Series A Crunch? Can’t We Call It The Seed-Investment Glut?

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Posted January 29th, 2013 in Innovation, Reconsider This | 0 Comments

Let’s start with what the Series A crunch is.*

For that, turn to how CB Insights defines it in its Seed Investing Report from December: “[The] Series A crunch is nothing more than excessive demand for a limited supply of Series A financings.”

Precisely. Lest we’re confused from the get-go, it’s important to know that the Series A crunch does not refer to any sort of contraction in the overall number of Series A investors doling out stacks of Benjy Franklins to cash-hungry startups.

Rather, the “crunch” represents what will happen as hordes of startups—those that have received seed rounds of financing from angel investors—find themselves chasing too few Series A dollars. Again, turn to CB Insights’ Seed Investing Report: 1,000 startups will be “orphaned” as they’re unable to raise successive rounds of investment capital following their initial seed raises.

Admittedly, this point about what “Series A crunch” means was muddled in the piece I wrote for Technically Baltimore, especially where I scoffed openly at even calling this phenomenon a Series A crunch:

“Series A crunch? Meh. What appears to be happening, rather, is that startups are starting to feel the effects of an excessive amount of poorly executed seed deals undertaken by inexperienced angel investors.”

I promise you I’m not operating under a misapprehension of what the tech world means when it says Series A crunch.

I am, however, being a curmudgeonly fuck. Let me explain.

In financial terms, a crunch is a shortage of cash or credit. We’ve already established that “Series A crunch” is a phrase that does not represent any shrinking in the overall capacity of Series A dollars. It’s not as if Thurston Howell Barnaby the Deuces is dropping dead, and therefore his $50 million in what could have been Series A funding is suddenly gone (with the appropriate amount extracted by the federal government in the form of estate taxes).

So why are we calling this phenomenon the Series A crunch instead of the Seed-Investment Glut? Or, you know, the Angel-Seed Glut? (Don’t laugh.) Or: “EXPLOSION!”

Forgive me for engaging in nothing more than a game of semantics, but I majored in English literature in college. Dissecting words, their meanings, and why certain diction is used in describing specific situations is more appealing to me than a jungle juice-soaked weekend in Vegas.

What I tried doing in my piece for Technically Baltimore was reframe the conversation. If a crunch is a shortage, then I don’t want to call this a Series A crunch. (Insert refutations by reporters/tech big-wigs—with far more experience/talent than a 24-year-old—asserting that all I’m doing is whining.)

Let’s call this something that focuses on the problem, namely: the deleterious effect had on startups when too many angel investors engage in seed deals, inflating companies’ relative worth, and, perhaps, founders’ dreams and aspirations.

Over the last four years or so, we’ve seen the volume of seed deals balloon. This “crunch” is now happening thanks to “pesky angel investors flinging dollar bills harder than Rick Ross out of a Maybach’s front, driver-side window, #LIKEABOSS.”

What that has created is an issue of supply and demand. With so many startups having received smaller rounds of seed financing, that means there are now more startups shooting for a limited amount of Series A funding. A portion of those startups are crappy startups that don’t deserve money, period.

Others, however—ones perhaps worthy of, and in need of, more investment dollars—will garner no attention from Series A investors. Which means those startups will receive no more funding. Which means those startups become subject to fortune (as well as a caffeine drip and the relative worth of whatever they’re selling). Will they make enough money to keep operating, or will they be forced to close shop? (Remember when unemployment was below 7 percent?)

CB Insights’ latest report shows that the volume of Series A deals in Q4 of 2012 increased.** So why the crunch?

Let’s pick a word that shines the spotlight on the problem: far, far too many seed deals.

*Rick Ross GIF unrelated to aforementioned crunch.

**Yes, yes, I KNOW even the smallest increase in Series A deals won’t alleviate the painful money-strapped smackdown many a startup will face as 2013 continues.

Modern Neck Wear From an Unlikely Source

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Posted April 27th, 2012 in Menswear | 0 Comments

Barton Strawn didn’t attend college to be a clothing designer. Now the 24-year-old N.C. State graduate, along with fellow sartorialists Justin Carey and Paul Connor, owns and operates Lumina Clothing Company, maker of skinny ties and bow ties that display a savvy, Southern sensibility. (It’s like Mad Men, only with gingham. And fewer martinis.)

Photo courtesy of Lumina Clothing Co.


Barton Strawn is good at design. At least, as an architecture major at North Carolina State, he was expected to be. So it only made sense that in 2009, during his junior year, Strawn found himself sitting behind—a sewing machine.

It all started with a few job interviews. Strawn, along with engineering-major friends Justin Carey and Jordan Pung, were beginning to look for work. “We were getting to that point in our college career where we were having to go to more formal functions,” says Strawn. “Job interviews . . .[a] variety of things that required us to dress a little more formally than we had in the past.”

Armed with a sartorial sensibility that belied their years, the three trekked through downtown Raleigh, N.C., looking for ties they could pair with the suits they already owned.

“We’re all fairly fashion savvy,” says Strawn. “But when we got to the store, there really wasn’t much of a selection.”

Pung and Carey seized on Strawn’s creative instincts and his background in design and, half-joking, urged him to make ties for the three of them; Strawn responded by making several skinny ties and a couple bow ties.

“The more we wore them around, the more we got complimented on the ties we were wearing from people in stores where we were shopping. That’s when it dawned on us that we could probably take this from just a hobby, essentially, into something that was an actual business.”

Enter Lumina Clothing Company. On a shoestring budget, the trio set out to create a line of neck and bow ties. Working out of Strawn’s mother’s house in Raleigh on a single sewing machine, they gradually built up their company to carry full lines of traditional ties, dress shirts, and bow ties that display a savvy sensibility, in patterns, colors, and cuts that are undeniably—and, perhaps, stereotypically—of the South (think: bright yellow, lime green, and light blue checkered and gingham patterns).

Today the company is still headed by Strawn and Carey; a third partner, Paul Connor, was brought in after Pung departed. And tomorrow at the inaugural Confirmed Stock event at 2640 Space, the team will be selling their signature lines of bow and neck ties, men’s shirts, and samples of their forthcoming line of men’s trousers. Fairly soon, says Carey, Lumina Clothing will release its first blazer as well was a line of women’s dresses.

Photo courtesy of Lumina Clothing Co.

Lumina Clothing borrows its namesake from the old entertainment and dance pavilion that opened in 1905 at Wrightsville Beach, N.C. Early ties’ names befitted the overarching theme: the “Dapper Dodger”; the “Chapel Thrill”; the “Sunshine State” and “Limeade.”

“It’s definitely a very purposeful decision to have a Southern appeal come through,” says Strawn. “But it’s one that can be appreciated by southerners and people who are from other parts of the country.”

While the Lumina gents now source all their fabric from wholesaling companies and use large-scale manufacturers for production—ties made in New York, shirts made in South Carolina—the process of making ties, in the beginning, was a little more hands-on. Strawn thought up the patterns for the neckties and bow ties, and all three purchased material at local fabric stores. Then Strawn, along with his mother, Karen, would work out of her house sewing each tie by hand (with the help of a sewing machine, of course).

“When your clientele base isn’t all that large, you can afford to make one bow tie at a time and you can afford to make one necktie at a time,” says Strawn.

In addition, the scale of Lumina’s initial, capital funding minimized what the company was able to pull off at the outset. Strawn, Carey, and Pung poured their own savings into the project, not wanting to take out loans or seek the monetary assistance of a third-party investor.

“One of our goals was to try to build it up from a very small capital base into something that was larger,” says Strawn. “And that in itself has been tough. … You know, you don’t have to be 45 to start a company. You can be 20, and part of that is working on that shoestring budget.”

But while being young menswear entrepreneurs can be difficult—minimal funding in a capital-intensive industry; being one person yet performing multiple duties (in Strawn’s case, not only does he plan out the ties for each season, but he designs and codes Lumina’s website, without which the guys wouldn’t have a national selling platform); and, as Strawn puts it, “never really not thinking about the company . . . even when I’m out with friends”—working as newcomers in a fairly traditional industry affords the Raleigh gents opportunities not readily available to their older counterparts.

“There certainly have been moments when we all kind of take a step back, where we have that moment and that shock factor where we think we might be in over our head,” says Strawn. “But one of the benefits of being young is we didn’t know how it’s [men’s clothing] always been done. And so that allowed us to look at the men’s fashion world in a slightly different light. We have a chance to do things differently than how it’s always been done.”

For the Lumina crew, that means bringing together seemingly disparate elements—Southern patterns and colors with classic, preppy styling—into a uniform package they can call their own.

Photo courtesy of Lumina Clothing Co.

“When we first started doing the neck wear, we noticed a trend with menswear in general that was shying a little more toward sort of the brighter, what are traditionally considered southern patterns and colors,” says Strawn. “It was also shying more toward a sort of classic, preppy look . . . so we wanted to pick up on that and add our own little touch to it.”

That Lumina touch is the width of the neckwear. All of their ties and bow ties are a far cry from the Gordon Gecko-like eighties ties that were fatter than the StayPuft Marshmallow Man. But, says Strawn, people they speak with in North Carolina identify Lumina’s patterns as too edgy, or modern, whereas people in cities like New York and even Nashville flock to Lumina’s ties’ patterns and widths.

“It’s an odd merger,” says Strawn. “We really picked up on people from D.C. and Nashville and larger cities that tend to be a little more fashion forward than those here in the south, but are still rooted in some of that southern tradition.”

In addition, the guys recognize the value in pairing traditional items—like the bow tie, which is Lumina’s best-seller—with more modern looks. And that, ultimately, is what drives their styling spirit.

“The bow tie is an interesting piece of men’s accessory because there’s a certain following of older gentlemen who wear bow ties, love bow ties, and continue to wear them,” says Strawn. “We’re seeing kind of a resurgence of the bow tie. … They don’t have to look old. They don’t have to look traditional. They can be done in a way that’s fun and modern.”

[Insert Title of Another Digital Trends Piece Here]

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Posted February 27th, 2012 in Carnival of Journalism, Innovation, Journalism | 0 Comments

Speaking about new technologies that have the potential to significantly or irrevocably alter the state of journalism in the twenty-first century is an exercise in both grandstanding and educated speculation—primarily because we don’t exactly know what’s going to alter that state. (Case in point: the exponential growth of the photo-sharing site Pinterest, and the recent move by Flickr to disable pinning of copyrighted images.) This isn’t to say the matter isn’t worth discussing, which is precisely why February’s Carnival of Journalism asks what “emerging technology or digital trend  … will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?” I’d like to argue that the second, qualifying question—“How do you see it playing out in terms of applications by journalists?”—is the more robust, and tricky, question to answer.

As an example, think back to last week when this story surfaced on Jim Romenesko’s blog: Nick O’Neill accused Forbes writer Kashmir Hill of stealing author Charles Duhigg’s work. An excerpt from Duhigg’s forthcoming book (The Power of Habit will be on bookstore shelves tomorrow) was published in The New York Times Magazine; Hill, according to O’Neill, “cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story,” something that grabbed her “a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.” O’Neill’s fundamental question: “When someone else spends a significant amount of time to research and develop something, is it not them that deserves the majority of the recognition?” (Read Romenesko’s post, linked to in the first sentence of this paragraph. He has responses from all three parties, including Hill’s counter-argument that she provided plenty of in-story recognition of Duhigg and for his work.)

The digital trend here is one that has been around: linking and “repackaging” stories. Nieman Journalism Lab today published a good read by Jonathan Stray on the value of linking to other stories. But the essence of the matter comes down to the nature of journalism itself: sniffing out stories, conducting interviews and research with sources, and publishing a wholly original work. In the digital age, original works can be of the traditional variety or an amalgamation of information collected from previously published articles, which are then linked to, and this is what we call attribution. (By the way, I think both have merit. To be clear, plagiarism—what would have been, in this example, Hill’s taking Duhigg’s words without attributing him by name and without using quotation marks, which she did not do—is blatantly wrong, for professional and ethical reasons.)

How this might impact journalism rests squarely upon our interpretation of the act of reporting itself. Or, in other words, in a digital age, is information free?* What we gain by linking and repackaging are, respectively, more thorough and robust articles and a wider readership for certain stories. Depending upon the subject matter of said stories, we might view repackaging as a necessary function as it relates to our mission as journalists: exposing truths and drawing people’s focus to issues of paramount importance. (Another Nieman article to read: On ProPublica and “aggregation in the people’s interest.”)

But what complicates this interpretation somewhat—and what would complicate such an interpretation of a well known digital trend if the interpretation gained legs, so to speak—is economics. Ideas, and information, are not scarce goods, as economists would say. And if we behave as strict adherents to that rule, then the question of what journalists are worth, monetarily speaking, gets completely exploded. (Refer to last month’s Carnival topic, when we wondered if good journalists can be good capitalists; my sense is that no one wants to admit they are a capitalist, unless, of course, it’s at the risk of not receiving a check for a published article.)

Interesting to consider is a wider-scale, slightly adapted version of something like Spot.Us,** which would take the digital trend here—linking, repackaging—and ensure that compensation went to both the repackaging author and the writer whose material was repackaged. If that were the case, I wonder how many allegations of work-stealing would get thrown around.

*This is the point where some people will probably stop reading, as I always end up taking these Carnival of Journalism topics and turning them into questions better left to brandy-drinking sessions in fireplace-bedecked rooms replete with high-backed leather chairs. (If you have one of these rooms, please, let me know.)

**SHAMELESS PLUG TIME! I am still seeking funding to complete a story about a Mississippi cyclist struck from behind by a car, an accident which put her in the hospital and therapy for months, and has resulted in a frustrating series of events with the state’s legal system, mainly because of the qualifications of Mississippi’s three-feet law.

Help! (…Me Write an Article)

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Posted February 7th, 2012 in Innovation, Journalism | 1 Comment

Friends, Americans, Countrywomen and Countrymen:

It has been eight months since I graduated from college and embraced a new life as a poor writer. I’m living a dream that has been romanticized through the years in a number of beautiful ways: expatriate living in France; participation in a Spanish civil war; eating your body weight in Ramen noodles. Believe it or not, though, things are coming together. For those who don’t know, I’ve been employed at Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine since May, writing articles for the print magazine and doing all things digital media (think: The Facebook, and a bunch of technical terms about “unique visitors” that Google itself can’t explain properly). I’ve also been holding my own as a freelance writer. And since October, I’ve been reporting and doing research on my biggest story to date:*

In May 2011, Jan Morgan—wife, retired physician, Florida Ironman competitor—was struck from behind by a vehicle while biking a stretch of Mississippi 50. At the time, the driver was on her cell phone and, before finally being forced from her car, ran over Jan’s head a second time. For nearly a month, Jan was in a sedative-induced coma, after which she spent five weeks in an Atlanta hospital recovering, and then another three months in therapy. By striking Jan with her car, the driver violated Mississippi’s three-foot-law, which mandates that motor vehicles leave three feet of buffer space between them and cyclists. Violating the law results in a misdemeanor charge. However, on the recommendation of Mississippi law enforcement, Jan filed a charge of simple assault with a deadly weapon against the driver, who was found guilty—and was then handed a $50 fine, which she is now appealing. (In other words, the judge knocked down the sentence.)

You can find out more on the story, set to be published in The Oxford American magazine, here. That’s where you come in. Funding for the story is limited; The Oxford American, while a national magazine award winner, operates on a tight budget. I’m using Spot.Us to seek the additional funding needed for a reporting trip to Mississippi.** And I’d like your help. Any amount contribution, even just a dollar, helps out with airline and rental car costs. Think of it as an investment in something exponentially less volatile than a wild housing market.

Here’s how this all works:
1. Go to my pitch at: http://spot.us/pitches/1138-a-sunday-bike-ride-and-then-a-coma
2. Click the large button that says “Free Credits” or “Fund This” on the right. You’ll have to register/login.
3. Take the quick questionnaire or contribute via credit card or PayPal.
4. On the check out page, make sure everything adds up correctly, applying your credits (aka how much it will bill you).
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for another survey, or pass steps 1-4 along to others.

Thank you, thank you.

Yours in community-funded journalism,

Andrew

*Hat tip to Pat Taylor for posting a Reddit link about this to my Facebook wall many months back.

**The due date for an initial draft is in early March, which, depending on how the fundraising goes, might make it difficult to get to Mississippi this month for on-the-ground reporting. I’m now coordinating with sources there (as well as assembling a nice phone bill courtesy of many interviews…) to obtain certain documents I need. Check my Spot.Us page for updates, but I’m currently mulling over using the money to facilitate a trip after the initial draft is finished, with the reporting going toward a series of Web-only articles. More to come soon.

Double Your Money and Make a Stack

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Posted January 27th, 2012 in Carnival of Journalism, Journalism, Reconsider This | 5 Comments

Why do journalists hate money?

This is an alternate interpretation of the part-facetious, part-disgustingly true question Michael Rosenblum poses in this month’s Carnival of Journalism: Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?

I think the question itself—and this is not meant as a knock on Mr. Rosenblum—is a farce to begin with.* We need to explode the premise, so to speak, because what it belies is the central nature of journalism itself: the sale of a product.

What journalists sell is information. Acting as arbiters between the public and various worlds to which the public either doesn’t have access or doesn’t have adequate time to access, journalists’ main responsibility is to fight myriad forces aligned for preventing our getting the information, and then packaging that information—articles, photos, videos, tweets—for wide-scale dissemination.

Many journalists, then, are already capitalists. I receive a paycheck for my work at Urbanite. I control the means to my own production. If I don’t write, I don’t get paid.

Really, then, this month’s question is another, slightly revised iteration of the problematic issue plaguing twenty-first century journalism since the stock market crashed in 2008: In a digital-first world, where information is created and transmitted almost instantaneously, how does journalism remain relevant to the point of commanding readers’ respect in the form of payment?

To quote Dave Chappelle: I want them greenbacks.

Firstly, we should note that “traditional” journalism (quotation marks used because, well, what the hell is traditional journalism—print journalism?) isn’t going away. In 2010, The Atlantic turned a profit for the first time in a number of years; Esquire magazine, which many in the publishing world had left for dead in 2009, is doing well. Traditional journalism is recalibrating and reconfiguring—paywalls, digital-first, expansion of the business model into festivals and events—but it isn’t evaporating.

Secondly, we should note that Mr. Rosenblum’s initial question seems to be asking how journalists can get a bigger cut for what we do. There have been models of entrepreneurial journalism, to be sure: Spot.Us and CoPress, now defunct, are two that come to my mind readily. The Baltimore Brew is another, although I can’t speak to their money-making model outside of a Kickstarter campaign they completed recently.

But entrepreneurship is hard, and always has been. Noticing that entrepreneurial journalism is difficult—Hard work? At a start-up?! Bunk!—isn’t all that compelling a revelation.

No, what I think we’re really talking about is how journalists can sufficiently leverage their collective power to create economies of scale that are similarly powerful to the big guys. You know: Hearst, Gannett, Tribune, Conde Nast.

I don’t really have an answer. Mr. Rosenblum gets at one, and upon cursory inspection, it appears quite clever. But I don’t think we’ll arrive at any semblance of an answer if we’re fooling ourselves about the original premise.

Journalists, of course, can be good capitalists. We always have been.**

*Michael Rosenblum’s post came off a tad satirical. I could be wrong—my 23 years might be showing—but I think Mr. Rosenblum is aware of the tenuous nature of his own question.

**I should note that what we’re not debating is the value of journalism on some esoteric or intrinsic scale. I could talk until I’m blue in the face about why I think journalism is necessary for any successful democratic republic. But seeing as how WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF DAMN LEFTIES, I don’t know how many people would listen.

http://www.copress.org/

The Mother City

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Posted December 27th, 2011 in South Africa | 0 Comments

On Lion's Head, overlooking Sea Point



In my family, Christmas is, in some ways, just another day. We don’t entertain dreams of being more misanthropic than any other family out there. But, sometimes, the actual day of Christmas is as innocuous as the weekdays that preceded it, and that’s because of people’s work schedules. My uncle, a paramedic, often has work on Christmas Day. My brother’s job permits him to be scheduled on Christmas Day. So, for us, Christmas Eve, or the day after Christmas, is the real family celebration.

This made the night of Christmas Day the opportune time to tell my parents I’m going to South Africa next summer. I found an internship program in Cape Town, and I was already set up to be an editorial intern at The Big Issue magazine. I had the paperwork all printed out, and I handed my mom and my dad a stapled packet of what the program is, where it was, what I would be doing, when I would be leaving, and how much it would cost.

And then my mom rolled her eyes and handed me back the papers.

That was three years ago. I ended up going to Cape Town the summer of 2009. The day after Christmas, everyone in my family knew (and were, somewhat surprisingly, rather supportive, if a bit perplexed).

Christmas lasts for twelve days (sort of), and not just because some song says so. Plenty of time to tell mom what you’d like to do next summer.

Digital … It Ain’t Dirty

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Posted December 26th, 2011 in Innovation, Journalism, Social Media | 1 Comment

I’m working my way through The Digital Divide, a collection of essays devoted to debating the influence social media and networking has on our 21st-century world, edited by The Dumbest Generation author Mark Bauerlein. Instead of starting from page one, however, I jumped to Clay Shirky’s essay in the back, a piece adapted from his book Cognitive Surplus. Shirky, who teaches in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, is something of a digital luminary. His mission, it seems, doesn’t seem to be one of conversion to new media for its own sake; rather, it’s more of a focus on why the digital sphere—and, specifically, social networking and the myriad manifestations of it—radically alters the definition of media in today’s world.

What we’ve experienced over the decade is the democratization of publishing. Actually, it’s something we’ve been experiencing for little more than half a millennium. Shirky’s essay notes how, in the aftermath of Gutenberg’s innovation of moveable type, it became dramatically easier to publish books. In economic parlance, barriers to entry were, and have been ever since, steadily removed from the world of publishing. (Shirky calls it “Gutenberg economics.”) What that meant was a deep shift in how we philosophically understood publishing—and that deep shift, for perhaps the last decade, but especially since 2008, has altered the way we view and do journalism. In short, publishing became easy. In fact, it always was. It just appeared more difficult because of the economic costs incurred. But as the economy of publishing becomes more manageable for “average people” (my term), the conceit that publishing is something best left to professionals—the romanticism of it, if you will—rapidly evaporates. As it relates specifically to mass media, Shirky describes this as a rethinking of media as not just something people consume, but something that everyone uses. One-click publishing, literally, means that society is no longer segmented into people who make content and people who consume it.

For journalism, this breakdown in distinction has become clearer: journalists are no longer the only people who produce news. I touched on this a bit with my post about The Atlantic’s great successes in navigating a digital-first publishing environment, but the broader implications of Shirky’s argument have yet to reverberate across the journalistic spectrum. Generally speaking, we still look at journalism as something only “gatekeepers” can do, regardless of how many people are doing journalism. “Citizen journalists,” “bloggers,” people posting on comment boards—these are dirty words, with equally unflattering connotations. (We’re all guilty of it, regardless of how digitally native we are: I bristle upon hearing people who don’t write professionally pronouncing themselves “writers.”) Indeed, many who make the argument against blogging, for instance, point out that it allows novices, people of no talent—idiots—to share their thoughts almost instantaneously to an Internet environment ready to lap up the tattered scraps from the hallowed Table of Publishing.

But—and let’s just stick with the term—idiots aren’t some new phenomena to the 21st century. What’s new is the ability for anyone to share thoughts easily. And while, yes, that makes it more difficult to sift through content to find the bits most reliable and valuable, what it does on a fundamental level is allow for true participation. People with worthwhile thoughts are no longer relegated to dinner-table conversations. (Just look at The New Inquiry, or Thought Catalog.) Journalists, and the industry as a whole, should embrace this concept. (Joy Mayer calls this news as “a conversation rather than a series of stories.”) At its base, journalism is about making connections with communities of people, sharing information, analyzing what we learn and know, and assisting others in making thoughtful decisions about the world. Why should we be turned off from any technology that makes this easier?

Raise A Brow

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Posted December 22nd, 2011 in Editing, Journalism, On Writing | 0 Comments

John McIntyre has an excellent post today on why it’s important to know what the hell words actually mean. He calls out Atlantic Wire writer Adam Clark Estes for claiming that GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul “furrowed his eyebrows” during a CNN interview prior to “storming off completely.” The video of the interview is embedded within the story in question, which was published by the National Journal.

You should read McIntyre’s post, as he does a better job than I could at explaining precisely why “furrowing the brow” is impossible (by way of pointing out exactly what “furrow” means). But the real lesson here is one all reporters—irrespective of publication medium—would do well to write on a Post-It note, carry around with us, and stick above our computer monitors prior to beginning any article.

Reporters report what happened. Sometimes what happened is boring. That’s OK. As you’ll see in the CNN interview, Paul gets agitated after fielding questions about newsletters he once published in the early nineties. At one point, the exchange between CNN’s Gloria Borger and Paul becomes visibly uncomfortable. For the most part, though, it’s a standard interview. It needs to happen, because journalists are tasked with holding political figures accountable, but the interview itself isn’t going off like fireworks on July 4th.

But at no time is Paul furrowing his eyebrows; and while it isn’t clear (from the video clip) if Paul abruptly ended the interview, or if Borger was finished with her questions, it is clear that he didn’t “storm off”—that is, angrily, suddenly, and hurriedly leave the room (possibly with the microphone still attached to the lapel of his jacket). To say he did is sloppy reporting, primarily because of the imprecision, and especially because writing it in such a way attaches a connotation—unfavorable to Paul—to the entire exchange.

Reporting, at times, can be boring. But accuracy is paramount. If all a person did was leave the room, it’s best to just say so.

What “Digital-First” Really Means

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Posted December 21st, 2011 in Innovation, Journalism | 3 Comments

The Atlantic, reports Mashable, made $1.8 million in 2010, marking that year as the magazine’s first profitable one in decades. The news also represents a marked turnaround from how The Atlantic had been existing—with a generous splash of red ink on its balance sheet—especially in the years preceding James Bennett’s hiring as editor in chief in 2006 and Justin Smith’s hiring in 2007. As the story says, it was Smith, as president of Atlantic Consumer Media, who announced that The Atlantic was going to adopt a digital-first strategy. Mashable staffer Lauren Indvik includes this quote from Smith: “We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be ‘The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.’ We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine.”

Kudos to Indvik for including that quote, because Smith’s determinedly different focus away from print and toward digital—and in October 2007, a full year before the housing market would bottom out and, along with it, the American economy and the print media model—is, as the data suggests, the very thing that saved The Atlantic.

In all likelihood, not shifting to a digital-first mentality wouldn’t have spelled imminent doom for the publication. But let’s be clear about what the convergence of digital media with traditional reporting means for journalism as a whole: the 21st century is the era of true accountability journalism. It used to be that journalists and news organizations acted as arbitrary keepers of information; journalists, by the power they wielded at large metropolitan newspapers or respected national consumer magazines, outlined the agenda for local communities, big cities, and the entire country. No longer is this case. Consider what John Paton, the CEO of the Journal Register Company, says of news reporting today:

“…[W]e no longer see our job as the old-fashioned agenda-setter or gatekeepers of information for our communities. Clearly communities know what they want and can organize themselves around issues and activities.”

This is the type of bottom-up accountability not typically seen in journalism. It’s the very real sense that we—journalists—write for audiences. And we always have, of course. But while journalistic enterprises used to dictate the importance, flow, and type of information that readers received, in today’s age of digitally-charged media, that model no longer exists. Readers will be—and already are—shunning news that doesn’t accurately reflect their concerns or what they consider important. By extension, journalists have suddenly realized that they produce a product, and, as is the case with all products, people don’t buy things they think have little value to them.  The Atlantic, by its actions—creating new verticals with the Atlantic Wire and Atlantic Cities, opening up the editorial process of the Wire to allow readers to pitch stories, removing TheAtlantic.com‘s paywall, curating a Twitter feed, etc.—has recognized this, and that’s what is making that particular publication stronger than ever before.*

And this, ultimately, is what is so important about a digital-first approach to journalism today. Not only does it encourage innovation—bridging divides between developers and journalists so that the two groups can come together to figure out how to make journalism profitable—but it also places emphasis on the importance of reader engagement. For a long time, prestigious publications could remain as insulated from and isolated of their readers as they wanted to be. Facebook, Twitter, other forms of social media, blogging, Instagram—these are just some of the myriad ways that no longer allow that sort of isolation to take place. Inclusivity, not exclusivity, is the new journalistic paradigm. Hierarchy, for better or for worse, is out. And while we’ll always need journalists—people who intentionally spend large swaths of time combing through records, conducting interviews, thinking, analyzing, reporting, and writing—readers won’t always necessarily need journalism as we’ve traditionally known it.

Embracing this new paradigm is the way newsrooms must go in 2012 and beyond. To prop up the traditional model will only sow the seeds of failure.

*Lest you think I’m another disrespectful youth, I’m aware that the likes of Mark Twain and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the damn thing.

Programmers, Here’s What I Want

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Posted December 9th, 2011 in Carnival of Journalism, Innovation, Journalism | 0 Comments

This month’s Carnival of Journalism has graciously asked for my opinion on what gift I’d most enjoy from a programmer or developer, which is a relief, since Mother has informed me that my no longer being a ward of her home un-entitles me to things like Legos wrapped in reindeer-covered colored paper.

It’s an uncomplicated gift, and one I think many journalists of the digital age would like to find waiting for them underneath their Festivus poles: a design for an online newspaper or magazine site that not only looks great, but makes it easy for editors to categorize and organize stories online while being simple for users to find the latest news first.

Essentially, I’m reiterating the point Joshua Benton made over at Nieman Lab back in July—in response to Andy Rutledge’s proposed redesign of The New York Times’s homepage—which was: “the problems of large-scale information architecture for news sites are really hard problems.”

Which, well, sucks. It’s difficult to envision how an aesthetically-pleasing website—something that looks like Rutledge’s proposed redesign, which is now available as the WooTheme “Currents”—would alleviate the main problems still existing on newspaper websites. (For a great primer on some of these problems, check out Lauren Rabaino’s post on the life cycle of a newspaper story on 10,000 Words.) The first is how to give editorial staff ultimate control of which stories are populated to specific sections of the website; the second is how to ensure that readers can view breaking news without burying related articles or other news items; and the third, as I see it, is how you do this automatically so teams of editors don’t need to babysit the back-end of a content management system all day.

On smaller-scale sites, something like a weekly college newspaper, using some sort of CMS that forces editors to drag and drop stories into specific locations on the homepage and section pages (I’m thinking of my experiences with Polopoly’s College Publisher 5) makes sense: the editorial staff has ultimate control of where stories are populated on site (problem one), and because problem one is solved, problem two becomes easy to navigate, since editors can move latest news to the top of the homepage. Of course, performing these tasks manually means problem three still exists.

What makes the overarching problem particularly vexing is that smaller-scale iterations of such a phantom site are in use and mitigate all three issues. So, by way of example a la Benton, let’s stick with the website for The New York Times. That site is updated with lots of stories all day, and stories are accompanied by photos, slideshows, videos, blog posts, and user comments, among other things. Taken individually, it’s easy to point to aesthetically-pleasing sites that solve my aforementioned three problems. Blog posts? Look at Mashable. Photos? How about ThemeForest’s “Classica” or “Gridlocked” themes.

But how do we combine a multitude of elements into a large-scale news operation’s website so that editors can maintain control of where stories populate—in the print world, where stories are placed—without preventing readers from finding the breaking news and frees up editors from finagling with article placement on a site ad nauseum?

Programmers/developers … that’s what I want. I can’t promise lavish pay. I can’t even promise milk and cookies. Bourbon, though, I can do.

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