I’ve long held that “the real you” needs to show up for a job interview. You may as well dress the way you dress, act the way you act and generally be yourself, because it’s you that has to show up every weekday for years on end, not some flimsy projection of you.
Turns out, Hunter S. Thompson was on this page back in 1958 when he was looking for a newspaper job after the Army.
A book blog from the staff of AbeBooks has the entire text of a letter that Thompson sent Jack Scott of the Vancouver Sun. Here’s one of the juicier parts of Thompson’s appeal:
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Thompson didn’t get the job, but there’s still a lot we can learn from his approach. Writers, of all people, must have a point of view, or they’re not writers, they’re typists.
But even if you’re not a writer, you’re a vital person with a past, present and future. Inject some of your dreams, struggles and most importantly your personality into a query letter. Sure, there’s risk involved when you reveal your true self, but if you fail to communicate anything of value, you’ll also fail to be noticed.
Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. In November he wrote about being “a blogger no longer.” Here’s an interesting passage in his sign off piece about the difference between writing traditional journalism and writing a blog.
Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging (on the other hand) is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view.
So, blogs are first person affairs? Many of them are indeed, but there’s no bloggers’ rule book that says, “Insert your opinion” or “Write in fist person.” Blogging is more about the platform. It’s where writers rush to publish. Again, there’s no rule book that says speed is of the essence, it’s just that pro bloggers feel compelled to publish a handful of times per day.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, in a reflective piece about how he used to write for AOL for a mere $5 per post, says he’s now having a hard time filling RWW’s current opening for a full time tech blogger.
Big league bloggers and writers these days need to be able to write well, in large quantity and quickly. It’s not easy, but who said writing for a living, in an era when anyone can publish with ease, was going to be easy?
In yet another thought piece on the lost art of blogging, The New York Observer observes that the best pro bloggers are writing original material today.
“I think the story of blogging in the last couple of years or more, professional blogging, is that we all do a lot more original content,” said Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. Choire Sicha of The Awl also notes the importance of original content. Specifically, he referenced the flyaway success of their newest property, The Hairpin, which he credits to its editor, Edith Zimmerman.
“She’s not aggregating blog posts about the thing that just came down the wire. She’s making things, and I think one of the mistakes that a lot of blogs make that kind of dead-end them as blogs is covering the same thing that everyone’s covering instead of like creating things and stopping to make stuff,” Mr. Sicha said.
To recap, pro bloggers (or those who make money from their efforts) are no longer writing personal journals while dressed in pajamas. Whatever their beat, pro bloggers have a distinct point of view, create a mountain of content every day and the best of the best don’t just write things, they make things.
Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government, in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media—and for good reason.
The marketing obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State’s increasing power. You can’t have it both ways, but the adolescent response is to whine and cajole Mom and Dad (or the State) for more allowance and more “freedom.†But freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it’s simply an extended childhood.
President Obama must be seeking re-election because here he is earlier today advocating for the continuation of the status quo:
I wish Obama wouldn’t concern himself with re-election and instead do the right thing for the country every day for two more years. But he won’t, because he’s stuck inside the two-party system, which is a prison of our own making. I’d like to think that one day we might break free of this prison, but to do so we will have to stop feeding the guards.
According to The New York Times, Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time.
Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends.
Naturally, this isn’t good. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,†said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.â€
“The headline is: bring back boredom,†added Dr. Rich.
Simon Dumenco, writing for Ad Age, taps a nerve when discussing the rise of social gaming and what it means for our culture.
In FarmVille, of course, you “work” your own plot of land, while FrontierVille stokes nostalgia for Manifest Destiny. (“Howdy, Pardner! Come join us on the frontier, where you’ll carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family.”) Cafe World makes you a small-business owner/operator.
FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 61.6 million active users and over 24.1 million Facebook application fans in June 2010. If you spend any time on Facebook at all, a portion of your friends will spam you with Farmville requests. Dumenco asks, “How America-right-now is that?” I might simplify his rhetorical question to “How American is that?” Day-dreamy ambition is indeed an American trait. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his entire career addressing the topic, and he’s one of our most literate 20th century voices.
Dumenco admits to being depressed by the rise of social media gaming. I know what he means but it’s important to make room for the imagination. There are more imaginative things to do than play games, online or off, but on the grand scale of attention robbing activities, Farmville and its lot are relatively innocent. First person shooter games are another story. Giving kids toy guns is bad enough, but now we provide the whole killing experience via the click of a mouse. Now that’s depressing. It’s also sick and wrong.
Men’s Health named Portland, Oregon “America’s Most Patriotic City.”
The magazine came to its conclusion after factoring the number of registered voters who turned out for state and federal elections in 2004 and 2008, money spent on military veterans, percentage of residents who volunteer, and finally, sales of fireworks and U.S. flags.
Portland wins lots of media contests and has long been the darling of The New York Times, but this new designation from Men’s Health Magazine is surprising to me, for Portland is home to lots of free thinkers. Of course, free thinkers are the people who make America great, but they’re often marginalized in favor of another, simpler view of patriotic Americans.
Speaking of Portland’s free thinkers, I met Jeffrey Thomas at Meatapalooza on Wednesday and just days later a huge, flattering feature by D.K. Row appears in The Oregonian on Thomas.
Row is the paper’s art critic and he asks Thomas, a former art dealer, some great questions about the art of selling art.
Q: Can you remind us how tough it was to sell art back in the ’80s here in Portland?
A: Remember, this was a timber economy and in the 1980s, Oregon went through its first of many recessions. We went through three years of lapsed timber sales; this little business called Intel was just starting up, so we really had no tech industry. Interest rates for houses were 12.5%.
So it was a tough time to get interest in cultural activity. There was a lot of money in town but you did not show it. It was very old school WASP. Nobody showed their wealth; no one supported anything. There was this anti-philanthropic thing going on. You just didn’t show that you had money. That made for a tough environment to create cultural activity and awareness that would draw people here.
Q: And people think it’s tough now.
A: It was nothing like it was then. There was just no cultural awareness. It was a country club for a few families and everyone else was part of the working class. There were few galleries, and only a handful of people interested in them.
Today, Thomas is a producer and photographer’s rep for Polara Studio. His Polara bio says, “…in his mind every day is a birthday party, which sort of explains the applause and flowers that he constantly showers upon everyone around him.”
Digital ninja, Faris Yakob–who I had the pleasure of meeting at a conference in Cambridge, MA a few years ago–made a guest post on Gaping Void that resonates.
Here’s the heart of Yakob’s argument:
Once you begin to extend yourself via media, you become aware that by broadcasting your life through media fragments, you are creating an idea of who you are that is distinct from, but inextricably linked to, who you are.
And that brand is a highly defensible asset.
Naturally, Yakob is referencing the ideas in “The Brand Called You,” a 1997 article by Tom Peters in Fast Company. I bought in to this line of thinking pretty much since it emerged and I’ve been actively “extending myself via media” since 1999, when I launched my first site.
Given the investments I’ve made in my brand, particularly at AdPulp, I ought to have a “highly defensible asset” that can be used to land clients, speaking engagements, job offers and the like. Yet, the reality on the ground isn’t nearly as grand as all that. I’ve spent many a long night tossing and turning on why that is.
One problem is I’ve established myself as an ad critic while continuing to work in the business, which may lead to some unintentional confusion. For instance, when you meet me, are you meeting David Burn the ad guy, or David Burn the guy who rips on and/or compliments other ad guys? Personally, I’ve never had a hard time unifying the two. To make quality communications, one needs to be acutely aware of the rest of the field in order to instinctively react to it, build upon it or utterly reject it. For that reason, AdPulp ought to be the ultimate portfolio piece. But unless the job in question calls for the creation of an online media property, it’s often perceived to be an apples-to-oranges situation.
Here’s the thing though, I’m not really concerned about the brand called me problem I just outlined. As Shakespeare said, “to thine own self be true.” I’m doing what I like to do, and what I’m good at. I don’t need a bunch of people to recognize how to best employ my talents for their own benefit, I just need a handful of people to do so. That’s why I started Bonehook and that’s why it’s a content development firm, versus an “ad agency.” I’m making it as obvious as I can that my success with AdPulp is directly transferable to any number of my client’s marketing problems.
I didn’t go to journalism school, but I was a journalist while in school. My training as a reporter and news editor on The College Reporter–more than my classes–prepared me for the work I’ve been doing for 22 years now.
My uncle was a journalist, a pioneer in TV broadcasting. When I graduated from F&M, I asked him if I ought to pursue a Masters in Journalism. He said that’s one way to do it, the other is to become an expert in a field first, then start covering that field. As it turns out, that’s the path I chose, or maybe it chose me. Either way, I worked in marketing communications for many years before I started to cover the industry on AdPulp, an industry site I co-founded, write and edit.
With that in mind, I’d like point to Chris Lynch and his ideas about where journalism, and J-school education is today.
In the coming years, I think most journalism schools will shrink or disappear. The ones remaining will be drastically different, with students focusing on topics that don’t relate to content creation at all. Moreover, some of the best new professional content creators won’t attend journalism schools. They will hail from different majors and degrees, like business, computer science and finance. The notion of being a professional journalist who is merely an objective observer of a topic or industry will officially fade in the coming years. This is a good thing, since it was a stupid fantasy that it should be like that anyway.
…most journalists today aren’t experts; they merely report about people that are. This creates a barrier and credibility problem that people paid little attention to before the Web because the journalists’ identities to regular people were less transparent, and less social.
The move to a pay model will be the first step in giving rise to the Reader Elite. Pay-for-media sites will employ smaller staffs that will produce headier content to satisfy its needs. Paying up to hundreds of dollars a year for their content boutiques of choice, the Reader Elite will expect stories, videos and podcasts put together by on-site content creators across the world.
Skipping over the elitist part of his argument for a moment, I’m thinking I’d very much like to get a percentage of the readers who frequent AdPulp to pay us hundreds of dollars a year for our work. Perhaps, that’s the next stage in AdPulp’s evolution as a media property.
But what about the remainder of Lynch’s points above? Is objectivity a tired old 20th century notion with no place in modern media? Are J-schools a waste of time and money? Will the rise of pay models hurt civic discourse? These are meaty questions and I thank Lynch for serving them up.
An objective storyteller is a faulty idea. Storytellers, by definition, have a point of view. Fairness is the question, not objectivity.
As for J-schools, they will adapt or perish, just like the businesses that employ their graduates. Will they adapt fast enough for this fast changing marketplace? If they don’t, another kind of school will rise up to meet the need, which is what happened in advertising. In advertising, one goes to an industry school like The Creative Circus or Miami Ad School to learn from working professionals. I can see where media companies might start calling for this type of hands on, real world training too. Whether established schools or startups staffed by working media professionals meet the need isn’t important, because the need will be met.
Lastly, will online pay models reward elites, while ignoring the needs of those who can’t afford multiple expensive subscriptions? I don’t think so. The idea that information is free (and wants to be free) is is still in beta. As far back as the late 18th century, people, not all of them rich, paid for content. In fact, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” cost two shillings, which Paine thought too high. The public did not agree and Paine’s pamphlet sold over one hundred fifty thousand copies in its first printing. Eventually over five hundred thousand copies were sold.
The mistake made recently by digital publishers of all sorts was to offer their content for free in the first place. Many, like The Times of London, now see the error of their ways and are preparing to put the genie back in the bottle. Here’s how the managers of that particular paper see things:
There are those who argue that it is in some way contrary to the “spirit of the internet†to charge for content. This is an absurd contention. The internet is one vast free market. Indeed it is the critics who fail to understand the net. In the early days it might have been possible to regard online publishing as merely a marketing teaser to encourage print sales. Years later, the internet has grown up and grown out of this. It is a proper platform for publishing a newspaper and we propose to treat it as such.
The Times will charge £2 a week for access to both the Times and the Sunday Times, which goes to Lynch’s point about hundreds of dollars per year, per periodical. But here’s the thing, if a site produces original content that no else has, their product is worth every penny. Which is another way of saying there’s too much talk about technological upheaval, and not enough focus on the fundamentals of the media business. I often say, “may the best storyteller win.” The reality is if an organization is able to charge for its content–because it is high quality and in demand–it needs to do so.
[UPDATE] Mashable is reporting that in the last four years, newspaper ad revenue dropped by 44.24%. That’s nearly half of the industry’s revenue.
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.â€
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.
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.
