So last weekend I was on a panel for the Chicago Future of Media Conference. I did enjoy being there– meeting new people and connecting again with friends and colleagues. I wanted to chime in with some more concrete thoughts about some of the spouting I did.
On money
I’m an excitable guy. I get pretty pumped-up about things and often roll fast on things. I said this on Saturday:
back ten years from now and we’ll all be making an insane amount of
money and we’re going to look at each other and we’re going to say,
‘Hey, you were there that day! Remember, we all thought we were
screwed?’ No, we’re not. Everything’s great. It’s literally impossible
for the answer to the question ‘What happened?’ not to be valuable.”
Michael Miner– a genuine hero of mine– called me cockeyed over this. Perhaps the “insane amount” is a bit over the top. Romanesko picked it up, without comment.
I fully believe in my heart that journalism is going to be a thriving endeavor ten years from now. I look around and see people starving for the answer to the question, “what happened?” and think that there’s no way that a question asked so many times cannot have value in the answer.
Let’s not
RTFPDF
One of my favorite phrases In the technology world is “RTFM”, an acronym for “Read the fucking manual”. It is used as a dismissive put-down to people who are trying to figure something out about something or other and asks dumb questions like, “where’s the start button?” or “can I change the background to blue?” or whatever. If they would just read the manual, they’d learn nearly everything they need to know, like a fisherman, and also respect the time and effort of people who try to teach fishing.
I think in journalism one of the most effective things to do is Read the Fucking PDF. When news breaks, very often there is some sort of dense document delivered by the newsmakers– an indictment, a scathing report, a
Be an amateur
The latest current shibboleth in journalism is “business model”. Everyone wants to talk about how to make money as we witness and participate in the cataclysmic, wrenching change we’ve seen.
Don’t worry about it. Wait tables, be a paralegal, work on shovel-ready projects– whatever it takes to obtain enough calories to eat. It’s not that hard. Just because things aren’t perfect, and all the professional and personal and macro-economics stars aren’t currently aligned in such a way so as to allow you to make your main money doing what you love most doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to innovate in journalism.
One day we’ll look up and see that everything changed. It might be a software innovation or a hardware standard or wide-scale consumer desires or a shedding of competition. I’m not smart enough to know what it’ll be, but it’s going to be something, because people are going to always want to know the answer to the question, “what happened?”. And we’ll look back at this nutty time with pride, and the old skool cred that comes with shared sacrifice and labor, and wonder why we were all so damn worked up.
There is more data than you can dream of
I first started making all of my money from the Web in June of 1998, when I became a Web project manager.