It can be ridiculously hard not to be a hypocrite some days.
I spent the previous weekend at the Missouri College Media Conference, where among other things, I presented the evening’s keynote address. Because the speech was just before the awards were presented, I decided to keep it short and focus on the topic at hand.
I told the students there something I’ve told every student in every newsroom I ever advised that I honestly believe to be true when it comes to awards:
“Awards are great things, and you should be proud to win one. However, they aren’t the end-all and be-all of life. When you win something, you should be honored, but don’t let it get to your head. When you don’t win something, you should NOT let it make you feel inferior, as you have more than plenty to offer now and in the future.”
The minute I said it, I realized I had essentially jinxed myself. My new textbook, “Exploring Mass Communication,” had been nominated for the Textbook & Academic Authors Association’s “Most Promising Textbook” back in late October and the winners were set to be announced any day now.
Sure enough, the results came out shortly after I got home and I didn’t make the cut.
After I checked the list a couple times to be sure, I emailed my friends at Sage and told them I was sorry I let them down. They spent time and money putting together an extensive application for this thing, not to mention about five years of their lives helping me build this opus, so I felt they deserved this award more than I did.
The answers came back pretty quickly and identically: We don’t know what the hell was wrong with the judges, but we think we have a winner here. The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive and adoptions are beyond our most optimistic expectations. We’ll take that over a plaque.
That made me feel better, as did thinking about the award itself. I didn’t know the TAA existed six months ago, so being really upset about not winning something from them seems pretty stupid. It also helped that this was one of those “best newbie” awards that often feels like a kiss of death. In scrolling back through my mind, I thought of all the “Rookie of the Year” award winners (Joe Charboneau comes to mind) and “Best New Artist” Grammy winners (A Taste of Honey comes to mind) who became part of that one-hit wonder crowd.
Awards ARE great and winning IS great, but I was right that they don’t mean what people think they mean. Hell, the Starland Vocal Band won two Grammy awards more than a decade before the Rolling Stones even got nominated for one. If you asked me whose career I’d want, you better believe I’d want to be with Mick and the Boys as opposed to Taffy Nivert.
The thing that really made me OK with all of this was my boss, who put a different spin on things when he told me, “You need external validation more than any human being I’ve ever met.” In other words, it wasn’t the award that mattered. It was someone telling me I did something right.
Which is where you all come in and why I’m writing this post today.
Steve is one of the best friends I could ever ask for. He’s put up with me for far longer than the AMA’s recommended lifetime allowance…
The one goal I have in everything I do is to try to make life a little better for the person who is interacting with me. I want a student to learn something. I want an advisee to get through the program more smoothly. I want people who attend my sessions at conferences to feel like they didn’t waste their time. If you’re reading this blog, I never want you to say, “Well that’s 20 minutes of my life I’m never getting back.”
The same is true for my books. I don’t write them to supercharge my ego or to win an award. I write them for other people. I hope that they can help instructors reach kids and help kids learn something that matters in a way that doesn’t feel arduous. The best external validation I get is knowing that people trust me to help them help their students. That validation is much better than any award I could ever receive, and it shows up when I least expect it.
Case in point, a few student media advisers were on a listserv, discussing which media-writing text would be good for their classes. “Dynamics of Media Writing” came up three times. That was amazing to me. I also got a few messages after MCMC from people asking if they could get a desk copy of my “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” text, as they wanted to adopt it in the fall because they heard good things.
Even the kids, who I have been told a jillion times hate textbooks and never use them, have been amazingly kind to me over the years. For example, I brought a bunch of swag to the MCMC, including “Filak Furlough Tour” T-shirts and a “trophy bat” for the organization to give away. At the end of the MCMC, the students on the board got copies of my reporting book as a thank you, when one of the kids came up to me and asked if I would sign the book.
“You don’t want me to sign that,” I explained. “If you keep it shrink-wrapped, the bookstore will pay you a chunk of change for it.”
She gave me a “why the hell would I do that?” look and then peeled off the wrapping. I ended up signing all three of the books that day.
Actual proof that someone wanted my autograph on something other than a check or a grade-change form.
When I got back and told the story to my reporting class, one young lady told me, “I read your book. I still think it’s the best textbook because I could understand things from it. It felt really… human.”
In the age of AI, I’ll take the hell out of that.
Perhaps this is the longest way I can think of to say thank you for everything you do for me in the “external validation” department. My goal with each edition of the book and each blog post is to make sure I earn it.
If there’s anything you need, please let me know.
Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)
