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Media monopoly should not pass go anymore

My Friday post about the news business drew an interesting response from reader Richard Ingraham, who noted that huge media conglomerates are not just unwieldy and inflexible and thus unlikely to respond quickly enough to new societal and market conditions, but may also be the poster children for strengthened antitrust laws.  Ingraham wrote:  

“Lastly I would just say that we are reaping what we’ve sown. By not having any sort of public outcry while the FCC changed rules about how one organization can own more and more newspaper and other broadcasting organizations all in the same market we have allowed these huge media juggernauts to be created, who as you just admitted are too large to change fast enough to keep up with the times. Hmmmm… maybe if we had insisted on much smaller organizations and less consolidation of all our media, they would be quicker to adapt and we would all have been better off.”

I don’t think there’s much doubt that government enforcement of antitrust laws has been, shall we say, toothless in recent decades. The obscene binge of mergers and takeovers that characterized the Reagan years may have subsided, but the government’s mindset hasn’t seemed to change a lot – many markets remain dominated by organizations that have grown gargantuan from buying up their competitors, severely limiting the public’s choices and making it impossible for entrepreneurs to challenge them profitably. Clear Channel and Time Warner are just two that come to mind.

But the Zeitgeist is changing and it looks as if the Obama administration may try to restore the power of regulations meant to keep corporations from driving everyone else in their industries out of business or into their stables.

So what will this mean to news outlets? Well, it’s possible that if media conglomerates ended up having to divest themselves of all but one outlet in each market (so that in a particular city, they own either a newspaper or a broadcast station, but not both, which is how it used to be) they might not be able to find buyers for their least-profitable properties and would have to close them instead. Undoubtedly, some enfeebled newspapers would be among them.

If that proved to be the case, we’d probably end up in the short run with even fewer news outlets than we have now. But with the media giants reduced to normal-sized adversaries and community demand for news going unmet, the opportunity for entrepreneurs to step in and create new – maybe much better – small media companies would be both great and healthy.

I hope with all my heart that we don’t lose our grand old newspapers – we as a nation desperately need their news-gathering skills, integrity and reach. But the conglomerates that own many of them have already sacrificed some of the unique editorial voice, investigative drive and spirit of experimentation that made those papers grand in the first place. It’s time to loosen the big bullies’ hold on the media marketplace and give other initiatives and ideas a chance to thrive.

How Obama can help America create a better civilization

The most important word in that title? ”Create.” It’s the key to our success. And the United States needs to be more successful in many ways.

That’s why at this moment – with a president in office who embodies the nation’s new attitude toward difference and change – I think America is, at long last, ready to begin the creative revolution it must go through to become the thriving, peaceful, stimulating, wise, caring and accomplished society that its citizens have always hoped it would turn out to be. 

I call it a revolution because a culture of creativity will turn the U.S. completely around, away from narrow, outmoded perspectives and failed ways of operating and toward a broader view that encourages people in every field of endeavor to imagine and experiment, discuss and collaborate – and then innovate. When we can embrace fresh ideas and support each other’s efforts, we will be able to solve a lot more of our problems.

How can President Obama lead us through this fundamental makeover? Americans for the Arts has made official recommendations to the new administration; what follow are the suggestions of other arts leaders, as well as some of my own. 

Education. As with any lasting change, education matters most.  But our educational system itself – what it teaches and how it teaches - desperately needs the same transformation as the rest of our culture. So it must be both the agent and the subject of change.

Like the military-style, 19th-century factories and workforces on which they were modeled, U.S. public schools still aim to turn out masses of identical products through a rote process. They largely emphasize conformity and uniformity - children stand in line, sit in rows, raise their hands to speak and are made to repress their natural inclinations to move around, explore and question.  They generally learn identical lessons in large groups, take identical standardized tests and are often strongly discouraged from deviating in any way from a predetermined norm. 

That may have been effective learning in an age when most people ended up working on assembly lines for rigidly structured corporations, but it doesn’t prepare today’s students for the flexible and adventurous thinking demanded by our 21st-century’information and service economy, where competition requires constant  reinvention of complex processes and products.  Even more important, a tool-and-die schooling makes most people bored, restless and miserable.

Our system ignores “the fundamental truth about how young people learn,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  “Clearly, refocusing U.S. education around creativity and creative engagement is central” to improving educational results.  

Studies, including the RAND Corporation’s significant 2004 Gifts of the Muse report, have shown that creative teaching methods and creative subjects help people learn better, enjoy themselves more, stay in school longer and develop the creative skills they need to lead successful, productive lives including, but not limited to, better employment. Creative disciplines such as the arts can provide the inspiration, stimulus and opportunities for discovery and self-expression that students often miss in standard curricula. Arts-related teaching methods - movement, building, illustration, composition, acting a role – can also help students better understand the concepts of their academic subjects.

In just one example cited by the Cleveland-based Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), young people attending Cleveland’s School of the Arts  – part of an extremely troubled public-school system – last year scored higher than Ohio statewide averages in eight types of Ohio proficiency tests; 100 percent of them passed their Ohio graduation tests. (Full disclosure: I work with CPAC as a free-lance writer and editor.) 

America needs more arts in its schools and more creative teaching methods. We also need better teachers.  Here’s what Obama could do to help:

•  As Robert Lynch of Americans for the Arts suggests, create a Secretary of Arts and Culture position, or the equivalent, to oversee and coordinate U.S. arts and creativity policy and initiatives
• Direct that official to work with the U.S. Department of Education on a task force to develop what Tepper sees as needed curriculum standards for creative instruction, to give state education departments guidelines for what methods to use, what to achieve and how to measure success 
• Fund and foster teacher training in creative classroom methods through community consortiums of arts, science, technology and arts-education organizations similar to Cleveland’s annual Summer Teacher Institute  
• Encourage, through Department of Education funding for teacher salary enhancements, the abandonment of tenure and the adoption of merit-based pay determined by administrative, peer, parent and student review 
• Establish an Artists Corps, as Lynch recommends, to provide jobs and job-training to artists of all ages in the effort to improve America’s infrastructure – but make it one section of a permanent  Service Corps offering environmental, technological, educational and entrepreneurial services to communities, and jobs and job-training for retirees, students between high school graduation and college enrollment and adults in career or life transitions in need or desire of employment, new skills or contributing to society. Coordinate the different sections’ initiatives to encourage collaborative programs, such as having artists and environmental workers provide creative and green-practices training to businesses

Which brings us to the next area of change …

Organizational culture. Like our schools, our other organizations – from bureaus and agencies to companies and unions - tend be structured like the  Army: highly regimented, top-down outfits with their own strict class systems, ingrained operational methods and culture of absolute power at the top and absolute obedience everywhere else.

The Army is not known for its creativity. Neither is the Navy, where insiders describe their institution as “over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.”  But they have missions vastly different from civilian groups, which must use the imagination and knowledge resources of all their members or risk being ineffective, inefficient, outmoded and – in the case of business enterprises – uncompetitive and eventually bankrupt. 

If American education becomes more creative and sends more inventive, unrepressed people into the world, chances are that our other organizational structures will change, too. But with all this bailout money being handed to dangerously flawed corporations and the president reevaluating the usefulness of government entities and programs, now seems a good time for Obama to urge some new organizational creativity by:

• Making a bailout contingent on the internal restructuring of receiving companies, to allow greater employee input, eliminate reprisals against whistleblowers and create transparency in communications and reporting
• Ditto for government departments and agencies, which can be made more creative and open while being streamlined to reduce spending and waste 
• Making creativity a goal for all government departments by directing them to work with the new Secretary for Arts and Culture and/or an expanded National Endowment for the Arts on incorporating arts, design and cultural heritage components into U.S. transportation infrastructure, health and human services programs and education, as Americans for the Arts director Lynch and CPAC president Tom Schorgl recommend (for more on the NEA, see Matt Charboneau’s Geniocity blog)
• Capitalizing on the unions’ delight at being included in the national agenda once more by urging a creative modernization of their missions and rules, especially as regards teacher tenure and arts unions’ restrictions on the ways their members’ work can be used. Theater companies, for instance, would be able to support themselves more effectively if Actors Equity Association permitted to them record their own professional stage performances for sale as CDs and DVDs       

Which leads to a final creative area …

Entrepreneurship. This country will never get anywhere if creative individuals and their endeavors don’t get more support of all kinds. As things stand now, people with ideas that will innovate society and the economy face a desperate struggle to get noticed and encouraged with advice, seed money and start-up resources. Whether they’re one-person projects, nonprofit organizations or for-profits, smaller enterprises generate billions of dollars in economic impact, create jobs, provide needed services and products and inject fresh energy and ideas into communities. But only if they don’t die a-borning.

To help, Obama should:

• Encourage public-private partnerships among banks, credit unions, foundations, industry associations and private investors to seek out creatively promising individuals and embryonic projects and provide them with grants, loans, mentoring, resources or combinations of all four. These services should not be open to the high-growth-potential tech start-ups exclusively favored by venture capitalists and incubators (See Will Limkemann’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• Change any tax restrictions preventing nonprofits, including arts groups, from supporting themselves by selling products derived from, or related to, their own work and missions
• Support revisions to intellectual property law, especially copyrights, which can discourage creativity by preventing entrepreneurs, artists and others from sharing ideas and work, Tepper suggests (See Peter Friedman’s Geniocity blog for more on this)
• And because creativity depends on the even bigger and wider flow of ideas that comes from intermixing peoples, Tepper says, change American immigration policy to permit greater freedom of cultural exchange and increase entrepreneurship

We and our president have a big job ahead of us, revolutionizing America. It’ll be hard. But because it’s creative, it’ll be fun, too.

Older workers can be creative links to the future

Monday night, I drove way over – I mean waaaay ooooover – to Elyria, a town west of Cleveland in Lorain County, Ohio, to attend a community class about the online business-social network, LinkedIn.

It was already dark when I set out and, this being December in Northeast Ohio, it almost immediately began to sleet/rain and blow. Thanks to the weather, the rush-hour traffic (amazingly, there are still a few people employed around here) and the unfamiliar roads, it took me more than an hour to reach the campus of Lorain County Community College. I met up with a friend, as planned, and the two of us eventually found the right building, tramped through mounds of plowed snow and made it to the classroom just as things were getting started. 

The place was packed. On a cold, wet, messy Monday night, more than 50 people were jamming this big room to hear the director of human resources from the regional Time Warner Cable office talk about a social network.

That surprised me. But what surprised me even more was finding out that the class was aimed at people over 50 who were changing careers and/or between jobs. One of them, I discovered, was a former colleague of mine who had recently been laid off.

That put their numbers in a new and dismaying light that had nothing to do with the typically greenish flourescent illumination. How many of these experienced people, still of working age and with decades of knowledge and skill, had been lost from the local workforce? At an age when American workers of earlier eras were secure in their company positions and looking forward to enjoying hard-earned pensions when they hit 65, how many of these folks were professionally and economically adrift?

In between the tips on LinkedIn etiquette and which icons to click to make a PDF of your resume, I found myself wondering if most of my classmates were just trying to find any decently paid work that would see them through the next few years or if some wanted to turn their personal employment crisis into an opportunity to innovate their lives.

A current catchphrase says that 50 is the new 30, which makes me laugh when I look in the mirror. But I also believe that 50 and older is an excellent time of life for becoming an entrepreneur. True, entrepreneurship is something like parenthood: It’s never truly convenient to subsume your whole existence to the care, feeding and raising of an infant entity. But I’ve always thought that experience and resources were more critical to the process than youth. Though your energy is more limited, you know how to use what you have more efficiently and you have the discipline to push yourself harder. 

Change is scary, particularly change you didn’t ask for, but I wanted to stand up and tell this roomful of late-middle-agers to be brave – not to settle for another dubious paycheck from another heartless and poorly-run corporation, but to use their lifetimes of knowledge to think new ideas, invent new ways to improve the world and, in the process, make something new of themselves.  

That’s how each of us can take an event that was beyond our control and shape it to our mutual advantage. And maybe that’s the best use of networks like LinkedIn – not simply to find jobs, but to form virtual brain trusts that will create new ones. If we don’t do that, we’ll just be using a futuristic tool to perpetuate the past.  

A brain trust keeps your own working better

“Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to start a small creative company with insufficient capital and no staff during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. You must be everywhere at once and do everything yourself and, if you have not made a profit by the end of the allotted mission period, you – and not this tape recorder – will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.”

Good luck, indeed.  Even the best-prepared entrepreneurs have got to have some, or their work will literally be “Mission Impossible.”

I’ve had good luck. Not yet with money or markets or personal fame – my good luck has been to discover a number of friends who try to help me succeed. 

These particular friends all started out as business acquaintances of one sort or other – one is a former source of mine from when I was a reporter, another two are people whose professional services I’ve used and a couple more are colleagues. I had a friendly, enjoyable but intermittent relationship with each, to start with. I never expected more.

So I was surprised and grateful when, independently, each one of them started forwarding useful information to me, checking in periodically to see how things were going, offering to introduce me to good resource people and generally spreading the word about my business. A few of them have actually gotten involved in what I’m doing and frequently help me by listening to my concerns and offering advice and ideas. 

And every time they do those things, I’m astonished and touched all over again. They make such a huge difference to my effectiveness and morale that they are becoming indispensible, like a team of personal advisors or cabinet officers who will set me straight or cheer me on when I most need it.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely occupation, so it’s wonderful to feel as if I’m not totally by myself, especially when I need to weigh difficult decisions or situations. And even though creativity seems like a naturally solitary kind of work, I find I’m most fired up imaginatively after I’ve spent some time talking and trading ideas with other inventive people.  

So I thank them often for their smarts and their support. And I hope continually that I’ll be able to repay their confidence in me by succeeding. Because of them, that mission – on most days – seems to be getting a little less impossible.

Setting a new insecurity standard

There are far too many days in the course of entrepreneurship when you feel marooned on a one-palm desert isle with chaos surging all around your tiny powdered doughnut of a beach.

Over the 24 hours from Tuesday night to Wednesday night, though, the chaos around my particular isle rose and swamped my last dry patch of sand and I have been clinging ever since, metaphorically speaking, to the slender, swaying, slippery stalk of my sanity.

It started - doesn’t it figure? – with a technology problem. I was informed by letter from one of my online service providers that my site needed to be in full compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and that I needed to arrange for certification. They recommended I sign up with a particular service that would scan (or scam? I was worried) my site and determine if its data security measured up.

Never mind that my tech advisor said these requirements are impossible to meet in a shared-server environment – I was evidently going to have to get this site scan or risk being fined for (scary, scofflaw, resisting-arrest kind of word) noncompliance.

So I signed up for the scan. Or tried to. With my tech experts unavailable, I had to fill out a questionnaire about all the servers and domains and waiters and city-states (or whatever) that my site uses and I tried hard to look up all the correct names, but after I submitted it, I realized I had put in one name that was probably wrong. The questionnaire wouldn’t let me go back and change it.

Then, after it got me to pick a scan time and lock it in irreversibly, then it told me I needed to get my server to agree to the scan in advance. Great – I had signed up on Sunday night for a 1 a.m. Monday scan.  

So by then I was pretty sure my site was going to go into convulsions and disappear after the scan, which reported to me the next morning that my site (but possibly the wrong part of it, thanks to my incorrect data entry) had FAILED – really failed, we’re talking an F-minus here – to meet the PCI DSS standards, even though we had just bought our own SSL and the store no longer got slapped with those ”you are moving to an insecure site” pop-ups when people tried to order things.

I was suffering from a cold and was not in a happy frame of mind, anyway. Being menaced with the prospect of an insulted server, underachieving site security and the PCI DSS police arriving to demand the deed to my house did not improve my disposition. I was bewildered, unnerved and not a little angry. My efforts to concentrate on my blog and my consulting work resulted mostly in a lot of empty coffee cups. 

But the computer world was not done with me. Tuesday morning, I tried to put up my daily blog post and found that I could not get into my own blog page. Now all my “1984,” persecution-complex paranoia churned into overdrive – everything was conspiring to undermine the cracked foundations of my confidence. The scan had melted my blog access (!?) I urgently needed to get to the bank … but the bank was closed for Veteran’s Day! I needed to advertise and social-network and call artists and interview bloggers and hire a salesperson and set up online bookkeeping and start a consulting project, but the antihistamines resisted. I especially needed to POST TO MY BLOG, but I still couldn’t get into it. Not all day.

Creative and innovative? I was barely lucid. 

By 11 Tuesday night, I had every tech whiz I knew (meaning pretty much anybody but me) trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my computer system or my waiter, er, server, or any other thing that might be to blame. Nothing could be done.

I went to bed feeling as if the world were doing a slow, disintegrating topple into ruin. First, our national security, then the environment, next the economy, and now our telecommunications system, my bank account and my business … all, all into the dark pit of cosmic dust.

I woke up with only a very loose grip on that palm trunk, I can tell you. Without even eating breakfast (a truly shocking departure, for those who know my routines), I sped to the bank and deposited money, sped back home again and – after eating, couldn’t stand it anymore – logged on to discover that my blog page would now LET ME IN. The tide of chaos seemed to ebb a bit.

In a burst of manic energy, I put up my post, answered my e-mail, did the household chores, sent out want ads and press releases, showered, dressed, had lunch (I’m incorrigible), called media people and artists, made appointments, began the consulting work, fetched home the children and cooked dinner.

And I’ve nearly completed my Thursday post. So I guess I’m recovering. Probably I’ll be OK as long as I don’t see the letters PCI DSS again.

Oh. Shoot …..

The fried sole proprietor and other fishy tales of necessity and invention

It didn’t take a collapsing economy to show me that starting a business was going to demand all the ingenuity I have. Since I was beginning with essentially no funding but my own little savings, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to hire all the experts or buy all the ready-made tools and services I needed.

I had to invent my own, instead. I’ve needed to learn to be my own marketing director, for instance, and my own office manager while crafting my own promotional materials, press strategies and inventory systems. When things turn out all right, I can feel some pride in my own creativity. And when they don’t, I find myself wishing like hell that I could just pay to get someone else’s. 

The fact is, no matter how energetic and determined I am, I just can’t be as knowledgeable, efficient and innovative as an industry professional in any field except writing. Which kills me, because I’m a type-A perfectionist.

So, on the one hand, limited money brings out my creativity, as it does many people’s, and on the other, it frustrates me with how inadequate that creativity often is. Thus, I am stimulated/bummed nearly all the time.

Only a licensed psychologist (which I’m not and I slump dejectedly to admit I never will be) can assess how many months and years of this sort of caffeinated moping my psyche will take before it cuts its moorings entirely. But in the meantime, the sleepless little orderly in my brain compiles growing lists of the creative tasks I want to keep and the ones I cannot wait to unload on some specialist whose personal economy I’ll be helping to develop.

This last list starts with fund-raising and, so far, ends with orchestrating search optimization strategies. But there’s a lot in between and the tally gets longer all the time. It all feels like homework and I seldom have a night without it, whereas the fun stuff, such as searching out new bloggers and artists, goes by as fast as recess.

Here’s the upside: Doing the creative jobs I like provides enough endorphins to get me through – well, almost – the icky stuff. But here’s the downside: Inevitably, say by Thursday night, I and my powers of imagination become burnt little knobs of pure filter-grade carbon. Week after week after week.

How can I and other lone business operators keep being endlessly creative (because we have to, especially now)?  Feed off other people’s creativity, I guess. Whether it really works or not, it’s a great excuse to spend Friday evenings reading novels, listening to music, watching movies and eating someone else’s cooking. For a sole proprietor, it’s a relief once in a while to make like a pilot fish.

Reminding myself how far I’ve come

Maybe this is true of most people with big goals to work toward, but I tend to focus on how far I still have to go, rather than how much distance I’ve already covered.

The habit keeps me motivated - I believe I’m less likely to slack off if I continually stare at my destination and the milestones I have to pass than I am if I’m always looking back at where I’ve been.

On the other hand, too much gazing at the horizon can convince you that you aren’t getting anywhere. Especially because a business isn’t a finish line you cross, but an endlessly evolving process that you have to revise and refine every day.  You never really “arrive,” although making some serious money might persuade me that I had. 

So maybe it was a healthy thing that, in the course of pulling together the exhibits I need to attach to my nearly-finished business plan this week, I looked at the stack of documents and materials and realized that I’ve actually accomplished something in the last couple of years. 

I think if I made a list of what I’ve done, I might feel pretty good for once about this experiment with entrepreneurship. Maybe making your own list would do the same for you.  We all need and deserve a little boost, don’t we? Ok, so let’s try it. Here’s my list: 

1. I came up with a business idea that totally excited me and still does

2. Over a year and half, I sought advice from experienced people I trusted and began shaping that idea down to the smallest details

3. I wrote an initial short plan

4. I found lawyers and got my company incorporated

5. I joined the Council of Smaller Enterprises ‘ Arts Network

6. Through COSE, I found a business advisor and started learning about the practical side of running a company

7. I chose an accountant and got prepared to deal with taxes responsibly

8. With help from my advisor and a friend, I wrote a Power Point presentation about my business

9. I got a vendor’s license so I can sell goods in my online store

10. With the help of my partner the web expert, I chose a designer, bought software and got my site designed and built

11. Assisted by my lawyers, I got a consignment agreement drafted for merchandise suppliers

12. I recruited three bloggers to write on my site every day and five artists to supply creative work to my shop and learned how to post my own blog entries

13. I got business cards and stationery designed, as well as an invitation to my company’s launch event

14. I wrote and sent out press releases and got some media coverage of my business launch 

15. I launched my business in a great location with a nice party that a good number of people attended and seemed to enjoy

16. I worked out cash-flow spreadsheets, set up a merchandise log, developed a rate card for advertising and developed a brochure for recruiting artists and one for promoting my store

17. I recruited an additional three bloggers and three more artists (more about this soon…)

18. I worked out three different sponsorships with area organizations and carried out a direct-mail campaign promoting Geniocity Shop creative goods as holiday gifts  

19. I slowly but finally created a full business plan

20. And I’ve continued to refine my site bit by bit, with the help of my tech partner and the designer

I was right – I feel pretty good about all that. It took an incredible amount of work and psychological discipline to get it done, and even though I know I have to keep myself steeled for all the many jobs still ahead of me, I’m confident that I can handle them in time.

So how does your list make you feel?

It means … no means

In my youth, love meant never having to say you’re sorry. I have lived long enough to recognize that for the disastrously impolitic and callous crock that it is and have moved on to wondering what entrepreneurship means. I offer a few thoughts, which are all the thoughts I can summon now that I work 19-hour days:

Entrepreneurship means … working for nothing (it seems, so far) but the sheer joy of it. I used to call this “volunteering.”

Entrepreneurship means … actually reading the business section of the newspaper. Well, some of it.

Entrepreneurship means … being able to claim to own a business without actually possessing anything but paperclips        

Entrepreneurship means … having to think about Christmas in September. And even earlier next year. This is something I would gladly have let my hyper-efficient older sister continue to be the only one in our family to do.

And entrepreneurship means … not caring if my syntax is tortured.

I’ll make more sense when I’m successful. Or at least, more people may be willing to pretend I do.