Serial entrepreneur, MarkAndreessen, thinks print media companies need to take a page from the Spanish Empire’s playbook and make real their commitment to digital.
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
I like the imagery Andreessen’s using, but instead of burning the boats, it might be smart to keep all oars in the water, as it were. It’s not like there won’t be printed newspapers and magazines in the future. There will be. They might become rather expensive–as they are expensive to produce and distribute–but they’ll be available.
There’s an increasingly tiresome argument being made in the corporate suits, government offices and newsrooms of Portland, Oregon. The argument goes like this: Portland doesn’t have enough top tier talent to properly grow a company, nor enough venture capital.
“It’s not about Portland,” says Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey’s new California-based chief executive. “It’s really just about the Bay Area.”
“My job is to shepherd this company to be a great company, and if we can’t do it in Portland, we’re going to do it someplace else,” Dave Hersh, Jive Software’s CEO, said last fall. “I’m disappointed we weren’t able to pull it all off in Portland.”
Jive and Ensequence maintain Portland headquarters, and all three companies have retained sizable contingents here. Still, last year’s executive exodus was especially dispiriting in the context of Oregon’s wilted economy.
In related news, Laura Gunderson of The Oregonian reports that Lucy Activewear is moving from Portland to San Leandro, Calif., eliminating as many as 95 corporate and distribution center jobs here. Lucy, it’s important to note, isn’t locally owned.
In addition to the lack of available capital and talent beef, Oregonians also suffer from rumors that we don’t work hard and that our taxes on corporations are too high. I’ll leave the tax argument to others more qualified to speak, but the work ethic gripe I’ll gladly mangle. First, the argument is false. This state and all the great companies, schools and cultural institutions in it weren’t put here by a genie. They were put here by the pioneering, passionate and deeply committed citizens of the Beaver State.
Plus, too many places with a notable work ethic are soulless husks of a city. I don’t want to be part of that. Do you? Work is a central aspect of life in Oregon, as it is elsewhere, but we strive for balance here. The arts are important here; we like to eat amazing food and drink local wine and beer; and we go camping, hiking, skiing, etc.
Good Magazine is sharing a particularly good idea here.
Having lived in San Francisco, I know what a pain it is to park there. Sometimes you go round and around for half an hour to an hour just to find an empty spot, which is insanity, but that doesn’t stop it from happening.
Dynamic parking meter pricing and availability is technology that’s solving an actual need. Thank you Streetline. So many of the tech developments that grab the media’s attention are inconsequential in the grand scheme. For instance any news about Facebook is completely wasted on me.
For most Americans polar bears are animals they see from time to time in the zoo or maybe on a PBS special. In other words, the polar bear is totally remote, whereas the things that need to be fueled with oil–one’s car, one’s home, one’s business–are all quite near and dear. Hence, how much do we really care about the plight of the polar bear or what happens way way up there in Alaska? The answer to that rhetorical question is, of course, not enough.
Frances Beinecke, President of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), reminded me in an email that this year is the 50th Anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Sadly, her occasion for doing so wasn’t a party announcement, but a grave letter of concern, asking for help now that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has given Shell the green light begin exploratory drilling in the area. Because what we care about as a nation, now as always, is the discovery and removal of natural resources.
The Minerals Management Service, part of the federal Interior Department, yesterday gave Shell the green light to begin exploratory wells off the north coast of Alaska in an Arctic area that is home to large numbers of endangered bowhead whales and polar bears, as well as walruses, ice seals and other species. The permission would run from July to October next year, though Shell has promised to suspend operations from its drill ship from late August when local Inuit people embark on subsistence hunting.
Environmentalists condemned the decision to allow drilling, saying it would generate industrial levels of noise in the water and pollute both the air and surrounding water. Rebecca Noblin, an Alaskan specialist with the conservation group the Centre for Biological Diversity, said: “We’re disappointed to see the Obama administration taking decisions that will threaten the Arctic. It might as well have been the Bush administration.”
That’s damning criticism and fans of The President might bristle at the suggestion. But facts are facts.
In related news, Willamette Week recently ran an article that asked people who supported Obama for President what they think now, one year into his run. Lawyer and peace activist, John Bradach, isn’t pleased.
I was disappointed when he adopted the war team that Bush had left in place. For Obama to take those guys on, he really has allowed himself to be maneuvered into adopting those policies. And that’s not why I voted for him. Now I’m really disappointed, more than cautiously disappointed.
I do not want to hear Barack Obama justifying war, period. I am tired of wasting American kids on that war and on that policy, which is not going to win and will just be an indefinite commitment of American blood and resources.
Obama promised change, but change isn’t easy to implement in Washington, DC. But there’s more to it than that. Policy wise, change was always a false promise from Obama, a centrist Democrat.
Obama has been building consensus since his days on the Harvard Law Review, and he’s not about to veer from that practice now. Yet to truly change the way things are, the art of compromise itself needs to be compromised.
How has the Internet changed the way you think? That’s a huge question for our time and it’s the question Edge.org put in front on 167 world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers. Their range of answers is a deep well that one can dip into time and again, like a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
To get a taste for some of the thinking, please sample these small bits…
Crap detection — Hemingway’s name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.
The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.
And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.
In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind.
We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
If we know anything about knowledge, about innovation, and therefore about coming up with big deep thoughts, it is that it is cumulative, an accretive process of happening upon, connecting, and assembling, like an infinite erector set, not just a few pretty I-beams strewn about on a concrete floor.
Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson’s list — the knowledge of what matters. Knowing what matters is more than mere relevance. It is the skill of asking questions that have purpose, that lead to larger understandings.
This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.
So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.
Of course, we all have our own essays to write.
I started using a computer to type up my college papers in 1983. But it wasn’t until 1995 that I started using email and even then, I used it sparingly. For me, 1997 was the year when the information revolution swept me up in its fast moving tide. Which means I’ve only been thinking inside this particular framework of networked machines for 13 years. Fundamentally, has it altered the way my brain works? I don’t know, but I do know my habits have changed radically. While I read fewer books now, my overall volume of reading and writing (and thinking) has increased dramatically. I now spend many hours almost every day reading, writing and thinking. I’d like to think that’s a good thing, although I’m keenly aware of the need for balance.
More than a century of industrial use has resulted in Willamette River sediments being contaminated with many hazardous substances, such as heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), dioxin/furans, and pesticides. This far-from-green reality led a 10-mile stretch of the Willamette to be classified as a Superfund site by the Environmental Protect Agency in 2000.
This month Oregon Business is running a feature on the Superfund situation. It’s a topic all civic-minded Portlanders need to get up to speed on, because our economic future is tied directly to our willingness and ability to clean up the river and put sustainable practices into place.
As with most things, we need to know our history if we’re going to find a route out of the mess we’re in and refrain from repeating past mistakes.
Portland was built on the Willamette River, and the city’s 150-year history has forever altered that body of water. The West Coast’s first navigation channel enabled timber and grain exports starting in the 1850s. The railroad followed in the 1880s. After a lull during the Depression years, the harbor shifted into full gear during World War II, as workers built Liberty Ships for the Navy and rail cars for the Soviet Union.
Since the war years, healthy business clusters have developed in international trade, ship repair and metals manufacturing. Little thought was given to the ecological health of the river until the 1970s, when Gov. Tom McCall campaigned against pollution in the Willamette and spearheaded efforts to clean up Oregon’s defining waterway. But by then much of the damage had been done. It was just a matter of time before the pollution bill came due.
Oregon Business does a nice job of showing readers just how large that bill is. According to a 2008 report paid for by the Portland Development Commission, failing to redevelop key harbor properties such as the Arkema site over the next 10 years could cost the region $320 million in investment, $81 million in annual payroll and 1,450 jobs.
Cleaning up the toxic messes along the river is not easy nor inexpensive, a fact that’s contributing to the slow pace of progress. Hard choices need to be made and compromises struck between competing interests.
Steve Gunther, an environmental contractor who resigned from the harbor’s Community Advisory Group in frustration, says, “This is a billion-dollar project with no timeframe, no budget, no vision and no accountability.”
Gunther calls Superfund process “a jobs program for lawyers, lab rats and consultants.”
The Oregonian says the cleanup effort could commence in 2013, with the cost potentially totaling $1 billion or more for industry, landowners, and sewer and utility ratepayers. It’s likely to involve hundreds of landowners past and present, and some of the state’s top industrial employers, from Schnitzer Steel to Siltronic.
I don’t see how Portland could have a more critical issue on its plate. We’re a river city and a city with a lot of unrealized ideals about how business and environmental needs can coexist. The thing is we’re not in a lab in a school. Portland is the lab and we can either get it right and prosper, or get it wrong and dissolve in a toxic stew of our own making.
Portland author Donald Miller has some thoughts on New Year’s resolutions.
I’ve discovered something better than resolutions. If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you know I’ve reorganized my life into stories rather than goals. I don’t have any problem with goals. I like goals and still set them. But without an overarching plot, goals don’t make sense and are hard to achieve. A story gives a goal a narrative context that makes sense to the brain, making them more likely to actually be achieved.
A story involves a person that wants something and is willing to overcome conflict to get it. If you plan a story this year, instead of just simple goals, your life will be more exciting, more meaningful and more memorable. And you are much more likely to stick to your goals. For instance, rather than saying I want to finish getting into shape this year, I’ve written down that I want to climb Mt. Hood with a couple friends. I have a vision of standing on top of the mountain in May, taking pictures and all that. Now my goal has a narrative context.
Narrative context is good. One of my goals is to be a better friend this year. But that’s kind of vague, isn’t it?
My goal needs specifics if I’m going to work my plan successfully. Specifically, I need to back off this tap tap tap medium that’s become so central to our lives, and actually call my friends on the phone and then make plans to go see them!
People tend to think of South Florida, and The Everglades in particular, as a swamp. But it’s not a swamp. It’s a massive river system that begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles wide and over 100 miles long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state.
Last week Darby, my mom and I got to see the river up close in the Shark Valley section of Everglades National Park. The river and what’s in it—birds, alligators, turtles and fish, all easily visible despite the throngs of camera-toting international tourists. Darby kept a handwritten record in her notebook of the scores of endangered wood storks, the anhingas drying their wings, pied-billed grebes moving through the water, blue herons and egrets fishing, and roseate spoonbills on the wing.
We also learned that Everglades National Park, established in 1947, is the third largest national park in the lower 48 states, covering 1.5 million acres. And that the sup-tropical region is home to six distinct habitats: hammock, mangrove, pineland, sawgrass, slough, and marine.
The Everglades is a great place to reconnect with nature, but the ecosystem is also the sole source of drinking water for more than six million people in South Florida. Hence, the idea that The Everglades needs protective care, now more than ever, is without question.
Contact Friends of the Everglades, the environmental group founded by writer and Everglades activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1969. Or reach out to Everglades Foundation, another group doing important work in the area.
For the past four years I’ve been keeping track of the various trips I take during the year as a way to celebrate (and make note of) the people and places I had the good fortune to visit.
This year I spent at least one night in the following places (other than at home in Portland, OR):
Activists seeking “Climate Justice” have been methodically protesting in Copenhagen during the two-week U.N.-sponsored summit on climate change, in order to push delegates and leaders toward real solutions instead of the usual rhetoric-filled nothingness.
According to The New York Times, the protests went from peaceful to heated today.
In Wednesday’s demonstrations, protesters began massing north of the center shortly before noon and pressed into a tight line of riot police blocking access to the hall. Some of the officers wielded truncheons against the chanting, shoving protesters in a close-order scrum. After forcibly removing protesters from a truck parked in an intersection outside the Bella Center, police in blue vans kept moving the protesters backwards, nearly pushing some into a watery marsh.
As the police vans advanced, skirmishes broke out with protesters who formed human chains and chanted their commitment to nonviolence and to helping people in parts of the world that they said would be hardest hit by climate change. A number of protesters encouraged individual groups to keep pushing against the police.
Apparently, 250 people were arrested today in these “skirmishes” with police. Like the protests around the WTO meetings in Seattle and elsewhere, it’s a hard core minority that seeks to escalate the confrontation. But I don’t believe anti-capitalist sentiment is a minority opinion. People are tired of powerful interests simply running people into the ground.
Mette Hermansen, 27, studying to train teachers, and a member of the International Socialists of Denmark, told the Times, “In the Bella Center they are not discussing solutions to climate change. They are discussing how rich countries can continue emitting and how to sell that to the public. We are not preventing leaders from making solutions but encouraging them to make solutions.”
Bonus click: I also wrote about “Hopenhagen,” the U.N.’s effort to rebrand the famous Danish city during the Conference, on AdPulp.
NPR is running a story on cargo bikes that features two Portland companies in the cargo bike business—Metrofiets and Clever Cycles.
The piece also introduces Portland mom, Carie Weisenbach-Folz, who picks up her two kids, ages 5 and 2, from school. “But instead of loading them into the usual minivan, she’s uses a cargo bicycle.”
Try that in Dallas, Missy.
It’s interesting to note that the majority of Metrofiets’ customers aren’t families—they’re businesses. Metrofiets has built a custom cargo bicycle for a floor refinisher to carry his sander, and another for a brewery to transport their beer kegs. Phillip Ross of Metrofiets says businesses “can absolutely get rid of one of their fleet vehicles, and use one of these bikes, within a certain geographical area around their shop.”
Today, 750,000 Americans bike to work–a 50 percent jump since 2000. There are no estimates yet on the number of cargo bikes on the street.
Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.
In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.
Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.
Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.
Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary” fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.
It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.
Here, let’s listen to the man:
Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.
President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.
In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.
It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.
I love to eat fish. Fresh fish, frozen fish, you name it. But the eco-conscious consumer in me wants to know which is better for me, and the environment.
According to Abby Haight of The Oregonian, frozen is better for the planet because it takes so much less energy to make it safely to your dinner plate.
“We said, ‘Eat wild salmon,’” said Astrid Scholz, vice president of knowledge systems at Ecotrust. “But it made me a little uneasy…. There’s something wrong about catching an Alaska salmon, putting it on a helicopter, and then putting it on a jet to Moscow and then to New York so someone can eat their $50 dinner of fresh Copper River salmon.”
Salmon that are flash-frozen at sea can be transported by freighter or train, which uses significantly less fossil fuel than jets. Troll-caught fish burn diesel fuel as ships chase fish across the seas. An Alaska salmon caught by a purse seiner, however, has a low carbon impact, Scholz said.
megnut and Ninecooks both have articles on cooking flash frozen fish.
