A "cover story" you'll love reading

Bloomberg Businessweek is ostensibly a publication meant for a business audience, but I have found in almost every issue a plethora of interesting and well-written features that can be appreciated and enjoyed by the general public too — here's one and here's another.

Many months ago the magazine changed certain aspects of the design and layout and began including a snippet of a column on how the cover gets made. Called "Cover Trail", the column gives us a little bit of insight into the workings of the minds of those who decide what the reader gets to see up-front. Far from being a banal discussion, the content of "Cover Trail" is often both intelligent and witty at the same time.

Sample this "Cover Trail" from the issue of March 10-16:

HOW THE COVER GETS MADE

"We need the world, with lots of arrows pointing to the world's trouble spots, areas that cause concern for American foreign policy."

"So, off the top of my head: Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, North Korea, Palestine, Israel, Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan. There are more, you know. A lot more."

"Could we just highlight areas of the world that aren't problematic for American foreign policy?"

"So just one big arrow pointing to moose people in Canada?"

"Don't joke about Canada or its mooses. Her frosty attitude is a constant source of strength to me in these long days of winter."

"Yeah. Me, too. By the way — do you ever get the feeling that the world's problems never want to be solved and we're all just in a self-supporting cycle of persistent delusion, enabled by a narcissistic impulse to impose incompatible ideologies on our neighbors for a type of political gamesmanship that no one believes in anymore? Our leaders all acting under some imagined oppositional moral pretense when all..."

"Just design the cover."
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"And make it look dumb."
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I just love the snap! crackle! pop! flow of that conversation. To read more "Cover Trail" columns, go here.

Incidentally, Commitscion David George (Class of 2005) is deputy editor of the Middle East edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. He has promised to give us his input on how his edition puts the cover together.

Speaking of covers, production journalists can learn a lot from reading the views of Fortune India editor D.N. Mukerjea on why good ideas and good writing need to be backed up by good design. And here's New York Times editor Bill Keller explaining how one of the world's great newspapers chooses stories for Page 1. Another good read!

A superlative analysis of how digital technology is rapidly transforming content creation and distribution...

...in Bloomberg Businessweek by Commits alumnus David George (Class of 2005). David, who is based in Dubai, is deputy editor of the recently launched Middle East edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.

• The edition is not on the web yet, sorry. If you would like to read a PDF version, though, write to me and I can send it to you via e-mail. (Commits students can read the article by borrowing a copy of the magazine that has been placed in the library.)

Are YOUR PowerPoint slides doing more harm than good?

PowerPoint is ubiquitous. Not only in boardrooms and conferences rooms but also in classrooms (yes, I use it, too, and so do my students when they make in-class presentations).

As Bob Parks writes in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, "No matter what your line of work, it’s only getting harder to avoid death by PowerPoint."

The article continues:

Since Microsoft launched the slide show program 22 years ago, it’s been installed on no fewer than 1 billion computers; an estimated 350 PowerPoint presentations are given each second across the globe; the software’s users continue to prove that no field of human endeavour can defy its facility for reducing complexity and nuance to bullet points and big ideas to tacky clip art. (italics mine)

Ouch!

There's more in the same vein:

As with anything so ubiquitous and relied upon, PowerPoint has bred its share of contempt. Plug the name into Twitter and you’ll see workers bashing the soporific software in Korean, Arabic, Spanish, and English as each region starts its business day. Part of this venting may stem from a lack of credible competition...

Microsoft’s other ubiquitous products, such as Word and Excel, don’t draw the same widescale ire. As PowerPoint’s sole function — unlike word processing and arithmetic — is grounded in visual arts, its slides do more harm than good. They bore audiences with amateurish, antiquated animation and typefaces and distract speakers from focusing on the underlying structure of their creators’ speeches.

Double ouch!

If you use PowerPoint (and who doesn't?), you will want to read this article in its entirety and then rethink your own slide-presentation strategy: "Death to PowerPoint!".

• Also read: Helpful advice on making better PowerPoint presentations.

• Related reading: "Four ways to quiet your presentation anxiety". 

• Cartoon courtesy: CartoonStock

The incredible story of how a documentary, "Kony 2012", went viral and helped raise millions of dollars for the NGO that made it

Headlined "Guerrilla marketing" (great title, that), a five-page feature in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has re-focused the spotlight on a 30-minute film about the heinous acts of an African warlord.

Kony 2012 was launched on YouTube by the US-based NGO Invisible Children in March — Facebook and Twitter users will remember the many "shares" and "likes" the link gathered on the way to becoming a worldwide sensation — and its popularity resulted in, according to the article, nearly two million people visiting the donation page of Invisible Children within the first few weeks of the campaign.

JOSEPH KONY

Bloomberg Businessweek staff writer Claire Suddath, who has clearly done an enormous amount of research for this story, tells us that Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell designed Kony 2012 to do two seemingly incompatible things:

1) explain a protracted international conflict happening very far away; and 2) be as popular as a Buzzfeed list. Russell did away with much of Kony’s back story and focused instead on the target audience: teenagers and twentysomethings browsing Facebook (FB) and Twitter.

He added some feel-good philosophy about the interconnectedness of society, scored the film with a dubstep song, and shortened it to 29 minutes and 59 seconds because a timestamp starting with a 2 looked less daunting than one with a 3.

Russell also put his young son Gavin in the film because, as Invisible Children’s director of idea development, Jedidiah Jenkins, explains, “if you want to get something watched online, you either have to put funny cats in it or little kids.”

What a terrific lesson that is about how to engage your target audience. Now you know why I think "Guerrilla Marketing" is such a wonderful headline for this piece.

There's more in the article in terms of marketing wisdom — as well as human interest. I was intensely moved, for instance, by the description of Russell's plight today:

He couldn’t be interviewed because he’s recovering from the “brief reactive psychosis” — a psychotic episode often caused by stress — he suffered after the release of the video, according to Invisible Children. He hasn’t returned to work. In an e-mail, his wife described his recovery process as “building invisible fences around what’s sacred [and] getting back to life.”

And why was Russell stressed out? Because, Suddath writes, the backlash against Kony 2012 was as swift as the video's spread.

At the height of the criticism this spring, 10 days after Kony 2012’s release, police found him naked and shouting in a residential San Diego neighbourhood, apparently suffering a nervous breakdown. Footage of the incident quickly appeared on TMZ and Gawker.

Why was there a backlash? What was the criticism about? Read "Guerrilla Marketing" here to know more. Also read: "Five Reasons the Kony Video Went Viral".

• Claire Suddath is a superlative writer by any measure. Learn from her "How to write a gripping article on office lunch thieves (yes, you read that right)".

• Photographs courtesy: Bloomberg Businessweek

• As far back as March 1998, The New Yorker, one of the most cerebral magazines in the world, had published a report on the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony. Read it here: "Letter from Uganda".

UPDATE (July 30, 2018): Read this BBC News profile of Joseph Kony: Child kidnapper, warlord, 'prophet'.

How to write a gripping article on office lunch thieves (yes, you read that right)

If you have read "25 commandments for journalists" and "How writers can overcome reader resistance", you are sure to appreciate a Bloomberg BusinessWeek feature on, of all things, office workers who steal your lunch.

I hear you ask, "Is that even a story idea?"

Yes, big-time. Ask anyone who has been the victim of lunch theft at work. Ask youngsters who live in a hostel that provides a common kitchen and refrigerator. Ask Tapasya Mitra Mazumder who told me earlier today that she stopped leaving food in her hostel refrigerator after she found a creepy bite mark in her wad of butter.

"But," you continue, "what can you write after you have put down a couple of points? How do you make this story interesting enough for readers?"

Well, there's a lot you can learn on that front from Claire Suddath, who wrote this piece on office lunch thieves in the July 30-August 5 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.

She begins with a colourful anecdote to engage her readers:

My friend Peter’s boss always eats lunch in the office — it’s just not always his lunch. If his boss finds a sandwich lying around, he scarfs it down without a second thought. People warned Peter about this when he took the job, at an aerospace tooling company near Seattle. Once his boss snatched an apple right off his desk; Peter has now taken to hiding his snacks in drawers.

Having engaged her readers, Suddath proceeds to "entertain" them. The opening line of the second paragraph makes it clear that Peter's boss is not the only aberrant around:

Everything is up for grabs in office kitchens: soda, coffee creamer, potato chips, it doesn’t matter.

Then we get an example from Suddath's own experience, which is followed by advice from a business etiquette expert. You will marvel at the wit in this particular paragraph.

After some more interesting nuggets of information presented in a smoothly flowing manner, Suddath tells readers how the problem can be tackled, with the help of Kerry Miller, the creator of a blog (you have to read Miller's advice, and also visit the blog concerned).

By the time you have come to the final sentence of the feature, you realise you have not only been engaged and entertained but also enlightened. What more can you ask of a writer?

• Read the feature in its entirety here: "Stop! Lunch Thief!"

• Illustration courtesy: Bloomberg Businessweek/Erik T. Johnson 

FROM PASSIVEAGGRESSIVENOTES.COM: “People steal other people’s food and drink so often in my office that security put up a notice,” says our submitter in Florida. “Apparently, the sign isn’t working.” Instead, the notes left by the victims have turned into an ongoing office-wide joke.