When Speakers Do Their Job

Sheryl and I survived the National Speakers Association Convention in Orlando last week. The four days flew past us in a whirlwind of top speeches, content rich workshops and bad food. Our wrists are still sore from taking notes, our planners chock full of business cards and our task lists out of control. But, still, something was missing. Something about meaning. About why we all speak. About what the affect of all our work might be, not just the sales figures we can rack up.

The day after the convention we drove over to the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. Although we were at the Institute for only a couple of hours, the effect of that short visit was in some ways greater than the entire convention we had just finished.

The Poynter Institute (www.poynter.org) is a non-profit organization named after newspaper editor and Congressional Quarterly founder, Nelson Poynter. The Institute’s primary focus is not on selling more newspapers, increasing subscriptions or filling ad space for special editions. Its mission is to “help journalists seek and achieve excellence” and its main concern is with what journalists can do to assure accuracy, protect victims, be accessible to readers, avoid plagiarism and uncover and expose scoundrels.

The minute we arrived at the Poynter Institute, we knew we were in a special place. After all, the first thing we saw, engraved on the sidewalk, was the first amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Bob Steele, our host, began our tour with a stop at a memorial for the four school girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Displayed on the wall was “A Flower for the Graves,” a column written by Eugene Patterson, (former editor of the Atlanta Constitution and successor to Nelson Poynter at the St. Petersburg Times). This column was so powerful that Walter Cronkite had Patterson read it on the evening news that night: “A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.”

Later in the visit, David Sheddon, library director and chief historian at Poynter, told us, “Patterson’s article is a great example of when journalism does its job.” That kind of did it.

You see, our NSA experience had been primarily about building a speaker’s business, creating salable products, crafting more persuasive marketing materials and using technology to create passive income streams.

All of these are crucial to assuring a successful speaking business. But, they are not everything. The workshops did provide us with new business ideas, yes, but we were still missing something.

Later that Wednesday, sitting alone in the quiet center court garden, the reason the Poynter Institute had such a hold on us became more evident – this place wasn’t just about the business of journalism; it was primarily about the purpose of journalism.

Although the NSA is an organization for speakers and Poynter is an organization for journalists, they do have a lot in common. Both speakers and journalists are in the information business; both have the ability to reach and affect large numbers of people; both require highly developed communication skills. And, both must make a living.

Making a living is a highly legitimate pursuit, but it has begun to feel that the focus of the National Speakers Association is not just about making a living – it’s about making mega-bucks. Top practitioners of the speaking craft can now literally make their audiences run to the back of the room to buy a stock investment system, sign up for more seminars or purchase gobs of product. Top Internet marketing gurus can now manipulate web visitors to do the same things.

And, we were a willing audience, hoping someday to achieve those same mega-results in our own speaking businesses. We admit it. We were at the convention choosing the workshops that might make us more money, get us more gigs, and bring us more success.

Sitting in the center court garden and watching the lizards that day at the Poynter Institute, we realized that we hadn’t gone to the convention primarily to become good examples of when speakers do their job. We were asking the wrong questions and looking for the wrong workshops. Next year we need to find the workshops on how to foster creativity, promote diversity, encourage dissent, develop relevant content, minimize sales hucksterism and help combat the trivialization of our society. And, if they aren’t being offered, we need to try to get them to be offered.

You see, what we finally figured out is that someday we want someone as insightful as David Sheddon to say, “Their work was a great example of when a couple of speakers did their job.”