Perfecting the Pitch
Dateline Washington DC, 25 March, 5pm
It's near the end of second of now three days of my Premeditated Media Tour. Again, not quite the real media tour scheduled for 26 April through 5 May in Boston, DC and NYC, but a pre-media media tour of DC to conduct drop-bys with producers of various TV and radio shows, plus some prominent think tanks and newspapers.
Today is a strange mix of frustration and elation.
Let’s start with the bad and work our way to the good.
Up and off to the Pentagon at 0800. My Department of Defense ID badge can get me into the building, but not Steve, for whom I cannot serve as escort because I don’t have the special Pentagon badge. Got the special Pentagon map, so I figure I don’t need no stinkin’ baaaaaadge.
But the security guys see it differently, so we wait. Steve keeps calling all his press contacts. I get a hold of a secretary in Art Cebrowski’s Office of Force Transformation and she comes down to escort Steve into the building (he cannot be left alone and I don’t count even though I can roam at will with my badge). So to pay her for her good deed, we drop off a hard-cover publication edition to Art. I don’t sign because I suspect he’ll give it away.
Our escort takes us to where the press offices are located. These are in a new wedge of the building, or a section that’s recently been rehabbed, so nice digs but small. What’s cool is that each mini-office has its own fake backdrop on the wall and a camera mount on the far side, so each correspondent can broadcast live from their own mini-studio/office.
No one seems around. What we didn’t realize at the time was that everyone was scrambling for eventual Rumsfeld press conference to rebut Richard Clarke’s testimony. Still, we do the drop by with two well-known defense correspondents. Out of the building by 10 and off to the Washington office of a major think tank for sit-down with new director. She is blunt about crush of books out there and how they choose authors for speaking engagements, but chat seems to go well and there may yet be something to it.
Then we break for lunch in Shirlington VA, hoping a news show producer will meet us there, but crunch of day’s events conspire to deny us his presence, so we eat and move on.
Next is trip to producer of a globally-syndicated new program who is scouting material for new season’s worth of shows. The usual pitch and the usual promise to read the book and think about it.
Then to a national business journal and a talk with a defense correspondent who is half way through the book and seems to like it a lot. He is promising review, so we cross our fingers on our way out the door that I did nothing to ruin that possibility.
Then off to another national newspaper and a sit-down with major reporter. Exchange hopefully pushes him to read book and think about something down the road.
Final stop is Washington Post and staffer in Outlook Section. I wrote for that section in late 1990 (about the Op-Ed Wars over Desert Storm) and have never been back since, so you can imagine how much I’d love to write them something. Steve had me gin up a series of possible article topics in advance which we sent by email. She is most interested in notion I first explored in email interview with Junk Yard Blog when asked about “losing” Spain on 3/11 and what does that mean to the Core? She wants me to explore notion I raise: that we should think more about what it takes to get New Core (like India, China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico) on board than contorting ourselves to keep Old Core Europe on board in this global war on terror. She wants it NLT Tuesday and she shall have it, by God. 1,500 words—hah! I do that before my first cup of coffee!
So, I start the day like some sleaze, hanging around reporter’s cubicles hoping for grip-and-grin and end day with offer to put something into Post’s Outlook section—definitely a journey from low to high. I knew I was lucky 14 years ago to get into the Outlook section. Some colleagues said back then I’d be lucky to get in again in about a decade—that’s how tough it can be! So it’s nice to think it may happen again, if I can make this lady (definitely no pushover) happy enough with what I produce to actually run it. It would run probably on 4 April. Close enough to book release to help a lot.
Whew! Need a drink, a nice room-service meal and to catch up on my newspapers. I won’t think about this article until I get a good sleep, but I am guessing I will start writing it on the plane home tomorrow afternoon.
Last note: I got to stop by and chat with old friend from Harvard, Minxin Pei of Carnegie Endowment for Peace in DC. He is a dear friend and it did me much good to see him in person. He reminded me he came to all the NewRuleSets.Project workshops atop World Trade Center One. We marveled at how far we’ve come from Harvard, where I was superintendent of an apartment complex in Brookline and he was a custodian of a family estate in Brookline. That’s how we made ends meet in grad school. Seeing him today made me realize how far we had come, and I felt good for us both. Pei is one of best and smartest men I know, and in a day full of drop-bys and perfect five-minute pitches to stranger after stranger, a friendly face was more than just welcome—it sustained me.
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