It’s tough to argue with her. The SPJ code provides an excellent example of a proscriptive ethical framework, offering various high-level value statements supported by more specific behavioral norms. At a 10,000-foot level, the SPJ code admonishes its followers to “seek truth and report it,” “minimize harm,” “act independently,” and “be accountable.” As a concise paradigm of independent and truth-centered professionalism, the SPJ code is hard to beat.

Journalism fancies itself a capital-P profession, governed internally with its own ethical norms and standards of practices – much like law, medicine and ministry. Whether it achieves this level has been debated for years by people who enjoy rhetorical sadomasochism. What’s clear, though, is that the barrier to entry into the field of journalism is tiny and shrinking: Any hayseed with a netbook and a Wi-Fi connection can become a “citizen journalist.” Thus the question of who’s bound by journalism’s ethical proscriptions becomes increasingly relevant.

The real danger, I think, isn’t with local writers stringing for the community newspaper or even people working through freelance assignments on behalf of a reputable news outlet. Rather, the ethical risk for the industry is twofold.

First, the phenomenon of “freelance writers” who work for content mills. Although there are certainly some high-quality writers out there, too many are more interested in making a quick buck than in getting it right. To some degree, it’s easy to sympathize with them. If you’re making $5 or $15 or $25 per article and quality control may be spotty at best, no one begrudges the mill writer for getting paid for half-assed work. Why cut your effectively hourly rate to provide superlative work product when inferior work product pays more in the long run? The sad thing is, many of the hired guns in this category are writers by function, not by vocation, and many of the worst offenders may well offend journalism’s ethical sensibilities simply because they’ve never been trained in journalism ethics.

Second, bloggers. Maybe it’s because I cut my teeth in the opinion section, but I’m less worried about blurring the line between hard news and opinion than some are. News analysis remains a venerable product line in mainstream journalism, and at their best bloggers provide a mix of news and analysis that saddles up to the point of pure opinion without leaving the firmament of responsible journalism. But when bloggers get too big for their britches and use their megaphone to deliberately misinform their audiences — either through factual inaccuracy, or through maliciously selective emphasis of fact — then the grey line turns into a sharp ledge dividing solid ground from the abyss of irresponsibility. Bloggers with their own larger followings should know better. Blog editors should also know better and should more effectively police the submissions offered by new contributors to help them get a lay of the ethical land.

So what ethical standards should semi-pro freelancers follow? Any three commentators will come up with five different lists, but I think a good start includes a few basic points.

First, be honest about facts and make a good-faith effort to reasonably research the question at hand. If the “facts” cohere too perfectly with your already established worldview, then one or the other must be deficient. Acknowledge fair counterfactuals and be open to adjusting a conclusion based on new evidence.

Second, avoid invective. There’s never an excuse to resort to name-calling or rote demonization. Progressive-left bloggers are especially susceptible to letting an insult pass as an argument, but they’re not the only ones.

Third, be transparent about potential conflicts. If you write about an industry and you get paid by members of that industry for something, disclose it. If you’re writing about a company that fired you, disclose it. If the restaurant you’re reviewing comped your bill, say so (although you shouldn’t let them do it). People make a big deal about conflicts of interest, and rightfully so. But sometimes just being honest about it level-sets readers in a way that disarms the criticism.

Fourth, fairly attribute sources. Hyperlinking is OK if the link attaches to the fact or quote being used; it’s not OK to use unattributed info and just throw a link in at the end of an article. When in doubt, cite your source.

Fifth, attempt to get at the original source of information. Very little value attaches to commenting or writing about a “fact” that’s not really a fact at all. For example, it’s a hackjob to take someone else’s partial quote, spin it negatively, and write a column about it without ever attempting to understand the fullness or context of the quote or even to validate its accuracy. Even a little bit of research may reveal the other side of the story — and often, the “truth” in Wikipedia or the first few pages of Google results doesn’t accurately reflect a nuanced understanding of the matter.

Any person who purports to be a freelance writer, citizen journalist or communication professional ought to put ethical competence at the forefront of his writer’s toolkit. Although the SPJ Code of Ethics, is a good start, it’s not the only game in town. Regardless of the standard one follows, a good freelancer knows the ethical rules of the road and follows them at all times.

• More than 80 percent of all apps are eventually deleted from mobile devices.
• A whopping 68 percent of smartphone users only use one to five apps per week.
• Of smartphone owners, 17 percent don’t install any third-party apps at all.
• … Leaving only 15 percent of device owners using six or more distinct third-party apps in any given week.

These stats notwithstanding, I’m astonished at how many apps are being pushed into the ecosystem, and how many companies — with cheerleaders in the tech media working as powerful instigators — are aggressively promoting apps and “mobile social.” Don’t misunderstand; I like both mobile and social. What grates, though, is that the tech media highlights the “flavor of the week” for the next best thing since what’s-its-name collapsed five days earlier after having been the source of buzz a week before that.

It’s getting ridiculous.

Less than half of Americans own a smartphone. Of those who do, users disproportionately avoid using third-party apps. One problem may well be oversaturation: In every online app store I’ve seen, it’s almost impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. You can sometimes get lucky finding an app that’s had a lot of positive reviews, but even then, it’s a crapshoot.

Notice to the Tech world, journalists included: We don’t need more apps. We don’t need Facebook-only apps or apps that do the same thing as 15 other apps on the market but have slightly different UIs. Flavor-of-the-week hype is great for bloggers and magazine writers — it pays their bills — but it merely enrages those of us who have grown weary of the overload.

What we do need is an emphasis on quality and usability. And developers, for heaven’s sake, if you are going to make an app, put it on all the major platforms instead of picking-and-choosing based on the relative skills of your programmers.

One thing that astonished me was his firm’s current costs. For a very basic, static HTML site, the firm pays thousands of dollars per year and well north of $100 per month for “hosting.” For a site that could probably fit on a floppy disk and hasn’t changed in years.

It’s important to remember that contracts for Web services written in the mid-to-late 1990s or even early 2000s may well contain cost structures that are no longer rational. Given the proliferation of cheap Web hosting, plug-and-play free content-management systems and no-cost social media platforms, a reasonably savvy company can run a really respectable operation for less than $200 per year in total operational costs.

The moral of the story: Don’t just keep paying invoices for old providers. You probably aren’t getting the best deal, and there’s no reason to pay other people to provide you with nothing of any real value.

Protect your wallet and your bottom line.

His goal — clarified in a second post, with an appendix from NYT executive editor Jill Abramson — was to start a public dialogue about whether journalists should attempt to rebut or clarify statements of fact issued by public figures when the truth value of those statements is open to debate. One of Brisbane’s examples (a good one, I think): Whether Justice Clarence Thomas was forthright when he ascribed the omission of some of his wife’s income on a financial statement as a mere misunderstanding. Some would argue that it’s implausible that a long-tenured member of the Supreme Court could “misunderstand” a routine financial filing; Brisbane’s question seems to be, Should a news reporter explore the truth value of the statement, or merely report it and leave commentary to the columnists?

The aftermath of Brisbane’s column was largely brutal. Many commenters responded with the equivalent of a “well, duh” and even professional journalists seemed to use the blog post as an opportunity to throw matches on their preferred straw men. Two Poynter posts (here and here) and Brisbane’s own comments to Jim Romenesko highlight the degree to which many otherwise reasonable people decided to ridicule the question Brisbane didn’t ask and instead skewer the stereotype of insular NYT judgment. My take on Brisbane’s posts isn’t that he questions whether news writers should fact-check, but whether they should assess in detail the accuracy of quoted statements when the factual content of those statements becomes difficult to prove objectively.

The ombudsman’s question deserved better treatment than it received. I’m not much of a cheerleader for The Times, but when the Grey Lady’s right, she’s right, and Brisbane’s question has merit.

Consider a few salient points.

Foremost, as much as some professionals like Jay Rosen question the “view from nowhere” — the idea that journalists should take great pains to avoid rendering judgments that could appear to favor a particular interest group — any Philosophy 101 student worth his salt understands that assigning a binary truth-value to a complex statement isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Any statement of fact more complex than “the sky is blue” or “most horses have four legs” usually doesn’t admit to a clean and obvious true/false dichotomy. Rather, as the “statement of fact” becomes increasingly complex, it tends to turn into the conclusion of an elliptical argument rather than a plainly obvious and falsifiable statement about the world that can stand alone without additional logical or epistemological support.

For example, were I to say that I believe Attorney General Eric Holder lied about his knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious, I’m articulating a “fact” — that Holder lied — that’s not a fact at all. It’s an argument. It rests on certain bits of information and a judgment that if these bits of data that I possess are true, it’s implausible that Holder’s denial of knowledge about Fast and Furious is honest.

A reporter very rarely knows whether a person is lying in the sense of being deliberately dishonest, instead of merely lacking some essential bit of information or believing a certain maxim. So when I say, “Holder lied!” I’m making a fact-like statement that’s the conclusion of an elliptical argument. My statement isn’t necessarily true or false but the premises that undergird that statement may or may not be accurate, leading me to a false conclusion. Again, this is Philosophy 101. To suggest that my comment about Holder being a liar is itself a lie or a deliberate falsehood is to pass a judgment without having had the opportunity to assess the premises behind my statement. Call this judgment what you will, but “neutral fact checking” it ain’t.

The point? Merely this: If a journalist were to report my statement about Holder and then attempt to deconstruct its truth value, the journalist isn’t engaging in fact-checking. He’s engaging in an argumentative rebuttal, which typically isn’t the purview of news organizations but rather of opinion columnists.

One last observation. The question of accent must rear its ugly head. Assume a reporter is assigned to cover a political debate. Each candidate will make various statements. The reporter picks which statements to cover, and hence which are subject to attack by the self-proclaimed truth vigilante. A left-leaning reporter may well disproportionately attack a right-leaning candidate, and vice versa — a prospect that increases when political statements depend on unspoken and unfalsifiable ideological judgments as part of the elliptical argument.

The point is, when reporters take it upon themselves to interject their own analysis of their subjects’ honesty, the writers become part of the narrative. When a journalist transcribes a debate, the story more cleanly reflects the debate and its participants; when a journalist analyzes a debate, the journalist becomes a hidden participant in the story he covers, one who gets to render opinion from behind the veneer of objectivity and who enjoys the privileged position of setting the parameters of the discussion. The “truth vigilante” reporter is both participant and referee in the subject he covers — a clear conflict of interest, and one that deserves more scrutiny than the “just trust us, we’re professionals” mantra that some advocate. Whatever the criticisms of the View From Nowhere, the idea that journalists enjoy a special access to impartial and accurate ”truth” reflects an institutional hubris that borders on megalomania.

Reporters ought to report. Columnist ought to comment. If we blur the line between reporting and analysis, fine — but we cannot then pretend that the truth vigilante is anything else than a hidden-but-coequal participant or even an adversary in the subject being reported.

Brisbane raised a good question. His question deserved a fairer treatment than I think it received. I don’t have the answers — no one does — but the cause of quality journalism is advanced by the conversation.

Yes, I know. “Social strategy.” It’s getting to the point where I vomit slightly in my mouth every time I stumble across a litany of blog posts with recycled tips about how to use Twitter or why you absolutely need a Facebook fan page or why Google+ is the next best thing since … well, Facebook. There are a lot of good writers out there, but it’s getting harder to find articles that add value for people who already know the lay of the land.

My major beef with most social-media writers, though, is that they think “social strategy” means optimizing one’s use of online properties. I disagree. I think a well-planned social strategy results in an increase of reliable face-to-face referral partners. Having a million Twitter followers means absolutely nothing if you don’t know who they are and can’t leverage them for real-world business partnerships without relying on a heavy dose of serendipity.

A top-notch social strategy will follow a few basic value propositions.

First, the only salient outcome measure of a well-executed social strategy is an increase in the number of people you know, like and trust and with whom you can build mutually beneficial business relationships that may or may not involve a client contract. Don’t get distracted by concerns about ad targeting, penetration, ROI or the rest of it. Unless you’re in a national cohort that primarily markets via online media, the only outcome worth counting is face time with new members of your personal network.

Second, the best way to build a face-to-face social network is to just show up. Go to mixers. Join the local chamber or BNI chapter. Find like-minded MeetUp or LinkedIn groups in your community. Attend. Bring business cards. Treat these events like a soft marketing event: Your goal is to build trust and familiarity, not to coerce a sale. Identify and connect with core influencers — people who are well connected and enjoy bringing people together. Be an influencer yourself.

Third, the best way to maintain a face-to-face social network is to keep the lines of communication open. For new contacts, practice the 3-3-3 method: Follow-up on a new contact after three days, three weeks and three months. If you don’t get an answer, then drop it. If you do connect, make sure you keep in touch. Send something once per quarter (news clipping, article) or arrange occasional coffee meetings to introduce people within your network who may value from getting connected.

Fourth, provide something of value for your network. For example, my friend Tony prepares an annual mailing listing all the various referral partners he personally endorses — the list contains roughly 100 local businesses, sorted by contact name and industry focus. He mails this out every winter, free of charge or obligation, as way of saying, “Hey, I know all these people and they’ll do good by you.”

Fifth, examine the real return-on-investment for an aggressive online presence. These days, it seems like everyone says you need a personal Facebook account, an FB business fan page, a Google+ account, a Google+ business page, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, a LinkedIn business profile, et cetera, ad nauseam. Certainly, some people do. Writers, consultants, professionals not bound to a particular locale — these folks benefit from the exposure of a carefully curated social media presence. But local tradespeople? I nearly snorted coffee out of my nose when I saw a local plumber’s front-window sign that invited readers to “like us on Facebook.” Um, no. I am not going to “like” a plumber, especially at random. Most won’t. A good rule of thumb: If your real-world income that derives from a social media presence pays you less than minimum wage for your actual time incurred, then cut back. You’re just wasting time and money, especially if you’re a local business. There are better ways to build brand recognition in a local community than social media profiles.

Sixth, consider the most effective mix of properties and strategies for growing an online presence. There’s lots of debate among the SM professionals about effectiveness techniques, but a few ideas smack of common sense. If you represent a local non-profit or target a younger demographic, building a Facebook fan page makes sense. A tech blogger should be ubiquitous. Large service-oriented firms ought to have a rapid-response Twitter team. But traditional products and services rendered into a municipal market — think trades, health services, etc. — may be better served by a simple blog accompanied by a local fan page. And if you do provide services, think about hiring someone to build an app for you, or to optimize your site for mobile browsers.

Seventh, commit to what you can do and no more. Want a sure-fire way to lose a potential client? Create a blog and then never update it. Or create a Twitter account and answer direct messages a week later. If you cannot reliably manage the infrastructure, then don’t built it in the first place. Or in your face-to-face marketing world: If you can’t spare the time to do all those one-on-one meetings with BNI members or show up consistently at a local LinkedIn group event, don’t go there in the first place. Failing to meet your commitments is worse than never committing at all.

A successful social strategy translates to dollars in your pocket, not in inflated Klout scores or vast hordes of Twitter followers who never read your tweets anyway. Focus on growing your business, one handshake at a time, and build the online infrastructure that works for you, not for your social media consultant.

Happy 2012.

Over the last week, I’ve put that theory to the test. Allow me to share some core learnings with you.

First, some context. I’m great at planning, but not so hot when it comes to execution. I can — and do — spend hours plotting a major initiative but can’t ever seem to find the time to bring it to completion. Things get in the way, I get distracted, or I suffer the general malaise that comes with intermittent, unexplained crashes in my Vitamin D levels.

This week, while on vacation from the day job, I’ve been astonishingly productive at preparing for 2012. And then in getting a bunch of stuff knocked off the to-do list already. This week alone, I’ve actually finished three major things that I’ve been meaning to do, in some form, since early 2009. Wow.

Here’s what I’ve done differently this week, and how using a PM approach to governing your own life may prove fruitful.

First, set the right framework for success. That means, in particular, watching your consumption. Most of us need to consume fewer calories and more sleep. Exercise, good nutrition and adequate rest are the absolute prerequisites to slogging through the rough stuff.

Second, decide what really matters to you. Think of this in terms of the long haul — the kinds of things you’d like to see (or not see!) mentioned on your obituary. Done right, it takes a long time; we’re remarkably adept at self-deception, and it can take a long time to realize that the life you have and the life you want aren’t even in the same ballpark. Keep at it.

Third, develop a whole-life vision statement. Keep it short and sweet, but relevant. Mine is: “I aspire to be an elderly man who, upon his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror free of the sting of regret.” Notice what’s not there? Statements about money, family or social status. A personal vision statement ought to get at the heart of who you are as a human person, not at a material condition that you want to attain. My vision statement has a supplement: “The measure of a man reveals itself in the sincerity of his struggle to realize his natural potential. For me, this potential is rooted in the development of authentic wisdom, obtained through the joyful pursuit of diverse experiences, meaningful relationships and bold new ideas.” The supplement sets the context.

Fourth, identify the strategies you’ll use to achieve your goals. Think of this as something of a scope statement: You’ll identify what tactics are or are not reasonable for you. Philosophy majors may recognize these as Kantian maxims of a sort that weigh the relative fitness of any given action. This list will be personal, but it’ll provide a framework to help judge whether goals, obstacles, opportunities or whatnot cohere to your broader vision. For myself, I’ve identified six key strategies: Reduce consumption; cultivate serenity; nurture relationships; exhibit insatiable curiosity; do fewer things, but do them well; favor action over study. This list has changed over the years; the last two points were added just a few months ago, prompted by my tendency to be a jack of all trades paralyzed by analysis. In general, if my life project needs to change, these strategies help me think through the best options for mid-course correction.

Fifth, establish your top-level goals. Think of it as your bucket list, or a year’s plans, or whatever makes the most sense for you. Keep the list reasonable — and make sure that the goals you identify follow the traditional SMARTER approach (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-limited, ethical and rewarding). Avoid, if possible, conflating your personal goals with your professional goals unless you’re self-employed.

Sixth, build the right documentation system. Some people use a day planner, others use notebooks, others still use a mix of computer systems. Regardless, pull together a means of conveniently tracking all of the tasks, dependencies, etc. that make up your goals. I’ve settled on task management through Outlook (hosted Exchange account, with robust categories, so I stay in sync on my desktop PC, netbook and Windows Phone), with additional documentation and notes stored in a OneNote notebook and shared among my three screens using SkyDrive. It works for me. Your mileage may vary. If you get really involved in detail planning, you may wish to download the free Open Workbench software — it does the job. Make sure your system allows you to file weekly “status reports” by means of a journal, form, tabbed section or some other mechanism.

Seventh, plot out the project. This is where project management tools really come into the picture. For each of your goals, list out each milestone it will take to get there, starting at the end and working backwards. Identify the time it will take, and when you can slot it. Estimate costs. You should be able to visualize each goal’s execution on a Gantt chart — the start date, the end date, the date of each milestone, any dependencies to any other goals, any dependencies on matters outside your control, a “go/no-go” decision point where you evaluate whether it’s still worth pursuing, a reasonable estimate of total hours to complete, and costs associated with the goal (and when they come due). For example, one of my goals for 2012 is to run in the Grand Rapids Marathon in early October. Although I used to be a decent runner, I’m a bit more out of shape than I’d care to admit. So, my timeline for this goal includes cardio endurance work with a stationary bike in January though March, followed by a mix of treadmill running and running along the trails of Millennium Park starting in the mid-spring. I set a few milestone time-and-distance markers over the summer, and planned out when I need to register, when I should buy new running shoes, etc. This simple goal — “run a marathon” — requires months of preparation and a couple hundred bucks in financial outlay. Plan for it, or it won’t happen.

Eighth, overlay all your goals into a single, continuous narrative. I have eight major goals all brushing against each other over the first nine months of 2012. To avoid overbooking in one month and underbooking in another, I developed a timeline where I put the milestones and substantial tasks associated with each goal onto a single OneNote page. Doing so highlighted that my deliverables for March were insane and that I had almost nothing planned for July. So I moved deadlines around so that there was a fairly even balance across the entire period under review. I also moved a few things that had a high dollar value attached, so I could spread expenses more evenly throughout the year. The upside to this overlay is that you can really get a sense for how goals can overlap the same idea, so you can better sequence tasks among disparate goals to make the entire process more efficient.

Ninth, adjust your daily routine to focus on goal achievement. If you’re really got fire in the belly to get your goals accomplished, then plan your day accordingly. Set aside time in the morning or evening dedicated specifically to your goal-oriented tasks. Even if you work a rough day job, picking a fixed hour every night, or a two-to-three hour block a couple nights per week, gives you the temporal flexibility to get stuff done. It’s too easy to let the detritus of the day’s mundane activities obstruct progress on your goals — so structure your day in such a way that you have no excuse for not making time.

Tenth, evaluate successes and failures honestly. When you complete something, celebrate it. When you don’t, evaluate whether you need to move the goalposts a bit, or whether you genuinely can’t achieve it. If you find you are consistently kicking the can down the road, ask yourself some hard questions: Do you really want to do it? What’s stopping you? Is what’s stopping you merely an excuse? Is your problem that you’re conflicted and need to engage in more personal reflection? Are you excited but too lazy to do what you’ve set out to accomplish?

Forrest Gump teaches us that life is like a box of chocolates. I disagree. Life is like a project, and holding fast to a clear PM methodology can mean the difference between success and failure in achieving your dreams.

• Allow/enable. These words proliferate in tech writing: “Microsoft Office Outlook enables you to send emails.” Check the definitions on these; allow means “to permit” and enable means “to give power, means, competence, or ability to; authorize.” Too frequent use of allow or enable in lieu of a more precise verb makes your prose sound sophomoric. Better to write something more direct: “Send and receive email with Microsoft Office Outlook” or “Outlook, a full-fledged email client, …”

• Issue. It seems like everyone has an “issue.” Whether set in an office environment or within a car, computer or relationship, we tend to want to use issue as an all-purpose, no-fingers-pointed way of indicating that something’s amiss. But why not skip the limp euphemism and go with the right word? Use problem or error or disagreement or any other word that actually suggests what the “issue” really is.

• Multiple. Strictly, a “multiple” of something refers to multiplication: “Six is a multiple of two.” However, an astonishingly large number of writers seem to want to use multiple as an all-purpose synonym for “more than one.” Avoid this temptation; use several or many or even more than one to be more precise. Reserve multiple for cases where there’s really a multiple of something under discussion.

• Once. This word really shouldn’t be used as a synonym for when: “Ensure the door is locked once you shut it” sounds too colloquial for professional writing.

• Utilize. Banish this pretentious euphemism from your vocabulary. In a strict sense, utilize means “to find a practical and effective use for something” — not simply “to make use of.” This follows from the 19th-century concept of the util, a basic measure of utility, advocated by early Utilitarians. In ordinary circumstances, prefer use instead; it’s probably what’s intended, and it doesn’t sound like you’re fond of employing empty buzzwords.

• Via. People use via all the time. Its primary meaning is “by way of” (e.g., “Bob flew to New York via Cincinnati”), but although some authorities grant license for a secondary sense of via meaning “by means of” (e.g., “Jane sent the letter via fax”) it’s preferable to use a more direct construction in the latter context: “Jane faxed the letter.”

There. Six tips for improving your writing.  I hope these multiple tips enable you to utilize cleaner prose to fix issues via writing once you master them all.

Newspapers

Our friends in the broadsheet world are definitely feeling the hurt. Circulation is down, ad revenues are down, employee skill and morale are down. Newspapers seem to be making all the wrong choices about balancing a print enterprise with a Web-centric presence.

Will more papers fold? Yup. Eighty percent? Probably not. There’s a market for traditional newsprint, and in any case, given proliferating sources of information, it’s not clear that mid- or small-market newspapers can endure as Web-focused outlets in the face of competition from TV news and increasingly professional local bloggers.

Just a guess: Newspapers that consider themselves the source of deep, high-quality journalism — the type that routinely engages in investigative journalism or high-profile analysis — will fare better than mere local reporting. Even anemic newspapers can leverage resources that bloggers and even TV/radio cannot. Papers that embrace their niche as the “deep fount” of journalism that then feeds more superficial enterprises may well ride out the storm. And who knows? Maybe newspapers that focus on hardcore journalism will largely cease to break stories to the general public and instead sell their content to other media outlets for rebranding — sort of like a mini Associated Press for niche markets.

Magazines

I subscribe to more than two dozen print magazines. (Hey, I need something to keep me occupied when I enjoy my daily cigar and cocktail.) A few themes from the glossy-mag world suggest that storm clouds may be on the horizon.

First, profile interviews increasingly read like acts of self-promotion by the writer: “Hey, look how cool I am by flirting and doing drugs with this well-known celebrity.” This isn’t journalism; it’s a hack job, and veteran editors should rein in this practice before it turns off more sophisticated readers. Second, editorial slant in non-opinion pieces wears ever more opaquely; many of the major lifestyle magazines appear to be in the tank for Obama (I’m looking at you, Esquire) or the environmental movement (your turn for the eyebrows, Discover). Third, tech- or entrepreneurial-focused magazines seem content to cycle through the flavor of the day with astonishing levels of optimistic credulity; if I read another glowing profile of some startup company with a bizarre name and a niche app, and how I need to invest/emulate/buy it now, I’m going to puke. Especially when the next reference to it appears a year later, when the glowing profile of the next hot startup makes note of last year’s quiet failure as a “learning lesson” on why this time it’ll be different.

Just a guess: Magazines may consolidate a bit, but they’ll be OK over the next five years. Quality will still suck, but most of the major titles will endure.

Book Publishing

The buggy-whip manufacturers of today’s print media, the book publishers will continue to stick it in the shorts for their customers in their ultimately futile attempt to maintain dominance against ebooks.

Just a guess: Ebook adoption will depend most heavily on e-reader adoption. And the latter will depend on how well Amazon and Barnes and Noble try to preserve hardware investment at the expense of customer satisfaction. My friend Duane recently blogged about it, but the point, in summary, is this: My access to content and subscriptions to a vendor like Amazon or B&N should not be dependent on the device I’m using. I own a Kindle. I should be able to access Kindle content (not just books, but also subscriptions) on my Kindle app for WebOS and WP7. To block content based on the platform of the reader, for no other reason than to force hardware sales, will turn off customers who may like the marginal benefit of ebooks provided they aren’t more inconvenient than paper books.

So. There. Three predictions. Do you agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your feedback.

Of course I called back. And that’s where the fun begins. I will spare the guilty the shame of direct identification, and instead offer seven principles about sales in the new media ecosystem, for the benefit of struggling ad reps across the fruited plain.

First, don’t assume the person you’re cold-calling is an idiot. Better yet, perhaps you should take 15 seconds to check who your potential client is before dialing. If you’re soliciting a consultant who self-professes some expertise with business media, it’s a bad idea to talk about why advertising is a good idea as if he were 2 years old — and a worse idea to engage on this lecture if you’re shaky about the concept yourself.

Second, don’t misrepresent yourself. The ad rep who called me asserted he was calling on behalf of the TV station, and never indicated that he was interested in selling an ad. Had I known that, my expectations would have been set correctly and I could have ignored him without further ado. Instead, I had assumed that the TV station was simply expanding its business profiles through its editorial operation. As it happens, the caller wasn’t from the station at all — he was from a West Coast ad company. And when I called back, he never actually got to the “paid ad” part until about five minutes into the conversation, about a minute after I figured out that this wasn’t an editorial operation. Bait-and-switch is always bad form.

Third, don’t misrepresent your account — especially about things that can be independently verified. The ad rep made some fairly unbelievable claims about total and unique monthly site impressions for the TV station, and a quick check of various public metrics and rankings suggested that the totals were inflated by a factor of 10. The special local section of a TV news operation in a 40th-to-50th national market does *not* get more than 1.5 million page visits per month. Sorry.

Fourth, don’t pressure someone to pay you before he can even review a contract. After detailing the “wonderful benefits” from “partnering” with the TV station, I was prompted to provide my credit-card number for about $150/month for a minimum of six months. When I said I’d prefer to see a contract and receive an invoice, the ad rep pushed back; when I held firm, I got transferred to his manager. Who reiterated what the ad rep said. Nevertheless, I stood my ground, suggesting that no reputable entrepreneur would pay for a service before reviewing a contract.

Fifth, don’t put artificial limits on invoicing just to get a credit-card number. The manager finally relented and provided an invoicing option — provided I paid quarterly, with the first bill for nearly $450 due upon receipt. Or I could provide a credit card for easy monthly billing. Seriously?

Sixth, don’t suppress bad metrics by claiming “trade secret.” As part of the song-and-dance, I asked the ad rep for the average click-through rate on the ads. But the response? A variation on the theme that each advertiser’s CTR is confidential, but I could evaluate my own metrics using Google Analytics after the ad contract was executed. Usually, when online ad metrics exceed industry averages, the ad reps are happy to blow their own horn and share reports substantiating the claim, so clamming up about it suggests the rates are below average. Suggesting that CTR is confidential (no reference to this was in the ad contract, by the way) feels like a lie.

Seventh, don’t give someone a bad ad slot but still charge premium prices and suggest that he’s really getting a world-class deal. I was concerned because the huge display ads being pitched in my direction were buried well below the fold, on the right column, below other features. Even in a maximized browser, a user would have to scroll well down before she’d even see the ad, and since it’s well-established that most news readers only get through the first three paragraphs or so before moving on, the odds that the user would scroll down feels like a bad gamble. Let’s assume an average CTR is 0.25 percent (probably on the high side for B2B media consulting, but …). If you assume that the ad rep’s impression count is accurate, we’re looking at 9 million impressions in a six-month window (if my other numbers are right, generously assume 1 million). This means that I could expect between 2,500 and 22,500 clicks. Over the life of a six-month, $900 contract, my cost-per-click is somewhere between $0.04 and $0.36; my gut says it’s probably closer to $0.50 when you factor my business focus and the weak ad placement. The conversion rates for those clicked ads aren’t entirely clear. The ad company, despite my expressed preference, wanted to put me in the “Grand Rapids South” market, where the B2B media consulting market is less developed than in the central city. In any case, a Facebook ad campaign, or a targeted Google AdSense campaign, would reach a larger and more targeted audience for a much lower CPC. So — this “deal” really isn’t.

The moral of the story? Yeah, the market sucks. Ad reps still need to make a living. But deception and pressure tactics aren’t the way to go.

At some point during our childhood, each of us wanted to be an astronaut when we grew up. The question, though, is why so few land among the stars while the rest of us believe we’re cruelly trapped by the iron bands of gravity. Very few people believe themselves to be incompetent dolts who have no real future. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. We have our dreams, and fundamentally we all believe ourselves capable of Achieving Great Things.

If we concede that everyone is equally capable of excellence, then the question of why some people fail to achieve takes a special significance. Why do people fail at life? What root causes of systemic unhappiness contribute to a person’s grudging choice to sit on the sidelines while wishing he competed on the field? Can we avoid the mistakes of others?

Having observed and counseled many people over the years — aspiring business owners, college students wondering what to do with their lives, prison inmates, the hospital-bound terminally ill — I think I have a stab at an answer or 13. 

1. You don’t know what you want. I remain astonished at how many people can’t articulate a clear sense of who they are and what their life’s mission is. Reminds me of some of the women I dated a few years ago — they knew they wanted a man, but they didn’t really know what kind of man (or whether the kind they thought they wanted actually existed in the real world). Hence, they bounced from bad date to bad date, never understanding why they couldn’t find Mr. Right. Swipe a page from my playbook: Take the time to think through who you want to be on the morning of your 70th birthday or what you want your obituary to look like.  If you do it right, the process should take weeks or months, not a few minutes with a notepad. Ask yourself some hard questions. What’s important to you? What things do you want to accomplish? Write them down. Plan how you intended to achieve them. You may find that your ideal life and your current life are radically out of sync (as was the problem for me). If so, you have ample opportunity to engage in a mid-course correction. In any case, clearly identifying your life’s purpose and mission provides you with a valuable yardstick with which to gauge the suitability of any future major life choice. Does it cohere? Doesn’t it? Does your life plan need revision? Consider it a work in progress. Just don’t live the unexamined life. I’ve seen too many people on their deathbeds who spoke only of what they regretted, instead of taking comfort in what they had achieved. The tragedy of it tears at the soul.
2. Your thinking is too tactical. Some people are organized with Teutonic efficiency. They have checklists galore, and hierarchies of sticky notes plastering their workspace. They know what they need to do, and have their life scheduled months in advance. But they’re too busy with execution to put all their tasks into a big-picture framework. They do, without thinking about why they do; these are the folks who cannot see the forest for the trees. If you find yourself drowning in tasks, put them aside. Classify them, and figure out whether they’re actually worth your time. When necessary, say no. Declining unnecessary work is incredibly liberating.
3. Your thinking is too strategic. Of course, other people’s hearts never leave the Left Bank. They always think about the big picture but they never concentrate on the various steps necessary to bring that big picture into focus. These are the folks who are so fascinated by the forest that they keep running into the trees. The best way to drill to the tactical when you’re inclined to think big is to start with a cloud diagram. Put your dreams in the middle. Put hubs and spokes out that describe all the things necessary to accomplishing those dreams. Connect them with arrows, as appropriate. The process is called “mind mapping” and its great for helping creative thinkers become organized at a more granular level. Use the mind map as a starting point for developing task lists or other planning tools.
4. You’re a jack of all trades or a master of one. People love polymaths, but the trouble with them is that they’re a mile wide and an inch deep; they are great at drawing connections among disciplines but their perspectives remain too superficial for serious application. People also love content experts, but these wise men often are so consumed by a narrow area of study that they cannot link ideas from different disciplines coherently into a complex picture. People become specialists or generalists in response to different pressures — usually career-focused. Better, though, to  be a jack of few trades and a master of some. Know a little bit about a lot, but cultivate sufficient depth in several areas. My personal recommendation is to know a lot about philosophy (logic, ethics, epistemology) and communications theory, and then become familiar at more than just the surface level in disciplines related to your area of interest. For example, I’m a certified scuba diver. I can talk with some “depth” (pun intended) about diving, pontificating with a degree of mastery, but I’m not a dive instructor; I’m not a genuine expert in the subject. But that’s OK. I know enough about diving to know the broad outline of the subject, which also helps me to understand and appreciate what I know that I don’t know.
5. You decline to accept 100 percent responsibility for your situation. A common refrain from the prison inmates I’ve counseled: Someone else was responsible for their incarceration. I volunteered in a now-closed Michigan prison that had a high concentration of sex offenders. If I had a nickel for every time a middle-aged man blamed his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter for putting the moves on him first, I could afford to re-open the prison singlehandedly. Funny thing is, the scenarios they described often happened just as they explained; never underestimate the extent to which teenage girls in certain socioeconomic conditions will compete with their mothers — even if it means seducing her mother’s man. Yet the men were hardly victims; sexual activity requires the active participation of (at least) two people. Regardless of which side of the bars you happen to fall, the temptation to blame circumstances for a failure, instead of fully owning your stake in it, precludes learning from one’s mistakes. It also sets up a victim mentality that inhibits reasonable risk-taking. A good strategy for any failure is to examine what happened and what you did that contributed to the outcome. Own that stake, even if you aren’t solely responsible. Learn from it. Don’t pass the buck.
6. You are paralyzed by analysis. One of my life goals is to complete a through-hike of one of the major trails in the United States — the Pacific Crest Trail. This 2,600-mile excursion takes five or six months to complete, starting at the Mexican border near San Diego and ending at Manning, British Columbia. As part of my research into this bucket-list goal, I’ve joined a few email discussion groups. One thing that becomes quickly apparent is that there are a lot of people who, year after year after year, say that they’ll try it “next year.” Many of them explain their delays in terms of logistics: They need to research gear more carefully, or try a day hike or two, or sell the condo, or whatever. Truth is, it’s not all that difficult to hit the trail, but the planning process becomes a surrogate for actually performing the hike. These wayward souls have gotten so lost in their check sheets and outlines that they never actually manage to step foot on the trail. At some point, you need to move from planning to execution.
7. You don’t perform adequate due diligence. I love Pat and Ali, the infamous “Bumfuzzle” duo. Almost a decade ago, they spontaneously quit their jobs in Chicago to sail around the world. They sold everything, bought a catamaran, and set out — with no real sailing experience at all. They blogged about their adventures, gaining the respect of folks like me and the chiding of armchair sailors who have spent half a lifetime “getting ready” to sail but kept finding reasons to not experience the open water. I loved their blog; their sundry misadventures delighted me and the fact they stayed safe and had fun warmed my spirits. Pat and Ali were lucky, though — they did something dangerous, with almost no research, and ended up being successful. Most people who don’t dive deeply enough into the background and logistics of their ideas find themselves stymied by avoidable errors. Rule of thumb, courtesy of my late grandfather: Anything worth doing is worth doing right. That includes appropriate study.
8. You don’t keep abreast of new trends. My friend Duane was a cutting-edge game designer back when the TRS-80 was hot new technology. Then he joined the Army, and after a successful career as an officer, he tried his hand at programming again after he left the service. Result? He struggled. Because he wasn’t able to keep up with changing technology (a result of his overseas deployments), he missed several formative generations of software design. Most people, though, don’t have Duane’s special problem; they refuse to keep abreast of new trends not because they’re stationed on the DMZ but because they think they’ve mastered the subject and therefore no longer need to study it. Then, when time passes, the lessons of the past become less relevant — as do the skills and perspectives of the person whose arrogance stopped him from being a lifelong learner. Tip: Read relevant magazines or RSS feeds. Small time investment, big reward.
9. You’re horrible at time management. Life requires project management skills. Silly as it sounds, the best way to ensure progress on your goals is to treat your whole life like a program and use a consistent PM methodology to keep it on track. Disorganization saps the vitality out of the best-laid plans. To avoid failing because time management presents a challenge, use products like Microsoft Project or Open Workbench to set up a task/dependency list and look at dates on a Gantt chart. File “status reports” in the form of a weekly personal blog or diary. Identify scopes and exclusions and make sure that individual goals follow the SMARTER approach — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-limited, ethical and rewarding. Plan for the long term, chunk major goals into smaller tasks and schedule deliverables in reasonable fashion.
10. You have no coherent social strategy. Success is almost never a solitary affair. We need networks of friends, funders, partners and lovers to shore up our weakness and help us to better leverage our strengths. Yet I remain astonished at how little attention most people pay to the size and quality of their personal network. Spend time on like-minded discussion forums, participate in LinkedIn/MeetUp groups, join a business networking organization. Do something to bring allies into your struggle for success, for trying to go it alone is usually a great way to fail. Note, however, that “social strategy” means “people you know in the real world.” Having 100,000 Twitter followers you’ve never heard of means nothing if you don’t actually have recourse to human beings who will help you directly, and who will accept your help in return.
11. You’re too comfortable to push your limits. The sweet siren of comfort: It’s better to relax today than to put in the hard work to make tomorrow better. How many of us with grand plans for the next better mousetrap never follow through because we rationalize why we need to protect the not-very-fulfilling day job we already have? How often do we say that our current lot is good enough so that we never risk it on a high-risk, high-reward pursuit that could put today’s comfort on the line? Comfort and risk aversion represent the Scylla and Charybdis on the map of success: You need to chart a course between them to make it to the other side.
12. You’re a poster child for sloth. A dear friend of mine has the potential to be a nationally recognized film reviewer; he know the industry, he writes with a sharp-witted flair and he genuinely loves the “best of the worst.” But he’ll never actually try to break into the market. Too much work. Good ideas mean little if you’re unwilling to invest the blood, sweat, toil and tears necessary to deliver on a major life goal. If you find yourself with a laundry list of goals, but you go home after punching the clock and tinker on the Web or watch TV or otherwise do absolutely nothing as a routine part of your work week, you’re in the clutches of Sloth. Until you slay that demon, you won’t make it except by accident.
13. You’re too agreeable to succeed. Gillikinism #47: “Nice people finish mid-pack.”  Success in a competitive environment requires aggression. It requires you to stand up for yourself, to fight for your dreams, to protect your investments of time and money, to never settle for half the loaf, and to beat your peers into respectful submission. Nice guys don’t finish last, but they don’t finish first. Grow a spine and be willing to fail over and over and over until you finally succeed. Be Steve Jobs, without the furniture-throwing temper tantrums. Embrace every failure as learning one more way of how not to do it.

Success is difficult. Success of the kind that gets your shirtless photo on the cover of Inc. Magazine is damned difficult. The funny thing, though — it’s possible. The tools of victory are always within our grasp. The challenge is to identify the snares we’ve set for ourselves and then use those tools to disarm them, one by one, until we realize that the real reason you’re not successful is — you.

After you internalize that insight, and adjust your attitudes and practices accordingly, your success is almost guaranteed.