When I went to work at the UNT Health Science Center in
2013, my boss, the legendary Tim Doke, introduced me to the HSC president as his
“storyteller.”
I was surprised at the title since I had been hired at what
was essentially a public relations job. But I embraced it with considerable enthusiasm.
I had spent a long six-months looking for a job after being
laid off at The Dallas Morning News before Doke plucked me out of the
dustbin and put me in charge of publications at UT Southwestern Medical Center,
where he was senior vice president of the communications, marketing and public
affairs division.
I followed him when he grew tired of the hidebound
bureaucracy of UT Southwestern and moved west to HSC in Fort Worth.
At HSC, Doke gave me a free hand in building a communication
team that eschewed a traditional promotional approach and embraced the idea
that storytelling was the best way to build HSC’s reputation and heighten its
profile in a community that had no idea what it was or what it did.
When I hang these HSC ornaments on the Gunnels Christmas
tree, they fill me anew with the sense of pride and accomplishment I felt during
my years at HSC, where I learned a valuable lesson: Left unchallenged, the
assumptions of a lifetime can be just plain wrong.
Like most journalists, I harbored an abiding distrust and
disrespect for the PR profession. I loftily distained the work of company “flacks,”
considering them at best incompetent and at worst paid liars.
Some were, of course. But not all. Given the opportunity to
do the right thing, most PR types can be extremely helpful to harried
journalists, particularly in this dismal time of newsroom layoffs and dwindling
resources.
Perhaps I’m delusional, but I’d like to think I was one of
the good ones.
This I know. With Doke’s unwavering support, I hired a group
of former journalists committed to telling the HSC story – its dedicated
faculty and staff, its remarkable students and the exemplary work they all were
doing to improve community health, train the next generation of health
providers and extend the frontiers of medical research.
Together, we completely transformed HSC’s main promotional
publication – the moribund Solutions magazine – updating its design and
filling it with well-written stories and exciting photographs.
We also launched an aggressive media relations effort that
succeeded in convincing local, regional and even national news organizations to
take note of the work being done on our campus.
We did it without vapid marketing slogans and the exaggerated
institutional boilerplate that undermines credibility and effectiveness.
And we did it without sacrificing truth and accuracy. By
telling and selling compelling stories, we convinced media professionals and
the public at large to trust us. That’s no small thing.
I preached, at every opportunity, the doctrine of good PR:
Never lie, never try to hide bad news (the truth wins out, always) and never
fall back on the cowardly “no comment.”
“No comment,” I told my bosses repeatedly, “is interpreted
by reporters – and the public – as ‘We did it.’”
For as long as it lasted, it was glorious.
Eventually, Doke moved on and other – less enlightened –
executives took his place. When my department was handed over to a former
political appointee of Trump’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I
knew the end was nigh.
It came last July, in the middle of a pandemic-plagued
summer, when I finally was handed my walking papers. One of my last acts was
ushering into print the final issue of Solutions magazine, yet another
victim of COVID budget cuts.
I’ve spent my entire career as a storyteller, both inside
and outside journalism. I consider it a noble calling.
When I cleaned out my HSC office last summer, one of the
final things I packed up was a framed quotation from the late Brian Doyle, who
did the same job I did – only better – at the University of Portland.
“I am a storycatcher, charged with finding stories that
matter, stories about who we are at our best, who we might still be, because
without stories, we are only mammals with weapons.”
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