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.

The creative dimension

Albert Einstein understood time and space.

No duh, you say. But I’m not talking about theoretical physics, at which Einstein was probably our most celebrated genius. I’m talking about another kind of genius he had: the twin gifts of understanding that time and space are valuable and of making sure he had plenty.

I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, who was (I think few would argue) one of the most creative humans the planet has ever produced. What impresses me the most so far is that Einstein instinctively knew how to get what he needed and what he needed was opportunities to think.

How many do you have? Likely not enough.

Me, either. Our culture isn’t conducive to it, which means our culture isn’t conducive to creativity. We’re all frantically sending and answering e-mails and texts, updating our statuses (stati?), cruising the Web, downloading stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, working, driving, dealing with each other. We really don’t have time to absorb information, slowly process it, experiment with it and invent big ideas from it.  

Instead, most of us produce what feels like the mental equivalent of carbonation – a lot of little fizzy notions bubbling out of the turmoil in our heads, as if our skulls were constantly shaken cans of Coke. Those ideas seldom last long. 

Einstein’s, on the other hand, seem likely to last eons. They were the result of years of concentrated thought, thought that was remarkably impervious to distractions from daily work, children, spouses and the state of the world, but that also demanded a great deal of time alone. He eventually arranged his life so that thinking was what he was paid to do, and the privacy to do it in was insured by indulgent universities and his motherly second wife, who had a separate bedroom and took care of all the day-to-day household business so his thoughts didn’t have to include laundry.

Most of us will never have gigs like that and are maybe even glad of it. The truth is, Isaacson explains, that Einstein was a person who never allowed his emotions to get  too deeply embroiled in relationships or events; he cared, yes, but there was a kind of inner fence around his feelings, protecting him from investing too much psychic energy in things that didn’t ultimately matter to him as much as science. Probably most of us wouldn’t want to be like that, at least with our families and friends.

I wouldn’t. But I still envy him the long, uncluttered hours he had in which to create and I worry that my e-mail will become such a time pit that I’ll end up never getting to eat, shower or sleep, much less think.  Maybe the hardest part of being creative, in the end, isn’t pushing our intellects to the limit, but finding the willpower to shut out the din of a world too in love with its own noise.

A good knight’s work

Barack Obama seems to be setting a good example of not letting fear stymie creativity.

In his speech to Congress last night, the U.S.president countered the absurd rumors circulating about health-care reforms (death panels, incipient communism) by bluntly calling them what they are: lies. He also made it pretty clear that he’s not going to cave on the innovative elements he wants to see in a revised health-insurance program, such as a “marketplace” of insurance options, including government-sponsored plans, for individuals and employers of varying means to choose from. He also pointed out – not insultingly, but unmistakably – that supporters of the Bush administration are in no position to question the cost of providing health care to the American people when they’re the ones who overwhelmingly supported spending billions on the Iraq war and cutting taxes for the extremely rich.

It was a speech that rode in, took an unshakable moral and policy stance and delivered knockout offensive blows while simultaneously conveying fresh ideas and the hope and expectation that  left and right will unite in an effort to think up even more.  

Whether or not you like the ideas or Obama himself, you’d have a hard time claiming that it wasn’t a bold speech. And boldness – guts, spine, heart and brains – is what we need more of in our thinking and our actions. It takes courage to invent new ways of solving our problems, but it take even more to make sure the best ones are put to use, in spite of other people’s reluctance, resentment, knee-jerk opposition and attempts at sabotage .

P.S. And how nice to see a president act boldly in the interest of actually helping people. Maybe before Obama’s term is up, all of us will be able to afford annual check-ups.

Copyrighting creativity and just … copying

Interesting bout last night at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The final score?

Cheaters – 2, poor creative people – zip

I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I find myself dumbstruck all over again that those humans who invent and express are essentially helpless to prevent all the others from making off with the fruit of that creative work and draining the profitability from it . .. unless the inventive, expressive people are already rich. And how many of you are? Uh huh. That’s what I thought.  

The occasion was a forum on intellectual property and the arts presented by the COSE Arts Network  and its leader cum Geniocity.com arts blogger, Matt Charboneau. It featured guest speakers Mark Hosler of the band Negativland;  Cleveland-area intellectual-property attorney Sharon Toerek; and Peter Friedman, professor of law at Case Western Reserve and Detroit universities and also Geniocity.com’s law blogger. Hosler spoke about the process and effect of creating Negativland’s audio and video collages from bits of other people’s work. The two legal experts explored the questions of what can be protected by copyright and what can’t, why, and what to do about either scenario.

What bothered me was not the fact that artists and inventors copiously borrow ideas and styles from each other and always have. Building on earlier ideas and discoveries allows inventors to progress farther faster. Influences and allusions add profound cultural value to works of art and serve as a kind of shorthand, efficiently and effectively conveying meaning to an audience or market with shared experiences.

No issue about that here. Ditto the notion of using identifiable snippets of existing works, as Hosler does, to create quite  new and different ones, or satirizing or parodying whole works as Weird Al Yankovic and the National Lampoon have. That’s all good.

What bugs me is bootleggers. These people – I use the term loosely – take artists’ and inventors’ painstakingly imagined and created works, make cheap, usually illegal, direct copies and circulate or sell them, reducing demand for the  originals and income for those whose mental and physical efforts generated them. And they have since art began, making unauthorized folios of Shakespeare’s plays, faking Rembrandts and Picassos and clandestinely taping concerts.  

I know that many artists these days think this is actually just fine – they believe that music or whatever should be free to all, especially now that the Internet exists and none of us can stop the world from getting access to practically everything. They regard all this sharing as free publicity, which it certainly is. But at what point do the sheer love of creating and the thrill of getting known cease to be sufficient benefits to artists who make something for which there is evidently some demand? When do artists and inventors – so often expected to donate their work and be satisfied with a rich soul – deserve to insist that they be paid for their creativity and labor?

It’s hard enough to to turn art or invention into a living without pirates duplicating your unique creation so thoroughly that it becomes as common and monetarily worthless as dirt. As Toerek explained last night, artists can protect their work by copyrighting it, but two facts make this less reassuring. One: officially registering a copyright – the legal process that allows a creator to collect punitive damages from pirates – costs $45 a pop, Toerek said, which may not sound like much unless you’re broke or prolific, like many artists. And two, the fact is that only rich artists can really afford to sue pirates or - coincidentally - to give their work away on the Internet. 

Most of the rest, like any car-part manufacturer or baker – would like to support themselves decently by selling what they make to consumers, whether those consumers are audiences, collectors, shoppers or mass-producers such as publishing houses. 

I’m not saying that the world owes creative people a special living. Like anyone else, they should have to use their skills to compete for gigs, commissions and pay. But also like anyone else, they should have the right to try to create a profitable market for their work. 

They don’t. Not anymore, because the Internet by its very nature discriminates against creators of  original work that can be downloaded and/or mass-duplicated. And unlike Disney or Gucci or U2, most artists can’t do anything about it.

Well – there’s one thing they might be able to try. Hosler explained a bit about Creative Commons, a recent and growing attempt by artists to take back some control of their work by licensing it to people online in return for being credited with authorship.  I don’t get the impression that it will help guarantee artists proper payment,  but it looks like an imaginative start in the right direction.

On the road

For the next few days, I’ll be visiting St. Louis, getting a thorough soaking in the preoccupations of college-age kids who think my age group is already all wet. You’ll find periodic reports here on what’s new and creative among their set, as well as among educators, on campus and in what was once, stirringly, the Gateway to the West, but has now become – at least in my mind – more familiarly known as the place that gave us T.S. Eliot and toasted ravioli.

One of these things was genius. Stay tuned to find out which.

This way to weird cooking.

Are creative and crazy the same thing?

Back in January, I wrote about some theories related to the scientific causes of  creativity. One of them was about a possible relation or similarity between schizophrenia and creativity - a study done three years ago found that the behavior of some highly creative people is rather like that of people with the mental illness.

Now comes a study that finds a certain gene mutation may result in intense creativity in some people and in schizophrenia or psychosis in others. The scientific community will probably want to see this mutation examined further before subscribing to this one study’s results, but the connection is intriguing. I just hope people don’t use it to reinforce the widely held notion that artists are nuts.

  Read the story and see what you think.

Cat images painted by artist Louis Wain during the period when he became schizophrenic.

Grow nothing but relaxed

You have a crop growing in your head. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what kind.

It’s a crop reflective of your own tastes and behavior and maybe even appearance.  (I suspect Dick Cheney’s is Brussels sprouts.) But whatever it is, you keep producing it too long and you deplete your brain. 

See, creativity is like farming ideas. (Well, at least, the fertilizers are similar.) A tour of the Internet reveals that there are a lot of people out there trying to help you figure out how to grow creative ideas more often and more efficiently in all kinds of fields,  from education to business to dance. Whole systems resembling irrigation networks have been developed to permit you to be creative on demand, as many of us have to be in our particular occupations.

And yet, as any farmer can tell you, you can’t keep raising the same thing in the same spot for years and years without wearing out the soil. And you can feel when that soil has about turned to gravel, can’t you? All those pathetic little gray cells surrendering,  piling up in strata of calcified corpses. Nothing but weeds going to be coming out of that wasteland.

This is why people in their 50s  flip out and start entirely new careers or  sell everything they own and take to the highway in campers. They know instinctively that they better rotate those crops, let the south 40 go fallow or become mental brownfields.  

It’s better not to let yourself get to that  level of sterility. I don’t know how many of these get-creative philosophies and regimens admit the success of this tactic but, frankly, sometimes – and more often than you’re letting yourself – the best way to be creative is not to think at all.

Luckily, it’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the impulses and opportunities for flatlining are  rich, indeed. We just have to take them. None of your half-hour meditations or 10-minute power naps or 30-second screen breaks, either. Those are important only during the other three seasons when there aren’t hammocks to lie in, beaches to read on and bright sun to bake our empty skulls like clay pots.

It’s time to slowly, indulgently and unconsciously refill those skulls with impressions and experiences to quietly feed the seeds of thought that will only later sprout into fresh ideas. That’s why it’s a terrible idea to make children go to school nearly year-round, and an excellent plan to make like the French and just shut down for an entire month. 

So go see junky movies and soak in the pool and drink icy stuff from frosted glasses until you slosh. Let the gray matter recuperate.  Your imagination will be a lot more fertile by September.  

This is your brain.

This is your brain on vacation.

Not just being, but making the change we want to see

I can’t believe I found this. It’s about everything we need to do to change the world and about how creativity can help us do it. All told in a lovely British accent. With Legos.

Anything, everything

On Fridays, it’s nice to let the pictures do the talking.

A refusal to succeed

Fittingly, it was an education story that got me thinking about this.  The piece by Sam Dillon in yesterday’s New York Times was about Arne Duncan,  the Obama administration’s education secretary, wanting to push the reset button on failing schools by closing them down and starting them over – a tactic he used as CEO of the Chicago municipal school system.

The story ends with a quote from Bryan Hassel, an education consultant:

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said. “But as a nation, we’ll never have the capacity to do this work successfully until we make the commitment.”

Hassel’s words struck me, because I had never chanced to think of change in these terms before – that commitment is the heart of deliberate change.

And that’s the reason why so many people fail to be creative, because creativity is the result of deliberate change and deliberate change means hard, determined, don’t-give-up work.

It’s so easy to be inert. And fatalistic. And hopeless. It doesn’t demand anything of you except to stay slumped at your desk or on your couch and do as you’re told. Being inert also gives you permission to crab about what’s wrong as much as you want without actually trying to solve any of the problems that bug you. And if you ever go so far as to attempt a little creative change, inertia allows you to give up easily and say you knew all along it wouldn’t work.

I live in a city and state where inertia is the perpetual Zeitgeist. There are plenty of creative and committed individuals here, trying in their one- or few-person ways to transform the place into the vital, prosperous, exciting region they see in their dreams, but the prevailing mood is one of defeat.  We are resigned, here, to our loserhood. In fact – heresy alert! – I think we enjoy it.

Because it means we don’t actually have to collectively get up off our large butts and do something. What would be the point? We’re losers and nothing we do will ever change that. Loserhood is our brand and we’re perversely proud of it. We don’t demand the best of our leaders or schools or communities because we don’t want to ask the best of ourselves – which is to make hard decisions, stick with them and labor ceaselessly until we get the right results.

I guess we’re too scared and lazy to do that. So, apparently, Duncan and Obama are going to have to reinvent America without us. Well, so what? Every sturdy, beautiful, redone house needs a basement drain. We’ll be happy to take that role so we never ever have to climb the stairs.

You might say we’re so convinced we’ll fail that we’re … committed to it.

Photo by Kat