I’m a little stunned by the coverage in the New York Times this morning (3.15) over the very public resignation by a Goldman Sach’s employee in the Times’ Op-Ed section on Wednesday.
On Wednesday morning I read Greg Smith’s eloquent public condemnation of the investment bank from beginning to end, raised my eyebrows at the severity of his anguished indictment of the culture of greed and burned clients that we all knew and suspected was the true agenda of the “too big to fail” world of Wall Steet, and marveled that a 33-year old over-achiever within one of the top white-shoe institutions would take to the public soapbox to share his resignation. I suppose the new tradition of Wikileaked internal memos and insta-meme driven news (see the Olive Garden Restaurant Review lady from the same day) means we’ll see more and more of these flash-in-the-pan news events, but it’s the day-after ouruboros reaction of the Times to its own Op-Ed that stuns me and which needs to be seen in print to understand the importance the Times’ editors thinks this Dear John letter deserves.
The main story leads the front page. Bigger than anything else. Top priority. That’s pretty indicative right there of the impact that Greg Smith’s screed had on the news cycle yesterday. Is it really that big of a deal? I guess if you’re a New Yorker riding the PATH or MetroNorth train into the city this morning to your job at some financial institution in the financial capital of the world, then yes, this is a big deal. If you’re in Omaha it is a scathing confirmation that the weasels of Wall Street indeed got away with murder, and have yet to be brought to account, and continue to slash and burn in the interest of their annual eight figure bonuses.
The Times pulled out the stops yesterday to own this real-life Jerry Maguire.
Along with the front page mainbar the jump inside also has a sidebar on pejorative nicknames that various industries have for their customers. Smith revealed Goldman calls its clients “muppets”. The Times teaches us that flight attendants call passengers “Clampets” or “Platinum Trash”, etc.. And there is a sidebar on the parodies that popped up yesterday, my favorite being Darth Vader’s resignation letter and great proof that meme-driven news is no longer working on a “nine-day wonder” cycle as it did forty years ago, but is now on a nine-hour wonder cycle. All in all I’d guess the Times devoted a couple thousand words to their own news event.
Yes, I’m second guessing the placement decision of the Times’ editorial board to elevate this mid-level investment banker’s “I Quit” letter above all other news. It’s great drama, it keeps the financial crisis in the spotlight, and it shows the Times isn’t about to relinquish ownership of what is arguably the most interesting and discussed news event of this week. Heck, I’m writing about it along with countless other blog bloviators, right?
What is particularly interesting by contrast is how the Wall Street Journal treated the Smith resignation. Yes, it is on the front page of today’s paper, but buried in the “What’s New” digest, jumping inside to lead the C section.
There’s a scene in Fight Club when Edward Norton mocks his meaningless materialistic existence defined by his addiction to Ikea. His apartment transforms into a movie version of a catalogue — with every napkin, bookcase and rug identified, tagged, and described as he moves amongst it all. The scene expresses a lot of the stupidity expressed in the early 1990s when the “Interactive Television” geeks bubbled on about how you’d be able to click on Jennifer Aniston’s sweater during an episode of Friends and receive a package from the Gap a couple days later with that exact same color sweater inside(in your size of course) . Didn’t happen. None of it happened: pick your own alternative ending, find a different camera angle … couch potatoes are inert by nature and only move their hands to pop another Cheesy-poof into their mouths. If they want to shop through the TV they switch the channel to QVC and pick up the cordless phone to order some zirconium.
Shopping interactively against a television show, movie, even video game is far-fetched and a long walk off of the proverbial short pier.
Shopping off of a story is a different subject altogether. Let’s start with an early example of “story commerce” most are familiar with, the J. Peterman catalogue, perfectly mocked by Seinfeld. J. Peterman was a brilliant mail order operation that delivered a tall non-glossy catalogue entitled “Owner’s Manual” with breezy sketches of Peterman’s travels around the world sourcing classic pieces of clothing and accessories from Australian dusters to a long-billed swordfishing cap just like “Papa” Hemingway wore. There are no photos, no customer reviews, just artsy sketches and short little “English-Patient-Meets-Mark-Helprin” purple paragraphs written by a copywriting genius. To wit:
“He probably bought his in a gas station on the road to Ketchum, next to the cash register, among the beef jerky wrapped in cellophane. Or maybe in a tackle shop in Key West.
I had to go to some trouble to have this one made for you and me but it had to be done. The long bill, longer than I, at least, ever saw before, makes sense. The visor: leather; soft and glareless and unaffected by repeated rain squalls. The color: same as strong scalding espresso, lemon peel on the side, somewhere in the mountains in the north of Italy. Cotton blend canvas. 6 brass grommets for ventilation. Elastic at back to keep this treasure from blowing off your head and into the trees.
(He probably got change from a five when he bought the original.)”
I bought one. I admit it. I looked like a total assclown with a foot-long leather duck bill sticking out my forehead. I immediately went back to Red Sox caps to provide me with glare protection while fishing in the sun and that was that. But I bought it, because I was buying the story. Not the hat.
The late publishing genius Bill Ziff told me during a Forbes interview in the early 1990s, that Ziff-Davis move into specialty magazines was driven by the insight that everyone has their own personal “porn.” In his case it was sports “porn” (the man read baseball statistics), Civil War “porn” (he knew his Civil War history like Shelby Foote knew Civil War history) and gardening “porn” (he had amazing taste in gardens). As he put it, pornography is derived from the Greek words porni: prostitute and graphein: to write, hence the original porn was writing about the oldest profession in the world. Ziff applied that insight to specialty magazines like Skiing, Stereo Review, Modern Bride, with the realization that a magazine focused on a hyper-passion — a reader’s personal taste in “porn” — made the relationship between the advertising and the editorial very different than the interruption-based relationship found in a TV ad or a general interest magazine. If you were really into expensive high fidelity stereo equipment in the 1960s, you would probably be very interested in the content of the ads by the equipment manufacturers as you were in the objective reviews by the editorial staff. You trusted the reviews to be objective and untainted, but the ads, with their specifications and gorgeous beauty shots of glowing dials and vacuum tubes, well; that was stereo porn and there was a reader service “bingo” card at the back of the magazine where you could check off a page number and receive even more stereo porn directly from the advertiser.
Ziff extended the insight to computer magazines and found amazing success with the formula of combining advertising and editorial together in a “porn model” where he was broker between the advertiser/prostitutes, the writers, and the readers.
Now all his magazines are pretty much gone as he called the top of the market in the early 90s and unloaded his print assets with the foresight that the Internets were going to thoroughly change the broker relationship of publishers controlling audience access to advertisers.
There have been some magazine launches — in the 1990s — of print publications about …. shopping. Lucky comes to mind, a Conde Nast launch that touts itself as “The Magazine of Shopping and Style.” But put the magazines down and look at what’s happened to eCommerce, the money side of the digital revolution.
eCommerce was available right out of the gate following the commercialization of the Internet by the National Science Foundation back in 1994. Both Amazon and eBay are, in Internet-terms, ancient brands. Once security issues (SSL, HTTPS) and online credit card processing got worked through, it was off to the races for the first round of online stores. eCommerce was difficult to implement in the early years, certainly a much bigger challenge than launching an online publication, but platforms started to be standardized, operational processes defined, and the entire order management/supply chain thing came together in fits and starts.
Skip a lot of well-known milestones like PayPal, and it is 2012. eCommerce is no longer a big boy game focused on behemoths like Target, JC Penny, Dell, and Amazon. From Etsy to Shopify to the WordPress of commerce — Magento — there is essentially nothing standing between a very small business and an online storefront. The days of needing a $100 million in revenue to justify a big Sapient ATG or IBM Websphere deployment are long gone. Anyone with the gumption can build their own online store without sacrificing their brand to Amazon, eBay or Yahoo.
I believe the leading edge in online commerce is not the technology — but the content and strategic approach. J. Peterman meets Lucky meets Magento meets Blogs and the result is pretty compelling.
The first place I really discovered story-based ecommerce was in the fashion sector. My favorite example, hands down, is Mr. Porter, part of the NYC fashion etailer, Net-a-Porter.
The design gestalt is a hybrid between a catalogue and an online magazine. The navigation header even points to an editorial area, “The Journal.” Even the home page hero about belts, is identified as coming from a standard editorial element, “The Edit.” Every call to action — the copy on the purchase buttons — doesn’t say “Buy Now!” — but “Read & Shop Now”
I suggest if you want to experience the bullseye point of this blog post, then go to Mr. Porter, hit The Journal “This Week’s Issue” and click through the eight-slide history of khaki. The formula is brilliant. Illustrate the piece with vintage black and white photos of legendary style icons. Steve McQueen is the cliche in this model, but the khaki piece has photos of Alain Delon, James Mason, James Dean, etc.. Under the slideshow, a bylined “story” that leads off like any fashion magazine with the usual fashionesque prose:
“Endlessly versatile, casual yet elegant, hardwearing and laid-back – it’s easy to make the case for chinos. That’s why, this spring, we’re looking forward to reaching for them again. Their great appeal has always been that they can be, and are, worn with everything from T-shirts to tweed jackets, which is how we justify updating them on an annual basis. Click through the gallery above to see how to wear them this season – easy and relaxed are the watchwords here – and to read about the history that’s taken them from colonial military uniform to preppy classic via Hollywood and 1950s-era hipsters.”
It all comes down to “Shop the Story”
Throw in some historical nuggets (khaki is the Pakistani word for “dust”; British Red Coats were easy targets so they switched to khaki to better blend in with the dusty walls of the Khyber Pass, etc.), and make sure every page has a product that the reader can buy.
The call to action (what graphics people used to call “CHA” or “Click Here Asshole”) is brilliant: Shop the Story.
Shop the story and live the dream. Buy those $495 Loro Piano khakis and you are one step closer to becoming James Dean. It’s the next evolution in a long tradition of catalogue copywriting that began at Sears, was taken over the top by J. Peterman, and is now infesting the flash sale fashion sites with the new Catazine movement.
The transformation from the ugly catalogue pages of most online stores to a fully integrated editorial/catalogue model is, I think, going to revolutionize commerce operations in the near future. The challenge of the old eCommerce 1.0 model was order management and integrating one’s act with the Borg’s ERP and MWS and CRM and ….. No more care went into the presentation of the product than the upload of an err0r-prone spreadsheet containing SKU numbers, price, and specs.
This drove me crazy at Lenovo, where the complex configure-to-order world of selling laptops yielded product pages as interesting as the ingredients list on a bottle of shampoo. “We sell black rectangles,” I would bitch as I pointed to web pages filled with the same half-opened clamshell forms of black ThinkPads. Other than price, prominent messaging around free shipping, the meat of the experience is either in the specifications — “speeds and feeds” — or catalogue-copy: “This slim, lightweight stunner, delivers the graphics impact you need to supercharge your gaming experience …” etc. No aspersions meant to my former colleagues — but the catalogue experience at 95% of most online stores is driven by a spreadsheet and a template with little to any editorial either trying to build some drool factor for the shopper, or a valuable experience worth revisiting. Commerce needs to move from demand generation, sloppy affiliate commission programs, attribution and optimization, and closer to an experience worth experiencing. Don’t do it and you might as well just publish the spreadsheet and hope your SEO efforts and the price comparison engines treat you well.
Shop the Story or Shop the Grid
The latest revolution for the old guard in ecommerce is toappend user generated content — reviews — to their product pages. Hanging a five star rating system with a paragraph of semi-literate user rave or rant (that I always suspect has been astroturfed and sock puppeted by the vendor) to every SKU using a service such as the recently IPOd Bazaarvoice is by and large a semi-smart move doubtlessly justified by some analyst on the basis of cart conversions and attachment rates and other ecommerce drivers. I like customers reviews as much as the next guy. Amazon has transformed them into a literary genre of their own, the most famous being the first satirical review of the legendary “Three Wolves T-Shirt” :
“This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.”
Can a publisher jump on the bandwagon and start to offer an integrated shopping function versus the current model of divorcing the sale from their carefully crafted “objective” words by segregating the “prostitution” into an adjacent banner ad or paid search link? Hey, they tried to muck up their content by using the particularly horrible Vibrant in-text ad gimmick. You’ve been annoyed by it — the double-underlined word links that pops-up an unrelated come-on for some advertiser. Can I imagine Forbes selling mutual funds in its annual dreary Mutual Fund review? “Click here to invest in your future with Fidelity’s Magellan Fund” ….and then receive a bounty on the sale? No. The incumbent press seems boxed out of selling-the-story. No way the New York Times is going to stick buy-it-now links in David Pogue’s latest review of a portable receipt scanner.
I sense the reason the editorial world isn’t getting into commerce comes down to confusion and ethics. The underlying transaction processing engine isn’t an issue. Getting a merchant payment account is pretty easy. Hiring some catalogue managers and fulfillment people to tend to the SKUs and answer the customer service calls is very doable. Where all ecommerce gets hard is integrating the fulfillment piece of actually holding inventory, pulling it off a shelf or out of a bin, boxing it and handing it off to DHL or UPS. Very few people do that well and there’s a reason Amazon is building depots that are so immense they can be seen from space.
I don’t see why a magazine couldn’t morph into a direct commerce operation. They better because the stores are turning into magazines and they aren’t using Facebook or Twitter to find their way forward. Get off the social commerce bandwagon (Fan pages for macaroni just confuse me) and hire an editor with an attitude if you want to increase your conversions.
The tale of Clive Nutting’s POW Stalag III Rolex: Antiquorum (fascinating slice of history about Rolex selling watches to Allied POWs in German prison camps with a pay-after-the-war offer)
Lotuff Leather’s American Craftsman blog: I lust for one of these briefcases.
If you have any favorite examples, please send them along.
Dorade: Max Kaleoff is a fellow blogger and New York digital marketing guy (Clickable) I’ve known for over six years. We’ve struck up a friendship over our shared love of wooden sailboats. He even grew up on one, a Sparkman & Stephens yawl. I’ll let him tell the tale:
“I lived on a 52-foot sparkman-stephens yawl named Magic Venture until I was eight years old. Didn’t have running water or electricity or non-coal heat — ever. Had the boat until I was 22. Rebuilt it along the way at Gannon & Benjamin shipyard in Martha’s Vineyard along the way.”
Max recommended a book review from the Wall Street Journal about one of S&S’s most famous boats, the Dorade. Published by the Boston publisher, David R. Godine (I interned there in 1980), Doradeis going into my bookshelf very soon. This boat is as much an icon of American yachting as Finisterre or any Herreshoff design.
From the review:
“Boats, like people, have yarns to spin, some better than others. Dorade, the low-slung wooden yawl that revolutionized ocean racing nearly a century ago and launched the career of America’s greatest modern yacht designer, has a rich tale to tell. Indeed, it’s still unfolding.
At 82, the graceful dowager still slices through whitecaps on the West Coast, where she is in the hands of her 15th owner—or caretaker, as he might more aptly be described. “She was, and is, unique,” writes Douglas D. Adkins in “Dorade: The History of an Ocean Racing Yacht. “On one hand, lovely and dainty, and on the other purposeful and determined. She is still an icon of a certain beauty in yacht design.”
Lewis Dvorkin on the Long Form movement
Lew Dvorkin runs Forbes.com these days. We were colleagues in the 90s when I ran the place and he was on the magazine side editing cover stories under Jim Michaels. Lew went on to run AOL’s homepage — making him arguably one of the most powerful traffic generators on the planet at the time (a link from AOL to Forbes.com in September 1999 on the occasion of the annual list of the richest 400 Americans, generated so much traffic that Forbes.com crashed went dark for three days under the traffic load, my first and lasting lesson on flash traffic capacity planning) — he’s recrafted Forbes.com into an interesting exercise in “open journalism”, opening the platform and tools to not only the paid staff of Forbes, but select outside contributors. The net result is a little like Huffington Post, but to draw too close a parallel would be a disservice.
Lew has written two excellent columns about the new strategy and how it fits into his view that online journalism can foster and support long-form reporting/writing over multiple screens as opposed to his earlier view that USA Today-style “news nuggets” and bullet-form journalism was best suited to the attention-deficit medium known as the web. I agree with his observation that “Store-and-read-later” apps such as Instapaper, digests such as Longform.org, and the ability to push long form content onto e-readers is helping to drive the renaissance.
Anyway, two good reads for anyone interested in the future of journalism, online writing, and the state of Forbes.com
Bloomberg Pursuits has a piece by Aaron Kuriloff on the state of the art in ocean racing, and the tale of one ill-fated hedge funded super yacht, the Rambler 100 that capsized during last summer Fastnet. A very fast boat this boat was, especially for a monohull:
“In one 24-hour period during that passage, she logged 582 nautical miles, just 14 shy of the record for a monohull (catamarans and trimarans go faster). That’s an average speed of 24.25 nautical miles per hour, or knots, equal to about 28 miles per hour. ”
George V. Higgins was one of the best contemporary authors in the state of Massachusetts and elsewhere as far as the crime genre goes. His masterpiece (and first novel) is considered to be The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which opens with one of my favorite first sentences:
“Jackie Brown at 26, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”
Image links to a Boston College Law Review appreciation of Higgins and his work.
Higgins died in 1999, before reaching the age of 60, but his impact will be felt far longer. I write of him not in appreciation, although I do appreciate him, but because the other day I found myself wading through a stack of magazines — those glossy sheets of paper stapled or glued together that had their Golden Age in the 1950s through 2000 — flipping with my finger through a iPad cluttered with apps from some other “magazines” and I suddenly remembered Higgins’ weekly column in the Boston Globe’s Op-Ed section: The Lit’ry Life in which he randomly related his reading through the books, magazines and papers from the week before. Higgins inherited that column from its original author, George Frazier, perhaps the most elegant columnist in the city of Boston.
I wish there was an example I could quote, but the column was immensely useful to me as a reference and recommendation source for great long-form essays and journalism. From the Atlantic to Harpers, Time to Foreign Affairs, Higgins somehow find the time in between his law practice and his novels to read and read some more and then summarize that in a succinct 200 words every week.
Not wanting to waste an opportunity, I figure it’s time to do the same, especially since an avalanche of reading material comes out of my post office box every week and it seems like a full time hobby just to skim it all. Add to that my vow not to become overloaded with junk information from the Internets and the Facebook, but to focus on quality, and well, heck, I might as well make a habit of noting what I’m reading and think you should too.
So, first off, the basis of my reading ramblings are:
The Atlantic Monthly: both in print and online. This was the crown jewel of Boston publishing until it decamped for Washington, DC, but the writing is superb and I am a devout fan of James Fallows.
The Economist: again, both online and in print. This is the magazine that, like cod liver oil, is taken dutifully as a chore but is good for you. While one might joke about reading a six-page exploration of the economy in the Maldive Islands, the business coverage is superb and the columns tart and succinct. All I know about the Euro Zone, I owe to the Economist.
The New Yorker: online only. A joy to read in the post-Tina Brown era. David Remnick continues to produce a masterpiece. Any publication that publishes John McPhee and Roger Angell is fine by me.
Monocle: print, haven’t checked out their website. This recent (and expensive) addition to my stack, is a uber-trendy global style monthly edited by Tyler Brule (there are all sorts of diacretical marks in Brule, but darned if I can find the keys to produce them) the founder of the late 90s style bible Wallpaper (which I never read). Monocle is part Economist, part GQ, part hipster e-zine.
WoodenBoat: print only. I believe the noblest manmade object is a wooden boat, and this monthly is a pleasure to read for any armchair maritime historian or sufferer of boat lust.
The New York Times: I still get it in print and read it both on paper and the iPad. The Sunday Magazine is a favorite, as is the Book Review. David Carr and Gretchen Morgenson and Nick Bilton and John Markoff and ….the talent goes on and on.
Wired: I only read it on the iPad. That is continues to march along is a bit of surprise. Anything as ahead of its time as Wired was from the beginning seems doomed to age and wither soonest, but not Wired.
Cape Cod Times and the Barnstable Patriot: local news I read online (and pay for). Disclaimer, I am a former Cape Cod Times “special” writer, having spent the summer of 1980 beginning my journalism career in the newsroom on Main Street in Hyannis.
All of these have one key thing in common: I pay for them and probably will continue to pay for them. Notable omissions: The Boston Globe which I probably should read for the Red Sox coverage. Forbes (I spent 13 years there, and grew so accustomed to receiving a box of first-run freebies every two weeks that when I left in 2000 I never got around to paying for a subscription).
So, going forward, I’ll try to find the time every week to write a synopsis of what I’ve read and recommend as well as what books are loaded in the Kindle. Right now I’m just beginning Gore Vidal’s first novel, Williwaw, and finished over the weekend Steven Pressfield’s account of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, Gates of Fire. More to come later.
Alan Mutter, one of the smarter voices on the transformation of the newspaper industry, decries the lack of good newspaper apps on the iPad. I read the New York Times on mine religiously and love it. Hate The Daily. Wish the Cape Cod Times would get on the bandwagon, but evidently News Corp’s love of the new doesn’t extend to its podunk newspapers.
The issue would appear to be no in-house experience or expertise in building an app, the expense of third-party development, and indecision over waiting for HTML 5 to transform the reading experience and give the newpaper’s designers full control.
“Publishers have to start doing better, because iPad owners, who represent the vast bulk of the tablet computing market, look an awful lot like newspaper readers.
In a study released last year, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 90 percent of tablet owners — who are concentrated among wealthy, highly educated adults between the ages of 30 and 49 — regularly use the gizmos to consume news. Significantly, 59 percent of respondents said the tablet has taken the place of “what they used to get” from a print newspaper.
In other words, tablet users represent not just a potentially valuable audience for publishers, but also one they can’t afford to lose. “
From an excellent article on serial “fabulist” Stephen Glass and his attempts to be admitted to the California Bar after sullying his name in the late 1990s by concocting a ton of stories in The New Republic, George, and many other fine publications:
“Such was their demand for their child’s success that they even hired a “tutor” to help Glass master rope-climbing. “Applicant noted that, at least in this case, their efforts were unsuccessful. He still could not climb the rope, even after tutoring,” Judge Honn continues.”
The poor guy, the victim of two over-weening helicopter parents who were hell-bent to see their son get a medical degree. So obsessed that they hired a rope climbing tutor to get him up the rope and build his self-esteem.
This is the guy that put Forbes.com on the map after our managing editor Kambiz Faroohar and computer crime reporter Adam Penenberg started checking into Glasses’ story Hack Heaven.They exposed the fraud, Vanity Fair wrote a feature, Hollywood made a film, and Glass went on to write a novel, The Fabulist, and graduate magna cum laude from Georgetown Law.
Last Friday I climbed a rope for the first time since I ascended one in the wrestling room in high school in 1976. I climbed it ten times in fact, inching my way up the 15′ long, 2″ wide hawser at the urging of my CrossFit trainer. I’ve got no skin on my inner thighs, have a lurid trench burned into my right shin, and no fingerprints on my right hand’s middle and pinkie fingers. But I climbed the frigging rope.
Oh but the feeling of accomplishment to have climbed that terrifying rope not once, not twice, but ten times in a row, slapping the girder on the ceiling every time before descending in a panicked slide of friction and controlled falling. I feel no urge to tell a lie as a result.
So, Mr. and Mrs. Glass, there is still hope for young Stephen. Sign him up for CrossFit and have him watch this how-to video. Then maybe the California Supreme Court will let him be a lawyer where his unique prevaricating skills will be right at home.
Om Malik delivered a thoughtful recollection of ten years at the front lines of the new, new media revolution yesterday when he recapped a decade of blogging that started in the earliest days of Dave Winer’s Userland, a humble beginning that has grown to one of the leading professional tech blog networks (GigaOm) and his rightfully deserved position as one of the world’s leading tech pundits.
We worked together in the mid-1990s at the launch of Forbes.com until he departed for San Francisco and I decamped for management consulting. What started as a professional relationship quickly turned into a personal friendship that has endured over the years, perhaps forged in the mutual crucible of 85 Fifth Avenue and the dingy second floor office that served as a launch pad for many interesting people and personalities.
Some highlights of his essay that stood out:
Cacoethes Scribendi: blogs scratch the itch to write for people accustomed to writing a lot. Moving from the intra-day publish-often always-on newscycle of Forbes.com to a monthly print schedule meant he needed a daily outlet. “When I was working for Forbes.com during the early days of the dot-com bubble, I learned a vital lesson – you had to write every day to be any good and to have a complete handle on the beat. There was no way around the plain-old beat the pavement reporting.”
Twitter Is Not a Blog Killer: maybe it is a communications vehicle for the barely literate, but 140 characters doesn’t stand a chance of competing with 250 words. “Twitter has only acted as an accelerator for my blogging role, allowing me the luxury of writing less but reaching far more people.”
On curation: “Mostly because curation and sharing of content has become as important as writing. By sharing videos, photos, links, or quotes we are all essentially editors and the sharing itself is an act of editorializing.”
And of course, what is a great blog post without a good list?
“Here are my 10 lessons learned:
Blogging is communal: In 2008, I wrote that “blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections.” That is the single biggest lesson learned of these past 10 years. Every connection has lead to a new idea, new thought and a new opportunity.
Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test of time.
Being wrong is as important as being right. What’s more important — when wrong, admit that you are wrong and listen to those who are/were right.
Be regular. And show up to blog every day. After all you are as fresh as your last blog post.
Treat others as you expect yourself to be treated.
(In 2006 I wrote this and it is worth repeating) Doc Searls once told me, and it has been one of the guiding principles for me: blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.
A long time ago, Slate’s Farhaad Manjoo asked mefor some tips on blogging and here is what I told him – Wait at least 15 minutes before publishing something you’ve written—this will give you enough distance to edit yourself dispassionately.
Write everything as if your mom is reading your work, a good way to maintain civility and keep your work comprehensible.
Blogging is not about opinion but it is about viewing the world in a certain way and sharing it with others how you look at things.
The tenth lesson comes from Kevin Kelleher when he was writing for us back in 2010. In his post, How the Internet changed writing he noted:
Many bloggers tailor headlines and posts so that they’ll surface at the top of search results, making them at once easier to find and less enjoyable to read. And this decade, a lot of other bloggers mistook a strong writing voice for caustic irreverence. But most eventually learned that writing with snark is like cooking with salt — a little goes a long way.”
Congratulations on ten years and here’s to ten more (at least) Om.
I never voted for Barney Frank — I couldn’t, he represented the next congressional district over from the Cape and Islands — and even if I could have I wouldn’t publicly expose my vote because, well, as an independent and former political reporter I’m conditioned not to tip my ballots in public.
I ran into him in July in Washington, in Reagan National Airport in the US Air terminal, both of us bound back to Boston; him for the beginning of some summer congressional break, me wrapping up a six month consulting engagement designing a social media metrics framework (if that isn’t a dreary bureaucratic cliche and hopeless mission, I don’t know what is) for a big public relations firm. He looked perturbed, a bit conscious of his face recognition among the people, hoping that no one would pick him out of the crowd and start chewing his ear about one contentious issue or another. He wasn’t alone, there was a New Hampshire congressman on the same flight, but there’s no mistaking Barney, one of the more visible and intelligent legislators of our time.
When I manned the statehouse bureau for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune — that is when the parochial editors back in North Andover deigned to let me out of their sight and flee the smoke-filled newsroom and their inane assignments to interview Megabucks winners (“I’m gonna buy a Winnebago and a microwave oven …”) and write thumb-suckers about the weather in the royal, USA Today inspired, “we” (“We Hate Snow”) — there was a now famous Barney Frank campaign poster tacked onto the wall of the press room by the tinny loudspeaker that piped in the ravings of the state representatives.
“Neatness isn’t everything”
By that point in time (1984), Barney had graduated from the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and gone onto represent suburban Boston and Southeastern Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress. We reporters loved him for his lack of preening polish and his sharp wit, his willingness to deliver the perfect mordant quote on any occasion. He was an unmade bed of a man, a schlub, a man living on an astral plane where clothes and body type didn’t matter. His statehouse office was a legendary mess.
He was one of the few elected types that would actually pop into the press room, a feral pen of hacks and wretches banging away on little pre-laptop Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100s, and yuck it up with the crew from the Lowell Sun, Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Salem Evening News. I was too green and intimidated to yuck it up with him or any of the big personalities in state politics, but I did love to lurk on the edge of the scrum, micro-cassette recorder held over the shoulder of some television or radio reporter, and listen to him dig into some opponent or issue with his slightly retarded lisp and swallowed “G’s”.
My favorite Barney Frank moment is this YouTube video, taken at a constituent town hall in New Bedford, when an unhinged Lyndon LaRouche candidate decided to mess with the wrong guy.
Politics and sexual proclivities aside, Congress has lost one of the smart ones. Henrik Hertzberg’s recollection in the New Yorker is worth the read. Today’s New York Times’ story about Frank’s retirement announcement at the age of 71 is somewhat depressing, only in that Frank blames the current partisan bitterness, lack of cross-aisle respect, and shallow-as-a-mud-puddle media coverage for his decision to leave the hustings and become a public intellectual.
“When he arrived in the House in 1981, he said, “you had Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan talking about how they were friends after 5 o’clock — although if you knew Reagan’s work habits it was really, like, after about 2:30.”
Now, Mr. Frank said, the notion that wrangling between Democrats and Republicans is “a competition between people of good will with different views on public policy” has vanished. For that, he blames Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and current Republican presidential candidate with whom he has a tense history.
“Newt’s the single biggest factor in bringing about this change,” Mr. Frank said. “He got to Congress in ’78 and said, ‘We the Republicans are not going to be able to take over unless we demonize the Democrats.’ ”
Mr. Frank also blamed the conservative news media for the bitter divide that had made him reluctant to continue in Washington, as well as moderate voters who he said do not make their voices heard enough.”
