Posts Tagged ‘Culture’

Subversive

We’re back from our vacation (we’ve got another planned for the first week of August, too). It was a great week away. We avoided email, cell phones, and general, 24-7-connectedness in all of its forms. Nancy might have sent a few emails, but I’m not sure. I didn’t send or read a single email, nor a Tweet; nor did I check Facebook nor my voicemail even once. In fact, my phone was stowed in a bag that remained in the back of our vehicle for the entire week and I didn’t even charge it until I returned to work this morning. That also means no Posterous, no UberTwitter, no FourSquare.

I watched exactly two halves of World Cup football, an out or two of Red Sox baseball, and two minutes of a weather report prior to a party that we hosted. On Saturday. Instead, I got my news through the paper, read some books, played with my kids, hung out with my wife, our family and friends and was present in a non-technologically-mitigated fashion. It was awesome. It was liberating. It felt subversive. Somewhere, someone is tut-tutting me, shaking their head in disbelief and pity, thinking to themselves that I’ve committed some sort of career/small business/personal-brand suicide. So be it. The world did not collapse. We’re still here, and back at it. Projects are continuing, starting up, and, finishing. Work continues. We are plugged in, yet again. We wait with bated breath for the next time we get to disconnect.

The "ayes" have it.

As I mentioned in a Tweet this week, the Season finale of Mad Men, was one of the greatest paeans to the entrepreneurial spirit of the advertising industry that I’ve ever seen in media. Throughout the episode we kept high-fiving each other as great line, after great line kept rolling out of the characters’ mouths. The best line of the night, and the most perfect line I’ve heard uttered about big agencies happened as Roger Sterling and Don Draper were leaving the Sterling Cooper offices after their stealth raid. Sterling looks at the modern, wood paneled reception area with his name on the wall, and the fancy plate glass doors and says to Draper, “When do you think we’ll be back working in a place like this?” Draper responds “I never really wanted to work in a place like this.”

Howls of delight ensued.

Whether you’ve entered the freelance, small-biz, solo-preneur pool voluntarily, or involuntarily, as many have over the past year, that line resonated. Some may say “sour grapes,” but many of the advertising-displaced stayed in the game because we really do love it. It’s fun, interesting, challenging and ever-changing. We just now choose to play the game by our rules, beyond the walls of big agencies with modern reception areas and fancy plate glass doors.

Draper, like many of us has the epiphany that the cool work space, the trendy address, the tricked-out office spaces etc., are not what this business is about. For all of his character flaws, and he has many, the thing I admire about Draper is his absolute commitment to the work. For many of us, it’s all about the work, yet the places we work (or once did) do not share our passion for the work. Rather, they are about rank, privilege, bonuses (though, tough lesson to agency-aspirants: bonuses in agencies are rare. They always cry “bad year/quarter/week/day.” If you seek bonuses, go to work for a “consultancy.” Wall St. can’t really hand them out anymore either. ). The work, and, ultimately, client needs, get lost amidst the noise and superfluity of the agency.

In a previous post I wrote about how the Mad Men creators really nailed something about agency life via the analogy of the mutilated foot. Nineteen sixty three in the show is the doppelganger of the current moment in the business. The creators of the show have shown how and why agencies end up where they do, and have shown what happens to the people who work for them. No doubt, 2010 will show what happens after people have decided that it’s not about the agency, but rather about the work and your clients, and what happens when individuals take charge of their destinies. Mad Men in 2010 should be interesting as well.

Gus Haynes, city editor of the fictionalized Baltimore Sun on HBO's "The Wire."

In the final season of HBO’s “The Wire” Gus Haynes, the city editor at the fictionalized Baltimore Sun is outside on a smoke break after an announcement of buyouts, talking about papers and why he went into the business. In essence he said he did so because his father, when Gus was young, was never to be disturbed until he’d read the paper and finished his coffee. Anything that could command such attention became a powerful force in Gus’s life and he knew that he wanted to be a part that world.

Written by newspaper-men, the final season of “The Wire” was a paean to the old school newspaper, as much as it was a gritty cop drama focused on the drug trade of Baltimore. Sadly the dramatization of the Sun is being played out ever more frequently in the real world.

Wither newspapers? I hope not. Though deeply steeped in digital media I still have some very strong attachments to certain analog artifacts of our world: Corked wine bottles, ink-printed and bound books, and newspapers

I still get two papers, each day,The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. While I don’t love the Globe, I enjoy its sports page and it does provide solid local news coverage. I love the Journal. I would be devastated to lose either, never mind both. I can only imagine how the 330,000 or so subscribers to the San Francisco Chronicle feel today with yesterday’s announcement by Hearst Publishing that they are either going to sell or shutter the paper.

Papers are the world delivered to the door, every day. The effort and skill that go into creating them and the ability to produce that world-recap each night and have it at the end of my driveway,or beneath my car (different story), every morning is amazing. The loss of each paper, some with long and illustrious histories, marks the death of a cultural artifact. From that perspective, news of the woes at the Chronicle, The Austin Statesman, the Rocky Mountain News, The LA Times and Chicago Tribune should upset anybody concerned with the material culture of our country.

This is not to say that some of the issues surrounding the pending demise of the newspaper industry are not to blame on the papers themselves. They were slow to adopt and adapt to the online space. They are embroiled in issues of fairness and impartiality. They were unable to match the ROI metrics of the web — the medium is the message. They were gobbled up by giant, publicly traded holding companies with much more emphasis on the bottom line than had been the norm in often, family-run, avocational-enterprises.

Now here we are.

I would say the potential death of the American newspaper is not good for the Internet, or the country. The papers provide a counterpoint to the information generated on the web and vice versa. Biased or not you know the political leanings and axes-to-be-ground of the paper’s staff and can process accordingly. This is not so evident when reading Larry-in-Wichita’s (and I’m not picking on Larry nor Wichita) coverage of the State of the Union. I’ll come back to, and close with another aspect of the materiality of the paper — there really is no replacement for the morning cup of coffee on top of the folded paper. As much as I love our laptops, it isn’t the same.