The conference's namesake quotation as displayed on the program.

As a result I’ve been doing my best to get out of the weeds and explore other fields to get inspired for the next move. Part of that personal journey happened last week at Behance’s 99% conference¹.

The conference is targetted towards “creatives” and focuses on turning ideas into action. Speakers included Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, How to be Black author Baratunde Thurston, Graphic Designer and Partner at Pentagram Paula Scher and many others. Also, Behance was kind enough to anoint me a 99% Fellow for the conference.

Below are a few larger takeaways from the conference.

Key Takeaways

Know your one thing – In our professional lives, it’s easy to be torn in dozens of directions. Several speakers mentioned the almost maniacal focus they had on their core goal and mission for their projects and credit that focus as the reason for any success. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian mentioned how he tries to give all of his products personalities and have those personalities permeate everything he does.

Jason Goldberg demonstrates how he figured out "design" was his company's "one thing."

Jason Goldberg, founder of Fab, mentioned that knowing your “one thing” is the key to success. When Goldberg and his team had to “pivot” fabulous.com to Fab, they drew this chart on a cocktail napkin to emphasize design as the “one thing” that Fab would focus on.

“Creativity is the residue of wasted time” – If we don’t stop ourselves, it’s easy to spend every waking moment consuming some sort of content. It’s also easy to mistake “working” with “being productive.”

Many speakers spoke of inspiration finding them in their idle moments (usually in the shower). Jonah Lehrer, author of “How Creativity Works” told the story of Bob Dylan writing “Like a Rolling Stone” after recovering from touring by taking time hiding out in a cabin in upstate New York while he swore off the music industry. Our inspiration is more likely to come when we’re relaxed.

The real hot startup? Cities – When companies get bigger, they are less productive due to bureaucracy and processes. However, when cities get bigger they are more productive and more diverse people become loosely organized. In a large city, citizens are more likely to bump into inspiration. The business/city comparison was drawn again by Union Square Venture’s Partner Brad Burnham in his “studio session” when he told listeners that businesses built on network effects² are move like governments than businesses.

Be bold – Keith Yamashita, partner at SYPartners, spoke of working on teams and urged the crowd to be bold. ”If you’re uncomfortable, you’re doing it right,” he said.

Alexis Ohanian during his talk at the 99% conference

Other notes / choice quotes:

Fortune 100 companies live an average of 45 years

“If it feels tedious, you’ll never stick with it.”

Email has us in the age of “reactionary workflow.”

The number one source of happiness at work, even above money, is ANY form of progress – Teresa Amabile, Hardvard Business school

“On the internet know one can hear you fail” – Alexis Ohanian

“Ship stuff. If only so your team has something to put on their resumes” – Tony Fadell, Founder of Nest

“Just try shit. Please.” - Alexis Ohanian

Final Thoughts

The conference was impeccably organized. As someone who has planned an event or two, I know how hard these things are to pull off. Big thanks to the Behance team for putting it together and inspiring me to push a few ideas forward.

If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.

1. Which is derived from the Thomas Edison quote “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” and has nothing to do with Occupy Wall Street.
2. like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Etsy etc.

While other people talk about revenue models for journalism, Jarvis actively teaches his students to explore for-profit businesses (see his curriculum here). However, I find myself wanting more from Jarvis and other professors that teach entrepreneurial journalism. What exactly, are they teaching students? What is the success rate of these programs? I often wonder what the ideal entrepreneurial journalism class would look like.

Below is my best guess on the class I wish I had when I went to school based on my experience with Technically Philly and Technically Media. And to you teachers out there: I know it’s easier to blog about teaching than to actually teach, this is more of a thought-experiment from someone who has been both a student and a business owner.

I think these classes should be less “Entrepreneurial Journalism 101″ and more “Y Combinator” or “DreamIt Ventures.” Make the class an open collaboration between students to learn from one another and test their ideas is a safe environment.

This is a simplistic break-down on how I’d do it:

Lesson One: pay me. The hardest transition from worker to owner is the notion that someone would actually pay you money for your services. Every freelancer goes through this when trying to figure out rates. Getting past the “payment” barrier is the most important hurdle in becoming an entrepreneur. To do this, I’d base the entire class on how much money students made. Why? Because good presentations skills do not pay the rent. On day one I’d walk in and write something like this on the whiteboard:

1. F = $0
2. D = $1 – $100
3. C = $101 – $150
4. B = $151 – $250
5. A = $251+

As a rule, students could not accept money from their friends or family. I’d also throw in some awesome prizes for those who make more than $250. Why so low? Sure, $250 isn’t enough for a full business but I remember how hard it was for Technically Philly to make its first sale. To paraphrase T.Boone Pickens, the first $250 is the hardest.

Lesson Two: Pick a niche. Theory is nothing without a working prototype to tinker with. In J-school there is enough pontificating, I’d rather get to work. I’d have students all research and create a niche publication on WordPress, Tumblr or other free CMS options. Their publication will act as the testing ground for everything they learn throughout the course. We won’t focus on design or coding, though students who are having trouble updating their site should be able to get the help they need. Some courses encourage collaboration with other departments such as computer science students. I’d rather keep the class focused on making money and not on the tools or technology.

Key to this lesson will be avoiding redundancy and duplicate content. For example, I don’t think I’d let any Phillies blogs make it. Also key here is defining the target audience. We wouldn’t have to get too specific but publishers should at least be able to complete a basic user persona.

Lesson Three: Case Studies. Most journalists know how the New York Times and NPR make money. However in journalism school we need to study online businesses, not only media companies. For nearly a decade many bloggers and news sites have made money using their content as marketing for something else. There are also companies that are really good at targeting content towards Google and AdSense. Others charge for subscription services. I’d ask students to tell me how sites like CopyBlogger (WordPress products), I Will Teach You To Be Rich (courses and books), All Facebook (conferences) make money. Maybe there’s even an untapped revenue source in mail subscription products. I’d also love to ask students what their favorite sites are and we can break down its revenue model as a class.

In journalism school, too many professors and students think that advertising and donations are the only way to make money online. That’s mostly because journalists only read publications about journalism. By getting out of the industry it’s evident that there are other ways to make a living.

Lesson Four: Presentations. After studying various business models, students will present their vision for their publication in a four-minute talks that will focus on revenue ideas for the site. Other students will then also chime in to help brainstorm additional revenue plans. Each student should end their presentation with a list of ideas to experiment with over the course of a semester. At this point it may be wise to allow students to group up and work together with two or three people on each publication.

Lesson Five: Get to work + speakers/mentors. The next few weeks should be the rapid testing of all of the proposed revenue ideas brainstormed by each student. Each class will instead become a lab where students will work on creating content, selling and helping one another. Meanwhile the first few minutes of the class will be speakers brought in for inspiration. Speakers should include other media entrepreneurs, investors, startup founders and event organizers to help inspire and answer questions. This is also a chance for students to network for their post-graduation life.

Additionally, classes will become labs around common revenue models such as “hosting your first event,” “selling your first ad” and more. This “lesson” will take up the bulk of the class schedule.

Lesson Six: Revenue check-in. At this point students should write short essays about the problems they are facing. As an adjunct, this would be a crucial time to offer insight or find experts to help students get over the hump.

Lesson Seven: Final Presentations. The last class will be case studies of each publication. How much money did it make any why? Each student, of course, is able to keep any profits they make and (hopefully) is encouraged to continue working on the publication after the class.

Again, I know it’s easy to play armchair professor. But journalism students are hitting the job market without the skills that are most in demand. Many students I talk to still have ambitions of being a sports reporter or a fashion columnist and are just hoping that a publication picks them out of the hundreds of other grads just like them.

We need to better inform students about the realities of the job market ahead and teach them how to stand out while giving them the skills to stand on their own.

Now for the scariest sentence in the history of this site: effective June 1, I’ll no longer be involved in the day-to-day operations of Technically Philly and Technically Media.

The reason: we’ve had great success running Technically Media as a tribunal, equally dividing roles and responsibilities between the co-founders: Brian James Kirk, Chris Wink and myself. As our business grew and diversified I had a growing opinion that we needed more leadership by having less leaders. It was time for me to lead, follow, or get out of the way.

I want to make perfectly clear that this is not because of any specific event that’s happened in the past few months. Chris and Brian are like brothers to me, I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve done and I hope to work with them again some day. Instead this choice was deeply personal, a choice to try something new and embrace change.

I’ll still maintain a stake in the company and will be involved in long-term strategic planning, but the company will be in the very capable hands of Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink.

This is usually the part of these “changing jobs” posts when the writer mentions what’s next. The honest answer is “I don’t know.” I will be traveling for a few weeks in June and July, but I’m mostly interested in taking this time in-between projects to recharge my batteries. I’m not looking to hide-out on a farm somewhere, I’m still very much fascinated by media, editorial/content strategy, entrepreneurship, online content, and journalism. I still see a tremendous opportunity in all of these things.

If anyone has ideas on something you’d like to work on together or would like to explore new ideas, please reach out. My calendar this Summer is wide open. In the meantime, I’ll be busy helping plan Philly Tech Week, speaking at SXSW and attending the 99 percent conference in May.

And to anyone that ever emailed me a story about how Technically Philly has helped them or came out to one of our events or purchased our consulting services: Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

It’s half curiousity, half my fascination with online content delivery¹. Tumblr’s CMS allows users to easily share links, pictures, videos and text treating them all as its own content type with its own front-end design. The content nerd in me loves this.

After my initial glee at receiving followers and likes,² I’ve discovered the majority of Tumblr blogs are just whimsical collections of animated gifs and irreverent one-off blogs. Even worse, I felt a sudden need to constantly have fresh material on the blog. I kept almost sharing pictures and links without adding any value just to keep it “fresh.”

And then I realized: something is horribly wrong here, and we’ve been thinking this way for far too long.

“Most of them are bullshit”

I’ve seen a similar phenomena in other projects I’ve been involved in throughout my life on the web. It’s easy to demand a post every day, a blog post responding to every twist and turn of the industry. You’ll hear editors say things like “we HAVE to have something on that or we’ll look ridiculous.”  People like Buzzfeed, Mashable, Bleacher Report and Business Insider make a living on the intellectual equivalent of these empty calories.

This post was, in part, inspired by M.G. Siegler’s breakdown of the recent Path privacy fiasco and the way the tech press handled it. Formerly a TechCrunch writer, Siegler now sees how laughable the system we’ve created can be:

We need to finally acknowledge that most people aren’t digesting online content in a vacuum. My local news paper doesn’t need a slideshow or a story on Whitney Houston’s death. We don’t need to react to news with faux outrage just to “have something” on the topic. “Breaking a story” rarely matters any more. I don’t need 15 recaps of the Eagles game I just watched. If we don’t post anything on our site,  the world won’t end and I bet most of our readers would hardly notice.

Creating lasting content

Somewhere there’s an editor craving more, an entrepreneur creating another content farm to sell SEO’d keywords against and a old-school newspaper holdover that all think we always need to “feed the beast.” But we need to change. Instead we should try and create content that possesses as many as the below characteristics as possible:

Withstand the test of time – Let’s create content that doesn’t have an expiration date of hours or days. Let’s optimize for not only the initial release but the long term. The moment we hit “publish” content is forever available online. Never in the history of humanity has there been a medium with the longevity of the web.

It’s okay to be quiet - Never publish anything “just to have something.” Everything we write does not need to be perfect, but it does need to contribute to a conversation in an intelligent way.

Be a resource (or at least be hilarious) – With reading services like Instapaper, long-form content consumption devices like the iPad and our various bookmarking services it is incredibly easy for readers to “archive” what we write and draw on them at a future time. Joshua Benton called this “TiVo for News.” Produce compelling and useful content and the return rate of readers skyrockets. See this Read It Later data boiled down by the author. Among the most time-shifted authors is Drew Magary of Deadspin and Bill Barnwell of Grantland. One writes lengthy humor pieces centered around his child-like urges in adult situations and the other offers incredibly detailed analysis of professional football games, respectively.

The more useful our content becomes the more people will link to it, and the longer it will last. Google will always be moving to reward quality content creators. Just ask Demand Media what happens when you try to game the system.

Curate with context and your expertise – One of my favorite example of smart curation is Dave Pell’s NextDraft newsletter. I get it everyday and its 10 links to intelligent stories in the media with loads of context by Pell. One of the smartest things ever said was “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” Don’t be redundant.

The most important reason for putting more thought into our content boils down to our humanity. We shouldn’t force writers to churn out eight blog posts a day. Writing should never boil down to a SEO formula and we should give quality writers with something interesting to say and incentive for doing so. Writers should never feel like a monkey.

After all, no one ever remembers the guy who was really good at writing Google bait.

1. I’m a hit at parties
2. They need a name for the crack-like high that comes from someone interacting with content you’ve posted. It’s the real reason people check Facebook multiple times a day.

But lately, my bookmarks folder in Google Chrome has been filled with articles about the following six subjects, which I think will have a big impact on the upcoming year:

It's not a roo-mah. The Internet Fridge is coming this year.

The Internet of Things – One of my favorite action movies is “The Sixth Day.” In the movie, which takes place in the future, the main character finishes off his milk and his fridge automatically orders a new carton¹. The “Internet of Things” is the concept of everything in our house being connected to the Internet and to each other. Imagine shades that automatically dim when you turn on your television or getting a text every time your door opens. Connecting our physical to our digital can have effects beyond the living room, it can even help make our cities more efficient.

I’ve even ordered a few Ninja Blocks, small open hardware devices design to help people experiment with the Internet of Things, to play with and I encourage you to kick in a few bucks as well.

Lack of innovation in content delivery – Despite the innovation in tablets, smart phones and internet connection speeds, we’re still consuming content in the same ways we did when it was printed on dead trees. Not since Twitter² has there been a new way to deliver information. We’re still writing hundreds of words with a single byline and a picture or two. Why haven’t other forms of content become more streamlined?

The Facebook Open Graph – Just like the Internet of Things connects the Internet and the physical world, Facebook’s Open Graph promises to connect everything on the web with our social circle. Evil? Maybe. Awesome? You bet.

The end of free – The culture of the web is starting to change. This first, and perhaps most public, sign was the Pinboard versus Delicious story. In a nutshell, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter followed standard Silison Valley startup protocol and sold the social bookmarking service to Yahoo for “between $15 and $30 million³.” The service atrophied as Yahoo struggle to find a home for it. Soon after Yahoo sold the service to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for $5 million. The total revenue generated by Delicious during this time? $0 ((One could argue that Delicious served ads and therefore had some revenue. However, those ads were likely served by Yahoo and the revenue was negligible)).

While Delicious was going through its second sale, users were flocking to Pinboard, a similar service. The difference? Pinboard unapologetically charges users for its service. This difference in philosophy led to one of my favorite blog posts of 2011: Don’t be a Free User by Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski((For an even more detailed break down, I suggest this story in the Guardian))

The ethos of the web is the same as business in general: provide people with value and they’ll pay.

The end of average – With two brothers in college and a mother in the education field, I’m constantly pondering the state of education in America. My conclusion is that we need to tell our children that the era of average is over.

Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas project – What happens when a personable millionaire barrels into a forgotten downtown area of an American city and attempts to revitalize it by attracting small business entrepreneurs? We’re about to find out.

1. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to Internet Fridges
2. Circa 2005
3. Says Wikipedia

Because we have such a specific niche, we are often the first interaction a local company has with the press. Many times we are dealing with first-time entrepreneurs who are responsible for their own marketing and media outreach. Typically, these entrepreneurs are programmers or business majors who don’t know anyone in the media and, as a result, are unfamiliar with how most media outlets operate.

Recently, at the end of one of my interviews, an entrepreneur I was speaking with turned the tables on me and asked me for advice for building a good relationship with the press.

Below is a synopsis of our conversation that I thought may be useful to other startups. Hopefully it leads to better business profiles and an amicable relationship between press and startups.

The very first thing you should know: journalists are an ethical bunch, sometimes annoyingly so. There are strict rules that journalists often follow. As a rule, journalists won’t let sources dictate when stories will run. They will often double check your claims, especially when given numbers. To get a feel for the world that journalists inhabit, I suggest paying a visit to Wikipedia.

Remember that your startup is like your child. Most tech journalists speak to three entrepreneurs a day who all think their startup will change the world. Most startups also are unnecessarily protective about seemingly trivial bits of news like hires and new feature launches. Your startup is like your child. Tremendously important to you, but for other people its just another kid. Have pride and be excited, but don’t let your ego and possessiveness affect your conversations with the press.

Keep the description of your business simple.  Explain it to me like I’m a five year old…  who speaks another language … and has been living under a rock. Your best bet is to give me a sentence (i.e. “We help students organize notes”) and provide a use case (“Let’s say Mary is in Math class and she wants to record her lecture…”) For an example of simplicity, I suggest reading the famous “No, shut up” thread about Dropbox on Quora. Also, read this before coming up with your pitch.

Have a demo or the press won’t write about you. I want my readers to read my profile of your business and immediately run off to go use your product.

Good design has an unfair effect on how I judge your company. When you launch, I can’t tell if you have the most streamlined code in the world or the smartest sales guys in the country. The easiest way for journalists to see if you’re serious about your company is design. Make it pretty and the press will give you an unfair pass.

Know what the publication is looking for. Like applying for a job, five minutes of research on the publication will go a long way. Decide what fits into the publication’s coverage area and what’s important to the publication. For example TechCrunch covers consumer Internet startups and places a high value on breaking news. GigaOm covers enterprise and Internet technology and places a high value on analysis. Technically Philly covers tech companies based in Philly and places a lot of value in promoting Philadelphia technology community.

It’s unfair, but there are several “red flags” that make me doubt your seriousness. These include businesses that are seeking press but are stilling looking for a technical co-founder or lead developer. If you’re unable to convince a programmer to help you, what chance do you have of convincing your customers? If your big “feature” is integration with Facebook or Twitter, I get skeptical. If you rely exclusively on advertising revenue, I get skeptical. If your business has the chicken and egg problem (or a “marketplace” business model) where the more users you have the more useful your product becomes, I get skeptical.

Don’t play the press against each other. I don’t think it’s worth it to promise media outlets “exclusives.” Journalists disproportionately value “scoops” and will get irritated if they discover you promised something to a competitor. TechCrunch is infamous for holding companies hostage in exchange for coverage. If you choose to get in bed with TechCrunch, know that you will be angering every other outlet.

Give me discounted product codes for my readers. I can provide my community value for reading me and you can measure the success of your pitch and the popularity of the media outlet. Everybody wins.

Practice your “personal elevator pitch.” You know how to pitch your business, but know how to pitch the founding team. Have a few anecdotes about the founding of the company or the circumstances that led to the creation of the business. Business journalism is often writing the same “entrepreneur saw problem and created company” story over and over. Have a few anecdotes ready and journalists will write a better story and you’ll make a better connection with that journalist.

A journalist is on your side. You’ll be asked questions like “How many users do you have?” or “How much revenue are you making?” Many entrepreneurs get defensive when asked these questions by the press. The press wants to help you. I want every company I interview to become the next Facebook. If I cultivate you as a source and you become successful we both win. Give the truth or know that the user/revenue questions are typically just ways of asking “How legit are you?” If you can’t speak to revenue or users talk about your team or your advisors. Tell me why you will succeed.

No, I will not let you read the story before publishing. And any publication that does is not a real news outlet. Remember item number two? Check your ego before talking to the media.

Follow up with headshots, hi-res logos and screenshots. If an entrepreneur doesn’t send me a headshot, I often snag a picture from Facebook or Twitter.

Questions you should be prepared to answer:

1. Tell me what [your product] does.
2. How did you meet your co-founders? Who are they and what do they do? How old are you all?
3. Where are you located? Why?
4. What problem are you trying to solve? How did this come up?
5. How many users do you have?
6. Who is your target customer? What has their feedback been so far?
7. What’s your plan for next six months? How do you plan on growing?
8. How are you different from [obvious competitor]?
9. Why did you raise money? What will you spend it on? Why did you choose [VC firm, angel investor]?
10. What’s the coolest thing [your product] does?
11. What do you think of [trend in your industry]?
12. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me that I didn’t ask you?

Journalistic entities are becoming product companies, offering products that turn content into marketing. As a side effect, this creates businesses that follow Jack White’s theory of control: vertically integrated, creating content that markets a product that markets the content that markets the product all over again.

Journalism as product

Like USA Today selling its data, POLITICO making a bookstore, my local public radio station selling membership or TechCrunch launching Disrupt. Publishers that successfully turn their content into brand building and marketing for a product are the ones that are surviving.

It’s the real reason Patch is having so much trouble: they’re selling nothing but pageviews and sunshine. I’d bet Aol would make more money with Patch if it used it as a sales channel for its dial-up internet access. You know, the business which still accounts for the majority of its revenues.

In the past that product was a subscription and publishers were quite good at marketing and selling it. Now, we have to all get a bit more creative. Your role as a publisher is to connect and help your chosen community. Content is just one way of doing so.

Product as journalism

The irony here is while publishers are racing to be more like more “traditional” businesses, businesses are becoming publishers.

Fields like editorial strategy, content marketing and custom publishing are emerging, teaching brands how to act like publishers through company blogs, social media and more. Think of what American Express is doing with its OPEN network, Behance’s The 99 Percent or Groupon’s army of writers. 37Signals is a master of the company blog and spins its content off into books.

Suddenly, businesses are in need of carving out their own niches online as thought leaders. This leads to publications that can blur the line between journalism and marketing.

A detailed chart created to help demonstrate the movement between publishers and companies.

For example, OkCupid publishes an excellent blog about mining its data for trends in the dating world. I’d call this journalism, though its end goal is marketing a product. Is this any different from PaidContent using its content to sell $500 conference tickets? How about Mint.com’s blog about personal finance? How is this different from the financial columnist at USA Today?

This collision exists beyond the web. Know why the New York Yankees continually snap up marquee free agents that aren’t named Cliff Lee¹? They own a TV network. According to Forbes, the Yankees made $400 million from the YES network. That’s more than ticket sales. Yankee Stadium could be completely empty for an entire season and the team could still make payroll, all from a TV network that “covers” them. Same goes for MLB, NFL, The Boston Celtics and multiple college teams. The product owns the medium.

How about e-commerce? Amazon is using its Prime program to rope users in, delivering the products first and then the content.

So what should I do?

The common theme among most of the aforementioned products is that the product is not the content. Sure Kindle singles and news apps are nice, but they won’t make a significant dent in anyone’s bottom line.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think Gary Vaynerchuk had it right when he gave a newspaper executive advice at the Inc 500 conference a few weeks ago.²

You shouldn’t be worried about pageviews, Facebook likes or what Poynter is saying about you. You should worry about the trust of your customers and the strength of your product.

You know, like a real business.

1. Yeah, I went there
2. I said on Twitter that I wasn’t a big fan of Gary’s and he offered to change my mind. I think that’s pretty cool.

“I’m going wherever you’re going,” said one women stopping mid-conversation.

“Where’s the party?” yelled one of the guys manning the sponsor tables in the hall way.

As much I’d like to say it was because they saw our handsome faces in the conference program, it was likely more about the three 12-packs of Harpoon IPA we were carrying through the halls on the way to our panel.

I’m often critical of conference panels. Talks on theory don’t do much for me. I love actual examples, systems, numbers and next steps. And beer.

Which is why I was excited to speak at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Boston last weekend. I partnered with my Omaha-based counterpart Danny Schreiber of Silicon Prarie News for “Making it Work With a Small Staff” a panel about a growing sector of the media ecosystem: bootstrapped journalism startups with less than 10 employees.

We took great pains to include lots of actionable advice from the point of two people who are in the trenches. Our panel even got a bit meta as it was originally supposed to be a four-person panel. So we had to, um, make it work with a small staff. We did this by shifting our original structure of the panel and by creating a friendly environment by handing out a few beers before we began our talk.

We discussed how Technically Philly and Silicon Prarie News make money, how we sell sponsorships, who we plan on hiring next and how we keep tabs on our growing communities. We goes lots of questions on our events business and many people remarked on how our editorial advice sounded familiar.

We gave out a handout that I’ve included below that includes links to the actual sponsorship materials, invoices and other raw materials that we use at Technically Philly.

The full video:

Excepts from the handout:

Business takeaways:

• Establish a workflow for invoices.
• Have goals. Do you want to bring on your founders full-time? Hire three writers? Launch four sites?
• When selling, always have reference material. Examples: a sponsorship one pager for a large event. For a small event.
• “How can we get involved?” = “We want to buy something from you.”
• Focus your efforts on products and services that yield maximum return per hour invested. Spending an hour selling a $50 advertisement? Not efficient.
• Many online publishers are constantly approached by vendors. Avoid them.

Editorial takeaways:

• Schedule tweets/Facebok posts with CoTweet or Hootsuite.
• Keep a strict editorial calendar with weekly features and departments to ensure there site never looks stale. The simpler the better (i.e. a Q and A, link roundup, a weekly picture, unedited video content).
• Alerts, RSS and Google Reader are your friend. Have Google News, Crunchbase & Twitter mention alerts for all companies, places and people that you cover.
• Never send three reporters to an event when one will do. Let the community fill coverage gaps if needed.
• If you can write something in bullet points, write it in bullet points. Not every story is a narrative.
• Freelancers can be a great way to relieve pressure on your staff or a huge waste of time and resources. Choose your freelancers with care and provide them with tools to succeed.
• Have an ethics policy and keep it public. Refer to this when faced with controversy.
• Be absolutely ruthless with your time. Don’t meet in person when a phone call will do. Don’t call when email will do.
• If you do meet with someone, send an agenda containing the topics you want to talk about. This helps the other party prepare for the conversation and keeps you on topic.
• Your reporters may also sell ads. Disclose this. For most outside of the journalism community, this is enough. Example of disclosure.

Other ONA notes:

• Somehow, my bio in the program got replaced with Joshua Benton’s from Neiman Lab. I’ll take it.
• Advice for future panel speakers: be over-prepared.
• Also, spend lots of time with your fellow panelists and determine points of disagreement. This leads to a better conversation.
• Many thanks to Andrew Pergam for helping us organize our session.
• Much of ONA is dedicated to digital departments within a larger news organization. I found myself wanting more for the indy news site.
• Conference attendees want new services, tips and tricks that they can write down and immediately implement when they return to work.
• Before ONA11, Danny had never heard of ONA. The group should do more to reach out to these independent and profitable news sites.

I’m not here to convince you about the musical talent of Jack White and the White Stripes, this video of their performance on Conan can do that for me.

While the band’s music made me a fan, what’s kept me interested is Jack White’s unique takes on creativity and business. There’s nothing subjective about business success.

Jack White soloing on Conan's desk.

The band is curious for a couple of reasons: the whole husband-wife/brother-sister thing, there are only two members and the band’s monumental success at a time when the infrastructure of the music industry was crumbling around them. Likewise, White’s latest venture Third Man Records, is selling custom, hand pressed vinyl records and making waves in the music business.

As a fan of White’s music I’ve probably read nearly every mainstream press attention he has received and Jack White’s thoughts on business and creativity have had a profound effect on who I am as a businessman.

Below are some takeaways I’ve gathered and try to live up to in my professional life.

Contraints produce creativity

“Little Room” is one of the White Stripes shortest songs, but it’s also one of the most important in understanding White’s business philosophy. The lyrics:

The White Stripes have build a strong, but limited framework for their music and their business. Much like good business can boil down their messaging to a simple phrase¹, creativity is best produced when faced with strict limitations. The White Stripes only have two members, limited color scheme and (for a while) only used analog equipment.

True creativity is born of a struggle of some kind. Build a strong framework you believe in and the limitations will empower you. Put a deadline on that meeting. Limit that product to only three features. Constrain. Ship the damn thing.

In a digital world, we are tempted towards excess constantly. When things are easy, they are boring. They are paralyzing. When we have numbers on every aspect of our business, the information can overwhelm our sensibilities and gut instincts.

“Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the colors in the palette, that just kills creativity”

Own it

During its entire lifespan the White Stripes never signed a contract where they would not own all of their content. This resulted in the self-publishing of their first two records. The success of the first albums enabled the group to negotiate favorable contracts for their rest of their career, including a one-album deal with industry giant Warner Brothers. In fact, all of the band’s contracts were short-term arrangements.

From the LA Times: “The band retains ownership of its master recordings–an arrangement almost impossible with major companies, and a major bone of contention between many artists and labels with an eye on growing digital distribution opportunities.”

We’ve seen this tactic employed by Bill Gates with much success when it came to DOS. Owning your work is an important long-term strategy for any creative product.

However, this Jobsian-like control can extend to the manufacture of the product itself. The reason Apple can innovate hardware and software simultaneously is that it remains tight fisted over the entire production process.

So when Jack White transitioned from rock star² to a record distributor he made sure to retain control over all processes.

From the New York Times:

“The [Third Man Records] building would include a rehearsal space, a small record store concentrating on vinyl albums and 45s and even a darkroom: a full-service facility for bands to practice, record and release music as fast as possible.”

Indie Nashville takes a tour through Third Man records and the vinyl factory nearby.

Omit needless words

White is unabashedly obsessed with the number three. From the White Stripes FAQ:

The White Stripes contain no more elements than needed. This serves not only as a gimmick but a way to keep costs laughably low while streamlining the entire operation. White often says that this simplicity also gives him nothing to hide behind, forcing him to put on a good show.

A simple stage set up for a White Stripes concert

Your profession is not a cartoon

Some people choose the profession they are in because they like the idea of that occupation more than the actual practice. In journalism, this disconnect was possible until the digital disruption. Yet journalism professors often tell me that their students are still chasing the romanticized ideal of a journalists, the archetype made possible in All The President’s Men or Good Night and Good Luck. But we can’t ignore our the business realities and we must do what we can to learn the business of content.

White talked abut his love of theatrics holding down his early business ambitions as an upholster. “I was an apprentice for years, but when I opened my own place, I just didn’t have that love for money that’s necessary to run a business. I was so into the cartooniness of it.”

While he never stated this explicitly, White wised up when it came time to turn his music into a business.

1. The iPod’s “A thousand songs in your pocket” comes to mind
2. A REAL rock star, not a fake “I know Ruby” rock star

Since starting the technology news site Technically Philly we’ve since spun off Technically Media (the parent company and consulting arm) and created a week long festival among other projects.

Along the way I’ve stumbled across a series of roadblocks that have forced us to pivot, devise our own solutions or go looking for outside help. I’ve found myself wishing for certain services and companies that don’t exist yet.

Below are 7 of those road blocks that I think would help make the journalism world a better place.

The ideas:

CRM for publishers – As I wrote in June, current customer relationship management options are not created with online publications in mind.  As we experiment with paywalls, one off e-books and events we could use a system to help better facilitate sales. I’m currently experimenting with KISSmetrics to help make this happen, but need an out of the box solution that connects to my site analytics.

Tumblr for advertising networks – Every publisher I have ever spoken with has attempted¹ to group together local sites to form an ad network. The inevitable stumbling blocks make a grassroots local network incredibly difficult to execute. Mostly, current ad serving technology is unnecessarily detailed, difficult and expensive. Let’s face it: most journalists don’t have a clue about online advertising. I don’t need detailed demographics. Or campaigns. Or sample creative sizes.

Give me a bare bones system that allows several sites to easily select ads they’d like to run on their site. That’s it. Keep it so simple that a child could use it. My ad partners and I should be able to set up an account in less than 20 seconds. Make the buttons big and keep it jargon free. Think more Tumblr than WordPress. More iPod Shuffle than full stereo system. More BankSimple than Bank of America. More Coursekit than Blackboard.

The service should have no upfront costs in exchange for revenue share and offer sales training and support for a premium upgrade. Remember: online publishing needed tools like Blogger and Livejournal to gain popularity among the common user. Advertising networks could be democratized similarly.

Voice transcription software for multi-person conversations – Journalists often waste hours transcribing phone and audio interviews from sources. It’s 2011, and we still haven’t figured out a way to easily automate this process that doesn’t involve a disgruntled intern, two cans of Red Bull and lots of muttering about going to law school. I once cornered a Dragon Voice salesman at a conference and he told me that the tech just isn’t available for computers to transcribe two voices at once. The software even struggles with once voice unless “trained.”²

I’d pay hundreds of dollars for such software, especially if it let me click parts of the transcript and jump to the related audio clip. Bonus points for tying the person I’m speaking with to my address book. Related: Google could pull this off if they wanted to.

Context makers – A large part of a blog post or story is often wasted catching the reader up on previous events to help provide a bit of context for the latest news. However, not all readers need this information and its often information that the journalist has written dozens of times. Typically, when humans identify a repetitive behavior, its only a matter of time before technology is created to streamline and automate the process, so where’s our context creator?

When reading stories about the Philadelphia Eagles signing star defensive back Nnamdi Asomugha, I don’t need the paragraphs about his time with his former team. As a football fan, I already know.

However, when it came to Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking troubles, the paragraphs offering context were incredibly useful in informing me about the intricacies of a story that I was not intimately familiar. Yet both stories had to break from the new information being delivered to offer context. This forces news to constantly cater to the lowest common denominator: the person who has never heard of the story before³.

Not all readers require the same amount of context. Perhaps this can be solved through some sort of uber-personalization or tools that help quickly create snazzy timelines⁴ and sidebars for context.

Easy online quizzes – Is Quibblo the best we’ve got?

Facebook Comments + Facebook page comments – Why can’t we connect the comments on our Facebook page with those on our site?

Custom post-type creator – Smarter people than I have long opined that the journalists need to rethink the article as the “atomic unit of journalism.” I agree, but I’m still waiting for the technology that allows me to easily assemble different data point in a structure I create⁵⁶.

Right now publishers are bound to the content types of their CMS. This most often includes pictures, quotes, links, articles and blog posts. But what if I had a user interface to drag and drop elements of different content types? What if I could even use saved snippets of text from other stories, source documents, my site’s taxonomies and social media to arrange them in anyway I’d like?

What if I could take a PDF of my local school board agenda and highlight all of the times and tag them as “time.” I could highlight the board member that led each discussion and tag them as “people” and highlight each agenda item and tag it as “event.”

I could then dump this data into an “event coverage” content type that I created with a WYSIWYG editor to create a quick story recap that is already properly designed, tagged and categorized. This same information could be used for my “timeline” content type as well.

Boy, I hope that made sense.

Closing thoughts

• I’ll admit, I wrote this post to elicit people to tell me that some of the tools above already exist.
• Also, you may have noticed a pattern above: publishers need tools that help streamline revenue-producing aspects of a content-focused business.

1. And I include myself in this category
2. Right now there’s a Geek Squad commercial touting back school software that includes Dragon Naturally Speaking. Even the YouTube commentors are skeptical about the service working in a quiet classroom, so don’t even think about using the service when there are two professors. And yes, I did actually find value in YouTube comments.
3. True story: I knew nothing about Casey Anthony until I got a CNN Breaking News text alert about the verdict
4. SacPress has the best solution for this problem so far with its “Storyline” tab on article pages
5. And I’m not the only one
6. Someone needs to come up with the “Jarvis Number” which takes the date of all Jeff Jarvis ideas / blog posts and figures out the average amount of time it takes the rest of the world to catch up. For Christsakes, the dude told mainstream media in 2007 to get linking and it took the AP until 2011 to listen. Maybe the Jarvis Number = 4 years.