Recent columns

Recently, I’ve written about the storm of bad PR that’s been hitting Craigslist, the pressure that children in Silicon Valley feel to appear ‘perfect,’ and the way in which suppliers tend to beat out prospectors when it comes to reaping long term gains from short term (gold) rushes.

A Growth Market for Writers: Celebrity GhostTweeter

Well, the NY Times beat me to it.  Sort of.

I’ve been meaning to write something on the consequences of celebrity tweeting for writers for weeks now.   I think there’s a whole new career path here.

It’s clear that while Tweeting adds considerable value to a celebrity’s profile, it’s also something he or she can get seriously wrong.

Intoxicated by the chance to share every moment of an unquestionably fascinating life (they’re a celebrity after all) said famous person can pretty swiftly reveal him or herself to be whiny, egotistical, entitled,crazy or — worst of all — utterly ordinary.

It’s what you could call rule one of celebrity tweeting: done wrong, celebrity tweeting destroys your brand.

Of course, a few rare folks can pull it off.  There’s Stephen Fry and The Real Shaq, whom Noam Coen mentions in the Times, both of who seem to have personalities perfectly suited to the form.  But for most famous people, being interesting many times a day is just plain hard.

Subscribe to a few celebrity feeds and it’s obvious that a lot of people are needing help.  And of those who have it, many clearly aren’t getting the help they need.  Have the wrong people write your tweets  and you quickly betray your twittering as phony PR.  What good is that?

The situation, it’s seemed to me for a while, calls for a new profession — the GhostTweeter.   And here’s the Times recognizing the same thing.

Coen is interested mostly in the fact of GhostTweeting.  I’m as curious about the mechanics.  What exactly is the job description for a celebrity GhostTweeter?

Here’s a try:

Writer needed to work with internationally known personality.  You’ll be:

• psychologically acute, able to understand what motivates both the famous individual and his/her many tens of thousands of diehard fans.
• a natural storyteller, able to take the facts of your employer’s day — whatever they are — and spin them into narrative gold, but always in the believable ‘voice’ of your employer.
• a high-performance, high-producing copywriter, able to translate that understanding into 10 or more engaging, entertaining and above all punchy 140 character tweets per day.  (You will also be expected to reply to at least 20 tweets sent to you be fans per day, to be written in the same engaging ‘voice’).
• available all hours, ready to be tweet for your celebrity wherever he/she is in the world (no, you will not be traveling with the celebrity.  You can do this from home).

Experience in brand management and creative writing is very much a plus.  Ability to work in a high pressure environment with emotional, ambitious people used to ‘high-touch’ assistance is essential.

How does sound?

My guess is this will be a rare growth industry for writers in the next few years.

Geography as journalistic destiny

Since I was writing recently about the Bay Area’s unique creative culture, it’s interesting (to me at least) to note that Ready Made magazine is moving from Berkeley to Des Moines, Iowa.  There was a thoughtful dissection of what that might mean for the magazine in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

“The move raises the question of how the change will affect Ready Made’s hip editorial sensibilites,” says the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli.

Garofoli also notes that none of the magazine’s six staff have chosen to go with the magazine to Des Moines.  I think that pretty much answers his question.

Recent Evening Standard columns

So this week I wrote about Silicon Valley’s new Singularity University.

And last week the topic was the wider Bay Area’s creative culture, of which the Valley’s own culture of creation is very much a part.

This week’s column

I’m thinking I should post my weekly Evening Standard column here, just in case anyone is interested.

So here is last week’s, about Twitter.

And here is the one from the week before, about the Crunchie awards.

The Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Future of Journalism

I’ve been following with time-sucking intensity the debate on the future of journalism now playing in locales as disparate as the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, various technology blogs and back-and-forth ripostes between individuals with skin in the game on twitter.

The bare bones of the issue is that traditional advertising-based models of media financing are collapsing.  People still want high-quality news content, only they would rather just grab it online — and they’re not fussy about who serves it to them, be they the content’s owners or not.

Why should social networks want to make money?

In a guest column today over at VentureBeat, Amuso co-founder Barak Rabinowitz writes about the failure of social networking websites to turn their phenomenal popularity into phenomenal profits.

“There’s an elephant in the room of online advertising,” he suggests.  “An elephant in the shape of 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared interests and activities — all who have yet to be tapped in any major way by web marketers.”

On booms and busts

It looks like we’re heading into a recession, and that has me thinking about the good times we enjoyed in Silicon Valley not so very long ago — which in turn has me offering a new “Perspectives” on KQED radio this week.

Finding the time to think

That’s the biggest challenge facing Americans today, writes Andrew Razeghi in a recent and thought-provoking San Francisco Chronicle editorial.

American lifestyles — and workstyles — allow for little but specialization at work and few interests, sports, hobbies or pastimes outside of it, he argues.

Partly, Razeghi wants to highlight the productive value of having ‘amateurs’ engage with a problem and seeing it from an entirely new angle. But he also points to the price we pay as a society in seeing narrow educational achievement and the 70 hour work week as badges of honor.

This week, in a not-so-veiled reference to the spectacular flame out of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, David Brooks makes clear the personal toll that a life spent as a ‘workaholic-specialist’ can exact. And there’s a cost to families, as well, as any child of over-worked parents will tell you.

It’s all a new spin on the ‘rat-race’ critique, of course. And it ties in closely with contemporary appeals to live life ‘slow‘ and with environmental critiques of capitalist consumer culture.

But what’s interesting — and new — is that Razeghi makes his appeal in terms of innovation. Great ideas, as much as cool gadgets and killer apps., he points out, tend to come out of left field. If American lifestyles barely let people get out onto the grass, let alone wander, that’s a problem for the future economic (not to mention political and psychic) health of the nation.

A dads’ (and moms’) utopia

Daddy Dialectic is one of the parenting blogs I try to visit regularly. This thoughtfully provocative recent post — a utopian vision of what parenting in America could be — shows why it’s worth a look.