Burnin’

We just completed a nine day journey cross country by car from coastal South Carolina to Portland, Oregon. On day one, we stopped for lunch in Asheville, NC to say “hi” to Gary and Katie. We then pushed on to Lexington, KY for the night. From the hotel we walked first to Mexican food and top shelf margs, then over to the historic Red Mile for harness racing. In the morning we found our coffee place downtown, before heading out to horse country for a tour of the distillery where the world’s best bourbon, Woodford Reserve, is made.

From the limestone hills of Kentucky, we headed north for Cincinnati where our wonderful hosts, Dave and Tera Ackerman, plus their kids, dogs and friends entertained us in their fine Craftsman-era home. That was fun. Day three took us northwest to Chicago where Casey and Gwen opened their Ravenswood apartment to us for the night. Stef came over and we walked down to Pizza D.O.C. on Lawrence to meet Liz and Buban for dinner. Pizza D.O.C. rocks, as does having dinner with friends one hasn’t seen in years. There was more drinking at two Lincoln Square bars after dinner–hey, this is Chicago we’re talking about here–before retiring to Casey and Gwen’s.

Sunday we dropped in on Evil Vince for a visit, before heading west. When Chicago started to give way to the fields of corn, I started to feel good. I felt even better when we crossed the Mississippi River and drove through the picturesque hills of Iowa. The sunset and simultaneous moonrise, as we were pulling into Omaha on night four, was stunning. We grabbed some salad, pizza and wine for dinner at a patio table in the Old Market before heading over for a free night on points at Hilton Garden Inn. In the morning I met with Shawn at his work place and had a chance to talk to his boss about picking up some copywriting assignments. We then met my aunt Leanne for lunch at Kona Grill in West O before heading for the Sandhills on Highway 2. We stopped in Halsey–where my grandpa and I used to go deer hunting–to mail some letters. At Seneca, we pulled over to see the Middle Loup River up close. A local gentleman directed us to his “rickety” cable and plyboard bridge over the river, a kind gesture we greatly appreciated.

We looked for a dinner spot in Alliance but decided to head on to Scottsbluff for the night. When we got there places were closing, but The Gaslight in Gering took us in and made steaks for us. I love Nebraska and Nebraskans. On day six we took the back way to Laramie, seeing the North Platte River near Fort Laramie. In the college town of Laramie we ate a kind hippie lunch at Jeffrey’s Bistro before heading over to Martindale’s for some new pearl snaps and a straw hat. That’s Laramie in a nutshell–part hippie, part cowboy.

We pushed westward on I-80 to Salt Lake City, where DK was entertaining his family rooftop at American Towers. DK and Anina recently purchased a truly outstanding 19th floor apartment in American Towers, with south-, west- and north-facing views. In the morning we headed up City Creek Canyon for a hike, then ventured across the tracks to Red Iguana for a mole festival at one of the nation’s best Mexican joints.

We were tempted to stay another night in SLC, but opted instead to drive five hours further west on I-80 to Winnemucca, where I thought we’d rent a cute little cabin or roadhouse room for the night. Instead, we looked at several flea-bitten options before settling in to the Days Inn. Thankfully, the grocery store had a Peet’s Coffee in it, so we fueled up in the morning and headed onto one of the loneliest stretches of two-lane road you’ll find anywhere in America. North of Winnemucca about 40 miles, we turned left onto Highway 140, which goes for many miles before delivering one to Oregon and the homey little town of Lakeview. Jerry’s Dinner in Lakeview made us perfectly prepared hash browns to go with our sandwiches and iced tea. We then took more country roads toward Crater Lake National Park, a park we’d never visited before. After you enter the park, you climb up several thousand feet to the rim of the ancient volcano and peer into the pearl blue otherworldly lake. Wow.

We took Highway 138 north from the park and wound down the canyon with the North Umpqua River as our guide. Another major wow. We caught up with the interstate highway system again in Roseburg and punched it up to Eugene for the night, where we dined on Thai food and infused ginger-cranberry cocktails. We made it to Portland by mid-day on Friday and began to settle in.

I.O.U.S.A. is a new documentary film premiering this month. The Los Angeles Times calls the film “an 87-minute alarm on the tsunami of debt bearing down on the United States’ future, caused by the rising national debt, the trade imbalance and the pending costs of baby boomers cashing in on entitlements.”

David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office, appears in the film. In March of this year, Walker resigned from the GAO so he could become even more vocal on the debt crisis.

The nation’s debt now accounts for 66% of the gross national product. But unless things change, the film argues that the cost of aging baby boomers will push that proportion to 244% by 2040, twice what it was at the end of World War II, our highest level of national debt. A debt that high, super-investor Warren E. Buffett says in the film, “could create real political instability.”

The film will open in 400 theaters around the country Aug. 21, followed by a live video town hall meeting from Omaha, featuring Walker, Peter Peterson of the Blackstone Group and Buffett.

By the way, this report from the GAO says most corporations doing business in the U.S. pay NO taxes whatsoever.

I enjoyed reading Mark Bowden’s piece in The Atlantic on changes being made to The Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership.

Bowden makes the point that Rupe lives by the scoop and that he sees news as a commodity, not literature or, God forbid, public service.

This is how Murdoch understands journalism—as content, a word he uses all the time, rather than as a form of literature or public service, and as a commodity whose value largely derives from its instant retail malleability. A short, crisp scoop that dramatically advances a major developing story—Obama’s poll numbers down! Britney back in rehab! Steinbrenner to fire another manager!—can be neatly packaged for a dizzying variety of media: print, radio, TV, the Internet, or even cell-phone screens. It doesn’t matter much to a fully integrated media conglomerate like News Corporation how its customers choose to access this content, as long as the transaction pays. He wants his reporters out in front of every competitor on the planet.

This means that, at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908.

I might add that the above argument is about content, not distribution. Rupe, like every other pedaller of content, is investing in the medium of the day, the net. Here Bowden gets worked up.

The Internet is in many ways a superior medium for journalism. It costs virtually nothing, in contrast to multimillion-dollar printing presses, giant rolls of paper and tankers of ink, and fleets of delivery trucks, to say nothing of the thousands of laborers needed to operate the equipment and distribute the product. But while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.

The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.

Neither does Rupert Murdoch.

I added the emphasis in the above passage, because I have invested years of effort in online content creation. My work is far from institutional, for it’s just me and a few friends doing what we do. Yet, in this chaotic media environment, I see opportunity. Opportunity to go well beyond blogging.

I like the term micro-media for it’s obvious connection to micro-beer. Micro-brewers recognized that the big players in beer treat their beers as a commodities and nothing more, so they chose to make something markedly better and the market responded favorably. Now many micro-brewers are themselves well established entities with national distribution and legions of fans. Essentially, that’s what we’re striving for with sites like HuskerZone and AdPulp. We’re pursuing a different flavor of coverage around niche subjects we care about.

We’re a long ways from an ideal editorial product at this time, but I hope to get there by dedicating to the work. I want to see our micro-media experiments excite people. To some degree they do now, but I want to get to where Sam Adams and New Belgium are. I want our published products to become side-by-side options for consumers. To achieve this, we will need to stop blogging and start breaking news. If we can garner the resources–time and money–we can do it.

The interesting thing is online content creators can learn from the both poles—the scoops and short format favored by Rupe’s papers and the values-based, facts first reporting of papers like The New York Times and Washington Post.