"Analogies are very dangerous" Barry Diller

It would seem the avian flu has reached Greece. We have decided to cancel our October EU trip including my speaking engagement. We hope to reschedule soon and look forward to catching up with our friends in the EU. The news from RFE/RL is here

The good people at Attention Trust are looking for an assist. You may find their blog here, and their wiki to discuss/develop/refine their Attention Trust Extension and Attention Toolkit (open source php) here. My thanks to Ed Batista for the heads up.

Vaughn Ververs is putting up some stuff that merits your attention. Kudos to the CBS tribe for joining the fold. Being a former CBS guy it makes me proud. Go for greatness guys! Check out CBS News' Public Eye here

Business Week bows Fine on Media a late addition to their Innovation tab. Congrats and good luck to Jon Fine and BW.

David Beisel has put up an excellent post Seven Questions Employees Should Ask Before Joining a Startup...

Could you meet the CEO, the founder(s), and those on the management team? Start-ups are all about the people involved. And there are a small number of people who are largely going to affect the organization. Even if an entry-level employee is going to work in engineering, I think it makes sense for him/her to meet the VP Sales; likewise, a marketing manager should meet the CTO. Yet it might not happen unless the prospective employee requests it. The handful at the top are going to have a profound affect on the future of the company as a whole and the position (regardless of function), and therefore it is best to meet as many people possible in the company possible before joining. Wise counsel David. Read the entire post here

Which reminds me of hiring and that of two hiring tips provided to me years ago by the late Bruce Johnson, a person of rare personal charm and considerable gifts...

Hire smart or manage tough (i.e., you will never teach someone to be smart)
Never hire anyone with a history of being "unlucky"

Both have served me, my colleagues, my organizations and our clients very well.

"When people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good work. Kill grimness with laughter. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom" David Ogilvy

Pulled a collection of Ogilvy from the bookcase (The Unpublished David Ogilvy) and it's a simply wonderful read. This being my tenth or so reading, Ogilvy remains fresh with exceptional insight which only serves to confirm Ogilvy's great mind, and the timeless nature of this writing. The notion that people need to have fun before good work happens is an important lesson indeed. My mentor and former partner Larry Bentson often asks "are you having fun?" at some point in almost every conversation. Larry understands that creative folks want to be led, never managed. So...are you having fun?

Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts is not getting the attention it deserves, a great read, much enjoyed his unvarnished take on the American military. What makes Kaplan's writing so crisp and refreshing seems to be a combination of his sense of history and a rare, vivid sense of place, one that only a truly gifted travel writer is able to conjure.

John Battelle's The Search is off to a terrific start. John's premise that search is "the database of our intentions" is elegant, brilliant!

Tom Evslin continues his very cool blook (sic), Hackoff.com; Chapter Five, Episode 1 is up and live today, don't miss it if you can, jump to a good read here

Got a nice email from Lawrence Lessig. The first annual Fall Fundraising campaign for Creative Commons is now live and needs your support. Please join me in making a donation to this important initiative. Get the donation info here

The new Thomas P.M. Barnett book Blueprint for Action ships this week. While Publishers Weekly has slammed the new writing, I remain ready for another helping of Barnett's candor and pragmatic pov. His earlier book The Pentagon's New Map is a fresh, engaging read.

John Heilemann has a fun read about my favorite media mogul, Barry Diller...

Consider: When Diller, with Murdoch’s what-the-hell backing, started the Fox network, he was up against a troika—ABC, NBC, and CBS—with virtually 100 percent of the prime-time audience. The Big Three had deep pools of talent, vast resources, and a hammerlock on national advertisers. To any sane observer, they looked granite-solid, impregnable.

Fast-forward to today and it’s déjà vu all over again. In the booming search business, you have another apparently indomitable Big Three in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. (AOL is No. 4, but everyone assumes, Dick Parsons’s protestations notwithstanding, it will soon become an appendage of either Google or Microsoft.) The new Big Three account for 83 percent of Web searches. Having developed a ludicrously profitable form of advertising, they are making money by the bucketload. They have deep pools of talent, vast resources, and, as they are quick to tell you, impossibly high IQs.

Bravo John, excellent article! For my money Barry Diller is the goods, the real deal. Read John's entire writing Diller's Foxy Strategy here

For those that have emailed me about Seth Godin's NAB presentation, please standby, will opine on things NAB later this week. The headline is...demosthenic Godin was not, imho, perhaps an off day.

Elizabeth Spiers gets a book deal! Cheers! And They All Die in the End, very cool, check the notice here

"Learn to handle rejection. It's easy to handle success" Seth Godin

The gentleman I first came to know and respect in the eighties when he was part of the Stanford Entrepreneurial Roundtable, The Skeibo Press and Spinnaker Software is not just an author any longer, he has also become a self-proclaimed "Agent of Change." I speak of Seth Godin who, it seems to me, may also be on yet another path, one of becoming an agent provocateur. To be fair, it's really too early to tell. Godin is speaking at the NAB Radio Show this week and we'll see if, during his talk, he mentions and offers support of his recent writing that "radio is officially dead, especially when wireless internet access comes to your car" (page 15, Who's There?). Why would Godin make a paid appearance presenting to what I must guess he considers to be the dead or soon to be dead? A case of schadenfreude? Certainly not. Is it wrong to take money from those you have publicly diagnosed as critically ill without offering the sick some assistance, advice, or at least disclosing to the dying that while certain of your diagnosis you are not now prepared to offer an effective plan of treatment? Hard to say without all the facts. Is his mission to now save an industry, the very one he proclaimed "officially dead" earlier this very month? Does he come to inspire and provoke into action the first tribe of wireless? Will the hiring of Godin to keynote turn out to be a stroke of genius or will we be asking "Was Mel not available?" Stay tuned.

Tom Evslin is in the process of writing a book by way of something he is calling a blook (sic), a book he will serialize on a blog. The story begins as hackoff.com CEO Larry Lazard is found dead of a gunshot wound. Tom has also created a faux corporate website related to his dot com story and is encouraging participation via a dedicated wiki. Very cool. Bravo Tom! As someone who worked in the crazed, sometimes plainly goofy, pre-ipo dotcom world I applaud Tom's endeavor and look forward to a good read. You may read the first chapter here. Thanks to Fred Wilson for the tip and background here.

"It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel" Goethe

Had a great time in Chicago earlier this week. Enjoyed lunch with my friend, the always amazing Kurt Hanson. While Bob Hamilton was certainly the first broadcast media person to do business online, Kurt, if not the first, clearly was one of the first internet radio evangelists. Kurt introduced me to Rockit Bar & Grill, I highly recommend the Tuna Tartar and the outrageous Rockit Burger (Kobe beef, foie gras, sweet and sour onions served with truffle fries).

The prophet from Philly, Jimmy Cramer, tells it like it is...this time it's about those dead tree guys...

Every time I think that my business is challenging, I think of what the newspapers face. The newspaper game, for the last decade, has been one of cost cuts and mergers. There's been no growth in the business.
Now, with regulatory authorities frowning on any further mergers, with the cost cuts already in place to the point where you might just as well run Associated Press copy throughout if you make more job eliminations and with newsprint and delivery costs through the roof, a bleaker situation looks, alas, even more bleak than I thought.

They seem incapable of being anything other than public services, and even there, they are falling down on the job.

Sure, they have cash flow. But who can monetize it? To me, they are just declining assets, call options with some dividend money thrown in. With no one available to take them out. Or, with boards that actually don't want to be taken over...Read JC's writing, Newspapers, Writing's on the Wall, here

Jeff Jarvis, having read JC's writing, offers this take..

Break free of the shackles of your medium, that’s what I say. Recast your relationship with the public to enable more to gather and share news. Stop trying to own content or distribution and get back in the business of building trust. And stop taking baby steps. The baby steps are killing you. Read more of what Jeff has to say including his perspective on why Times-Picayune and Nola.com deserve a Pulitzer (but may not get one)...here

Agree with Jeff. The TP/Nola gang have earned a Pulitzer and for many of the same reasons the WWL network initiative rightly deserves a Peabody, a Crystal and a Marconi. Moreover, "baby steps" are killing broadcast media. As poor as most newspaper sites are the majority of broadcast sites are far worst, badly in need of attention and investment. The poorest of the lot, by any measure, are the majority of radio sites. Streaming audio does not a website make.

During our leadership seminar this week I provided a one page handout for discussion. This writing was originally a full page ad run in the Wall Street Journal by United Technologies. I am always asked to provide copies and place it here for all to enjoy/share.

Make Something Happen

You come out
of a meeting
and someone asks,
"What happened?"
And you answer,
"Nothing."
You sit in a
legislative gallery
and someone sits
down beside you
and asks,
"What's happening?"
And you say,
"Nothing."
Maybe that
meeting room and
that gallery
should have had
the same sign
hanging on their
walls that--
so the story goes--
a college football
coach pasted in
his teams' lockers:
"Cause something
to happen."
He believed that
if you didn't make
something happen
with a good block,
your runner would go
nowhere--and if
you didn't tackle,
the other team would
run all over you.
He sure caused something
to happen. He won more
college games than
any other coach.
Bear Bryant.


Rick Moody writing in The Atlantic Monthly (Fiction Issue 2005 - Writers and Mentors)provides a list of questions "that are a commonplace of the contemporary fiction workshop"

1) Does the story begin effectively?

2) Does the story end effectively?

3) Does the story have a conflict?

4) Does the story move from beginning to end?

Rick then goes on to suggest "...to the extent that a student comes to expect these questions, or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely product will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of innovation..."

He then offers his own set of questions...here's a sample...

1) Has the writer attempted to eliminate all adverbs?

3) What's wrong with using a few more semicolons?

4) Does this story contain any sentences that you want to remember to your grave?

5) Would Samuel Beckett like this story? Would Gertrude Stein? Would Virginia Woolf?

6) How would this writer put paint on a canvas?

7) Is this writer just using his or her eyes, or has he or she tried to use the other senses - for example, the all-important literary sense of audition?

9) Does this story like music?

11) Can this story save any lives?

Real progress, in my experience, begins with the courage to ask the right questions. Folks in media would be wise to take a hint from Rick Moody's exceptional essay and begin to ask a fresh set of questions.

Had fun catching up with Tim Fox today. Tim's good work disabuses any reasonable person of the notion that the oldies radio format is dead. The oldies format is certainly not dead; Tim's station, KIOA, is very, very successful. Tim is a bright guy and a good broadcaster - lucky Saga. Tim made a strong point in our conversation today saying to be successful a radio station "must have a soul." Of course, he's right. Forget that stationality and all the brand stuff - give me some of that post-graduate level "soul" any day. Tim's comments today reminded me of the word Steve Wynn likes to use "wonderment"

"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

Great article in the latest CJR, a must read by Steve Twomey.

American readers want more voice, more connection to where they live. So why has the great metro columnist gone missing?

"Too many are lazy," says Dave Lieber, an investigative columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telgram and the chairman of this year's annual meeting of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Lieber has a litany of complaints about his peers: "They refuse to, as Breslin says, climb stairs. Don't engage in new journalism storytelling techniques. Refuse to be innovative, take risks and fail, which is important. Don't want to get people angry, which is very important. Want to play it safe. Quote their friends. Write feature stories that pretend to be columns. Forget why they got in the business in the first place. Make stupid jokes."

So many columnists sound so alike. Tim J McGuire...says "One of the things you find when you read a lot of metro columnists...is there's not a lot of difference between Hoboken and Timbuktu."

"...a newspaper needs a sizzling metro columnist more than it ever did in any Golden Age."

Bravo Steve! Excellent points. Read the entire piece here


I agree with Steve...we are not talking about op-ed here but the real deal, the local writer that is hardwired into the community. The stuff that rises to the quality of a Royko, Breslin, or Hamill.