Entries Tagged 'Media' ↓

I had a great experience this week hearing two inspirational friends of mine read from their new books. They both dug into an area of personal interest and wound up illuminating a fascinating history that can teach us all something important.

Frances Dinkelspiel started looking into her family history, and found 50 boxes of papers at the California Historical Society. It turns out her great-great-grandfather — a Jewish immigrant — was a pivotal figure in building California’s economy, yet was so behind-the-scenes that he had been lost to history. She now has a great book out about him: “Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.” 
 
Her web site is www.francesdinkelspiel.com. (She also writes a great blog on the Bay Area book scene.)
 
She’s speaking Saturday in San Marino and Long Beach, and Dec. 2 in NY at Congregation Shearith Israel. then at numerous Bay Area events Dec. 2 and onward (including Temple Emanu-el Friday Dec. 5) and Dec. 11 and 12 at Metropolis Books and Congregation Kol Tikvah in LA. 
 
And Jonathan Curiel, a Chronicle reporter and former colleague, told the fascinating tale of how the Islamic world has influenced so many things in modern culture that so few people realize, from the Alamo to blues music to, ironically, the World Trade Center.

 Jonathan’s book, “Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots,” is a great read about an important but little-known topic. His Web site is www.jonathancuriel.com and he has readings coming up Dec. 7 and 8 in the Washington, DC area.

Way to go, Frances and Jonathan!

Everyone kept asking for a take on the Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview run awry at South by Southwest in Austin last week. Having weighed in on the subject in Fortune.com, I might as well offer my thoughts.

 My main thought was: I felt sorry for Sarah Lacy. Sure, I thought she could have done things differently, and I generally prefer a much more subdued style of interviewing. But the criticism was over the top and out of proportion to what happened. In addition, she had a notoriously tough subject on stage, one who was heavily coached as well as not particularly forthcoming.

I do also think the interview raised some age-old questions about the journalist-source relationship. Lacy was apparently Zuckerberg’s hand-picked choice, and she has become something of his Boswell. They clearly had some rapport on stage. That’s great for her, as a lot of journalists would love to have that kind of access. But it also comes with a price, as it’s in her interest to maintain that relationship, which sometimes can affect the tone of the questioning.

The geeks in the audience thought this would de-rail Lacy’s career. I don’t see it. She’s immensely talented, and I anticipate that her book coming out on Web 2.0 figures will be a great read and will sell well. And hey: A little controversy never really hurts. No publicity is bad, right?

I come across a lot of startups in my work as a technology journalist, and quite often I can’t tell if they have any shot of making it. I admire the passion, but I know that they face many hurdles, and many will fail.

 I don’t know if Get Satisfaction, the startup that I profiled in today’s New York Times, will hit it big either, but I do feel that the folks behind the company are onto something big. And that’s the notion that in the networked economy, companies no longer control the discussion about their products. Customers are increasingly in the driver’s seat, writing on blogs and their own Web sites aimed at different products. 

 Smart companies will listen to their customers, and embrace this new transparency. Get Satisfaction is giving these companies a way to do just that.

 The other fun thing for me, in writing this story, was catching up with Thor and Amy Muller, who I knew at their old company, Rubyred Labs. Thor told the story of Get Satisfaction’s inspiration in a silly side project the Mullers had started at Rubyred. Called Valleyschwag, people could pay $15 a month and get a care package of Web companies’ t-shirts, stickers, buttons and other paraphernalia. When the blogosphere touted it, it took off, and Valleyschwag had 2,000 paying customers in the first six weeks. The Mullers and their partner Jonathan Grubb were overwhelmed. Eighty percent of customer issues were repetitive, and in some cases the community solved the problem before the Mullers could get to it, giving birth to the idea for Get Satisfaction. (Jonathan is moving to L.A. to keep running Rubyred while the Mullers teamed with Lane Becker on Get Satisfaction.)

I’d like to join the chorus wishing for Om Malik’s speedy recovery. In today’s New York Times, I have a story about how Om suffered a heart attack just after Christmas — and how other A-list bloggers like Paul Kedrosky and Michael Arrington warn how stressful it is to have to constantly update a site.

Om was already wrestling with the issue. His chief operating officer Paul Walborsky told me that others, most notably Martha Stewart, have had to figure a way to extend their name across a media business in which others do most of the work. Martha’s staff was forced to work without her through one kind of hardship; Om’s staff is coping with another.

It can be done. Utne Reader survives without founder Eric Utne (although his wife Nina, who sold the magazine, is still an editor-at-large), and Collier’s survived its founder for nearly 50 years. (Others haven’t fared as well: Jane magazine didn’t last long without Jane Pratt, and let’s not even get into what happened to Rosie.)

I wrote a story in today’s New York Times about how Dow Jones has lost its spot in the Standard & Poor’s 500, getting replaced by GameStop, a shopping mall seller of new and used video games.

For Dow Jones, the demotion is but one more sign of the painful move into Rupert Murdoch’s fold. For devotees of Dow Jones, it’s bad enough that a king of the tabloids now takes ownership of the Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones is an iconic company, whose very name is synonymous with Wall Street. Yet because it now is no longer a publicly traded company, but instead merely a division of the conglomerate News Corp., Dow Jones has lost its spot on the stock market’s most influential index.

A story I wrote about what Rupert Murdoch might do with the San Francisco Web site MarketWatch.com is up today on Fortune.com.

Fortune has revamped its Web site, and it looks great. Now, instead of stories appearing to come from CNNMoney, you can tell that they’re by Fortune writers. I hope to contribute more in the weeks ahead.

As a writer, length has always been important. As a newspaper reporter, I tended to write long stories, trying to cram in every detail I had gathered. As a freelance writer, I’m frequently paid by the word. I love long-form journalism, and am enjoying writing for magazines and dreaming up book projects.

 Yet I struggle with the notion that longer is not always better. Mark Twain summed this up in an epistle: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Editing takes extra effort.

 Now comes proof, in several delicious forms.

First was a story by Motoko Rich in the New York Times last month, about how Raymond Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher wants to publish the original versions of some of his marvelously minimalist short stories. These versions reveal that Carver wasn’t always so economical with language, and his editor stripped out entire sections, imbuing them with the ambiguity that made them so intriguing.

Almost immediately thereafter, Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker wrote a fascinating piece on how the British publisher Orion is releasing new, heavily edited versions of old classics.

The subtraction does not turn a good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It is all Dick and no Moby.

 And  today, in the Times, David Carr extolls the virtues of The Week, Felix Dennis’s weekly magazine that summarizes the long stories published elsewhere in favor so that busy readers can know what’s in the news.

Yet shortening a lengthy work is not always an improvement. And I was reminded of that as I put together this post, and looked up Gopnik’s piece online. The piece is not there, but an abstract is.

I’ve got a story in this morning’s USA Today about how cell phones will soon have credit card information stored in a chip, so that you’ll only have to wave it over a scanner in order to pay for something.

While all the experts I spoke to said this is a very secure technology, there are plenty of skeptics out there, judging from the comments the story is receiving.

I welcome the skeptics. I’m a big fan of paying with cash myself.

The New York Times today published a story I wrote about how small businesses and individuals can outsource even mundane tasks to “virtual personal assistants” in India.

In reporting the story, I found many people using these affordable services in a variety of creative ways:

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

A man in Cambridge, Mass., even started a business, TajTunes, in which he gets the workers to telephone people in the United States with singing telegrams for $5 a call.

I’m thinking I need to outsource the production of this Web site.

I recently read Matt Richtel’s Silicon Valley thriller “Hooked,” and loved it. Matt is a tech reporter at The New York Times and a versatile talent — he even writes a comic strip under a pen name — and he really nailed a key element of modern computing culture: Addiction.

It’s the feeling of being exhausted, yet logging on to check e-mail before bedtime — and finding that you’ve been up hours longer without even nodding off. It’s working online and realizing that you kept typing away hours past lunchtime. It’s chatting online and checking your social networks, when you need to make phone calls to complete other assignments. It’s forgetting to exercise, clean house, or bathe, while you bask in the glow of your monitor.

Matt’s novel suggests that companies might even be inclined to deliberately make the technology addictive, that there’s some chemical reaction in the brain that keeps you working against your better judgment. And that companies could easily use metatags and other features to induce subliminal suggestions.

It’s pretty dystopian, yet as with most good satire, it’s not too far off the mark of where we are now.