Reflections on a Career

 I recently retired after a 44-year career in journalism, publishing, corporate communications, and organizational change management. Over that time, I’ve worked for small, family-owned businesses, large multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies, and lots in between. I’ve had many good bosses, a few lousy bosses, and some truly great bosses.

It’s been an incredible journey.

I spent years on Capitol Hill covering hearings on the breakup of AT&T, sat in on Supreme Court cases, attended briefings at the White House. As the head of corporate communications for a large real estate developer, I travelled to Rome and Madrid, flew in the corporate jet, scripted investor calls, drafted CEO letters to shareholders, arranged deskside chats for the CEO at the top business publications. I wrote, edited or published newsletters in industries from telecom to IT, fashion to waste management, pharmaceuticals to transportation, and more. I met celebrities and sociopaths, and over the decades learned much, grew tremendously, and made many great friends.

The stories I have! The time I was trying to understand the approval process for a giant commercial development my company was pursuing. I kept asking the senior executive in charge of the project questions about how we were going to get the needed local government official votes. Finally, exasperated, he yelled at me, “You don’t get it – the fix is in.” It sounds like a line from a cheesy movie, but the fix was, indeed, in. The project was approved over strong opposition and today is a very profitable destination.

The Friday afternoon I received a call from a man who identified himself as an FBI agent, wanting to interview me the following Monday. After a sleepless weekend (he didn’t explain why he wanted to talk to me and told me not to mention his call to anyone), I met him at the specified location. He interviewed me about a Polish academician who was on the editorial board of a newsletter I was the publisher of. The professor turned out to be an East German spy. I never found out what happened to him.

The time I had an idea for a PC security conference, back in the 1980s. I pitched it to my bosses, who greenlighted it. We decided that London would be a good location for it and I was given full rein. I was young, with a young family. We had little money and I had never been overseas before. I somehow found a good hotel to host the conference in the pre-Internet period, made the arrangements, and ran the marketing. While there I wanted to host a dinner for my publication’s editorial advisory board, about a dozen influential consultants, practitioners, and academics (the spy the FBI had spoken to me about was there so I assume somewhere in the bureau’s vaults is my dossier with a photo of the two of us). The dinner was grand, but I was terrified the entire meal that my newly minted credit card would be rejected. I had no backup plan if it were. Luckily, the charge went through, but my suit was ruined from my profuse sweating.

But the real memories will be of the people who helped me along the way. Leslie Albin, a great journalist and a great boss, mentored me early on in my career and gave me important assignments, taught me how to dig for the real news in hearings and briefings, and taught me how to write for a business audience.

Dave Williams, who would literally dash from a Federal Communications Commission meeting to a hallway phone booth (they actually existed back then) and call in a story off the top of his head, also took me under his wing and showed me the ropes early on.

Jonathan Miller helped me break into news writing. My first real job was at a publisher that produced resource books and newsletters for the broadcast and cable TV industries. I worked in the books section, which was monotonous and tedious – reading newspaper clips from around the country to find information to add to our books and the weekly addenda we would send to subscribers. To get hired for the newsletters, you had to have daily newspaper reporting experience, which I lacked.

Occasionally, Jonathan would let me write a brief item about a new cable system or something, and ultimately got me an interview at another publisher for a reporter position. I got the job, in part on his recommendation and the articles he had let me write.

Jonathan let me work in the upstairs newsroom on Friday nights, when the articles for the newsletters had to be written and edited, and the publications formatted for printing. There weren’t word processors or computers at that time, so the edited articles would be run down to the basement where three guys typed the copy into columns using special typewriters that could do proportional spacing. They had day jobs working at the World Bank, I remember, and moonlighted for us. They would tell me the filthiest jokes I have ever heard. When the typists were finished with a page, I would run it upstairs to be proofed, then run it back down for the typesetters to type a corrected word, line or sentence and I would take that back upstairs. Then I would put the original page on a light table, lay the corrected copy over it, and use an Exacto knife to cut out and replace the errant words. It was literal cut and paste.

I once worked for a developer of retirement communities that was expanding to new markets. Two of my colleagues, Chris Siciliano and Gale Samborne, and I formed a team that would do grassroots public relations to try to get community support for our projects. We would drive to a prospective town and conduct public meetings to pitch the advantages of building a sprawling retirement campus in their community.

One thing I learned on these grassroots efforts was that racism is firmly embedded in towns across the country. We worked in North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio, and bigotry was everywhere. In the town halls we would host, there inevitably were questions about the makeup of the workers. “We don’t want their type flooding into our neighborhood,” I specifically remember one attendee saying in Ohio, although we heard the sentiment everywhere.

We would also go door-to-door to canvas. Neighborhoods were often opposed to our projects so we would try to offer them something. In one neighborhood that we knew would be strongly opposed to the project, we offered to connect them to the sewer line we planned to build. It was pretty lousy work, but the three of us had a lot of fun together, and it gave us a chance to be out of the office for a few days.

Peter Nagan, a legend in journalism, was absolutely the toughest, most demanding editor I ever had. I thought I was a pretty good writer when I went to work for Newsletter Services, but the first copy I submitted to him came back in a river of bright red ink. It was a brutal welcome. It took me months to get to the point where my copy would come back from him nearly clean. He was a master at writing with exacting precision, clarity and brevity, and I’d like to think a small fraction of his skill rubbed off on me.

There were many characters along the way. A guy who wrote a newsletter for me had some issues. I once walked into the men’s room and heard him whisper from a stall, “I’ve been discovered.” Or the woman who on nearly every deadline day would come to me and say she didn’t think she would be able to have her newsletter ready. Once it was because her cat was sick. Another time there just wasn’t anything happening in her industry. Another time she had had an argument with her mom. It was always something. But she always managed to get her copy in.

There was a guy who would go around the office giving the female reporters backrubs. A very talented female reporter who would scream into the phone at a reluctant source, “FUCK OFF” and hang up, then call back 30 seconds later and get the story. A guy who passed around samples of Tinkle Targets, a product he had written a story about for his newsletter on early child development.

I was out of a job for an extended period after the retirement community developer I worked for went bankrupt. To make ends meet, I took a job selling cars for a Ford dealership and later as a host at Aida, a restaurant owned by long-time friends Joe and Mary Barbera. I remember feeling humiliated when a couple guys I knew from my former employer came to the restaurant while I was hosting. It was an awkward moment for all of us.

One day while I was hosting, I got a call from a recruiter named Jimmy Iannuzzi. He had seen my profile on LinkedIn or I had sent him my resume, I don’t recall which. He said there was a contractor communications position at Constellation Energy in Baltimore I might be a good fit for. I met with Jeff Myers and Angela Bernstein in the Communications group and got the job. The contract term was six months, and every six months I had a tense wait to see if I would be extended another six months – it always came down to the last day, and it was nerve-wracking. After three years of that, I finally was onboarded as a full-time employee, in the IT department. Even then there were hiccups, and I bounced around from IT to Business Execution and back to IT.

Catching on with Constellation was life-changing for me. Besides having relatively stable employment with good benefits, I found my place and had fulfilling work, and my contributions were recognized and valued. More important, I had colleagues who were outstanding in their craft and collaborative and generous.

Jeff took a chance by hiring me while I was severely under-employed and gave me increasingly responsible assignments, including writing the monthly letter from the president of Retail to the business and occasionally messages from the CEO. He also let me gravitate to handle communications for a high-impact, four-year IT project where I worked closely with Jodi Heston, Kim Fohl, Rob Schlotterbeck, and others. Kim brought me with her when we were both in Business Execution and she moved to IT under new CIO Shaina Green. Shaina was an advocate of mine as we worked to build a new culture in the department and was patient with me while I learned to communicate in her voice. In my role I had the privilege of working with many, many outstanding people in IT and across the business.

This past February, Constellation was split off from Exelon, a utility holding company, and there was an upheaval of personnel changes. I landed in Constellation IT, working with Kim and Jodi, and with a new boss, Jennifer Hunt. She is among the very best bosses I ever had – extremely talented in communications, technology, and people skills. She was supportive, inspiring, and committed to bringing out the best in me. Jennifer and the rest of our team, including Kim, Jodi, Brittany MillerHarris, Heather Fleischmann, Juliet Anderson, Tammy Radvanovsky, and Tassany Campbell, were way more than colleagues. They are among those who I hope will be life-long friends.

But after 44 years, it was time for me to hang up the cleats. To everyone who helped me along the way, inspired me, or just showed me an occasional kindness, thank you!