Over the years I have been asked to speak to colleagues and students I work with about best practices for preparing testimony, public interest comments, opeds, speeches, etc. A few years back, I jotted down some miscellaneous thoughts and used these notes whenever speaking on such matters. I did another session with some GMU econ students today and someone suggested I should publish these tips online somewhere.

So, for whatever it’s worth, here are a few ideas about how to improve your content and your own brand as a public policy analyst. The first list is just some general tips I’ve learned from others after 25 years in the world of public policy. Following that, I have also included a separate set of notes I use for presentations focused specifically on how to prepare effective editorials and legislative testimony. There are many common recommendations on both lists, but I thought I would just post them both here together.

CONTENT BEST PRACTICES: Never bury the lede & hammer your key point(s) repeatedly

• Get your key point up-front. We live in a world of information overload and limited attention spans. No matter what it is you are producing (opeds, papers, speeches, testimony, and even books), it is vital to get the message up front. Do not be so arrogant as to assume people care about what you have to say or are willing to spend much time thinking about it. As you begin any project, write down your thesis or key takeaways and make sure it is in the first few lines of your publication or remarks. And then end by repeating that point to drive it home. Do this in all your writing and speaking. Make it a habit of mind.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat! Never be ashamed to repeat what you’ve said before. Again, people are really busy and will have very limited time to devote you and your arguments. Just because you said something brilliant once doesn’t mean anyone heard you the first time around, or that they remember it. In fact, don’t be afraid to self-plagiarize a bit. If you spent a lot of time coming up with brilliant arguments and excellent messaging, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Reuse your key arguments and talking points again and again. Hammer them home.
• Use lists. People love lists. They help focus their thinking. They love Top 3, Top 5, and Top 10 lists in particular. I begin almost every speech and testimony by saying, “There are 3 things I want you to remember about this issue,” and people always start jotting down whatever I say. It’s like magic! I also wrap up by briefly reiterating that same list of key takeaways/conclusions in case they missed them.
• Repurpose your work and publish variations constantly. Use a modular “building blocks” approach to your policy outputs. Think of your work like Legos that can be stacked in many different ways. Every product you create is really multiple products that can be aggregated, disaggregated, and then re-aggregated in different ways and in different formats. (See options in graphic below and think about how your main message and talking points can be used across the entire range of outputs).

MARKETING BEST PRACTICES: Build your own brand & know how to target your audience

• Don’t wait for others to promote you; promote yourself. Think of yourself as a brand that needs to be promoted and then figure out how to be your own advertising agency.
• Do some of your own outreach. Every analyst should do some of their own outreach, particularly to the academy, contacts they have built up over the years, Cap Hill, Executive Branch, press, the academy, etc.  This can complement efforts by outreach and communications departments in your organization.
• Have lists of people that you want to consistently push your work out to.  If you quote someone in a paper, journal article, book, or article, highlight it and send it to them.  This greatly increases the chances they will cite you and your work in the future.  
• Know the “connectors” in your space (i.e., the people who know everybody in your circles and have a huge following) and get your work on their radar screen.
• Stay active on social media platforms (e.g., blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, FB, etc.), at least as much as you can tolerate before the jerks get you down. In particular, use social media to constantly remind people of relevant work you have done when you are at other events or even just listening to other speeches.
• Use multimedia to communicate your message in creative ways beyond boring slide shows (e.g., YouTube, podcasts, or other video and audio services. Even animated videos can help).
• Plan ahead and try to be first-mover out of the gate. There is a huge value in being first out with commentary when your topic hits the news; that value drops rapidly if you are second and third out of the gate.
• “Tease” your own forthcoming work. While working on paper or new project, alert relevant parties it is coming; seek their input. Also consider doing a couple “teaser” blog posts or short essays alerting others that your paper is coming.
• Post all your major publications on major document hosting sites such as SSRN and ResearchGate, among others.
• Tag your work. Good SEO (search engine optimization) is vital to making your work easier to find. Use embedded keywords (take the 20 -30 most important keywords in your document and then paste them in the “properties” or “keywords” section of your Word documents, PDFs, SSRN uploads, and blog posts.)
• Use anniversaries to your advantage. If there is a special day or anniversary coming up that you can hook your work to, take advantage of them.  

PERSONAL BEST PRACTICES: Get organized & de-clutter your life & brain

• Develop talking points files for major issues you cover to help you remember your main points in an instant in case you get random media or policymaker calls and can’t remember everything you wrote 5 years ago on a topic.
• Develop a good system of organizing your work. Keep hyperlinked lists of your major publications to easily repurpose elsewhere. Also, using Evernote (web page clipping service) combined with Dropbox (cloud-based document storage that syncs with all your computers & devices) can be a very useful way to organize your work and retrieve it quickly in the future. It helps to develop a sensible filing taxonomy to organize all your work.
• Learn which communications to ignore. Do all those emails or social media messages have to be answered right away (or at all)? As important as it is for you to engage with others across multiple mediums, it is also important to figure out who and what can be safely ignored so that you can actually get some thinking and work done! (Ex: I only check work emails twice a day. Most stuff can wait.)
• Find your “magic hour.” Different people work better during different parts of the day. For me, I get more quality writing done between 9 to 10 am each day than I do most of the rest of the day. Whatever your “magic hour” is, make it sacred and block out all other distractions to maximize your productivity when you are at peak output potential.
• Develop your own style and voice.Examine the approaches others and learn from them, but don’t get too hung up on trying to perfectly mimic them. Develop your own approach that fits your comfort zone. And practice, practice, practice! Get some speech training in particular. Public speaking is difficult for many analysts.
• Communicate with conviction but courtesy. It is easy to start screaming when you are passionate about policy issues. Restrain yourself. Treat people and their arguments (no matter how silly) with a certain degree of dignity. You will do a better job demolishing bad arguments with reason and empirical analysis than with sarcasm and shouting. You will also be respected as a better person for taking the high road, even by many of your intellectual enemies.

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3 Specific Tips for Crafting Good Opeds & Testimony
by Adam Thierer

Here are 3 simple rules to live by when crafting good opeds and congressional testimony. Before reading them, it is vital to never forget one simple truth: People are busy! We live in a world of information overload and limited attention spans. So:

• Why should anyone care about your issue or argument relative to any other?
• What key point should they remember about it?
• How does it affect them or others they care about?

Keep those questions in mind at all times as you are preparing opeds or testimony. Accordingly:

1. Don’t bury the lede:
   • Tell your audience right up front the most important takeaway (or takeaways) from your article/testimony. Even consider telegraphing it with a line like, “The most important thing to remember about this issue is _______.”
   • Alternatively, make a short list. People love lists! (ex: “My message here today can be boiled down to three simple points: ______”) As soon as you say that line, watch how people grab a pen and start writing down what you say. [See an example here.]
2. Keep it simple / speak clearly: 
   • Use clear, jargon-free “family dinner table” language. Pretend you are writing a letter to your grandma and want to make sure she can understand what the hell you are talking about but without being condescending. You want to impress people with your intelligence, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with it.
   • Metaphors are particularly helpful and create lasting mental images. Fun example: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” – P. J. O’Rourke.
   • Keep the narrative tightly focused on bolstering your 1-3 key points. Do not go off on wild tangents.
   • Make sure you reiterate your key point (or points) at the end. Remember, people are busy and their minds are cluttered (especially policymakers). Thus, they are only likely to remember one or two key themes. You have to hammer them home and dispense with much of the supporting evidence. (For testimony, put supporting evidence in an appendix. For opeds, very briefly summarize it. Better to focus on one big number or result as opposed to dozens of statistics.)
3. Honor word count / time limit:
   • Most opeds can only be about 700 words, and most testimony is capped at 5 minutes. Do not exceed those limits.
   • For opeds, edit and re-edit multiple times and then ask friends and colleagues to proof them to cut words and tighten language.
   • For testimony, rehearse your remarks out loud multiple times until you are 100% certain that you will not go over and get cut off before you are finished. In my experience, I can get out about 990 words in 5 minutes, but that is really pushing it and I am a very fast talker. Better to shoot for under 950 words and speak at a normal pace.

There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too.  Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of the classic study Who Owns the Media?, has added his own two cents in his latest essay over at the Rebuilding Media blog. Like everything Ben writes, it is well worth reading:

If newspapers have essentially been able to thrive on the revenue from advertisers alone (again, with cost of printing more or less covered by circulation revenue), why are they having so much trouble today? The answer is not one single factor, but a major contributor is that newspapers – whether print or digital—are just worth less to advertisers than they were 20 years ago. Back then, local advertisers did not have many options for reaching the mass local audience. What was the alternative for auto dealers? For real estate agents? Supermarkets or department stores? For some, direct mail was one possible option. But that was about it. Using pre-prints instead of ROP became attractive for some large display advertisers, leaving the publishers with a piece of the cash flow. Advertisers were hit with regular rate increases. And they pretty much had to pay, The publishers made good money. But then a double whammy. Just about the time the Internet became a real alternative for classified listings—think Craigslist, Monster.com, eBay, Autotrader.com—and for retailers—think DoubleClick, Google, et al—the boys at the cable operators had perfected the insertion of highly local spots into their feeds. Between 1989 and 2007 local cable advertising increased from $500 million to $4.3 billion—or from 0.4% of all advertising to 1.6%. Advertising in newspapers fell from 26% to 15% in this period. Although some of the highly local advertisers going to cable may have taken some of their funds from budgets for radio or other local media, it is probable that a significant share came from the hides of newspapers. I estimate perhaps up to 20% of the decline in local newspaper advertising share can be attributed to local cable spots. The other whammy, the gorilla in the room, is Internet advertising. No need to elaborate. But its impact on newspapers is not just that it has siphoned off dollars per se. Much more importantly is that the Internet has given most advertisers greater market power against newspaper publishers. Many big advertisers—like car dealers, real estate offices and big box retailers—don’t need the newspapers as much.

Ben’s got it exactly right. The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of  “protectable scarcity” (thanks to Canadian media expert Ken Goldstein for that phrase).  There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears.  We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans.  That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.

If you want to boil the newspaper death spiral down to an equation, it would look something like this:

(1) unprecedented technological change

+

(2) massive inflow of new media competitors / platforms

+

(3) end of geographic “protectable scarcity”

=

(4) inability to capture a guaranteed audience

&

(5) complete loss of advertiser / investor confidence

And the process is viciously self-reinforcing.  Again, a seemingly hopeless death spiral.  So, do papers have any hope?  Compaine considers where papers might turn next in terms of a business model:

I suspect that what we will find in the intermediate future is a mix of models and choices, among them:

• The Detroit model [Detroit Free Press and Detroit News] is one reasonable experiment: An attractive daily digital version, with home delivery of the paper reduced to Thursday, Friday and Sunday.
• An advertising supported all digital model, with the publisher closing down the printing plant, selling off its trucks, laying off the circulation and production departments.
• A voluntary pay model. This may take one of several forms. The “shareware” model for software has proven to work to a point. Users are asked to pay what they can or think the product is worth. Many users will be free riders. But, as we see with public television and radio, millions in their audience make annual contributions. (In 2007 at least one-third of those who downloaded Radiohead’s free “In Rainbow” album made a payment, in some cases higher than what the band would have received from a CD sale.)

The problem with that last model is that it might help some papers remain afloat, but it is highly unlikely such a model could sustain the industry as we know it today.  There’s a reason, after all, that NPR doesn’t have a lot of competitors in the non-profit radio world; only so many benefactors — whether corporate, foundations, or individuals — are willing to spread around their donations when it comes to news.  A non-profit model or charity-based model might work for a couple of big-dog dailies with generous sugar daddies — think the New York Times and Carlos Slim — but that model won’t work for most other papers.

As Ben suggests, the best hope likely lies in some combination of all of the above, with a particular focus on finding a way to monetize the all-digital model (model #2) as quickly and effectively as possible.  But some papers are late to that game, and even those that moved aggressively to get everything online have found that the economics are still challenging in a crowded field.  The advertising cross-subsidy they lost is in the old world has already been captured online by many others. There’s just less ad $$$ to go around with so many other outlets presenting more targeted and affordable platforms than what old newspapers offer.

Regardless, I think it’s time to accept the uncomfortable reality that the newspaper industry as we know it is dead and will never return.  As an old newspaper fanatic and journalism student, this makes me a bit sad.  I still get two dailies on my doorstep every morning and will certainly miss them when they pass from this Earth.  Of course, a lot of that news will be repurposed online. And other news sources and outlets are still out there or will develop in response.  But challenging issues remain about how “long form” investigative journalism gets funded going foward. I don’t believe in the pollyanish fantasies about a world of user-generated content and “We-dia” giving us all the important news of the day.  You can’t reassemble the New York Times one Twitter at a time.

Faithful readers will recall that, several months ago, I penned a 7-part “Media Metrics” series that took a hard look at the health of the media marketplace. Today, the Progress & Freedom Foundation is releasing a greatly expanded version of these essays that I have put together with my PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen. In this 100-page special report, “Media Metrics: The True State of the Modern Media Marketplace,” we begin by noting that heated debates about the state of the media marketplace continue to rage in Washington, and opinions seem to range from grim to outright apocalyptic. As we note on pg. 1:

Many people—including a large number of legislators and regulators—argue that America’s media marketplace is in a miserable state. Some claim that citizens lack choice in media outlets and that options are just as scarce as ever. Others believe that media “localism” is dead or that many groups or niches go underserved because of a lack of true “diversity” in media. Others argue that the market is hopelessly over-concentrated in the hands of a few evil media barons who are hell-bent on force-feeding us corporate propaganda. And still others say that the quality of news and entertainment in our society has deteriorated because of a combination of all of the above. It all sounds quite troubling, but is any of it true?

After taking an objective look at the true state of America’s media marketplace, we conclude that such pessimism is unwarranted. Indeed, a careful review of the facts reveals that—contrary to what those media critics suggest—we have more media choice, more media competition, and more media diversity than ever before. Indeed, to the extent there was ever a “golden age” of media in America, we are living in it today. The media sky has never been brighter and it is getting brighter with each passing year. We come to this conclusion by looking beyond the rhetoric that has for too long governed debates about media in American and providing a comprehensive look at a variety of media sectors such as audio, video, print and online media. Our survey contains over 70 charts and exhibits illustrating facts and figures on such diverse topics as advertising revenue, company market share, audience trends, and areas of growth in the sector. We will also aim to periodically updated the report to reflect the rapidly evolving media industry.

We encourage readers to provider input about how to improve and expand the report going forward in an attempt to refine and improve the metrics. And we look forward to future debates on this subject–debates that we hope will be guided by facts instead of fanaticism and by evidence instead of emotion. The hyperbolic rhetoric, shameless fear-mongering, and unsubstantiated claims that have driven policy debates in recent years have no foundation in reality and should be rejected as the debate over media policy continues.

This and future installments of “Media Metrics: The True State of the Modern Media Marketplace” will be available on the PFF website at www.pff.org/mediametrics. I have also embedded the entire document below as a Scribd file so that those interested in the topic can peruse the report immediately.