How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

Here’s a quick rundown of my own changes, and contributing reasons for them. I’d be curious to hear about other people’s personal media evolutions, too. Please share your own experiences in the comments below…

1. More conversation and annotation, less exposition.

I’m an avid user of two social media channels: Twitter and Delicious. Through these, I’ve gotten used to quickly stating what really needs to be shared or communicated. Most of the points I want or need to make don’t require exposition. Generally just a brief statement, or a link with context, will suffice. This is why the vast majority of my posts to this blog have been syndicated from links I’m saving and annotating in Delicious.

Personally, I think this is a gain, not a loss. For most things, I prefer more efficient communication. It allows me to cover more ground — and to learn more.

What’s lost? Not eloquence, since I was never very eloquent. However, continuity and context can suffer. Often it can be difficult for others (or for me) to follow my trail of breadcrumbs, to connect all the dots in order to see a larger picture. Yes, I still want a “me collector“.

2. More text, less voice.

I’ve never been much for talking on the telephone. I even squirm at face-to-face conversations that go on for more than about 20-30 minutes at a stretch.

Instant messaging suits me much better. It’s a key way that I keep in touch with the people who matter most in my life. Every day I text-chat with my current and former intimate partners, close friends, colleagues, and more casual friends. I’ve been able to connect with these people more substantially and meaningfully through instant messaging than by relying primarily on phone or voice.

I like the pace of IM conversations. They’re either very fast and functional (“Got a quick question for ya…”) or they ebb and flow over an hour or more. Depending on the conversation or person involved, I don’t like to feel the constant pressure to respond immediately that exists in phone or face-to-face conversations. In IM chats, pauses generally aren’t awkward, so conversation feels less forced. Even better, my attention is free to wander, as it is prone to do, without me seeming rude or uncaring.

What’s lost? I still see local friends face-to-face quite often, so I don’t feel I’m lacking conversation there. But I do make less effort than I probably should to reach out by phone to people who are important to me but who don’t use IM. So there is some relationship impact there. I do tend to prioritize people who are available via my preferred communication channels.

3. News: Listening up, reading down

It’s been many years since I read much news in print. But in the last couple of years I’ve found myself relying almost entirely on audio news podcasts for my daily fix of what’s happening. I prefer to listen to news while doing things: making breakfast, cleaning up, working out, running errands, strolling the neighborhood, etc. I don’t just sit there and listen to news, and I almost never watch video news podcasts. When I have to sit there for news, whether for reading or watching, I get antsy.

It’s not that I don’t read online news at all. Every day, I read a lot of online news — but rarely any more than headlines and the first few paragraphs of most online news stories. I’m one of those people who’s more likely to glance at the headlines and summaries on Google News (especially on my phone) a few times a day, and to maybe click through to a couple of stories.

There are exceptions: When an article is highly recommended by a friend or colleague, or when it’s extremely relevant to my specific circumstances or interests, I’m likely to read it through to the end. Quite often, for online news I really want to read, I’ll use Instapaper to transfer the content of that web page to my Kindle. I’m not crazy about reading long-format content in my web browser. I prefer an e-book reader. Both the Kindle device and the Kindle iPhone app offer me a great e-reader experience.

What’s especially interesting to me is that through audio news podcasts I feel a very strong loyalty to several mainstream and niche news brands (NPR, Slashdot Review, etc.). However, when reading online news via a web browser, I feel almost no brand loyalty. I have a strong preference for news aggregators over news sites. It’s very rare that I visit the home page of a news site.

What’s lost? For me, nothing. Do habits like mine hurt the news biz? I don’t think so — especially since it’s the only way I feel any loyalty for specific news brands these days.

4. Journaling: Sharp increase

2009 was an emotionally wrenching year for me. I sold my house, ended my marriage, transitioned to a very positive post-marriage relationship with my former spouse, moved from Boulder to Oakland, left my cats behind for now, downsized my possessions to fit into a single room, got knee surgery, dealt with knee surgery rehab, traveled a lot, had a very short and unhappy relationship with an unsuitable partner, began a much more rewarding and happy relationship with a very suitable partner, watched my cousin die from afar, and some other stuff…

Most of this I would never blog about. Some of it I wouldn’t tweet about, either. But I do write about it all, in my paper journal.

Yes, when it comes to working through difficult emotional stuff, journaling tends to work best for me. And this year I filled up three of them. That’s a lot for me. There have been times in my life when I didn’t journal much at all. For the past couple of years I’ve been journaling a lot, and it keeps me sane.

I like doing some writing that is only for me. And I like doing it by hand. I like the feel of a fine-point felt-tip pen on the creamy paper of a Moleskine journal. It feels deeply personal and intimate. I think better about how I feel when I journal. I understand myself and my life better. I forgive myself more, I allow myself more. I don’t worry about covering all bases or responding to critics. And right now, I need all of that.

5. Twitter as antidepressant

I’ve noticed that when I’m feeling low energy or in a down mood, spending a few minutes scanning Twitter tends to engage and energize me. I follow a lot of very interesting people and organizations on Twitter. Any time I dip my toes into that Twitter stream I always find something interesting, amusing, heartfelt, friendly, or useful.

…Yes, there’s some drivel and occasional nastiness. But I tend to unfollow people who get boring or mean there. So I’ve got a pretty high-quality Twitter stream.

I like that Twitter takes so little effort to read. (Similarly, I dislike Facebook because its interface is so chaotic.) I feel no pressure or desire to “catch up,” for me Twitter is all about right now. If I’m feeling lonely or bored or isolated, it’s an easy way to reach out to people I know. I respond often to other’s tweets, both publicly and by private direct message.

In a year of so much personal upheaval, having an instantly available ambient sense of my friends around me, and what they’re into, has helped keep me functional, balanced, and happier than I would have been otherwise.

The downside? Yes, sometimes Twitter can be too distracting. When I was having some especially hard times in my life earlier this year, I definitely used Twitter to procrastinate and distract myself. But that seems, for me, to be more a function of how I’m doing, rather than anything inherent to Twitter.

…Anyway, those are the changes I’ve notices in my own reading/writing patterns. What about you? Please comment below.

Last week, GigaOm reported that Nokia is now suing Apple, claiming technology patent infringement. And on Oct. 15 CNET reported on Nokia’s dire slide in the US smartphone market.

According to GigaOm:

“Nokia is looking to collect patent royalties of 1 or 2 percent for each iPhone sold, according to a note from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, which — given the roughly 34 million iPhone units already in the hands of users — would amount to $200 million-$400 million. That’s not a lot of money to either company, of course. But Nokia is clearly hoping it can be more successful in the courtroom than it’s been in the marketplace.”

Nokia: Really? Is this what you’ve sunk to?

There are far better ways. Here are some options…

Nokia: How about finding ways to get the price of your smartphones phones down to compete with the iPhone?

How about offering smartphone service to your US users on reasonable terms? If my ultra-expensive Nokia phone breaks, don’t make me mail it back to you at my own expense and wait up to a month to get it back. Don’t tell me to drop by one of your flagship stores — because you’ve only got two (count ‘em: two!) US stores.

How about achieving both of those first two goals by finally cutting some deals with some US carriers? I know you don’t like the way they play. No one does. They all suck. But they do rule this market. If you want in on this market, you’ve got to play with them.

If you want to be accessible to most US smartphone consumers, they need to be able to buy, service, and replace their Nokia phones locally. Plus getting a subsidized price break for handsets would help a lot.

Yes, unlocked phones are nice…  IF they’re not outrageously expensive to buy, or exceedingly onerous or risky to repair or replace.

Also, how about releasing Android phones? Symbian and Maemo are OK, but just too geeky for most folks. I really don’t understand why you’re still fighting Android when you’re already losing in this market.

Nokia, if you care about the US smartphone market, then please start acting like you really want to be here. Work with us. Stop digging your heels in and telling us what you think we should want. Rather than snapping at Apple’s heels, why don’t you invest in building a real business here?

You make pretty good smartphones, Nokia. I like them. It’s just the recalcitrant way you do business that turns me — and a lot of other would be Nokia users — off cold.

If you don’t want to be here, then just bow out. You’ve got a strong market presence in the rest of the world. You may not really need to be a player in the US smartphone market.

The biggest challenge in business is deciding which business you’re really in. That’s partly about deciding which business you want to be in, and also not kidding yourself (and others) about what business you’re really in. Nokia, I suspect you need to ask yourself some frank, basic questions about the nature of your US smartphone business

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions: Top of a brilliant, too-accurate pyramid infographic by InformationIsBeautiful.net

Productivity and task management seem like strictly practical issues, but in fact they’re deeply emotional. That’s what David Allen describes at in the first chapter of Getting Things Done, when he talks about the sense of calmness instilled by having a mind like water.

It seems to me that tuning into and recognizing your own feelings (especially hope, shame, relief, and fear) is THE crucial first step for figuring out what to do, getting stuff done, and letting stuff go. That’s what I’ve been working on today. Here is a little background, and some thoughts and lessons on this theme…

In the last eight months I made several major changes in my life: I ended my marriage (on the best of terms), sold my house, moved to a new state, eliminated my debt, stopped working on some projects I’d outgrown, began some intriguing new projects, had a brief painful relationship with a thoroughly incompatible partner, began a rewarding intimate relationship with a wonderful friend, and downsized my possessions to fit in a room plus small storage area. Plus, I got knee surgery to fix a torn ACL. Plus, a fair amount of business travel thrown in.

Yeah, it’s been a lot to manage — with a lot of mixed, deep feelings involved in every step. And a lot of stuff that needed to get done: projects, tasks, and priorities. Everything from figuring out where stuff goes in the kitchen to selling a house.

Through this process of major life-surgery I’ve had to face something I’ve avoided: I’ve spent most of my life in a near-constant sense of dread. I was scared that my life and work were spinning out of control, and that all sorts of disasters were waiting to pounce due to my inattention or ineptitude. I coped with it by keeping busy. If I just kept doing enough, surely I’d get ahead. Then I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a flat-out panic. And I’d work all day and feel like I’d accomplished nothing by evening, and feel terribly guilty and ashamed. I felt like I was failing at nearly everything.

In fact, I wasn’t failing — at least, not most of the time. Not any more than most people do. In fact, in a lot of ways I’m doing pretty damn well with my life. But because I was certain I was failing, and constantly braced for the next crash, I avoided looking too closely at what was happening, at what I needed to be doing.

It’s kind of like how you shut your eyes and cover your face before a car crash. It’s a reflex. You don’t really want to watch.

But when that kind of mental flinching becomes a permanent way of life, bad stuff happens. Namely, disorganization and procrastination — with all the bad stuff (tax penalties, pissed-off partners, missed opportunities, poor health) that go along with it.

It’s important to recognize that for all the pain that disorganization and procrastination cause, they do offer immediate, addictive emotional relief.

When you deliberately blur your mental vision and don’t look very far around you or ahead, and when you don’t habitually keep close track of information you need, then for short stretches of time you create the illusion that nothing needs to be done or figured out right now. It’s a false sense of security, but it does provide a sense of rest and it’s easy to do. Also, it works about as well as drinking salt water when you’re thirsty.

Since I’ve downsized and simplified my life and commitments, I’ve realized that I don’t want to keep living with that daily dread. I could keep it up — because I’ve done it my whole life. But at this point I’m making a conscious choice to change. Dread eats up too much of my energy. I’m 43 years old, and I’d like to use my remaining time and energy in ways that please me.

So I’ve been focusing on organizing my life, especially projects, tasks and priorities. Here’s what I’ve done so far, and what I’ve learned:

1. I CAN’T THINK AMIDST CLUTTER. Clutter distracts me, and provides a ceaseless nagging of all the things I might have forgotten. I cannot focus on a task when I’m around clutter — unless that task is decluttering.

So I’ve put a lot of effort into organizing my new room so that everything I need has an intuitive place, and that things I don’t need on a daily basis get stored or filed, and things I don’t ever need get tossed. This includes eliminating as much paper as possible from my life: I scan every paper I’ll need, shred most of them, file only a few original copies. I have redundant electronic backups (external hard drives AND offsite backup) for all my data.

The downside: Organizing feels so rewarding to me that sometimes I dive into that for emotional relief as a form of procrastination. I’m working on that.

2. MULTITASKING IS A MYTH. This was truly a devastating thing to admit to myself, since I always thought I was a consummate multitasker. But in fact, tons of scientific research and an honest look at my own experience indicates that human brains really can only do one conscious thing at a time. I cannot listen to two simultaneous voices and understand well what both are saying. I cannot run a quick Google search and track what a client is saying on a conference call. I cannot Twitter or instant message while trying to do another kind of writing. I cannot read an incoming text message while paying enough attention to driving.

Of course, I can TRY to do any combination of these things, or more. And I usually succeed to some level with all of them. But usually not as well as if I’d consciously taken a moment to set a priority and then waited to do tasks in priority order.

Focus is important to getting stuff done. But for me, focus can be another kind of trap. I can get so into doing something that I get obsessive or perfectionist about it, and and up spending way too much time on it. It becomes another type of procrastination.

I’m finding that for me, the skills I need to improve are time management and setting priorities. Not just “what are the things I need to do” but “what are the goals I wish to achieve?” Once I have in mind all my goals, I can set priorities among them, and then decide how much is really enough in terms of moving toward a particular goal for that day.

I’m realizing that my tendency to attempt multitasking often stems from a wish to distract myself (and thus procrastinate), or a wish to please (assuming that people expect me to do everything at once), or boredom.

3. ORGANIZE AT AN APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF DETAIL. I was discussing productivity systems today with a friend. She prefers to list out her to-dos in minute detail, including items such as “find Mr. X’s phone number” and “call Mr. X” in the overall task of “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference.” That works very well for her because it relieves her of the necessity to figure out the next step to take.

I’ve tried that approach, and I’ve found it does not work for me. The labor involved in listing and checking off so many minute steps feels overwhelming to me, and takes considerable time. In my task-management software OmniFocus I tend to list action items like “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference” unless I’m noticing that I’m procrastinating on a task. In that case, I may list sub-tasks in more minute detail.

I’m still working with this to try to figure out the best balance for me. But anyone else attempting to use a task management system should tune in to how they feel about using the system. If the system ends up feeling like a chore or a burden, if it scares you, you won’t use it and you’ll feel frustrated or ashamed. Recognize all your emotions involved, and name them. They’re important indicators of what you really need.

4. MOST LIFE-MONSTERS CAN WAIT (AT LEAST A BIT) TO BE SLAIN. For the parts of my life that had become dangerously disorganized, I’ve found I couldn’t just sit down and said “I’m going to face Monster Z right now, and parse out how to vanquish it, and get started.” I tried. I really did. Every time, this effort turned into an emotional wreck, unable to sort out which part of the monster to strike first. I’d make lists of tasks and goals, but be unable to sort them into a doable sequence. I’d feel ashamed, frustrated, and like an even bigger failure than before.

I realized that, with most of these life-monsters, I needed to first build up my strength and skills prior to the attack. I needed to attain more of a sense of my life generally gaining order and purpose on a daily basis. After all, I’d put off wrestling the life-monsters so long that I could put it off a while longer.  In the meantime, I set up doable systems to capture enough incoming monster-related  information to spot flags that would require me to speed up my timeline.

So even though organizing my space or developing a new exercise routine may not objectively be a higher priority than, say, developing a retirement plan — giving myself faster, easier “wins” that directly support my ability to tackle longer-term, bigger goals is what allows me to move forward. Right now, if I try too hard to stare down monsters that loom ever-larger due to neglect, I freeze.

Right now I’m only tackling one life-monster at a time. I’ve learned from the last eight months that trying to do them all at once, or in too close sequence, leaves me overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed, and unproductive on other fronts. Getting through knee surgery and recovery (and dealing with insurance bureaucracy and medical bills) is my current life-monster battle. That’s enough.

Down the road, I’m considering working with a financial planner and maybe a life/career coach to figure out some longer-term monster-slaying strategy. I think getting that kind of support might help, when I’m ready for it. But I’m not ready for that now, so please don’t bombard me with pitches for these professionals just yet. When I’m ready, I’ll ask for it.

5. RECOGNIZE & APPRECIATE WHAT YOU CAN DO OR HAVE DONE. Many people love crossing items off their to-do lists. That gives them a sense of accomplishment. That visual symbol has never worked for me, however. It just feels negative, the act of crossing-off. Not creative, not productive.

I’ve realized that when I’ve been getting depressed because I think I’ve been unproductive, it helps to reality-check myself by taking a day to make a list of all the stuff I actually do in a given day. For this list, anything that takes my time/effort counts. It includes things like:

• Making my bed
• Doing my leg exercises (5X/day, to stick with my physical therapy program)
• Taking my vitamins
• Making breakfast
• Corresponding with clients
• Doing actual billable work
• Arranging to get a transit pass
• Hanging a few pictures
• Vacuuming
• Scanning, shredding, and filing
• Sorting out which jewelry needs repairs
• Reading a chapter of a book

…Most of this stuff would never make my to-do list or get crossed off. I don’t need to track that level of detail day to day. But each of these tasks, and many others, need to get done and take my time and effort. I should at least recognize them. They are not wasted time. So if once in a while I make a “done” list of all this stuff, that reassures me emotionally. In turn, that reduces my tendency to beat up on myself, and gives me more energy to get stuff done.

Those are my thoughts on emotions and productivity for now. I’ll be writing more about this, I’m sure. But what are your thoughts on this topic? How do your feelings — and your awareness of them — affect how you get accomplished in life and work? Please comment below.

A month ago, as I wrote earlier, I was willing to pay $10/month to subscribe to the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle. I canceled that subscription last week, after the release of the WSJ iPhone application that provides free access to all WSJ content.

The iPhone app carries ads at the bottom of the screen, but I don’t mind. I also get audio and video content from WSJ through the app, too. Meanwhile, Subscribing to WSJ.com currently costs $89 per year. ($99 per year if you want the print edition, too.) And, as I noted earlier, WSJ’s own subscription page currently doesn’t even mention subscribing via Kindle.

Apparently WSJ plans to start charging for some of its iPhone app-delivered content at some point. Wired.com reports:

“There is free, and then there is free, apparently. A Dow Jones spokeswoman wrote to Wired.com Thursday to say that the company does intend to charge for some content consumed on smartphones ’so we have a consistent experience across multiple platforms,’ though the company is ’still exploring its options’ and isn’t saying when that might happen. They would offer ‘both free and subscription content, so the idea is to mirror the experience on the site,’ the spokeswoman said.”

“…Eight months after it released its Blackberry app Dow is still saying that ‘Full access to subscriber content (is free) for a limited time only.’ There is a free mobile site that has a large sampling of the Journal’s content. …We’ll see if the almost certain bad will of a giveth and taketh away revenue model is worth trying to put the content genie back in the bottle.”

WSJ.com founding editor and publisher Neil Budde (who just joined Daily Me) recently exploded some common myths about WSJ.com’s pricing model — a nuanced history that often gets oversimplified.

Still, I think Printcasting founder Dan Pacheco got it right last night on Twitter: “Content pricing must be consistent across platforms. And it shows how charging for print will get more awkward day by day.”

…After I originally published the above story in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits yesterday, Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review took what I said as an excuse to rally for WSJ to “hold the line” on charging for its content.

I found this very amusing…

As I commented on the CJR piece, it seems to me that the WSJ iPhone and Blackberry applications indicate that the WSJ may be exploring the value of free content, without admitting that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I doubt their paid content model will last. I suspect it will get whittled away over time, to be replaced by various services. (Like, even, selling wine. No kidding.)

It’s worth repeating an anecdote I recounted last month in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Bill Grueskin (former managing editor of WSJ.com and now dean of academic affairs for Columbia University’s journalism school) related in Reflections of a Newsosaur on Mar. 22:

One day last month, a Columbia journalism student asked me in class why WSJ.com had started as a paid site. This moment reminded me of the scene in Annie Hall (about two minutes into this), where Woody Allen produces Marshall McLuhan to refute (OK, I get the irony) a pompous Columbia instructor pontificating about the media.

At the class, I turned to my co-instructor, Peter Kann, former CEO of Dow Jones and the person ultimately responsible for the paid strategy.

“I made the site paid because I was ignorant,” Kann told the class. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought people should pay for content.”

‘Nuff said. Well, and then there’s that video I posted above. Yeah. Plus all the Columbia j-school connections bouncing around here. Coincidence? I think not

…Anyway, Zach Seward of Nieman Labs noted in a comment at Tidbits: “This interview I did with Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, might help clarify things a little bit. It’s about the concept behind the WSJ iPhone app. At the end of the video, he says:

“Inititally, it will be free, as is the BlackBerry app, but the ultimate plan is to pattern those mobile devices off of the website, which is to say, we’ll give you all the political coverage, the opinion coverage, the arts and leisure coverage, and a certain number of the big stories of the day for free. We’ll give you a snippet, a preview of any story for free. But if you want access to the full depth and breadth of our coverage, you’re gonna have to pay for it on the the iPhone on the BlackBerry, just as you would on the website.”

The new Wall Street Journal iPhone app from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo

My response: OK, let’s see you do that. If the WSJ is so dedicated to its high-profile paid content model, then why make the content completely free on the mobile apps at all? I strongly suspect what’s going on here is that WSJ is using mobile apps to quietly explore free-content business models, without admitting that’s what they’re doing. Time will tell.

(For more context on failure, see this consummate resource.)

Perhaps more than any other She’s Geeky session, this one resonated with me. Right now, I’m in the process of ending my marriage, relocating from a community I’ve loved and called home for nearly 14 years, entering midlife, and dealing with much emotional backlog that has accumulated while I’ve kept busy busy busy for so many years.

That’s a lot of stuff to handle, on top of work and ordinary life. Frankly, it’s been hard for me to admit to myself — let alone anyone else — that because of all these issues I am not currently operating at the 1000% (not a typo) level I typically expect of myself, and often deliver.

So first, here are my tweets from this session, followed by some results of my mulling on this. Note that I deliberately did NOT identify speakers, except for prompting questions by Susan Mernit. Discussing failure leaves people vulnerable, and the attendees of this session agreed to make it a safe space. Everything appearing in quotes below is from an attendee…

Now at @susanmernit’s epic #shesgeeky session on failure… A topic I know well….. Big taboo on discussing it, though!

@susanmernit: It’s important to understand what caused your failure and what kind of failure was it, and what you learn.

Lesson from failed startup in a tech incubator program: “I realized that I was not the best fit for my own company — thankfully before I got too committed.”

“The problem with deciding to pull the plug on a project is that I was worried about what folks would think/say. Was my reputation at risk?”

Depending on how you define success: What’s failure, really? Success can = maturity/objectivity to admit something’s not working.

“Often when I’ve had failures, it’s when I ignore my gut, try to just work harder instead of admit what’s happening.”

“Women tend to be very hard on ourselves, and the possible consequences of failure loom larger than reality warrants.”

“In Silicon Valley, when a man’s startup fails, it’s a one-off. When a woman’s startup fails, it’s treated as normal, expected.”

“Because women are expected to fail in business, you feel guilty about failing because you think you’re feeding that stereotype.”

“Men tend to have more mentors. That helps cushion failure and encourages risk-taking. Women fly without a safety net more often.”

“Men often act like they’re doing their ventures on their own, but they really have much support. Women usually ARE on their own.”

“Men are socialized to compete within their brotherhood. Adolescent girls usually don’t experience healthy competition.

Author and podcaster Dan Sawyer noted here via IM: “Great stuff you’re tweeting. Tell Susan it’s got me shouting and cheering over here. It’s very true, and women need to hear it. Particularly the part about doing ventures on their own — that’s a social camouflage, and it’s complete bullshit. The thing is, all of us guys KNOW it’s bullshit — we usually don’t realize that women DON’T know it. And yes, we are trained from birth to compete with each other like boxers — enemies within the ring, friends once the bell is rung. Men who can’t keep that collegiate spirit are not well regarded by other men, even if they’re successful. Actually, reading your tweets on this REALLY helps me understand a couple female friends who had hereto baffled me.”

Recommended book on women’s attitudes toward failure & competition: Peggy Ornstein, Schoolgirls

Susan Mernit asks the group: When you do have a failure, how do you process it?

Attendee mentions Julie Wainwright, CEO of Pets.com: her company failed the same week that she got divorced. Great essay by Wainwright on getting stronger.

“We all have hindsight on how we could have avoided failure. It’s hard to really own that you just made a mistake.”

Susan Mernit asks: Why do we always think failure is always “wrong?”

“If you don’t take the opportunity to learn when you hit problems, that’s probably more a failure than anything else you can do.”

One attendee keeps a running list of every time she took a list and it paid off: motivation tool.

Retweet @senia: Doesn’t one need the time to step back in order to learn from failure? If always running, no time to analyze.

Me: Especially in online/social media, you can get excoriated very fast and very publicly for failing. You need to be able to deal with that without freaking out.

Susan Mernit asks: When you have a big failure, how do you move forward than that? What’s the next step?

“Immediate coping skill for big failure: ask for help right away. Don’t close yourself off.”

Some attendees disagree, prefer to process failure alone/internally first.

“When you fail a team and feel personally responsible, it’s important to remember it’s not ALL on you.”

“I now know that when I’m going in a wrong direction, I need to speak up right away. I can’t depend on other people to be my voice.”

“What’s weird in tech community is that sharing failure is uncool. It only happens in small private circles an limited ways.”

“No one in tech really wants to talk much about failure because it’s such a perception-based business.”

Important context for failure: “The lousy economy is happening. Everyone’s vulnerable. Have some compassion.”

“I feel like if I grieve a failure, I’ll be weak — even though it’s a natural process. I know that’s stupid, but I still do it.”

ReTweetTrends asked me: Doesn’t one need the time to step back in order to learn from failure? If always running, no time to analyze.

I reply to ReTweetTrends: Yes, it can help to step back, take time to process failure. But sometime, that option doesn’t exist.

“For women, it’s easy to take one failure and pile on: ‘I’m fat. My company failed. I burned this potroast.’”

INITIAL RESULTS OF MY FAILURE-RELATED MULLING

Failure is inherently energy-sapping. When you (by which I mean “I”) have an experience that gets consciously or subconsciously labeled as a “failure,” that just sucks the wind right out of the sails. I suspect this is part of what makes it so difficult to move past failure. It’s a definition that halts momentum.

Is the concept of failure a problem? It does seem that the essence of “failure” lies mainly in the labeling. After all, it’s just another experience — and all experiences have positive and negative aspects and connotations. Since it’s inherently energy-sapping and problematic, would it help to just ditch the concept? Are there any benefits to having a concept of failure?

The disease model of failure. The taboo about discussing failure intrigues me. We act as if it’s contagious, that it spreads via admission, not commission. As scared as we are of failing, most of us (especially women) appear even more scared to discuss it — similar to how people used to whisper “…cancer…” Even trying to listen compassionately to someone else discussing an experience of failure makes many people squirm. Do we think it’s “catching?”

Not talking about failure is a bigger problem than just failing. Failure is a deeply emotional and social experience, and humans are social creatures. Most people seem to need to do at least some emotional processing to get through hard experiences and learn from them. Simply talking things over with a compassionate listener can help us handle the emotions, process the experience, and move on. It also helps others by giving useful insight, information, and validation of feelings that otherwise might leave us feeling isolated and powerless.

Group failure is harder to discuss. When you fail by yourself — or you’re in a position to assume all the blame — it can be much easier to process the failure by discussing it. But when others are significantly involved, it gets harder to discuss the failure because you run the risk of transgressing their desired privacy boundaries or otherwise making them vulnerable or putting them at risk. The litigious nature of business and the competitive nature of tech make it especially difficult to openly discuss failure in these spheres.

Gender differences in failure experiences/discussion? The attendees of this session seemed to agree that women and men experience, process, and weight failure differently. I’d be curious to see a group of men, and a equally mixed-gender group, engaging in a similarly themed discussion to see whether the points and mood are different. I do believe, however, that in U.S. society women are expected to fail and are more likely to be “punished” or “blamed” for failure — and thus may have more reason to fear failing, or discussing failure.

…I’m still mulling all this, but thought it was time to write about it. In the meantime, what thoughts does this spark in you? Please comment below.

That’s what David Cohn is trying to do with Spot.us, which launched yesterday. This project, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is attempting to support local investigative journalism through crowdfunding. Poynter’s Ellyn Angellotti described this project her recent centerpiece feature. Here’s Cohn’s short explanation of how Spot.us will work:

Yes, crowdfunding is a very different approach to journalism. And the unfamiliar always seems potentially dangerous. That’s why most mainstream media articles so far about Spot.us, like this one from the New York Times, include some variation of this caution: “Critics say the idea of using crowdfunding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking?”

That’s a valid concern, but I think it must be considered in context…

1. Journalism has always had funding strings attached — often implicit, sometimes explicit. Great journalism has always been subsidized by people, organizations, or sectors with various agendas. And, more often than most journalists would care to admit, this has skewed coverage. This explains why so many newspapers have long offered meaty real estate, auto, travel, and lifestyle sections. It also explains why many news orgs take extra care (including, sometimes, outright avoidance) when covering news that might hurt the economic interests of big advertisers. To navigate this morass, most news orgs have devised processes (including the advertising/editorial firewall) that address internal conflicts of interest — not perfectly, but generally well enough.

2. Could crowdfunding actually work? We don’t know yet — hence, the experiment. And Spot.us is just one experiment; typically several experiments are required to fairly test a hypothesis. Leonard Witt analyzed the prospects of Spot.us according to Clay Shirky’s “three rules of crowdsourcing” test. (See Ch. 11 of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.) Witt thinks that so far, Spot.us succeeds on two of Shirky’s criteria: “Is there a plausible promise?” and “Are the tools effective?” Witt says the open question remains on the third: “Is there an acceptable bargain with the users?” I agree: This needs to be a good deal all the way around. That’s why the first few Spot.us projects should offer blatantly obvious value and impact to the Bay Area. Without great content, the model might be unfairly judged.

3. The traditional approach is broken, perhaps beyond repair. It has become glaringly obvious that ad-supported, mass-media news orgs — the key support infrastructure for most investigative and enterprise reporting — are in dire trouble. Alarming numbers of them are shedding staff and cutting costs fast, yet still remain in danger of folding entirely, sooner rather than later. While national-level investigative journalism will probably continue at the major news orgs left standing after this shakeout, local projects are very much in jeopardy. For this reason, more than any other, I think we need experiments like Spot.us. We cannot dismiss a community’s willingness to pay directly for investigative journalism without giving it a serious try.

(NOTE: I originally posted this on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Amy Gahran's brain, according to Typealyzer

Here’s what else they said about me…

ENTP – The Visionaries

“The charming and trend savvy type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and anticipate trends. They often have sophisticated language skills and come across as witty and social. At the end of the day, however, they are pragmatic decision makers and have a good analytical abilitity.

“They enjoy work that lets them use their cleverness, great communication skills and knack for new exciting ventures. They have to look out not to become quitters, since they easily get bored when the creative exciting start-up phase is over.”

Yep, sounds a bit like me….

You can also check the readability level of your blog. That service says Contentious.com should be easily readably by high school students. Sounds about right.