Welcome to Ft. Myers

OK...so let's say you're in my position. You just discovered that you're moving to Ft. Myers, Florida. You'll be in a small, coastal city near the Gulf of Mexico...the smallest city you've ever lived in. None of the people you know have any clue about what to expect or any advance guidance on what the place is like. All you've been able to glean is that you'll be close to Tampa and Miami.

From experience (I've moved to four different states in the past 8 years) I know that the first impression you get on a place really sticks with you. Those first few nights you have and the first random experiences you have make a really deep impression. Since this is now day 4 I'd like to share some of that experience...and some of those impressions.

The place I'm working for has corporate housing right near downtown...and that was what led me to my first quick lesson:

LESSON ONE ON FT. MYERS: THERE IS NOTHING DOWNTOWN.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've lived in places where there's not much to do downtown. For example, downtown Phoenix is nearly vacant once the big buildings shut their doors at the end of the business day. Ft. Myers is something entirely different. I've been through downtown Ft. Myers at all times of day and night, and I run into the same weird experience: empty streets absolutely devoid of cars, buildings with 'for sale' signs on the store fronts...and, the weirdest part: NO PEOPLE.

I've come to learn that there are, in fact, a couple little enclaves of activity in downtown Ft. Myers. I just went to 'Spirits of Bacchus' tonight, a cool little bar/gastropub with an absurdly delicious gourmet ham and cheese, a nice - though small - crowd, and a great bartender. That said - it's mostly a dead zone. It's as though you were driving through a movie set of empty storefronts...the nicely re-done brick streets have no cars parked on them and no people walking anywhere at all.

It's just something typical to the area: 'everyone knows there's noone downtown.'

The line you hear people here say is: they're really putting in a lot of work to build it up. Which may be true, but currently it looks as though there is a noxious cloud of poison gas in the air...and everyone else knows it but you.

Its important to point out that I got really lucky: my second afternoon here I got to go to a barbecue with an old family friend: Uncle Jimmy. Uncle Jimmy is Jim Thomas, a good friend of my brother's and a mainstay of his life when I was tiny. I got to know him pretty well (as well as any 8 year-old can know someone.) Jim moved to Ft. Myers about 10 years ago now, and he invited me to hang out with his family on Memorial day. It was especially nice in that it offered that little bit of familiarity everyone craves when faced with an entirely novel experience.

I asked about the area and Jim told me he'd get back to me with a few cool places to go check out in the city. This was when I learned my second big lesson.

I'd planned on living at the beach. I mean...obviously, we're so close to the beach, you'd be a fool to not live there. I found, though, that people would be nearly befuddled when I mentioned it. "Ohhhh," they'd say, "You don't want to live at the beach."

To any normal person outside of here, the statement sounds plain ridiculous! Why would you move all this way, be THIS close to the beach, and not want to live there. The answer has a few layers...but the truth is this:

LESSON TWO ON FT. MYERS: NOBODY LIVES AT THE BEACH.

The polite line is that, during tourist season the traffic is horrible (sometimes upwards of two hours on what is normally a 20 minute commute) but that's not the whole story. I got to spend a couple of days hanging out with people I met at the beach and found that the majority of them were...how do I put this:

FORMER 70'S FLOWER CHILDREN BOMBED OUT ON QUAALUDES.

I met only two people in that whole time who even approached my age, a 29 year-old girl who had just moved back, and just looked like she'd had a hard time of things....and a pasty mid-twenties girl who was so drunk she didn't even talk to me, she just tried to lure me with a drunken come-on look and a clumsy grab at my arm.

I refused those advances.

It's important to note that not EVERYONE on Ft. Myers beach is this way...I work with someone who lives there and he's a very smart, aware, and cool guy. However, that does not describe the lion's share of people I met.

Then there are the accomodations. They are normally descibed as "beach cottages" but that just means 'torn up one or two-story shacks that share coin-op washers.' While I understand that people will definitely put up with the shabby quality of living if it means they can live at the beach...I also realized that quality of life also means the type of people you're surrounded with.

In this case it means dealing with a place on the steep decline: one person told me that they could name 15 different bars that had closed in the past year...and the ones remaining were hardly standing.

The sparse nightlife, shabby living, and unfamiliar crowd (again, mostly 40's or older and dissociated from reality) meant that living at the beach wasn't really for me.

So, I wondered - where ARE the younger, professional people like me? I know there aren't a bunch of them, but there have to be a few. That's where Uncle Jimmy came out HUGE. A list of three places showed up as a text message the day after the barbecue, and I went to one of them. It's called 'Reserve' and I found a mostly empty place (it was Tuesday at 8:30) with a cute girl at one end of the bar, a cool bartender named Johnny, and a band setting up on the nearby stage.

I started chatting with the bartender, then the girl, then some other people who began to trickle in. I found out that lots of people live in central Ft. Myers. The nice places to go (the cool bars, the well-known sushi place, the creative restaurants) seem to be located there. Some people go to 'The Bell Tower' (though, I must admit I haven't been there yet) or Gulf Coast Town Center (another place I haven't been, but have heard some things about) but lots of people go out in central Ft. Myers. There's even a bar known as 'the buddha' for the gigantic buddha statue out front. It's a biker bar during most hours, but it's where most people end up after a night of going out.

I was told: "If you're gonna live anywhere, you should move to 'College Pointe'" It's a nice apartment complex in central Ft. Myers near the nice restaurants, the local school (Florida Gulf Coast University), some cool bars...and that buddha is a short walk away.

I met a girl that night who lives in that complex...and in addition to giving me a rave review of the place, she agreed to split the referral fee with me if I mentioned her.

The complex I'm temprarily staying in - the corporate housing - is in an 18 story tall building that is about 20% occupied. The parking lot is just as empty most times as the downtown streets.

When I went to College Pointe, the leasing office told me that they only had one single bedroom available. Otherwise, they're totally full. No twilight zone here.

I signed my lease today.

The Ridiculous Race

I think I initially read about this book in Wired magazine...and added it to my Amazon wish list. I got it for Christmas, and it's been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. When I flew to New York last week, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to do so and brought it along.

Before my flight was over, I'd devoured 150 pages of it...nearly half the book!

The Ridiculous Race by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran is a true story about a drunken wager made between two professional comedy writers: who can travel the entire globe (every line of latitude) first without airplanes. The winner gets a bottle of 40 year old scotch (a Kinclaith 1969 )...and stories to last a lifetime.

It combines the clever writing of two former Harvard Lampoon members (one of whom now writes for the TV show American Dad) with enthralling stories ranging from the mundane (the bathrooms on the trans-siberian railroad) to the exquisite (The Cambodian temples of Bankor Wat).

Interspersed within the funny writing are mind-opening observations about the rest of the world from two people who have done as much international traveling as most americans (read: none)

One section near the end was so well stated I thought it warranted repetition here:

I got to thinking that America isn't like a bully, or a jock, or a cool kid. In the high school of the world, America is like one of those girls that's just effortlessly beautiful. So beautiful you can't even have a crush on her. A girl like that isn't deliberately mean, it's just that she can't possibly understand how lucky she is. And people always do what she wants, without her even realizing it, so she never bothers becoming smart, or savvy about the other kids in school. Just with her airhead remarks, she's always accidentally screwing up the whole order of things. She doesn't even realize it.

Now, when you have a girl like that, the other kinda-pretty girls sort of like her but sort of hate her. That's maybe Germany, or France. And the ugly girls talk about her in the locker room, but are still totally afraid of her. That's Venezuela and Iran. The regular-looking dudes can't help but be awed by her. Maybe they try to woo her with poems. That's Great Britain. And the really twisted kids develop unhealthy obsessions about destroying her, just because they're so infuriated at how unfair things are.

The quick chapters, fast-paced writing, and juvenile gamesmanship of it all kept me in rapt attention all the way thorough. I didn't expect a book endorsed by Seth Macfarlane (creator of Family Guy) to provide such a good read on so many different levels. If you have a few hours, and want to be entertained with the TV off...check it out.

Sports Night

Sports Night came on the air in the 90's, and only lasted two seasons, but that was plenty enough time to make an impact.

When I started at my very first TV station in Orlando, I asked our sports director Penn Holderness (a UVA grad with a degree in Philosophy of all things) what TV best conveys what its like to work in a TV newsroom. Without pausing a beat he answered 'Sports Night.' More questions around the newsroom confirmed it showed the practical world of working in TV...

Curiously, the show talks very little about sports...instead it focuses much more on the team putting a show on the air every day. And while conveying the practicality of the TV news world, it sprinkles in some of the best writing on any television show.

The monologue below by William H. Macy about glass tubes is a perfect example, and conveys exactly the kind of impact I want to make in any newsroom I work in.

Scanwiches

Every once in a while someone comes along with a crazy idea that just might work.

Frans Johansson says that the best innovations are often an amalgam of two existing ideas or technologies that are melded together in a new and unique way.

With that definition at the top of your mind, allow me to present: scanwiches.

This is a site that provides what Anthony Bourdain would call "food porn" in a new and unique way...people (normally the site administrator, but some events allow others to provide content) provide a sandwich to be scanned by a color scanner. Then the image is posted along with a brief description of the lunch in question.

The scans, performed crisply with a stark black background look almost artistic.

Thanks to Julia Im for initially facebooking about this.

And then what?

I've been think more and more about the future of TV news, and local TV stations in general, but that thinking has been focused on two arenas: what happens next, and what happens way down the road in the future.

Tonight a different question occurred to me: what happens in the mid-term? SO TV stations continue to lose money for the companies that own them and those companies have few options: change their revenue models, sell the stations, or go bankrupt.

Changing the revenue model is a possibility, but most local TV stations are owned by big companies that don't adapt well to change, and the changes needed for these stations to weather the coming economic storm are going to be too drastic for most consultants to admit and too hard long-time news directors to implement. The existing structure for TV stations, and TV newsrooms in particular is built on a very particular style of news that simply isn't selling anymore. See the post on what TV news and coffee have to do with each other for why this painful collapse was brought about.

So, changing the revenue model is exceeding unlikely, so the next possibility is to try to sell those stations. There are a couple of major problems with that, the foremost being that people don't buy failing businesses with revenue negative business models. Not to mention, the people who have the money required to meet the likely asking price of these businesses would be wiser to sit on that money in the short-term than to risk it in this down economy.

That brings us to the last possibility: bankruptcy. Even if bankruptcy is filed, and the stations land on life-support for a while...eventually they will go dark as new investors fail to materialize.

I wonder, then...what happens after that? Are we going to see local markets where local media is done away with, and the nation becomes a group of consumers of network-only broadcasting? Do the nets simply pipe their signal to the local TV master control rooms, and sell advertising through the New York office? Do local newsgatherers form online collectives, breaking stories online and collecting big payouts only on the rare day they come across a piece that 'blows the lid off' some big local story that pushes traffic to their site?

There's a good reason why "news from where *you* live," and all those other platitudes we've been fed for decades as local news consumers are cliche. There *is* a desire for local product...just not the product being offered, and not sold in the way it's always been sold. Local TV stations have made their money by selling a product you can't hold to produce a result that can't be easily verified based on the premise that they were the only way to reach thousands of potential local consumers. Thanks to technology there are countless ways to reach people in your community, and do so in a more targeted, verifiable, and cost-effective way.

What does all this mean? How do you re-make the model of a business that hasn't had to change for decades? How do you re-tool TV news from a product that appears an exercise in virtual sameness across local stations into something worth watching? How do you uproot the sense of entitlement that was showered on our industry by advertisers from 20 years ago into a hungry, aggressive, adaptable fighter that's willing to scrap for every tiny piece of that increasingly shrinking pie?

There are more questions than answers, as they say, but the days when decisions need to made are increasingly closer at hand. The big newspapers are stopping the presses, newsroom staffs are being told to stay home, and the future looks much worse.

What happens after all the dust settles? As strange as it may sound...I really hope to be on the other side, bacuase that's when the real excitement is going to begin. That's when the kind of people who brought television to the world will get to be part of a new revolution. TV wasn't always a foregone conclusion: it took people with the ability to see the amazing potential that lay waiting at their fingertips to plow through problems as they arose, and find solutions to problems nobody else had ever faced. It's part of why the "originals" at CNN are such a tight group: they got to fight this battle together.

A new battle is coming, and it's not the kind of thing that's palatable to people who have grown comfortable with the certainty of a stable paycheck and a guaranteed bonus. It's the kind of thing that doesn't have a guarantee of any kind on the other side...but it offers a chance to really change things. It's a chance to be a part of the next new saga of TV and TV news.

I don't know how or where I'm going to get to be a part of it...but I know this much: I'll be there. There's too many people in the world disgusted and made cynical by jobs they hate. Working in TV is a job I love...perhaps more than just about anything else in my life, and no matter what it takes I want to be a part of it.

Not despite the fact times are going to be hard...but because of it.

A day in Savannah

I got to Savannah around 5pm...I was really excited about getting to the hotel. I got a great deal on Priceline, and wanted to know exactly what I was in for $79/night. The result? AWESOME!

I'm right next to City Hall - the picture to the left was taken from my room - *and* I can see the river from my window (although I kind of have to crane my head a tiny bit.)

They told me that they can park my car for me...for $18/day. They do valet only, they told me...and parking is tricky in these parts. I later discovered that there is a lot next door that I can park in for free until 8am, and then renew my parking spot for 5 hours for $3.50...kind of seems worth waking up at 8am to save $15...especially since there are so many other things to spend that money on.

I dropped off my bags, and realized that I was a little short on clothes. I suddenly realized that I'd *planned* on bringing several shirts that I had hanging on hangers...but I left those hangers in the closet and only brought the bag I'd packed. So...I had plenty of underwear, jeans, shoes, socks, and everything EXCEPT for shirts. I'd noticed a cool second-hand clothing store (named 'The Clothing Warehouse') on my drive in, and tracked the place down and asked the guy there for some suggestions. I soon walked out with a couple changes of clothes to last me well for the next couple days of eating and drinking.

I was told to head to Jekyll Island because there's an amazing restaurant at the end of a pier there that serves amazing crab. I'm from Maryland, and telling me that there's a place to get fresh crab is all you need to say...so, obviously, that was my next stop.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize that Jekyll Island is a 90 minute drive from here...but, the promise of delicious crab at the end of a quaint pier was too much to ignore.

I worked my way down I-95 and finally got to Jekyll Island. I'm sure the place is picturesque, but it's really hard to tell in the dark...but I didn't care. I only barely noticed the ratty little barbecue joint as I drove in towards the island. I followed the directions on my TomTom and got closer and closer to the fabled unnamed restaurant at the end of the pier.

On arriving at Jekyll Island I met the toll-taker who looked crestfallen as I told her what I was in search of. She was able to give me directions but had some bad news. I drove to make sure...and she was right.

The "Rah" Bar is closed on Mondays...as are most restaurants on Jekyll Island. Suck.

I remembered that little BBQ place I saw on my drive in, and the thought of tasty, smoky, sweet barbecue really started to make my mouth water. I remembered that column of smoke rising from the place, and realized that my proximity to Brunswick, Georgia almost ensured that I was in store for a really great meal.

However, as I arrived at that little barbecue place, I noticed the plume of smoke was gone...as were any cars in the parking lot. I parked and went to the front door...the sign read that they closed at 8pm. It was 7:58 by my clock...but the place was abandoned, locked, and empty.

I hoped that the TomTom would be able to help me find some sort of barbecue *somewhere* in Brunswick...but, don't be fooled. Brunswick, Georgia closes at 8pm...except for one place: The New China Restaurant. I hadn't eaten almost all day...and there's nothing better than salty Wonton soup and super-sweet tea when you're desperate for food.

I made my way back to Savannah and got back to the hotel, and realized (after parking) that there were two bars just across the street. I walked into 'Moon River' and asked when last call was. I was told it was half an hour ago...then asked what I wanted drink. The place was still stacked with at least a dozed suit-clad big-spending conventioneers...and the bartender was not at all anxious to kick *them* out...so his patience was my gain. I got a drink and a shot, and settled next to a girl in a hockey sweatshirt reading the New York Times.

She was homely and seemed Canadian...but she was really from New England. She used to be a US Marine, but now works at a funky lunch place...and is studying historical preservation. Her skill at conversation was obviously adapted from her training at recruiting agents...so it was a lot of pushing for details and little rapport-building.

I closed my tab, and wandered my way down Whitaker street and found a couple people sitting in a dimly lit bar sipping on drinks and listening to recorded jazz music. The place was named "Circa 1875"...I'm guessing that's from the date on the liquor license posted on the wall. I grabbed a Stella Artois and talked to a couple of sous-chefs from the area. We did shots (them Jameson, me Firefly) and talked about the area, places to eat, and how the economy is treating everyone. I learned that a restaurant named Garibaldi's may be the pace to go for local seafood...and, on my way back to the hotel, found out that Paula Deen's restaurant is just two blocks from here.

I've got a rough itinerary for tomorrow...but I guess we'll see what happens...time to go to bed.

Being a journalist means being a marketer too?

Just finished 'The End of Journalism as Usual' by Mark Briggs in the Nieman Reports, and he makes a fascinating point about the future of journalism.

He references the blog Techcrunch and says that after just two years their coverage of technology has eclipsed the readership of similar coverage by the New York Times and bay area news outlets because they focused on their marketable content; directed it at a market segment that wanted it, and sold advertising to that market.

To some journalists the idea of thinking of targeted content and marketing detracts from the purity and truth-seeking that brought them in to journalism in the first place. However, Briggs issues a response to that line of thinking:

Digital entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder visited the University of Southern California last fall and spoke frankly to journalism students about this new environment, according to a summary posted by Online Journalism Review. She presented the following recipe for entrepreneurial journalism:

Start with the impact you want to have. Figure out what audience you need to assemble to have that impact and what kind of content is needed to do that. Then price it out: How much money do you need to do it?

After one student complained that this felt too much like business school, Osder defended the new approach as bringing to them a necessary discipline. “It forces you to be relevant and useful versus arrogant and entitled,” Osder replied.

What do you think? Do you think learning the additional skills required to make being a journalist a viable business is necessary, or does it take away from the purity of the job?