Writing better email

Inside Higher Ed: A Primer on Electronic Communication — A bit wordy, but several good suggestions including:

1. Write a clear and descriptive subject line.
2. Address the person politely.
3. State your reason for contact.
4. Read your letter (before sending).
5. Get in touch again in a week if you receive no response.

Also, NY Times: ‘Yours Truly,’ the E-Variations — There’s lots more to ending an email than Sincerely,.

Wall Street’s multimillion-dollar lure

NY Times: Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices looks at how Wall Street is so lucrative that doctors, lawyers and others are leaving their primary professions to receive the huge rewards there.

A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded physician-scientist,” Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.

And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical investments, he is a multimillionaire.

Value investing primer

USA Today: ‘Little Book’ delves into value investingThere is something heartening about a serious investing book that is sharply written, gets you fired up about buying stocks …. Book is The Little Book of Value Investing by Christopher Browne, managing director of Tweedy Browne Co. Browne begins by sharing the history of Tweedy Browne, founded by his father, Howard Browne, in 1945. Two of the brokerage’s early clients: Benjamin Graham, who essentially created the discipline of value investing, and his young associate named Warren Buffett.

Gannett test journalists without desks

Washington Post: A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It’s Online and Hyper-Local — Gannett is testing mobile journalists — reporters with laptops, digital audio recorders and cameras — who spend their days traveling around their cities filing stories for the web, and sometimes the print editions, too. The journalist’s goal is to generate fresh content throughout the day for the web and push the publication’s focus to more local coverage. In Fort Myers, Fla., Gannett expects to have 30 mobile journalists on staff by the end of 2007 — all working without offices. The Fort Myers
News-Press has also turned to citizen experts, such as retired city officials, to help with investigations. While the paper’s print circulation has fallen, traffic to its web site has more than doubled in the past year.

This is a follow-up to Gannett’s news experiement.