The Face Behind the Artisanal Ball Bearing that Keeps Your Plane in the Air?

Don’t Mock the Artisanal Pickle Maker, read the headline in this past Sunday’s New York Times magazine.

It tackled something that I’ve been mulling for quite a while. It’s all well and good to make novelty t-shirts or artisanal bitters, but with small, home-spun craft businesses proliferating, can they really, seriously stay afloat?The author of the Times piece says that there is hope in the surge in micro-scale businesses–and it’s because they say something important about the direction in which our economy is heading:

It’s tempting to look at craft businesses as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism. But the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith. One of his central insights in “The Wealth of Nations” is the importance of specialization. When everyone does everything — sews their own clothes, harvests their own crops, bakes their own bread — each act becomes inefficient, because generalists are rarely as quick or able as specialists.

For most of human history, though, people needed to do a bit of everything to survive. The result was a profoundly inefficient economy that required almost everyone to work very hard just to create enough of the essentials for survival; even then, famines were still disturbingly common. Efficiency, Smith explained, comes when individuals focus on specific tasks. The miracle of the Industrial Revolution was that through specialization, humankind became far more productive.

The article goes onto point out how entrepreneurs are seizing micro-niches in very “business-y” contexts like precision metalwork and healthcare — and using their very artisanal specializations to make major bank and differentiate themselves.

So today…handmade suspenders, tomorrow… a handmade widget on a rocketship?

Stranger things have happened.

Yesterday at work, we were talking about how people engage with customer support. Some people use the phone, some people use Google and some people (though I don’t know any) use the manual. We were trying to better structure our support site, but we had to confront the simple truth that people access information differently. So our next question was naturally: how do we equip users with tools that help them filter better — match the need with the correct information more seamlessly? “It’s like being the Netflix of support,” I said. 

On the way home on the train I was reading the Sunday Times and there was a front page story a kidney donation “chain.” What initially drew me into the article was the dateline: Riverside, California, it said, which is the rather unremarkable Southern California region where I grew up. In the story, a man from Riverside decides to give up his kidney to a needy stranger, and unknowingly sets off a chain of events that potentially saved 30 lives.

What interested me most about the story was the role of an entrepreneur, Garet Hill, who’s daughter had once suffered from kidney disease. In the transplant cycle, there is a lot of inefficiency — say you get sick, and a relative wants to donate, but you are not a match. With sophisticated “matching” techniques and algorithms, one could create a “chain” in which people who need kidneys can be matched with living donors. In this case, the chain encompassed 17 hospitals in 11 states over four months and made good matches between 60 people.

It’s a great story of a businessman finding a pain point and applying technology to make a process more efficient. But it’s also an interesting reminder that “matching” technology — what we normally think about in the context of eHarmony and Netflix — can do more than root out affinities. It can actually save lives. Check out the article, it’s great! 

The other day, I was reading a long thread about pit bulls. Obviously, these pups suffer from a branding problem that gets magnified every time one of their members gets splashed across the news. The common thread of the mythos of pit bulls in the media is that there are dogs over here, and then there are pit bulls over there, pit bull being synonymous with scary, unpredictable monster. And if we fall into this type of reasoning, then it logically follows these monsters-not-dogs should be banned, banished, destroyed, right?

Do you buy it into it? I’m gonna be completely honest here. I used to. I was one of those people who tensed up a little bit when I saw a pittie. I never thought I would adopt one. Then I saw a pretty amazing documentary about the rehabbing of the Michael Vick dogs at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary (it’s an episode of Dogtown you can get on Netflix, Season 2, Episode 1). In it was an interesting segment about the former branding of the pit bull. They used to be called the “nanny dog” because they were of the sort you’d want to leave your kids with. They were synonymous with post-war Americana. The Little Rascals, anyone?

Further, when I watched the fearsome, specially bred killing machines Vick once owned, I was very surprised by how much like all other dogs they were. Obedient, loyal, eager to please. These were the worst, most horrible “killing machines” on the planet–and yet I could see they were actually a product of a process that used their universal doggy natures against them and toward a human objective of violence-as-sport, and also that they could be rehabilitated, managed, and live out a long, happy life.

I had come face-to-face with my own confirmation bias, which is a way of filtering information based on what I believed to be true about pit bulls. I only saw the scary things and I was surprised to learn that once upon a time, people all assumed the opposite.

Something I’ve been preoccupied with for a long time, when thinking and writing about the task of taking ownership of your own personal brand is how challenging it is to overcome other people’s confirmation biases. 

Who of us hasn’t been that pitbull, at the receiving end of a snap judgement?

There are so many insecure people out there who want to tell you who you are, what you can do, what your station is–whether you are man, dog, or *shudder* or monster.

Of course, sometimes it helps to get identified with a certain “type.” My friend Cheryl recently threw up her hands and said: “I’m not Miranda July. Everything I do isn’t instantly quirky or indie or vintage.”

As much as her personal brand supports a creative empire, even Miranda July suffers from being pigeonholed. She gets associated with a kind of twee-ness that I don’t think is always fair. You read her stuff and you’ll be surprised by the toughness and darkness in some places. But like the pit bull, she gets reduce to one thing only.

So what’s the answer?

Create a narrative line

Like my friend Cheryl says, sometimes it’s difficult to find the common thread between all we do. But even if your interests and talents are disparate, try to find the common thread between them. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and talking to people about the future of books — and I like to draw a connection between this and my background in film because the commonality between both worlds is stories.

Building a narrative you control is essential to not getting put in a box. Know who you are — so that someone tries to tell you who you are, you are armed with the truth of the matter.

More — here — about personal branding

Own your definition

I’ve been doing a program in my increasingly limited free time from Problogger called 30 Days to a Better Blog [affiliate link]. I really like it and one of the very first assignments was to write a “mission statement” for your blog. I don’t think I’ve necessarily arrived at a bullseye definition, but it was a completely worthwhile exercise–so much so that I went through it again when redeveloping my personal site.

More — here — about mission statements

Look harder

If you don’t want to be pigeonholed, make it a practice to not make snap judgements about others. Look beyond the surface, find out what that acquaintance or coworker you thought you knew is really about. Who knows? You might find an unexpected asset.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

Those who pigeonhole others have a tendency to be rigid and insecure. They dislike uncertainty, chaos. Use that to your advantage. When they go left, you go right. If you keep ‘em guessing, you’re much less likely to get pigeonholed.

Then, when other people get hung up on titles, crane their necks to see if anyone “important” is in the room, obsess about protocol, wait for the official memo, you’ll have already left them far behind.

And, for the record, I’m totally team pit bull and team Miranda.

A few days ago I was reading a blog post by a new mom and native New Yorker who was planning to move to the suburbs. In it were a lot of the familiar complaints about what a hassle it is to live in New York, how many compromises it entails, and how it’s just “not worth it” if you’re not making the most of everything you can do.

While reading this post on my iPhone I was partaking in the happy hour special at the bar at James, which is basically one of the best grass-fed burgers in NYC (please don’t tell) at half price from 5:30 to 6:30. Sipping on a James’ Revenge, I was smack dab in the middle of a moment that makes me feel like the luckiest girl on the planet.

You see, I’m precisely where I should be. I’ve lived here for years, came here for college, and even as I change as a person, my feelings and romance for the city remain a bedrock. That, for me, is the definition of true love.

I was thinking about this while coming home late from work one night in a cab in the rain sometime in the fall. Whooshing down Seventh Avenue South, I was reminded of walking those same streets as an undergraduate, how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

So in honor of Valentine’s Day, I want to take you on a tour of my first true love, New York. It’s a tour that exists mostly in my head but represents actual physical places.

The hassle thing is totally true, but hassles come with the territory of loving a complex character wholeheartedly, tenaciously. Don’t you think? 

Verticality

When I came here, I was always looking up. All those lives pressed into tiny apartments, stacked on top of each other. The history, the verticality, that was what I thought I was in love with, and therefore I thought I’d always be a Manhattanite. But a film job took me to the church on the corner of Sterling and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope and I realized how beautiful Brooklyn was and a couple of years later I had the chance to live in a Brownstone right on that block. Less vertical but poetic just the same.

Biking Everywhere

I didn’t understand biking in the city until I was working on a film job in college and the Director of Photography handed me a key and said, use my bike and run over to Rafik and buy some gels. Of course I complied, only to find myself flying, floating down Broadway from a gasp-worthy vantage point.

Driving in the city gives me an anxiety attack, but not biking. I’m uber-confident, weaving in and out of lanes and holding my own even in crazy NYC traffic. When I found myself riding uphill the other day at night on the Manhattan Bridge, standing on the pedals, I laughed a little and thought, is this like when Juniper stands up on her hind legs to make herself look big?

Institutions

The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of the Moving Image. The Guggenheim. The New Museum. NYC’s many cultural institutions take my breath away. Part of it was growing up on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, which is the story of two kids who run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and solve mysteries. I mean, if you want to know the stirrings of my love for the city, start there. A classic. More about institutions. 

Prospect Park

Once we were turned down on a prospective dog adoption because our apartment was too small for two dogs. I’m pretty sure these people didn’t understand that 585 acres of Prospect Park is truly our backyard. More about Prospect Park.

Everything and nothing

Once I worked with a German film crew who wanted to shoot various neighborhoods of NYC as doubles for foreign locales. We shot Chinatown for Shanghai and the West Village for London and the were driving over the Manhattan Bridge when “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” came on the radio, and we all started singing along.

Juxtapositions

I was working on a job just outside the old Domino Sugar Factory and I was sitting there changing a roll of film and I noticed a woman in a polka dotted dress step out of a vintage Cadillac against the perfect blue sky. The skeletal remains of the old factory made the beauty of the unexpected tableau all the more stark. I realized that day that you could shoot and shoot and shoot and never be in the same place twice, because idiosyncratic things are always colliding here.

Sesame Street

New York loomed large over my childhood in Southern California. It had so many things that seemed completely foreign — wire mesh trashcans and stoops, things I’d never seen and would never have imagined if not for Sesame Street.

A few years ago, I lived in a crumbling brownstone with a bunch of other people, and I finally had my stoop:

Catcher in the Rye

Of course I loved it as a teenager, but I was thrilled to get a whole new perspective on the book when studying with Richard Locke at Columbia. Well worth a second read.

Commerce Street

My first time in NYC, I was in college, and wandering around the West Village trying to find a schoolmate’s parents’ place. I got completely turned around, walked past the intersection of West 12th and West 4th (how’d that happen, hey?), and found myself on Commerce Street. Oh my heart, my soul. I just looked around me and thought “this must be the place you were meant to be.”

The light

These are just a few of the illogical things that I think of when I think of how grateful I am to live here.

New York is always bigger than life, bigger than my imagination. And compared to that the actual square footage of my apartment doesn’t seem so important.

And growing up? Who needs that?

Been a little quiet round here, and I didn’t mean to go silent. I love blogging, being able to take interesting people that I meet and ideas that I encounter and turn them into posts.

It’s just it’s been pretty busy lately. First of all, we launched SocialFlow Optimized Publisher last week. So much went into that from my side, from crafting copy to planning advertising to launching a new website to engineering social promotions to coordinating creative from design to coding. Whew. But I’m happy to say we launched it.

I love the product, and I’d love for you to try it, too.

Secondly I’ve been working on a panel for Social Media Week called Literature Unbound, which hosts a really incredible group of visionaries who will be there to talk about the innovative spaces literature can occupy in the digital age. Super excited about this stuff.

A couple weeks back I did an interview for the Social Media Week website. It felt a little dorky, but it’s been fun to get feedback on it.

I am totally back to blogging, too, even if I’ve got to crunch the verbiage on the train on the way to work. Stay tuned, because there are more posts coming your way very very soon!

Social Media Week is nigh upon us and Susan Halligan and I have been busily preparing a knock-out panel on the future of books and “social reading.” In a prep session a couple weeks ago, we gathered together Jason Carey of Brooklyn Public Library, Stephen Duncombe of NYU, Richard Nash of Small Demons, Aziz Isham of Arcade Sunshine and Corey Menscher of Findings.com to come and chat about some of the topics we would hash out during the conversation.

I was slightly in awe to listen to this diverse group of individuals who are working in so many different parts of a very exciting frontier — we’ve got tech founders, developers, academics, thinkers and people who, of course who wear many hats. Susan and I kept shooting each other looks as our panelists chatted over everything from Apple’s new Author software, to the attention spans and digital reading habits of children. If this is anything like the panel is going to be, I think both of us were thinking, this will be amazing. 

I don’t think this conversation could come at a moment more ripe with possibilities–and pitfalls–for writers and readers. Just a scan of the past week or so’s headlines shows why:

Mashable published a story headlined: “Apple Will Own Your Work with iBooks Author” and ripples of dismay filtered through the blogosphere. Hope to get beyond the hysteria in a subsequent post but for now, let’s just say, no, Apple will not own your content and copyright so take a deep breath and read some better research and reasoned analysis such as this piece in Ars Technica.

Jonathan Franzen weighed in on the downsides of ebooks, remarking: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

On the plus side, TechCrunch published a pretty good overview of key considerations for those who want to embrace the world of book creation and self-distribution, entitled “Why every entrepreneur should self-publish a book.”

All of the above are likely to be among the many subjects we cover during the panel on the morning of Tuesday, February 14th.

Hope you’ll join us!

I’ve written in the past about Facebook ads and how much of a boon they are for small businesses and nonprofits.

For instance, I created the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s first digital marketing program by purchasing ads that helped connect our diverse programming with appreciative audiences. These ads in turn put our programs in front of thousands of prospective ticket-buyers in the metro area who might not have otherwise heard of us.

One thing that I think is really important for a fledgling effort is building up a base of “fans” to consume and interact with the content you post. That’s why if you’re just getting started, I’d strongly suggest that you post an ad that asks for “likes.” You’ll find you can drive up your fan count really, really quickly with highly qualified individuals and prospects.

Now there’s even less reason to weigh the pros and cons of Facebook advertising — because the social network is giving away ad credit for FREE!

The Facebook Small Business Boost contest is great encouragement to get out there and start racking up the fans. If you have at least 50 fans and are based in the U.S., you qualify. Plus, if you are able to get 100 more fans during the duration of the contest, you win even more credit!

Here’s the gist, from Facebook:

What you need to participate:

1. A Facebook Page for your small business
2. Your business must be based in the US
3. Your page will need at least 50 likes^[?]

How It Works:

1. Get $50 in free ads if you have at least 50 likes on your Page
2. Get $100 more in free ads if you add 100 more likes to your Page before April 1, 2012
3. Win $10,000 more in free ads if you are one of the top 10 pages that gains the most new likes before April 1, 2012

I believe the adding 100 more likes goal is completely attainable — here are some tips on how to do it.

Some things I discovered while participating:

• Make sure you have at least the city and state of your business filled out on your profile page. I found that most of the pages I manage do not have this info filled out. This contest only applies to businesses in the U.S.
• Make sure you select your fan page from the drop-down of the ad creator (I accidentally selected an “app” I had made that was called Jellybean Boom, making for an unfriendly user experience for the first few days the ad ran). Then, the “like” button will appear with your ad, which is essential for racking up fans.
• Make the copy simple and engaging. For instance, if you run a catering business, you might put “click “like” if you love cupcakes.” That will rack you up new fans very, very quickly (with a hat-tip to Brian Moran).

Get out there and start advertising your business — it’s a powerful way to gain more visibility in 2012!

This past week I got an email that the Brooklyn Academy of Music had just launched a blog. I clicked over and found BAM’s new blog on blogspot in commemoration of their 150th anniversary, already pre-stocked with a bunch of posts by the staff, including one that hit close to home, about Paul Auster’s Park Slope.

Cooper Hewitt, too, has just launched an interesting new twist on the institutional blog, Cooper Hewitt Labs, which takes you inside the Digital and Emerging Media Department at the Museum:

Both blogs are interesting examples of the different ways institutions can tackle blogging, and it got me to thinking about some of the real challenges pioneering a “social” editorial presence for a major cultural institution.

A few years ago, when I joined the Film Society of Lincoln Center, building the institution’s first blog was one of the very first of several major projects that I tackled.

The reason was simple: I knew that we needed to build our profile in social, and the best way to do that would be to be pushing out content on our own real estate. I quickly found I was definitely onto something — as syndicated links that filtered out from our blog, to Facebook and Twitter doubled traffic to filmlinc.com within a matter of months.

We were in business, and working with zero budget and no resources, I had demonstrable proof what a dramatic positive impact a blog can have for an organization’s visibility.

The pitfalls I faced breaking that ground for the organization will be familiar ones to anyone pushing emerging strategies and forms to a traditional organization — if I wasn’t being criticized for all the risk I was exposing the organization to by opening it up to the conversational web, I was being told it wasn’t risqué enough, that I wasn’t capturing enough comments through posts promoting the organization’s events.

That both of these concerns are naive ones doesn’t mean that you won’t have to deal with them constantly while trying to mount an organization’s blog.

I don’t blame institutions for not trying — first, you’re going to have to get a lot of buy-in internally, appeasing those who have a lot of anxiety about social media with the kind of safeguards and protocols that hopefully won’t absolutely kill any chance you have to build some interesting content. Secondly, you’ll be dealing with the fact that blogs that are created to help promote and raise visibility for organizations don’t typically garner a lot of hot commentary or debate.

At the same time, the benefits outweigh the aggravations. There’s simply too much to gain.

So how do you do it? In my early enthusiasm for institutional blogging, I wrote an article called “How to Get Your Institution to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog.”

These days, looking back, I see things a little differently. What I learned about running an institutional blog can probably be boiled down into three lessons. I hope you’ll find they’re good guidelines for anyone who wants to get into this space, but specifically drawn out of my experience at the Film Society.

To wit:

You’ll get flack for taking risks — but it’s worth it

During New Directors/New Films 2009 (when I had the blog going about six months), I tried something that both got me into a lot of trouble and further convinced me I was onto something with this fledgling blog I had put together. I tapped into various connections I had in film schools and brought on board a group of young film enthusiasts to be the blog’s “New Voices.” The idea was not to build a blog of film criticism (which I felt was already being done by plenty of other people) but instead to get off the cuff takes from young people who were actively immersed in filmmaking that would hopefully point to why the mission of the Film Society was so important.

It was a risky move and one that I got a lot of flack for internally — mostly because the idea of turning over an official organ of the Film Society to a loose collection of opinions was so anathema to an organization that had been on a high pedestal for years. But it was also an opportunity to steer the Film Society toward a reality where the cultivation of young people became not just a goal, but part of standard outreach.

At the time, I organized a mixer where I could meet a few of the applicants. I was approached by a young man, Nicholas Feitel, who’s application questionnaire was among the worst I received. It didn’t matter, as his blog posts were completely engrossing (and I urge you to check out his riotously funny and sometimes profound current blog, Feitelogram). Nick turned in these absolutely fantastic, thought-provoking and gonzo piece where he stalked Whit Stilman, hung out with infamous critic Armond White and interviewed blogger Glenn Kenny about being asked to appear in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. [Here's a good example]

Nick’s pieces got noticed–picked up on aggregator sites like Movie City News, but more importantly, what I loved about Nick’s contributions is that they let us take a pretty interesting turn into the personal and idiosyncratic. Nick’s posts were full of the kind of enthusiasm that I thought really spoke to what we were trying to do by keeping up the cause of non-mainstream movies.

Look for intesting angles outside of the organization for inspiration

One morning, as I was taking the B train into work, an astonishing kinescope-like artwork flickered to life before my eyes. Masstransiscope, which literarily is a moving artwork that turns the subway rider into a camera lens, was originally created by Bill Brand in the 80s. Brand is an art professor at Hampshire College who happened to have shown work at New Directors/New Films, a co-presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

Of course there was no way of knowing that at the time — there has been no official announcement of the restoration by the MTA, no press release, nothing Google-able.

As soon as I saw it, I knew the story was perfect for our blog. Through a little detective work and calling around, I had an interview with the artist, and I was able to break a pretty cool story that was well-meshed with our mission as a film preservation organization. Six months later the story of the restoration finally made the Times — who knows if that writer stumbled upon our humble article in their quest for sources? [Here's the original article]

I think that by treating the intersection of tech and the arts, Cooper Hewitt blog has found a critical sweet spot that will resonate with an audience. People working in museums and institutions constantly face the problem of discoverability, how to connect a passionate audience to the myriad things they have in their collections. I’m excited to continue to read the Labs blog and see how the team at Cooper Hewitt handles these challenges through technology — and I expect it to be the prompt for a lively discussion.

So if you’re looking for an angle for your blog, look for something specific, something connected to the organization’s mission, but also something unexpected — the fact that your constituent audience isn’t going to get anywhere else will keep them coming back to see what’s new.

Get out there and make your own mistakes

Which brings me to BAM. They made a lot of decisions about the blog that don’t make a lot of sense to me–first and foremost the decision to go with blogspot, which neither affords the institution their own branding nor represents a forward-thinking stance in the digital space.

If I was advising them, I’d tell them to go one of two ways. Either they want to piggyback on a vibrant community and/or be seen as doing something edgy and interesting, and in that case, Tumblr would be the obvious choice. The good thing about Tumblr is that it’s already well-adopted among the community they want to target, young Brooklynites.

If it were my project — I would have made them a custom implementation of WordPress, something that lives on the bam.org domain, completely fits into their branding and is packed with social sharing tools to make their content more viral.

But the fact is, looking back to my early experiences with the filmlinc blog, I only came to know this through years of trial and error. Our first blog, like theirs, was hosted on a separate service (WordPress.com), before I learned enought to migrate it over to its own hosting setup.

It was the trying out of things — different voices, different kind of stories — that first put the community of NYC film enthusiasts on notice that we were on the map, and set the stage for the social media presence of the Film Society to grow to the point it has today.

The thing about your first move is that it’s unlikely you’re going to get it absolutely right.

The trick is to get out there, as quickly as you possibly can so that the learning curve can commence — and your fans can find you.

Late last week, Chris Brogan had a great post up called 97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform. It’s jammed-pack with ideas on standing out, with so many I thought I’d underscore a few that resonated most with me here.

One common thread throughout the piece was something that should be familiar to readers of Jellybean Boom — a strong exhortation to get up and go.

1. Don’t fret as much about the technology. Don’t have a blog? Start one atWordPress.com or Tumblr.com. If you want more flexibility, get your own WordPress blog (affiliate link) by clicking the 4th option on this page.

39. Never worry that someone else “stole” your idea. Ideas are free. Execution is what makes you money. I’ve met countless bitter people who “invented Facebook” years before.

50. Start where you are. Lots of people worry that everyone’s so far ahead. Those people? They started somewhere.

Stop waiting for permission or for the exact right market conditions. You’ve got to start somewhere. That’s always been a strong theme of this blog — that acting, executing is as important as having all those brilliant ideas.

But Chris’s list also has a bunch of things I need to work on myself!

76. There are very few successes in the world that happened as solo acts. You need a team, a network, and a lot of goodwill.

After being inspired to by the advice of Susan Halligan, I’ve spent a lot more time this year making the time to actually meet people I admire, learning about what they’re doing and how they got started. While I’m actually a pretty introverted person, I’ve been delighted, time and time again, by how much energy and momentum comes out of a having a conversation with someone who’s doing something really cool and inspiring. A lot of new opportunities, too.

I’m also thinking a lot about how I’m connected to various communities — of bloggers, of tech people, of creative people right down the street. During this year I’ve made it a goal to be a much stronger participant in and advocate for those communities.

Definitely check out these 97 ideas — they deserve to be bookmarked by anyone who’s trying to start or grown a business.

What does it mean to be a creator in 2012?

It means you’ve got to be ready to be your own cheerleader, creating websites, micro-marketing and just figuring out by hook or by crook how to get seen by the world.

But entrepreneur? Is this the new de facto addition all writers, actors, critics and filmmakers should be tacking onto their biographies?

Obviously, it was Louis CK really kicked the conversation into high gear.

The comedian had the audacity to self-distribute his latest comedy show “Live at the Beacon Theater” for $5 over the internet and made a cool million in exactly 12 days.

Imagine that.

The subtext to Louis CK’s daring but inevitable move is a question that more and more creative types are asking themselves. Ought the artist attempt to retain more control over the distribution of their work — which is to say, more of a financial stake?

Hidden in the discussion is the dream of all scrappy artists: financial security.

I certainly think that artists owe it to themselves to take a greater stake in their own “brands” as it were to better withstand the slings and arrows of an outrageous economy.

J. Hoberman’s recent departure from the Village Voice is a good case in point. In the press, it was framed as blow for film criticism in general, as in this Anthony Kaufman piece from Indiewire:

The conventional wisdom may be that individual critics don’t matter, or aggregation review sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Flickster, have replaced them. But distribution executives are constantly lamenting the loss of local critics–who have established a rapport with audiences, who, in turn, trust these reviewers and, in fact, go to see movies because of them. And in New York, the most important art-house market in the world, Hoberman was among the most respected.

Less discussed was how whether or not being a part of the Village Voice really matters anymore since the rapid watering-down and corportization the paper had succumbed to after it sold to New Times Media. I mean, it’s hard not to romanticize the name — when I first came to NYC in the late 90s, the Voice was a piece of my neighborhood’s bedrock, still being produced by a ragtag bunch of misfits in an office near Cooper Square. Thumbing through the newsprint for the apartment listings, the tinfoil-hat wearing letters and the superb reporting on Giuliani-era club crackdowns was more than just a pastime, it felt essential. I saw the editors then as celebrities and framed a copy of my very first check from them for writing for one of the Best of New York issues.

A lot has happened since then, most notably, the growth of the interwebs as a new vehicle for the dissemination of news and opinion. Titanic media names are scrambling, trying (and failing) to mimic the wildly popular bloggers. When I brought home a print edition of the New York Times this past Sunday, I read a relatively new full page feature in the magazine which was comprised of twenty or so snippets by different authors with chagrin. The Twitter-ization of print.

Old guard commentators decry a trend toward the online churn as a  slippery slope meaning that inevitably the serious discussion of serious cultural things will be written by obsessed teenage fanboys.

But what if we are indeed in a time where the great chaos produces a lot more opportunity for artists to seize control? Where Hoberman as a brand name has a lot more authenticity, credibility and value than the Village Voice?

And one of thing that’s been guiding me as I investigate people and ideas that are shaping the future of publishing is the question of who “owns” the new means of production and distribution of creative work.

Over New Year’s Eve, I started chatting with a Columbia MFA friend of mine about the changes Amazon is bringing to publishing. The conversation even turned to the dreaded “s-word.”

Self-publishing. The phrase used to strike horror in the heart of any serious lover of literature.

Trust me, I’ve been in the trenches, wading through slush in such vaulted basements and offices as Miramax Films, the Paris Review and the New Yorker. The self-delusions of aspiring writers can be alternately bewildering and comical.

Finding a readership is a really challenging thing. Traditionally, publishers have fulfilled the role of gatekeeper. I know by FSG’s track record that they generally don’t publish bad books. So the imprimatur of a major house says something about the volume you’ll pick up.

So what’s changed? A lot of people will tell you it’s technology. I can make an album or a film completely at home now and you might not guess it’s an amateur effort. I push a little button and voila I have a website. Making an ebook is not actually that much more difficult.

And so if you look beyond Louis CK’s million dollar check, the much more seismic shift in the consumption of entertainment equation is the changing role of the audience.

A vocal audience can make an unknown — and readership/participation is making a strong run at pedigree.

Not everyone is happy with the change. My MFA friend craves the the possibility of the brass ring, meaning big advance, excerpt in the New Yorker, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.

Me? It’s seems like the biggest prize would be readers who care passionately about what you’re doing.

And I’m tantalized by a number of recent stories of authors taking more control over the shape of their careers via new digital distribution channels.

To wit:

• Darcie Chan’s debut novel, The Mill River Recluse, became a bona-fide hit thanks to her canny digital marketing tactics and competitive pricing.
• Deborah Reed’s self-published genre novel earned the attention of Amazon’s new publishing imprint, who offered her a publishing deal for her next literary novel.
• The Fearful Adventurer, a popular blogger, writes: ”I launched my self-published book in the first week of September this year. In just over two months, I’ve landed some big publishing deals and a movie deal.”

“Entrepreneur” has become such a trendy word that it flirting with meaninglessness. But as the tools for creation become ever more accessible (Apple’s iBook Author, anyone?), creative people owe themselves the exploration.

A related note: I could go on an on about this, and the good thing is that I will have a chance to go on and on about it, in a public forum, with people who know a lot more about it than me.

Susan Halligan and I co-curating a panel on “social reading” for Social Media Week New York on the morning of Valentine’s Day, February 14th. We’ve got thinkers, academics, founders and developers on the panel and it’s going to be an amazing discussion. Hope you’ll check it out!