Sarah Lacy is a successful tech journalist. So successful in fact, Sarah Lacy is more than a journalist, she’s a brand. Yet, she’s not convinced that being a brand is all that great.
I’ve written before that one of the advantages of the Internet– the relatively low barrier to click on something– is an advantage for building brands and gaining distribution online, but it’s also a disadvantage. People flock to you as a side-show, but don’t actually want to invest real dollars to support whatever you are doing. Honestly, how many of Tila Tequila’s million MySpace friends buy her CDs? There’s a currency in mild watching-a-train-wreck-fascination and even hate online, that doesn’t exist in the offline world in the same way. And, to date, it hasn’t translated.
I’ve got an inkling that this multi-year trend towards brand-this and brand-that in the business world may be in for a rude awakening. After all, there are far more high-profile examples. Think about Howard Stern: He used to be one of the most talked about, most hated, most beloved people in popular culture.
Valleywag asks, “What is wrong with you internet people? Sarah Lacy is working hard so you can fully appreciate her and you’re not FULLY APPRECIATING HER IN ALL MEDIA CONSTANTLY.”
On a personal note, my brand is not here at this scrapbook site. It’s at AdPulp. My intention from the beginning was to create something bigger than just me. I suppose that’s the difference in being a writer versus a writer, editor and publisher.
Chicagoan Andrew Bird is featured in today’s NYT Sunday Magazine. I like how the critic describes Bird’s music.
Bird’s sound is not easy to categorize. His songs are swelling and orchestral, the legacy of years spent studying classical violin at Northwestern University’s prestigious conservatory and elsewhere. He has been compared with the Irish rock singer Damien Rice, but Bird’s sound is also distinctly American, part of a new wave of folk — free folk, psych folk or freak folk, as it has variously been called — that has grown in popularity in recent years. His songs have a pastoral, homespun feel, but they also have a darkness and emotional complexity not typically associated with folk rock.
Bird’s new album, “Noble Beast” will be released Jan. 20 on Fat Possum. If his last effort, “Armchair Apocrypha,” released in 2007, is any indication, Bird’s fans have something grand to look forward to.
Kathleen Parker, a columnist for The Washington Post is working to understand what the rise of new media means for print journalists like herself.
Thankfully, she does so in a funny manner:
It’s over. Done. The old media are no more. We are all new media now. All journalists, we are also the news. We are essentially a nation of news-mongering newsies making news as we do the news. At some point, the news will simply consume the news consumer-slash-provider in a big-bangish event that will go unreported.
Parker also offers this bit of insight in to the news business:
If you want friends or money, my first editor told me, get another line of work.
What are we to make of all this journalistic self-loathing? I know what I make of it. Clearly, this is the perfect time to create a new kind of media company. One that holds tight to certain basics—like an informed citizenry being the key to a healthy democracy—while finding new means of production, distribution and monetization. Paid advertising and paid subscribers can’t be the only two methods of making money in this business. Let’s invent some new ones!
I’m pretty proud of my Best of 2008 Mixtape that I sent out to nine friends today (see previous post). But Merge Records is giving me a run for the money with their own 2008 Sampler.
Here’s the lineup:
1. Slipped Dissolved and Loosed by Lambchop
2. Life Like by The Rosebuds
3. Dark Leaves Form a Thread by Destroyer
4. All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco by American Music Club
5. Cape Canaveral by Conor Oberst
6. I Don’t Feel Young by Wye Oak
7. Warm Rising Sun by Radar Bros.
8. Auctioneer by The Broken West
9. Some Small History by Portastatic
10. She’s Fetching by Big Dipper
11. Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? by She & Him
12. Majesty by The Music Tapes
13. Jingle Bells by Julian Koster
You can stream these songs on Merge’s site or register and receive the album as a free download. Offering the download is a smart move by Merge, as the Conor Oberst and Wye Oak albums are the only ones we currently own. After this new sampler sinks in a bit, I’m sure we’ll be tempted to pick up more of these ’08 releases.
Bonus tracks for download here: Lazy Susan and Living in Sin by Oakley Hall (another Merge recording artist, but one that didn’t release an album in 2008. These tracks are from 2006.)
There are plenty “Best of 2008” lists floating around these series of tubes.
My own take on the year is expressed as a mixtape.
Here’s my playlist:
1. “Real As an Animal” by Alejandro Escovedo
2. “Drunken Poet’s Dream” by Hayes Carll
3. “Cheney’s Toy” by James McMurtry
4. “Poor Old Dirt Farmer” by Levon Helm
5. “I Love Your and Buddha Too” by Mason Jennings
6. “Morning Is My Destination” by Tift Merritt
7. “San Francisco B.C.” by Silver Jews
8. “Soldier’s Grin” by Wolf Parade
9. “I Will Possess Your Heart” by Death Cab for Cutie
10. “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” by The Helio Sequence
11.”Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” by Drive-By Truckers
12. “Forty Days and Forty Nights” by Donna the Buffalo
13. “Real Love” by Lucinda Williams
Let me know if you’d like a copy. I’ll burn one and send it to you.
We went to Newport Seafood Grill for lunch today—day 10 of a massive winter storm. The staff was incredibly happy to see us.
According to The Oregonian, Portland restaurants are reeling.
Portland’s formerly bustling scene is squeezed as never before. Soaring ingredient costs, escalating gas prices, vanishing credit lines, a looming increase in the minimum wage and consumers who closed their wallets back in October all contribute.
David Machado, owner of the popular Lauro Kitchen and Vindalho says, “This weather is ripping the guts out of restaurants and wiping out one of our busiest times — this micro climate thing is going to tip the balance against a lot of businesses because restaurant margins are as thin as they get.”
“I’ve heard some people say their business has dropped by as much as 40 percent in the last month or so,” says Bill Perry of the Oregon Restaurant Association. “Things weren’t too bad until October — sales were off just 4 percent or so over the year — but then, two or three weeks before the election, things just froze. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Oregon lost 1,900 restaurant jobs in September and October, and suppliers are left with unpaid bills and dwindling orders.
“These are hard times for everybody because we’re all in the same boat,” says Ben Savery of wholesaler Provista Specialty Foods Inc. Savery has been in the business for years and says he’s never seen the likes of 2008. “The economy has been not great for a year or so, but in the last three months it’s become something much worse.”
[UPDATE] We did what we could to prop up the restaurants this holiday season by visiting Fife, Ciao Vito, Toro Bravo, Pok Pok and McCormick & Schmick’s.
While leafing through the current edition of Paste this morning, I came across a full page ad from New West Records. The ad drives readers to LivefromAustinTX.com, a microsite set up to sell DVDs of past Austin City Limits episodes. The label is offering 40 titles from some of the best artists in existence—Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Robert Earle Keen, Widespread Panic, John Hiatt, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and many more.
BTW, Paste named Lucinda’s new album, Little Honey, 9th best album of 2008.
I read the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach many years ago. In the book, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the nation. I’ve been a bioregionalist ever since.
Now I see in “Sunday Styles” that the book—which sold over 400,000 copies in the 1970s—has caught on with new audiences in churches and classrooms around the nation. A fact which has led Bantam to reissue the title this month.
Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said, “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.â€
The green movement’s focus on local foods and products, and its emphasis on energy reduction also have roots in “Ecotopia,†he said. In fact, much of Portland, Ore., with its public transport, slow-growth planning and eat-local restaurants, can seem like Ecotopia made reality.
Which must be why the copy editor of this section titled the article, “The Novel That Predicted Portland.”
Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian put together a feature article on the efforts being made by Portland’s various creative communities to unite and successfully promote themselves.
salon owner, Kahala Orian, sporting a knitty
Here, Oppenheimer shows the two ends of the local spectrum:
If you picture the creative economy as a continuum from corporate giants to part-time artists, Nike inhabits one end. Oregon’s largest company employs more than 6,000 people at its headquarters, on a college-size campus near Beaverton.
A notch away from Nike is the advertising firm that branded it: Wieden+Kennedy. Columbia Sportswear Co. and Adidas USA round out the huge names. A slew of midsize companies design clothing, sports equipment and buildings, make movies and computer games, and promote it all to the world.
To explore the other end of the continuum, you could’ve walked down Southeast Belmont Street last weekend, past coffee shops and neighborhood bars, across from a retro arcade and a vegetarian diner, into KOiPOD salon. The owner, Kahala Orian, hosted a craft show called Handmade for the Holidays.
More than 20 entrepreneurs covered card tables with knit hats, soy candles and hand-stitched pillows, while a DJ wearing giant silver headphones spun tunes.
The article also explores how Steve Gehlen and Tad Lukasik are launching Oregon Creative Industries “to connect people online and in person, lobby for resources to help business grow, and to make creativity the state’s economic signature.”
OCI is a startup in the non-profit sector. They’re looking for volunteers to help grow the business, if you’re interested.
