Why don’t I have a calling? (a random complaint)

Or why wasn’t I good enough at something to the point where it became inevitable that I would do that thing and do it better than most people? I have always enjoyed the fact that my career has been, shall we say, eclectic. I’ve always lurked within the media and communications sphere, but trying different roles and mediums over the years. But now, as I get closer and closer to my 35th birthday (holy cow, it’s a month from tomorrow) I am starting to feel disappointed that nothing — of all the things I’ve tried — has reached out and grabbed me by the throat. I think about all of the jobs and hobbies I’ve embarked upon or dabbled in and there was never a time when I thought, “I must be able to do this or I will die!” I’ve heard that people have those moments — those epiphanies. Where is mine? I know you can’t chase these moments down, per se, that they have to find you as much as you find them. And I’m OK with being a late bloomer. But this is getting ridiculous. Do I just have too many choices? Would it be better if I had been born one of those super flexible Chinese kids who got whisked away from her parents at the tender age of 3 to become a future gold medal gymnast? What about if I had come from a long line of carpenters, blacksmiths or cheese makers and knew that following in the family tradition was simply my destiny? Maybe it’s all the time I spent in school trying to do what I thought my teachers and professors wanted me to do rather than forging my own path that stunted my sense of self determination? Who the heck knows. I just wish I had some idea. 

Children training at Chinese Gymnastics School

Chihuly exhibit, DeYoung Museum

I am enchanted.

Olympic Fever(ish)

I’ve been tuning into the summer Olympics, mesmerized as I am by the sheer power and superhuman qualities of the athletes competing there. Last night I watched China win the gold in the men’s gymnastics. I sat on my couch holding my breath every time one of the athletes took to the floor, high bar, horse, vault and then, once he landed (and especially if he stuck the landing), I found myself involuntarily grinning or tearing up. Sometimes both. Maybe it’s knowing that if China hadn’t won gold, the coach had promised to fling himself off of the top of the tallest building in Beijing, maybe it was just knowing how it will change the winning athlete’s lives (and the lives of their families), but I could not help rooting for China. I wanted our boys to get that bronze and when Alexander Artemev killed on the Pomel Horse to clinch that medal, I jumped up (in my mind) and cheered. But for some reason, it was the Chinese who had me at hello. 

But if I may, I’d like to register a complaint: The NBC reporter interviewing the swimmers poolside is getting on my last nerve. Her cringeworthy interviews feel cheap and ridiculous, more red carpet coverage on E! than Olympic Games. (Not that I don’t love the red carpet coverage, but you wouldn’t have Ryan Seacrest interviewing athletes, would you?) Case in point, when she yelled into her microphone at Matt Grevers to come back to be interviewed after he tried to sneak away and leave his teammate in the spotlight. Don’t blame him one bit for trying to make a break for it.

Getting Back to the Blog

So it’s been a long while since I sat at the Innovation Journalism conference (two days after quitting my job as a PR lady at a boutique agency that handles tech clients) and madly transcribed various panelists talking about innovation, journalism and Innovation Journalism to log what turned out to be my last blog entries for some time. Yes, a long while indeed. Since then, I took a job at a new PR agency — a bigger agency with much bigger clients and a higher degree of hubub — and also quit that job. Two weeks later.

The amount of hubub and email (156 in one day) seemed a little over the top for me seeing as I wasn’t sure whether I even wanted to be in PR or not and exactly how I ended up there in the first place. OK, to be fair to myself, I know how I ended up in PR. It had something to do with the day that I was driving to my job as a tech reporter and upon spinning off the road and winding up in a ditch thought, “maybe if I get hurt just enough, I won’t have to go to work for a while.” I went home, logged on to Craig’s List, found the PR job and applied. It was great while it lasted and a fun education in and of itself. And really, isn’t that what we all hope for with our jobs? The chance to learn something new? 

But there has been this nagging feeling, little voice, whatever you want to call it, that has been telling me that this is just not it. So at this point, I’m career hunting. I’m sitting here with a pile of books, including Cool Careers for Dummies and The Anti 9 to 5 Guide and an issue of Outside that I stole from my therapist’s office for the article, “The 50 Best Jobs: Recession-Proof, Adventure-Packed Careers” and wondering how to begin this process of finding what it is that will make me want to get up every morning and bound out into the world. 

So far, I’ve been creatively unemployed since June 30. I’ve been avoiding the blog because that’s what you do when your life takes an unexpected turn. Or at least, that’s what I do. Stop blogging just when things get really interesting. Today’s plan: Finish Culture and Consumption II by Grant McCracken. He is a brilliant cultural anthropologist who I found via his blog: CultureBy: This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. And then start in on a second Anthro book that I ordered from Amazon.

The role of local media in covering innovation: challenges vs. best practice

Coverage of innovation is important for local media, not just big pubs. Local media:

• disseminates information about innovation
• create an understanding of innovation
• put innovation on the agenda of the community
• support the evolution of innovation system

Media as a feedback loop: they provide coverage and feedback on what’s been done so far.

• Media enables innovation to evolve and improve
• it is part of innovation system whether it provides coverage or chooses not to

Challenges:

• Making complicated matters understandable — how do you make stories interesting?
• Finding and keeping skilled journalists — how do you attract journalists to smaller markets?
• Allocating adequate resources — no start or finish to this story…
• The editor as obstacle — editors make the final call; doesn’t matter how dedicated you are as a reporter if you don’t have support
• Introducing a new beat in times of downsizing — can local journalism be profitable

Mercury News strategy in attracting, keeping skilled workers: Stephen Trousdale, business editor of San Jose Mercury News

The primary mission of SJMN is to cover innovation as a topic. Our primary mission, esp in business section, is to cover innovation in the SV. (Chris O’Brien is new columnist.) Challenging biz climate for newspapers. Never would have thought NYT would lay off newspapers, shows how biz model has shifted from under them. Problem of trying to convey story in simple language: broad audience. Have to do this explanation in engaging way. It is a gradual story — how can you keep tabs on that gradual process and pick the right moment where you can explain to people that they should pay attention to it. High ratio of noise — 1,000 press releases/day. How do you filter it? The key thing is to learn from mistakes and create dynamic feedback loop with readers and internally, we’re learning same lesson. Give folks sense of dramatic changes in SV across broad range of spectrums.

Matt Wenger: President of Packet Front Inc. Eight years in rural Canada as entrepreneur and social economic development organization to create innovation systems within this rural area. Stymied by local media. You’re in a town of 5K in the Rockies and they wanted to bring advanced fiber optic communications to homes & bizs in rural area. Headline in paper: 18-year-old reporter who was there on this complex issue: city to pledge $18 million to hang wires on polls. People got upset, most funding coming from private sector, but it made it difficult. It really helped to slow the progress of the innovation. It’s not just covering it, but covering it well and providing the appropriate context. Tried to work with local media directly to provide editorials in paper so that people working with innovations could write directly about it. 

Thomas Frostberg: Making local journalism profitable: Rapidus. Pick up interesting stories about startups rather than listed companies. Newsletters, email format, subscription only, no ads, worked well. We focus on bringing up new stories all the time. Regional rather than national, we could go across the subjects. 

Does it take separate actors like Rapidus, or can local newspapers do this? 

TF: often easier to do this when you start from zero so you don’t have to think about how you did things yesterday. there are ideas you can also merge into newspaper organizations. Launched new news service they’re distributing copy to local newspaper. 

Now opening floor to questions: 

Appetite for news about Apple, Google. This is wonkier than we normally do… Tough decisions that we face every day: we want to be savvy when a small company claims it has a dramatic announcement. We exercise huge level of skepticism. Most of those small companies aren’t doing anything that’s that interesting to a broad audience. Finding that diamond in the rough is one of our biggest challenges. We don’t want to look foolish and pick the wrong companies…

David: Innovation clusters in places that aren’t that big… When you look at smaller newspapers, the financial, buz stuff is not appreciated — need editors with insight. Not just a story when company in region is laying off people. 

Audience: do you go looking for innovation or do you expect it to come looking for you? Those who can innovate and those who can self-promote are not necessarily related. 

TF: Failure: I have different idea about that — VCs, entrepreneurs don’t know if their companies will succeed. I can do fact checking, due diligence, but we can’t see into the future, so must come back and report on the company again and again and then report on success or failure. 

ST: Those who are best promoters don’t have, nec, best technology. We discuss things internally, run story ideas through a “smell test” in the newsrooms. When we’re addressing something new, we do have some discussions internally if we’re overhyping and need to be more skeptical, critical, run thru financials, like TF said. There’s so much going on we don’t even come close to tapping the surface, so we do tend to get higher profile. One of the things I ask them is, why do you want to reach SJMN audience? Many pitches about innovative concepts are better suited for other pubs, not the SJMN. We’re going to cover higher-profile ones that are going to effect more people. 

How would local media attract and keep journalists that are skilled enough to take on this challenge? 

ST: Pay them more.

MW: That’s where we found the weakness in the system. Forty-five newspapers got collapsed and bought by Conrad Black, everyone got laid off, the only thing we could do was partner with these companies to take our coverage of the local things. They were not going to be hiring people to cover these things, but create partnerships to do that. 

How to write about startups without causing a bubble

Bubble stories from the dot com boom: Webvan. Raised $370 million in IPO, expanded to 8 cities, gigantic infrastructure, 2000 employees, not enough customers. Pets.com. IPO to liquidation within 9 months. Hop On. Disposable mobile; dubbed one of the best inventions of year by TIME in 2001. Washington Post, BW wrote enthusiastically about it. Stock soared from 2 cents to $1.50. SF Chron decides to write about it: Todd Wallack, checked out phone and found out it didn’t work well. Went online to check out company with SEC, could not find any financial info on them. No phones on the market. Spoke to tech analysts who were skeptical, said CEO Peter Michaels had stolen their money to buy yachts and corporate charter had been suspended; looked inside phone. Trademark had been scratched off, except for battery, and it said Nokia. He spoke to them, sent them the phone, this was only a $200 Nokia phone disguised to look like a $30 phone. Only produced phones for newsrooms and investors and all the company ever sold was STOCK. How can we avoid that? Todd Wallack from Boston Globe: 

Funding from credible VC

Partnership with well known company or 

Track record of starting companies. 

Tom Abate @ SF Chron: “There is no way not to hype something that’s not new.” If no products, write on group of companies in the same space. 

Dan Farber @ CNET: Whenever it is interesting

Trick iis to rite without buying into their messianic vision that this is going to change the world. We are guides for our readers, finding new species, some might not survive, but we are there to observe. We of knowledge instead of “wire service approach.” Back up what you’re writing with links — instead of having all perspectives in one article, they may get around that by linking. 

Panelists: Managing editor of largest Scandinavian biz daily

MK: Green Tech Media, analyst

Turo Uskali: Senior research scholar, writing on bubbles. 

Question: Pete, how early would you write?

Peter: What we try to do or what we try to find out is the company has to prove itself in any way — real customers, want to see the numbers. As it often is, their loss is bigger than their turnover, and that’s a bad sign. Or, of course, if the company listed somewhere or traded somewhere or has got successful people behind it so you can get ahold of the company more than just a fantastic idea and that is what happened too much in 2000, 2001 — we all got too fired up from the good speakers with the big egos, even in Sweden.

What will be the consequences if they have to have customers and good finances b/f you are willing to write about them?

They don’t have to have good finances, just have to prove themselves in some way — how many people work there, turnover? burn rate? IPO? Usually they don’t talk as well about these things as they do about their vision for the world. 

MK: If there’s a published paper — two years ago, paper came out of UCLA desalination technology — peer reviewed, you can cover it at that point. Web 2.0: when they start getting a groundswell of customers. A lot of people didn’t believe in Facebook b/c it was late to the space, but then they started to get a groundswell of users. He gets worried about credentials. Kleiner Perkins is their founder, and they say that like it is all they need to say, but he says that, at least in cleantech, it doesn’t mean anything. 

Or a mention in the NYT: it must be true, they covered it. He gets worried about that, or if it’s over-funded. Those are his cardinal rules. 

TU: In all societies, we need bubbles. Not necessarily big ones that would cause crisis. What he prefers is, let’s create tiny bubbles. When I went to wine country, learned that the best sparkling wine, you can find that one if you find those quality tiny bubbles. They do not cause any hangovers, he says. Example: they are just working on that in Princeton. Read in the WSJ, they’re hiring “clever minds” to do research on bubbles. The politicians and also the scholars, they have been able to realize that now, there is time to research on this issue — every ten years there’s a bubble…

Evan Hanson, chief editor of Wired.com, she interviewed him: he worked at CNET during the bubble. He said, CNET stock was soaring in 1999, went up, so it was hard to remain completely unbiased in some circumstances. Do you see a problem in being part of the market that you cover. 

MK: Yeah. You have to watch yourself. The best thing about being a reporter is that it’s a harmless job. You’re not forcing people to buy Pets.com; you’re writing about it. Vicarious thrills. 

PF: Media, especially newspapers, are under “hard pressure” and it’s a market that is undergoing this huge change, so of course it’s difficult to be working. If you want to be outside the market, you are in the market — you boost them if you write about them. On the other hand, you want to write about the new companies. 

John Joss: How many people here have written about nanotech? Carbon nanotubes are a health hazard. Electronics industry, Memorista, just announced by HP. 

PF: We have written about nanotech, but we haven’t been writing about Memorista, we want to sell papers instead.

MK: I’ll look clean and fresh pressed in my coffin due to the nanotech coating my clothes.

Question from audience: does it matter when we write about new companies? More eyeballs going to websites that cover that vertical space. They start the ball running, at what point does it become an avalanche that we in the traditional media have to pick up on as well? Does it matter if we stay away as traditional media if that company is being covered by blogs.

PF: We need to write about them, but do it properly and be critical. 

JJ: Challenge isn’t can you make it popular for the reader, but can you make it clear and relevant for the audience? 

MK: That’s a daily assignment for me. When started CNET, got a lot of guff for not having layers of editorial vetting. We made some mistakes but we got it out quicker. 

PF: When the media is changing, even tho the traditional media is losing maybe, the trademarks of the newspapers give trust. The trustworthiness will pay off. 

Audience question: Rather than reporting on individual companies, what about reporting on a group of companies that would survive together. What do you think about reporting on clusters of companies, not just competitors, but collaborators?

MK: Oh yeah, there’s always that fifth paragraph in there where you have to mention other companies doing something similar…

PF: Good way to write about new areas, so you don’t boost one over the other. 

She’s talking about supply chain — groups of companies who are surviving together — a different approach. 

Audience question: About story she told about Hop-On

Hannah’s question for Turo: What are the signs of a bubble? Too much money chasing too few ideas, says Turo. Like Web 2.0 one year ago. 

PF: We are living in a world where money is moving faster and faster, we will have bigger bubbles. 

JJ: How do you get the story to journalists? They have transmit modes, but no receive modes. 

Reality Check

I’m at the Innovation Journalism conference at Stanford University, listening to a presentation by Erik M. on how journalists can avoid getting caught up in the wave of exuberance that often accompanies the startup culture that they report on. He says that, in Sweden at the publication where he works, journalists must include at least three reality checks within each article. Disruptive new technologies should be new. He Googled “world’s first robotic vacuum cleaner” only to find several examples that all claimed to be the first. He’s now talking about patents: are they granted or pending? And now, burnrate vs. cash? When will they need more money? And do they have real customers? The one most important factor for a startup is having real customers. How do you define that? Easy, real customers pay real money. And finally, does it make sense? If a company can’t explain their business model and how they make money, there’s a fair bet that the customers won’t get it either. Now, on to a panel. Michael Kanellos, formerly of of CNET, was supposed to sit on this panel, but it looks like he’s stuck in traffic. Frederick Voss, freelance journalist and blogger from Sweden. He writes about startups in Sweden. 

If you want to criticize and analyze a company, you have to put them in the context of other startups and people in the industry. He bounces this new idea off of people and other companies in the space. The history behind — if you treat people fairly, you can be critical and put out the negative factors, if you treat them fairly, you will be able to phone them at a later date and get their opinions at a later date, says Eric. Now John Joss is asking audience members to share their own “horror stories” about reporting on startups against the criteria that Eric was discussing. 

No volunteers, so he decided to tell his own. Next, funded by Ross Perot and Cannon…

Criteria for successful coverage of an innovation. Pitfalls and traps if you don’t do the due diligence.

MK: as a journalist you should be incredibly gullible. There’s a lot of good ideas out there — he was interviewing a CEO about online video, he said, if you think blogs are bad, you’d be surprised by how bad online video would be for consumers. Electric cars, great idea, it’s going to happen some day, but there’s a lot of uphill. He says you have to be able to go with ideas. 

Promises and claims being made by hydrogen cars: he says he’s driven one, drives well, nice. Each costs $1 million now. (John says, there’s also no infrastructure that would provide you fuel.) Wind power…But it’s unpredictable. It’s more efficient at night when people don’t need as much power. 

We have to put things a bit in perspective and see these negative factors as well. Betting your name on a negative assertion. 

News angles — reader doesn’t want a balanced view, wants good or bad. 

Harper’s Magazine predicted that clean tech will be the next bubble: should this bother us? Should we do something to prevent the next bubble? 

Erik: You can’t do these kind of general assertions — the devil is in the details. You have to look at what cleantech, what bubble, what economy.

MK: Is it going to be a bubble over the next 10 years? What is the timeline for the bubble?

FV: You have to think like a VC…