Writing about internal communications

For free. 

I sort of don’t mind LinkedIn even if it is full of people madly patting each other on the back. So much PATTING it’s incredible. You see one person retweet an achievement. You see another person commenting “Congratulations” it’s one thing and the next. 

A virtual schmoozefest.

But it has been around for a while and is based on the idea that people have to declare their identity. So props for being sensible. Recently I’d seen things appearing in my feed asking me to contribute to stories. Today I saw an inmail regarding the same thing. I’ll include it below.

Inmail is a tool LinkedIn gives people letting them message each other. With a subscription you can send messages to people you’re not connected to.

As you can see from the above the company disabled replies. I wanted to ask them if they’d be paying me for my expertise. It was disappointing that the only thing I wanted from LinkedIn that they hadn’t already provided wasn’t mentioned. It’s like AI, the big companies want to get the content but they don’t want to have to pay any money for it. Big tech likes to get rich but sharing some of that bounty with struggling writers isn’t part of the getting-rich plan.

Now, I’ve been in business since 1985 and have written countless emails, messages, letters, postcards, you name it even end-of-year cards that they use in Japan. So it’s only right that to get the benefit of that expertise LinkedIn should pay me something that I can actually use: some cash. 

Hoo!

On the other hand maybe I should get involved just to get my name out there. Presumably LinkedIn has a mechanism with these stories to publicise the names of the people who are involved in their capacity as writers. With this insight ringing in my head I visited the post again and added comments to two parts of one article about writing. To minimise the effort involved in this task I reused some text I’d written some years before for my daughter who, at that time, had writing plans of her own. In the end she ditched them but I kept the MS-Word file on my computer which I found. I did some more of these posts later on, I mean on subsequent days because I felt like I knew something about internal communications. After all I’d worked in PR – both internal and external – for a decade. No, more than a decade, because my work with the change manager at Sydney University was also internal communications. So that’s 9 years in Japan plus sic years in Sydney: a total of 15 years in IC. Then there was my work with Eastern Suburbs Art Group from 2022 to the present. Total: 17 years.

I felt I had something to contribute. The money could wait. I needed to get a few things off my chest. I wrote for free and it felt GOOD.

New and old media struggles

If you bother to read to the end I won’t promise you’ll be amused but this story about new and old media is at least interesting. The new represented by X and the old in this case represented by the Sydney Morning Herald. X has been here I think since 2007 the SMH since I think 1831.

I saw a tweet by someone I follow and I won’t include his name here because I don’t want to cause any consternation or upset. I don’t have a problem with this poster usually but this event was so extraordinary that I just had to comment. He wrote:

Now I'm not one to speculate as you know but if you were Justice Lee picking up the paper today and seeing a headline saying a lying recidivist and alleged rapist should receive compensation, I dunno, I'd probably be taking a dim view.

I immediately thought that there had been an announcement in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case. It had been in the media a lot the previous year. I personally had heard nothing so when my acquaintance tweeted this my ears pricked up. Had the judge said something? Surely I would’ve seen an announcement if the case had been brought to a conclusion.

So I responded with a question and my acquaintance replied with a link to the story that had appeared on the SMH website a day or two before. I had seen this story and it was just word of what the lawyers for one party had suggested should be done. I asked if the SMH had done wrong by publishing the story.

But the judge hasn't announced anything, this story is just reporting on the progress of the case. There doesn't seem to b anything abt this story that's exceptional from a legal standpoint. Were you suggesting otherwise?

He said “No” and I asked again if the SMH had done something wrong.

But [name removed] your tweet suggests something different. It seemed to me that reporters who had been invited into the court and had done their job as the judge wanted them to do were the object of your opprobrium. Correct me if I'm wrong. Did the SMH do something inappropriate here?

He told me to let it go, I told him to be wary of defaming the plaintiff.

This highlights a certain problem that new media has with regard to the instruments of government. People who use new media have trust issues for whatever reason, I can’t fathom what they are in every case, in fact in most cases there’s no way to know why a person might distrust authority, but the fact is that my acquaintance worked for a media company for all of his adult life.

What to make of this event?

It’s funny how posters like my acquaintance crow with delight when an election result that is favourable to them transpires, how they celebrate when someone they hate is successful convicted of some offence. Yet they still don’t like authority, in this case simply the authority the SMH has to be trusted based on 190-odd years of operation. 

If this situation doesn’t illustrate the conflict between the new and old medias I don’t know what does. You see here a electronic platform that is being used to publish defamatory material with the assistance of a company that is legally going about its business as the judge wants. My acquaintance is exploiting the company for his own purposes.

Calling someone an “alleged” rapist is bad enough, the word at least shields the poster from possible action. The other accusation? Bruce Lehrmann has shown no inclination to let things go, and his case in court at the moment hinges on what the judge thinks about his testimony and the testimony of the woman he is accused of assaulting. 

This is the thing with social media, the release is instantaneous, you can get things off your chest but they can come back to bite you. I contacted Seven West Media, which had paid for Bruce Lehrmann’s accommodation. I had tried to find out who was representing Lehrmann and in the news stories had only been able to discover the names of his barristers. Now I needed that of his solicitor.

UPDATE

• The initial poster blocked me then about five days later unblocked me saying “I’m sorry”. Another person’d gotten involved who also blocked me, but so far no apology from that quarter. I did find out where she works though (in an art gallery).
• I sent an email to Lehrmann’s solicitor but they never got back to me. As at the time of posting this the judge in the case still hadn’t made an announcement.