Creative people in search of access

A bunch of us Clevelanders had an interesting discussion last night down by the Cuyahoga River. 

A crowd of artists and other creative-community members gathered at SPACES, a nonprofit gallery, to hear a panel of local arts journalists talk about how they do their jobs, how the processes and constraints of those jobs have changed in the digital age and the current economy, and what arts people can and should do to get their news and work before the reading/watching/listening public. Sponsored by the COSE Arts Network, the panel included Ideastream (WCPN/90.3 FM  NPR)  “Around Noon” producer Dave DeOreo; Scene magazine arts editor Michael Gill;  Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt; and me.

Eventually, the podcast will be available and I’ll provide a link so you can experience the whole wide-ranging discussion. But what interested me the most about it was this sort of collective epiphany the group seemed to have – the realization that, even with the Internet putting public access in reach of anyone with a website, an e-mail account or a social network, it’s clear that gatekeepers still control whose creative work gets widely seen or heard. And that there will always be gatekeepers of some kind, as long as humans have mass communication.  And that that, believe it or not, is a good thing.  

 These days, many of those choosing the information to disseminate are self-appointed. Individuals with little or no training in communications, they blog, they tweet, they post stuff on their personal sites and Facebook pages in a breathtaking and clamorous display of free speech. It’s a heady feeling for all of us to sense that we can reach the entire human race with a few clicks and keystrokes.

But even if every one of us on the planet ends up with a blog someday, most of us likely still won’t have real access to the public. That’s  because access comes through influence, and influence comes from the ability to reach a consistently large number  of people. And what consistently draws a large number of people?

Expertise and useful, reliable, entertaining content. 

What came out during the discussion was that artists and others still want and need the validation of their work that comes from being covered by a reporter, host or critic who really knows something about a field and commands wide public respect because of it.  Which means, in most cases, that media professionals, not citizens journalists, are going to continue to be the  people who decide what gets written or talked about in the media, no matter what form the media take in future.

This is not to imply in any way that there aren’t a lot of knowledgeable, talented  individuals out there whose blogs and tweets are informative and worth reading.  But unless they can build and keep a sizable amount of public  influence, theirs will still be single voices among billions of others on the planet, all vying for attention and each drawing only a handful of followers.

Getting reviewed or featured by one of these communicators won’t get anybody much traction with the general population. Who among the general population has time to search through a billion different amateur or near-amateur news outlets?    

The fact remains that, just as people want trained teachers in their classrooms rather than random  residents of the community, so humanity needs and wants professional critics and news people to separate the worthwhile from the endless amount of mediocrity we have no time to sift through for ourselves. Creative people and those interested in creative work will, as always, often disagree with what gets chosen. They will also always have the right – and, increasingly, the means - to seek out for themselves what they consider excellent.  But to reach the largest number of news consumers who understand and care about  their work, artists and arts communities can’t do better than to work with successful professional media.

Let’s hope some of those media survive.

No good entrepreneurs in Cleveland

I got angry yesterday morning.

It’s not an emotion I like to experience before breakfast, but a Plain Dealer story I read left me little choice. It reported that movers and shakers in Cleveland’s business-development community believe our region lacks seasoned entrepreneurs and that the best strategy our leading development fund could adopt would be to import talent from Boston, Silicon Valley and select places overseas.

Excuse me? A shortage of talent and experience?

This is the bitterest joke that Cleveland endlessly plays on itself – claiming that people here aren’t good enough to invest in when the real problem is that the talented, enterprising ones are routinely ignored by the very leaders and groups that could help them and the local economy the most.

“Believe in Cleveland”? Great promotional slogan for a city whose ”developers” don’t do anything of the sort. What they do is look around with their noses in the air, see nothing that’s happening on the ground and conclude that we need to uproot the brilliant thinkers and doers from some other city and embed them in our half-empty office towers and decaying factories. 

There are imaginative and capable people all over this corner of Ohio who are starting from scratch with great ideas that could become important sources of jobs, money, community pride and, someday, global influence – but because they don’t fall into the one narrow category of worthy enterprises (IT innovations or biotech that will produce $1 billion in revenue in five years) local major funders will consider, they are denied the money they need to succeed. 

Compare this reality to what’s happened in Ireland, a long-impoverished nation that has undergone an absolute economic revolution in the last few years. What did the Irish do right?

 As the New York Times reported nearly a year ago:

“The change began when Ireland entered the European Union in 1973. In subsequent years, the government rewrote its tax policies to attract foreign investment by American corporations, made all education free through the university level and changed tax rates and used direct equity investment to encourage Irish people to set up their own businesses.

‘The change came in the 1990s,’ said James Murphy, founder and managing director of Lifes2Good, a marketer of drugstore products for muscle aches, hair loss and other maladies. ‘Taxes and interest rates came down, and all of a sudden we believed in ourselves.’ ”

Think of that. Ireland encouraged its own people – not people from someplace else - to set up their own businesses. National leaders trusted that Ireland actually had talented entrepreneurs just waiting to be given a chance and encouraged them with material help. They believed in themselves. And – what do you know! – a lot of entrepreneurs emerged and are succeeding fantastically, building their ideas and small companies into international corporations that are bringing gobs of money, excitement, pride and an improving standard of living to a land once synonymous with hopeless destitution. 

Now, get this: Right underneath the story I read about Cleveland business development was another one noting that the Ohio state government had approved grants to three business projects expected to bring jobs to Cuyahoga and Summit counties, the home bases of Cleveland and Akron, respectively.

What is one of the three? A $78,000 grant to buy equipment for Proxy Biomedical Limited, an Irish company specializing in bio-materials, as part of a $2 million project expected to create 26 jobs.

So Ireland believes in the Irish and so does Ohio. But no one in charge believes in entrepreneurial Clevelanders. 

No wonder our most gifted citizens so often decide, after years of fruitless efforts, to “be leavin’ Cleveland.”