Warning, soul search underway

May 12th, 2012

The GOP must do an immediate about-face on its position on gay marriage. That’s not some liberal shouting at some conservative; it’s an official position from a top-ranking GOP pollster. Go read Andrew Sullivan’s post today on a remarkable memo circulating among Republican Party thought leaders from Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster and strategist. It basically says the party needs to shift its position on gay marriage and gay rights and do so quickly. Otherwise, van Lohuizen writes, the GOP risks marginalization, irrelevance or worse. Wow!

Go read it, and when you come back, I have some things to say.

In the late 1970s, evangelical Christian leaders looked around and proclaimed life in the United States to be a mess. They had happily helped elect a Georgia farmer-turned-governor as President, in part, because he professed to be “born-again.” One of theirs in the White House held out so much hope, but it quickly turned disastrous as Jimmy Carter became their national embarrassment. There was budget balancing by gutting the military, and blaming the “malaise” of the American people for a sliding economy. Then there was the Iran hostage crisis, a failed rescue attempt, and, well, hurry 1980.

At about that time, Pat Robertson hired George Gallup to do a study of American attitudes about evangelical Christians. He found that people viewed Christians as illiterate and uneducated, bigoted, overweight, wearers of ill-fitting polyester suits, Bible-thumpers, self-righteous hypocrites, rural and Southern. Dr. Robertson then made a brilliant, mad-men-esque marketing decision: he would use his television program, The 700 Club, to depict Christians as exactly the opposite.

I began working for Pat in 1981. Being a TV magazine show guy (12 Magazine, PM Magazine, Louisville Tonight), I had some of the knowledge he needed to help build his program into a news magazine “with a different spirit.” I witnessed the rise of the Christian Right as a participant and an observer. Above all, Pat wanted to change the view of Evangelicals in the country, because he felt anti-Christian attitudes were bigoted, anti-intellectual, self-serving, and mostly, bad for the country.

We had unwritten policies in place at The 700 Club, for example, that denied access to overweight people. We required people who wrote to us to report a “miracle” to include a photograph, so that we could filter people out based on how they looked. We wanted youngish, intelligent, attractive and articulate people to counter the view that Christians are all stupid Bible-thumpers. We very rarely, if ever, invited guests on the show that were overweight or fit the stereotypes discovered in the Gallup study. When crowd shots were taken in the studio, the camera operators were advised to zoom in on the most attractive people in the audience. None of this was written down, of course; it was just understood.

Reagan was now President, and a conservative shift was underway in the U.S. In 1984, we did $248 million in contributions, and the clout of the Evangelicals was gaining. When Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert went down in scandals, Pat’s stature increased, because his was the voice of intelligent Christians. In 1985, The Saturday Evening Post ran a cover feature on Pat, raising the possibility of a run for President. We were later summoned to a retreat, where Pat told us that “God has told me to run for President and that I will win.” It split the ministry as the plan unfolded. Contributions crashed, as donors responded by closing their checkbooks.

And so it went. Pat lost. His ministry never recovered completely. The Christian Right evolved and eventually morphed into the Tea Party, and the gap between the Evangelicals and others widened, all of which leads us to this week, and President Obama’s historic support of giving the gay and lesbian community the same legal rights to marry that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples. In the same week, North Carolinians did the opposite ratified Amendment One, which outlawed gay marriage at the constitutional level. The usual suspects are saying the usual things in the usual “he said/she said” way, but beneath all that, I sense a great soul searching underway, one that I think is long overdue and will have lasting consequences for our culture. Jan van Lohuizen’s memo is a part of that, and so is what follows.

A young Christian writer, Rachel Evans, published a moving and personal piece this week that speaks to all of this. How to win a culture war and lose a generation is a heartfelt cry to anyone who will listen that “my generation is tired of the culture wars.”

We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for.

And when it comes to homosexuality, we no longer think in the black-and-white categories of the generations before ours. We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere “issue.” These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen. And Amendment One hurts like hell.

…it should be clear that amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.

I like what Rachel has written and think she speaks for the vast majority of younger Christians in the country today. Her plea reminds me of something Kathie Lee Gifford once said on The 700 Club. Kathie Lee was the darling of the Evangelicals in the late 70s and early 80s until her very public divorce in 1983. Many people turned against her, and she talked about it on the show. “It’s easy to walk in black and white,” she said, “until life forces you into shades of gray.”

I have strong feelings about civil rights for gays and lesbians, and I think if what Rachel calls “The Church” wants an honest confrontation with God on the matter, it needs to take a deep and thoughtful look in the mirror first. Will it see the youthful, intelligent, slim and successful people of the old 700 Club, or will it see the bigoted, self-righteous sheep who deny the Gospel of Grace in favor of the very “Law” that Christ died to overcome? Take a look at this remarkable diagram from The Guardian for at least part of the answer.

And finally, hasn’t history noted that the prophets of the day were always the most different of all? People of the arts – those whose sensitivity puts them in contact with worlds beyond the flesh – have always been those who carried the message of the moment to others. Why? Because the others have a tendency to get too comfortable within the status quo.

One day long ago, the prophet Jeremiah took a message to the recently enthroned King Shallum, son of King Josiah. Josiah was a righteous king and the land and its people had prospered under his rule, but Shallum was in it for himself. He let the people do as they wished and built himself an incredible mansion. Jeremiah warned of trouble ahead as a result, and then said these powerful words about Shallum’s father: “He pleaded the cause of the poor and the afflicted. Then it was well with him. Is this not what it means to know me, saith the Lord?”

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, History, Politics, Postmodernism | No Comments » |

We need to get back to basics

May 9th, 2012

The issue is RSS, really simple syndication, a Web protocol that is EXTREMELY efficient for moving content from place to place along the byways of the Web. It’s an XML protocol, which means it passes content separate from formatting, to be reconstructed at the other end. It frustrates media companies, because it removes “their” content from the infrastructure within which they make their money.

I’ve been a student of all things new media for over 14 years, and the current spinning & whirling hodgepodge of everything from this to that has caused me to take a big step back for a bit. When this happens, I start looking at fundamentals and those “big” trends that I’ve talked about often. Maybe it’s the pending Facebook IPO, but I sense forces building for some form of cosmic explosion that will force everyone back to basics. Let me explain.

In earlier days of The Pomo Blog and in my earlier essays, I wrote of the revolution in what I called “unbundled media.” People were sharing individual cuts from albums and newspaper articles and TV clips among other things, all separated from their infrastructures. Today, it seems the successful ventures (can you say “Instagram?”) are trying to do the opposite: putting media into infrastructures like, well, Facebook. This is why I think we all need to be very careful today, because in big money’s attempt to inject artificial equilibrium into the chaos of the Web, things are moving in opposite directions. There will be a day of reckoning.

Back in the early days, I wrote of unbundling news stories and of building newsrooms that would function in such an environment. I even wrote about a revenue play with unbundled content, in some cases, created by the people formerly known as the advertisers. None of it has materialized yet to the extent that I saw, and I’ve always wondered why. I mean, I knew that media companies would struggle with the concept of making money apart from their infrastructures, but I felt (still do) that the right people with money could force this on unwilling industries and that media would eventually see and seize the new value.

There were others on this particular vibe back then, people I had already grown to respect. Umair Haque wrote of the difference between a blockbuster and a snowball rolling downhill, the latter of which is a part of a networked world. He also wrote of unbundled media and the value of quality content over marketing. Dave Winer was putting forth a concept called “rivers of news” based on the simple process of RSS — which he actually invented — and I felt I was joined at the hip with Dave. RSS was and is the perfect distribution vehicle for unbundled bits of media, but it, too, has not yet reached anything near its potential. Dave blames an almost conspiratorial effort by leaders in tech media. RSS, after all, is free and unencumbered. How does Silicon Valley make its fortune from that? Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen and others were also on the vibe, and if anyone claims provenance for the whole thing, I think I’d have a problem with that. It doesn’t matter who got there first; the point is that a handful of people (much smarter than me) were all exploring this obvious (to us) development at about the same time, but it has seemingly sat there unattended.

Dave Winer never gave up. Heck, I don’t think any of us gave up, but he’s the one who has kept trying to move the rock while the rest of us have been basically cheering him on. Now this week, he’s posted “River of News — FTW!” and it bears a fresh jolt of energy and enthusiasm.

I wish I could work with the teams of the best publications. If that could happen, we’d kick ass. But I’m here on the sidelines giving advice that you guys take on very very slowly. It’s frustrating, because it’s been clear that rivers are the way to go, to me, for a very long time. A lot of ground has been lost in the publishing business while we wait. There’s a lot of running room in front of this idea. We can move quickly, if publishers have the will.

Dave Winer is a very interesting fellow. A lot of people misinterpret his genius for self absorption or worse, and I think the tech industry is the real loser for it. The more I read Dave, the more I get to know him, and the more I get to know him, the more convinced I become that he’s right.

Doc Searls followed Dave’s piece this week with “Take us to The Rivers.” Doc admonishes his readers to take up arms with Dave, encouraged by this piece by Jason Pontin of Technology Review.”

The bigger and older the industry, the harder it is to make fundamental reforms, or to embrace disruption. Publishing, including newspapers, had been working the same way for many generations, so it has taken awhile for the obvious to sink in…

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we’re redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we’ll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we’ll kill our apps, too.

Now back to Dave… Please, this time, listen to the man. While you still can.

My sword is with this group to any extent possible, but I have some advice. Unless and until we set our minds to resolving the revenue problem for media, we’re going to have a hard time (with people who really count) being taken seriously. That’s not intended as a swipe at anybody; it’s a simple fact. How does a media company put ads into its river without insulting people? Is that something we cannot tolerate at all, or would it be best for us to create the rules and protocols? And what about using RSS as a commerce mechanism? The people putting out the content that really matters today are those who used to be advertisers. What’s so wrong with using this technology to resolve their problems. Again, if we could influence the rules, wouldn’t that be worth the effort? And besides, content from advertisers is news in many ways.

I wrote about this back in the day in “The Economy of Unbundled Advertising,” and while the ideas expressed there were perhaps ahead of their time, I believe fundamentally in their hand shake with the Web, and that’s via RSS.

I owe my blogging history to Dave Winer, for he helped me get started. He’s right as rain on this, but the anti-capitalist nature of an open, seemingly chaotic architecture is what’s causing so much grief for those institutions and industries who exist in the old-fashioned, top-down world of modernity. This is the pragmatic postmodernism about which I write and preach. It’s also why, I suspect, I’m so drawn to the minds of people like Dave, Doc, Umair, David Weinberger, Kevin Kelly, and many others. None are opposed to making money; they simply all see the limits of doing it the top-down way.

Like I said, it’s time for all of us to get back to the fundamentals.

Posted in Advertising, RSS | No Comments » |

The WalMart reality: what Silicon Valley doesn’t want (or get)

May 2nd, 2012

There’s a certain arrogant but humorous P.T. Barnum flair that accompanies a core Silicon Valley notion that a company’s value is higher if it doesn’t have a growing revenue model. Fortunes have been made via this slight-of-hand, slipping beneath the cracks of common sense and traditional business logic. Money has that effect on people, I suppose. It reminds me of the head-scratcher in the mortgage loan portfolio foolishness that led to our economic collapse five years ago — that you could make a TON of money by selling bad loans. Huh?

The essential lure of technology and technology investments is big money fast, so the core approach of 99.99% of venture capital initiated start-ups is — and must be — top-down. It uses the global reach of the Web to dazzle everyone with numbers so astronomical as to set aside common sense. The trick is to build the scale rapidly to initiate dynamic value, regardless of whether the economics make sense. I got caught up in this game with my own Web start-up and lost. Our investors-cum-”advisors” took a perfectly sound, albeit bottom-up concept and destroyed it by switching it to top-down.

A fascinating CNET article alludes to the same problem with Facebook, and those of us especially in local media need to pay very close attention. Opportunity is knocking. More on that below.

Traditionally — at least in the U.S. — business growth has come through expansion: create something that works somewhere, and expand it elsewhere to grow the company. In this way, systems and processes are put into place that cater to the people who bring in the revenue. In some cases, it’s consumers; in other cases, it’s other businesses. Regardless, the interaction between the company and revenue is the tried and true method of up close and personal.

Walmart is a great example of this. According to the Forbes Global 2000 list, Walmart is the world’s 18th largest public corporation and the largest public corporation when ranked by revenue. Wikipedia notes the company is also the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and is the largest retailer in the world. It has 8,500 stores in 15 countries, under 55 different names.

Yet, it all started with Sam Walton opening Walton’s Five and Dime in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1951. Walton’s strategy for success was simple: make money by volume sales at slightly lower prices than competitors. Sounds familiar, right? He opened the first Walmart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and began spreading outward.

In the modern start-up world, headquartered in Silicon Valley, businesses want nothing to do with 60 years for growth, and so everything is shortcutted in the name of scale. Scale without revenue, after all, provides only the illusion of business bigness, or the potential for bigness.

In the CNET article (Frustrated advertisers to Facebook: Take our money — please!), writer Paul Sloan says Facebook has become a victim of its own success. While Facebook users can interact and relate with anybody, Facebook itself ironically relates or interacts with very few.

It’s automating its process and using technology to increase efficiency. But that’s not the same as dealing with a human being; big advertisers are a needy bunch who want hand-holding. However, plenty say they can’t even find anyone at Facebook to take their calls — or their money.

Here, for instance, is Mike Parker, the co-president of U.S. operations of Tribal DDB, talking about his frustration with Facebook: “For the longest time, we’ve been trying to call Facebook to do business with them and there’s nobody to pick up the call,” said Parker. “They’re very focused on the consumer experience, and less focused on revenue and working with advertisers.”

And here’s David Smith, the CEO of digital agency Mediasmith: “Facebook just doesn’t seem to care. They’re still trying to grow this thing. The question is, do they want the big bucks?”

This inability to make contact in order to do business isn’t limited to Facebook either, especially from a local perspective. Have you ever tried to reach someone at Google to discuss business? I’ve actually spoken with someone at Twitter about local business, but the prices were so outrageous as to evoke only an odd form of belly laugh.

You see, when you build a business from the bottom-up, you have no choice but to immediately cater to the needs of the people who are paying you. Since venture capital supports Silicon Valley, companies are able to sidestep the issue in the name of generating scale, because revenue isn’t really the mission. Local media companies sit back and watch this happen without seeing the opportunity to seize the revenue while others are building the scale. I remember one media company owner who asked, after I proposed creating a local search portal, “Do you honestly think we can compete with Google?” In scale, glitz and tools? Of course not, but most definitely in market revenue, especially with a television station at its disposal to promote the site. Advertising at the local level, after all, is sold, not bought. I don’t care how sweet the social media application is, the opportunity for revenue is local, because the preponderence of the app’s use is local. Self-service ad software, no matter how simple it may seem, is no substitute for listening, interacting, and the occasional hand shake.

Advantage local media.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions, Facebook | 1 Comment » |

This bubble stuff feels eerily familiar

April 30th, 2012

I was sitting in a conference room at the hi-tech incubator BizTech in Huntsville, Alabama with hopeful eyes fixed on the TV. It was January 10, 2000, and on the screen was the press conference during which the AOL and Time Warner merger was announced. I remember it like it was yesterday. Here I was trying to raise a million dollars for my own start-up, ANSIR (A New Style In Relating), and these guys were talking about a merger valued at $350 billion. AOL itself was valued for the deal at $165 billion. It was then and remains the biggest merger in business history.

I remember the excitement and the wonder of it all. Little did we know it was all just part of a big market bubble, and I remember especially this provocative line from Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, a very sane, important and knowledgeable businessman at the time.

“I accept that something profound is happening in the Internet space; I believe that. The new media stock-market valuations are real – not in every case, of course. But what AOL has done is get first position in this new world. Its valuation is real, and I am attesting to that.”

Levin’s attestation would later be proven wrong, and he would be forced out as the merged company shriveled under the blended brand. It is now a case study in why what Levin said is a bad reason to take such an enormous gamble. Walt Disney built his empire with what he called “the plausible impossible,” and I suspect that was at work here. Logic is great, the old saying goes, unless you begin at the wrong spot. Believing the valuations was what grew the bubble. Turns out that if it seems unbelievable, it probably is.

I’m recalling this today, because I’m feeling the same vibe as Facebook is about to approach Wall Street with an IPO valued at $100 billion, a valuation that’s roughly 100 times its earnings from last year. It sounds and feels oh so familiar.

So are we in a bubble? The always astute Mathew Ingram has a nice overview of the subject today that’s worth a read, although his conclusion tends to support those who feel we’re not.

So while some venture funds may be doing their best to inflate expectations and cash in on high valuations, that appears to be causing problems only at the small end of the startup pool — for now. Without any obvious signs of a public-stock mania that puts individual shareholders at risk, it’s hard to argue that we are in a 1990s-style bubble yet (although some critics fear that the new crowdfunding bill could accelerate the problem). Whether Facebook’s IPO triggers a broader inflationary atmosphere remains to be seen.

Dave Winer says we’re “definitely” in a bubble, and I believe him. I mean, look at the evidence. AOL’s model was based on a pre-Internet business model, one we know of as mass marketing. They could make tons of money, if they could just keep people inside their walls, a “walled garden” as many would later call it. When the fickle public disagreed, a new garden called MySpace sprang up. This social network could make money the same way, and for awhile, things looked good, until a young guy named Mark Zuckerberg took over with his Facebook. So here we are again, and the whole thing still hinges on the same value proposition, that Facebook can somehow keep those people within its walls. Old school media value, after all, is about controlling the infrastructure for content, whether its made by the New York Times, Zuckerberg or Joe Blow.

And for the last few weeks, we’ve been treated to justification and rationalization that Facebook is somehow different than its predecessors. The company paid a billion dollars for Instagram in what most (myself included) feel was an overpriced grab at real estate Facebook needed to be inside its wall instead of outside. But is Facebook substantially different that previous walled-garden approaches? Get real. It may have a few more bells and whistles and connections, but the core competency is the same. Web research and consulting firm BIA/Kelsey is hosting a webinar on the topic this week to probe this specific issue:

…questions continue to swirl about its (Facebook’s) actual worth and whether any company can justify becoming public at such a high value. The prevailing question: How will Facebook support this valuation…?

I don’t believe it can be justified, although lots of smart people who’ve doubtless done their homework will try to explain that it is entirely justified.

I’m sure Mr. Levin had done his homework when he made that infamous statement back in January of 2000, but at some point in a gamble, you must consider that you could be wrong, partly or as the AOL Time Warner deal proved, utterly and completely. So in addition to homework, what say we also consider common sense. We could also ask a few teenagers.

“Everybody’s switching to Twitter,” a 17-year old family member told me. She used to be a pretty regular user of social media, but her activity has been shrinking for the last year or so. She doesn’t need Facebook anymore, and besides, “it’s pretty lame.” Think about that for a minute. It’s AOL all over again.

“To everything is a season,” we’re taught. I wouldn’t bet on Facebook’s future if you gave me the money with which to do it.

Posted in Culture, Economy, Facebook, MySpace, Social Media, Technology | 1 Comment » |

Temporarily Closed

March 26th, 2012

I’ve been away from my blog for over a week, and I’m afraid that’s going to continue. Why? I’m working on two new projects that require my full attention. There’s so much to write about, too, but I just can’t. I need to focus elsewhere, and so I’m shutting down for a couple of weeks and not feel guilty about it.

As Ah-Nold famously said, “I will be back.”

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment » |

We need to get over ourselves

March 15th, 2012

There it was, staring at me with remarkable clarity, a headline from Business Insider on the sad state of newspapers pared with a picture from the film “All The President’s Men,” the story of Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post and, of course, Watergate. The irony? Evidence (Gallup) suggests that this event — the elevation of everyday journalists into superstar status — was the bellwether occurrence that began the downward slide of press trust in the U.S. Of course, you won’t hear contemporary journalists speak such heresy. After all, Woodward & Bernstein are the model of what it means to be the successful professional (a.k.a. “real”) journalist of today, and this is why BI used the photo.

The BI article examines new research from LinkedIn on sectors of the economy that are losing jobs.

On a percentage basis, newspapers shed the most jobs, down 28.4% between 2007 and 2011.

The good news: online publishing had job growth of 20.4%. But it didn’t add as many jobs as newspapers lost.

We’ve heard from thousands of insiders and outsiders, experts and armchair quarterbacks on what’s causing this decline, and all tell part of the story: disruptive innovations, Craigslist, the recession, failing to initially charge for content online, and so forth. But most of these are shortsighted, and the Gallup research is the only evidence that points to the origin of the decline in press trust in the country, and it begins shortly after Watergate.

I’ve written much about what I think happened, that journalism subtly shifted from a way from a career in which a single person could make a difference to one of riches and notoriety (see: “I love to be in front of cameras” below). The ability to hobnob with those they covered — and, therefore, gain status simply by rubbing elbows with the famous — became the wish of many of those who passed through the gates of accommodating journalism and communications schools. I witnessed this up close and personal in my own career. Employees who “wanted to be on TV” became the majority, and then there’s the ugly side of market-hopping, the slow shift from parochial news coverage to cosmopolitan news coverage in smaller markets as more and more Woodward & Bernstein wannabes expressed themselves for the sake of their resumes instead of the community they were supposed to be serving. How else do you explain stories of young TV reporters doing things like jumping a fence at a very small market airport to “prove” how easy it would be for a terrorist to do likewise? This kid got himself arrested, but that’s not the point.

Playing hotshot super sleuth in a place like that wasn’t even close to reporting news for the community, and the thing we’ve always failed to see about this is that people — you know, the audience — have been paying attention. It’s crystal clear to them that news people are in it for themselves and serve neither the public nor the profession. Beginning at the university level, an entire industry swung from making a difference to the quest for the big bucks (“quest,” because we never really got there, except for the few, right?), and the hell with what the audience might think.

This is why I wrote last week of the Great Winnowing that has begun, wherein the practice of journalism is having its way with a whole generation of misled practitioners. I have faith that the demand for journalism remains (and will be) strong and that people will earn a decent living at the end a really rough season for most.

Ego is a funny thing. It drives people to great personal risk, which can produce great rewards, but it can also create unrealistic expectations and turn normally sane people into preening peacocks of staggering insanity.

What has been our chief sin since Watergate? We just can’t seem to get over ourselves.

Posted in Journalism, Newspapers | 1 Comment » |

Of Britannica and pulse weaponry

March 14th, 2012

Downstream thinking — a.k.a. living in the future — is a stressful but necessary pastime for one interested in innovation. Why? You must be prepared to look for unseen, hidden or unintended consequences. As astronaut Frank Borman told the congressional committee investigating the Apollo I disaster, it was a “failure of imagination.” A fire on the ground wasn’t something they had considered.

The inevitable decision announced today by the Encyclopedia Britannica to cease its print publication in favor of its digital unit is one such event. Let us all enter into this with eyes wide open. Through such decisions, we’re saying as a culture that we prefer our knowledge stored electronically, so let’s take a look at a downstream issue that badly needs discussion: how do we protect digital storage?

One of the problems with people is that whenever somebody builds something new — especially when it means an advantage — there is an immediate need for somebody else to tear it down. This is especially true in Western Civilization, where imagination and invention are rewarded through steps up the social ladder. Maybe it’s because we’re predisposed to destruction, but every new thing seems to be immediately weaponized or turned into something that can be used to our advantage.

So it is with electricity and the electromagnetic space. Electromagnetic Pulse weapons (EMP) — which we have — can take down electrical grids and permanently (until parts are replaced) destroy instruments, devices, systems and infrastructures. “Blinding” and “deafening” the enemy is more than just the physical destruction of cell towers, for example; it’s about blowing out the electrical components that make everything work. We’ve long known this was a side effect of nuclear bombs detonated high in the atmosphere, but we’ve refined the process in modern times.

Many gasped when it was discovered last summer that China was building EMPs to hypothetically use against U.S. aircraft carriers in the event of war.

I’m certainly no alarmist when it comes to this stuff. I’m 100% behind the fuel and the products of the Digital or  Information Age. I just think it would be prudent to explore all aspects of what we’re doing as we make big cultural decisions like this.

Think about it. How would you and your neighbors respond if everything suddenly stopped working? The ensuring chaos would be unspeakable. I’ve often wondered why Hollywood hasn’t grabbed this concept.

The Air Force is responsible for protecting the electromagnetic space for us. Do we have an anti-pulse weapon weapon? I wonder…

Posted in Culture, Disruptions | 2 Comments » |

The new old breed

March 13th, 2012

From the Seattle Times comes word that Miss Seattle, Jean-Sun Hannah Ahn, tweeted her disdain for Seattle and its residents after going to school for four years in Phoenix. The story is one of foolishness and the permanent record that is Twitter, but there’s something deeper here.

Her dream is to be a TV news anchor.

“I love to be in front of cameras,” she says

I rest my case.

Posted in Broadcasting | No Comments » |

An open letter to newsroom employees everywhere

March 12th, 2012

The business of media has been a part of my life for over 41 years. I care deeply about it and especially the people who are in it for reasons of journalism. It is to you that this open letter is addressed:

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Economy, Journalism, personal media | 9 Comments » |

This is my dwelling place

March 11th, 2012

Like many whose pathways have been littered with the waste of addiction, I grew up feeling very different. An inability or incapacity to reconcile those feelings led me down many dark roads, and while I currently live in the Light, the power of feeling different still astounds me.

A part of living in the Light, I’ve discovered, is accepting that there is no “normal” against which we can (or, God forbid, “should”) measure ourselves, no middle ground of contentment and satisfaction within the human race. All are dysfunctional to one degree or another, and the object of life isn’t to overcome those dysfunctions as much as it is to learn to live with them and still feel good about oneself. I am, as we say in my crowd, “comfortable in my own skin.”

It wasn’t always so. I shared much in my note, “How I Know God Loves Me,” but that is not a part of my thoughts today.

Many, many years ago, an employer required that we all take a certain, very thorough personality/character test. I was about 35, and I’d spent my entire working life in positions of leadership and management, regardless of the industry. When working with the expert from the personality test company, she revealed that I had scored zeroes in the two key measurements of management ability. Zero. No innate capacity to manage. The lowest possible scores. “How,” I inquired, “can I possibly exist in management – and actually thrive – given this revelation?”

She turned to another section of the score sheet and responded, “Because you are in the 99th percentile when it comes to both intelligence and creativity. You make games of management requirements, so that you can resolve what is very unnatural for you.”

This was one of those life-changing moments for me. I’d always known that I was smart. School was easy. I’d also known that I have a vivid imagination, but this was the first time the degree of either had been scientifically revealed to me. It scared me, but it also was comforting, because it made a lot of sense. This was me: smart, creative, and very much alone. Such gifts can be a curse to one who only seeks acceptance and perhaps the hero worship granted to athletes. I wanted, I needed to be some ONE; what I had failed to realize was that I already was.

As a boy, I was most comfortable when I was alone. Mostly, I wandered the fields and forests of our neighborhood and beyond, where my imagination took me to new worlds and new situations, while my intelligence helped me figure out how to survive and thrive when the chips were down. There are no smarts like street smarts. I clearly lived in my head, surrounded, however, by the sights and sounds of nature, the warm glow of the sun, the breeze that moved my hair and cooled my skin, the taste of whatever I found to test and the beautiful smell that is a combination of all life. I also discovered Life, with a capital L, as I studied and applied my mind to everything around me. I also witnessed death and the paradoxes of nature. We anthropomorphize the creatures around us and empathize with their suffering, but there are important reasons the weak don’t make it. I hurt over this, but I understand.

My old friend Holly often tweaks me for not applying my intelligence through study, and I always appreciate that. I never went to college, nor did I “academically” study the things about which I write. It’s a catch-22, for while I’m sure I would have gained much (and probably still could) by such study, my reality is that it would interfere with what Life is trying to show me or teach me. There is Richard Adams’ “Unbroken Web,” where I can tap the source of all, and I’d rather get it raw from there than filtered by human study. It may make me feel ancient to discover for myself things I could learn from books, but the rewards of touching The Unbroken Web go way beyond knowledge filtered by human study. Answers exist in the Unbroken Web, because it is incapable of saying “No,” and these answers inspire the passion and energy required to bring them to the light. This is the world of art and the arts, for as Jonah Lehrer wrote, “When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.” Yes, the world of ideas versus the world of processes. My heart leaps with joy for being so alive. Who wouldn’t feel joyful in the presence of Life?

And when I’m there, in this world of absolute creativity, I feel safe, the only thing a young boy really pursues in the forests and fields of his world. There are no problems here, only solutions, and it’s here where the Light shines most brightly. Some would see this as the nonsensical “head in the clouds” of those who “should” know better, but it’s my home. I’m proud to exist here and thankful beyond words. Here, sensitivity is a gift, not a curse that must be overcome.

And as life goes by on my human journey through time and space, I find peace and joy and serenity in this dwelling place. It’s my heaven. Me, my spirit, my soul with its hopes and dreams will always be there.

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