Next-gen news professionals have guts – and imagination

You might think, with the news industry as financially beset as it is, that none of the current crop of  college kids would want to major in journalism. But as I was happy to discover Saturday at the Society for Professional Journalists Cleveland Chapter spring conference, titled Rise Up in Cleveland, a lot of young people out there find journalism both interesting and promising.

A number of them attended a panel I was on called The Journalist as Entrepreneur, giving me hope that the industry’s next generation is already thinking about how to re-imagine journalism in effective, profitable and highly creative ways. As panel leader Chris Seper, co-founder and president of  the online start-up MedCity News, pointed out, what looks like an era of disaster for the news business is actually a time of unsurpassed opportunity for media entrepreneurs.

That’s true of many fields these days, and the more total the industry implosion (banking? real estate?), the bigger the opportunities are. I know that money people by definition are cautious people, but what everybody needs right now — from the humblest job seekers to the entire U.S. economy – is investors with daring, people who understand that the future is going to have to look a whole lot different from the past and who ardently want to make that future happen now.

It’s no time to be timid. And I’m excited to see that, in the news industry at least, some of our youngest adults are also our bravest. I’m betting they’ll be among the most innovative, too. You can find out what some of them are thinking and doing by checking out the RJI News Collaboratory.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Sunday has never been one of my favorite times. Once I get past breakfast, the dread of Monday permeates the whole rest of the day. And most of those hours end up consumed by dreary chores that have to be done so I can start the week organized: cleaning, laundry, paperwork, mending, ironing, bill-paying (the worst). I seldom have any actual fun on Sundays.

But I really topped myself for eye-glazing tedium yesterday - I had to spend hours online trying to figure out proper shipping charges for the items in The Geniocity Shop. I would have had a more rollicking evening poking dead gnats out of the tiny squares in the window screens with a pin.

I’ve had a lot of Sundays – and Saturdays and nights and holidays – like that since I decided to start Geniocity.com. I thought I saw it coming, but I’ve always been nearsighted: What looked like a few hills from afar were actually K2-sized piles of minutiae that I’ve had to identify, extract and analyze since committing to this project. At this point, two years of suffering later, the merest word from anyone about needing me to come up with numerical calculations or comprehensive rates or profitability projections acts like an instant karate-chop on my will to live, dropping it to the floor catatonic, with its thumb in its mouth.

But in the business world, catatonia doesn’t count as an excused absence.  I’ve had to physically drag myself to my desk like a briefcase full of lead, unsure whether I was more terrified of trying some humongous, math-related task or of not trying it and dooming my project to a shriveling, contemptible death.

The most awful chore jumped my partner and me (not now, Kato!) about a year ago: We had to create cash-flow spreadsheets showing all our anticipated expenses and income for three years. Three years. Even with the proper forms and some tips provided by our kindly business advisor, we honestly thought we’d die. It took weeks of agonized labor with calculators and a laptop, marked by emergency coffee breaks and deep breathing, to get us through it. We probably could have used some portable defibrillator paddles.

I exaggerate only slightly. Making myself deal with this stuff has been not unlike facing down writer’s block. In fact – and even though my being a word person is why I suffer these numerical meltdowns – business has more in common with being a journalist than you might think. 

Just as I do as a reporter, I the Entrepreneur have to find things out. And I have to make sure those things are accurate. It takes a lot of checking out information sources, from phoning people and asking questions to hunting up written stuff online and in print, to learn what I need to know. And also like a reporter, I can’t allow myself the luxury of failing to produce on time.

See, journalists can’t afford writer’s block – those stories have to be written come hellfire or power blackout. You miss deadline or get beat on a story, you’re toast. Entrepreneurs, alas, can’t afford to skip figuring out where every dollar is going to come from or go. Not even if that makes you wish you were one of the dead gnats in your own window screen.       

Where we’re going

It was like this: My business partner and I were lost.

Actually lost, somewhere among the fields and woods of Northeast Ohio. We had driven east of Cleveland to a picturesque country village for a meeting a couple of hours earlier and, on our way back to the city, I had taken a wrong turn.

And now we were both a little wild-eyed, me clutching the wheel as we looped around the two-lane, blacktopped roads on a cloudy summer afternoon, staring hopefully at signposts and at masticating cows, neither of which gave us any helpful information. The signs stated only route numbers – not west or north or anything – and as far as I knew, cows didn’t grow moss.

We needed to be at another meeting, it was getting later and later and neither Dan nor I had any idea which direction we were going.

We were both rattled to begin with, which is probably why I missed the turn. Our meeting in the village had been with a twentysomething designer we hoped could help us with the web site that was to be the core of our new business. But instead of offering us design ideas, this young person had spent an hour and half telling us why he thought our business idea wouldn’t work.

Our reactions had started at surprised and defensive, intensified to dismayed and were building into anguished fury as I aimed the car for – I thought – Cleveland. Deep in agitated discussion, we scarcely noticed that we had traded a view of ruburban yuppie chateaux for 360 degrees worth of sugar maples and late-season corn.

Who the heck did this guy think he was? We absolutely believed in our idea, in the goals of our plan, in the viability of our services and products as moneymakers and good influences on society. Yes, we were first-time entrepreneurs – an arts journalist/creative writer/singer and an arts journalist/artist/teacher – but we knew our fields, we saw a real need for what we wanted to offer and many professional people we trusted had said they liked our concept. What gall this character had, telling us we were wrong.

But what if he was right? He couldn’t be. But … what if he was?

We didn’t really believe he was right. Not really and truly. Yet even before we realized that we had lost our way, we had lost our confidence.

Off course, unnerved and alone (not counting the cows) – if that car ride wasn’t a metaphor for a big part of the entrepreneurial experience in general, I’ll eat my annotated Shakespeare.

On the long, strange trip to owning and running a creative enterprise, I’ve constantly rocketed up and down between bone-deep discouragement and euphoria, but that frantic drive was both the lowest moment and the literal turning point in my attitude towards my project.

I learned a lot about myself in the two horrible hours it took us to make what should have been a 45-minute jaunt – I mean other than that I could use a GPS in my car.
First, I found I was able to get back on track by using common sense and looking for familiar landmarks. Second, I realized that, even though all the conflicting input Dan and I had been given over months of seeking opinions from different experts had been informative in some way, what we had to do now was trust our own judgment and heed only the advice that helped. Naysayers could sleep wid da cows.

And third, I figured out that business isn’t that different from arts or journalism or raising kids or working with humans in any of a zillion other ways you can think of. Everyone you have to deal with thinks his way is the right way. Many people will try to talk you out of, and even prevent you from trying, your way. The overwhelming majority of people don’t have the imagination to understand your way until you show them a working example.

And since finding the road up and out of my pasture-ized personal wilderness, I have decided this: Above all, don’t let anyone talk you out of being innovative. A great many people are comfortable only with what they know and have seen over and over again, but that’s not how humans make progress. I mean, are you reading this in charcoal pictographs on a cave wall?

So welcome to Geniocity.com, where we encourage those who dare to think up new ways of working, expressing themselves and solving problems. From our initial focus on entrepreneurism to the broader information on creativity and innovation that we plan to bring you in time, we hope you’ll find this site helpful, entertaining and inspiring.
And just wait ‘til you hear what we’ve been going through to get this far ….