Behind the Scenes By Michelle Russell

Names and Faces

Eight years ago this month, I first started interviewing people in the meetings industry.

I

came to Convene from another industry, serving as the editor for an online resource and monthly

publication for food- and drug-retail- ing executives, and let me tell you, get- ting those people to talk was not fun.

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Convene

A reader who sent us an e-mail recently started out by saying that she was reading the December issue of Convene on a Friday night with a glass of wine. She went on to com- ment about one of the articles in that issue, but she kind of had me at hello. Reading the issue at the end of a long workweek with a glass of wine? That told me she expected to savor the experience. She had already paid us the highest compliment. Perhaps I take that so much to heart

because I’m reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Author Nicholas Carr makes the argument that our immersion in all things digital is making us “more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contempla- tion, and reflection.” We’ve made a real effort over the past few

years in this magazine to “chunk up” informa- tion, to create lots of entry points to stories, and to make them less dense visually. But to be hon- est, that was because we realize that planners are time-starved. But could it also be that we subconsciously realize that the Internet may be making us all a little ADD?

4 pcmaconvene January 2011

They were not only close-mouthedabout what their companywas doing but unwilling to discuss what they sawas overall industry trends. By shar- ing their perspective, they might tiptheir hand to the competition. Sowhen I first started speaking tomeeting

planners and their supplier partners, Iwas not only relieved by everyone’swillingness to talk, but surprised by howgenerous they were, freely sharing their knowledge and experiences. That is,most planners.When I posed a ques-

tion to a group of corporatemeeting planners for an article Iwaswriting last year, I got pretty much the same response fromthemall:“Com- pany policy preventsme fromspeaking to the media.” Iwouldn’t ask anyone to violate their

employer’s policy, but it’s hard towrite anything compelling if you can’tmake it personal.We relate to and learn fromreal people and their sto- ries, not anonymous sources and generalizations. That’swhy I’mpleased to publish our new SMMPseries byMeeting Sites Resource Presi- dent JenniferW.Brown,CMP(see thismonth’s CMPSeries story,“GettingBuy-In,” p. 57). As an independent planner and former corporate planner, Jennifer is an insider. She’ll interject corporate planners’ voices in her ongoingSMMP column, so you can hear first-hand howyour colleagues are getting their arms around their organizations’meetings. We name a few other corporate planners

in the companion piece to this article (“Corpo- rate PlannerTableTalk,” p. 62), which is also the latest installment in the Experient Breakfast series. It’s always good to put a face to a story, especially when you’re talking about an industry that’s all about the face-to-face experience.

ON THEIR MINDS: When we debuted our Leadership Profiles section in our inaugural January issue, in 2008, we posed a very differ- ent set of questions to DMO and industry- supplier executives — with nary a word about the economic downturn. While we’ve all been focused on the (oh- so-slow) recovery, we didn’t make that the focal point of our questions this year. Nor did our intervie- wees make that cen- tral to their discus- sion. Read what’s really on their minds, starting on p. 67.

Michelle Russell Editor in Chief mrussell@pcma.org

www.pcma.org

MICHELLE RUSSELL PHOTOGRAPHED BY DENNIS CHALKIN; ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES YANG