Putting humanity in your newsletter - it's not worth it (or is it?).

So, you're starting over, either re-something'd or just sick of playing games. Either way, you want to do it right from now on. No more corporate pabulum spoon-fed to the masses. You're taking a stand for forthrightness. You want your newsletter to mirror reality, not the party line.

Well, far be it from me to dash hopes. There is hope, but it's slim. Do I sound sarcastic? No, just war-weary.

I came into corporate communication from newspapers with a thirst for stories. The classic definition of story: A sympathetic character encounters a complication and overcomes that complication and (if you can get this, it's a bonus) grows as a person in the process. I'd seen how powerful stories were at my newspaper. I'd seen how important it was to imbue your stories with humanity - with all its yearnings and failings.

Problem is, in the corporate world, people don't yearn - except in a kaizan kind of way (a striving for perfection) - and people certainly don't fail, at least not in print.

This isn't daytime TV, where we can pay off dupes to share their deepest secrets to a nation of gawkers. This is Work. And one gets ahead at Work by both effort and appearance. That is, they work as smartly, as earnestly, as diligently as they can and hope nothing slips out to the contrary.

When I pitched this story to Gloria Gordon, editor of Communication World, I told her I would write the story about one I wrote - an employee's battle with bone marrow cancer.

I would have written that such a venture was laborious and highly technical. I remember a story I did for one company about an employee who fell off a waterfall. The story chronicled his fight back to normalcy. I interviewed him for nine hours over several months. Then I followed a strict outlining procedure detailed in Jon Franklin's book, "Writing for Story." Was it worth it? It was without question the most popular article I ever did for that company. Today, six years later, the subject of the story still gets comments on it from his peers at work. It made people feel proud to work for that company.

When was the last time one of your stories did that?

(I don't mean to belittle what you do. I'm an internal communicator, too. It's just that the stuff we're forced to publish is so laundered. We bleach all the life out of our stories. They're safe - no worries there. They're meant to offend no one who is not directly connected with the subject of the story and boost the egos of those who are. Those people are made to feel proud. The rest just yawn, read the first three paragraphs and flip the page.)

I would have written that the best way to find that very human story was to look for a candidates in the company's elite, someone who had risen quite high but, because of circumstances beyond his/her control, likely wasn't going any higher - yet was quite satisfied and happy. Someone who didn't have anything to lose by appearing human in the internal publication.

Early on at this company, I had heard that this person had beaten leukemia several years ago and still received regular chemo. I toyed with approaching him but thought better of it. When the leukemia came back, I thought, well, it can't hurt to talk to him if he's willing. I'd just wait it out and see what happened. The subject received his marrow transplant and, though it looked dark at times, kept getting better - so I stuck with the story.

I would have written that your choice of photographer was as important as your choice of subject. Find one with newspaper experience and a good "bedside manner." You want a sincere extrovert. I happened to find a hungry young photographer with a history of cancer among his relatives and friends. He and the subject hit it off right from the start. And the photographer, Matt Hagan, was let into places I never could have gone. On the day of the bone marrow transplant, Hagan was in the hospital room. He captured the subject, prone in bed, spent, as a nurse hooked up the IV. The subject's best friend, also an employee, stood at the foot of the bed wiping a tear with one hand and holding the morning's Wall Street Journal with his other hand.

A good photographer is so important because the camera doesn't lie. (Well, actually, it can, in this digital age.)

People began raising eyebrows at the thought that I was considering publication of such a piece. My Pulitzer-esque photo was killed (not by the subject in the bed but by the friend wiping the tear). My one vindication was that the attorney who reviews all issues of the newsletter before publication said the story nearly made her cry. I could tell it made her proud to work for that company.

Undertaking such a gloves-off effort at bringing humanity into your newsletter is a highly delicate matter that must be approached step by step. Something such as this will really teach you what strategic thinking is.

Now that I've told you what I'm not going to tell you, I'll spend the rest of this article expounding on more fruitful matters. If you see the value of humanity in your newsletter, of having people act/think/do in your newsletter in concert with how they actually act/think/do - well, you're better served tapping away like a clocksmith than blasting open a hole for the sunlight.

So, look for the little opportunities.

Concentrate on the research aspect of your job. By that, I mainly mean interviewing. The best interviews are intimate conversations that just happen to be recorded. (First, if you're not sincerely interested in what makes people tick, skip the exercise altogether.) Take your time. Ask apparently strange questions. What's their motivation? How'd they get into this crazy line of work in the first place?

For example, I was writing a story for a well-known computer manufacturer about its Rochester, N.Y., sales office. I was talking to its top salesperson, Jo. Because I was conversing with her, not "interviewing her," I found out how she got into her line of work and was able to put in a paragraph that gave a glimpse at who she really is.

Partnering required that the Rochester office must innovate to find new ways meet a customer's needs. That requires understanding the customer's business well enough to see opportunities even they might miss.

Jo's the consummate innovator and take-what-we-have-and-turn-it-into-winner type. She was about to graduate from Cornell in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. (She had always wanted to be an electrical engineer, at least since early girlhood when her dad took her to the site of the 1960 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows to see the science exhibits. She was enthralled. Once a month, she'd ride her bike to the fair site to see the new exhibits.) With graduation looming, she interviewed with Hewlett-Packard. At the end of the interview, they gave her an assignment of designing an oscilloscope in an hour. She went back to her hotel room and, using the room service menu, the ice bucket and a bag of peanuts, "built" an oscilloscope, which she presented to them with a sales pitch.

After her presentation, the execs said, "Clearly, you should not be just an electrical engineer. We'll come back in two weeks to interview you for a new hybrid job we have, part systems engineer and part salesman."

The rest, history.

I used the same story structure by telling about the day-in-the-life of another salesperson. By asking him a series of seemingly inane questions - such as what he had for breakfast and how many hours of sleep he typically got - I was able to open the piece in a way that let you see him as a person.

"John Smith (I changed the name, readers) is dreaming about something totally unrelated to work, which if you knew him and/or the office he works for, might surprise you. When the alarm goes off, he shoots up and for a second his mind is clear, washed clean by five whole hours of sleep. That second gone, he begins mentally diagramming his day as sales rep for XYZ's Rochester, N.Y., branch sales office.

"Once out of the shower, he flips on CNBC in his bedroom to catch up on business news. He has his standard bowl of cereal for breakfast. And, of course, his first cup of coffee.

"En route, no coffee. Has to have one hand free to drive and the other to use the cellular phone to gather corporate voice mail from the night before and answer client messages.

"By the time he reaches work - 7:45 - it's already churning. An hour or so to make calls, then he'll be out breathlessly pounding the pavement. He sees Jo has beaten him to work and is already hunched over her desk. Jo Dokes - the office's other sales rep - describes the melee of the office as 'controlled chaos.' (Or as another employee put it, 'The pace here is not for the faint of heart.') John grabs his second cup of coffee and plants himself behind his desk.

"Jo is like a comet. She blazes hard and fast for a while and then she'll crash. So she has to go somewhere for a short breather. Me, I'm more of a constant plugger. Lots of coffee. Different styles, but we're both high producers."

Also, once again because of my interviewing technique, I was able to close the story thusly:

"On his drive back home at night, John picks up his corporate voice mail from the day. He doesn't listen to it during the workday. Devoted to client calls. Since he's born and raised in Rochester, he knows the drive home like the back of his hand, so he can concentrate on his calls. He and Sandy eat dinner, play with the kids, watch a little TV. During the night, when ideas concerning work come to him, he quickly writes them down and returns to his family. Eventually, TR, 12, and Evan, 7, are tucked into bed.

"Then John heads to his study to work on his computers. He surfs the net (making sure to stop at competitors' home pages), sends out E-mail and plans out his next day's priorities. That done, he switches off the computer and hand-writes letters to execs that he saw that day. About midnight, he heads to bed, in his favorite XYZ T-shirt, and reads trade journals until he drifts into sleep."

This is more than just an obsession with detail. It's all about really caring about people. If you don't get a kick out of delving into people's personalities, don't do it.

Keep it up with such "little opportunities," and eventually your publication will take on a tenor of human-ness.

But it's a struggle. Ninety-nine percent of the time the people you interview lie to you. Of course, they're white lies - or lies for the good of the company - but they're lies. The most mercenary among them are grooming their images in the company and want to use you. Most are just people whose real life - their close friends, their spirituality, their counseling sessions - happens away from work. They don't want known that they get frustrated with the bureaucracy. They just want to work hard (most of the time), say the right words, attend the right mandatory Total Quality training sessions and go home to their lives. Learn to live with that.

So why go to all this trouble?

Well, for me, as I said, I have a thirst for a good story.

Also, I could tell you that if the subjects in your stories appear human, other employees will identify with them. Also, accompanying key messages that come out of their mouths will be more credible and, hence, bought into. And that, as they say in internal communicators' school, is what your job is about.

But, mainly, wrestling for humanity puts you on the side of right.

Too much about our companies' media - and hence, to a degree, their culture - is dehumanizing. I'm not telling you something you don't know. You're the voice of that culture. If you don't fight for real-ness, who will? The dupes? Not likely. (Kidding.)

So, continue taking risks. Seek out the little opportunities - what the heck, go for broke now and then, too. Worry more about matching reality in your publication than smoothing out your career path. Care more about people than profit.

Be a human.

John Draper is a communicator in Tacoma, Wash.