The Business Pitch

"Reporting Local, Reaching Global" was a free panel discussion on business news hosted at Plant Zero by Aaron Kremer, founder of Richmond BizSense and notorious anti-Twitterite. (Can you be a Luddite if you operate a website?)

Panelists were freelancers Phaedra Hise and Maya Smart and former Media Generalists Robert Powell (now editing Virginia Business), Sean Ryan (now a PR flak with Hodges Partnership), and Pam Feibish, current activity unknown but former T-D business editor.

Here's what I learned.

Kremer wisely had several prepared questions to start the program. By the time they were answered, the audience was ready with their own, and if they had stiffed him and asked nothing, he still would have provided a substantial panel discussion, so that was good thinking.

Press releases, faxed or mailed, remain uselessly dead. Press releases sent as attachments to emails are on life support. Time of death will be called momentarily. Your best shot at a pitch now is in the SUBJECT LINE of an email, because most editors get so many emails, they can't open and read them anymore. Feibish said she used to get 300 a day.

Pitching your story in the subject line is shorter than an elevator pitch. It's shorter than a Tweet. It's a semi-tweet. All the more reason you should be on Twitter, learning how to say what you have to say in 140 characters or less, because less is not going to be more in this new media age. It's going to be ALL.

If you're pitching yourself or your client as a story, hang it up. Better to pitch yourself or your client as a source a la Larry Sabato who can be available to comment on any story the reporter is working on. When you call freelancers, ask only, "what are you working on?" and "what do you need now?"

As for being the story, you must have a narrative, a struggle, a trial by fire, from which you rise like the phoenix, triumphant and whole. You must be willing to divulge all your secrets and finances. You must contact reporters when you don't want anything from them and just be their friend. You must not call them on the phone because they are too busy. But you must call them when you have breaking news, especially if they are a frequent publisher.

You must never say "no comment" because it only makes them desire the words you do not want to say all the more. If you are in a scandalous mess, better to call the media yourself before they hear about it elsewhere, call all the media, and try to contain your bad news in one 24-hour news cycle. (In my opinion, confessing on Friday night is always good. The second-stringers are manning the media over the weekend and really don't want to work that hard.)

Panel discussions are always lighter learning experiences than one guy/woman with a PowerPoint and a laser light, pounding in the truths of our time, but this one wasn't bad and I went home with a new resolve to keep lobbying my workplace to give up the press release attachment. Also, the price was right and I had a Pepsi and some chips.

Some Thoughts on Free

These are quotes from Malcolm Gladwell's article on Chris Anderson's book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" from The New Yorker.

[Anderson] Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business.

Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists...There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

Anderson's second point is that when prices hit zero, extraordinary things happen.

[Behavioral economist Dan Ariely] A group of subjects are offered a choice between two kinds of chocolate, Hershey's Kisse for 1 cent, and Lindt truffles for 15 cents. Three-quarters choose the truffles. For the next test group, the price is reduced by 1 cent. The Kisses are now free. The order of preference is reversed. Sixty-nine percent choose the Kisses. The magic word free has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon does the same thing with free shipping for orders more than $25. People will buy a second book to get free shipping.

[Anderson] From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between free and cheap. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it, and you're in an entirely different business. The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.

The philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. Mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are artifacts of an era of scarcity. We had to worry how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint, shelf space and broadcast time.

Digital infrastructure is effectively Free.
Consumers love Free.
Free means never having to make a judgment of value.

Counter argument: [Gladwell] The Wall Street Journal has found more than a million subscribers willing to pay for reading online. Broadcast television is struggling. Premium cable is doing fine. Apple makes more money selling iPhone aps (ideas) than the iPhone (stuff). The company could give away the iPhone to boost downloads.

[Me] Fascinating stuff!

The Dinosaur on the Lawn

I am so over the format of newspapers. I still get the Sunday paper for the grocery store coupons and my husband has an addiction to the Best Buy flyer. Truly, that is the only thing he reads. He takes that, the K-Mart, Target, and OfficeMax flyers, and goes downstairs and dreams his little dreams of having all the toys. This morning he was away on a camping trip, so I was the one at the window looking at the paper rolled up in a plastic bag on the lawn. In this day and age, this is how this product is delivered to me. Rolled up. On the lawn. In a plastic bag. I went out and got it. The paper was rubberbanded in two tight rolls. One part was the ad flyers and sections like Commentary, Flair, the ads, that were obviously printed around Friday, and the other roll was the usual paper, A section, B section, sports, business, which is now called Money? I took off the plastic bag. A waste of plastic. I took off the rubberbands. A waste of rubberbands. Part of a page ripped off while I was pulling off rubberbands. Then I had to smooth it out on the table. It felt dirty to my hands. It wouldn't lay flat. It kept wanting to curl. I moved the big pile of papers, the ad inserts in one pile, the news in another, various other inserts falling out, to the sofa, but it was too big a pile of paper to comfortably read, not that there was anything I wanted to read anyway. I don't care about a dozen profiles of area fathers. I really don't. What do I care about this morning? Well, how's Iran doing? Has North Korea fired a nuclear missile toward us? Did Steve Jobs really get a liver transplant and is he going to survive and continue to run the greatest tech company ever? I scan my iPod's news service aps, read those stories, and I'm done with the news this morning. I have lots of things to do. I can't spend even an hour turning these huge, dirty, newspaper pages, scanning for stories. Later on this evening, I'll scan the headlines on the iPod again and see what's happening. Meanwhile, after 15 minutes, the entire paper has already been put in the recycling. Later today, I'll clip my coupons.

Nothing Changes in Richmond

I started reading Roger Mudd's The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News this morning, and his story starts in Richmond, at the News Leader where he got his first job, replacing a reporter who was out on maternity leave. The year was 1953 and what was amazing to me (besides there being a female reporter who was going to come back after having a baby) is he talks about the same people I encountered when I arrived there 20 years later -- Charles Hamilton, John Leard, Charlie McDowell, and Guy Fridell.

All of them still had jobs at Media General decades later. McDowell and Fridell were columnists. Hamilton had been booted upstairs to the executive floor where he was put in charge of the employee newsletter, and he wasn't happy about that one bit. Because I wouldn't flirt with him or otherwise play nice, he sidelined my professional career. It took me several years to discover that he was the reference that was tripping me up. I swore I was going to show up at his funeral to glare at him, but he lived a very, very long time, and by the time the obituary appeared, I had lost my steam. There was so much sexual harassment going on back then anyway. He wasn't the only one.

But my point is, back then the newspaper was so reluctant to change, even when the person was old, retired, and completely out of it, Media General found a job they could do so they could keep writing or keep coming to the office to sit behind a desk, even if they didn't have anything to do. One old guy had his wife drive him in from Barboursville twice a week so he could sit in his little glass cubicle and turn in his column, with the date line Barboursville. He actually died in that little cubicle one Labor Day weekend.

Mudd writes that black preachers could not be called The Reverand. Only white preachers could have the capital The. The blacks were just Rev. He also reported living in Baltimore Row in the "historic district." Where is this Baltimore Row?

After his spring and summer at the News Leader, he was hired by WRNL, the sister radio station, and had several successful years there chasing the Byrd political machine with his gigantic tape recorder. He went on to jobs in Washington radio and television and eventually CBS News, coming back to Richmond to be married at the Cathedral.

Oral Sex, Organic Blueberries and Social Media

Members of the Social Media Club are an amazingly handsome group of people (and pretty much white). If they had an age contest, I could easily win Oldest Woman. And who said nerdy girls weren’t good looking? They are.

One thing I noticed was everyone used their skinny photo for their Twitter ID. If the camera adds 10 pounds, you guys were once super thin, and you’re not now. No, you are not.

Well trained by formative years at Disney World, everyone filled in the rows without leaving empty seats (keep moving, I don’t want to have to crawl over you), and precisely at 6:45 the program began and a sea of iPhones lit up across the room, Twitter screens at the ready.

Here’s what I learned:

Style Weekly, despite the downward trend for newspapers, is growing.

Richmond social media people turn out in bigger numbers than our D.C. counterparts.

Rachel DePompa’s Facebook page is private.

Social media, even if it’s the only communications avenue used, can draw people to an event like flies to….uh, watermelon. (This may be the true revenue stream it generates…the ability to direct attention to a product, event, person or idea.) @RVAMAG’s Ian Graham boasted of getting a massive crowd for the first Carytown New Year’s Eve at next to no expense, using social media.

Aaron Kremer filled the Andy Rooney role, despite his youthful appearance and past history writing for Brick. The Richmond Biz Sense curmudgeon does not Twitter, despite working for a completely online publication. The advantage of online-only is you can stay viable during the start-up phase without printing expenses or deadlines.

Everyone claimed they get story ideas from their Twitter and Facebook friends and followers, but then everyone conceded the same thing happened during the old email days, or even the old telephone days. Or for DePompa, the standing on the corner waiting for her live shot days.

DePompa crowed about being able to break exclusives even faster on Twitter, before the T-D got it online (muffled laughter at that), or even before her newscast aired. But then she remembered she really shouldn’t do that because Channel 6 then steals her story.

Jason Roop of Style Weekly said reporters and columnists for the Times-Dispatch should be tweeting to give the newspaper some personality. (Is that columnists with an “s,” Jason? Are you sure? I think there’s no “s” anymore.)

WWBT’s Ryan Nobles contributed the most quotable quote, that the Internet was making the world smaller, not bigger, because we were all falling into these little niche communities. (I looked around warmly at my niche community, such a handsome group of niches.)

By a slip of a pronoun, DePompa revealed that her secret City Hall source was a male. My list of suspects immediately narrowed.

How to monetize Twitter? Nobody knew.

Roop astutely noted that Richmond’s blogging community seems obsessed with food -- that any blog headlining food or a restaurant immediately rockets to the top of Most Clicked Open on RVA blogs. I might add, sexual references work, too. (Hmm, what should I call this post?)

Is journalism still ethical? (Uh, was it ever really?) With the 24-hour cable news cycle and the rise of conservative talk radio, we’ve gotten a rash (and rash is a good word) of commentary programs that put a clear political spin on everything. Ian Graham sought to warn us about the evils of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but was almost shouted down by audience members (alcohol blood levels rising) who said “we’re not stupid!” (Maybe not us, because we’re all so good lookin’, but Rush’s callers certainly do sound like they don’t get that he’s an entertainer playing a role.)

Nobles waxed wise again with his endorsement of Twitter as a medium that provides the most results with the least investment. How long does it take to twitter a few times a day? No time! “Those not on it don’t understand it.” So true. I get weary of hearing people who have never used Twitter dismiss it, although I feel the same way about scallops.

Nobles is wise again. Appointment journalism is out the window. Despite his need for employment, we soon won’t be gathering religiously around the TV at 4, 5, 6 and 11 because we will get news on our own time schedule.

Then Andy Rooney Kremer becomes bafflingly unwise. He opines that the only future is micropayments. We will go to a system where we pay to read the news online. I just don’t see that happening, except maybe for highly technical or political websites, or for people willing to pay a subscription to watch a video feed of Rush Limbaugh sitting at his microphone like a Buddha during his broadcast. Graham calls him out on that rather forcefully, the only even slighty uncivil thing all evening. Maybe he was still smarting from his O’Reilly/Limbaugh audience smackdown.

DePompa becomes momentarily unwise, thinking newspapers will always be there because in times of Huge News, like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech massacres, we will still turn to newspapers for information and to buy them as souvenirs of a disaster. (How macabre is that?) I disagree. Newspapers by their very production schedule end up being too far behind disasters and Huge News. We go to television for that, and for the souvenirs, a nice magazine special edition holds up so much better in the attic. (I still have my John F. Kennedy Jr. memorial Newsweek edition, waiting for the prices to improve on eBay.)

Prizes are awarded to those who stayed to the end. (At home later,  I review the tweets from people who were also there and discover most of them tweeted about needing to pee.)

The Urban Pigeon

Every day at the bus stop downtown, I watch the pigeons. They are fearless. They don't care that cars and buses are whizzing by inches away from them. They don't care that people are sharing the sidewalk with them. They're busy looking for garbage to eat.

Then they fly to a monument and crap on it.

It's sort of like my life.

Actually, I really do like pigeons. They remind me of my father. As a boy growing up in the 1930s in the tenements of Long Island City, he raised pigeons. A lot of city kids did. They kept the roosts on the roofs of their apartment buildings. You didn't need pet food as the pigeons could find things to eat while they were out flying, and they always came back.

When I was in the 7th grade, we moved to a house in Greenville, North Carolina. It was the first house we ever had to ourselves. In New York, we had lived with relatives, or at least had my grandmother living upstairs. Then we lived in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and then we moved to this house in North Carolina. There was a kid in the neighborhood who had a pigeon coop and we were so enthralled with it -- I had heard my father's pigeon stories -- we decided to buy a couple of his pigeons and build our own coop.

So for a year, I had this project I shared with my dad, the pigeons. I have never had a very close relationship with my father, and this was the last chance. Before long, I'd move to permanent alienation via puberty and then distance, and then evil stepmothers.

Our two pigeons had babies (squabs are very ugly babies; I don't think there is an uglier baby in the animal kingdom), and the babies had babies, and I kept journals of which pigeons were married (they mate for life) and who their children were, and who their children married. We let them out. They flew around the house, sat on the roof, and came back to the coop. We cleaned out the coop. That was an awful job, and what eventually distanced me from the pigeon project. That and puberty.

Towards the end, it was just my dad. I'd see him out in the yard, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, watching the pigeons circle the sky around the house. And eventually it was no fun for him either and he sold our pigeons back to the boy who had gotten us started. The roost was still in the yard when we sold the house.

And that was pretty much it for me and my dad. He died a few years ago. His third wife kept us all at a distance, so I hadn't seen him in 20 years. But he wrote me one letter every month of just casual chit chat and put a $50 bill in it. I would write him back not to send cash through the mail, but then it occurred to me it was the only way he could do it without his wife knowing. And sending me money was the only way he could make up for not ever coming to see me, or being there for me.

So I watch the pigeons at the bus stop, and because of my dad, I know they're not well bred pigeons because they don't have thick crusts on top of their beaks, but they're not trashy birds either because they do have rainbow coloring on their necks. I wonder who they're married to and where they live. And I think about my dad, standing out in the yard by himself, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, and watching the pigeons we named and raised together, flying around the sky.

So, that's why I'm moving to a new blog, Urban Pigeon, where I can write stuff that isn't about the newspaper dying. I'll still come here for that, but otherwise, I'll be over there. I value your bookmark, and thanks for listening.

I Tweet, Therefore, I Am

The social media website Twitter is like being at a cocktail party where you don’t actually know anyone, but you’ve heard of them. You stand against the wall with your drink, or you walk slowly around and listen to fragments of their conversations. You’re always coming in at the middle of a story, and you can’t stay for the end because they may look at you rudely for eavesdropping, so you keep moving. Very few people speak directly to you, but when one does, you feel very happy, as if you connected, even for a moment.

Some of the people at this party do know each other, and their conversations are lively and fun. You enjoy just listening in.

And in the end, you feel like you had a good time. You were with people who ordinarily wouldn’t include you in their reindeer games. You heard interesting things. You picked up some tips about how to live a fabulous life, how to be more like them, what you have to do to have a career like they do. Maybe next time you’re at the party, more people will speak directly to you. It's like being with the King of Comedy without having to physically kidnap him.

After awhile, as you spend more time at this party where people drop in and out, you begin to notice there are people hovering near you. They think you are interesting, but they don’t know you to speak directly to you, so they’re just hanging out nearby, listening to you talk to yourself, listening to you pretend you are the center of attention and everyone is hanging on your words. You are flattered.

It’s not that peculiar a social networking model. It’s the traditional after work mixer, only ported to a virtual world and the mixer goes on night and day. The ways to get popular in the Twitterworld are the same ones as in the real world. You can be funny. Someone who is fast and culturally current with the quips gets followed by many. You can be the wagon train leader, out in front of the Internet exploration, sending back appropriate links to interesting pages and articles.

You can be a news service, either an actual news service like a blogging TV reporter or CNN, or a limited area reporter (which is probably the future of journalism). I follow people who write about the weather, several who tweet about what’s happening in their neighborhoods (crimes, accidents, fires, traffic jams, lost pets), and others who seem to be home unemployed all day breaking the news of what’s on TV.

Then there’s the people I call the cool crowd, the same group you yearned to be part of in high school. They all know each other, so you follow everyone in the crowd and you know what they’re up to, where they’re going for dinner, what’s the latest popular bar, who’s doing what this weekend.

Then there’s the salesmen and scam artists, trying to figure out how to play the room to their advantage. There’s a Twitter philosophy that says you should follow everyone who follows you, but this clutters your feed with their sales pitches. I see no point in following people I don’t know from other towns either. Where they’re going to dinner in Palm Beach or Irvine doesn’t add anything to my daily experience like a rave about a local restaurant could.

Yes, there’s fake celebrities on Twitter, but there’s also several genuine ones – actors, comedians, musicians, tech columnists – who have eliminated the Catholic Church model of communication. You don’t have to go through a priest to communicate with God. These celebrities have eliminated the entertainment reporter and the magazine editors who filter their stories back to the fans. They talk directly to their fans, but in a nice, safe way, which preserves their privacy and guarantees they’re never misquoted or misrepresented by someone with an agenda.

Newspapers should be afraid, be very afraid. I would hazard a guess many bloggers are frustrated reporters who couldn’t get hired by the almighty paper or had other careers to pursue but still wanted to write. Even if no one is reading them, they are self-fulfilling their desire to communicate. Several have amassed faithful readerships any newspaper columnist would envy. Twitter flings open the communications portal even more – to those who don’t even have the verbal wherewithal to blog, who haven’t got the skill and talent to put together an informative, tight, well-thought out 1,000-word Style Back Page. They don’t have much to say, but they have this to say, and dammit, they’re going to say it, and what do you know, a couple of hundred or more people will read it.

It’s the Mini-Me Newspaper, all about just me and what I think is interesting. Subscribers come onboard, whether you’re a celebrity, the life-of-the-party, the wagon train leader, the scummy salesman, the lonely girl, the frustrated reporter…doesn’t matter. You are the center of your universe and a galaxy of Tweeters will revolve around you in an exchange of news, ideas, jokes, secrets, sighs and lies. It’s your party within a party in an ever-expanding chain of parties where the conversation never stops except for the occasional sighting of a whale being carried by birds through an azure sky.