Belated Thanks All Around

I've been remiss in thanking a handful of folks for recent kind mentions of this blog or of its author in various media outlets. Through the wonders of Google and Technorati alerts and other mysterious technical tools our vast staff has assembled to help us keep up with things, we've noticed a pleasing spike in mentions recently. Sometimes I'm slow to acknowledge these mentions, but I'm nevertheless always thankful for them.

Back in February, Crain's managing editor Scott Suttell, one of the truly nicest guys in the business, had this tidbit on his widely read Editor's Choice blog. A few weeks ago, ace web developer Marc Majers had a nice write-up in the Cool Cleveland e-letter about our Web Association panel event. It's online, but since it's relatively brief and buried deeply in this issue, let me reprint it here in full:

Last Monday, the WA gathered a group of tech-savvy pioneers to discuss the growing impact of social media. Moderated by Jim Kukral of BlogKits, the panelists consisted of George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily, Dan Hanson of Great Lakes Geek and John Ettorre of Working with Words. The panel passionately argued for the business case of this growing medium. In a nutshell, local companies should care about web 2.0 marketing channels like blogs, video and podcasting because they can generate business. Web 2.0 as explained by Dan Hanson is "push-button publishing for people." The Time Magazine person of the year 2006 was "You" because now anyone can post content on the web. John Ettorre stressed that content is "The heart and soul of the Internet" so make sure what you post is valuable. Web users are scouring the Internet for two reasons: a solution to their problem or to have some fun. You need to put your best foot forward with whatever you create to build a community around your work. "Make sure you don't have typos—they are worse than fascism", Mr. Ettorre exclaimed. The increasing bandwidth of the nternet in tandem with this "push-button technology" is causing a flurry of new content being posted in the form of blogs, podcasts and video. Blogger George Nemeth said one overt benefit of blogging is learning something from someone else. Blogs also have direct organic search engine optimization benefits because of the sheer content. Instead of you finding a client, they will find you. The content you are posting on your blog is making you an expert in your field and this will ultimately lead to a sale. Everyone likes getting their content through a different medium; that's why you should offer your customers choice. Some people want to read it, watch it or listen to it. Jim Kukral stressed that video is the next big medium because it is the most effective way to get your point across to busy, attention-deficit web user. He suggested making short 30-60 second "how to videos" to connect to the YouTube generation. As a matter of fact, Google will be adding video results in standard searches this summer. You know when Google does something, it sticks. Social media is setting the table for marketing to make a sale. Marketing is designed to get someone's attention. Blogs, podcasts and videos are just another medium to get a consumer's attention and they work best when you use them together. We are now our own travel agents, insurance agents and journalists, but the quality of the content is key. As Jim Kukral said, "People can lick off or wash off your stickiness." Web 2.0 tools can deliver your message faster and more efficiently and all you can do is get the customer's attention with quality content.

An interesting guy named Gary, whom I've never met, happened to be at that event, and shared this brief nugget of insight later on his fine blog. I'm hoping we get to meet some time.
More recently, and as an outgrowth of a subject that came up during this panel, my friend Dan Hanson, tech editor of Inside Business magazine, quoted me about the "long tail" phenomenon in the current (May) issue, none of which is online. Finally, I happened to come across a truly humbling reference to Working With Words on the blog of a local graphic designer I've never met. I also hope to meet this fellow some day, and thank him for those kind words.

Now go enjoy the weekend, people. You hereby have my permission to begin it early.

Here Are Two Chances to Join Me
For Writing Events in Coming Days

I'll be appearing at a couple of writing-related events around the Cleveland area in the next week, both of which I heartily encourage you to consider attending, should you have the time and interest.

This Saturday morning, March 24th, I'll be giving a presentation on blogging at the 16th annual Western Reserve Writers' mini-conference, at Lakeland Community College. Shame on Lakeland for not harnessing the web better to promote it (their bare-bones listing doesn't tell you nearly enough about it to convince anyone to attend. They've instead relied solely on mailed brochures). So in a moment, I'll fill you in on it myself.

Two days later, on Monday, March 26th, I'll be taking part in a Web Association luncheon panel with a trio of friends, Dan Hanson, George Nemeth and Jim Kukral. I've written about Dan here (scroll down, if you care to, to see all the mentions) George here and Jim here. This one should be a particularly fun event. And doubly so for me because of its echoes of a similar event nearly four years ago, when George and I and a couple of other online writers addressed the then-new subject of blogging to a roomful of about 100 folks. One of the co-sponsors was the Association of Internet Professionals, a predecessor of the Web Association. As it happened, I met Jim Kukral that very evening. He had been blogging for some time even then, and was thrilled to meet others in the region who did, too. So anyway, do consider attending if you can.

Okay, back to the Saturday conference at Lakeland, where I'm happy to say I'll also be joined by some old writing comrades, including Suzanne Alexander and Scott Lax. Here's a quick overview of the morning:

8:30--registration and coffee
9:00--welcome
9:15--Mary Ryan on writing for children, me on blogging, Susanne A. on making connections, and Barbara Snow on coaching yourself to success.
10:30--Deanna Adams on memoir-writing, Les Roberts on book reviews, Malcolm Wood on outlining a novel, and Ruth Fawcett on independent publishing.
11:45--Scott Lax on creative writing for beginners, Nancy Christie on essay writing, Steve Grant on legal issues, and Nicole Hunter on writing dialogue.
Networking, refreshments and author signings to follow.
Cost: $55. For more information: call 440-525-7116.

Cool Cleveland Cleans Up in SPJ's First Online Awards

My blogging pals, uber-blogger George Nemeth chief among them, understandably grow weary of my relentless message about how bloggers (at least the serious ones) have more in common with traditional journalism than they'd like to admit, or perhaps even recognize. A particularly spirited discussion has broken out this morning over PD editor Doug Clifton's incredibly awkward, even ham-handed, attempt to up the ante in a showdown with the Newhouse chain's attorneys (and their ultimate clients, the owners) over a couple of stories being held out of legal concerns (more about which later). But against that backdrop, some other news is especially well-timed. This year's SPJ (Society of Professional Journalists) 2005 Best in Ohio awards have just been announced, and they include the first-ever awards for the category of online journalism. It's an important category, and it was an important statement for SPJ to make in adding it this year. I'm proud to call myself a member today, in large part because of it. SPJ continues to let down its hair, grow ever further from its roots as a band of censorious ethics police prigs and is instead slowly taking on a more central role in grappling with the ever-tougher, ever-grayer issues at the intersection of journalism and civic affairs.

And guess what? My friend George's second child (Brewedfreshdaily is his first baby), the e-letter Cool Cleveland, which he serves as chief information officer, cleaned up, winning four of the six online awards, including best general news site in the state. Take a bow, Thomas, George and especially Tish, who has toiled perhaps hardest and longest, and who has just left Cleveland for a job in Chicago. This award should have a proud place on your resume for the next 20 years, overworked-and-underappreciated Tish. For the rest of the CC crew, I would expect this is only the start of bigger things. Just please find a good editor, will ya? Or at least the best one you can afford.

Today is the 74th Birthday of a Man

Often Called 'Cleveland's Conscience'

Thirty-nine years ago (plus a day), Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. A day later, on what happened to be his 35th birthday, my friend Roldo Bartimole decided to quite his newspaper job and begin his independent newsletter, Point of View. Cleveland would never again be quite the same.

I've written about Roldo in this space more times than I care to count (including here, here, here, here, here, here and here). But to mark his birthday today, I thought I would also reprise a profile I wrote of him three years ago (but which I've never published here) to mark the occasion of his induction into the Press Club of Cleveland's Hall of Fame. He honored me at that time with the impossible and humbling task of formally introducing him at the event (an annual banquet), which came along with the duty to try to sum up what he has meant and still means to Cleveland. I can't pretend that I even began to do that assignment justice, but in any event, here's that piece from the event program. And should the spirit move you to send along greetings to the birthday boy, please do so, by sending him an email at roldo@adelphia.net.

A Singular Point of View
Roldo Bartimole has been Cleveland's independent voice for more than 40 years

He's been a Cleveland institution--appreciated by some more than others--for as long as most people can remember.

In 1973, just five years after he began his fiercely independent newsletter, Point of View, The Nation magazine took notice of Roldo Bartimole's municipal muckraking. It headlined the profile "Invaluable Pain in the Neck." More than 30 years later, Editor & Publisher magazine observed that he "has become a municipal institution as familiar as the Terminal Tower or the West Side Market."

In between, the gadfly journalist/muckraker/troublemaker/civic pamphleteer (take your pick) lambasted developers, public officials and more than his share of traditional media institutions, thundering like an Old Testament prophet at anyone he thought was manipulating the public agenda for private gain.

For his efforts, the Chicago Tribune once dubbed Bartimole "the conscience of Cleveland." But that job pays less than even a staff reporter at a small weekly might earn. So this butcher's son had a simple answer when his own children complained about the chilliness of their house. "Wear a hat," he told them, not unkindly. Tellingly, they have grown up to harbor no sense of having been deprived, but rather an appreciation for the sense of social justice passed down to them.

Because he has been read and digested by at least two generations of activists, government officials and planners, establishment figures and especially members of the media, Bartimole's views found a louder echo through incorporation into the work of others. Todd Swanstrom, now a professor of public policy at St. Louis University, says he came to depend on Bartimole's reporting when he wrote his dissertation on Cleveland politics, which later became the 1985 book, The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism.

"Roldo Bartimole's POV was key in my research on Cleveland," says Swanstrom. "I found someone who had an entire archive of his newsletters, which were quite valuable in piecing together the history."

Though he's often assumed to be a lifelong Clevelander, Bartimole is actually a transplant from Bridgeport, Conn., who first came to Cleveland in 1965 for a position as a reporter at the Plain Dealer. He later worked for a time in the Wall Street Journal's local bureau.

Then, on his 35th birthday, which also happened to be the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Bartimole made a decision that would change his life. When he went to hear a black welfare-rights official explain to a largely white audience why the murder had unleashed spasms of urban rioting, he was shocked at the audience's seeming inability to grasp the roots of underclass anger. He figured there was only one thing to do: Quit his job and start his own newsletter. He called it Point of View.

It appeared in subscribers' mailboxes generally twice a month. Bartimole served as reporter, editor, publisher, circulation director and copy editor. It often had its share of typos, but offered subscribers columns of sharply written type, its lone nod to design being the upside down "e" in the title word "view."

If Bartimole ever had models for his work, they probably consisted of two people: consumer advocate Ralph Nader (for whom he briefly worked one summer) and the late I.F. Stone, the ruggedly independent mid-century journalist known for culling the country's paper of record and obscure government documents for clues to important stories overlooked by the traditional press corpse.

Bartimole once observed that Nader "is probably the best journalist in the country, simply because he goes to the major issues, investigates them and puts out information that the public needs. If you look at what the newspapers have done in the last 30 year and what Ralph Nader has done in the last 30 years, newspapers come out shamefully way, way behind." Nader returns the admiration. Roldo Bartimoe, he wrote in 1997, "gives some of us in Washington a respite...his monthly POV punctures the balloons of the city's political surrender to corporate fat cats who shake down the Mayor and the City Council for huge tax escapes..."

While he was well-known in certain circles through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Bartimole probably first came to the attention of a wider Cleveland audience in 1981. In a now-celebrated incident, then-Cleveland City Council president George Forbes grabbed and physically ejected him from a special meeting of council when he refused to leave. The resulting photo of Forbes' bullying got big play in the Cleveland Press, but the TV footage was even more dramatic. The far smaller, bespectacled Bartimole could be heard protesting, "George, you're tearing my jacket" in the clip. He laughs about it today. "That was my sharp First Amendment retort," he says.

Three years later, he began reaching an even larger audience when his column was featured in the Cleveland Edition, the city's first major alternative newsweekly. Bill Gunlocke, at the time a bookstore owner and himself a transplanted Clevelander, knew he needed to recruit one voice to help launch his free weekly. "Roldo was the obvious centerpiece, with the credentials and the courage," says Gunlocke, who now lives in New York City. "He was like a priestly scholar. Wherever you saw him, he had some reading material. He always looked like he was coming from something important and going to something important." Bartimole's column later ran in the paper's successor, the Free Times.

Now in his early 70s, Bartimole remains thoroughly plugged into events as an elder statesman who's become half social historian and half institutional memory. He spends more time with his beloved second wife Ann, and with his children and grandchildren. And while POV came to a close in 2000, he continues to write occasional columns, which are now distributed through the Cool Cleveland e-newsletter. He's widely quoted and footnoted in a flock of histories of Cleveland and municipal politics. His Point of View even has its own entry in the Encylopedia of Cleveland History. By influencing the influencers, his moral outrage has left a deeper mark than even he could have ever imagined.

"He worked hard and he worked long and he never made any money, but he had some fun," says his friend Terry Sheridan, a legendary Cleveland reporter and later private investigator, who now lives in Belgrade, Serbia. "And on publication day, he always had a flag for sunrise, one that proclaimed, 'I shall continue to be impossible so long as those who are now possible remain possible.' A good epitaph but a better credo--just about perfect for a guy who purposely set out to be a pain in the ass in a terrific news town and succeeded superbly."

UPDATE: The ever-acute Bill Callahan has this to add about the subject of Roldo. And George Nemeth nicely steps up with these additions.

Gathering Around the Old Wireless

Blackout 2003 will no doubt be remembered for many things. But I'll remember it chiefly through the lens of the radio.

A wise person once observed that radio is better by far than television "because the pictures are better," a reference of course to the fact that radio listeners are forced to use their imaginations to add context to the audio in ways that they don't with TV, which doesn't demand much of anything, and surely not imagination. And that's all the more true of splendid NPR, which routinely crafts beautiful little audio hymns for the richly imaginative to feast upon. But during the blackout last week, with our local NPR affiliate WCPN caught without backup power (tsk-tsk, more about which later), I got the chance to go back to the AM dial in ways that most people haven't been in years.

With the power going out just after 4, I hurried home and found the family calm but bummed out about the power loss. With reports and rumors growing rampant in that first hour, I sought out one of the kids' small boom boxes with batteries, and took it out to the back yard to listen in. The family eventually joined me, prompting me to tease 14-year-old Michael and 13-year-old Patrick: "Isn't this great? This is what it was like in the 30s, with everyone gathered around the radio, listening to the news and talking about their day." Patrick's reply: "Was this like the 30s, too, dad?" as he chucked a nerf football at my head.

Anyway, the boys soon lost interest in radio news, but I stayed with it for hours. And here's what I found. Cleveland's WTAM, which has always staked its rep as the news giant, actually got a chance to deliver, with probably hundreds of thousands of TV-deprived people listening. Even the ordinarily lowbrow sports talk jock Mike Trivisonno smoothly shifted out of his ordinary routine and calmly moved into a more serious public service mode, taking call after call from listeners from around the area reporting in on the situation in their suburb. It was oddly soothing, even compelling, to hear this tapestry of ordinary folk become reporters, which of course had a special resonance for bloggers. Even more impressive, the station seemed to grasp just the right blend of that local input with periodic feeds from ABC news, reporting on the larger picture around the country. All in all, I'd give WTAM an A+. Too bad they don't get to serve this role more than once a decade or less. Who says Clear Channel (the station's new owner) is a heartless, mindless corporate drone? Now that they know the world is watching, they seem to be acting a little more responsibly--for now, at least.

As I moved around the dial, something else occurred to me, though. Unlike Pittsburgh (unhit by the blackout) and Detroit (which was very much affected), Cleveland doesn't have a station with historic call letters harkening back to the early days of the radio era. Steel town has KDKA, the first commercial station in the country, and Motor City has WJR. Judging by what I heard the other day, it would seem that each has retained something of its former primacy in their towns. Our equivalent would be WHK, one of the first six stations in the country, and while it still nominally exists, there's hardly anything still there of its former glory. Sad, but not really the end of the world, I suppose.

While I was quite impressed with KDKA's coverage, one ridiculous comment made me wonder about everything else. In response to a caller who mentioned the Internet, the DJ proceeded to opine that people would "be surprised at how so much of it is located in a single room." When I finished laughing out loud, I did wonder about how many more millions of Americans are that utterly ignorant of the Internet in 2003.

Still, the funniest and the most interesting observations about the Blackout came via the tube, after the power came back. Humorist Andy Borowitz observed on CNN that he called his parents in Cleveland to try to discourage them from looting, before dryly noting that despite the blackout, no one was observed trying to loot Madonna's new CD. And CNN's Jeff Greenfield, possibly the best journalist working in television right now, got off a good line about the spirit of the Blackout in New York. He called it "Like the (London) Blitz without the bombs."

As for WCPN, I can't imagine why it was nearly alone among local radio stations in being without back-up power. The million dollars-plus challenge grant that Peter B. Lewis has given the station has gone to good use recently, helping the station's long-mediocre news operation pick it up a notch (our Coolio Clevelander Tom Mulready sounded like a veteran radio DJ during a WCPN appearance last week, with the pipes of a younger Walter Cronkite). And the great job that they would have undoubtedly done during the blackout would have only solidified their growing position as Cleveland's electronic hearth, or audio town hall. But they never got the chance. A pity...

A Few More Scattered Blackout-Related Observations. I think the PD hurt itself by choosing to go with only half a news hole on its abbreviated next-morning edition. For reasons only publisher Alex Machaskee can say, it offered up five pages of so-so coverage and five pages of ads. It reminded me of the famous case study of the New York newspaper competition: During the paper rationing accompanying World War II, the NY Times was alone among the dozen or so papers there at the time in reducing the space for advertising. While a difficult financial decision in the short term, in the long term it was considered one of the prime reasons that the Times emerged as the strongest competitors. Having chosen the public good when push came to shove and it meant losing some money, it also served to hook a loyal readership that rebounded to its long-term benefit. Couldn't the Newhouses have forgone just a single day of ad revenues in the face of this historic crisis, even though they no longer have to worry about competition?

Motor City Pillar of Calm. I also came away charmed in a couple of ways by watching repeated TV clips of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (what a name combination!), who calmly took control of the situation from behind a podium in a way that our Jane Campbell, who looked rattled and high-strung, so clearly did not (and her ridiculous strategy to have her clueless press secretary try to dictate coverage may have just gone from momentary embarrassment to full-fledged disaster, with Sam Fulwood's PD story now gone national via a prominent link on the national media's favorite site, Romanesko Media News, complete with a photo of Jane--guaranteed to draw even more attention since few entries carry a photo of any kind. Romanesko, you should know, is widely credited with infusing oxygen into the NYT Jayson Blair story, keeping it alive as a national story for weeks. Jane may have to put off her plans to run for governor for awhile). Anyway, to my delight, I noticed that Mayor Kilpatrick also appeared to be wearing a small earing in his left ear lobe, surely making him the first male mayor of a major American city to be so adorned. I made sure I pointed that out to my oldest son, who's been taking some serious abuse from the parents of some of his friends over a similar decision. See, Michael, you've got some defensive ammunition now...

And speaking of my beloved Michael, who starts his high school career this week at St. Ignatius (whose well-stocked website is maintained by our friend Mark Geyman), he has decided in recent weeks to join the ranks of bloggers, with the debut of his weblog, devoted to all things basketball (the name of it, KingE23, is a reference to the sainted Lebron). To release his adolescent angst, I've encouraged him to write and articulate in any medium with which he's comfortable, which led to one especially memorable rant against his parents, in the medium of rap lyrics (which I'll of course keep private--but trust me, it was pretty interesting). So the blog is merely his most recent venture into those waters, which I hope will be a lifelong progression in using language. In just four blog entries, he has already done a couple of interesting things: posted from a remote location (while at hoops camp with his cousin on the west coast), and gone collaborative, by letting his buddy Tyler write the most recent posting. Good luck on your writing, Michael. Maybe in a couple of years we'll see if you'd like to get involved in this cool news collaborative for and by young 'uns, begun by a visionary 25-year-old BBC reporter as a way for fledgling reporters to gather some quality clips.

It seems National City's long-awaited refresh of its massive website has been postponed due to the blackout, which strikes me as a pretty good excuse. It was due to debut on August 15th, or Day 2 of the blackout, but thus far hasn't yet arrived. I'd guess we can look for it sometime this week, though. It was on this giant project (it can now be told) that I labored fulltime as an outside resource during all of May and into June. So I'm rather looking forward to the unveiling.

Bullshitter-in-Chief. I know George W. wasn't trying to be funny, but he again came away with the howler of the day/week/year, with this ridiculous bit of blackout-related BS: "I view it as a wake-up call. I've been very worried that our infrastructure is old." Is there a living, breathing person who believes that he's been worried about infrastructure of any type? The Prez seems to outdo himself each day in the lengths to which he will go to lie to us. Which is why we all need to join together in the solemn task of sending One-Term George off to a well-deserved early retirement...

And finally, congrats to our George Nemeth on his appearance in today's New York Times. Goes to show you that it pays to put your phone number on your blog. I also got an email from the Times's Amy Harmon Saturday morning (I only have my email address above, not phone #), but couldn't get back to her before her deadline. Still, it was nice to be stumbled upon by the NYT, presumably via Google. And even nicer to see George's comments (though it would have been nicer if they'd have published his URL).

Working With Words: Now Out In Paperback

We were charmed to learn recently that a newly published comprehensive guidebook to Cleveland mentioned this blog as a valuable resource of information about the town. We knew the guidebook's author, veteran Cleveland writer Douglas Trattner, only by his familiar byline, which has appeared over a wide assortment of fine articles around town for a number of years. Thus, we were doubly charmed to stumble over his brief description of WWW: "This sharply written blog by Cleveland-based journalist John Ettorre casts a wide, humorous net around topics as varied as local politics, business, fiction, sports and current events." We also liked the company we found ourselves in: the other two Cleveland-centric blogs he mentioned, Brewedfreshdaily and Writes Like She Talks, are operated by longtime friends of this establishment, George Nemeth and Jill Miller Zimon. In a bit of exquisite timing, given the Cavs' collapse this weekend, the book includes a brief section on "Cleveland Sports: Hope, Heartache, and Wait Till Next Year." Anyway, for those who are interested, the new book is available on Amazon.com. I happened to find a copy in the local Border's.

Using BFD as a Window Into Place

Dan Gillmor, one of the leading gurus of web journalism, knows a good representative "place blog" when he sees one. The longtime tech writer for Silicon Valley's hometown paper (the San Jose Mercury News) and author of the seminal book We The Media, is building a new search tool called Placeblogger, from his perch at Harvard's Center for Citizen Media. In an election round-up used to demonstrate the experiment, he points to coverage on George Nemeth's Brewedfreshdaily.

STIHOSOBFDTW

No, that's not a typo. Instead, it's a new weekly feature we've decided to insitute here at Working With Words. In case you can't solve the acronym puzzle, it stands for Smartest Thing I Heard or Saw on Brewedfreshdaily This Week. We do it in part to honor the central role our friend George Nemeth has played in starting and hosting smart conversations, even when he's not around, which is quite a trick. And of course also because we think there's value in steering you to particularly compelling conversations or points.

This week's STIHOSOBFDTW? We expect some weeks it'll be a tough call, but this initial choice was easy (and by the way, gentle reader, we'll welcome your nominations). It has to be a wonderful, pithy observation made by our friend Ed Morrison, an economic development guru with wonderfully contrarian instincts and Vesuvial intellectual energy (earlier, we wrote about him here), who had this to say in a string about debate over bringing casino gambling to Cleveland: "Here’s a basic law of regional economic development: If you don’t have any innovative ideas, money is always a problem. Conversely, if you have a habit of generating innovative ideas, money is virtually never a problem." Brilliant, Ed.

My Day of Atonement

If I could borrow any single element from Judaism in order to apply it to my own faith, there'd be no competition: the Day of Atonement during Yom Kippur is a uniquely wonderful tradition. But since I'm not Jewish, and in any event this holiday doesn't come around again for several months, let me now publicly atone for some needlessly hurtful words I wrote some months ago in the comments section of a blog.

Way back in September of last year, during the thick of the Cleveland mayoral campaign, I visited George Nemeth's popular Brewedfreshdaily.com, where I noticed that a longtime figure in local politics and p.r., Andy Juniewicz, had posted a comment on behalf of the candidate for whom he was then working. That name rang many layers of bells for me. Andy had been a Plain Dealer reporter many years ago, and had since gone on to work for many political campaigns, including Dennis Kucinich's presidential run. But for me, he was best-known for his long association with the brass-knuckled p.r. firm headed up by William Silverman, a man who was once his father-in-law. That was all the red meat I needed: I posted some comments that noted his long record in politics and the fact that he had worked for several losing campaigns. In short, I carved him up a bit, mostly a result of guilt by association (Silverman was known for his heavy-handed tactics with the media).

Anyway, some days passed, and then I received an email from Andy. I couldn't help but notice the unusual way in which he went about seeking redress. Rather than simply abuse me and call me names, as most targets of such comments would understandably have done, he was trying to convince me that I had him all wrong, and that if only we could meet, he would convince me of that. How could I refuse? We met for breakfast (at the erstwhile Ruthie & Mo's, no less), where I finally got to meet a man I'd long heard about and whom I had thus convinced myself I almost knew. I found him a decent, thoughtful guy who cared deeply about his reputation. But unlike most people who thought they had been wronged, he didn't lash out in anger. Instead, he tried to reason with me. Yes, he's a smooth, veteran p.r. person, and I understood that he was using every method he had ever learned about persuasion to convince me I was wrong. But he convinced me nonetheless.

Anyway, the upshot is this: I apologized to Andy privately at the time, as I'm now apologizing publicly. Guilt by association is no more appropriate a tactic now among honorable people than it was during the McCarthy era. We must all stand alone on the reputations we've carved for ourselves and the actions we've taken over time. Andy is a good and decent guy, and he deserved better than my words that day. Here's hoping we'll find a new and even better place for that occasional breakfast.

On Behalf of Great Lakes Geek,
We Demand a Recount, Wired!

We found this story in Wired Magazine interesting. But as we scanned it over, we came away thoroughly disappointed. How could any self-respecting magazine list of the 10 sexiest geeks not include our pal Dan Hanson, easily Cleveland's most eligible geek bachelor (George Nemeth, he of the matinee-idol chiseled features, would give him serious competition, but G seems to be quite happily occupied with a lovely lady friend). Oh, well: there's always next year. Get your comments and votes in for him for '06.

A Month for Inaugurals


Another week, and nary a word shared with my dear readers, at least via this channel. As the old Latin-speaking priests would say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! But I'll endeavor to do better, to catch up, to try this week to at least briefly get to many of the dozens of lively, interesting little tidbits I've observed, read about or experienced at first hand.

Double Inaugural Weekend. The weekend just passed saw a couple of notable inaugural efforts in our house. My oldest, Michael, kicked off his Ignatius hoops career with a rousing first game on the freshman gold team. He and his mates got off to a bit of a cold start against Mentor, with their basket seemingly having a lid on it for the first few minutes. But when opening-game jitters wore off, they rolled to a convincing victory that was fun to watch. And my favorite center poured in 19 and added perhaps a dozen rebounds in his first game. All in all, a great beginning. But neither victories nor (certainly) personal stats are the point of it all. What fills me with such wonder is watching the sheer joy with which he plays his favorite game, and thus how special it feels. It's like watching a prodigy tickle the strings of a Stradivarius. Can't wait to see my other boy, Pattie, in his spring play, where he takes that same joy and puts it into action making his own joyful noise. The other inaugural came harder: after a dozen drafts of tinkering, I finished and sent off the first of what I hope will be many years of monthly dad's columns for Cleveland/Akron Family. With about 60,000 print copies (and more than 100,000 readers including pass-alongs) it's become ubiquitous in its approximately 15 years of life (don't hold that butt-ugly website against them, the print copy, which you'll find in stacks all around 800 public places in Cuyahoga and a few other counties, looks lots better). I knew the founder, Ann Billingsley, who began the pub in a fashion not unlike most good entrepreneurs, after getting rejected. She had lived in New York, where, as she once recounted, the Village Voice had a great, literate regular supplement targeted at thinking parents. After moving here, she took that same idea to every publisher in town, and got nowhere. So she started her own, later buying and merging into her operation a great, and similar, parent-focused pub based on the west side and founded by then-New York Times Cleveland correspondent Jennifer Stoffel. Anyway, Ann sold it all to new owners not long ago, and the fresh team was looking for some new voices to pep up the pub. The impossibly great news for me: the monthly is adding just two new columns this year, mine and one by the nationally known family-advice guru, Dr. Sylvia Rimm. So expect to hear lots more in the new year from this now-refreshed new pub, edited by my newest collaborator and colleague, the talented Frances Richards. May she undangle all my participals and rein me in when I get wordy or vague.

Straight Ahead: The Holiday Blur. The next two weeks will be studded with a glittering array of amazing get-togethers, which is partly why Working With Words has been quiet for a week, as we furiously tried to finish up all our lavishly paying work in order to prepare for these fests. I won't pretend to be remotely comprehensive, but they'll include the following: tomorrow evening's kick-off event of the Northeast Ohio area's Ryze business network, ably staffed by George Nemeth; the communicators' holiday party this Thursday night the 11th, at the Club at Key Center, which features the never-before-seen spectacle of five professional groups collaborating; the next day we have a mid-day brownbag lunch to hear an update on the OneCleveland digital initiative. And the following week, on the 19th, is the latest in a series of Cool Cleveland's Art/Tech events, which should be especially warm and festive, coming less than a week before Christmas. I'd call it Cool Yule...

And Announcing the Working With Words Holiday Bash. But nestled in there about mid-way on the calendar is also the First Annual Working With Words Holiday Gathering (or a third inaugural event mentioned thus far). That's set for a week from today, December 15th, from 5 in the evening to whenever, in Little Italy, coolest of all Cleveland neighborhoods (at least to my deeply biased way of thinking). Just buzz me at the above email for more info, but do it quick, because the unfortunately limited space is going fast. But if you miss out this time, don't despair: we have a bigger and possibly better gathering, this one a Party With a Cause in the works for not too far into the new year.

A Few Scattered Thoughts

A debate is heating up over what exactly constitutes acceptable journalism, and just where do bloggers and blogging fit in. I've just added a few logs to the fire by responding to a posting from Chris Thompson on George Nemeth's blog. But this recent Wired article adds a few other interesting insights to the debate. "More and more I'm running into myself on Google," reports one Madrid-based blogger. A search-engine optimization guru adds a crucial insight: "The web is the great equalizer. Good content rises to the top of the Internet. It doesn't matter if the medium is a blog or a corporate Web page."

In other words, writing for the web is something of a radical meritocracy, which lots of traditional journalists have a problem with. It makes them really nervous that they might actually have to compete for readership or audience respect solely by the power of their arguments or writing style or how compelling their subject is. You can't coast on the fact that you have a staff job at a well-respected pub and then write crap.

And this new story really points up how hard it's becoming for those in power to enforce the nice rules of silence which often amount to little more than censorship, as long as there are who can directly report on events of interest. Seems that a blogging lawyer and a venture capitalist had a stronger urge to communicate with their audiences than did the well-behaved "journalists" who tamely agreed to stop taking stenography when their patrons insisted, their audience be damned. Said San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor, one of the first high-profile bloggers in straight journalism, said it best: "conference organizers cannot make an event off the record only for the official journalists anymore. The rules of 'journalism,' whatever that is, are changing. This is just one more example."

Enough said about that for now. Suffice to say that we'll be hearing lots more years of self-righteous indignation from journalists who are driven to distraction by the possibility that millions of people who aren't in their profession might actually be able to write better, more compellingly, with more passion and knowledge than they. That's a scary idea for people used to thinking of their professional status as an ID card that mostly serves to keep the hordes out, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Here's a good example for you. Matt Welch is a guy some of you may have heard of. He got his start as a writer primarily on the web, in the functional equivalents of blogs or self-publishing. And yet his profile and reputation have grown incredibly, based on just one thing: the guy can write! Check out this article, for instance. Read this, and then tell me that he's not a first-rate writer and thinker.

On to other developments: Rookie blogger of note. Recently I nominated Kukral for the prize, and his last week of entries have done nothing but confirm that status. His take on Feagler was especially interesting (but in fairness, I wanted to point out that poor, lazy Dick F. could once write like a dream, back when he did some work. Try this heart-tugger, for instance, on the last days of the Cleveland Press. It's sublime. Too bad he hasn't written like this in at least 10 years. Jimmy K. also has a pretty good sense of humor. Check out this little animated head app that he put together on a page that's a take-off on Google.

Anyway, Kukral's successor as the rookie blogger to watch is none other than Bill Callahan, a name perhaps familiar to you if you've been in the neighborhoods movement. For years, he's run programs on the near west side, in something called the Stockyard Association. Bill ran a couple of interesting events around the theme of the digital divide, which he billed as Digital Vision. And he's even received funding from the man himself, Mario Morino, which is all the vote of confidence I need.

Bill's West Side Computer Community Center is even reputed to be increasingly collaborating with Dan Hanson and his Computers Assisting People, which is a welcome development that gives a nice geographic balance (near east/near west) to those related efforts. With all that as background, check out his blog when you get a moment.

And speaking of Dandy Danny Hanson, my heart dropped for him just a moment, when I learned that United Way's Community Vision Council has teamed up with Cleveland Public Library to debut an attractive, well-funded site for seniors. Called SeniorsConnect.org, it comes complete with eye-catching signage throughout the library (motto: "The Web Site for People Who Weren't Born Yesterday"). This will compete directly with Dan's spunky self-funded site, Clevelandseniors, which isn't the most graphically appealing thing, but contains some wonderful content if you know where to dig.
But there's enough out there for everyone. I'm just happy that Cleveland Public (which is actually the third largest public research library in the country), under its energetic, charismatic new director Andrew Venable, is fully living up to its ambitious slogan as "The People's University."

Reserve This Date, Y'all

Best line of streetwise philosophy heard on the tube recently:
"Yeah, everyone's your brother---least till the rent's due."

Here's hoping that you can carve out a night to spend with a few dozen, perhaps as many as 100, of the most interesting folks in Cleveland. On May 15th, at 6 p.m. in the tasting room of the Great Lakes Brewery, we'll be putting on a celebration of local web journalism/blogging/choose the term you like best. For those who've known me for awhile, consider it this year's installment in my series of annual journalism events, where me and a few partners in crime try to feature what's new and interesting and vital in journalism, and pack the room with all the best minds we can find to host a group conversation that might just enhance our sense of community. Come to think of it, we kind of missed last year's event, but no matter...
In years past, the Press Club of Cleveland has been kind enough to serve as the official convener, and we hope they will collaborate on this one as well. But the initial main sponsor this time is an equally serious and dynamic group, the Cleveland chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. And the main champion is my longtime friend and colleague, and one of Cleveland's leading writers for more years than I can count, Jay Miller, who has done nothing but remove hurdles and otherwise help plan this event.
The panel of four is an all-star cast: longtime music writer and now hyperblogger Eric Olsen, veteran urban planning strategist Don Iannone, and code-writing king and regional community development/blogging activist George Nemeth. Finally, there's a special guest, a guy who I think of as an average Joe citizen, a transplanted Clevelander actually, who just decided about five years ago to begin commenting on Cleveland events and politics on the web. I think of Mark Schumann and his Cleveland pages as something of an e-Tom Paine of Cleveland. Lots of folks (though hardly enough) have read him for years, and I wrote a bit about him in the Free Times a few years ago. But for the first time ever, we'll all get to hear him talk about his work.
And here's the other agenda: to demystify the journalism/writing aspect for the techies, and to demystify the publishing technology for the writers and journalists, we'll be inviting a handful of technology groups to co-sponsor this event. Fast Company Magazine's Northeast Ohio Company of Friends group is the first of these fine orgs to jump aboard and join the fray (thanks to the smooth servant leadership of our zen genius Jack Richiutto), and we'll next be talking to Cleveland Clicks, the Association of Internet Professionals and NEOSA. If you have a similar, like-minded organization that you think ought to be involved, please let us know.
Here's looking forward to seeing you all on May 15th. For more information, don't hesitate to buzz me, either at jettorre@voyager.net or at 216.382.6548.
--John Ettorre