“Priority one for me has always been ensuring American jobs and employers see the full benefits of the natural gas renaissance.” -Oregon Senator Ron Wyden
Energy is often produced in rural areas for the benefit of urban dwellers, who sometimes live and work hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the source. Meanwhile, citizens of rural communities do not begrudge the arrangement—they are hungry for work and the prosperity that comes in the form of high-paying jobs, energy leases, corporate taxes and so on.
Today, in southern Oregon this drama is playing out, as it is in communities across the nation. The proposed Pacific Connector Pipeline, would transport liquefied natural gas, or LNG, 232 miles from Malin, Oregon—where an existing pipeline terminates—to Coos Bay, where an export facility would be built.
The export facility is a $7.7 billion proposal in its own right. Jordan Cove, which is owned by Calgary-based Veresen Inc., and its associated infrastructure will be the single largest private investment in Oregon’s history. According to The Washington Examiner, Jordan Cove is the seventh and latest natural gas export terminal approved by the Energy Department. The Obama administration supports exporting more natural gas.
If it gets built, Jordan Cove would be the first U.S. export terminal on the West Coast, giving it prime real estate to tap into Asian markets thirsty for natural gas.
Naturally, there are forces opposed. “Jordan Cove still needs a slew of federal and state permits to begin construction,” said Zack Malitz of San Francisco-based environmental group Credo, which is opposed to exports because it could lead to more drilling. The Oregon Sierra Club is also squarely against.
The Jordan Cove export terminal at Coos Bay would require the largest port dredging project in Oregon’s history in habitat important for marine species and the fishermen that depend on them. A 230-mile-long pipeline would be built to deliver gas to the terminal, crossing nearly 400 streams in the Klamath, Rogue, Umpqua, Coquille, and Coos watersheds.
In related news, there are greener energy developments brewing along the Oregon coast. The state of Oregon has invested more than $10 million in the Oregon Wave Energy Trust, to fund research and other projects to accelerate the development of wave power in Oregon.
In 2012, Ocean Power Technologies, a Pennington, N.J.-based wave energy company, appeared set to build America’s first grid-connected wave energy project, a 1.5-megawatt power station composed of 10 “PowerBuoys” in waters near Reedsport, Ore. Sadly, they abandoned the project earlier this spring.
In yet another development, Principle Power Inc. is a Seattle company with a permit from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for a wind project off the Oregon coast, near Coos Bay.
“We like what Coos Bay has to offer,” said Kevin Banister, vice president of business development and government affairs for Principle Power. “It’s in the middle of a really rich band of offshore wind.”
Principle said it could have five massive turbines spinning by the summer of 2017.
Rich Saperstein is conversant in Italian and is an avid salt and freshwater fisherman. He’s also Chief Investment Officer at Treasury Partners in New York City and one of the nation’s top financial advisors, according to Baron’s.
Here he is speaking in optimistic terms today about the growting strength of the American economy.
To repeat, “We have no inflation, we have a budget deficit that’s shrinking. There’s tremendous demand (for stocks), and lack of supply.”
Saperstein didn’t say a word about President Obama’s hand in the economic recovery. Maybe there is no need to say anything. We all know who the President is and increasingly Americans know which party is pro-business and pro-labor at the same time.
Pageview journalism is a method of presenting information online in a slideshow or other framework that garners as many clicks from a reader as possible. This is what it looks like:
Writing for The Guardian, Charlie Brooker lambastes the painful conformity of web-based media today, largely in response to the shortcomings of pageview journalism and the damage it does to a journalist’s ability to establish a narrative.
Newspapers used to be sombre dossiers issued each morning, bringing grave news from Crimea. Now they’re blizzards of electric confetti, bringing The Ten Gravest Crimean Developments You Simply Won’t Believe. The art of turning almost any article of interest into a step-by-step clickbait walkthrough has been perfected to the point where reading the internet feels increasingly like sitting on the bog in the 1980s reading a novelty book of showbiz facts that never fucking ends. This trend will only continue. In five years’ time, all news articles will consist of a single coloured icon you click repeatedly to make info-nuggets fly out, accompanied by musical notes, like a cross between Flappy Bird and Newsnight. Even a harrowing report on refugees fleeing a warzone will cynically draw you in by promising to show you a famous person’s bum after every 85th click. And it will succeed.
Media criticism, like this, delivered with a sharp bite is something to behold. The digital echo chamber is deafening. It takes a piercing voice to rise above it. Brooker has this going for him.
Of course, I agree with him that lowest common denominator page view journalism is a shitty development for readers, and makers of news. I’d extend this to advertisers, as well. For brands, the opportunity to serve people with valuable information and develop a customer relationship is in owned and social media. Paid and earned media continue to be important, but even the best online ads and editorial are competing with a thousand other possibly more interesting options, all of which are just a click away.
Media companies that peddle “step-by-step clickbait” believe digital media is not a reading experience, nearly as much as it is a self-guided navigation through text and images. New sites like Medium are beginning to counter this negative trend. Medium is a place for readers—that’s how the site is designed and it shows.
Alternatives like Medium provide one way to combat the “blizzards of electric confetti.” But pageview-driven techniques are not going away. Anything that can be monetized, will be, and right now advertisers and investors are propping up pageview journalism sites with buckets of cash. Henry Blodget told the Financial Times that Business Insider’s 2013 revenue would be “close to” $20 million. That’s a lot of money to work with every year. Nevertheless, media critic, Michael Wolff, puzzles over the math. He concludes, “The digital traffic world, with techniques and sources and results that are ever-more dubious, is, as I’d guess the astute Henry Blodget has ascertained, not a sound long-term play.”
Hard to say who is right, Wolff or Blodget. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” H. L. Mencken suggested. Maybe clicking 30 times through an “article” satisfies people in ways I don’t understand. Perhpas I should not impose my desire to have people read long copy? By the way, this article is under 600 words, so I fully expect high rates of comprehension and retention.
I like to read about media enterprises that are thriving. It provides hope for the industry, and hope for me personally as a writer, editor and self-publisher.
According to The New York Times, Etienne Uzac, 30, and Johnathan Davis, 31, founders of IBT Media, are bringing Newsweek back to print. Each issue will cost $7.99.
“You would pay only if you don’t want to read anything on a backlit screen,” Mr. Uzac said. “It is a luxury product.”
What I find fascinating is how this company’s online media strategy paid dividends and paved the way for this print rebirth. The Times reports that IBT began using online metrics (across its 10 media brands) to help tailor coverage to what readers truly wanted.
Dry corporate-earnings articles larded with financial data, for example, were poorly read. But Mr. Davis discovered that readers landed on earnings pieces by searching for a company’s products. So IBT began to de-emphasize numbers in earnings stories while highlighting a company’s product pipeline.
There is a lot of chatter about big data and its various uses, but here is one example an applied use of data that proved both successful and desirable.
Nearly two months ago, I made the decision to stop adding new content to AdPulp.com. I wanted to starve the blog and my blogging habit in the process. In theory it ought to be easy to do, the starving of a blog. Just close the window on it. Shut down the machine. Look away.
I wish it were that simple, but it’s not, at least it’s not for me. AdPulp exists as a media brand now. Digital media is alive in a way printed media is not, and you don’t put something that’s alive in a drawer and call it good, The End. AdPulp is also alive in our readers’ minds, at least for now. Which begs the question: why step off in the first place? A writer courts an audience like a bee courts flowers, so there’s something unnatural here. Right?
Actually, the reasons for quitting the blog are pretty simple. From a return on investment perspective, ad blogging was a losing proposition. I also confused the marketplace that supports me, by presenting as both ad creator and ad critic. People prefer to hold one idea in their mind about you, not two. Given that making ads pays better than ad criticism, it was easy enough to decide where to focus my efforts.
Having said that, I continue to be an advertising critic and a journalist. Quitting a blog doesn’t change that. In fact, I am working on a new feature right now for The Content Strategist about the challenges of managing “brand voice” in multiple digital channels. In days of old, this article would have gone up on AdPulp.com. It would have been unedited and typically I would have spoken to no sources.
Timeframes for “real journalism” are also much different. A blog post is something you throw together in an hour, maybe two if it’s highly involved. A feature for a proper media entity takes many hours of work spread over several days, even weeks. Now my process looks like this: come up with an idea, pitch it to the editor, create a list of interview questions, find people to interview and schedule a time to talk, take copious notes during the interviews, transcribe the notes, prepare a draft, edit, submit, receive changes from the editor, make changes, re-submit, wait for approval and publication. A blogger would likely laugh at the archaic nature of this process. But I cherish the slow, deliberate, thoughtful approach.
Whatever happens with AdPulp—a sale, an inspired reinvention, or nothing at all—I now have valuable knowledge I didn’t have before. One of the loudest-and-clearest messages from this nine-year journey is build a business first, then add a blog. AdPulp was a blog before the business, a write-it-and-they-will-come dart into steady headwinds.
Contently, the publisher of The Content Strategist, is a good example of the business-first approach to making media today. Contently, the business, is a platform for connecting journalists with publishers and brands. The Content Strategist, on the other hand, is Contently’s media brand–its skin in the game. At the same time, the site is an “ad” for the platform. That’s how it’s done!
The clever display of the poem fragment above is from Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s Poet Laureate. Interestingly, in this Art Beat Oregon segment on OPB, Petersen says poetry must be spoken to be fully realized.
She is right! Here I am sounding out a poem about living in the white noise of Chicago.
U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, writing in Virginia Quarterly, says it’s important to see poetry as a cultural force, and to believe in the necessity of it.
Trethewey also makes this deeply poetic point about poetry’s place in our culture:
Each day we are faced with sound bites and catchphrases deadening and trivializing our language, the widening gulf of our ideological differences eroding civil discourse and our ability to truly communicate with each other, to hear each other. For all of that, poetry is the corrective, the sacred language that allows us to connect across time and space, across all the things in everyday life that separate us and would destroy us.
Last year I began to actively seek out new places to publish my writing.
As someone who has invested heavily in the development of my own sites, I felt it was important to break out of any traps of my own making. To this end, here are three new pieces of writing (not published on any of my own sites) that I’d like to share with you:
Medium is an interesting development for readers and writers. It’s a platform for text, where writers self-publish as they would on their own sites. The difference is Medium offers what only a platform can: opportunities for discovery, collaboration and recommendation.
The web is too big. Millions of personal websites are too hard to find, bookmark, return to and read. Some are well designed for reading, others not so much. I wouldn’t say stand-alone web sites are in danger of extinction, but there is a shift from owned media to shared media.
In my own world, I saw the need for consolidation and focus, which led me to step away from AdPulp.com after a nine year run. The topic became tiresome, but it was also a matter of economics. David Burn the writer and brand builder makes money. David Burn the ad blogger makes friends in the business, and sometimes those friends lead to work.
A blog can be good for business, but the line from the blog to your paid product or service has to be direct and I didn’t have that on AdPulp. I do have that on Bonehook.com.
“Choose my bluest tape and unlock my car
An honest tune with a lingering lead has taken me this far” – Houser/Bell
Here’s a run down of the places (other than home) where I spent at least one night in 2013:
Smithtown, NY
Marco Island, FL
Seattle, WA*
Brownsville, OR*
Takhlakh Lake, WA
Yakima, WA
Abbotsford, BC
Lake Country, BC
Salt Lake City, UT
Baker City, OR
Garibaldi, OR
The year in travel was highlighted by an extraordinary summer vacation in Lake Country, BC. The area is described as Canada’s Napa for its bountiful wineries. It’s much more than wine though, it’s lake living at its finest. So, if you want to compare Okanagan to a place in California, think Tahoe, but with outstanding wine.
Seattle loomed large in 2013 too. I visited the Emerald City four times, including for my birthday last April, for Ryan’s birthday and for Dan and Val’s wedding in July.
Baker City is a place I can’t wait to return to — there’s something powerfully alluring about NE Oregon. For it is tempting to believe that all the last great American places are taken, but NE Oregon and the Wallowa Mountains in particular are not Aspenized in the least.
As my best friend faces his final days on Earth, I am thinking and feeling many things, including how important it is to focus on the right things in life — good times with family and friends, doing meaningful work, battling injustice and pursuing dreams for a better you and a better world. There’s truly no time to hate or to waste.
I know it sounds simple. Do the right thing, honor all people, be kind and considerate. Yet, when you consider how our culture is drowning in negativity—much of it fed to us 24/7 by a voracious and unconscious media—it’s not simple. The reality is it takes all out dedication to the positive to make music and happiness instead.
Right now, I am hyper aware of the gifts we are given in life. DK can no longer walk. When I go on a walk or hike now, I take DK with me in heart and mind. He can also no longer eat food or drink water. Even music isn’t a comfort to him, as cancer eats away his spine and bones. Walking, eating, drinking and listening to music are precious gifts and seeing him do without is a strong reminder of this.
My desire to honor DK has a powerful hold on me. For instance, he always makes an extra effort to stay in touch (even now), which is something close friends do for one another. It is time for me to carry this torch. I want to be more like DK in this way and many other ways. His ability to focus and commit deeply to a path is also highly admirable. This is how you build things in the world, things like an ethics center and a healthy environment for a secular liberal arts education inside one of America’s most conservative counties.
More than any single accomplishment, to me DK’s legacy will be about his commitment to help people become better more fully realized people. DK has always been one of my biggest champions as a writer (along with Darby). I don’t know if I can express how important it is for a writer to have champions. Readers may be the end goal, but without champions you never reach any readers.
As I look to raise my own standards by living up to my friend’s, I reconsider how DK’s unique passion, work ethic and natural intellect helped him reach thousands of students over the years and impact their lives for the better. His eight-part series “An Introduction to Ethics” captures him at his professorial best. I plan to watch and re-watch these lectures for years to come.
Without question, DK will continue to lead and teach well beyond his physical life on Earth. He will live on as long as we love him and look to his life well lived as a source of strength for our own journeys.
I learned about the existence of SCOTUSblog this morning. The site is read widely by those with an interest in Supreme Court cases, and this year won a prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media.
While the industry pub I co-founded lacks the Peabody, I can see a clear parallel between SCOTUSblog and AdPulp. Both are industry blogs put together by industry insiders, as opposed to a publication from a traditional media company. SCOTUSblog’s co-founder and publisher is Tom Goldstein. Goldstein is also a lawyer who specializes in arguing cases before the Supreme Court.
In October 2002, when he and his wife Amy launched the site, Goldstein saw it as a business development opportunity. “Turns out it was a really stupid idea,” Goldstein said in a C-SPAN interview. “People who need serious Supreme Court counsel don’t say, ‘Get me the guy with the website.’”
Three years in, having learned a lesson about media and marketing, SCOTUSblog realigned its purpose.
“We hired a real reporter, Lyle Denniston, who’s been covering the court for more than 50 years and we changed the mission completely,” said Goldstein. “We don’t write about our own cases at all, and we’re not allowed to talk about our own cases. We said we’re just turning this over to the public. It’s not intended to promote us in any way. It’s intended to be a public good.”
Shawn Hartley and I launched AdPulp.com one year after SCOTUSblog got its start. I can affirm Goldstein’s findings. A stand-alone industry blog is a poor vehicle for self-promotion. Like Goldstein, I figured it would be easy for AdPulp’s readers to connect the dots and say to themselves, “Hey, these guys really know what’s up — let’s hire them to make advertising for us.”
Because I am a MarCom pro, this lesson might have been easy for me to relearn. It was not. Ergo, I will repeat after myself…Complicate and/or confuse the marketplace at considerable risk to your earning power.
I nearly quit AdPulp several times in the past few years. I have always enjoyed the act of making the site, but the near term return on investment has been consistently disappointing. Like Goldstein wisely counsels, people who want an ad campaign do not turn to the guys with a website.
Goldstein smartly incorporated his learnings and went in a new direction. SCOTUSblog is now a viable media entity. I’d like to see AdPulp become a more viable media entity, as well. We started it as a business, not a hobby, but it has become more hobby than business over the years.
Perhaps, we too need a shift in focus? For nine years, we’ve been a site for ad grunts by ad grunts. But that’s a small, well-informed audience. Meanwhile, there’s a massive audience of relatively uninformed advertising lovers and haters that we might serve.
