Madison Taylor

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a “Seinfeld” episode. That’s not too surprising really. It was a TV show that certainly tried to cover nearly every cultural or behavioral issue or theme of its time — from people who talk to closely to answering machines. Every now and then I wish Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were still around. I’d like to get their take on Facebook, for example.

The other day, though, I felt like Jerry in the episode in which his new manager arranges for him to speak to a school assembly — for two hours. “But I don’t have material for two hours,” Seinfeld exclaims.

That was my thinking after I was kindly invited to talk to a group at Twin Lakes in Burlington. The format called for 60 to 90 minutes. In a word, I was petrified.

Turned out, there was no need for alarm. They were a great and receptive group and I probably didn’t need to be as Pentagon-style prepared as I turned out to be.

Some of the things I hoped to share with the group, however, tied in with how I got into the newspaper business. Much of it tracked back to movies. As anyone who follows my work probably knows, movies have been a huge influence on my life and when I look back, tons of classic films from the 1930s to the 1970s featured newspapers or newspaper reporters. They were smart people, fast talkers, people in the know and who came by that knowledge quickly. They traveled to exotic places and liked to take a drink now and again. And from “It Happened One Night” “His Girl Friday” “The Philadelphia Story,” and “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance” to “All the President’s Men,” people in newspapers were unafraid to challenge authority, showed tremendous courage, actually every so often righted incredible wrongs  and told the best jokes.

I wanted to be like them.

To illustrate the point to my Twin Lakes audience, I tracked down some newspaper-related scenes from a couple of my favorite films. I also snagged a YouTube link to a video our company included in our training about the importance of social media.

One of the clips I decided to show was a New York Times snippet about the classic comedy “His Girl Friday.” It was based on the play “The Front Page” by former newspaper guy Ben Hecht and starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Great stuff.

The second clip was one I decided not to show because it contained a little rough language. It’s from the outstanding 1970s film “All the President’s Men.” It’s based on the Washington Post investigation of the Watergate break-in. It’s probably my favorite film about newspapers. The scenes I selected feature Jason Robards as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. His is the voice I hear in my head when I ask reporters about stories in progress. I’m also pretty bad about boring young reporters with tales about my past in the business.

And the third clip I did show the group and it was perhaps the thing I presented that astonished them the most. Part of the reason was how quickly this video is edited. The images move at a rapid rate. But the information is also overwhelming. It’s called the Social Media Revolution. It did a pretty fair job of selling people here that we had to get on board with Facebook and Twitter or be hopelessly left behind.

The piece of information in this video that troubled my audience the most? That email is becoming passe.

Stay tuned.

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