Shutting up is one of my most difficult skills. Not talking and listening to others is a skill set that I was not born with. I have had to work at it. I tend to be a talker and storyteller (and I’m usually entertaining though I recognize I am at times obnoxious and self-centered). I have to make a conscious decision to listen to other people’s stories. But I do because I’ve learned that, one it can be interesting, two, it makes people feel good to have you listen to them, and three, making people feel good makes me feel good and, it is, after all, all about me feeling good!

When I do media training I tell participants that shutting up is a strategic skill. When I give talks about communications I tell people it’s important to know when to shut up.

This past Friday night I hosted my wife’s big 50th birthday bash. I realize I did more talking than listening. I’ll excuse myself though, since I was in the hyper host mode (though really having fun at it).

But the more Blogenberg remembers to shut up, the better communicator Blogenberg will be.

I’m sitting at Starbucks, drinking my very masculine skim latte, overhearing a 30-something women pitching her financial planning services. I wanted to lean over and offer this tip: nobody cares about how your philosophy of life aligns with your approach to business. They care about what you can deliver. Just say that, simply.

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I’ve hurt my back. Thus far, the only thing that seems to help is whining incessantly about it. The good thing is, I really do think my wife finds a 49-year-old man who whines constantly to be sexy. Wouldn’t you think so?

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I’m realizing, safety is making it a lot harder to be a parent of a small child today than when my kids were little. For example, they just said you can’t give cold medicine to children under the age of four. What do you give them, brandy? How is a parent supposed to survive a sick infant or toddler if somebody can’t take drugs? And take booster car seats. Now they tell parents to have kids ride in booster seats until they are, like, 30. What a pain. I was so glad to get rid of kids’ car seats. You ever try to put those things in a car? Ever try to slam a toddler down into one, pull the strap over his head, and latch it without getting kicked somewhere sensitive? I guess, for my children, we were just the Years of Living Dangerously. Good.

I’ve started to give this definition of effective communication to clients, workshop attendees, and media training participants: Did you understand what I just said?

Pretty radical, huh?

I used to get my haircut at a very basic salon. The guy who owns it closed it and opened a fancy day-spa 5 miles south. I followed the woman who cuts my hair because I still get the old price. Last week, I sat down in this very fancy day-spa to get my haircut and noticed the place was empty.

I asked my haircut lady about it. Nearly all of the stylists who worked at the old salon refused to come to the new day-spa. Seems that the owner gave the stylists all of two days notice. Now, he’s got a very expensive spa with very high overhead in a very high rent district. What he doesn’t have are customers.

He got all excited about his new product and forgot about his old relationships.

The guy had two constituencies he needed to worry about: his stylists and their customers. Once he knew he was moving, the owner needed to hire us. We would have put together a communications strategy for both constituencies. We would have helped him with messaging about the move, determined the best way to connect with stylists’ customers (probably in-salon and direct stylist-to-customer communications), and timed a rollout that addressed all business concerns (including, I assume, a need for secrecy for some period of time).

We would have worried about his relationships while he worried about his fancy new product.

Instead, I just made sure the woman who cuts my hair calls me when and if this new day-spa shuts down.

When it comes to dealing with media, I always give this advice: “Don’t worry about what you can’t control.” Don’t get all wrapped up in worry about what a reporter may or may not end up writing about you because you can’t control it. Instead, worry about what you can control — having a good strategy for the interview; delivering effective messaging; being accurate, concise, and clear; controlling verbal and non-verbal communication; responding in a timely manner; getting a reporter what he or she needs to, hopefully, be accurate.

My lessons apply to me today. Our firm has just been named No. 241 on the Inc. 500 list. The online write-up of our firm is terrific. In the magazine though, the short description says our firm “specializes in parenting and abstinence campaigns.” Only kind of, sort of accurate. Our biggest project is actually a campaign urging parents to talk to their pre-teens and young teens about waiting to have sex. (It’s a rarity — a social marketing campaign proven by independent research to work!) And what we really specialize in is bringing sophisticated public relations to issues such as early childhood education, workforce development, health, family and child wellbeing, and the many other issues that led me to get a master’s degree in social work.

My reaction to not being thrilled with how Inc. magazine characterized my shop? Who cares? It’s nothing I can control. Plus, I’m in the Inc. 500.

Recently, a popular blog about media trumpeted a decision by a newspaper to shutter its presses and go completely online. The writer said this was the future of journalism. I posted a comment saying that this was not the future, that the future will involve giving consumers more control of content. I got skewered.

Other people commented and said I am jumping on the “citizen journalism bandwagon.” One wrote that, if you followed my argument, journalism will look like that job site commercial where hundreds of fans at a tennis match rush the court and try to play.

All of the people commenting said I don’t understand that the value that journalists bring is accuracy, and that giving consumers control over content will create a messy concoction of truth and fallacy posing as journalism.

It’s not an either/or proposition. Saying that success in the future will require ceding some control to consumers is not saying that journalists should go get new jobs. Of course not. How do people get information now? They rely on journalists, yes. But they rely just as much on their neighbor, the postman, the clerk at the store, their priest, and so on. The online newspaper that figures out how to bring both to their site will win their market, hands down.

My other bet is that it won’t be today’s brand name newspapers that do this. Somebody new will move into the media space and create, local market by local market, online news sites that combine journalists’ reporting and analysis, with local citizenry filing reports. That’s how people have got their information for centuries — somebody’s going to figure out how to bring that together on the web and actually make money.

Last Blogenberg I wrote that “accuracy is what accuracy does” when noting why the mumbling in the distance heard by traditional media is the last rites. That is, unless traditional media stops pretending it controls information and, most important, has a monopoly on accuracy.

Citizen journalism — where your neighbor feeds your need for information — will overtake traditional journalism as the trusted source of information in the coming years. That’s because it’s all about control and accuracy. Technology allows consumers to control where and how they get information. Journalism, advertising, marketing, etc. no longer have control over what information you get and where you get it. You do. And traditional journalism no longer decides what’s accurate. You do. People assign credibility where they decide to assign it.

What do you think people find most credible? The New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times? Or different feeds of information from neighbors, colleagues, family, the clerk at the local drugstore, etc., all creating a tapestry of information from which they determine their version of accuracy. Because accuracy is what accuracy does.
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I usually pay no attention to the Public Relations Society of America online discussion group for independent and small PR shop owners. But a recent thread about marketing caught my eye. Several contributors raved about a certain marketing consultant. They touted his books, his websites, his talks. They said he can revolutionize your marketing.

I was intrigued. Goodness knows, bringing in new business is one of the biggest challenges I face. So I clicked through to the marketing genius’ website. It was a cluttered mess. It was the online version of the proverbial everything but the kitchen sink. My reaction? If you can’t put together a clean, tight, attractive website that easily and quickly tells me what I need to know, why in the world would I pay the brain that created that website to think about my marketing?

I am the end of journalism. The very end, my friend.

I read the Washington Post every day. But I never read the front section, the news section. Because all my news comes from news aggregators, blogs, social networking sites, etc. (I read the Washington Post for sports, arts, entertainment, etc. But that’s only because I’m from a newspaper generation.) Obviously, I could know everything I want to know without ever reading a newspaper or watching TV news.

There’s something else I can get without ever touching a newspaper, something more important than information alone — and it’s what really portends the end of journalism as we know it. I can get proximity of information source. I can get credibility where I assign credibility. I can get trust. In other words, I can choose to assign accuracy and credibility to, and invest trust in, blogs, Facebook feeds, Twitter updates, etc.

In a recent post in his influential blog, Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel, writes, “Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.”

It’s trust and accuracy that has always been the currency of traditional media. It’s trust and accuracy upon which journalism professors hang their hopes for their profession. Problem is, to steal from Forrest Gump: accuracy is what accuracy does. Next Blogenberg I’ll explain what I mean, and why, within 15 years, at most, citizen journalism will be the market for this currency.

*Borrowed, with a bit of Blogenberging, from The Doors depressing song, The End.

This is the first edition of Blogenberg News Links. Each week we’ll compile, in no particular order, a few stories that we’re following that you may not have noticed, that we’ve found interesting and that provide insight into communications, media, business and culture.

• True to form, Marc Gunther takes a provacative look at business and the potential costs of carbon emissions caps.
• Seth Godin sort of perfectly captures the definition of good writing.
• NPR covers the impact of blogging on sports reporting in “Blogging the Name of the Game in Sports Coverage.”
• Conde Nast Portfolio explains why CEOs should be aware of what their kids post online.
• Newsweek predicts the “Return of the Experts” will define the future of the Web.
• The Harvard Business Review podcast looks at how to make your business a learning organization.
• Brandstorming explains that a small business’ online marketing budget is better spent on blogging than Pay-Per-Click advertising.
• From Good Experience, a look at the ultimate example of corporate citizenship.

I got two phone calls last week, within a day of each other, inquiring whether I had any interest in selling my business. One I called back. One I ignored. The difference in my response was so simple, yet it speaks volumes about effective marketing and public relations.

First things first: I’ve got no interest in selling my business. Maybe someday in the future my view could change, but it’s certainly nowhere near my radar screen right now. But the mix of curiosity and the possibility of learning something led me to return one of the calls.

One caller asked for me by name. He had done some preliminary research and had a good sense of my business, what we are about, etc.

The other caller left a voicemail message in our main mailbox. He didn’t even bother to press “1 for Jeff Rosenberg.” Keep in mind, even if you’ve done no research into my business, it’s doesn’t take a degree from MIT to figure out that Jeff Rosenberg is the principal in a business named Rosenberg Communications.

Not very hard to figure out which guy I called back, is it?

(I did learn some interesting things from the guy. I’m not selling my business but I am a bit smarter after the conversation.)