Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • Make Journalism Pay Its Way?

    Some time ago I made what I thought was the best case I could make for why philanthropy ought to support Journalism. Today I want to argue another side of that. To be clear, my article about nonprofit Journalism was not about bailing out newspapers. It posited a split between news gathering, Journalism, and news…

  • Fishkin and WMD

    Stanford professor James Fishkin is a luminary in the civic engagement field. He is the developer and chief proponent of something called “deliberative polling” and he heads Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. He recently posted and article to his blog at the San Francisco Examiner in which he complains that our “political system is struggling…

  • A Lesson In Collaboration

    I recently spent an evening with two friends, working on a soundtrack for a DVD. My friend Ed Corr’s company, OPX, is creating a video presentation about what the office of the future might look like, if you ask the twenty-somethings who are going to have to work in them and design them. To its…

  • My New Company: The Mannakee Circle Group

    Today I am launching a new company called The Mannakee Circle Group. This will be an extension of some of the work I already do, but it also represents a renewed focus on helping organizations engage better with their public. The name comes from a crossroads of sorts in the town where I live —…

  • Common Sense Needed Online For Journalists, Too

    On Friday, the Washington Post’s ombudsman ran with a blog post outlining the Post’s new set of standards for employees who use social media (like Twitter and Facebook). The peg for the article was the story of managing editor Raju Narisetti, who evidently thought that Twitter is a private forum where only his 90 best…

  • Learning To Theme

    One of the most important skills in working withe the public is, I believe, one of the most often overlooked. People whose work is public facing — community benefit organization leaders, public agency heads, journalists — need to be able to theme what they hear. Put simply, this means “making sense” of what they hear,…

  • Best Practices Are Killing Us

    A friend of mine recently made the following comment: “[T]he dresses & hairstyles worn at the Emmy’s were really boring & predictable. Bring back the days before the stars paid stylists, please!” While I do not watch awards shows, the comment struck me, because it applies equally well to management and leadership. Today’s obsession with…

  • Survey Shows Americans Struggling At Home

    I wanted to share with you some work for a client, the Northwest Area Foundation, that is being released today and of which I am very excited. Each year, the Northwest Area Foundation commissions a survey on poverty — my friends at Lake Research Partners (Mike Perry and Tresa Undem) design and execute it. I…