Social media force me to decide what music I like, what my political views are, or even what I did tonight. Of course, those views and preferences and facts exist regardless of Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. But whether I share them with my online networks, and on what terms, comes down to a bunch of tiny, semi-conscious editorial decisions. I may decide to tweet about the new Radiohead album, but not the new Barenaked Ladies. I may post a photo from my trip to Austin for SXSW, but not my trip to Miami to stay with my snowbird grandma. I’m happy to take a potshot at the Tea Party, but my thoughts on Israel/Palestine may be a little too nuanced and touchy to expose to Likes, comments or @ replys.

You may call the product of these editorial decisions my “brand,” but that makes it seem like I’m trying to sell something. I prefer to call it my public self. Personally, I’m not ready to embrace the sort of radical transparency espoused by digital utopians like Jeff Jarvis. There are some things I’d prefer to keep to myself. Part of this is probably J-School baggage. A journalist never carries a sign at a protest or reveals which candidate he supports, my journalism professors taught me. Part of this is probably middle child syndrome. When I was five I refused to let my birthday party guests sing happy birthday, my parents love to remind me; I didn’t like the attention.

Picture a Venn diagram with two circles, one private, one public. Our social media selves exist in the sweet spot where the circles intersect. The big innovation of Google+ was that it allowed us to keep those circles apart. But, as Farhad Manjoo has noted, keeping them apart can be tedious, “like creating a seating chart for your wedding.” I don’t want to make all those decisions all the time. I don’t want to cultivate a “family self” and a “professional self” and a “high school friends” self.

Having one public self forces me to decide how sarcastic I am (trying to tone it down), how silly I’m willing to look (pretty silly) and what I’m ready to go to bat for (black licorice, Entourage, Beyoncé). And over time those decisions form a pretty complete picture of who I am. Whether I Like it or not

—

I launched this site just over two years ago when I truly was beginning a career at the end of journalism (as we know it). It also seemed like I was beginning a career at the end of the world as we knew it. Just a month earlier, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, triggering the biggest and scariest financial crisis since – as you’ve heard countless time before – The Great Depression. Barack Obama’s historic election victory was a week away and the world was in a state of nervous anticipation.

At the time, I was living at the epicenter of all this, a journalism student working as a reporter in Washington, DC. I remember visiting the White House for the first time and being more impressed by the modest, less iconic building next door, the Treasury Department. If an unpopular and overwhelmed lame duck President lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue surely contained the men and women who would or would not save the world.

—

Six weeks and four days after election night I returned to Montreal. I finished up my thesis, overhauled the blog, and began searching for a job at what might have been the worst time, in the worst industry, in the worst market I could have picked – an English journalism job in Montreal during the heart of the Great Recession. Because of my American degree, I was eligible to work in the States for a year and sent off countless CVs and cover letters for entry-level newspaper jobs and magazine internships as far-flung as New Mexico and the Northwest Territories.

Of course, I was competing with hundreds of recently laid-off veteran reporters and fellow fresh J-School graduates for a rapidly dwindling number of positions. I got a couple “Wait, can you even work in the States?” emails and a few “Sorry, not hiring but we’ll keep your resume on file” formalities but that was pretty much it. In the meantime, I honed my craft writing for Masc magazine and at one point nearly moved to Ottawa to write Web copy for Michael Ignatieff who I could have sworn would be Prime Minister by now.

During this time, I did what every good job hunter is supposed to do. I reached out to former teachers and mentors, set up meetings with people in the field whom I admired (or had some tenuous connection to) and cold called a few wish-list publications. I had a great phone chat with Jordan Timm, then at The Walrus and now at Canadian Business, who is a friend of a friend of my girlfriend. Jordan was generous and helpful and said that if my heart wasn’t 100% in the game, that if there was anything else in the world I’d be happy to do other than journalism, to run for my life. I spoke to my thesis advisor at B.U., the amazingly empathetic Boston Globe alum Mitch Zuckoff, and essentially asked his permission to do something else – something that’s not quite journalism – until things picked up. I spoke to my former editor at the New London Day, who said she would love to hire me if only they were hiring. 

—

In the end, I got a job through a combination of luck, perseverance, social media and good old-fashioned shoe leather. I’d heard years ago that one of the more coveted English media jobs in Montreal is to work for Air Canada’s enRoute magazine. Yes, it’s an inflight magazine but Canada is a very small market and since the magazine has a solid business model and coveted audience, they’re able to hire great editorial and art staff, pay freelancers better than more prestigious national publications, and have an award-winning product to show for it.

Early in my job hunt I had cold called enRoute’s deputy editor, Susan Nerberg, figuring she’d be more accessible than the top dog. She was very friendly and seemed impressed by my background but informed me that no positions were open at the moment. That was before I spoke to Jordan Timm who happened to be a freelance fact checker at Spafax, the custom publishing company that produces enRoute. Now that I had a name to drop, I decided to try my luck with Editor-in Chief Ilana Weitzman. In a carefully worded email, I explained to her that I wasn’t asking for a job, but would love to chat. Her response: “Why aren’t you writing to ask for a job? I’m not saying we’re hiring right now — no one really is — but it’s good for me to know you’re here.”

Ilana sat down with me for a full hour at Spafax headquarters, for which I’ll always be grateful. She gave me the lay of the land of the Canadian magazine landscape (sadly, pretty sparse) and wondered, quite reasonably, why I wasn’t in Toronto. I left her my CV and she wished me luck. Then, a couple of weeks later I was at a neighbourhood café for what I thought was a reading by CBC radio host Jonathan Goldstein. Turns out I was a day early and found myself engulfed by an event called “Fiction Bitches” where a parade of female writers read excerpts from recently published books. The last person to read was Arjun Basu. He stood out because he was a man and instead of reading from a book he recited a bunch of 140-character stories he’d “published” on Twitter. They were funny and I told him so as I passed him on the way out of the café.

The next day I began following Arjun Basu on Twitter, which I had signed up for a few months earlier. Within minutes I received a direct message: “I’m going to follow you on my “corporate” page – have a better chance of connecting. Thx for follow here. You were at reading last night no?” That’s when I learned that honourary fiction bitch Arjun Basu sunlights as the editorial director at Spafax! I realized I had unwittingly made my way up the Spafax chain of command and soon made the trip back to Spafax headquarters for a corner office chat. Arjun confirmed that they weren’t hiring (in fact the hiring freeze was handed down by WPP, Spafax’s giant British holding company), but he said he had a feeling that they would be in a few months. In the meantime, I was welcome to come in at my convenience to help out and learn how magazine are made. Living just up the street (and not having much else to do), I happily accepted.

On the first day of my internship Arjun told me they were about to launch a new, “lightly-branded” corporate blog “that’s not really a corporate blog” and started assigning me things. I put together a piece about airlines on Twitter and a so-called charticle unpacking Robert Scoble’s social media starfish. The blog went live a month later, which is when I found out its name: Sparksheet. The following week I happened to be in Toronto for a wedding and Arjun suggested I take the time to meet Raymond Girard, Spafax’s President of Interactive and the man behind the blog. A couple weeks later I became editor of Sparksheet.

—

I’ve had the job for a year and a half now. Sparksheet has grown and gained a fine reputation among media and marketing folk. Last month we won a record four Canadian Online Publishing Awards, more than any other publication. CBC.ca put us in the lede of their story on the event, alongside them and the Toronto Star. This fall I hired Sparksheet’s second intern, interviewing her in the same conference room where I met Ilana two springs ago. I’ve also started finding myself on the other end of queries for advice on breaking into the biz. In effect, I went from cold caller to cold called, from someone’s intern to someone’s boss within one session of US Congress.

Which brings me back to this blog and the question that inspired this long-winded post: Does the premise (and tagline) of Hopeful & De-Pressed still hold up? Breaking it down, am I still at the beginning my career? Are we still at the end journalism as we know it? And what do we know about journalism anyway?

As I discussed in my previous post about branded content, my peers and I have been charting some new and ambiguous territory in the journalism world. Sparksheet is an independent-minded industry publication with an arm’s length relationship to its publisher. But it’s also a strategic corporate property that must ultimately shine a positive light on Spafax and avoid embarrassing its clients. I’m extremely proud of our content, our ethics, and our transparency. But I still have enough J-School baggage to wonder if I’ll ever have to plead my case to a future prospective employer who might frown upon Sparksheet’s corporate provenance.

Sometimes I get rather indignant about the whole thing. After all, it wasn’t for lack of trying that I’m not working at a small-town newspaper or fledgling indie magazine. I got a master’s degree, did all the right internships, amassed a pretty solid portfolio of clips. By no means am I suggesting that I’ve “paid my dues” in the industry. I realize how privileged I am to have had these opportunities, which ultimately came with a hefty tuition price (I’m quite sympathetic to the notion that high-priced journalism schools and the necessary evil of unpaid internships are turning journalism into an upper-middle-class profession).

But I wasn’t asking for a staff position at Maclean’s right out of grad school, just a chance to chase ambulances in Saint John or cover Synagogue board meetings in Brookline. But whether it was the recession, the print industry implosion, or an industry-wide disdain for cup reporters, even those perfectly unglamourous gigs were closed off to me in the long winter of 2009. In Spafax, I found a company where my skills are appreciated. Where my enthusiasm for the Web and the way it’s changing the media world is seen as an asset, and not a Pollyanaish idea to be snuffed out by cynical, Luddite veterans.

—

Faced with my imaginary future interviewer, I’d also argue that the role of the journalist is changing. I tend to agree with folks like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen who say that journalists should become more like entrepreneurs. After all, they were the ones who got screwed when their colleagues on the other side of the Chinese Wall fell asleep at the switch, failing to recognize how the Internet would shake up print media just like the music industry before it. Lately, I’ve been brought into discussions about future opportunities to monetize Sparksheet. It feels good to have a seat at the table in conversations that may impact whether or not I continue to have a job. In this age of personal branding and “slash careers” journalists ought to be able to wear more than one hat – as long as they’re still able to distinguish between them.

It may not be as romantic as chasing ambulances or bootstrapping it at a quarterly arts magazine, but it’s nice to work at a company with resources, to be in a position to think about how we should grow and not how we’re going to scale back. It’s also nice to work in an age and industry where I can go from intern to editor to perhaps something bigger in less than two years. And to wonder whether I’m still beginning a career at the end of journalism or whether this beginning might never end.

As I’ve discussed before, I’m the editor of a lightly-branded media and marketing blog called Sparksheet, which is both an independent-minded industry publication and a strategic corporate property. So I’m always navigating the line between editorial and advertorial, zealously guarding my journalistic independence and integrity while making sure not to embarrass the company or its clients.

Which brings me to this recent blog post by Sally Gethin. A self-proclaimed “old fashioned journalist,” Gethin edits a respected inflight entertainment industry newsletter (yes, such a thing exists). Although I can’t say for certain, the post seems to be a thinly-veiled attack on Sparksheet.

(Note: For some reason she seems to have deleted the post. But here’s another Web lesson for Ms. Gethin: online content is forever. You can find a cached version here- just scroll down a few posts to “When news becomes clutter”).

Indeed, most of the post is an inchoate rant. She blames the Internet for killing investigative reporting. She laments that “There is too much online ‘chatter’ going on.” Regarding Twitter, she contends that “just the word itself defames the notion of real debate.” Really?

But the question of whether branded content should be regarded as credible journalism is a legitimate one. So here is my response (originally posted as a comment on her blog):

As a fellow journalism school graduate and someone who works in the branded media space, I couldn’t disagree more.

First, the idea that the Internet and “digital media” are killing investigative journalism is ludicrous. Check out websites like ProPublica, Spot.us and Talking Points Memo, which have picked up the investigative torch dropped by newspapers, magazines and TV stations that are no longer willing or able to invest in proper muckraking.

It’s a shame that so many legacy media outlets are struggling. But “old fashioned journalists” and media executives are far from blameless. Ignoring what happened to the music industry in the face of Napster and iTunes, they failed to grasp the impact digital media would have on their outdated and inefficient business models (low subscription costs, print classifieds, un-targeted ads, etc.).  Instead of seeing the Internet as an opportunity, they saw it as a threat, and leaner, keener outlets rose up to fill the void.

Sure, there’s a lot of clutter online, but that’s not an Internet phenomenon—think of tabloids, trashy magazines and bad commercial radio. In any medium, the cream will rise above the clutter. And it’s the cream that legacy outlets should be afraid of.

Second, the notion that branded content is necessarily vapid or corrupted is just plain wrong. Custom magazines—from inflight lifestyle magazines to meatier publications like Benetton’s “Colors”— have been around for decades. Newspapers and broadcast outlets have always been beholden to advertisers, sponsors, parent companies and stockholders. As you suggest in your post, what distinguishes the credible from the cloying is transparency and disclosure. Personally, I have more faith in the candidly partisan Huffington Post than disingenuously “Fair and Balanced” Fox News. I also think Benetton’s “Colors” has more journalistic merit than AdBusters, and that Andrew Sullivan’s blog is far more credible than the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page.

Finally, I dispute the notion that corporate blogs, Twitter accounts and any other branded community “simply places the sponsor owner in a strategic powerful position in a given market.” On the contrary, engaging in social media puts brands in an inherently vulnerable position. Press releases, direct mailing and other traditional marketing practices were all about controlling the message. Blogs, Twitter and other social media are about letting go. Again, it goes without saying that companies need to be transparent about their role in a branded space. But once they create that space, anything can happen. United Airlines and, more recently, Southwest Airlines learned that the hard way.

In some ways, the worlds of journalism and marketing are converging. Journalists are being trained to consider search engine optimization when writing headlines and assigning stories; marketers are realizing the power of useful content and powerful storytelling. As the editor of a branded blog/newsletter, I do need to stay on message—but not at the expense of core journalistic principles like accuracy, fairness and balance. I’m not sure someone who resorts to tired caricatures and name calling can say the same.

Note: This post is my own opinion and not necessarily that of Spafax, Sparksheet’s publisher.

In November, Forbes magazine pronounced Apple’s Steve Jobs “CEO of the decade.” The runners up? Microsoft boss Bill Gates and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. At a time in which financial giants, manufacturing moguls and media barons are cutting their losses, the geeks have inherited the earth.

This was the decade in which technology went mainstream. Gadgets and gateways—some loaded with “apps” and run in the “cloud”—fill our pockets, furnish our living rooms and power our offices. For most of the decade, it was all about “You.” From iPods and iMacs to MySpace and YouTube, the noughties made technology personal. Blogs, search engines and aggregators turned newspapers and other mass media “old.” On-demand entertainment made movie and television watching into custom experiences. eBay, Amazon and online banking transformed your laptop into a private commercial hub. And file sharing and MP3s rendered music labels and number one hit records unnecessary. In 2006, “You” were even named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

Then came social media and Web 2.0., and suddenly it was all about “us.” With a world of knowledge at our fingertips, we rediscovered our desire to connect to the world (and not just to our friends via email or instant messenger). Enter Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Google Wave. Even the iPod—that perfect vessel of bespoke gratification—morphed into the iPhone, a humanistically-designed connector and communicator.  Napster and “Just Do It” gave way to Wikipedia and “Yes We Can.”

But this decade’s achievements have also raised the bar for what comes next. In an age where everyday people can point a cursor at an image of the globe and zoom in on their kitchen window, we’ve become hard to impress. We’re shocked and appalled when our GPS doesn’t recognize a new roundabout or when a Blu-Ray disc won’t play on our Nintendo Wii. Google, Apple and Microsoft have proven that anything is possible. These days the only thing surprising about technology is its limits.

Photo by celinecelines via Flickr

As I wrote in my last post, the Internet may enable us to connect with countless people from all corners of the world.  But that only fuels are desire for face-to-face meetings and personal connections. That’s why God Google people invented Tweetups, or small grassroots get-togethers of local Twitter users and like-minded geeks twits people. OK, geeks.

Tonight I went to an event organized by UXMTL, “a group that aims to help Montreal organizations create more enjoyable, useful and meaningful connections with their audiences, through User Experience Design,” as they put it.

Ironically, the venue was having connectivity issues (and I’m currently iPhone-less), so I wasn’t able to share my notes in real time. Normally, banging on my laptop or phone when people are talking makes me feel like a tool. At these events, being offline makes me feel naked.

Better late than never though, right? Here are some highlights from the evening’s panel discussion. Note that these are paraphrases/interpretations, not direct quotes. The panel consisted of:

• Joël Pomerleau, Assistant Director, Accessibility and Digital Enterprises, NFB
• Sylvain Carle, Co-Founder and CTO at Praized Media
• Daniel Drouet, partner at Montreal Start Up
• Marian Kolev, Creative Director at Bluesponge
• David Rollert, VP Interaction Design at Pheromone

What’s the value of UX?

Daniel: Start-ups don’t usually take users into account as much as they should. You often have one business guy, one tech guy– but no design guy. There’s no money for it. UX is not a one-off. It’s an ongoing need, and an ongoing expense.

David: The upfront investment in UX is usually worth it. If your site isn’t properly designed, you’ll  lose your audience right off the bat.

How do you measure success?

Daniel: Bounce rate is important, but user feedback is key.

Marian: You don’t try to engage everyone. Just have to make sure your target audience likes it.

Sylvain: How do you measure success? “Is the client happy?”

David: It’s important to keep in mind that there’s no ideal UX. If there were, every product would be exactly the same. There’s a science to UX, but it’s also intuitive and situational.

I’ve spend most of my career in New York City and Boston, and the creative energy in Montreal makes me want to stick around.

Joël: Our job as designers is to showcase content. The best compliment I get about the my site is that people don’t notice it at all.

———-

Now I’m looking forward to connecting with people I met, or didn’t get a chance to meet, online. Yup, it works that way too.

1. Online vs. traditional journalism is not a zero sum game

Despite some stinging comments hurled at CNN anchor Don Lemon during one panel, I was surprised by how much love “legacy media” were getting in BlogWorld. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen advocated using search data to determine what readers care about. Blogcritics publisher Eric Olsen waxed nostalgic about the tactile experience of print magazines. Rather than eye each other suspiciously, old and new media types shared best practices and ideas for preserving quality journalism.

2. Video kills the blogging star

Since most of us bloggers came out of the print world, we sometimes tend to overlook the power of multimedia content. But panelists ranging from Facebook evangelist Shama Kabani, to consultant Jay Berkowitz warned that anyone who forsakes video is leaving money on the table. According to Berkowitz, only four percent of marketers use YouTube, even though the video-streaming site is also the world’s second most popular search engine. So whether you’re filming it or embedding someone else’s, video ought to be part of your content strategy.

3. The Internet is just a big search party

Speaking of search engines, almost every BlogWorld speaker mentioned the symbiotic relationship between content and search. Chris Baggott, an expert on corporate blogging, said that many content creators foolishly buy into what he called “the myth of the audience.” Most websites get roughly 66% of their traffic from search engines, Baggott said, and so all content should be written for the first-time reader. This means defining—and relentlessly repeating—a strategic set of keywords that people are likely to search for. “Think about what [prospective customers] are going to type,” Baggott said, “And talk about it.”

At first this rubbed me the wrong way; I’m a big believer in fostering community and building relationships with readers over time. But I now realize that these things aren’t mutually exclusive. Defining a set of keywords and writing clear, pithy content around them is simply good communication. One thing that Twitter has demonstrated is that brevity can go a long way. People don’t have time to decode your cutesy headlines when their RSS feeds and Twitter Lists are packed with goodies. So don’t just think of search engine optimization as a crude marketing strategy. Think of it as good writing.

4. Nice guys finish first

In the heady days of ink-stained newsmen and billionaire publishers, loutishness was a virtue. Think of newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Citizen Kane), Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch. But now that media is no longer a product but a conversation, to paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the meek have inherited the (Word)press.

The “rock stars” of BlogWorld were celebrated not for their egos but their generosity. This was evidenced by the drastically different receptions given to Guy Kawasaki—billionaire venture capitalist—and Chris Brogan, the so-called “nice guy” of social media.

Brogan is known for superhumanly responding to every @reply on Twitter and playing “matchmaker” between vendors and clients, as he put it. Kawasaki is notorious for his automated “robo-Tweets.” During his keynote, Brogan preached mantas like, “Selling is never about getting more than you give” and “I like making relationships before I make money; I’m not a hooker.”

During his moment in the spotlight, Kawasaki reminisced about cruising down the streets of L.A. in a Ferrari and stubbornly refused to play along with comedian Kevin Pollack’s hilarious “Larry King game.”

I met lots of people at BlogWorld. There was the group I joined for dinner after they put out an open invitation on Twitter, and the successful podcaster who told me about his family on the way back to the hotel. And then there was the guy who ping-ponged from table to table pitching his product and boasting about the 500 business cards he had “collected.”

I’m not sure how many cards I collected. But I’m certain I got more out of BlogWorld than he did.

But now it’s clear to me that Slate got it all wrong. The lesson of online news is not that readers want their news all the time and from countless sources. It’s that they can afford to be pickier about when and from what medium they get it.  Sometimes that may still be from the newspaper at the breakfast table. At other times, it may be via smart phone on the way to the pub. In any case, organizations need to add value to the news by providing either content or context. I don’t need Slate to tell me what the 12 most important news stories are right now. That’s what my RSS feeds and Twitter and Digg and the myriad other aggregators that have emerged in the 14 years since Slate introduced TP are for. Today’s Papers did something that was virtually impossible for most of us to do on our own: read all the major papers and write up a concise and thoughtful summary of their contents.  As another blogger put it, “what made TP worthwhile was the ability to get a good-if-not-full picture of a big and complicated world without easy answers in just a couple of paragraphs at a time.” There’s still a need for that.

But the truth is that TP was never about the news cycle. It was about news judgment. It’s not just inside baseball to know what newspaper editors are leading with, fronting, or putting below the fold. It helps us—as editors and reporters and media critics but also as readers—to not just read the news but think about the news. That’s where “meta news” differs from aggregation. The latter can be achieved through algorithms. The former needs human processing. Behavioural economists talk about how meta-thinking—thinking about thinking—can lead us to make better decisions. Well, thinking about thinking about the news can make us better journalists and better citizens. My favorite media outlets—from the Daily Show, to On the Media, to Talking Points Memo—not only deliver news but encourage us to give it a second take. By listing instead of processing the day’s top stories, The Slatest makes us work harder, but think less.

I told him that journalism is changing, that first-person narratives, argumentative essays and cheeky personal blogs were all the rage in our battered journalistic landscape. I said that the best bloggers—the Josh Marshalls and Michael Geists and Andrew Sullivans—are serious intellectuals whose reporting is grounded in sound research and reasoning. Yet, they all have strong voices, and crystal clear points of view. I told him that, in any case, I didn’t go to J-School because it was my lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter. I wasn’t even particularly keen on current affairs until university.

Rather, I pursued a master’s in journalism because I was interested in everything– from music, literature and pop culture, to  politics, religion and technology– and figured a life in reporting would allow me to dip in and out of various disciplines and worlds. I chose journalism because it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, what Churchill and Herzl and Orwell did before moving on to grander things. Besides, a year and a half of school would allow me to hone my writing and chops and put off getting a job for another 18 months.

I told him all this, and I meant it. But why, despite all that, did I still feel as though I had betrayed some fundamental instinct or ethic that I never had in the first place?

Have you heard of Steve Harvey? He’s the comedian turned self-help guru who has been making the T.V. talk show rounds lately, promoting his book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. Harvey gives dating advice to single women. He promises to reveal “men’s secret playbook” and teach women how to “win the game.”

I stumbled upon Harvey’s apperance on Oprah a couple of weeks ago and at first I was impressed. He’s funny and self-deprecating, with a mischievous teddy bear charm. Harvey urges women to set their standards high and to delay sex until they find out what men really want from them– whether they’re “subsistence fishermen,” or merely “sports fishermen.” He preaches that men essentially need three things from women– support, loyalty and “the cookie,” which is his cutesy, network-friendly euphemism for sex. “Slow down ladies,” he says. “We can’t hold your hand unless you let us.” All reasonably sound –if simplistic–advice.

But then Harvey lapses into cliche. On relationships, he insists that “the woman controls everything,” that they have “all the power.” He says that “a man has to mark his territory” and that every women should adhere to a 90-day probationary period before granting her partners his “benefits package”– another cutesy euphemism for sex.

Wait a minute. I’m all for empowering women, but why should they have “all the power”? Isn’t a relationship about sharing and compromise, a constant negotiation based on trust and communication and not some 90-day money-back guarantee?

A relationship is not a zero-sum game; It should be a partnership, not a power struggle. Instead of telling women how to “win the game,” perhaps Harvey can teach couples how to move beyond it.