[For bearings, (1) see general conclusions at the end of this entry, which are from my September 7 entry “Sugar-coating the horse pill.” (2) For information that had been on my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality, see near the end of this entry. Generally, below, “confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in the June 28 entry, and are listed below. Also, (3) as noted in my July 3 blog entry, where appropriate, I can refer to “data on file” (or “DOF”; this term usually, in typical industry parlance, refers to information that is in the possession of the Big Pharma company; but I make adapted use of the term here), which will usually signify documents I have copies of; some may be drawn from the Internet, and others not. A small edit was done 10/14/12. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing. Important edit made 12/23/12 & 12/26/12, between asterisks, toward end. Another important edit was made 1/2/13 immediately before the edit just mentioned.]
Subsections below, for Part 1:
Becoming a freelancer employed directly by CommonHealth
Memory and my records: Piecemeal but not as bad as you might think; and a picture of the snarky-corporate culture “developing in the developing fluid”
Back at Ferguson
A new editor under Karen: Tweedle Dee
A strange incident between Tweedle Dee and a manager
Karen leaves; then, the ascendancy of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
Tweedle Dee makes the grade
Preface to later 2010 story
Part 2 is a separate blog entry
Subsections for Part 3, subheads subject to change:
Tweedle Dum’s joining the team in 2007: A female who couldn’t relate to me
Not all young women there (in 2008) were paranoid about relating to me
How things started in 2010: No indication of a disaster, but with things definitely declined; yet with a new trafficker starting
By early 2007, CommonHealth had moved to, and been consolidated in, its new location in Parsippany. In at least the physical sense, Ferguson Lanidex Plaza Ferguson
Becoming a freelancer employed directly by CommonHealth
See my blog entry of August 1, “Getting bearings: My more spotty, mixed-bag time with CommonHealth…,” for an account of my experience at MBS/Vox in 2006. This was an important prelude to my experience of “The Gary Laverne Group’s” breaking down in 2007. It was right when that placement firm was suddenly looking not viable, even if its principal Gary (a pseudonym) was a little slow to realize it, that I arranged with someone at CommonHealth, Mark K., with whom I’d worked by 2002 at Xchange, to work directly for CommonHealth, not through a placement agency.
I was actually invited to undertake this arrangement by Gary , when Mark K. called Gary Ferguson
After my brief time at Mark K.’s division in spring 2007, lasting to sometime in May, I didn’t work at CommonHealth for two or so months, then—I forget whether in response to my having sent a tickler letter or not—I was called in to work at Ferguson by Karen Smaldone in summer 2007. I would work there for three straight weeks, starting on August 1, 2007.
Memory and my records: Piecemeal but not as bad as you might think; and a picture of the snarky-corporate culture “developing in the developing fluid”
[This subsection may seem tedious, but it shows how, from my time at this company, I can form a picture of various things, seemingly trivial and not-so, and often rooted in evidence that is not just my memory, that can give an important set of reference points for understanding the 2010 messes.]
One of the challenges of coming up with an account of how things operated at CommonHealth—through all my blog entries (and previously made documents)—is that the evidence at my level as a craft worker is usually scrappy, partial, and catch-as-catch-can. It includes e-mails, other miscellaneous documents, and (most important on certain things) memories of key events. (As I’ve found in talking to other people who have some familiarity with the medical-advertising industry, it is not the sort of industry where you build up a portfolio of work samples, such as I have done with nearly every other publishing/media work I’ve been involved with. It is, one could say, a very jealously “proprietary” type of industry where (1) you really don’t have ownership of what work you do, in part because what you work on is made by a wealth of different hands, and where (2) confidentiality strictures—and the sheer parameters imposed by the practicalities of things in the industry—usually prevent you from having much or any work samples.)
Further, where a given medical-ad company tends to be very top-down in management style anyway—never mind that it may claim not to be this (it is not possible for these firms to operate as they characteristically do if they weren’t very top-down)—and use of craft-level workers can tend to the manipulative, you could easily not know all the specifics of management rationale behind some move that is made. This is even if the move is so bizarre that it automatically raises questions in your mind and arouses your curiosity enough to start hypothesizing on the likely reasoning behind it.
What you end up doing is like what Sovietologists like Robert Conquest have done regarding writing incisive histories of the former Soviet Union, or what police investigators seem to do in dealing with a tough drug ring (consider The French Connection or American Gangster, with even half of what’s going on in these films “bracketed out” as fictional): not that medical-media is a (criminally) conspiratorial type of industry, but you end up having to be very patient in sifting through, sorting, marshalling, and otherwise developing theories out of a lot of scrappy evidence. As it turns out, since a lot of the people in this industry happen to be not terribly technically adept in certain ways, your job in accumulating evidence and supporting theories, while sometimes indirect, isn’t always so hard.
When it comes to my time at CommonHealth in 2007 and 2008, things are odd for a different reason. First, it is crucial to my addressing the 2010 matters that I have narrated a history of my experience of the company, over nearly a decade, to meet the important prerequisite of showing what the culture has tended to be that could allow the perversions that happened there more recently. This is true while in the process I show how much I don’t (and sometimes don’t fully) know about how the company operates.
But I’ve made an effort to be a little more careful in my account than with 2001-06. Double-checking and digging into records have allowed me to come up with a picture of things in 2007 and 2008 that is more detailed and textured, in a realistic (and minor-details) way, than a lot of my stuff describing 2001-06. But it also is limited to showing how the CommonHealth culture was turning out to operate in a fairly daily-business way, without giving examples of the obviously problematic (and arguably ad hoc, “emergency-addressing”) company moves such as occurred against Horizon Graphics in 2003 or “The Gary Laverne Group” in 2006. The picture of 2007-08 tends to make the company look like a more banal, unitary corporation than it had seemed to me in my earliest years there, although this banality (particularly on the level of bad manners) coheres with the more extraordinary negatives of my experience in 2010. On the other hand, my account (regarding 2003-06 or so) of how the top-down, manipulative-of-craftpeople mechanics seemed to work also becomes relevant in my account of 2010. But whether in 2010 the company reached a whole new plateau of less-than-ethical operating—underwent a “paradigm shift” in this regard—is hard to say.
Another thing I found about 2007-08 is my short length of time there: summer 2007 was only three weeks in August, and 2008 was sets of time scattered over a little more than two months (September and October), but probably only about three weeks in total if measured as continuous time. (Contrast this with my time at various divisions of CommonHealth from 2001 through 2004, which if added together as continuous time, is roughly a year and a half [or more], and which included one continuous stint of eight months—which, when spread over a long period, and including densely arrayed work whenever I was there, is fairly substantial. If this doesn’t sound like much time of work, consider that this way of using freelancers for short stints, for dense work, is common across other media industries; and timewise, you can seem to have a sketchy resume, but when you look at the sample products you’ve worked on, they can add up to a mountain of stuff. For example, my 1990s work I often summed as running over 10 years but, if all my time at workplaces in that decade was joined together and accounted as full-time work, it would have been six and a half years, or such. But this also meant 11+ million worth of words, or the like. People who are not skilled in this field might take more than 10 years to process the same amount of wordage with roughly equivalent technical means. With CommonHealth, the situation is made more complex by the idle time that you as a freelance proofreader could have; but by the standards of medical media, 2010 featured one of the more densely arrayed amounts of work I’d ever had at CommonHealth or at any other medical-media firm. Also, with medical media in general, the amounts of wordage per time period, on average, are almost always lower than at more usual publishing firms, but the pressures—and pretensions on the part of management—can be much higher.)
In sum, the historical episodes I got from 2007 and 2008 do help explain how the unfamiliar-with-me people at Ferguson
(Incidentally, among my rather rich trove of journal notes on CommonHealth facts from 2007 are points made by Gail S., an editor with whom I had worked at The World Almanac in 2000 and 2001, who later worked in medical media. She spoke in August 2007 about working then in the relatively upper-level department of CommonHealth that authorized use of freelancers, which goes to show how the company, probably more than in about 2001-03, was exerting tight reins on use of freelancers “from above” rather than leaving it to the discretion of more craft-oriented managers, tailoring workers to projects based on their demonstrable “goodness” for meeting certain localized craft criteria.)
Back at Ferguson
In that summer period, I found there was a new VP (new to me, anyway) in charge of Ferguson
I would encounter this craziness again in 2010. In any event, at this point in August 2007, things would go unusually smoothly. However, there would be what was unprecedented rudeness in my experience at CommonHealth.
In obvious response to Karen’s e-mailed request, after whatever length of time, a male voice came from a few cubicles away: “So I’m supposed to renew the dirtbag?” (This paraphrases, but the word dirtbag was definitely used. And I recently corroborated this memory with a note on precisely this in my journal from the time.)
Later, I saw the smug, vacation-tanned face of the asshole who apparently had said this—and it was, as I’d surmise, the VP. He apparently hadn’t been aware I could overhear his rude remark, and then (I’ve recalled) he realized that I had. (My 2007 journal echoes this sequence of his behaviors, including his reacting to realizing I’d overheard him.) In any event, my time was renewed for another month. (By the way, CommonHealth had employed freelancers as direct employees before—I wasn’t so strange in this regard.)
What is unclear to me about this asshole is who he was. For years I thought the VP’s name—well, I won’t give credit where credit is due and tell the actual name of who I think did this—but it rhymes with “Piss-topher Drama.” (When I see the LinkedIn photo of this person today, I believe that indeed is the snarky one from 2007.) He’s no longer at CommonHealth, and is pursuing his career elsewhere. (A newspaper mini-article reflecting a press release, from October or November 2007 [DOF], shows that “Drama” was made president of Ferguson
But oddly, I first noted in my 2007 journal that the snide-mouthed manager’s last name was Levy. Now it is quite possible I was mistaken that Mr. Snide-Mouth was a __ Levy, because later I would have that 2007 news clipping about “Drama,” as if I knew that was the snarkster.
Aside from the identity of this person, I thought that was a hell of a turn in behavior for CommonHealth—things had never been so rude there before. [CC #3, 4] In retrospect, I would be able to confidently say that this was emblematic of the sophomoric place that CommonHealth was becoming, as shown in further behaviors in 2008 and 2010. CommonHealth as the amazingly civilized place I found in 2001 was decisively disappearing. But I couldn’t know this as a general trend, yet.
Interestingly, as I only found in late August 2012, I wrote a fairly substantial amount of journal notes on my time at CommonHealth in August 2007. Among them, I noted things told to me by people with whom I’d worked in the past, and a number of things I observed on my own on new things I saw in Ferguson
A new editor under Karen: Tweedle Dee
When I finally worked at Ferguson again in August 2007, whatever array of staff or long-term-freelance editors I had seen Karen Smaldone supervise—either at the Lanidex Plaza
I had never seen him before. As far as I know, he had never put in “apprentice” freelance-editor time with CommonHealth. [CC #3] (A press release I later discovered [DOF] said he had started at CommonHealth in 2006, but I had never seen him in 2006 at the location in the Lanidex Plaza Ferguson
This pattern of new employees, who as it happened often supervised me, being placed as permanent staffers at CommonHealth who had not worked there in a more temporary or testing-out capacity—at least in the editorial realm—was, I think, becoming more common there in 2007. (In fact, in retrospect, and with my doing research in more recent years, it would seem as if the desideratum in hiring such new staffers—sometimes almost comically so—was in their being amenable to a very corporate way of operating; and certainly, the backgrounds of some would indicate no, or almost no, familiarity with the conventions of high-volume, hands-on editing such as I’d learned in the 1990s.) [CC #3; looking toward CC #4] This pattern parallels the overall more corporate quality that was obtaining in CommonHealth at its new location.
This new editor was the one to whom I refer (or will refer) elsewhere as “Tweedle Dee.”
He was slightly off-putting when I first saw him there in 2007. He occupied a cubicle behind Karen’s and, as I said, gave off an air of being firmly ensconced at CommonHealth—as if he’d been there for five years. And he didn’t really try to click with me. I might as well have been some anonymous squirrel who had wandered in off the street and would disappear without incident by day’s end. It was Karen who acted as if she knew me well, and she had no reason not to.
I don’t know how old he was at the time. I’ve always felt he seemed, physically, more boyish than you would expect someone to be who would quickly assume the position he would there.
A strange incident incident between Tweedle Dee and a manager
Tweedle Dee, if I may get ahead of myself, would become the “director of editorial services” at Ferguson
Now, among us editors, when it comes to being a dweeb on occasion, or being walked on, let he who has not done or been this cast the first stone. But sometimes an example of this really stands out as marking someone, especially in retrospect, and not least when you want to ground a situation of gross, multi-person lack-of-professionalism. When I heard my journal tape entry from September 2008, I found that in it, I had trouble remembering who Tweedle Dee was—he had left me a phone message in September 2008 to come in and work if I wanted—then (as my tape journal reported) I remembered him, and noted I’d thought he might have been fired, most likely in light of the incident I’m about to relate.
After 2008, I would understand more how he was valued there—from a not entirely disparaging perspective. After 2010, I would even further affirm—but in not as “friendly” a way—that this 2007 incident shows how he would be valued in terms of fitting into the new culture developing there by 2007. He would be a corporate stooge who could be relied on to be walked over, or used to jerk around us underlings.
The incident: Tweedle Dee was “addressed” by a production director, Alison F., all of the sudden: with the two of them out of sight, but her voice clearly audible, as she met with him at his cubicle, she addressed him about a general matter of what you might call attitude, not about any particular work issue. While he and I both happened to be doing hands-on editorial work—since Karen was still the head editor (but she was not around for the moment, or maybe had the day off), and while Tweedle Dee of course wasn’t typically holed up in meetings so much of the time that year, as would be the case in 2010—Alison came to him and she sounded as if she huddled closely to him, and said, “If you don’t commit yourself, you’ll be out of here” (the second half of this sentence may be a paraphrase; the first half is not). It was like she was threatening him with being fired if he didn’t exercise more energy and diligence.
Her manner in doing this, which with her huddling close to him I’ve long considered promiscuously boundary-crossing, was astonishing. [CC #4] I’ve long thought that if she had done that with me, she could well have met with a rude shock from me. Never mind what precisely it would have been.
Karen leaves; then, the ascendancy of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
After the end of August, I didn’t work there again for months. When, in about early November 2007, I sent a tickler e-mail or the like to Karen, she answered that she was leaving CommonHealth [DOF]. She said she would forward my resume that she had on file to her supervisor. Note: to her supervisor, not to her underling Tweedle Dee. (If her supervisor was Mr. “Drama,” well, I guess my prospects were inadvertently diminished there anyway.)
Thereafter, I did not hear from any Ferguson Ferguson
(By the way, though I would be in touch again with Mark K., who was at the successor of Xchange, a few spaced-apart times until September 2010, I would never again work at any other division than Ferguson
Tweedle Dee makes the grade
After Karen left, or maybe before, there was no time wasted (on the part of whoever—maybe Mr. “Drama”) in lining up the successor for her position: Tweedle Dee.
The October 28, 2007, press release (which I would not see until years later) announced, among several hires and promotions, that Tweedle Dee “has been elevated from senior editor [which apparently he was when I first met him earlier in 2007] to director of editorial services,” which wording was, I believe, Karen’s title. (When Karen was last there, she also had the title of vice president, which rank I don’t believe Karen had yet when I first worked with her in 2004. Tweedle Dee wasn’t given this title yet in late 2007.) The press release continued, “In his new post, [Tweedle Dee] will be responsible for ensuring that editorial quality, accuracy, and style meet agency guidelines and clients’ objectives.” This is a pretty generic description of what a “director of editorial services” is usually supposed to be responsible for, and certainly Karen’s work suggested she took these objectives seriously. [CC #3]
When I worked under Tweedle Dee in 2008, I felt, or did shortly after leaving, without being especially apt to make a “big case” out of it, that he was the weakest person I’d ever seen with his kind of title at a medical media firm—“director of editorial services.” (Though it may not seem this way, I wasn’t being mean with this assessment then. Today, I would pitch this assessment about as caustically as I could manage.)
Just to jump ahead: Strangely, though you would think that anyone who rose to the rank of “director of editorial services” would tout his or her experience and editorial skill in the specific areas of medical editing (whether for serious publications or for medical advertising/promotional agencies), in 2010 Tweedle Dee noted himself on the company intranet as being distinguished for “crime writing.” Crime writing! That was about it for the big area of expertise he put on his intranet profile. I wondered what this “crime writing” was; I thought he meant writing for the police blotter or crime-features department of a (relatively local) newspaper. Well, it turns out (as I found only in 2012) he did have some experience in that area, apparently having won a New Jersey press award tied to some work in that specialty. But (as I saw in 2010) he had a book published in the “true crime” genre, a few years before. In October 2010 I found that its Amazon ratings by readers pieced out this way: There were five five-star reviews; two four-star; one three-star; one two-star; and two one-star reviews. A I rechecked his ratings recently in 2012, and in terms of distribution they hadn’t changed much—in fact, he got more low ratings: They were: still five five-star ratings; now three four-star; now three three-star; now two two-star; and now four one-star reviews.
A literary agent had placed this book with a trade publisher. [ahem]
Further, in late 2010, he had a Web site set up (for maybe a few years), which he took down in early 2011, that advertised another book he’d apparently written (for the price of $40) that told how you could get a book published if you followed his easy formula. (I viewed this site on December 20, 2010 and have printouts of its copy from different dates [DOF].) The Web site’s sales spiel—including rather insulting people’s intelligence, being too long, and being formulaic in some ways—was as if it followed a script.
It included such remarks as
I got the 4 [sic] things above—agent, publisher, book deal[,] and an advance—in less than 90 days. My new program for 2007, 90 Days To Crime (Writing) That Pays[,] reveals exactly how you can achieve the same things. [DOF]
His testimonial that follows starts with,
I wrote and edited for newspapers and magazines. I founded two publications. I wrote and published a print-on-demand book about an interest of mine. As my family grew and money got tight, I became an advertising copywriter for the bigger paychecks. [Oh! Smart.] All along I was writing, but something always felt wrong. I wasn’t the writer I wanted to be. [DOF]
As I said, let he who has not been a dweeb at some points in the difficult fields of editing and writing cast the first stone. But when Tweedle Dee effectively sat back and let happen what happened with me in August 2010, at the hands of his de facto supervisor Tweedle Dum, with the result that I could no longer work at Ferguson, or probably even CommonHealth as a whole (I have some evidence supportive of this latter point), I have to ask, OK, Tweedle Dee, you think I was some no-account to be rolled by trafficking manager Tweedle Dum? Who’s kidding whom, here?
So, if Ferguson
Preface to later 2010 story
Anyone who thinks this story has gotten awfully complex can rest assured I feel the same way. I had worked in good faith within the industry for years, until incidents in 2010 made me unable to continue working there. The media is a kind of hermetic area, which has practices and “rules” of its own that outsiders might have a hard time understanding, much less morally agree with (some practices/“rules” would seem more typical or palatable than others); the medical-advertising and promotions area is a sort of derivative of that, with the arrogance and weirdness worse than in non-medical media in some ways. Further, when young people are hired in medical media with limited or no media experience, and then they can “run with the ball” in a flush of youthful enthusiasm, arrogance, or whatever else that only years of experience can tone down, this can make for more complex or catalyzed messes than you can find in non-medical media workplaces. I think I’ve explained some of the nature of this field in previous blog entries as should make at least some of this description not entirely strange.
Further, I never claimed to be an exemplar of medical-media editorial practice. In some ways I could never fully relate to the medical-media world. The editors that seemed to march around as if they had epaulets on their shoulders because they knew AMA style, and yet clearly were deficient in some ways such as knowing finer points of the English language, showed how medical media was an unusually likely place to find a certain caliber of worker—their heads taken by the money you could make there, for one thing—who yet hypocritically looked at someone like me (with chops built in different areas of the media world) as if I was a relative barbarian.
If you consider my experience in non-medical media (5 million+ words, in 60++ different magazine issues, at All American Crafts; almost 3 million words at AB Bookman; a 1,000+ page book at the five-month Official Catholic Directory job; roughly 8,000 pages’ worth of material I and other editors had to wade through on the Prentice Hall High School Literature project of 1997-98; the Blest Are We Catholic-school books freelance work I had in 1999-2000; 6,000+ press releases edited for North Jersey Newspapers in 1996-99; three editions of The World Almanac in 1999-2001; and now about 13 years with Magazines for Libraries…), you would think that I could be treated as something other than a no-account who could be so little valued at CommonHealth after my nine years with it, that I should slathered with defamatory allegations about harassing someone who had enjoyed only a few-month stint there in 2010.
In fact, even to write this situation seems unbelievable. But it happened. And since I have seen meritless accusations of harassment (not only against me) over the years, and since I had done more than one-third of my work (about 140 items handled) at CommonHealth in 2010 for the account whose trafficker was a focus of the allegation there, and since one way the 2010 work was mismanaged was in how “product information” (P.I.) documents—which are FDA-required for consumers’ purposes—were arranged for me to proofread repeatedly, with no other editor doing the same in the same period—and I have received no fewer than two responses from the FDA to my letter to them about this mishandling of P.I.s in November 2010 (one response from the FDA was by e-mail in December 2010, another was by regular mail in October 2011)…you would think that, regardless of whether my experience in several other types of editing made me quite the fit for the medical-media world, I still have the right to address the cluster of gross deviations from professionalism I witnessed there, and stick my neck out in revealing how crazy-arrogant the corporate side of medical media can get. Which of course suggests implications for the health interests of the public at large.
And if I were to be dismissed as the type of editor “eminently” not fit to be in medical media, well, others at CommonHealth could fit that categorization too.
There were three individuals most closely involved in the allegation/defamation that was visited on me in August 2010. These are:
“Georgia Bellamy” (pseudonym), the young woman whom I was alleged to have harassed, who had been at CommonHealth all of about four months when the allegation was “dignified” by management. In a separate blog entry, Part 2 to this Part 1, I will describe how little I will say about her (in good part for her benefit), and how I basically excuse her in this situation. Though my feelings toward her have been mixed, I have also been touched by her position in this predicament—if she feels she’s never been in a situation like this before, neither have I; and I also know the jungle of the media in general, and medical media in particular, much better than she could be expected to—I seal over my “position” on her with the judgment that because she was young, naïve, and accordingly apt to be arrogant under pressure, she is by far the least to blame and I am basically supportive of her pursuing a media career (which I know she is), but [change made 1/2/13] I certainly would not have supported her returning to CommonHealth (partly for her own sake) up through the recent past. It now appears she ended a stint with a small firm in early 2012; considerations related to this can be seen on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog entry for January 2, 2013. *[Added 12/26/12: Seeing her as a person with whom I interacted briefly in a peculiarly intense, good-faith fashion, doing tightly deadline-oriented work, I wish her well in a general sense. As far as her future involvement with CommonHealth goes, I decidedly offer no opinion at this time.]*
“Tweedle Dee,” the director of editorial services, who should have stood up for me and cravenly did not. He had been discussed—with identity hidden to those outside CommonHealth—in detail above. My discussion of him above, backed up by several interesting pieces of documentation, by no means makes him out to be head and shoulders a more eminent editor than myself, and certainly in the hands-on, craft-level department, he was no star.
“Tweedle Dum,” the trafficking manager (who was Georgia
The apportionment of criticism is as follows: Georgia made some big mistakes that some outsiders might feel make her the chief focus of opprobrium, but I argue—not out of “infatuation” with her—that having dealt with her on the “craft” level, for various reasons I both blame her the least and find cause to keep various information on her hidden (see Part 2 of this blog entry), which has the effect (not the only intention) of protecting her interests arising out of this matter.
Tweedle Dee I have pretty settled feelings about, and they are not largely positive, but I also feel he is dispensed with pretty easily within the discussion done so far.
Tweedle Dum I happen to work up the most steam for, in part because, as a manager, she happens to reflect the more abusive or reckless cultural and business-related tendencies within CommonHealth anyway. And as a manager, she probably also feels she is justified in how she handled me. So in a sense my scorn toward her, and toward a certain benightedly “feminist” attitude she might embody, is toward a peculiar aspect of the larger arrogance at CommonHealth, expressed especially in some women’s arguably “work-feminist” stances (practices and attitudes) there. (Also, Tweedle Dum will be a rare example in my experience of a younger female coworker about whom I would be mostly, unsparingly tough in criticizing; over the years, and this encompasses some difficult, very-mixed-feelings, and hard-deciding business, I have tended to give younger women a break, even if this followed our coming to a pass that included a lot of unfairness to me.)
Further, this isn’t merely about personality issues. If that’s all it was, the 2010 mess would be offensive enough to me. But Tweedle Dum’s promulgating defamatory information about me was done in the same hand as having me in on August 27, 2010, at risk of my finding out about the defamation, in order for me to do more exclusive early-pass proofreading of a product information (P.I.) document in a more general management of documents that…(hold off on the full story). Therefore, this matter has become the hairy story to convey (with a lot of difficulty in deciding what venue, and how, to do it) that this is.
If you could trust legal authorities to help in this, I wouldn’t have to blog on it. But the Bauer suit in 2008 was unquestionably mishandled by one or more legal professionals in the case, including by at least one judge. My complaint to the New Jersey Attorney General’s office about The Write Agenda in December 2011, in a large, exhibit-including letter, appeared to result in changes at The Write Agenda’s site for some weeks, but I received no response of any sort from the A.G. Was its office too busy to acknowledge my painstakingly prepared letter, especially if it resulted in the A.G. contacting some principal behind The Write Agenda?
My experience with other attorneys over many years in media issues shows how useless, essentially, they are in this area of business, at least in New Jersey
And most notably, CommonHealth has done nothing adult in the matters I have brought to their attention (via a Web site or blog) since August 2010. A letter that a member of its H.R. department sent in late March 2011 was laughable in what it asserted, and of course it offered no independent evidence bearing on the matter at hand.
I wish I didn’t have to go through all this, because I never thought my time with medical media would end like this, and the sheer complexity of making clear what the issues are—so that outsiders can understand an arcane industry—is conveyed by my blog entries on this. But at very least, I am positioned to say something incisive enough on this mess, by virtue of experience and regarding what the mishandling of me in 2010 meant with respect to public-health interests, as reflected in two FDA communications to me.
If the average reader were to ask, Why can’t media managers mind their own f**king business appropriately?, well, that is a question I have been asking for the past 20+ years (within or outside medical media), whether in the medical-media world or not, and I don’t think there will ever be an answer to it or a remedy for the perpetual foibles it reflects.
##
Considerations regarding confidentiality, from the June 28 blog entry:
“Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to above are numbered per the criteria listed below.
(1) I can talk about what happened more than 10 years before I signed an agreement, or I can talk about an issue when it has been more than 10 years since I worked on an account that involved the issue (which is consistent with the express language of the agreement); meanwhile,
(2) anything that happened within 10 years from the time of signing is not allowed to be discussed outside the company, except:
(3) given the proper conditions, I can talk about something that is NOT a matter of trade secrets as ordinarily understood—“trade secrets” meaning information that pertains to specific brands or, especially, any “proprietary” strategizing regarding how the brands would be marketed (which, typically, and perhaps ALL the time, I was never privy to in my narrowly defined technical work); or
(4) given the proper foundation, I can talk about something that is NOT a matter of trade secrets and that IS a deviation from accepted practice with respect to ethics that seem to be expected in media offices, and/or with respect to more general office manners, and/or with respect to technically-related methods or assumptions, as understood (or as should be understood) across the medical-media industry and/or across all publishing-related industries in which I’ve had experience; or,
the most conscience-wracking area, (5) when an issue involves the nature of a specific brand or some issues regarding the strategy or more specific tactics for how the brand is marketed, I can discuss this issue if it raises questions of a possible threat to public health and/or a possible violation of federal law regarding health-care-product marketing, violation of the letter of the law or (harder to address) of the spirit of the law.
Whenever I discuss an issue that involves any of the above criteria, I will reference, by number, which criterion or criteria I am following. Believe me, this is all not an easy thing to grapple with.
General conclusions from the “horse pill” blog entry:
(A) How you were embraced in good-faith and constructive ways—for your technical role, and your sense of being “part of the team”—varied over the years, to say the least.
(B) The roles that (some, not a small number of) women played, and the manner in which they played them, could be rather unusual, to put it very generally—ranging from the facilitative in a way that was based on female mannerisms, to what would be considered impertinent or even sexist-oriented behavior (e.g., when the company seemed to value women for their appearance) in other industries.
