Month: February 2003

mix 102 dot 9

Sign No. 3,497,263 of the Internet’s encroaching role in popular culture: Driving back from Louisiana Monday, I came across Shreveport radio station KBED at 102.9 FM. But during station breaks, instead of calling themselves “one oh two point nine,” they called themselves “one oh two dot nine.” Dot. As in dot-com or dot-org.
Sign No. 1,647,748 of how far the Internet still has to go: The radio station in question doesn’t have a web site.

personality test

If you’re one of those people who obsesses over the difference between an INFP and an ESTJ — and you know who you are — the Hartman Value Profile may be for you. As This American Life put it last weekend (about 42 minutes into that RealAudio file):
“A standardized test, just eighteen questions long, created by scientists, that not only can tell you things about yourself that will haunt you for weeks, it can diagnose just how good you are…and how evil.”

personals ghostwriter

The secret of successful personal ads, revealed!
I got a call from Jane Lederman, 44, a divorced Boston business manager whose ad touted the “high cheekbones of Renee Russo plus personality of the young Katharine Hepburn.”
She didn’t write the ad, she said. It was ghostwritten by Susan Fox, founder of Personals Work, a professional personal ad ghostwriting service in Boston.
“She interviews you and gives you homework assignments,” Lederman said. “She asks you to name an actress you identify with. And you have an assignment to ask your friends, ‘If you were to think of me as a celebrity, who would you think of?’ ”
It was that process that inspired Fox’s lyrical ode to Russo’s cheekbones and Hepburn’s personality.
Now, Lederman says, she can pick out a Fox-written ad at a glance: “When you see a reference to an actress, you figure she had a hand in it. Or somebody was copying her style”…
As soon as I hung up with Lederman, the phone rang. It was “Head-turning good looks evocative of Diana Rigg.” She was willing to talk but not to be identified by name. Her ad, too, was ghostwritten by Susan Fox. In fact, she said, it was Fox who came up with the Diana Rigg line.
“I said, ‘I don’t look like Diana Rigg,’ ” she recalls. “And she said, ‘This is advertising!’ ”
I called Fox. She was eager to talk. A former freelance writer, she has been a full-time personals ghostwriter for 11 years. She charges $125 an hour for a job that she says takes at least three or four hours. She has “hundreds” of clients, 75 percent of them female.
Fox doesn’t think it’s cheating to hire a ghostwriter to compose your personal ad. Nor does she think she was deceptive when she used the phrase “evocative of Diana Rigg” to describe a woman who says she doesn’t look like Diana Rigg.
“We said evocative of,” she explains. “We didn’t say a look-alike or a carbon copy.”
Personal ads are, she stresses, advertisements.
“It is, after all, advertising, and people have to put their best foot forward,” she says. “If you say you’ve got a botox appointment and a screwed-up 17-year-old kid in addition to being bright and fun, it doesn’t work.”

carver story

Here’s my story from today’s front page, the latest in the Schools That Work series. It’s about the Carver Academy, the new school Spurs center David Robinson has founded in San Antonio. I just got an email that 60 Minutes saw my story and now wants to do a feature on the school. So when you CBS watchers see that San Antonio dateline at some point in the future, remember it was crabwalk.com that gave you the love first. (Oh, I’ll also be on TXCN at 4:35 this afternoon talking about it.)