We Will Party Hard

I just had to listen to some Andrew W. K. the other day and tell myself to lighten the frick up. I’m tired of worrying, tired of the economic doom and gloom, tired of the bad news coverage of Michigan. Have we hit bottom? Probably not, but why wait? It’s time to take a break and throw a party, for no other reason than the fact that we’re all still here. Turn off the Fox Fear Channel and do a little victory dance with me.

I present you with some positive news from my neck of the woods:

1) I don’t live in a war zone.

2) I haven’t lost any family or friends to disease or accidents lately.

3) The birds are singing straight through the April snowstorm outside. The air is clean, and the crocuses are blooming.

4) My first baby is due next month.

5) My pregnancy nausea has lifted enough in the last 2 weeks that I can enjoy food again! I’ve missed our special times together, food.

6) My husband is truly wonderful and only gets better with time.

7) I haven’t had a migraine in so long I can barely remember how awful it was. What an unspeakable blessing!

Okay, can I get churchy on you for just one second? The Bible advocates partying in a crisis. Oh, yes it does! Psalm 23:5 says: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” That’s Israel’s King David celebrating the fact that in the middle of a war, God says “Time out!” and throws out a banquet spread. Awesome! Go find that bottle of wine you were saving for a special occasion.

Times are really hard, but is it ever as bad as we fear it will be? (I’m preaching to myself here.) What are you celebrating today?

RIP, Ann Arbor News

Yesterday Mlive.com broke the news that The Ann Arbor News, my hometown newspaper, would be closing in July, to be replaced by AnnArbor.com. The paper has long been called “The Ann Arbor Snooze” and has shrunk to near ad circular size, as reduced advertising revenues required the paper to cut back on reporting and printing costs. The article on Mlive.com also reported that a handful of other Booth newspapers in Michigan would be reducing employee wages or cutting back to several days a week to survive.

It’s sad that Ann Arbor, the city in Michigan with the lowest unemployment rate (7.3% in January), would lose its paper first, but that is probably because Ann Arbor is also best able to convert to an online news format. The new AnnArbor.com claims that “92% of the Ann Arbor community has the skills and technology set-up to receive and engage with online news.” Yes, what will the other 8% do, and whose responsibility is that?

I admit I never read more than the headlines on the front page of The Ann Arbor News, the weather forecast, and the cartoons–and that was years ago. I got community events news from The Observer (the print edition is still far superior to their web presence: they’re going to need to do something about that soon), and national news online. My mother prefers the print format of the news but admits she was planning to cancel her subscription in the near future anyway, after decades of receiving the daily paper, because there was no longer any content in the paper she couldn’t get elsewhere….

Could this have been avoided? I’m tired of asking the question. People have been advising The News for well over a decade on how to adapt to the times, and they either botched the attempt or it simply wasn’t a feasible business model. The fact is that the community will adjust, trees will be saved (let’s be honest: printing newspapers is no longer sustainable or responsible), and more people will be out of work. Someone I know in the printing department hasn’t been able to find a new job, despite already having searched for months. She woke yesterday to hear the news of her impending layoff on the radio. That makes me feel sick to my stomach for her. But what to do?

I want to find an economically viable alternative to The News and take advantage of this vacuum to meet the needs of the community while employing some good people, but I don’t know how to get people to pay for news when it’s not crucial to them, and advertising revenue only covers the most basic (in this economy maybe uselessly so) of reporting. AnnArbor.com might just be the best option. I’m eager to see how they handle the transition. Maybe local news is just one more thing that needs to contract when times are tough. RIP, Ann Arbor News.

Jon Stewart Is In The Studio, Doin Ur Job

Jon Stewart just asked some tough questions that I’ve been waiting to hear financial journalists ask since the stock market started tanking:

How did no one see this crisis coming? Or did some people we trusted to advise us see it coming and do nothing? Why?

Why aren’t journalists and the news networks asking the tough questions?  To whom are journalists responsible?

How can a network like CNBC claim to have omnicience (“In Cramer We Trust”?!) on financial issues, then pretend nothing happened when they clearly screwed the pooch? How can they treat serious financial issues like a carnival game?

Journalists are currently facing a crisis in their own industry, and as Rocky Mountain News reporters point out, if investigative journalism goes away, who will really look into corporate corruption and tell people what is going on? Who, indeed? But then again, who is doing that now? A comedian.

Here’s my question: Could the fact that news media have largely caved to the pressure to entertain people rather than inform them of important news be the major reason they are unable to sustain profitability? Maybe it’s only partially about the medium they use to deliver the news. If a news network offered me real answers instead of a zoo of meaningless commentary, I might actually pay for that content. How about you?

The Future of News Is…

Front Page of La Canadien, 1806

Anyone else sick of the discussion about how the media/publishing industries can make money going forward? Not a single business model seems to be working anymore. This means one of three things: 1) There is no solution. An economic recovery will bring with it more advertising dollars, and we’ll stagger on until then. 2) There is a solution, but we haven’t gone on enough chat shows to find it yet. 3) There is no solution; there are solutions!

I’ll choose what’s behind door number three. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the news will look like in the future, and what I would be willing to pay for. The sad truth? I’m not really eager to pay for anything online, and that’s where I’ll be getting my news, for sure. For me to subscribe to a news service, it will have to be one-stop shopping, customized, interactive, and take the work/time out of exploring the web. I can see an improved Google homepage fulfilling some of these functions, and it occurs to me that the various functions I want from my “news” could be performed by different companies, different applications. What if we all started building niche news-serving tools like iPhone apps and then put together the best ones? Instead of reinventing the entire concept of publishing and news, we can simply invest piece by piece in the companies and tools that deliver content in new and tasty ways.

Here’s what Laura’s news feed of the (not too distant, I hope) future will look like:

- Headline news I can filter by category (block politics right before elections, or block sports I don’t give a whit about), produced by traditional news reporting/distributing agencies.

- Niche publishing industry, green technology, general interest IT, arts & entertainment, and international personal interest news. A combination of traditional reporting sources and blogs.

- Suggested news stories of all kinds based on my preferences and click-throughs.

- RSS feeds with a tool that suggests new blogs I might like to follow.

- An RSS reader that compiles blog feeds by category for easy viewing.

- A tool that keeps me informed of new or high levels of traffic on various websites across the intertubes.

- A tool that suggests new social media contacts based on my interests and activity.

- A tool that crawls the web for the best price on an item I’m thinking of purchasing, or finds baby gear sweepstakes, etc.

We consumers will pay one-time or ongoing fees for the apps that bring us the type of content filtering we like best. We can continue to pay for some content that is valuable to us, and less in-depth content will be supported by advertising dollars (hey, it could work as a partial strategy).

The good news? I believe at least marginally decent versions of all these tools/services are already available! Someone (ahem, Google) just has to put it together in a way that serves users on computers and phones, and they’re sitting on a mountain of gold. Seriously, if an iPhone fart app can make hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s some money there for news-serving, web-exploring, horizon-expanding apps, don’t you think?

What would you like your news to do for you that it’s not currently? How would you like to access published content? Is your content lacking depth, accessibility? Let’s start a new conversation, please, on what news and published content product we’re willing to buy, not just how to make money off the old product after it’s long expired.

Your Favorites

I have a little more time and energy lately to read blogs and look for new media outlets I want to follow, but it’s hard to cut through the noise online and find the good stuff. Today I want to know what your favorite sites are for writers, editors, or just news/fun/business in general. Here are a few of mine:

mediabistro.com (media news, job postings)

inhabitat.com (Green and fabulous stuff)

digg.com (social news site: mostly 12-yr-olds, geeks, and PR staffs voting stories up)

autoblog.com (interesting cars)

jalopnik.com (funny cars)

mastheads.org (find the right contact at a magazine)

ed2010.com (Psst! They didn’t tell you, but so-and-so is hiring.)

freelancefolder.com (freelancing)

thesimpledollar.com (frugal tips)

writetodone.com (about writing… till you’re done)

lifehacker.com (how to hack your life)

freelanceswitch.com (also self-explanatory)

hulu.com (free movies and TV! Lots and lots of 30 Rock episodes )

Okay, your turn. Give me some new sites to visit! I must have more media! What are your favorite blogs, news sites, etc.?

Small Changes

When I was transitioning into freelance, a colleague advised me that the most successful freelance journalist he knew put out one request for new work every day to keep himself in the game. He is, consequently, one of the busiest automotive journalists in the business. Sounds like a great idea, but is it really that simple? How do you keep up with it? I spent several hours a day cold-calling companies for the first couple months, and then got distracted with current work or other projects. There was also this thing going on in the news about the economy. Maybe you heard about it.

Well, I’m back at it, networking, writing, and shaping my career into what I want it to look like before the kiddo arrives next spring, and I think I’ve found a way to build my career that doesn’t resemble crash dieting. Job hunting has a lot in common with An Inconvenient Truth: I avoided watching this movie for a long time, knowing I would feel overwhelmed at the volume of work needed to turn this planet around, and then Al gave us some small steps we could all take to do our part, AND showed us how small steps could have a huge impact. Not discouraging at all! I began to recycle more, compost, make better food choices, and lo and behold my expenses went down along with my environmental impact. I even negotiated 25% off my trash/recycling bill, because we’re so low-volume now! I just didn’t believe my little changes could make such an impact before.

Same thing with a freelance career. You know you’re your own marketer, but it’s tiring to think of having to keep up with working and networking at the same time. But what if networking weren’t as overwhelming as it sounds? What are a few small changes you could slowly make to your career to give it a boost, without burning yourself out? Here are a few:

Join LinkedIn and Twitter: LinkedIn allows you to easily keep in contact with old colleagues, and gives you access to their networks without a “let’s do lunch” effort. Twitter sounded pretty self-indulgent (“I’m sitting on the pot, reading WIRED”) until I tried it; it’s an excellent networking tool, because it allows you to notify people of new projects you’re working on, info you’re seeking, and puts you in contact with others in your industry that you’d otherwise never meet. (Please note: Blogging and micro-blogging don’t replace normal human contact.)

Cold-call Companies: This needs to be a focused effort. I researched several types of publishers I both wanted to work for and would have some credibility with because of my work experience, then called down the list. One a day would have been too frustrating–I needed to get in a groove–so I set aside several days a week when my energy was up and called as many as I could. The ones I could really offer value to responded positively. If I hadn’t tried this, I wouldn’t have found a new primary source of book editing work or gotten my first print article published in Automobile Quarterly.

Replace One Bad Habit: Just like changing your eating habits. Replace soda with juice, and juice with water, and you’ll never miss the soda. Replace people.com with gawker.com, and gawker.com with mediabistro.com, and you’ll find you’re spending free time keeping informed about news in publishing instead of Hollywood. Fewer calories, more satisfying.

Be Flexible: Writers and editors need to find a schedule that works for them in order to be productive. If you’re a night owl, spend the day exercising and networking, then write at night. If you’re a morning person like me, do the important stuff first so the to-do list doesn’t crowd it out. Don’t procrastinate your work time away, getting nothing done and feeling guilty just because you’re too tired at the moment to work. What works for you? Find that rhythm and shape your life around it. Don’t let anyone tell you what your day ought to look like, as long as you’re getting things done.

I’m sure there are many more small changes we can all make to help ourselves improve our lives and careers. What are your favorites? What works for you? Let me know in comments. I’ll post more at a later date, using your best ideas as well as any others I think of.