Do You Have Info?

The Team & The Drink:  A one act play of posting request
By Adam Holisky
October 2010

ADAM

Hey team!

THE TEAM looks up to ADAM, disinterested.

TEAM

What…

ADAM

Wanna relax and drink this weekend?

ADAM takes a sip of a gin and tonic.  He motions forward with his glass, nodding towards THE TEAM.
THE TEAM perks up at the mentioning and display of alcohol.

TEAM

Yeah!

ADAM

Cool!  A couple of you want to write a post this weekend?  We’re on an every-other hour schedule through Monday, so we need all the regular columns plus a couple more posts.

THE TEAM is now excited to write posts for this weekend.

TEAM

Sure!

ALEX can be seen nervously holding his bottle of Tanqueray, not sure he wants THE TEAM to drink it all in one shot.

ADAM

Thanks! I love you all.

Adam makes the <3 sign with his right hand pointer finger.

Oh, so who wants to write a post this weekend?

_______________ (your name here?)

I do!

~fin~

I need to set some goals for myself for the next year, and what better way to do it than to publicly say so and let the internet be the judge of me.  Some are cryptic and don’t make sense, but that’s because there’s a backstory to them that I’m not sharing.

1.  Earn 15% more than I currently am.  This should be doable, one way or another.

2.  Branch out writing / managing an area I’m not currently heavily involved in.

3.  Spend more time in the editing process and be more self-reliant on editing decisions.

4.  Absolutely no working after 10 pm.  This includes IMs and Campfire discussions.

5.  Don’t bite off more than I can do in an eight hour day, and learn to say no to things that I don’t need to take on.

Perhaps the internet isn’t the best place for such a list, but really I work in public enough anyways, so what harm could it do.  People that care will care, and the people that don’t won’t be reading this anyways!  All is good, amirite?

I have a secret – everything that you see is not always what it seems.  This secret is probably pretty hard for some folks to stomach.  They see things like an article being edited or a change in format and immediately assume the worst.

“Oh no!  Adam is only writing the post two days a week instead of three!  He must be in trouble…..” Be sure to say “in trouble” like you did back in third grade when someone got called to the dean’s office, because that’s how I’m saying it as I’m writing this extrapolation.

This situation presents an interesting conundrum in that what is reality is far away from what the public perception is.  In the case of one of my daily columns, we’re just moving around resources to allow other talented writers chances to shine.  No evil or negative intent what so ever.  In fact, I was the one to suggest the change.

But herein lies the crux of the matter – how do you correct such a public perception without coming out and sound like, well… like a whinny little three year old?

Part of the way you can do it is provide excellent transparency in all public processes.  But often that opens up such processes for public input – people think because we’re telling them about internal workings they can influence and change them.  That’s hardly ever going to happen (infact, I can’t think of a time it has happened).  More so, it often leads to points where you have to say “But we can’t go into that, because it’s a private matter.”

So how else can public perception in the mass media world we all live in be changed?

More and more communication, even if it’s not all transparent.  Letting people know what’s happening, answering even the most mundane and ridiculous questions with the same cool and collected answer can quash even the most abusive perceptions.

In my day job it’s become apparent that this level of communication is necessary in order to keep things running smoothly in the public arena.  Daily interaction with comments and community figures allows this level of consistent communication.  Not only does this lead to better public reception of changes, but it also leads to growth of the site and overall buy in of our ideas and direction, which is a good thing (one that will eventually lead to even bigger and better things).

In my previous job, working as a manager of a symphony orchestra, my boss and I would often have to work day and night to get the orchestra and its various factions to buy into our ideas.  The group was much smaller, about 150 people at most, but the same concepts apply when dealing with numbers in the millions.  The key is not to change the nature of your decisions, which are hopefully well thought out and hopefully correct, but to change the perception of such decisions through directed communication and overall message shaping.

It takes a lot of work and practice to become proficient at that level of communication – it’s something that I am no where perfect at yet, and might never be.  But the key is to recognize this point of importance and be mindful to always take care of it.

There have been two stories that WoW.com has broke under my name in the past week:

• Patch 3.2 Going Live
• Cataclysm races leaked

Each story relied on anonymous sources (well, anonymous to you) that had information pertaining to the facts which were being reported on.  Each story was cited as such, with the words crafted in a way to express the source’s validity.

But yet here we are, the evening of the big Cataclysm leak, and the crying over WoW.com not revealing its sources has reached the worst levels I’ve ever seen.  People seem to think they’re entitled to the same trust that individuals place in myself and fellow editors at our site, and feel that without their personal seal of approval we have nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors.

Well, okay then.  I’m fine with people questioning or holding up a skeptical eye to our news, especially with something like this.  But when people shut their brains off and just start yelling, it tends to get to me. (Same with the “town halls” going on right now).  And while most of those people who are yelling are getting banned from our site over the next few hours (there’s so many of them), there are some facts I think are appropriate to put out there:

First, we would never stake our reputation on posting news like this if we were not supremely confident in our sources.

Second, the sources are not just one person saying something.  There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got with only one person saying it.  We have no idea if it’s true. It could be false.  But like a good journalist, when more than one person says the exact same thing, and are in a position where they’d know the facts at hand, it becomes valid enough to write about and bring to the public.

Third, no one will reveal their sources.  This is a founding principal of modern journalism.  Anonymous sources stay anonymous.

If I were to reveal the sources, I would likely be fired from my job at WoW.com.  I would be untrustworthy and show a clear lack of decision making capability.  I would be a person who cannot handle confidential information, and thus would be someone who could jeopardizes the welfare of the site on a daily basis.

If I were to reveal the sources I would likely not be able to get another job with responsibilities and tasks which I enjoy spending my life doing, and would be forced to be a burger expert at McDonalds.  And I’d be lucky to even be able to land that job in this economy.

I’m not going to reveal the sources under any circumstance.  If I did, I would be ruining the lives of people who put their trust in me.  That is something I will not, cannot do.  It goes against every ethical fiber of my being.

I know I have a flare for the literary.  I was a big reader as a kid, my nose always buried in some book.  As an adult I’ve carried this tradition on, spending too much money at Barnes & Nobel every month.  I figured that someday I’d write an article for a magazine or SciFi novel, but it was never at the top of my list.  I thought that I’d end up working in computers somehow, probably with stuff on the internet.

I never thought I’d be editing other peoples work.

You see I have two faults as a writer.  The first my grammar – it isn’t really up to my standards.  I have a good persuasive and conversational tone, and can meld the two together with ease.  But my skills in technical and “100% proper” grammar have never been my strong point.  Not the basic stuff like you’re and your, or their, there, and they’re.  More “advanced” stuff like use of – or; or my, penchant, for, comma, usage.

If the above paragraph doesn’t get me fired I don’t know what will.

The second fault I have is my spelling.

I had a teacher in the fourth and fifth grade named Mrs. Davidson, at Otter Lake Elementary School in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.  I stayed in touch with her throughout the rest of my public education, and did some work with her classes for a college course later on.  She was a great teacher to both my brothers and me, and she always gave me shit about one thing: I couldn’t spell to save my life.

I was in an English class of hers in 2003 helping out and observing for a large college honors report I was doing on power structures in the classroom.  She chuckled and motioned for me to come over to her desk, giving me the dreaded two fingered summons.

You know.  The kind every teacher can do.  Raise their hand above their head, look right at you over their bifocals, put their pointer and middle fingers together and give you the “Come over and receive punishment” motion.

I pop up from my seat at the back of the classroom and walk over between the rows of students, reminiscing that I once led such a simple life of worksheets and crossword puzzles.  I take a seat on the chair next to her, smiling.  She hands me a spelling test and says softly, “Make sure you know how to spell the words before you tell the class.”

A grin and a chuckle later, she reminded me after first teaching me over 10 years ago that I still didn’t know how to spell worth a damn.

And she was right.  One of the words was italicize.  Z and not S?  News to me.

So this brings me to today, a full 16 years after I first had spelling lessons given to me by Mrs. Davidson.  I’m now working as a full time editor for WoW.com (formerly WoW Insider) and amongst other things, every day I correct people on spelling, grammar, and other subtle nuisances of the English language.

It’s absolutely the last job I ever thought I’d have.

If you’re reading this site then you know what I do for a living; I write and edit posts at WoW.com. Some of these are true blog posts, others are news articles, and still others are encyclopedic features that take months of work. I want to ramble for a minute about diversification in blog posts.

Here’s a bold statement for you all: talking just about World of Warcraft is very boring. One of the great things about the game is that it lets you combine many other aspects of your life into it. Have a bunch of friends that play it? You’re probably going to spend the majority of your time talking about non-Wow related stuff while you’re in game. This isn’t a bad thing, indeed it’s a great thing. The inclusion and ability for non-game related material in game will, and might have already, extended the lifetime of the game many times over.

That same diversification should be taken into account in blog posts about WoW. Note that I’ve made a distinction above of the different types of posts WoW.com has. Blog posts are very different from encyclopedic reference posts. You shouldn’t include a Monty Python joke in a 50 page knowledge dump about in-game mounts. But you should include a Monty Python joke (or two) in a blog post where you answer random questions.

An example of this was The Queue that I wrote today.

I’ve reached this conclusion about diversification and inclusion of external non-game content based on the feedback we’ve had to The Queue. When something like Hawaiian Pizza is mentioned, we’ll get 75 to 100 comments talking about Hawaiian Pizza. Post some music or comic reference, guaranteed to get lots of comments on those references too.

Last week my fellow editor Alex Ziebart included some music to listen to while reading The Queue. People loved it, and we’ve continued to include optional reading music. The music doesn’t have a damn thing to do about WoW, but it’s still a piece which people seem interested in and want to comment on. That helps build a community, which means the site gets more traffic and will be around much longer.

Now on a scale of WoW.com, where the site is already well established, has been around a long time, and will be around for a long time to come, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on community building and traffic numbers (however we do see popular and well written articles have increased traffic, of course, just like anything else). But when everyone at WoW.com suddenly starts building communities of readership around their posts and columns, the site’s heath sky rockets. This is true for any long established blog. Just because you’re big, bad, and are pulling in billions and billions of visitors a day doesn’t mean you can’t improve. And that improvement, is, well, awesome.

This might seem like a justification for including off-topic content, and in some ways it is. But it’s also a recent epiphany of sorts on pulling in readers and keeping them here.

Anyone can have a blog, but only the special blogs will make a reader raise an eyebrow at their content.

Really.  Look at this.  A blog update!

I have a good reason for not updating since the flood: I’ve been super busy with work.  WoW Insider has morphed into WoW.com.  WoW.com combines both social networking tools and the great World of Warcraft information site everyone has come to know and love.  The transition took a solid month of internal testing before it went live, and even now, it’s officially in beta.
I’m very impressed with the work that the entire team has put into it.  The social networking side of things really got tested thoroughly by the writing staff.  We were well prepared for whatever problems would creep up on launch day.  The other thing that happened was the new site redesign went live.  This was, in my opinion, even a larger deal; if only because the width of the columns increased from 425px to 580px.  That makes a big big difference in the content that we’re able to produce.  Expect to see lots more tables, graphs, and complicated graphics in the future.

I’ve been doing a lot more behind the scenes with WoW.com/WoW Insider now as well.  I just finished a big project that should help things out significantly.  Lots of research but a good results will come of it.  Completed projects make me happy.  +20 mood for the rest of the week.

BlizzCon is coming up in August and I’m looking forward to traveling out to LA again to enjoy the event.  Perhaps more than the actual event is getting to meetup with the WoW.com folks face to face again.  Last time was a blast, and I’m sure this time will be great fun as well.

Facebook has been discovered, forgotten about, and then rediscovered by me recently.  I’m not really sold on it personally, however.  There is too much personal information in there.  Not that there’s not already a shitton out there on the net about me already, but I’m not too keen on letting eFriends know my phone number and address.  So I think I’m going to limit it to people I know (or remember), and gently let everyone else down.  As if they’d care.  /ego.

I’ve become and am becoming more addicted to twitter.  I hate myself for that.  Oh wait, someone tweeted about their bowl movement.  I wonder how that’ll go.

/facepalm!