Theater, politics and technology join Geniocity.com’s range of topics

To Geniocity.com’s newest bloggers, welcome!

And to our readers, I’d like to invite you to enjoy the first posts of Terrence Spivey, artistic director of Karamu House; Leonard Steinbach, cultural technology expert; and Seth Rosenberg, politics writer, whose insights and particular senses of humor will make reading about the latest innovative twists in their fields both eye-opening and entertaining for all of us.

I look forward to many more such introductions, as we at Geniocity.com continue to expand our range of subjects and writers and our means of connecting you to the creative cutting edge. We don’t want the communication to be one way, either. We want to hear what you think – about individual posts, about Geniocity.com as a whole and about the directions in which inventiveness is taking humanity.

Thanks for being part of the conversation and the adventure.

Geniocity.com gets expansive

Like most humans, I rarely look forward to Mondays. But today is different: I’m happy to announce that Geniocity.com will soon get bigger and better.

A week from now, we’ll launch three new blogs that I think you’ll find fascinating as much for who writes them as for what they’re about. And who are they?

Terrence Spivey, the artistic director of Cleveland’s Karamu House, who will blog about the creative frontiers of live theater. Terrence joined Karamu, which is the oldest African-American theater in the nation, in 2003 after nearly two decades of mastering his craft in New York City. He’ll connect you with what’s developing in the real and increasingly diverse laboratories of American stage art. 

Leonard Steinbach,  technology consultant to American and international museums and the former CIO of  the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Len’s work in devising digital solutions for the artistic and administrative needs of  cultural organizations gives him a unique view of innovations that make art a science and vice versa. Currently principal of Cultural Technology Strategies and a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, he’ll blog about the intersections of these disciplines and others.

Seth Rosenberg, marketing consultant and writer.  Rosenberg, who studied political science and economics at Tufts University and wrote op-ed pieces for the Tufts Daily, now lives and works in Manhattan. In his blog, readers will find our newest generation of adults represented by his fresh, witty and well-informed point of view on politics’ creative side.

With these exciting additions, including the recent launch of Charlie Eby’s “Media Man: Electronic and Mainstream Arts,” Geniocity.com will double its content, offering you not only a widening range of topics and perspectives, but also a glimpse of the developing links between fields you might never suspect were connected.  

Please join us Monday to meet our new writers, read their blogs and enter the world of creativity, where people are doing things to change the world, not just talking about it. That’s the world Geniocity.com opens up for you.

Journalists need Creativity 101

Peter Friedman’s blog post yesterday on this site  about how well law school prepares people to be lawyers got me thinking about how well journalism school  - and journalism itself – prepares and encourages people to be good reporters, opinion-writers and editors. 

My own experience of journalism school was perhaps unusual – the curriculum was designed to cover the basics of news-gathering and -writing, media law and analyzing statistical surveys, along with photography and layout for those interested, but because I was preparing to be a theater critic, I found I had to essentially construct my own course of study. There were no classes that really delved into the evaluation of creative work or that examined the purpose, ethics and goals of  criticism, much less any that offered regular opportunities to practice the craft of reviewing.

Perhaps because I took an unusual path within  my profession, it seemed to me that the standard curriculum did little more than indoctrinate students in a rote style of newswriting and narrow categories of  news coverage that the business had adopted generations ago and that had slowly hardened into a kind of industry-wide arteriosclerosis that kept journalism from significantly changing and adapting along with the times. There were, to quote a Paul Simon song, “no times at all – just the New York Times.”    

Like law schools, apparently, J-schools also seem to attract people as professors who have very little real experience of the trade. Many of my own teachers were either theorists who examined the media’s effects on society rather than how to put out a great newspaper or nuts-and-bolts newscraft instructors who had left the profession years earlier because, apparently, they weren’t much good at it.  

And like the law, the journalism industry itself has been run largely by people rewarded for sticking with business as usual, rather than being notable innovators or even just good managers.

Journalism doesn’t prepare its practitioners to be managers; it simply moves reporters or ad salesmen or production folks into higher positions, to deal with people and administrative tasks when their skills lie in digging up information, scribbling, hustling ad space or designing pages. Lacking any real training in their new power jobs, they often resort to copying the older editors or managers around them, perpetuating bad leadership habits and old, entrenched ideas of what a news publication should be. That some good managers emerge is evidence of natural individual talent rather than an astutely planned and run system.

I suppose the status quo becomes gospel in any industry, but it’s particularly inexcusable in a business that’s supposed to be all about what’s new. In medicine, they say “Physician, heal thyself.”  In journalism, it ought to be, “Editor, broaden your own darned mind – or you’ll never get your readers to broaden theirs.”

Imagination and creativity have to be encouraged in both the newsroom and the  J-school classroom. Students must be shown how to think differently, to try new approaches with every story and every photograph or video; editors must stop copying other publications’ tiny steps forward and boldly experiment, not just with the individual elements of news publishing ,but with the concept of news itself, and let their staffs come up with fresh ways of communicating information.

My guess is that, right now, the J-schools are actually ahead of the industry on this.  With young, electronics-savvy students  flowing into their programs, many schools have embraced the Internet as the primary medium of the news and are investing in the state-of-the-art equipment and spirit of re-invention with which they need to explore this new frontier, while the economically ravaged professional news industry struggles to overcome its own ossification and get up to speed before it truly and finally dies of shortsightedness, cowardice and a dangerously low idea count.  

Someone – I think it was a character in the Steve Carell movie, Dan in Real Life - once said, “Love isn’t a feeling – it’s an ability.” I would say the same thing about creativity - and journalism needs to develop it.

Europe gets out the vote – for creativity

The European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 may be drawing to a close pretty soon, but the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture, which has been implementing the program and its many multinational collaborations, keeps coming up with engaging ideas.

One of the latest is a photography contest that anyone in the world who has access to a computer can vote on. Just click here to register and vote for the pic of your choice. 

It’s mindblowing that we’ve reached a point where nearly everyone can contribute to a single creative activity with the click of a button. Maybe someday, we’ll all be able to compose together what would literally be a piece of world music.

Aback in black

Even creative people suffer from the herd mentality.

I got stampeded by it Sunday night when I took part in a gathering of the Cleveland-area literati - not a charity-ball kind of thing, but a series of readings by authors, journalists and other wordy types that was held as a benefit for a local library system.  

I wasn’t sure what I should wear. Even though I’m something of a creative writer, I don’t frequent literary circles much – I tend to hang more with the theater and newspaper crowds. I know how those people dress. Or don’t. They actually dress somewhat alike, which is very informally, but stage folks manage to make jeans and sweaters look somehow dramatic, while the press just make theirs look … unpressed. I am at home with that.

But a bunch of authors – what was I supposed to go as to that costume party?

I guessed I’d be safe with black, the protective coloring of all culture vultures. And, quel surprise! I was. But it struck me that safe is an odd thing for creative people to want to be. It makes us oxymorons.

I looked around the room and, though the variations on the dress code were several – from motorcycle chic and Beat Generation boho to the tweedy colorlessness of academics whose brown was their own kind of black - it was clear there was one. And the message it sent was: Looking arty and individual means looking like pretty much everybody else in your group.

Black leather, an earring and a ponytail - or  a shaved head - have become the uniform of self-conscious male counterculturalism as surely as a blue suit bespeaks a banker. Ditto black stiletto boots for the young woman or a black dress, handwoven Third World shawl and free-form silver jewelry for the over-60. And professors aren’t professors without an earth-toned jacket and jeans.

I guess this proves that no matter how boldly imaginative people think they are, they’re still terrified of looking different from their peers. Even after they leave middle school.

And yeah, me too. I regularly put on as much black as the next self-deluding art poseur. But with Geniocity.com, I’ve tried to resist the visual and content conventions of news websites for whom the grid is a box their creators can’t see beyond. Over the next weeks and months, you’ll see gradual changes in Geniocity that will start bringing the site closer to what I’m really aiming for: not just a  source of a different kind of news and opinion, but a medium that makes finding out about creativity an innovative aesthetic experience in itself.   I hope it will be an adventure for all of us.

So don’t wear your uniform, ok?

‘Media Man’ debuts today

Today, Geniocity.com is proud to welcome Charlie Eby and his new blog, Media Man: Electronic and Mainstream Arts, to this site. I hope you’ll visit Charlie’s page regularly for his irreverent and tech-savvy perspectives on the latest innovations in electronic arts and entertainment.

Find Media Man by clicking on Charlie’s blog link on our Geniocity.com home page, by clicking on his name under the blogger list on this page or by going to http://blogs.geniocity.com/eby.