Way back in early 1990, I spent several weeks preparing a long Sunday piece on the death penalty in California. It was my best work in my then still nascent print journalism career, a story that would make people think. This was ultimate power, at least to a writer.
But when a copy desk editor wrote a misleading headline (in my opinion) and moved around some of the key paragraphs, I blew. I called the editor names I didn’t even know I knew, and threatened to quit if the article ran with his changes. I didn’t mind editing, in fact I welcomed it – however this was editing that changed the meaning, and that was something I couldn’t tolerate.
The story ran as I had wanted (not entirely but close enough); I apologized to the editor and kept my job. I was ready to lose my job, however, over what I felt were my principles, albeit my youth and inexperience certainly led to my acting like a complete asshole.
But the incident taught me something else, something far more important, something I didn’t realize until much later.
Why did I care so much about that story? I never cared about a headline before or about copy changes. But this time the topic was capital punishment, which I had covered in Missouri and remained passionate about since moving back to California.
A few months later, I did leave my newspaper job. I gave up my apartment, packed my belongings into a couple suitcases, and threw them in the back of my car along with my Macintosh computer as I headed out for a three-month journey across the United States to talk to people about the death penalty and write a book.
I didn’t actually have a book deal, didn’t have a job to go back to when I was finished. I didn’t even have half of the interviews lined up that I needed, figuring I would fill in the spaces along the way either by intention or circumstance. But to this day I have never been happier.
Input vs. Output
This experience – and the book that followed, which was published in 1994, three years after my cross-country reporting from prisons, courthouses, family homes and roadside diners – was all due to that earlier story for which I was ready to quit. The story wasn’t my life’s goal at the time, and neither was writing a book.
What I needed was the journey. Not the final words on the printed page, but the experience of writing them and meeting the people who would help and inspire me along the way.
It didn’t make sense that I could leave my job and gain access to Death Row inmates and political leaders without a valid press credential, but I did. It didn’t figure that people would talk to a young reporter with no affiliation and little chance of their stories ever seeing daylight, but they did. In fact, looking back, it all seemed so easy, from the decision to quit my job, to getting my job back, to getting a publishing deal and being on a radio talk show tour.
But it wasn’t easy, not even close. It’s just that when you finally decide to do what you need to do, what you are supposed to do, things have a funny way of falling into place. It’s like turning the final number on a combination lock – everything just clicks.
All of this, believe it or not, brings me back to social media.
Linda Zimmer, a close friend and former colleague, put it best when she told me that social media breaks down into a series of inputs and outputs. The problem for many is that they tend to focus primarily on the outputs – the blog post, the Wikipedia entry, the Facebook widget.
But input is the key. Social media’s power – and the power of all “socialized” media – is in the connections we make and knowledge we gain. It’s in how the outputs are created and the meanings behind the metrics.
Social media thrives on input, not on whether the resulting content and conversation is part of a blog or a Twitter channel. As Linda said, you learn far less from a Wikipedia entry than from the Talk pages and comments about that entry. Input equals insight.
No one knows where they will end up when they start their social media journey, but those who focus on the journey will never be disappointed with where they end up.
Focus on the journey, and the destination will take care of itself.
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