IF you are reading these words on publication day, October 23, it’s likely I will be delivering similar ones to the most unlikely of audiences – high level content creators. The fact that I was invited to speak to a group of renowned people who do what I have absolutely no idea how to do was as anathema to me as those creators believing that banking is something you do inside a bank.
Yet the invitation to address such an august group of hundreds at a gathering organized by Janay Symonette and Bevy Agency with world-famous creators was too tempting to ignore and too challenging to refuse. Despite my worries that I’d be like a rhino trying to pass as a kitten, I recognize there is nothing like a good challenge to keep the mind greased and the body refreshed. Taking on challenges so long as they don’t involve climbing mountains like Kilimanjaro--which I can’t even spell, let alone climb--makes the difference between staying relevant and becoming a relic.
So what does someone like me have to offer to those who can whip out a Tik Tok video faster than I can sign into my account? They want to know about branding. I want to know how to turn my playlist into a user-friendly Spotify whatchamacallit.
Another pot of coffee later – yes, a pot, not a pod – and I understand the connection between their world and mine, the one I started in a half a century ago and have plodded through every day since, most holidays included. It’s all about messaging. Theirs is a world built on how the messaging looks, sounds, and feels when it is delivered and how the messenger is perceived. Will he or she move up in the rankings? Will they be recognized and rewarded? Will they be a creator or an influencer? Mine is based on the information it delivers.
More often than not, to attract attention, theirs has pizzazz. It’s fun.
Content creators shun scandal
You don’t see content creators reporting a murder or revealing the latest twist in a scandal. Mine is hard news, features, human interest, threats to a fragile environment, a court case, the story of a child with special needs who stuns everyone with a singular engineering feat.
We are not so different as we are similar in many ways. I won’t be posting about the hottest look in sandals. They won’t be creating content about pending legislation, but both of us will jump on it when there is a matter of public interest – their posts on protecting the environment will be every bit if not more powerful than mine. Their recipes for a perfect holiday meal might take a few shortcuts, but if I write tightly, mine will be similar.
Where the real difference lies goes beyond the method of delivery.
For influencers trying to build their brand, what they do is about them. It’s intended to make them the centrepiece.
JLo set the stage
As I, and others do by contributing the musings we do, we focus externally, on the subject, not ourselves. Our delivery requires another route, through media, not a self-constructed platform. For that, we depend on relationships.
They deliver through channels. They build their reputation on platforms. We build ours on the news we uncover, analyze, report, share. Our placement of our reporting requires that third party. And in doing so, it becomes more personal. We work with people upon whose good graces we depend, news editors of TV, radio, print – the media.
We build relationships with clients whose stories we tell and whose products or services we may help enhance. We help them build relationships through networking. We are the connectors.
Traditional media and social media messages, worlds apart in appearance, may also overlap, one reinforcing or re-affirming the other. Voices coming from different places with a single thread of thought. But their delivery must be slick and compelling to compete for attention from a global audience that’s information fatigued. Our message doesn’t need a slick or snazzy coating. It needs compelling content that is based on fact, knowledge, and assessment not just of what this sliver of news means for today, but what impact it can have on tomorrow.
Their success is based on who looks at what they produced today and follows them into tomorrow. It’s about them. Ours is harder to measure. It’s not about us. Or rarely about us, though the lines are more blurred, as newscasters become quasi-TV stars and anchors have their own following.
What Jennifer Lopez did as a pioneer in personal branding in the early 2000s by turning voice, acting, and body into the JLo brand set the stage for celebrity branding with followers. The unsolved disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother raised the Today Show’s following, sadly, through tragedy.
Following tragedy
No one plans a tragedy. Millions follow it.
For those of us who have long been at this work of reporting, providing information, building news libraries, and helping to record or write history, there is one element that will always distinguish what the Alex Wolff’s do from what we did – it’s the how, the means, and methods.
When stories were a bike ride away
When I began my ‘career’ at 14, I rode a bike and collected photos, which I peddled back to the Boca Raton News where, in exchange for my writing the weekly birthdays, weddings and obituaries, they let me write a teen column. In high school, I produced the Teen Town News, a black and white mimeographed 11x14 tabloid with all the latest school news and gossip. Every Friday night I ran off copies on a mimeograph machine, turning the big wheel that spun paper through and spat it out with print on it, a fact that never ceased to amaze me. It was so popular that I doubled the price from five cents to a dime and still sold out every week.
Later, as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post and basically running the South County bureau, I covered city council meetings, elections, the civil rights movement, my alma mater FAU still in its infancy, crime and fire. I didn’t follow influencers. The concept had not been invented, nor had the cell phone or internet. What I followed was the scratchy voice of the police radio. My contacts in police and fire in the multi-city area were strong. If a fire broke out or there was a drug bust at some ungodly hour, the phone – a landline -- would ring. I knew their voices, they didn’t have to identify themselves when they dropped a hint about where to go. I grabbed my young daughter, threw her on the blanket that I kept on the floor of my light green El Camino truck and off we went in the middle of the night to cover the action.
After a City Council meeting, I dropped a dime or a quarter, I don’t remember which, into the pay phone in the hall and dictated the story. I wrote it as I spoke it, though sometimes I usually knew the lead by the time I was done dialing the number for City Desk.
At the National Enquirer and Weekly World News where I worked for the legendary Generoso Pope, we had the best of everything, the newest, finest equipment, the best Fleet Street writers, live artists before the days of apps and software like Photoshop.
It took a true artist to doctor a photo of a heavy Elvis or Carole Burnett or Mary Tyler Moore. Pope wanted to bring in the latest technology, electric typewriters. Every writer got one – and almost every writer rejected it. After two weeks, they begged to go back to their manual Royal or Underwood. The sound of the electric motor was too much pressure to produce the next few words.
Marvel of the IBM Selectric
The IBM Selectric with its ink ball revolutionized the act of telling a story. It was a marvel. Less than six months after it was introduced in 1961, there were orders for 80,000. By 1986 – just 25 years later – there were 13 million IBM Selectrics in use. When I moved to The Bahamas 44 years ago, I worked on one and found it amazingly state-of-the-art.
Then the even more amazing word processor came along. You could correct a mistake up to 17 letters back without having to start all over again, yank your paper out of the machine, insert new, and start all over again, typing from the top of the page.
The PC revolution, nearly 300 million units later
It all seems like ancient history now, yet it was not that long ago. The world of how we tell our story, how we attract those who will follow, faced its greatest change when the PC was invented. Then came the laptop (some 220 million of them have been sold to date!) In 2025, the total number of laptops and desktops reached 278 million, creating a $250 billion market with all the accessories.
Stories began to spread via phone, first text, then all the social media channels a Smart phone could get. Memes flew back and forth faster than all the airplanes in the sky at any given time. Today there are eight billion cell phones in use, the equivalent of one for every man, woman, child, and infant.
So where does this leave us?
Content creation is not new. What is new is the means by which it is prepped and delivered.
For all the greats, like TV host and creator Lolo Wood; Alex Wolf, one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business; and Grammy-winning producer Bryan-Michael Cox, there were the predecessors. Like Edward R Murphy, whose voice explained wars to us; Barbara Walters, whose probing personal interviews produced laughter and tears and gave us close-ups of hundreds, including Fidel Castro; Bob Woodward, whose reporting brought down a president; and Brian Moss, who with the testimony of people like Norman Solomon brought down the crime cartel of Colombia and the Colombian flag that flew over Norman’s Cay, a symbol of the shame that smeared The Bahamas for its blatant condoning of the drug trade.
And, if there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, it is this: In the end, it’s not the means of the message, but the honesty on which it is built and the relationships that guarantee it will be heard.
No matter how easy it is to post something without ever having to come into contact with or pump the flesh of a human, it is, in the end, the human touch and interaction that matters. When there is a crisis, when there is a sense of urgency, when there is an outbreak or an injustice that must be righted, it’s people who make it happen and relationships that make it better.
In the end, it’s about trust and relationships. Our dependence on technology, our absorption of the content others create, no matter how remarkable or popular, shall never erase the power of the personal touch. Don’t get swept away by the metrics.
In the end, it’s people and relationships that matter. There’s room for both worlds and a better world for all when they intersect.