I don’t even remember how I got roped into the writing of the weekly newsletters. I’m sure I volunteered, but I don’t recall the circumstances whatsoever.
I know I was at the 6 in Burbank, and writing the newsletter for the entire three-building complex (the Media North 6, the Media Center 8, and the Burbank 14). A page a week for at least three years, though I think I handed it off to another manager before leaving Burbank entirely. But leaving that building behind wasn’t leaving the writing behind, I began/assumed control of newsletters at Sherman Oaks, Century City, and Santa Anita along the way.
Some cheerleading was a necessary evil; these were supposed to be work communications that kept the staff looking at the positive sides of what we were doing. SO there was a great deal of practice at being able to frame corporate nonsense in a credible way, or even a way sometimes that even the staff could genuinely get behind.
There was a great deal of repetition over time. Count back change. Openers stock before you go. Closers clean more. Please for the love of God wash those uniforms. But that repetition was practice too. That writing was all over a decade ago so I look at it now and cringe, but I remember cringing at early newsletters even as I was writing later ones. I take that as progress having been made, as a process of never being content with the idea that there isn’t a better way to get a point across.
Beyond the skills associated with the written word there’s the narrative and the audience. Every year I was writing those bulletins, I was writing them for a crowd that stayed between 17 and 22. Aside from having to maintain a style that doesn’t get crusty, it was a requirement to try to keep part of my own perspective by looking through that same staff lens. Even years after leaving the actual work behind, I had to stay connected to the thought process to stay credible.
Staff management really isn’t so different from parenting. Sometimes kids need you to get down and look them in the eye at their level before you can really get through. In the exact same way, sometimes you need to catch staff at exactly where they’re at. Those newsletters were years of practice at speaking to staff with a management voice using staff words to achieve a management goal. That coercion became more graceful over time; the forced efforts at motivation early on are perhaps the greatest source of cringe throughout.
Plus it was an opportunity to have a little fun on the job myself. There was a dreadful CGI adaptation of Beowulf that came out one year; that week I wasted half of the entire page on an excerpt of Beowulf in the original Old English. Sometimes I would make clipart out of celebrity heads to use them as drop-in endorsing mascots. Leading up to April Fools at Century City, I spent a few weeks building up a little play between Telly Savales and Telly the Muppet that culminated in a 4/1 newsletter that was a full-page reporting on a nationwide manhunt for the identity-stealing Muppet.
Newsletters were a thing with Pacific, but I don’t recall being as involved there as I had been during the AMC years. Pacific brought different puzzles to solve. Though to be fair, all that practice at “writing down” to the staff perspective was invaluable help at writing emails simplified down to the executive level.
