Update: Joe Grimm is leading a workshop on building your personal brand.
Update: I have blogged about my own personal branding strategy.
Update: I used Storify to curate discussion of this issue on various blogs and Twitter.
Update: Weingarten has responded twice. Please see the first comment and his later comment.
Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist. But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and journalism. So I will answer the question a journalism student (identified only as “Leslie”) asked him: How he built his “personal brand” over the years. Update: Leslie Trew Magraw, the student in question, gave me permission to post her research paper on Weingarten’s brand. And Owen Youngman, her professor, blogged about this branding discussion as well.
The question was a belt-high fastball for Weingarten, whose brand is equal parts wit, sarcasm, insight and the ability to write tearjerking (from laughter or other emotions) sentences that you wish you could have written. He swung at the pitch and wrote a funny column, How ‘branding’ is ruining journalism.
Weingarten’s response:
The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.
Lots of journalists might have been smart enough (and scornful enough of branding) to think of the basic response of turning the branding question around into a branding iron that would inflict pain. But that “nice, meaty sizzle” kicker is a classic Weingarten line that I wish I would have written, even though I disagree with Gene on this.
I won’t quote at length from his criticism of branding in journalism. But I have to include Weingarten’s formula for career success:
My goals, however, were unambiguous, and heroic: 1) Get great stories that improve the world. 2) Get famous. 3) Get doe-eyed young women to lean in close and whisper, “Take me.”
Um, Leslie, that’s branding. Process, insight and humor — great branding advice delivered within the Weingarten brand.
He continues:
Note the order. First came the work. Now, the first goal seems to be self-promotion — the fame part, the “brand.”
Leslie, Gene was giving you insight about branding, including the insight that veteran journalists are scornful of the term, even if they are good at the practice. Despite what he says, branding starts with quality and hard work. But lots of outstanding journalists who did the hard work are losing their jobs. They are losing their jobs mostly because their industry has failed to develop new business models and new revenue streams in a period of disruption. But some of those journalists are losing their jobs or struggling to find new ones, in part, because they failed to show their value to their employers and their communities. Personal branding is about showing your value. It starts with quality and hard work, but if you don’t show the value, you can become undervalued.
(In truth, lots of journalists with strong brands have lost their jobs and struggle to find work, too. That’s how severe the disruption in journalism has become. I know of journalists with brands I respect who are unable to find jobs. But I do believe branding helps you in these turbulent times. I know it has helped me, and I’m sure it has helped Gene.)
So yes, Leslie, the Gene Weingarten brand starts with hard work and quality journalism. I have frequently cited his Pearls Before Breakfast masterpiece (his first Pulitzer Prize-winning story) in my storytelling workshops. I could just as easily cite Fatal Distraction, Pulitzer-winner number two. That’s an illustration of how quality, hard work and branding go together: Winning two Pulitzers is an indication of quality and hard work, but “two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten” is a brand. (That exact phrase in quotation marks, by the way, gets 258 hits on Google.)
Lots of Pulitzer winners and other outstanding journalists fail to develop a strong personal brand, though. Journalism has an ethic of “objectivity” that pushes us to pretend we are objects, not people. And you can’t develop a personal brand without being a person and being seen as one. His protests aside, Weingarten has become a journalist whose personality and creativity are part of his journalism. By becoming a columnist, he was allowed to be funny and personable, to become a personal brand, while working for one of the most serious (and successful) brands in journalism, the Washington Post.
He writes in first person, something most journalists are not allowed to do. (I will blog sometime about how one of the best pieces I ever wrote was not published because I used first person and I was too much a part of the story.) Cartoons accompanying Weingarten’s columns frequently include caricatures that make him recognizable (I recognized him the moment I saw him, and was delighted to meet him, and told my wife right away, another indication of his successful branding). While traditional journalists tend to keep out of their stories at all costs, Weingarten was a key character in Pearls Before Breakfast, staging the whole stunt himself.
Many old-school journalists who are disdainful of branding are also disdainful of social media, especially Twitter. So is Weingarten. But he is so clever that he uses Twitter regularly (1,554 tweets), making it part of his brand, showing his disdain with an avatar that is a disgusting photograph of a turd rubber novelty item resembling a turd. (Previous sentence was corrected after Gene’s comment.)
Branding is not all about selling yourself to the public. Sometimes it’s just establishing a brand within the industry. I was a pretty good editor and reporter for years. But my career became more successful when I used personal appearances and the web (through this blog, an earlier blog, a now-defunct website called No Train, No Gain, and, yes, Twitter) to build a personal brand, first as a newsroom trainer and later as a voice for innovation.
I’m not necessarily a better journalist now than I was 15 or 20 years ago, but I’m a more successful brand. Not as successful as Gene Weingarten, but I’m trying. Perhaps I should ask him for some branding advice.
You have one egregious error in here, Steve. That is not a disgusting photograph of a turd. It is a disgusting photograph of a rubber novelty item that very much resembles a turd.
You’re wrong about everything else, too, but I do admit we’re mostly talking semantics. I’m not really opposed to self-promotion; what I’m opposed to is the casual way journalism has readily — eagerly — adopted a term from marketing, the most soulless and cynical enterprise on Earth. We seem content to think of ourselves as just another type of salesmen. We’re sissifying ourselves.
Back in the late 1980s, when The Miami Herald was beginning to panic, and was starting its self-inflicted decline, a new corporate strategy was announced. It was called something like “Customer Satisfaction Comes First.”
The newsroom was appalled. Horrified, actually. Suddenly, via slogan, we no longer had “readers,” we had “customers.” And suddenly, insidiously, we were no longer in the business of telling people what we knew they needed to know; we were in the business of telling people what we thought they wanted to know. The resulting decline in quality was steep.
— Weingarten
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Thanks for your response, Gene. I have corrected the error. And I share your view that marketing has had some negative impacts on journalism. But I’m not sure we were always serving the public (readers, users or customers) well when we thought of our jobs as telling people what we “knew” they needed to know.
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Steve: If you’re not telling me something new or surprising, then why be a customer? Focus groups hurt journalism by corrupting it.
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Jim, to be clear here, I never mentioned focus groups.
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Hi, Steve….I guess I will out myself as the professor who made this assignment to one of my graduate courses in the just-concluded spring term. I shouldn’t be more specific for privacy reasons, but I can say that this student got one of the highest grades in the class on this final paper for indeed demonstrating that Gene “qualifies as a recognizable brand and reaps the benefits that come with textbook brand equity,” going on to say that “The tension between journalism and marketing has been building, and is perhaps most strongly felt in discussions about the practice of journalism as a personal brand-building exercise.”
The paper also included an earlier version of Gene’s colorful response to the initial inquiry.
The assignment anticipates that many of the subjects never gave building their brands a thought on the way to doing so, and also alerts the students that more than a handful will reject the idea outright. So they also are required to interview members of the journalist’s audience to see how and whether those readers, or viewers, or users, or customers are relying upon and benefitting from that brand.
And you know what? More often than not, those brands are built on exactly what we longtime journalists would hope: Credibility. Accuracy. Curiosity. Interpretive excellence. Self-promotion happens, sure, but not till there is something to promote!
Let me give Leslie the last word.
“As long as a journalist can deliver on the promise that he or she has made to the reader by showing up, creating consistently imaginative, surprising and sometimes even profound work, the reader will keep coming back, looking to get a job done by reading what they’re offering.”
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Owen,
I hope the meaty sizzle on your buttocks didn’t hurt too bad. Thanks for sharing. Please invite Leslie to send me her paper as a guest post (or at least to join the comments here). I am glad (but not surprised) that Gene responded directly. Thanks for sharing!
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I spent about 20 years in newsrooms, and I can report with some authority that the marketing department had no monopoly on soullessness.
Doesn’t matter whether you’re a hack or a saint or a scoundrel or a genius, if you came into the business in the last century, you bought into a professional brand, and if that brand were accurate, then every newspaper newsroom would be staffed by Rick Blaine, Hans Solo, Clark Kent and Fletch.
Talk about a reality gap. Newsrooms have always included ass-kissers, cowards, sycophants, sociopaths and shameless conformists. Plus, the macho swagger (Sissyfing? Really) is stale. Our profession is narcissistic as hell, and our noble-noir stereotype of ourselves is an absurd romantic fiction.
I like the idea of basing your reputation and your sense of professionalism on hard work and real achievement. But to suggest that what’s wrong with journalism is that people are talking seriously about “branding” is like standing on the Titanic and bitching colorfully about interior decorating.
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Wow. You said it Dan.
It’s also incredibly silly to think branding precludes honest hard-hitting reportage. Other industries exist where the revenue comes from pointing out flaws and asking hard questions and you can bet you’re ass they rely on branding and marketing.
I’m thinking of accounting firms that conduct third-party audits of companies and organizations. Surely they have to have a brand that relies on credibility. Engineering testing companies and IT security companies also come to mind.
No doubt some of these companies and the people in them have at times been corrupted by personal or professional biases (or by other factors). However, nobody would make the claim that those industries are untrustworthy and deserve disdain as a whole because they market themselves.
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Unfortunately, I feel this debate is getting bogged down by semantics. It seems Gene’s real complaint comes down to word choice or his perception of what personal brand means.
But if being a columnist for one of the world’s largest news organizations is not personal branding, I don’t know what is. If Gene and other Post employees didn’t care about their own personal brands, they wouldn’t have by-lines and named columnists. That is the model that The Economist uses, and everyone writes from the voice of the paper itself. Yes, some insiders do know who columnists like Lexington are, but regular readers do not.
Gene also has a Facebook page that you can “like.” If that’s not personal branding — or straight up branding — I don’t know what is, again. He is on Twitter, as a Washington Post columnist and general raconteur.
If a journalism student wanted to know how to become a strong personal brand, I’d point them in the direction of Gene Weingarten. He’s created a strong personal brand across old and new media, and when not writing about inside journalism topics, he’s a pretty good columnist too.
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I don’t think Steve was suggesting “branding” could save journalism, rather it turns reporters into a recognizable commodity. Because let’s face it, the only people reading our bylines with interest is our parents and ourselves.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep it that way, the silent sentinel/watchdog, but there’s also nothing wrong with letting readers get to know you and see you as a resource.
Twitter, Facebook and the Internet in general have let print journalists achieve the same recognition as, say, television news anchors/correspondents. If you establish yourself as objective, trustworthy and accurate then you’ve already built a brand. Newspapers and other major outlets build brands on the ability of their newsroom, why else do we turn to the Washington Post or the Boston Globe? Because they have a reputation, a brand, for good reporting.
It’s silly to suggest reporters and editors, no matter who they work for, aren’t inadvertently building their “brand.” Any time a reader approaches you to compliment, insult or just discuss your work, you’ve been working on your brand.
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Straw-man humor is funny even when it’s not an effective argument. He doesn’t like “branding?” OK: Give us another word. Because the concept that those of us not lucky or talented enough to be a columnist for the Washington Post and who want to maintain a career in an industry — a bidness, like it or not — that is suffering through its own unrelenting and unceasing meaty sizzle should create a reputation, a persona, a recognizable style, that transcends the assignment of the day seems like a pretty smart idea. And not really a new one. But in the Olden Days, you pretty much had to be a Dave Barry to accomplish it. These days, the Intertubes allow those of us with less visibility (and, sigh, talent) to build our own smaller version in hopes that it will help us keep this job and/or find the next one.
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I find myself agreeing with both Steve and Gene. And I agree that this is totally a semantic argument. I think many journos, myself included, have a visceral reaction against the term “branding” largely because it seems like marketing-speak. Branding seems like something you do for a company or a product, not a person. It just seems…one-dimensional, while what we as journalists should be doing is more well-rounded. I think that’s what I mean. I have a really hard time articulating what I mean here.
I get the importance of branding — I work for an alt-weekly, and as a paper we have a really strong brand, largely because we don’t shy away from having a strong editorial voice. I’m just not sure if we’re talking about quite the same thing when it’s on an individual scale.
So yes, it might be semantic and petty to disavow the word “branding,” but that’s still important. (If the student emailed Gene Weingarten to ask how he “built my personal *reputation* over the years,” I bet we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now and Gene would’ve had to write about something else this week.) Maybe branding is the right word for a publication, but not for a person.
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Odious ass-kissing marketing slime here, with perhaps a workable definition of “brand.” Your brand is the sum of all the things of unique value that you offer. What do you bring to the party that makes you different and your presence vital, without which the party wouldn’t be as great? What makes you *not* interchangeable with any other hack out there? THAT is your brand. And you have one whether you like it or not. (And, as Gene Weingarten rightly points out, it requires things of *value,* like journalistic talent and hard work. It is not an empty container.)
For a group of people with famously oversize egos, many of whom get into this gig for the potential fame and glory that comes with toppling a president, journalists sure have a funny aversion to the word “brand.” Got a LinkedIn profile? A blog? You’ve got a brand. Every time you apply for a job, you’re selling your brand. Every time your byline tops a story or content gets posted with your name on it, you’re enhancing your brand (or detracting from it if you’re Jayson Blair), and if you’re a columnist, even more so.
Yes, brand is a marketing term. So what? Consider it a convenient word to define a unique set of assets, and move on. Or, as has been suggested above, use the word “reputation” if you haven’t had your shots and you don’t want to get any marketing on you.
Here’s another definition: A brand is what allows a business to charge above cost for what it produces. The greater the brand assets, the bigger the possible markup. (Do you *really* think an iPad costs $500 to manufacture?) To draw a parallel, building a strong personal brand will, in the best of all possible worlds, allow you to charge a premium for what you do, or in the current environment at least enhance your chances of getting paid for doing it. A brand is a promise of value, that’s all. How dreadful is that?
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[…] Comments « Gene Weingarten knows branding (even though he scorns it) […]
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[…] responding to an inquiry from a journalism student he identified only as “Leslie.” In a comment on my blog, Owen Youngman, a journalism professor at the Medill School at Northwestern University, […]
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I have an odd capper for this thread. I’ve gotten a few messages from people who were surprised to discover that “Leslie” was real; they thought I’d created her as a foil, and didn’t seem to think that would have been wrong. So there really is a bit of a disconnect between what we do and what people think we do.
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Wow! Thanks for sharing that, Gene. I always knew she was real. I guess it’s good for us to get occasional reminders of that disconnect.
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[…] Post | The Buttry Diary Gene Weingarten says he had three goals when he was a hungry young reporter in the 1970s: 1) Get […]
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[…] Also well worth reading is Steve Buttry’s own take on branding. […]
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A couple of these responses suggest that the terms “brand” and “reputation” are equivalent. That’s the problem. It is “semantics.” Brand is an important concept in marketing. Reputation is an important concept in other areas — for example, for individuals such as reporters and institutions such as newspapers. Whether the reporter or the newspaper also has a brand is a different issue. You can sit around a table in a boardroom and decide what your brand is going to be. Is it going to be tastes great or less filling or both? You can’t do the same with reputation.
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[…] Gene Weingarten knows branding (even though he scorns it) « The Buttry Diary June 24, 2011 by Steve Buttry Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist. But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and journalism. So I will answer the question a journalism student (identified only as "Leslie") asked him: How he built his "personal brand" over the years. […]
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If fresh out of school journalists don’t build a brand of some kind, they won’t be find jobs. They’ve got to have an angle, some kind of expertise they can pitch to a potential employer. New swarms of j-school graduates hit the market every 4 months like clockwork. There are no jobs for these people unless they can show an employer that they can solve a specific problem they’re having. They demonstrate this by building a brand on things like Twitter.
“Reporter who knows Drupal” or “Copyeditor who blogs about tech startups on the side” or “Food writer with graphic design skills”. These are all brands and new journos need to have something like this to have a shot at getting a job, much less an unpaid internship these days.
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[…] Steve Buttry pointed out in his reply to Weingarten’s non-answer to Leslie’s question, Weingarten was not interested in admitting that his considerable […]
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[…] journalist Steve Buttry responded to Weingarten’s column with this: [B]randing starts with quality and hard work. But lots of […]
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[…] ironic thing about Weingarten’s rant, as Steve Buttry and others have noted, is that the Washington Post columnist himself is a great example of a […]
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[…] find the new media discussion on personal branding and whether its ruining journalism to be one big waste of time. But it has been […]
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[…] humorous branding advice to journalism student Leslie Trew Magraw or the responses to him (including mine). This is about advice, not arguing. However, Gene is continuing that discussion in his weekly […]
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[…] journalist Steve Buttry responded to Weingarten’s column with this: [B]randing starts with quality and hard work. But lots of […]
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[…] on the side, Post home design writer Jura Koncius rebuffs columnist Gene Weingarten, who caused a bit of a stir with a recent […]
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[…] I’m really not deliberately picking on the Washington Post here, though last month’s exchange with Gene Weingarten gave my blog a nice boost in traffic. I had a draft of this post in […]
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[…] is ruining journalism, he set off a barrage of rejoinders from personal-branding advocates, most notably and prolifically Steve […]
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[…] future. “Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist,” retorted the commentator Steve Buttry. “But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and […]
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[…] future. “Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist,” retorted the commentator Steve Buttry. “But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and […]
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[…] future. “Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist,” retorted the commentator Steve Buttry. “But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and […]
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Semantics? How can journalists — professional writers — be so tone-deaf to language?
The words “brand” and “branding” slithered out of the mouths of the marketeers and apparently now are being taken up in academia and even embraced by some who call themselves journalists and should know better.
Journalists have been so battered by the marketplace and so hectored by media ownership that it’s not at all surprising that many now think of themselves as producers of content, as though their job is to fill boxes and bags with whatever sellt. No surprise so many have bought into this. Folks can toss a lot of principles overboard when a job-loss is in view.
But why so fashionable in academia? Because within the professoriate there is the ancient faith that if you can pin a label on something then you can understand it, and if you can understand it you can control it, and if you can control it you are superior to it. Thus we have j-profs who have never met a deadline, never written a clear, vivid, suspenseful or even useful story in their lives examining the “branding” of a two-time Pulitzer winner. And “Credibility. Accuracy. Curiosity. Interpretive excellence ” have been transformed into brands, not virtues or simply best practices.
Of course journalists want to earn a buck, and some no doubt want some doe-eyed young thing of either gender to murmur to them. But mostly we want to write stories that illuminate and surprise and that matter.
Gene wrote a piece in which, unlike any other journalist I can think of, he went to the trouble of finding out why some parents forgetfully leave their children to suffocate in a hot car. The story was a masterpiece of contrarian thinking, of clarity, human sympathy, shrewd reporting and vivid writing.
Tell me, what kind of “brand” would that be?
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Bill, I don’t know whether you missed or just chose to ignore the multiple times in this discussion (more than just this one post) that I and others said that branding starts with quality journalism. We are content producers and always have been. You’re welcome to your rant, but some of us need to live in the world as it is. For journalists hoping to succeed in a challenging marketplace, branding helps you show your value. I think seeing the world clearly has always helped journalists succeed.
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Steve,
I didn’t miss the point at all.
The language — “branding starts with quality journalism” — IS the point. Starts? Where on earth does it end?
That journalists have to live in the world is an observation so trivial, it’s hardly worth making. So do manufacturers of potato chips, pig farmers and poets. What does the concept of “branding” add to our understanding of our profession that we didn’t already know? That we have to sell what we write to somebody? This is hardly news.
The application of marketing jargon trivializes and degrades “quality journalism.” It leaves the issue of “quality” unanswered and places the whole emphasis on saleability, on packaging, on hucksterism. It assumes that the methods and techniques of marketeers are legitimate and accurate means of arriving at some kind of truth. Any journalists who has had the unpleasant experience of sitting in with a focus group will have some idea of what I mean.
Most of us write because we enjoy it, because we are curious about the world, and we believe that what we write makes a difference. The bargain we make with our readers — to call them “consumers” is demeaning — is that they enjoy reading, that they too are curious, and that what we write will matter to them. That we will not waste their time. No amoumt of branding can assure that.
Journalists and writers need to examine the concepts and language of branding very carefully before taking them up to describe their craft, their calling. Corn flakes can be branded, even politicians. I am not a brand. And I am a content producer only in the sense that a book is an assemblage of cellulose and that a blog is a collection of jittering electrons.
Finally, Steve, I enjoy a good rant. There aren’t nearly enough of them these days. Too many folks seem to just roll over for each new buzz or fad that comes along. They are the branders’ natural prey.
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[…] remarks about the whole idea of a personal brand from Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten. Personal brand enthusiasts responded to Weingarten’s skepticism by saying that Weingarten himself, like nearly every successful professional, has a reputation that […]
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[…] remarks about the whole idea of a personal brand from Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten. Personal brand enthusiasts responded to Weingarten’s skepticism by saying that Weingarten himself, like nearly every successful professional, has a reputation that […]
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[…] Gene Weingarten knows branding (even though he scorns it) June 24, 2011 by Steve Buttry Update: Joe Grimm is leading a workshop on building your personal brand. Update: I have blogged about my own personal branding strategy. Update: I used Storify to curate discussion of this issue on various blogs and Twitter. Update: Weingarten has responded twice. […]
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[…] the significance in showcasing your value. The process starts with producing quality work, but, as veteran journalist Steve Buttry stated, “if you don’t show the value, you can become […]
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[…] future. “Gene Weingarten has developed an outstanding personal brand as a journalist,” retorted the commentator Steve Buttry. “But that brand will not let him write, except scornfully, about branding and […]
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[…] Washington Post Magazine, ripped the increasing discussion of branding by journalists, I noted that Gene is an expert at branding, but that the curmudgeon aspect of his brand doesn’t allow him to acknowledge what he does as […]
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[…] journalist Steve Buttry responded to Weingartens column with this: [B]randing starts with quality and hard work. But lots of […]
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Is this silly conversation still going on?
If by “branding” we mean that folks become more or less known for what they do well — or ill — then what we’re talking about is so self-evident as to be trivial.
If we mean that marketeering can create the impression among potential customers, readers, whatever, that someone is doing the job well, whether that person is or not, then we’re talking advertising and public relations with all their manifolds possibilities for spin and corruption, not journalism.
In either case none of this is worth more than a moment’s thought in any serious newsroom or journalism classroom.
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[…] more background on Gene’s and my disagreement over branding, check out the three blog posts I wrote on the subject, (with links to Gene’s post that started it all), plus a […]
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[…] argued here with Gene Weingarten about whether branding for journalists is good, and I’ve blogged advice for journalists on branding. I have co-authored a booklet with […]
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[…] commented on the branding discussion Gene Weingarten and I were having. (Gene has appeared in this blog frequently, but I think Mathew has received more overall […]
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