Copywriters Podcast

When I was but a wee lad, not even 40 years old yet, I worked in the Chicago News Bureau of McGraw-Hill as a correspondent for a number of niche business magazines. One of my most important clients was Engineering News Record, or ENR for short. Now this was an interesting challenge, since I had trouble screwing a nut on a bolt. And I’d never taken an engineering course in my life. I had to get up to speed super quickly on a whole range of things, to write about concrete, rebar, sheer forces, cantilevers, and all kinds of technical construction stuff that was a complete mystery to me. I did it, and it really paid off. I became ENR’s golden boy in the field, and when the San Francisco bureau chief job opened up, they lobbied to get me in it. And, for the first time in 40 years, San Francisco’s McGraw-Hill World News office had a new bureau chief: me. Now, the reason I’m bragging about this is to put some focus on a skill I developed that helped me get through many trials by fire. (That would be, each article I