I get a little attention now and then in blogs, columns, stories and other discussions of media issues. Here were some of my 2014 mentions:
New York Times
I was “one reader” in a New York Times blog post (but was really pleased that the Times, after my urging, is calling for better linking by staff members). It is accurate. I am a Times reader.
On the other hand, I did get a mention and a second quote, attributed to Digital First Media, my company at the time, in the New York Times Innovation Report (mention on P. 87, blind quote on Page 15).
The leading theme on the blog this year was Project Unbolt, which occupied most of my attention the first half of the year. I worked with four Digital First Media newsrooms on their efforts to “unbolt” from their print workflow and culture and produced more than 30 related posts on this blog and more for the INMA Culture Change blog.
I had quite a head of hair (and maybe a bit of attitude) 40 years ago.
Why do we express ourselves through our hair?
I pretend not to care much as I’m about to lose mine to chemotherapy drugs.
But I grew it long in my defiant (or was it compliant?) youth.
By caucus night 1980, I was in the middle of the action at the Des Moines Register. But I soon would grow a beard in hopes of adding some years to that baby-face appearance.
As a young assistant city editor supervising reporters who were older than my parents, I grew my first beard to sort-of cover up that baby face underneath.
Mimi liked the soft beard better than my five-o’clock shadow, so we had an accord for decades, as long as I’d shave my scraggly neck and keep the beard trimmed. For most of my 20s and 30s, I had a full head of hair (thick, but shorter than in my college days) and a full, if usually trimmed, beard.
That’s me at the right, learning with Des Moines Register colleagues in 1985 that the company was being sold to Gannett.
Gray appeared in the beard long before it was noticeable higher up (there it’s still mostly brown). I began describing the beard as salt-and-pepper. But I had to admit salt was taking over the sideburns in the late 90s when my black-and-white photo (left) that ran with my religion column at the Des Moines Register made me look as though I had a goatee, as readers often commented upon meeting me, surprised to see the fuller, frostier hair on the sides.
My brothers, one older and one younger, started losing their hair earlier and faster than I did, as shown in a 2006 photo of us bowing our heads in a mock prayer for a cure for baldness.
In 2006, my hairline was in retreat, but I still had more hair than Don, center, or Dan, right.
My mother, who fueled my ego more than she deflated it in my youth, brought laughter and humility in the early years of her memory loss by suddenly noticing and exclaiming, more than she was asking, “Is your hairline receding?”
For a few years, Mimi would refer to my “bald spot” in back, but I could feel hair when I put my hand there, so I denied it, just as she kept telling our boys “I’m taller” as they shot up past her in adolescence. Occasional photographs from behind quieted my denials.
Photographic evidence finally silenced Gramps’ denial of the bald spot.
When I was a victim of age discrimination, I asked my attorney if I should shave the mostly white beard in looking for my next job. If we were going to sue, I’m sure she would have urged me to keep it. Since we weren’t, she didn’t have a legal opinion. But as a female friend, she said, yeah, I’d look younger. After I shaved, many others agreed.
After I found a job, I tried a goatee, with the hairline continuing its retreat.
The beard came off when I was in my mid-50s, looking for work.
When I found the job, I grew back a goatee, telling myself that part was still salt-and-pepper. But salt was winning. Eventually I grew the full beard back, embracing the white. But then vanity prevailed and the whole beard came off, even though I wasn’t looking for work (but it certainly stayed off when I had to start looking again).
2013, clean-shaven with large forehead.
Just when I was comfortable with shaving daily and accepting a slow retreat of my hair (it’s still thick where I have it), I’m facing two developments I can do little about:
Chemo is killing my white blood cells, which fight infection. So I need to avoid nicks. So the beard is coming back, even those scraggly neck hairs Mimi always made me shave.
Soon the beard will fall out, along with what’s left on top of my head and other hair you don’t want to know about, as the Cytoxan and other chemo drugs kill off my fast-dividing cells: primarily lymphoma and hair.
Mimi suggested that waiting to lose my hair would be depressing, not to mention clogging our drains and covering pillows. I briefly pondered whether I’d feel some connection to Roger Maris if I let my hair start falling out in clumps (the stress of his record 1961 season caused hair loss). But I knew I wouldn’t hit any homers. So Mimi took me to her stylist, Jason Keller, for a close buzz, rather than risking a shave.
Jason clipping me close.
So that’s my new look, scraggly beard, topped by my buzz cut where I still have hair. It will all fall out soon, but short enough to spare the drains and, hopefully, look less depressing on the pillowcases.
I hear it will grow back eventually, and that sometimes it grows back a different color or texture. More on that later.
In the meantime, I might express myself through my hats.
Feeling entirely self-indulgent, I did two video retrospectives. The one below is sort of a history of my hair. The one below the hat photos looks at my hair through four decades of weddings.
I love competition, so I enjoy a newspaper war (even if it was just an overhyped skirmish). And I mourn the death of any newspaper, even if it was really just a zoned edition.
My heart in this “war,” though, was with the other Long Beach daily, the Press-Telegram, colleagues for nearly three years in my days with Digital First Media.
I was skeptical from the first and might have said so on social media, and did say so privately, but I refrained from blogging about Kushner. I didn’t want to blog phony optimism, but I was hoping Kushner would succeed, for the sake of all the journalists he was hiring (including friends of mine). Others hailed Kushner’s strategy as bold, showing embarrassingly little skepticism, as Clay Shirky noted this year in a withering commentary.
But it was a foolish strategy. Newspapers haven’t figured out the right digital strategy yet, but pretending that print isn’t dying isn’t going to work. And Kushner compounded his blunder by buying the Riverside Press-Enterprise and then launching daily “Registers” for Long Beach and Los Angeles (the LA Register launched after Long Beach but crashed earlier). (more…)
I highly recommend reading both pieces. Rosen’s post is full of good advice for understanding the path your business is taking and contributing to making progress along the path. Nolan’s post is fascinating, the kind of scornful dismissal of Rosen’s visionary digital thinking that I normally expect from those clinging to legacy media, not one of the digital upstarts that the troglodytes are so scornful of.
Journalists should absolutely try to understand your organization’s business: how you deliver value and how the company plans to make money from that value.
Business models change, sometimes with little warning, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. You won’t always be informed immediately of the changes.
Colleagues need to understand and believe in the value you provide.
We can protect our integrity and still discuss and understand the business.
Learn the language; you always have.
Leaders are critical to the success of a changing organization.
Business model issues are worth changing jobs over, but I recommend trying to change the organization before quitting it (and finding another job first, too).
I’ll elaborate shortly, but first I’ll defend Rosen against Nolan’s anti-intellectualist insult. Noting the New York University professor’s brief career at the Buffalo Courier-Express before joining academia, Nolan said Rosen “makes money by producing proclamations about journalism rather than by producing actual journalism.” (more…)
The past 14 years he’s been a journalism entrepreneur, working for himself and the people of Iowa. Part of that has been writing books. So, when I decided to blog this week about book promotion, I asked Chuck for his advice. He responded with enough good tips that I wanted to use them as a guest post, rather than rolling them into Thursday’s post with advice from me and several other writers. Buffy Andrews also sent enough promotion tips to merit a separate guest post.
Here’s Chuck’s advice (with a few links from me):
After doing seven books over the last 32 years – mostly biographies or histories about notable Iowans – I’d say that no matter how much technology has changed, the most effective book promotion is for the author to show up at libraries, book clubs, bookstores, trade groups and civic organizations, do a reading, talk about the story and answer questions. Then you sell & sign those books as quick as you can.
Beyond that, and before you even go to print with the book, I’d tell aspiring authors to use the technology. Do that book online. Invest in a good web developer who can do an attention-getting website that is interactive, so readers can write you for chats, so that you can do video and audio, too. Do it with photos and artistic illustrations.
Meanwhile, you promote the bejeepers out of it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. If your book is good enough, you’ll create a real stir with people, and they’ll be quoting it and sharing it. Meanwhile, agents and publishers will be watching – especially if you ask them to watch. When they see that you’ve got a good one, one of them will be more likely to pick it up for actual print publication without you as the author having to cover that cost.
If you’re going to do a small-market book – say 5,000 or fewer copies – you’ve got to really want to get that story out there to make it worth your time.
One reward that new authors might not realize is that you will meet people you’ll never meet otherwise, and develop new audiences. That’s why in addition to your book, you should be blogging all the time.
Neighbors who ask Buffy Andrews for a cup of sugar probably get a full canister.
I emailed several authors, asking their advice on book promotion for the post I published yesterday. Some didn’t respond, which was fine. I knew they were busy. Some responded with a single tip or a few, which I was hoping for, and I gladly included them in the post. Buffy responded in less than an hour “off the top of my head” with a detailed promotion strategy. So I’m using her tips as a separate guest post (yesterday’s post was pretty long already), with a few of my observations sprinkled in and at the end. So here’s Buffy:
I market my books just as I market anything else. You want to fish where the fish swim. So, identify your audience, figure out who would be most interested in your book, then go fishing. (more…)
