Bruce the Blog

Politicians like to press the flesh, slang for shaking hands, and perhaps applicable as well for back slapping (as opposed to back stabbing, an occupational hazard of political life). I make reference to press-fleshing in my Talking Points column in this week’s print edition of North County News (Feb. 18, page 8).

There’s another kind of press that politicians do, otherwise known as media, like us.  At this past week’s annual meeting of the Association of Towns of New York State, I participated in a panel presentation titled, “Getting the Word Out — A Primer on Public Relations for the Municipal Official.” A more apt title would have substituted “Press” for “Public,” but then again, I never met a sentence I didn’t feel obliged to edit.

The session was arranged by a trade association named Free Community Papers of New York, of which our parent company Chase Media Group’s president, Carla Chase, is the current president, in her role as publisher of Yorktown PennySaver, this newspaper’s sister periodical.

As with most conferences, there were concurrent tracks of seminars, with track titles such as Supervisors and Town Boards, Fiscal and Personnel Management, and Basic Planning and Zoning, as well as tracks dedicated to positions such as Town Clerks, Justices and Tax Receivers and Collectors.

With 16 tracks to choose from, and ours categorized under Topics of General Interest, we weren’t sure how many of the nearly 100 seats in the New York Hilton meeting room assigned to us would be filled. To our gratified surprise, it turned out to be a very popular, standing-room-only session. Among the attendees was Putnam Valley Supervisor Bob Tendy.  I also bumped into Cortlandt Town Board member Ann Lindau in the corridor, but she was on her way to a panel on Energy Efficiency and Your Town.

Tag teaming with Dan Alexander, owner of a chain of upstate New York and Vermont newsweeklies, I offered some “Inside Baseball” anecdotes about how newspapers work and the best way for those in the audience to work with them.

The 50 minutes flew by. One recommendation I never got around to making is not to send emails with all the information contained in an attachment and no clue about the contents emdedded in an email. It’s discouraging how many communications professionals don’t make effective use of emails. Media workers receive a hefty volume of emails every day. Requiring the recipient to open an attachment in each email to discover what it’s about is neither a friendly nor effective way to get your message read and acted on. All it takes is embedding a synopsis of the attachment, or copying-and-pasting the headline and first graph, into the body of the email.

During the Q-and-A period, the elected officials in the room expressed emphatic concern — and in a couple of cases outright disgust — with newspapers that not only tolerate but enable anonymous blogs, where the posters are nasty as you please and hurl epithets and personal attacks at their targets. Such blogs are the refuge of recluses who don’t have the nerve to identify themselves.  I agreed such media organizations are to be criticized for leaving up that ilk of post when made aware of it.

My advice to those complaining about the nasties was to ignore them, because part of the nameless nobodies’ endgame is to bait people. Not responding to the lunatic fringe helps keep them where they belong — in the margins of society, where they can do the least harm.