Below the Fold

Innovation and the Meaning of Nowhere

It’s easy to let your mind to wander while driving along the Blue Highways of Mid-Missouri, especially in the Winter. To the naked eye there is little with which to occupy your thoughts -- just gray two-lane roads and thin, sleeping trees. All around it’s tombstone quiet, the rumbling of the tires competing only with the beating of your heart.

There are no skyscrapers, shopping malls or sushi joints. And good luck finding high-speed Internet service, wi-fi, 4G or 3G (yes, Virginia, thankfully there’s still GPRS.)

But there definitely is something here, something more important than post-modern technology yet just as critical to its success.

This place -- and countless other “nowheres” like it -- oozes with infinite possibility. The expanse is exhilarating, empowering. It makes you believe that you can do anything you want, armed with nothing more than a dream and the desire to realize it.

Where some see desolation others see a canvas. Where some see miles of nothing, others see paths to innovation. From the quiet can emerge a cacophony of new ideas and creative sparks.

My point is simply this: Sometimes there is more to learn from shutting down Twitter and not reading Mashable. Sometimes, what we think is real, what we think is a trend, what we think is epiphany, is nothing more than the reverberation of the voices outside our heads giving us a Groupthink version of reality.

Sometimes you need to forget everything you thought you knew and start over. This is how the Internet thrives, how new technologies are discovered and how culture is transformed. These are the pleasures that perspective brings.

The value of Nowhere should not be underestimated. Find yours, and you will find innovation not far behind.

Eleven Things That Won't Happen in 2011

Tis the season for predictions, prognostications, suppositions and, let’s be honest, some downright guessing about what’s in store for next year. Rather than join the fray, following are 11 things that I boldly predict will not happen in 2011:

-- Print won’t disappear

-- Rupert Murdoch won’t get less creepy

-- Social media won’t cure cancer, though it will be discussed as if it could

-- Coming up with new ways to say the same things won’t make those things new again

-- No one will “own” social media but everyone will try

-- Cable companies won’t go away (but damn a lot of us will try to make them)

-- Steve Jobs won’t wear a jacket, much to the chagrin Jewish mothers everywhere

-- The New York Mets won’t win. Anything. EVER.

-- No one will be “the next MySpace,” not even MySpace

-- Yahoo! won’t change it’s name from “Yahoo!” to “Big Deal, Yeah, Whatever...”

-- I won’t shamelessly plug my book (The Last Newspaper, http://amzn.to/ijf6eS). That would be, well, just plain silly.

Social Media Technology is History in Motion

I’m a technology evolutionist. Granted I just made that up, but it fits.

I don’t believe new technology is just created -- I believe it evolves, with each innovation building on the other. No printing press, no iPad. These technologies are from different centuries yet share the same DNA.

And like technology, content evolves too:

-- Radio started with low-quality programming — but better content (and a world war) drove mass adoption

-- Television started with little original programming, mostly re-purposing radio serials — but better content and Madison Avenue made TV must-see

-- Then came the Internet, which began with grainy postage-stamp sized video and the Star Wars Kid. Now we have Old Spice, “amateurs” making HD-quality videos and former presidents doing live Q&As on Facebook

Media is about sociology and not technology. As the stories we tell get better, the mediums we use will adapt and interfaces will morph to meet modern cultural demands. Better content will drive scale.

I know it’s cliche, but the technology “revolution” is just an evolution. What we are experiencing today is nothing less than history in motion.

The WikiLeaks Saga: Transparency without Judgment is Gossip, not Journalism

Everyone is talking about the WikiLeaks disclosure of confidential diplomatic cables revealing the oft prickly relationship nations have with each other. That this comes as a shock is almost as shocking as the messages themselves, which, stripped of the Bond/Bourne intrigue and hurt pride, amount to little more than high school gossip and in-fighting among popular cliques.

The fact that these cables exist and reveal, if not confirm, the ugliness of diplomacy, makes them news. What few have mentioned, however, is what the leaked documents are not:

They are not reporting

They are not journalism

They are not investigative

They are not analytical

They are not, by themselves, important

According to WikiLeaks, “publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.” Um, yes, but not always. Transparency also requires judgment and analysis. Transparency unchecked will get people killed.

WikiLeaks’ site goes on to say that “better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society's institutions, including government, corporations and other organisations. A healthy, vibrant and inquisitive journalistic media plays a vital role in achieving these goals. We are part of that media.”

Fine, I agree. But from where I’m sitting, WikiLeaks and those who support its brand of “journalism” are neither inquisitive nor vital to global discourse. WikiLeaks is not part of "that media" -- it is part of a rogue, opportunistic and reckless media that has little understanding of journalistic principles nor concern for the fallout created by its selfish actions.

You want to be “part of that media?” Great, then grow up and act responsibly. Find the story and tell it with context and conscience. Don’t just put stuff out there and rely on the New York Times to clean up your mess (and thank God they are trying.)

As I’ve said before, I don’t care that newspapers are dying, I care that real journalism is dying with them. WikiLeaks just fired another shot into an open wound.

A Social Media Sanity Check: Six Ways to Slow Down

I’ve had to take things a little slower lately, which for me means going from working about 70 hours a week to only 60 hours.

Nevertheless, there’s great value in slow. Going slower makes you think faster. Slowing down can make you more productive. Slow works but doesn’t get enough credit.

My colleague Steve Rubel reminded me about being slow when he wrote about favoring “old school technology like newsletters in an age of too much.” And this from a guy who consumes more information in a week than all of humanity produced from Year Zero to 1900.

If Steve Rubel can slow down, then so can I. Here are six ways to help you put on the mental brakes:

• Stop following people who update Twitter with banal observations about the music they’re listening to “right now,” or with where they checked in, or with “inside tweets” to fellow ego-driven douchebags of the socal mediasphere. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything...

• E-mail is not a medium designed for urgency, so stop checking your Blackberry every nanosecond. If something is truly urgent, go to your mobile device of choice and try out the “phone” App.

• Do as Steve suggests and subscribe to newsletter “digest” versions of your favorite blogs. An earthquake in Haiti is important and necessitates real-time coverage – Google Buzz or the latest eMarketer chart does not.

• Read a newspaper while you still can. In fact, take a day, turn off your feeds and consume news only from print and radio. Then see if you feel less informed or more aware of actual news that matters.

• Write something longer than 140 characters or even a few paragraphs. Give it a premise and a beginning, middle and end. And when you’re done put it aside and come back to it a day or so later, and then edit the hell out of it. Finally, don’t post it anywhere. Not everything needs to be shared.

• Most of all, don’t believe blindly in the future. Believe in the past and trust your experience to make the future manageable, tolerable and, hopefully, more worthwhile.

A Thanksgiving Story Worth Repeating

(The following post originally ran Nov. 21, 2007, and has become a holiday tradition of sorts. For those who have read it before, please pardon the repetition -- and for those who are reading it for the first time, I hope it serves as a reminder of what this holiday, and being human, is all about.) 

LOS ANGELES IS A CITY of fragments, pieces loosely joined yet bound as if against nature. Most people only see L.A. through a windshield – the observer protected behind glass, the observed seen in glimpses if at all. Los Angeles is a place apart and in parts, where everyone lives but no one is from.

It is into this concrete dichotomy I drive several days a week. I’ve done this for nearly a year with no regret, save for the occasional Sigalert that slows traffic even more than the usual crawl. Once this happened by the Staples Center, forcing me to watch the video ad for “American Idols on Tour” more times than should be considered humane.

Almost every day, before joining my fellow commuters on Interstate 10 and 5 for the long slog to  Orange County, I see a homeless man by the freeway entrance. Always smiling, always pleasant, and always with a hand out, as if he’s the operator of an imaginary toll booth. I give when I can, when the stoplight cooperates. This means lowering the window, a risky proposition in a place where people lock their car doors while they are still driving.

For months I saw this man – and then, a few weeks ago, he was gone. Maybe it was the weather, both turning slightly cooler and for a long while heavy with smoke and its unhealthy remnants.

He could be anywhere, doing just fine, but nevertheless I worry and wonder – whether he is safe, whether he found a better onramp, or whether he melted back into the jigsaw world of Greater L.A., another face in another windshield. This is the time of Thanksgiving after all, a time for holidays and families and desires for human connections. So I wonder, I worry, and wait.

The Day after Christmas
This man – and next time I see him, I promise to ask his name – reminds me of another man I met in Atlanta, exactly 17 years ago Friday. He, too, was (at least to me) homeless and nameless, a regular character at the CNN Center. I wrote about him in my book, and the following passage tells the story of our brief encounter:

“Where are you from?” The question came out of nowhere, as did the man. He looked 40ish, wearing a purple long-sleeved shirt, a green jacket-vest, a black hat, and a beard grown from neglect rather than purpose. As we talked, he would continuously sip from an empty Styrofoam cup. I wanted to tell him there was nothing in there, though I’m sure he knew. I just stared at the cup rising and falling from the man’s lips with mechanical precision.

I don’t know what was in the cup before, but based on our conversation, I got the feeling it was more likely vodka than coffee. We talked about life on the streets, and how being homeless is a lot like being in prison – except that in prison you get three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. But that wasn’t the worst part.

“It’s the loneliness,’ he said, taking another imaginary sip. “All the time, loneliness. All of my friends are either dead or gone.”

I was going to tell him how lonely I felt that Thanksgiving, but decided against it. Here was a guy who has endured the same ugly feeling for six years, and I was depressed about one day spent in a warm hotel room with the people I love a phone call away. His cup was empty; mine runneth over.

“The day after Christmas,” he said. “A business is made or broken by how well it is the day after Christmas. Everything is defined by where you are the day after Christmas.”

We had been talking about Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t going to argue. This was his conversation. I was just along for the ride.

I gave him some money as I got up to take my tour, which he accepted but don’t think expected. When I came back downstairs an hour later, I spotted my friend talking to a couple of other street people, and he waved to me as I passed.

He still had his cup and it was still empty. And I felt bad, really bad, because I knew that on the day after Christmas, he would still be there.

I never looked at people or a place the same after that. Everywhere is home for someone – every place has its own ecosystem that functions often despite itself. No matter where we live, we can connect.

Yes, Los Angeles is a city of fragments, the people fragmented. But while the pieces don’t always fit, they do, eventually, come together.

Let's Say Goodbye to Social Media “Gurus”

I’ve never liked the term Guru – it’s a throwaway word, much like Paradigm, Content, or Kanye. Plus, I wonder if calling a marketing person a “guru” is offensive to actual gurus, and whether by using the term I’ll get punished with some karmic payback, like being reincarnated as a Fox News anchor.

But I particularly dislike the word when precedent by two other overused words, “social” and “media.”

Any blowhard with a blog can self-designate as a social media guru, and because any blowhard can, many blowhards do. Same goes for Twitter, the only difference being that Twitter allows people to become assholes much faster and with more grammatical errors.

If you say you are a social media guru, then you are focusing on the wrong thing. It’s important to understand the tools and channels and all that, totally fine – twenty years ago it was important to understand fax machines too, but not a lot of people touted themselves as gurus in “faxable media.”

What really matters is understanding consumer behavior, how people communicate and why, what they are saying and why, and to whom, and where. We use the word “social” as often as a person with a cold reaches for a tissue, yet we forget that “social” is about sociology – you know, people, not platforms.

All media today is social, so in my opinion there is no “social media.” And there are no gurus either, only those who know a little more than some others – and trust me, the others aren’t too far behind.

The Web Won't Give You Cancer

Everyone has a story, a friend, a relative – everyone knows someone who has had or is fighting cancer.

Three friends from high school had it, one of whom works in the office next to mine. Another colleague just learned her mom has it. My dad died from it and I dodged it though I still feel the effects almost every day.

I don’t know why any of these people got cancer, why some can smoke and live to be 100 while others eat their vegetables and die young. But I’m pretty sure the Web won’t give you cancer.

The Web can do a lot of things, great things – it brings people together, makes work easier and global.  And, not to be overlooked, it can reconnect you with people from high school who once tried to stuff you in a locker but now want to be your friend and update you on every lame detail of their lives.

As most of us now know, the Web (in this case, the overwrought and misleading term “social media”) can sell t-shirts, thanks to P&G’s experiment where it asked some of the best online communicators to flood the zone with Tweets, videos, photos, smoke signals and whatever else they could muster to sell as many Tide shirts as possible in two hours (all proceeds went to charity.) Think of it as a Jerry Lewis Telethon that was on every channel, albeit without the human-interest stories and bad formal wear.

The Web made “Chocolate Rain” an instant classic, the "Star Wars Kid" everyone’s embarrassing little brother. The Web gave us Dr. Horrible and Obama Girl. Thankfully, the Web gave us Obama, too.

Sure, the Web also gave us online predators, cyber bullies and outlets for speech some of us wish wasn’t free. It has compromised our identities and lost us lots and lots of money.

But the Web won’t give you cancer. I’m pretty sure of that.

In fact, Rick Murray, my boss and all-around digital guy, is riding his bike to conquer cancer and using the Web to raise awareness as well as funds. People on Facebook donated their status to organizations like Susan G. Komen For the Cure. Several years ago, a newspaper reporter used the natural cadence of new media reporting to give hope to thousands of other cancer victims like her.
 
Love the Web, bash the Web. Embrace social media or dismiss it. Sing, sell t-shirts or run for President of the United States.
 
Do whatever you want – but whatever you do, understand one thing.
 
The Web won’t give you cancer.
 
But the Web can damn well stop it.

Everyone has a story, a friend, a relative – everyone knows someone who has had or is fighting cancer.

Three friends from high school had it, one of whom works in the office next to mine. Another colleague just learned her mom has it. My dad died from it and I dodged it though I still feel the effects almost every day.

I don’t know why any of these people got cancer, why some can smoke and live to be 100 while others eat their vegetables and die young. But I’m pretty sure the Web won’t give you cancer.

The Web can do a lot of things, great things – it brings people together, makes work easier and global.  And, not to be overlooked, it can reconnect you with people from high school who once tried to stuff you in a locker but now want to be your friend and update you on every lame detail of their lives.

As most of us now know, the Web (in this case, the overwrought and misleading term “social media”) can sell t-shirts, thanks to P&G’s experiment where it asked some of the best online communicators to flood the zone with Tweets, videos, photos, smoke signals and whatever else they could muster to sell as many Tide shirts as possible in two hours (all proceeds went to charity.) Think of it as a Jerry Lewis Telethon that was on every channel, albeit without the human-interest stories and bad formal wear.

The Web made “Chocolate Rain” an instant classic, the "Star Wars Kid" everyone’s embarrassing little brother. The Web gave us Dr. Horrible and Obama Girl. Thankfully, the Web gave us Obama, too.

Sure, the Web also gave us online predators, cyber bullies and outlets for speech some of us wish wasn’t free. It has compromised our identities and lost us lots and lots of money.

But the Web won’t give you cancer. I’m pretty sure of that.

In fact, Rick Murray, my boss and all-around digital guy, is riding his bike to conquer cancer and using the Web to raise awareness as well as funds. People on Facebook donated their status to organizations like Susan G. Komen For the Cure. Several years ago, a newspaper reporter used the natural cadence of new media reporting to give hope to thousands of other cancer victims like her.
 
Love the Web, bash the Web. Embrace social media or dismiss it. Sing, sell t-shirts or run for President of the United States.
 
Do whatever you want – but whatever you do, understand one thing.
 
The Web won’t give you cancer.
 
But the Web can damn well stop it.

The Last Newspaper

Daniel headed for the darkest corner of his local Starbucks, the Last Newspaper clutched snug against his chest.

He opened it slowly, carefully, as if he were cradling an ancient parchment. The crinkling sound it made drew a few stares, and then a few more as those around him realized that they were sitting just a few feet from history.

Daniel pretended not to notice. He wasn’t much for attention or conversation. But even he couldn’t deny the significance of this stubborn relic that had struggled against the future and lost.

So he didn’t cringe when several customers put down their Kindles and slid over to his table. After all, he had heard the questions over and over for months as he executed his daily routine of “offline” media consumption. He knew that this day would come, when the Last Newspaper rolled off the press and he alone would be left to feel the ink seep into the creases of his fingertips, turn the oversized pages and engage in a forgotten literary ritual.

The questions often took the form of puzzled amusement:

• "Isn't the news old by the time you read it?”
• "How do you search?"
• "What do you mean you had to pay for it?"
• "Why would you want a bunch of content you don’t care about?
• "I’ve got all the news that’s fit to click right here."
• "What is ‘ink’”?

Daniel took it all in stride. He nodded politely, laughed lightly, and answered what he could with all the patience and quiet pride of a museum curator.

He reminded his rapt audience that what they now refer to as “content” used to be called “stories,” delivered by trained individuals known as “storytellers” and “journalists.” These people didn’t work for companies like Google or Amazon as they do now, culling “content” from armies of information aggregators and feeding it into computers which analyze and pull out the relevant information by keyword. Before news was fully automated, Daniel said, individuals wrote entire stories themselves. They researched and crafted linear narratives – unheard of today, he admitted, but at the time people found value in following a certain flow.

Of course, people had more time back then, too. The move from stories to content was slow as well, and its tipping point went largely unnoticed. Before anyone knew what was happening, stories became shorter, sliced, repurposed and packaged as do-it-yourself news. Where once we read stories, we now consumed content.

Maybe this is why it happened, Daniel thought, as the crowd went back to the soft glow of their Kindles and mobile media devices. Maybe the descent from stories to content was the fait accompli of the printed page. 

Stories are personal and transformational. Stories have definition and character. Stories are history personified.

But content is cold, distant. Content is a commodity – a finite consumable of fleeting value. Content is artificial intelligence.

When storytelling is reduced to content, ideas die.

And with that, Daniel stood, folded the Last Newspaper back under his arm and walked away, leaving the future behind for the last time.

Into the Fire and Back Again

"Nothing breaks the spirit of a Californian like a fire – it starts quietly and then grows, moves and acts as if with conscience, teasing you with a schoolyard bully’s joy." – Gary Goldhammer, Below the Fold, 2007

 

As regular readers of this far too occasional blog know (my day job is also often a night and weekend job, not a good recipe for frequent posting), I like to wax on about Southern California culture and Los Angeles in particular. Whenever possible I try to link these posts with something about new media and journalism – this blog’s topic – but usually these parochial musings fall outside my self-constructed confines.

This is one of those times.

So if you are looking for my take on the Christian Science Monitor going entirely online, or Barack Obama posting the weekly Democratic “radio” address as a YouTube video, or why I’m increasingly pissed off that the term “social media” is so overwrought and misused that it has lost all meaning and is now, at least for some, becoming a substitute for authentic conversation and engagement (as asinine as that sounds) – well, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer.

Nothing breaks the spirit of a Californian like a fire. I wrote this a little more than a year ago, after fires in Malibu, in San Diego, and near my Orange County house destroyed thousand of homes and lives. I knew people who were affected, which made the fire real – more so than the smoke and ash in my backyard or the dryness at the back of my throat.

The past few days have seen more fire in the tinderbox we call Southern California, this time in Santa Barbara County and once more in Orange County. And again I know people affected, including a close friend who had to evacuate her Anaheim Hills neighborhood, not all that far from my Tustin area home.

Again the sky took on that ubiquitous red-orange glow. Smoke filled the lungs and fire consumed not just our property but our minds. We cursed the wind and prayed for the firefighters and our neighbors.

Fire holds a special place in my psyche. About 18 years ago when I was a reporter, I covered another Santa Barbara fire. I remember my car filling with smoke as I searched blazing hills for the fire command center, then taking cover under a desk as an AP stringer and I shared the only working phone so we could call in our stories (no Internet, e-mail or cell phones – yes, I’m that old.)

I remember a fellow reporter getting out of his car, forgoing his job and objectivity to climb onto a stranger’s roof to help him hose it down. I remember the homeowner who gave me a tour of the smoldering embers that used to be his living room. And I remember standing next to a group of firefighters working to knock down a flare up, wondering whether the heat would burn my notebook before it burned us.

If I didn’t have a job to do I’m sure I would have been scared to death, but fortunately there was no time. Fear comes later.

I feel that fear far more now than I ever did on the fire line. I felt it watching the 24-hour local news coverage of neighborhoods and towns I’ve known my whole life go up in flame. I feel it for my friends who, like me back in Santa Barbara, are too focused and busy to be afraid for themselves.

Maybe if I lived somewhere else I’d feel the same way about floods, hurricanes or tornadoes. I know many other places experience the same things during similar situations; the admirable response of man and machine is a human trait, not a California one.

Yet I can’t help but feel there is something about Southern California and Los Angeles that make them different. I find both to be complicated places, more so than anywhere else I’ve lived or visited in the United States or abroad.

This region, with its diversity and unconscious yearning for a collective soul, is capable of uncommon poetry and passion. It speaks to us in times of tragedy and triumph – and then quickly retreats into its freeways, Bluetooth headsets and industries of make believe.

Nothing breaks the spirit of a Californian like a fire. And nothing except a fire can make this disparate people whole.