Cheryl Broom (00:00.078)
Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. Today's guest has been an interim director of communications at two California community colleges and has built a really successful career based on his superb writing and editing skills.

David Ogle is someone that I've worked with for, gosh, I think almost 17 years. He used to be an editor and reporter for a local newspaper in San Diego County. And when I was director of communications at Maricopa College, he covered the college, including several scandals we had. And his excellent coverage of the college led to me hiring him as a freelance writer. And once he moved on from being a journalist.

And from there, he's worked with dozens of colleges across the nation and now has a successful career serving as an interim communications director for colleges who are in need of that position. I thought it'd be great to have David on to talk about why former journalists excel as public information officers and also to give some advice for people who might be interested in becoming communication directors or PIOs at colleges.

and let them know what type of skills they need, what they can look forward to in the job, and some things that might present a challenge. It's a fun conversation. And whether you're aspiring to be a PIO or you're one right now, I think you're going to get a lot out of it. All right, David, thanks so much for being here today. I'm excited to have you on as a guest. to be there. It's pleasure. Thank you, Cheryl. You and I have a very long history.

You started, we met when you were a reporter or actually maybe you were an editor and you were covering the mess that was happening at the college I was working at. That's true. I was, it wasn't a mess though. Francisco Rodriguez is there. He was great. He was great. No, but it was tough. was, we were going through, we were going through a lot lawsuits, votes of no confidence, lots of drama. And you covered us so fairly that when your newspaper did layoffs,

Cheryl Broom (02:19.85)
Dr. Rodriguez, who was the president, came to me and said, hey, this David Ogle guy, he did such a great job covering us and he's looking for work. There you go. Even if you have bad news, if it's covered well, you can get hired. What was it like to be a reporter and an editor? So my yeah, I had a long career as as a in journalism.

in newspapers. And I had worked as an editor for the last 15 or 16 years of a 32 year career in newspapers. And it's much different being a reporter than it is an editor. So it's fun. I I love telling stories. And what more could you ask for than a job that pays you to go out and talk to people and learn about things.

you know, you have to become an expert in like about 30 minutes on some subject you didn't know about even like an hour before, but it's just, it's a blast. It's a blast, you know, like here at Grossmont College, you know, talking to students who are coming here from around the world, professors who are just have a fascinating background and then, you know, writing about them or promoting them or promoting the college and yeah. So it's much different than what I'm doing now.

You know, Cheryl, the one thing I tell everybody is that, you know, back in the, this was back 12 years ago, it was a long time ago. I don't remember how long ago it was, but it was in the fallout from the great recession and people were, people were, there was a lot of layoffs. A lot of people were out of work. And what I learned is, that no matter what job you're in, you could be a manager at a restaurant or you could be an editor at a newspaper.

There are certain skills that you could take from whatever profession, whatever job you're in that are applicable elsewhere. In this case, know, writing, editing, managing your time, managing people, all that, you know, being able to market yourself. You know, when you're a reporter, you're trying to market your stories, your editor. So when you are, you know, in your public relations or community relations, it's the same thing in marketing your product to the community. So those skills,

Cheryl Broom (04:46.552)
transfer. And in this case, very well, because a lot of it, as you know, you have like some great storytellers over there at graduate. It's transferable, and it really wasn't difficult at all. You know, it's interesting you bring that up, because I've had the chance to meet, I don't even know how many dozens of directors of communications for community colleges. And I'd say the majority of them actually come from the background as a reporter.

I I did myself, you did. A lot of my current clients used to be reporters. And I think it does translate over well, right? I had never thought about though, the fact that you have to pitch yourself every day as a reporter. And I think that's something that a lot of our communication directors aren't actually very strong at is pitching themselves. Really?

Yeah, because they work so hard and they forget the fact that they have to showcase what they've been working on and they need to talk about it and take the time to convince other people that they're doing a great job. Right. Well, that's what they're doing. They're pitching their product to the community or to community leaders, to politicians, to the chancellors, whoever it may be, and to prospective students. And it's same sort of skill.

the same sort of persuasive, if you're successful, arguments that you were doing when you were a reporter, definitely, when you're pitching a story to your editor. And then even with me, when I was an editor, I was an assistant Metro editor, but I still had editors above me. I wasn't the publisher. And you'd still have to pitch the stories to your assistant city editor or the Metro editor or what have you. Again, it's a transferable,

One thing I will say that is at least in my case, one thing that wasn't transferable was the marketing element of the ad buys and that sort of thing. That was new. The requisitions, the purchase orders, that was new. That was a learn on the job thing. So you started as a reporter, you had a great career.

Cheryl Broom (07:10.784)
And then you became a freelancer and you did freelance writing and you started off doing some freelance writing for Maricopa College and then you grew, right? You grew a really successful business writing for colleges really across the Western United States. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I did. Again, it's taken taking the skills that you already have and one of them was was writing and telling a story.

But I also did a lot of freelance work for like the Los Angeles Times, the Union Tribune, the company that laid me off, the Baltimore Sun, papers in Florida's and some publications I had never even heard of. But that sort of dried out when AB9 was passed in California.

And so, yeah, the focus became, there's greater focus on community colleges. And it really did start with Miracosta. And you probably know the story better than I do. I only heard it secondhand, but I started doing work with you and or for you and at Miracosta. And I think that a couple people said, hey, who's writing your stories? Where are you getting this one? Where do you find the time to do this?

And your reputation kind of follows you. And luckily I had a, I didn't screw up too badly and I still had a halfway decent reputation that it went, kind of spread from there. You also market yourself. I was reaching out to San Diego Community College District, Southwestern, think some professional coworker of mine is.

told me about the chancellor's office up in Sacramento. That's been a good relationship. and then ultimately it led to this job, which is, was supposed to only be a few weeks, but it's been about a year and a half now as interim director of college and community relations is a fancy term for director of marketing and communications at Grosso Moc College. And it's been a blast.

Cheryl Broom (09:31.258)
I when you let me know that you were going to take the interim job and I said, how long are you going to be, you know, in that position? And you're like, probably a couple of weeks. And I was like, no, you're not. I guarantee you that you will be there at least six months and if it's 18 months. You would know. I heard that there was a, you know, some kind of like, you know, like lottery amongst the PIOs that I was working for.

As to, know, no, it's gonna be a year. No, it's gonna be two years. You know, was quite the range there, but nobody said, I think the shortest anybody said was six months to the end of the year. But I have no regrets. This has been great. I've learned so much. And the great thing, there are a lot of awesome elements about this, Shami, you you've done it.

You know, it's during a trying time, you know, talk about, you know, throwing you into the fire or learning by fire, whatever that phrase is. I was during COVID. And as we were coming back from COVID, then, you know, one step forward, three steps back, two steps forward, five steps back. And sometimes you just jump off the cliff. But, you know, it was a challenge. you know, you when you're faced with a challenge, you know, it's like when like kids were young, I used to always tell them that, you know, when you're when you

when you're faced with a crisis, you have two choices. You could either succeed or you could fail. And failure is not an option. So you know you're gonna succeed, just do whatever it takes to succeed. But then once, like this semester really is when we saw the difference, because we came back last year, 2021 in the fall, not full time, but...

This year, it's like the first day of ball classes. There were so many people on campus. It was so amazing. And it was like all this work that you had, you know, everybody at the college, but that you had contributed to. And then you see the fruition of it and it was just awesome. I mean, the first week of school, the first day of school was just, it was really inspiring. Cause you know, after a while you get depressed, you know, declining enrollment. It's not working.

Cheryl Broom (11:57.058)
and you just kind of, I'm wasting my time for, and then you see that, a minute, you know, it did have an impact. It is having an impact. And enrollment in our district, in fact, is up a little bit. Yeah, as it is through most of San Diego County. Yeah, yeah, it's easy, I think, to look at the numbers, though, and forget that there's people behind all of those numbers. And when we're all isolated in our houses and not seeing the students and the energy on campus,

It does get depressing. You know, you just see these numbers go down, down, down. These are all people who are still trying to, you know, better their lives. I thought it would be really interesting to have you on the podcast because I get asked quite frequently by people who maybe are outside of community colleges or higher education or who are in community colleges and higher ed, but in different roles, what it would take to become the director of marketing. And so a lot of people actually, you know, they aspire

to the role that you've been filling for the last 18 months as interim. And I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone that had a career like yours, that's done so many interesting, great things to see how would you tell someone to prepare for this job? Like what was unexpected for you and what about your background have you found the most useful? Wow, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. I don't know.

there was an opening for this position. It hadn't been filled for a while. And Anne Krueger was the director of government and community relations for the district. And she kind of like scoped me out. She just wanted to know, took the temperature of the room, so to speak. And then I knew Dr. Gable, Marsha Gable, who was the interim president at the time. And I had worked with her at Queen Macca because I was an acting over there, acting PIO. It was part-time, but.

And so she, you your reputation follows you. And so, so for me, I don't know, was, it was, I guess, I don't know if I could answer that question with authority. could just talk from my, my experience. I had been, as we stated earlier, I had been working with community colleges from, you know, Texas to Sacramento for a decade. And that created the connections.

Cheryl Broom (14:23.966)
and those connections led to this opportunity. I will say now that I have the experience, I'm kind of like in a transition right now, but there's a greater interest now. Trying to find another job if I were to leave this one would be much easier than sort of like falling into this one. But how do you prepare for it? So if you are a reporter, and there's a lot of people in,

in the, for me, in the newspaper industry who were looking for, after they were laid off or didn't wanna put up with not knowing whether they would be laid off when they came to work on any given day, were looking for alternatives and to change their careers. And that's way it was like the last few years at the newspaper that I was working at. And...

PR was something that many of my former reporters that I supervised and coworkers went into. the biggest difference, and I can't speak for people who went to work for like the city of San Diego or various county offices, and a lot of them did go that way, but really the biggest difference to

to the community colleges is the marketing aspect of it. And I mean, as you know, there is so much involved with ad buys and marketing strategic plans and putting those together. I did a little bit of those, some of the strategic plans when I was freelancing, but to go straight from journalism to doing strategic plans and ad buys,

It's not an easy transition. I guess if you knew somebody and you got lucky and somebody was really desperate to hire somebody, but that's really where I think, and this is what I did. I went to UC San Diego and to their, what do call that? Extended studies. Extended studies, yeah, thank you.

Cheryl Broom (16:45.23)
their extended studies program. I would, you know, as halfway through that, when this job came along, you know, on content marketing and digital marketing, they was helped a lot. And so it helped prepare, you know, I mean, so get my, my advice would be, if somebody would be so foolish enough to follow it is to, is to, to go to school and go back to school and learn about the elements that you may not know about the marketing, the, advertising, the, you know, the digital.

the digital elements that come with this job because the communications part, already know everybody in this business, everybody in the newspaper business or as a journalist knows the communications part. It's the other elements that you, you know, that somebody may not know. And so that's where I would, that's where I would strongly suggest that they get some experience in doing that. And then also you can, you can always find freelance work, maybe not always, but if there is an opportunity to find some work, even if it's part-time,

with a college or a university, know, do it, you know, learn more about the system and how it works, learn more about the politics. So as you know, that's always, that's always interesting, but it's not, in a way it's easy, but in a way it's not, it's not, it's not what I expected. I expected it to be entirely writing communications, news releases.

on really a lot of social media and that was fine, easy peasy. But there was this whole other side to it that I was unaware of. Is this not crazy to you or did you have the same problem? and I think there's a couple really good takeaways. First, the important of networking. And I think that a lot of younger people maybe haven't latched on to how important it is to make good connections.

Even when I first started at Maricopa, I started off as, as they called it marketing coordinator, but it was really a writer. I I wrote, that's what I did. And I had met the director of communications at Chico State, cause that's where I got my master's degree. And I think he spoke to a class or something and I was the PIO for the sheriff's department. And so I asked him for lunch and I remember I told him, said, you've got my dream job.

Cheryl Broom (19:05.452)
And he laughed. He thought it was so funny. He was like closing retirement. It was not his dream job anymore. And so I asked him, said, you know, how do I get, I'm already a PIO. What do I need to know to go into higher ed? What do you, what do you recommend? And he was fantastic. And he ended up writing me a letter of recommendation. And so I looked back and that lunch date and that letter was pivotal for me to get hired at Maricopa and now running my own company.

networking is key. I have to talk to people and get to know them and understand. And so I think, you know, that's how you got, you know, both of your interim jobs and continue to get work is by your reputation and your connections. So I think that's great advice. And then the other thing that I think is a big takeaway is that this job is like, like a corneacopia.

There, I mean, and the better you do the job, the more you have to do. That's true. Then you become the person that everybody goes, everyone on campus goes to for things that don't even have to do with your job. Right. So I think that's great advice. Like if you're weak in one area, go take some continuing ed courses and, you know, take them at your community college. You can learn digital marketing, graphic design, writing all at your local community college.

get a certificate. What a great way to, to improve yourself. Right. Or YouTube. Or YouTube or Coursera or LinkedIn. I learned how to your refrigerator from YouTube. And then not to do everything. You know, once you're in the job, what I learned, and I think you learned this too, is you just can't possibly do everything yourself, especially if you're a one person shop or a two person shop, you have to get help. Or else you're going to burn yourself out.

That is probably my biggest weakness is I can't say no. And I did this when I was doing contract work. I'm going to New York for two weeks. well, could you take this assignment and get us back into us in a few days? And yeah, sure. remember in Hawaii, I took my wife there for her birthday and I was working half the time. And so it's the same thing here.

Cheryl Broom (21:32.342)
And that, yeah, you're right. There's so many people coming in here. Could you do this? Could you do that? This person is just, it's got an amazing story. Or could you market this or market that? And you're right. You have to say, you have to say no, but you can't say no, especially when it's the president's. When the chancellor, you know, forget it. Of course I could do that. You know, remember I said, have two options. Either succeed or fail and failure is not an option.

So, you know, move forward and yeah, but you're right. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And a lot of it goes back to the, you know, just the cornucopia of what you're doing is, I think it was a Farsight cartoon. So it was our favorite cartoon when we were working it as every reporter knows of what I speak. And it was some guy, was a reporter and the editors put a blindfold on him.

And there's these like sticky notes on the bulletin board and he's got a dart. And it's like, okay, today you're going to be an expert in, it's like, know, world affairs or, you know, NFL or, you know, all these different subjects. And you, yeah, again, it's a similarity between the professions. That's so funny. I want to find that cartoon because that is so true. Yeah. You just never know. You never know what you're going to deal with. Yeah.

One of the things that I, for planning purposes, is we have these things called beat notes. And when you're a reporter, you have your beat, and your editor is asking, what are you working on this week or what are you working on tomorrow? And you would write up at eight o'clock this, nine o'clock that, 10 o'clock this. This is the stories I'm working on for daily. And this is the long-term program or the stories that I'm working on. These are the projects I have, et cetera.

And so I do that same thing as a, for, you know, to manage, be able to see what I'm supposed to do. And I have like 17 things on my beat note today, not counting my appointments. And this podcast podcast is on it. want to call it podcast with Cheryl. And, I've gotten to three of them.

Cheryl Broom (23:52.942)
And I, but I have been busy all day. I mean, it's been nonstop busy, busy, busy, but I haven't been able to do any of stuff I planned because there's always something coming up. Always. One of the, one of the things I feel is really important about the public information officer marketing director job is writing. I feel like you really have to be an exceptional writer. Do you find that? you been doing a lot of writing for the president or the board or other people? Yeah.

Yeah. Not as much as I would have liked to, as I said, when I first got here, I thought it was all writing. Like, you you mentioned that your first PIO job that you thought that you, was all writing what you was already. And that's where I thought it was going to be. I knew, you know, when Dr. Gable hired me here, when she was the interim president, one of her priorities was to, and I think was a priority when I was working for you over at Mira Costa.

was to boost our followers on Twitter and social media. And that was one thing that she was not happy about was our social media presence. And so that was a focus. And we've succeeded at it. We have something like 30,000 followers or subscribers, followers on LinkedIn. So we've taken these really pitiful numbers and made them not so pitiful.

on some other platforms, but I've not been able to, I haven't had the time to write as much as I like to, because that's really what I like to do. I mean, I'm a Everything else is just kind of like, you know, writing takes so much time too. If you, you you want to write a great student profile, you've got to give yourself hours to do that. mean, and when you've got a million

fire is burning, it's hard to get to those longer projects. And I think though, from my perspective, if I was a college president and looking to hire a marketing director, writing's gotta be skill that they excel at, especially at a community college, because you end up helping the president a lot with his or her writing. And I think it's

Cheryl Broom (26:12.908)
You know, as we have less reporters and less media outlets, it's a skill that's harder and harder to find somebody who could tell a good story and can communicate with a word. I found that some of the worst writers, work at colleges and universities, but they could really use our help. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it was really cool because, you know, with, you know, you meet with the president, you're talking with the president.

all day, every day. And so much of my work is not writing. it was just out of the blue. It was just this really cool compliment. She said, you're a great writer. And it's like, wow, you know, it's, so yeah, it's, you know, it's recognized and, and it's appreciated. But yeah, it is, it is very important skill. Yeah.

And my writing skill is probably TMI, but the best writer I ever read was my brother who was an attorney, defense attorney, very well known, he just retired. He was just this incredible, he is an incredible writer, very detailed, I don't know, just the amount of detail in what he's doing. It almost seems effortless when he's describing something. And it served him well as an attorney.

My writing style has always been Steinbeckian, just real simple. I just don't want to get, I don't want to get any lost and have these $10 words that nobody could understand, like Time Magazine used to be. Those were actually hundred dollar words. And I found that that served me well, just simple sentences and having fun, being somewhat irreverent when you can.

But yeah, so yeah, I love writing. it really, I've all, you you mentioned something about how long it takes. I've always found that, you know, when you get writer's block, it's not really a writer's block. It's you haven't done your job reporting. You don't have enough material. So it's not that you can't write and it takes a long time to write. It really takes a longer time to report and to do the research. So once you have what you need, the writing is so easy.

Cheryl Broom (28:34.19)
And a lot of times like I'm writing while I'm talking to somebody, I'll be like, this is what the story is. And I don't wanna give away too many trade secrets, but for me anyway, but writing's never really been a challenge. I've always, what I, it just flows naturally. of course, what I have the most fun with is just talking to people. It's just talking. If I remember talking to,

Pam Lester, Dr. Lester, she's over at Mesa College, San Diego Mesa College, absolutely wonderful person. even, well, probably not possible to even be a better president, but she was just an absolutely wonderful person. And I was doing some work for the San Diego Community College District, and it was a magazine piece on her, in-house magazine piece. And we sat down with her, was first time I had met her formally.

She, you know, where are you from? You know, and I wasn't taking notes. It's like, man, so where are you from? You know, she's from San Jose. She was born and raised in San Jose. And I go, so San Jose, you know, are you a, do you follow the Giants or do you follow the A's? And we ended up spending the first half hour talking about baseball and how her family always went up to Oakland Coliseum and watched the A's. And I'm like, okay, so what was probably like in the seventies. so she,

We're talking about the Oakland A's, Joe Rudy, Sal Bando, Bert Campanero. She can name everybody on the 72, 73, What does this have to do with what we were talking about? Nothing. But I learned so much about her and we got to know each other so well so that an hour later when we got to the questions about how she became, how she started off as an audiologist, that she went to school for that.

started teaching some courses as an agent, got hired as a dean, this led to the other thing. But when you get to know a person and you're just listening to their stories, man, it's so much easier to write. whenever I ran into her at Costco, she's retired now and not too long ago. And we're talking about the A's and the Dodgers in the 1974 World Series. It's like, we're not talking about Skiff.

Cheryl Broom (30:59.31)
That's a great point. That's the beauty of being a reporter and a writer is that you have the time to get to know people. You have to as part of your stories. And I think that's actually a beautiful takeaway from your time as a PIO because you're so busy. Sometimes you're running in between so many different things. And if you lose that time to talk to people,

you're going to burn yourself out. So yeah, I mean, that's the beauty of being on a college campus are all these amazing stories and cool people and, you know, take the time to get to know that. Yeah. Yeah. That is what makes it really rewarding. Yeah, definitely. It's not a 60 hour or 70 hour weeks. Not the emails. They will be there. I try to keep my emails down to single digits, but

It's just to keep popping up. You know, they don't stop. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up our conversation, any other tips, somebody who's looking to move into a position like yours, anything else you can think of to, absolutely. You know, I just think about that when we're, when we're talking about, Dr. Lesser, who really is a fabulous person. and I hope she listens to this cause I really mean it sincerely and we need to go to a baseball. You hear that Pam, we need to go to a baseball game. They're not working anymore. which is

I say that facetiously, she's working harder than she ever has, which was pretty damn hard before. she is that you can't, you have to be genuine. know, cops, I used to be a cops reporter in Riverside a long time ago, back in the day of black and white TV. And we used to always say, or the cops used to always say that they had bullshit meters. You know, they knew when you were just full of it. And that's the same thing.

You you should, you should take that should be a takeaway no matter where you go, even if people are aren't as, you know, wise in that, in that sense. I mean, you need to be genuine. need to be yourself. And the other thing is, and again, I don't know if this is G-rated or not, but you'd be the, as you see is you can't be an asshole. You just have to be a good person. And if you're not a good person, if you don't like dealing with, with people, just, you know, go do something else.

Cheryl Broom (33:25.39)
you know, work from home and stay away and let the rest of us who enjoy life and enjoy around, enjoy being around people, you know, do the work that needs to be done because this is, it is a calling. It's a great job. It is public service. You know, you know, this is reason why you do it. Community colleges are the portal for so many people.

who have or have come from families with so little to transform their lives and have so much more. And if you're gonna get in the way of that, do something else. Great, great words of wisdom. Couldn't have said it better myself. Don't be an asshole. That's true though. I mean, you have to care. I love it. If you don't care, you're in the wrong line of work. You have to care.

You have to care. Well, it's always so much fun to talk to you, David. And I know you're wrapping up your time as interim director at Grossmont College. And what's next for you? don't know. My plans are to go back to the contract work. But there are some things that are popping up. So we'll see. I don't know. I just don't know.

Well, I'm excited to see what's next for you and have always loved seeing your work and working alongside you. So it's exciting to see what the next chapter will bring. Yeah. And thank you for the encouragement on This Is Gross Month. I love it. For those of you listening, David came up with a really cool hashtag and tagline. And I think it's got legs. It looks like it's working well. Yeah.

Yeah. And the cool thing is we have the sign, you know, it's a hashtag, this is Grossmont with the the Griffin, the Grossmont Griffin. And and we put one of the banners over by the sign off the freeway when you come off the freeway and then it's Grossmont College and then the thing says this is Grossmont. So in case you were lost and you didn't know where you were inside. I love things that have multi uses. It's directional, it's aspirational, it's informative, it's perfect. Yeah.

Cheryl Broom (35:47.736)
So yeah, it's a pleasure, man. It's always, it's always fun getting together with you and, and my friends at graduate. Awesome. Thanks, David. All right. Cool. Be well. Thank you for listening to higher education coffee and conversation. If you liked the podcast, please leave me a five star rating and to discover more great higher education related content, make sure to visit us at graduate communications.com. And with that.

I'm going to say thank you for listening. Thank you for the hard work you do for students each and every day. you