Executive Leadership 201: You will get shot in the head

I was asked a few years ago to write a column for an executive magazine about lessons to share with future leaders. If you’re in any business long enough - and enjoy a middling-to-better level of success - you’ll be asked to do the same. It’s a rite of passage.

If you track these columns, podcasts and leadership books - which should end after the first chapter, and if you’ve read your share, you know what I mean by that - you know the Hero Path breaks down to these tent poles in a four-act arc:

• Overcome lowly circumstances but use that as a superpower. Your parents/coaches/peers never thought you’d amount to much. But you were going to show them! So you worked twice as hard, walked five miles uphill both ways to school, ate Ramen, hawked your baseball card collection for rent money, dug some coal. These hardened you like a diamond but kept you humble. But you knew you had the horsepower to go the distance.

  • (You watch “Field of Dreams” a lot.)

• Accomplishment and Achievement (correctly capitalized) arrive simultaneously with Impostor’s Syndrome (see previous). You rise through the ranks because of your unique thinking, designs and calculations. If physicists don’t publish important works in their 20s, they’re written off - and you haven’t been! You have a family, which you compartmentalize but also use as the relatable source of your humanity. You are on track for executive, thought-leader shit. You win awards you deserve.

• And then you arrive! Executive life with its perks. You fly first class without paying for it (because you sat in coach during Act II for, like, 800,000 miles) and you’re a Captain of Industry. You draw on all of your past to lead humbly and with an iconoclast’s outlook. You know everyone’s name in your leadership realm - there are hundreds. You manage up and down. You win awards because conferences want to make money off your name.  You serve on boards where you can give back.

• Pay It Forward. Your shares are vested but you still have something to give, so you’re going to consult/teach/advise/volunteer in the arena where you can have the most impact. And this is when you write the column/book/manifesto for how future executives can follow your path, mimic your success, do you all over again. But with different words, clothes and airline choices.

And all of that’s true. And you’ve read that before. It’s the story of Kal-El as business executive. You just don’t fly.

But that’s not what I wrote. Because that’s a lovely arc - it would be better if it were a three-act arc, but sometimes, reality defines the arc, not screenwriting school. But it’s not true.

Not on the fourth act.

The fourth act is this:

You will get shot in the head.

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In the movie “Phenomenon,” John Travolta’s character is mentally accelerated by a flash of light, perhaps the flare of a random synaptic condition, that catapults his IQ to quadruple digits. He has heroic accomplishments, even without the telekinesis, but dies as the condition shows its true nature: It’s a tumor.

He was shot in the head.

This third act bothered me so much I contacted the writer of the screenplay - I was in my early 30s - because I was offended that the resolution of the story wasn’t The Next Level of Human Achievement, but a miscarriage. (I also asked him to be my mentor as a writer; I had a screenplay in front of Warner Brothers.) He said he wasn’t game for the mentorship, but offered a valuable piece of advice:

“That’s the only way that story can end.”

I was in the middle of Act II in my life. I was horrified by his response. It’s a cliche that we all are the heroes of our own stories - listen to yourself the next time you talk about getting home in heavy traffic - but we all believe we’ll do the climbing of Act I and Act II to arrive at Act III to realize the sense of accomplishment and statesmanship of Act IV.

And you know what?

He was right.

You will get shot in the head.

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First, you’ll be careless. Naive, maybe. You’ll forget you’re a manager and not still one of the guys/gals/union. When you’re in Act II, you’ll forget that you crossed a street, as my friend and mentor Howard  Weaver said to me once, and you can’t uncross it.

You’ll say something, do something or even intimate something that suggests you’re still part of what you used to be, and you’ll be shot in the head. That’s not your world anymore. Don’t talk about the dirt under your fingernails or anything that happened in Act I. They don’t believe you were there. And they don’t think you earned the awards. They kind of doubt the Pulitzer nod.

Once you’re into Act III,  you’re managing up more than you’re managing down. You just don’t know it - and that’s where the bullet comes from. I have a moral compass and a true north. I once told an executive boss that I had one rule, and that was not to ask me to lie. He broke it, I didn’t lie and then I was shot in the head.

Later in this act, I worked for an industry group that drove more than $100 million a year to local news organizations. It was a non-entity (it didn’t have tax status because we didn’t know if it would survive beyond holding conferences paid for with equity loans on my house)  and then I folded it into a legal for-profit entity. This meant I couldn’t be a ghost in the machine anymore; I’d have to be a CEO.

A few members of the Board didn’t like that, so they emailed me to rescind my CEO title and go back to being a contractor, which is illegal. They also instructed me to pay back the federal tax withholdings, which is even more illegal. I pointed this out, and they shot me in the head.

And here is what I wrote in the article that was ditched:

I am glad those things happened.

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Act IV should not be a hero lap, where you spend your winnings on second or third homes while writing memoirs about how awesome you were. I lived in Sarasota, FL, for 11 years; the #2 question everyone asks is “Who did you used to be?”

Most of those conversations ended with what kind of European sports cars those previous lives provided, a dozen selfies with your trophy spouse in an island you can’t pronounce, and the fortunes you are trying to spend down as fast as you can to give meaning to your Autumn season.

Because you never were shot in the head.

But if you were, chances are, you were …

• Iconoclastic

• Passionate

• Mission-driven

• Forward-leaning

• Path-clearing

• Authentic

• Sincere

And you got shot in the head.

And it will hurt. It will bleed your finances. It will get right up on your neck about your own self-worth. It will call on your lesser angels. You will skip leg day at the gym and “forget” to make the bed. You will look at social media and wonder why all the people who were quick to adore you can’t be found. And you’ll lose friends and colleagues and peers - especially the ones you helped along your journey.

Their hands are on the gun, too.

But what comes after that shot? That’s the act that columns and podcasts and business books don’t cover, because it’s  not being Odysseus for future generations of Olympus. Future generations want to be gods. And gods don’t get shot like that.

Because what comes after that shot is being back on the ground.

Being mortal.

I’ve been an executive for almost 30 years. I talk regularly to owners of news companies, enormous nonprofits, billion-dollar foundations, writers who have scripted your imagination, college deans, a couple of guys who invented Twitter and Square, a Beatles fan who runs all the photojournalists in Europe and the Middle East (and, sadly, Ukraine). I once served soup to Jerry Garcia and signed a 10-figure deal with Google.

And all those people, at one point in their careers, were shot in the head.

It’s how you come back. That’s the real Act IV.

Because when you’re shot in the head, you’re down on the mat. And the mat is betting every day that you won’t get up. Every day.  And it’s your job to prove that mat wrong.

Every day.

Local media and tech platforms: It's time for The Commission

It’s time to stop the saber-rattling between local media and giant tech platforms regarding who owes who what. It’s time to form an independent, nonpartisan Commission to do for digital media what the Carnegie Commission did for television.

The latest salvo: Australia’s government will force Facebook and Google to share advertising revenue with local media firms.

The Australian government has asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to frame mandatory code of conduct between media outlets and digital platforms.

First, let’s acknowledge that Australia’s entire digital advertising market is a rounding error in Google’s overall income. Australia’s digital advertising market is almost $9 billion, and Google/Facebook get a third of that. The US digital advertising market is more than $100 billion, and Google/Facebook/Amazon get two thirds of that, or 70 percent.

But this news again raises the question: Should the platforms - and I’ll go with the GAFA acronym to include Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon - be required to give a percentage of digital revenue to local news providers? After more than 20 years working in digital media - in local news operations and closely with the major platforms - I can argue both opinions. Here’s the ping-pong:

• No: Capitalism almost never favors forced tithing to incumbents from disruptors. The usual argument goes that Henry Ford owed no special tax for buggy whip makers or horse farms. But then, his cars weren’t using horses as raw materials. A better analogy for the “you used our raw materials” would be whether radio and TV news stations that rewrite or flatly read newspaper stories should pay the newspapers. (In the news industry, we call this time-worn practice “Rip and Read.”) But that’s been going on for a hundred years, and so far, iHeartMedia hasn’t sent any checks to newspapers. 

• Yes: Google and Facebook use local news - and ALL content - as raw materials. Google monetizes the search results page and in most cases the local news sites you land on, because local news site ad platforms come from Google. Google’s programmatic ads (nationally purchased digital ads) run on these news sites, and Google gets a cut. The local news sites get a far bigger piece from those ads, but Google still gets paid - and wouldn’t have been paid on their own search results page if those stories weren’t there to turn into little blue links.

• No: A cudgel - especially one wielded by the government for an industry it (from all hearings I’ve watched) clearly doesn’t understand - smashes everyone equally. GAFA now would have an economic incentive NOT to work directly with news providers, which has proven very successful in the U.S. The Local Media Consortium, of which I was the founding Executive Director and CEO for seven years, did exactly that with the platforms bringing - over that time - nearly $1 billion U.S. dollars to local media.

  • A sub note on this No: Asking the government to force GAFA to behave this way weakens the posture of journalism in significant ways. Asking to be cast as a victim is not a good look.

• Yes: Each member of GAFA has been built on our backs, and none pay the kind of taxes it should. Yes, I favor sales taxes on Amazon in every state its products are ordered and shipped, and those funds should be earmarked to support local and state infrastructure. Yes, Google should pay state tax on digital revenues earned in the states of its users. (What complicates this is not parsing the data of where a user came from - it’s the labyrinths of state tax laws.) Simply, anything done digitally did not happen on the Internet, it happened in a home, and that home is in a state. The real discussion is how states will distribute to counties, cities and communities.

And more. There are more pro/con arguments in this discussion as arguments over the use of the Oxford comma. So here is what I propose: a compromise.

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Compromise: We need to take a very thoughtful and measured pause in this shoulda/woulda/coulda hissy fit - on both sides - based on something all local news organizations are doing right now because of COVID-19:

They are creating strategies and budgets based on today’s reality and not last year’s results.

Realizing this is Step One of the Compromise.

The pandemic is unprecedented and all former bets - and business practices - are off. News companies have, in a matter of days, changed publishing cycles, air time for news, scrapped time-worn revenue practices such as events and pledge drives or, more drastically, shut down hundreds of alternative weekly papers because there is zero advertising for events during a shelter-in-place age. These companies are basing strategies on today’s reality - and what will come afterward - and not on how they were doing last April, because last year was another planet compared to this.

(And please don’t call what they’re doing “transformation.” The support beams will in no way change: media companies create content, which engages audience, which is monetized. The Media Transformation conferences and seminars I’ve attended only paint new colors on those beams. They don’t substitute those three beams with “Media companies collect meteors, which create mutants, which are delicious.”)

So, the pandemic is causing unprecedented and innovative thinking. The game-changer that hit local media is 25 years old. It’s called digital, and our response has not been to base budgets and strategies on today and tomorrow. They all smack of YOY madness. Media companies need to treat their entire business models with the same urgency and flexibility they are employing in drawing up their Q2 and Q3 operating plans right now.

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Step Two of the Compromise is creating a commission on the scale of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. I’m not a marketer, nor its naming-rights funder, so I’ll just call it The Commission.

Established in 1965 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, it was created to research the role that noncommercial television played in the U.S. Its goals were to distinguish the role of public television. That is, anything that was instructional, educational, informed public affairs and wasn’t supported by advertising. It’s why public radio and public television exist.

For local media to continue to exist, The Commission would study and create recommendations for a fair and sustainable digital news ecosystem that looks at:

• What is the total value of local news content to GAFA? This data is available but has not been reviewed, in total, by an independent, nonpartisan commission.

  • This addresses the size of the interdependency.

  • Humbling sub note: Local news is percent of a percent of all content utilized by GAFA - but even those small numbers are in the billions.

• What percent of GAFA’s digital revenue comes from that interdependency?

• What percent of that percent should GAFA distribute back to the creators of that content?

• What value do local communities, governments and community foundations place on being informed? What is a recommended model for funding local journalism through those mechanisms?

• What is the recommended business model for this intake and distribution? (A large, nonpartisan nonprofit - think The Nature Conservancy - is one I’d explore.)

• And all the fun stuff: charter, governance, member qualifications, appropriation process, middleware.

In this Compromise approach, The Commission would be made up of members not directly working for local media or the major platforms. But they can’t come to it with no knowledge of the dynamics - see earlier comment on digital hearings on Capitol Hill - and should have the gravitas of people who are trusted and get shit done.

The Carnegie Commission’s work culminated in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. I think The Commission can work faster than that but would not rush. The politics, business dynamics and economics make sabermetrics in baseball look as complicated as counting your toes.

But it’s necessary. We have to be thoughtful - at long last - about this ecosystem and how it will be sustained. Google’s business model is dependent on quality content being behind those blue links. (And, to be fair, discussions about this topic are not new inside Google.) Facebook’s business model is dependent on social shares of news. There is no Apple News without it. And there is no Amazon without local merchants and resellers.

Let’s have this conversation. Let’s form The Commission. Let’s stop trying to do this with one foot planted in the past. Let’s build today’s business model today for tomorrow.

Let’s go. 

Remote working: Staying productive and sane

As coronavirus continues to spread, many people are learning to work from home for the first time. After doing it for more than 10 years as consultants with employees and clients around the country - while raising five children in the home where we built our business - here are a few things we’ve learned at Coats2Coats to stay productive and sane.

Workplace:

1. Create a designated place to work, whether it’s a home office, a desk in the living room (far from the sofa and Amazon Prime) or any other designated zone. Don’t use it for a den, craft table or folding station for your laundry after you’ve punched out. Honor the workspace.

2. If your spouse, partner, significant other or roommate/s also work from home, have separate workspaces if at all possible. We’ve found it more productive to “go to your corner” and then set times to get back together so each of us can focus on work without being tempted to talk about personal or household distractions.

3. If you have children home from school, give them a designated area, too, and establish office hours (if they’re old enough to understand that) - but make peace with the fact that they will come and go. If you’ve worked in newsrooms, this is nothing new - the interruptions just come in smaller (and more adorable) packages.

4. Consider the background. You’ll be spending a lot of time on video calls, and you probably don’t have a green screen like the talking heads who get interviewed on cable news. What’s behind you should convey professionalism with personal touches - but be wary of over-personalizing. You’ll be inviting dozens of people into your home on video calls, and you won’t want all of them in your personal business.

5. Also consider the ambient noise. We’ve learned to put blankets on floors to dampen echo, since we don’t have carpet in our offices. Rugs help, but rooms with mostly hard surfaces need more to prevent your calls from sounding like you’re in a cave.

6. Dress for work, and (if you’re a manager) expect others to do the same. Business casual is the norm for most virtual workplaces.

7. The quest for the perfect headset is never-ending. If you’ve found the ideal headset, with great audio and a crisp microphone, do tell.

8. Dogs happen. They will bark, usually at inopportune times. We used to put them in a time-out closet and even tried bark-suppressing devices (which definitely do not work on terriers). Now we just apologize. With so many people being asked to work from home, barking dogs (and cats jumping on your shoulder in the middle of a call) are just part of working from home.

9. Manage bandwidth. This is especially true if you have children at home. We learned to set limits on when our kids could stream videos, particularly if we were leading web seminars or on video calls. Establishing bandwidth priorities is important to prevent lag - and remind others that this isn’t a snow day.

10. Take a lunch break as far from your work station as you can. If you’re working at home with anyone else, use this as social time to check in, ask what they’re working on and what they’re noodling.

11. Set an end to the work day and be strict about it. While we’ll dip into email and work extra hours when projects demand it, we’re wary of letting everything become urgent. With work literally at your fingertips at all times, you need to self-govern - we’re looking at you, Type A people - or you’ll never be off the clock.

12. Take days off. Working remotely is working. Recharge your batteries.

Software tools:

We use the following tools outside the ones prescribed by clients to increase productivity, manage the workplace and have a little fun. Of course, if your company has defined all of these for you, these are optional add-ons that may be helpful to your personal style of work.

1. Monday. We’ve tried all forms of project management platforms and even built our own, but Monday is simple, elegant, collaborative and very flexible. The secret to a good project management platform, though, is whichever one you’ll use consistently.

2. Cloud storage: We started with DropBox and continue to use it, but have migrated more to Google Drive over the years as more people/businesses use it. We’ve found the version control of using Google Docs, Sheets and other collaborative office products superior for project work, but still use DropBox for “cold storage” items such as billing, contracts and internal documents.

3. Slack Our main communication channel. After years of bouncing between text, email iChat, Evernote chat and numerous others, we aligned on Slack and never looked back. Great for group-wide collaboration, team- and individual-specific channel discussions and brainstorming. Be sure to create a Random channel and treat it like the metaphorical workplace water cooler - and learn the Giphy function to add humor to the day. (From my experience, this is the only way extroverts can survive working remotely.) Bonus: You can hold virtual happy hours with remote colleagues. Cheers!

Mind/Body/Spirit:

1. Move around. We wear FitBits, which alert us every hour if we haven’t clocked at least 250 steps. Find whatever device or system works for you to prevent sitting in front of a laptop for several hours without a break.

2. Exercise. Just because the gyms are closed doesn’t mean you can’t stay in shape. Five miles of walking a day is an achievable goal (I’ve done it in a hotel room) and you may find a treadmill under that pile of laundry - and dumbbells in the closet. Walking around the block a few times to clear your head is safe as long as you keep a social-distancing zone. And you can do pushups and sit-ups anywhere.

3. Calm down. A 10-minute guided meditation with apps such as Calm can work wonders when you need to put a pin in the home/work/family/pets chaos.

4. Take calls on the porch or balcony if it’s not a video call. Get some sunshine and breathe. Maybe say hello to a neighbor and ask how they’re doing.

5. Take time to treasure your family. If you’re working from home for the first time because of the coronavirus, remember that we’re all doing it together and to stay safe. That begins with the ones you love most. Remember that when they walk in during a video call and ask where you hid the remote.

Red wire, green wire

I sat across from a young man who was older than me and tried to defuse a bomb.

We were in a conference room with three glass walls and one plaster, because open concept is an awesome venue for sensitive conversations. The board on the opaque wall boasted the multi-colored penmanship of the most recent brainstorming session between the newsroom, advertising and marketing, about an event no one would attend but everyone had very strong opinions about. The Next Steps corner said only, “Tuesday 2 pm follow-up.” Productive.

We were on the third floor. The young man’s estranged wife was on the second floor. Their shifts overlapped by less than an hour. We’d designed that. We were from management and we were here to help.

“She won’t let me see my child. I’m not gonna have it.”

I nodded. I had small children, too. It was getting dark, so I could see myself in the reflection of the glass facing the outside wall. I wanted to get home to them and watch “Power Puff Girls.” My girls called me Mojo JoJo. In those days and I was trying to like Scotch. The first took.

“I get it,” I said. “But we’ve worked out the shifts. And based on the separation terms —”

“I didn’t agree to the separation terms.”

And this is when he put a snub-nosed revolver on the table.

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Managers go through a shit-ton of training. At least, they should. When a mentor boosted me from (pardon me) doer to manager, I ate up management books and training and tapes. I restored a 1966 VW Microbus camper to the dulcet tones of Zig Ziglar, telling me how to reach my goals.

Any new manager should binge this, the way some people binge “The Crown” or “True Detective” or, god help us, “Friends.” Immerse yourself in all of the pedagogy, all the theory, all the technique.

Soon, you’ll learn that there are as many ways to manage as there are to lose weight. There are systems as varied as religions - and as similar. All of them saying, “Avoid darkness. Walk toward light.”

And, at the end of that study, you learn how to be a good manager. You know how to source, produce and ship the product with the resources you’re given. You put round pegs in round holes and shave the edges off of squares - or see how squares can be disruptors. You manage down and manage up, because both are slurry - at least, in your opinion. And you live by your checklist, because that is your Bible.

But you’re not a leader.

That takes a gun on the table.

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I love HGTV and the couples who crave Open Concept Homes (which is its own religion) but don’t agree that this is the best way to build a workplace where human beings are ready to dispose of a career and a few human beings because a separation has gone very south.

I looked at the pistol on the table. It looked like any revolver you’re picturing. Off balance because of the nubby, rounded chamber. Grip on the table. Barrel in the air.

And he was spinning it.

His index finger in the trigger guard. Turning it so it spun like a clock hand. While I looked at my reflection in the dark window, thinking about my wife and kids at home, thinking that this would be a shitty story to tell at the AfterLife Bar. “How did you die, Rusty?” “Well…”

I explained again why he wasn’t going to the second floor, using management speak. I mentioned that his shift was ending and he could go home now, full pay. I wondered if anyone would call me MoJo JoJo tonight.

After an endless - and, let’s face it, pointless - conversation over a laminate table with bullshit erasable-pen Next Steps on the wall, I caught the reflection of a deputy manager pass the glass behind me.

I rolled my chair back, cracked the door and said, “Hey, could you get security? I think Mr. Blank just needs to go home.”

He shook his head, ready to get gone, then saw the snub-nosed pistol. And he nodded.

Five minutes later, Mr. Blank went home without his pistol and without shooting anyone.

There’s a common trope in film about defusing a bomb. If you cut the red, you must cut the green. Black/white, blue/yellow. And so on. It helps us grasp the wiring of bombs when we can’t understand the wiring of ceiling fans. As if the former comes in handy.

But in leadership, it does.

The red wire - management - is producing TNT. Because every business is combustible. We all work in pressure cookers. We work with flammable economics. We work with uncertainty. We work with people having human moments.

The green wire - leadership - is making sure it doesn’t explode.

Fix It

When I was 12, I rode the bus home from junior high to our house in rural Indiana. We called it a farm, but it was just a few acres of cows, a you-pick strawberries business and the remains of a chicken coop I burned down the previous summer because they’d stopped laying and, well, on a farm, that’s that. And I puttered around the house as many Gen-Xers did - making myself lunch and watching reruns and going all Tom Sawyer on the house.

Xers get this. We were feral kids. I saw a tornado lift our carport off the house that year, my parents nowhere to be found but our neighbor Mary Uhl on the corded party-line phone asking if my sister and I were OK. Sure, we said; why not? “Because a tornado just tore off your carport and threw it in the soybean field behind your farm.” And so we rushed to to back window to watch the little spinner turn the aluminum carport into spaghetti. After it swept back into the air, I made my sister a Steak-Um sandwich. That’s what it was like to be an Xer.

So I’d spend those hours before a proper grownup showed up prowling the house like a Raymond Chandler hardcase. And I found things no child should find, because Boomers left handguns and porn and powder cut with baby laxative in plain view. (The latter keeps you quite regular.) And I found a slot machine.

Which I took apart.

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The slot machine belonged to my grandfather on my maternal side. An intimidatingly tall man with a raging temper who had been an educator, then a school principal, then - for an unexplained period before being a real estate agent - a bar owner. He was tyrannical.

The slot machine came from his bar in downtown Sellersburg, Indiana. This was a tiny burg then, and is little more than a commuter hospice for Louisville now. It was so small that when my grandmother on my paternal side needed work during one of International Harvester’s many strikes, receptionist at Hinton Insurance was the only gig in town. She got it, and that’s how dad met mom. Creeks rise and fall and flood.

The slot machine took nickels and paid tokens, which appeared in a glass window slot on the side, and its denomination portended how many free drinks you would get. Lotteries come and go.

So I took it apart. The porcelain case comes off easily, after you remove the knob with an Allen wrench. (It’s painted with fingernail polish, btw.) And the innards are pure mechanism. Pre-digital, pre-electronic, back when Wurlitzers ran on pistons and electricity didn’t want to be grounded. Just a machine of unthinking metal.

And - spoiler alert - once I had it down to metal pieces so small you could put them in your eye and still blink, I could not figure out how to put it back together.

And that’s when my father came home.

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He saw the mess of metal on my cowboy blanket. Nuts, bolts, gears, cogs, who knows what that is, all spread across the bed. He had no real love for his father-in-law, and this was very much a mutual arrangement, but what is mutual is respect.

“Fix it,” he said.

I looked at the litter of dry metal - the whole mechanism was thirsty for oil - and the porcelain husk and cried because I was overmatched. Later in life, I’d be nominated for a Pulitzer for covering methamphetamine in the Central Valley of California, picking up the detail of how meth addicts will take apart carburetors and electronic equipment and then despair when presented with the rubble of their mania. I got that at 12.

“You get no allowance and you’re grounded until I can put a nickel in that and get a token.”

Granted, “grounded” at 12 in rural Indiana is a small threat. But I had designs on taking a girl named Kathy to a double feature. So I got to work. To fix it.

This became my job after school. Steak-Um for me and my sister, then the slot machine.

It was impossible. I’d put all the pieces in place, pull the handle, nothing. I’d tear it down again, put it back together, pull it and get a token - and then present it to my father for approval and it would chink up.

But after almost a full summer of tinkering, it threw a token. And then another. And that’s when the machine became mine.

It’s on my shelf today because I’ve needed it as a beacon throughout my career. Every industry is difficult, small and complex in absurd ways. Every industry goes through periods where they are taken apart, parted out for scraps, maybe abandoned on a cowboy blanket. But the pieces are there to be assembled. Stare at them. See how they come together.

And fix it.

You Drive, I Drive

When Janet and I married in 2007, we exchanged vows as professional equals. She led all news coverage for The Tampa Tribune, NBC affiliate WFLA and digital powerhouse TBO.com. I led digital audience and innovation for our parent company, Media General, across a few dozen media properties.

In her previous marriage, Janet had been the breadwinner. Ditto in mine. We’d held the responsibility for making sure the bills got paid. Now we would be on equal footing. (Not in all ways, of course. I am a journalist, and facts matter. To wit: Her IQ is 17 points higher than mine. I cede the floor, your honor.)

Our motto for this equality has been: “You drive, I drive.”

That is, each of us is equally capable of taking the wheel if the other is compromised. By the flu, say. By a mother’s stroke. By a child’s emotional health. By a father’s slow slide into death.

When we started our business 10 years ago, this motto was critical to our success. In consulting, you eat what you kill. And not everyone kills on the same day. Client work can clump into one side of the business, then switch for a stretch, then switch back. It’s allowed us to put four children through college, support two ex-spouses and their households, and smooth paths for aging parents who need the support that even terrific planning can’t foresee.

Success for us has been based on the willingness to step into the spotlight and then step out when the business demands. As a theater brat - I had my Actors’ Equity Card by the time I was 16, so don’t quiz me on Rogers & Hammerstein - this is the equivalent of going from the chorus to the leading role, then back again, depending on what the audience wants.

You drive, I drive.

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Of course, it’s more fun to drive than ride shotgun.

Although we’ve worked most projects together, there always were some that required one of us to be the face of the business and the other to toil in the background. And for a long stretch, that was true as one of our clients - the Local Media Consortium - swelled from a 40-hour-per-month engagement in 2011 to a full-time CEO position in 2017.

As the LMC’s leader, I spoke regularly at conferences, attended high-level meetings with Google, Facebook, Apple and others, hit Platinum on Delta (and even had Delta CEO Ed Bastian sit next to me on a flight) and enjoyed the illusion of status. Since the LMC did not want me as a full-time employee until I incorporated it in 2017, I managed full-time employees but remained a contractor and kept a small hand in other consulting projects.

But with one client taking so much bandwidth, other work slowed. Janet’s side of the practice was strong, but mine took up more and more space. And attention.

You drive, I drive.

This works until it doesn’t. After a while, you get tired of singing harmony and want to take center stage again. Not for the attention - although that’s always a factor, and only the Dali Lama may be above such things - but because not flexing those muscles wastes those muscles. And you worry that they will atrophy.

We talked about this often - a marriage of journalists does not lack for communication skills - and Janet would share her frustration over this imbalance. And how little time I spent on our relationship, our children and my health. A calling is consuming, and it will consume everything if you let it.

So I let go of the wheel. Resigned from the LMC in March 2018, saying, You drive.

And she did. And now, she’s about to really hit the gas.

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For almost two years, Janet’s work with Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has grown, much like my work with the LMC. She wrote grant proposals - and in some cases, managed the execution of those grants - for a variety of programs. She toured the U.S. with visiting journalism scholars from around the world. She helped design an editorial leadership program for public media. Sometimes I catch her on the phone with journalism professionals in Macedonia. Wow.

She’s been able to do this remotely, but her work has been so impactful to the school that she’s been, in baseball terms, called up to the majors.

Starting in January, she will be Executive Director for Innovation and Strategy for Cronkite, in charge of the vast adjunct faculty, the school’s international grant programs, accreditation and myriad other duties, including working with the school’s News Co/Lab on its efforts to build media literacy.

This is a huge acknowledgement of her work, her career and her capabilities. It puts her in the company of journalism professionals around the world - her tribe, that Murderer’s Row we all want to join - and will challenge her to flex those muscles.

Last week, we loaded a U-haul and moved her into an apartment close to the ASU campus in Phoenix. I’ll stay in Florida to manage our business and family obligations - they don’t call it “the Sandwich Generation” for no reason - and give her the wheel.

Co-location is no picnic, but we’ve done it before. We’ll both accumulate a lot of Delta miles. We may see Ed again. But this as an important season, and one of personal growth. 

For Janet, fully occupying that spotlight and knocking the cover off the ball. For me, helping her be successful and keeping the trains running on time.

This is an essential part of being a leader and certainly of being a partner: Knowing when to lead and when to support, and embracing each with equal gusto. As Type-A people, leaders who lack that balance can come to resemble that guy at the gym who skips leg day. Don’t be that guy.

If life is a highway, the only way to navigate is to embrace the motto: You drive, I drive.

Running toward the Renaissance of local news

On May 9, The Salt Lake Tribune publicly announced that it was pursuing federal approval to become a nonprofit, citing years of steep advertising declines for the privately held, Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper.

The news was shocking/not shocking for anyone in the local news industry, and many were quick to add this as another chorus in the endless noir opera “Death of a News Industry.” Previous stanzas included the shuttering of more than 1,300 weekly and daily newspapers in recent years, local news institutions selling their historic buildings to tech billionaires and vulture capitalists slashing newsroom jobs to one quarter what they were a decade ago. 

So it’s easy – even obvious – to add the news in Salt Lake as something defeatist, a newspaper basically crying “Uncle.”

But if you’re reading the tea leaves, that’s not what’s happening.

Local news is headed into a Renaissance. And just like what happened when some of civilization’s brightest minds pulled humanity out of the Dark Ages, two things are certain: It will not look anything like the past, and it will shine like a beacon.

In fact, it’s just starting to catch fire.

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On March 9, something interesting happened in Denver. Colorado Public Radio announced the purchase of digital news site Denverite from Jim Brady’s Spirited Media. CPR News executive editor Kevin Dale and CPR CEO Stewart Vanderwilt were quick to assure everyone that each would maintain its unique voice. 

What they didn’t say was that, on March 9, 2019, Colorado Public Radio – with a combined newsroom of 40-plus with several new news jobs yet unfilled – was poised to be the largest employer of journalists in the state of Colorado.

The Denver Post, long-suffering at the hands of owner Alden Capital, had recently lost one third of its newsroom in a single day of layoffs. A single day. It had just over 60 newsroom employees before that day.

And if The Post continues its trajectory – which, I’m sorry to say, is inevitable – the largest news institution in Colorado will be a public radio station. A locally owned, mission-driven, nonprofit news institution.

CPR quickly followed up on the Denverite acquisition by announcing it would be building a newsroom office in downtown Denver– just as Post journalists were getting used to their digs 20 minutes away from downtown.

Weeks after the announcement in Denver, WHYY announced it had purchased the independent news site Billy Penn, also from Spirited Media. And previously, in February, WNYC, KPCC and WAMU announced purchase of assets from the Gothamist and associated sites DCist, LAist and DNAInfo. 

(In fairness to history, this path was paved six years ago in St. Louis, when KWMU began talks to merge with independent news site The Beacon. Disclaimer: My consulting firm, Coats2Coats, orchestrated work leading to the powerhouse of those combined newsrooms – but all credit for that vision goes to KWMU CEO Tim Eby and Beacon Editor Margie Freivogel. Simply brilliant.)

So, this Renaissance is about mergers and acquisitions. Large yawn. Meh.

No. These are dynamic moments in an otherwise quiet story that has been foreshadowed, seeded and cultivated over the past few years. While many local journalism analyses – and hand wringing – have focused on the decimation of local newspapers and the frantic pace of consolidation of local TV stations, nonprofit news has been growing and flourishing.

Consider:

• Over the past decade, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has invested millions of dollars to grow local and regional journalism capacity through programs such as Local Journalism Centers (or Collaborations) and Regional Journalism Collaborations.

• After a decade of concentrated growth, the nonprofit news sector now pulls in almost $350 million in total annual revenue, dominated in particular by the organizations started almost a decade ago, according to a report by the Institute for Nonprofit News (nine years old itself). The organization boasts 180 members.

• And, also quietly, in the past few years, local public radio newsrooms have added more than 1,000 journalists to their newsrooms across the country – some in places seen as news deserts by the algorithms of Facebook’s “Today In…”

• In October 2018, CPB invested $1 million in the Editorial Integrity and Leadership Initiative, an effort to mentor and grow 100 editorial leaders in public media. The program, based on a proposal designed by my partner, Janet Coats, is being executed by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The Initiative may be the largest concerted effort to grow editorial leadership capacity in any medium. 

Against this backdrop, it’s not crying “Uncle” for The Salt Lake Tribune to seek nonprofit status. It’s simply where the puck is going. 

And here’s my prediction: In the next 18 months, a media company will announce it is donating the assets of a newspaper – though not its real estate – to a local university that just happens to have a journalism school and a public radio/television license, as the tax benefit is greater than its earnings.

Count on it.

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This inflection point comes at a major surge in funding for news from global technology companies, foundations and new initiatives: 

•  Google announced in March 2018 that it was investing $300 million over three years via the Google News Initiative to build “a stronger future for news." 


• In January 2019, Facebook announced a similarly sized investment: $300 million over three years "to support local news." 


• In February 2019, The Knight Foundation announced it was going all in on local news and would invest $300 million over five years “to rebuild trust in democracy from (the) local level up." 


• The American Journalism Project, a new effort launched in 2018, announced in February it was launching with $42 million in initial funding, with ambitions of growing much bigger.  


Why these are good investments: The Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy’s report, “Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America,” released in February at the Aspen Institute, found growing divides in consumers’ trust in news – except at the local level, where trust in news GREW.

Public media has been doubling down on local news and has been collaborating with independent, non-profit and sometimes for-profit news sites to build journalism capacity and better serve their communities. But for every success in Denver or St. Louis (and others, such a Louisville Public Media, which likely will be the next public media outlet to employ more journalists than the city’s shrinking newspaper) there is much to be done. And it starts with working together.

Here are a few ideas about how to accelerate the Renaissance:

• Collaborate to build capacity. Working together, informally or all the way to a merger, is the most efficient, transformative and audience-focused way to serve a community’s news needs. Nonprofits are not slaves to ad impressions or CPMs. They’re measured on impact, and that can happen on your site, on air, in a tweet, in a conversation, anywhere. You just have to do the work and go where the audience already is.

• Fund into where the puck is going. Many nonprofit news organizations are in markets where the desire to level up is great (I’m looking at you, New Orleans) but the ability to get there needs a financial and technological boost. It also will contribute to deepening the community content flowing through the pipes, so that interfaces such as Facebook’s “Today In…” aren’t overrun with crime and car crashes.

• Take membership to the next level. Membership has become the darling of conversations about diversifying revenue streams for news organizations. (If your news organization has started substituting “subscriptions” for “membership,” you know what I mean.) Public media is masterful at membership, and far too many startup journalism sites have failed because they thought it would be easy to mimic. It’s not. 

• Amplify and broaden the conversation with major funders and technology companies about public media – at the local level. It’s easy to understand why they often get overlooked – each is locally owned, so it’s difficult to work at scale. (Hence the cliché of “If you’ve worked at one public radio station, you’ve worked at one public radio station.”) As founding executive director and CEO of the Local Media Consortium, believe me when I say there are ways to overcome this.

• Merge these conversations with efforts by community foundations to invigorate their communities. Mission-driven news organizations and mission-driven community foundations share similar goals for an informed, productive and involved community, but too often, these conversations happen in separate rooms. A great place to begin bringing them together is the Community Foundations Program at the Knight Foundation.

As a journalist who has worked in literally dozens of newsrooms, it is painful to watch the decline of trusted newspapers and the consolidation of ownership (and voice) of local TV stations. And it is easy to be pulled into that noir opera at every turn. But there is light glimmering on the horizon.

Run toward it. 

Why it takes two wings to fly

Each year brings its lessons, and the harder the knocks, the greater the wisdom – or whatever passes for that. This year’s lessons fell in four buckets for me: loss, forgiveness, appreciation and why it takes two wings to fly.

Loss of a company I helped build and the loss of colleagues I thought were more than that taught me that sometimes captains don’t quit teams, teams quit them. Loss of a father who had been my rock – in all senses, because sons always need something to push against and something to anchor them, and they’re usually the same rock – while simultaneously facing a mother’s memory loss taught me, again, what it means to be a mast in heavy weather.

Forgiveness of broken trusts, breeches and other reminders of peevish human behavior taught me that we don’t forgive to grant others a pass, but to relieve ourselves of the splinters in our sole. Or soul, I guess. Forgiveness of the way people who are here to help, who offer thoughts and prayers, who don’t really show up in any useful way but are eager to point out how you could do it better taught me to be kinder, because everyone is going through something.

Appreciation for true friends who showed up without being asked and put a barbell or beer in my hand taught me that friendship is not transactional, not the real stuff, and that the other kind is just wax. Appreciation for the love and strength of a good woman – who spent equal time this year holding my hand and kicking my ass – taught me that true companionship means being strong enough to be vulnerable.

At 52, I’ve worked – and, yes, lived – under the belief that personal strength, will and determination are what make all success possible: business, relationships, personal and physical health, creative pursuits, the mission and calling of our lives. And this year taught me that those abilities – those attributes and traits – are all part of one wing. You can flap that one wing as much as you’d like and you may get off the ground, but you’ll never truly fly. Because you need the other wing.

For me, 2018 taught me that there is another wing, and 2019 will be about developing that one. That wing is about being open to kismet, luck, coincidence, chance and change. Of letting go and letting the air lift you. Of understanding that there is more power in two hands, open and up, than there is in a single fist.

I wish you well. I hope your lessons of 2018 sow seeds of success in 2019 – with the knowledge that a new year always brings lessons of its own.

Cheers. 

Thanksgiving in Strength

Giving thanks in the face of loss – a counting of blessings while itemizing the reasons you have been beset by life’s nastiest and most devastating curveballs – always has struck me as a thinly veiled humble brag. A passive-aggressive ace thrown from a hand of twos and fives.

Yes. Life has dealt me these low pairs, but I’m thankful for this ace.

As my southern-born wife has taught me to respond, “Well, bless your heart.”

So on this Thanksgiving, as we recount blessings and sometimes catalog the ways we are triumphant over pain or betrayal or illness or chaos or death, I want to share what I’m genuinely thankful for: strength.

As I walked hospital halls in the weeks before my father’s death, one thought became my mantra: That’s what the strong is for, I don’t know where I first heard it; I’ve ascribed many of my one-liner guideposts to my father and grandfather, even though I’m pretty sure they never said them. But that line was my rod and staff.

That’s what the strong is for.

I’ve been lifting weights since I was 12 years old. An Irish build pretty much guaranteed that the rippling muscles Charles Atlas and Soloflex promised were not in the cards. I lift heavy and I lift often. I’m 175 pounds, just like I’ve been for most of my adult life, and that’s just how that’s going to be – but that’s not why I lift. I lift because you never know when strength is going to matter, maybe more than anything.

In business, it’s easy to be a leader when times are good. Leading an organization through recessions, secular changes, disruption, cost-cutting and layoffs, toxic personnel – up the ladder or down – calls on strength that isn’t showy or even externally noticeable. It’s what you trained for, whether you knew it or not.

That’s what the strong is for.

Reinventing your career? Putting kids through college? Dead furnace? Figuring out finances after an unexpected turn? Health and finance and family and career and storms and circumstance. All of it. 

You don’t put in the work without knowing that someday, you’ll have to put the work to work. That’s the bargain we make, the bargain we keep.

I am thankful for strength this Thanksgiving. I am thankful to have role models who have shown me – more than they ever told me – how to be strong. To remember when the winds howl: That’s what the strong is for.

Remembering the man who broke the Internet

The luckiest of us, I believe, count our parents as our greatest mentors. Other generous souls have nurtured and coached me through the years, but no one influenced me more than my father, Larry G. Coats. Dad died September 24, 2018, with family at his side and a legacy that will outlive us all. On September 29, I delivered a portrait of his life in the eulogy below, and only wish I’d nailed it as firmly as he’d landed so many speeches. Onward.

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I was on a business trip in 2004 to California’s Silicon Valley to visit clients now worth more than most nations when my father called. I was in a freeway snarl headed out of San Francisco Airport, brake and gas, brake and gas, and I picked up the line.

“Well,” he said gravely, “I’ve gone and done it.”

Most of you know my father. “Done it” could apply to an entire calliope of notes – some that inspire us, some that lilt, some that clank, some that arouse a greater purpose, some that just go bam, bam, bam. 

I avoided rear-ending a car on the 405 and said, “Gone and done what?”

He was silent for a while. “Nope. I shouldn’t say. I’ve gone and done it.” Another long pause. “The authorities are probably headed this way.”

Well. My Bay Area commute just became amazing.

Because with my father, you never knew.

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 Larry Gene Coats grew up as the child of a single mom, because his father was overseas in World War II. My grandmother worked odd jobs – including a drive-in theater – while my grandfather, Carl, was on the USS Missouri when the Japanese signed the Instruments of Surrender. Carl was headed into combat if Fat Man and Little Boy failed. “Gone and done it” meant surviving with Marjorie, and raising his little brother, Keith, on whatever food was the cheapest kind.

As a teenager, “gone and done it” meant something different. Mostly fast cars, cigarettes and Elvis Presley. I’d add “fast women,” but I’m his son, and we don’t speak of such things. Dad bored out a ’55 Chevy Bel Air and lowered it by torching the springs. A fast car for a short guy. Dad barely graduated high school – he was Summa Cum Cut-Up – at 5’1” (I followed closely in those footsteps, graduating at 5’4”) but he gassed up with aviator fuel and raced on abandoned runways. 

After graduating, “gone and done it” did not include college. It involved a parts truck and a lube gun at Willcox Chevrolet, after he was turned down for the same job at other dealerships in Southern Indiana. He’d lost his teeth by then – we forget how rural dental care really has its roots in fluoride and the idea of brushing with something other that foot powder – and took to the job with gusto. He was a hot rodder. Parts got there on time.

Back to California traffic. I said: “The authorities are headed your way? Dad, what did you do?”

I heard my mother in the background, in their motor home, somewhere in the back roads of America, say “Tell him, Larry.”

All my dad would say was, “Gone and done it. It’s done.”

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What “got done” from there was this: My father, with a poorly earned high school diploma, worked his way up from parts driver to a parts clerk at Willcox. (This is a big promotion.) And after World War II, my grandfather – thanks to FDR’s CCC program – had enough skills to get a factory job, rather than the agricultural life that had kept my family in poverty, pretty much since 1630. These skills also allowed my grandfather perspective on the United Autoworkers Union and its regular vacations, otherwise known as wildcat strikes.

 Which is why my grandmother continued to work odd jobs. And one of them was at an insurance agency run by George Hinton.

Some of you can see what is about to “get done.”

Marjorie was the receptionist for George and his partner, Corby. George had a daughter, who was at Indiana University. She graduated from Silver Creek High School the same year as my dad. Her name was Lin. (It’s actually Vera Lin, because that was a popular singer – “the Forces’ sweetheart” – but mom hates “Vera,” so Lin it is.) And Lin was home from Bloomington on Christmas break. 

“You should get in touch with Larry,” Marjorie said. She was black Irish. She had flint in her eyes and love in her veins. “He’d be happy to see you.”

Less than two years later, they married. Mom, raised Republican and known about town as being from a “good” family; dad, raised yellow-dog Democrat and definitely on the ready-to-be-gentrified side of the tracks. Coatses were elated. Hintons were skeptical. Willcox needed its clerk back, pronto.

Back to San Francisco traffic. “What’s done, dad? What did you do?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m on the computer. That one you gave me.”

Ah. I have been tech support for my father since I was a boy. Once, I was on a Cub Cadet in the front yard of our farm – my corners were sloppy – and my father appeared on the front porch. He rang the cast iron bell until he got my attention. I shut off the engine and ran to the house, where he was already in his recliner. He pointed at our pre-cable TV – four channels on two dials – and said, “Change this channel, Rusty. I can’t watch this shit.”

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After I and my sister, Pam, were “gone and done” being born, my father’s life went into overdrive, like downshifting that ’55 Bel Air. He went from parts clerk to General Manager at Willcox in a blur of promotions – it turns out you can run the table if the guy who owns the table doesn’t enjoy the game. He started building a network in the fraternal ways of old – Moose, Optimist, Elk. He helped like-minded politicians turn out the vote, then decided to seek a vote of his own.

Like-minded. That’s an interesting phrase to say now, when we seem so divided. But my dad didn’t view party lines as enemies, although we short guys are competitive to a fault. Instead, he looked at what needed to be “gone and done.”

So he ran on that. What are we going to get done? Roads? Jails? Reform? Education? I’m pretty sure our first “Vote Coats” campaign pins were stolen from Bacon’s, a department store. They were having a sale on parkas. Dad saw an angle. He saw an angle and he ran.

And won.

Back in San Francisco, I hear my dad say, “I was on the Internet.”

Traffic is a horror show south of San Francisco. Café motorcycle riders split lanes as if they want to eat mirror glass. I said, “Netscape or AOL?”

Don’t judge. It was 2004.

My dad spent 16 years in public office and influenced Indiana politics across three decades. He also was my inspiration for being a hacker. One Monday night at Willcox – I worked in the body shop and the sales floor stayed open until 11 pm, I think to sober up some of the salesmen from their weekend blackouts – I air-gunned my jumpsuit and came up to meet dad. He was in the sales clerk office, sitting by the first computer Willcox installed. It was the size of a hatchback.

“Look,” he said, staring at the square green lines of text. I saw serial numbers, makes and models of familiar cars. He said, “That’s how our competition is pricing those cars.” And then he reduced the prices of similar models at Willcox. And sold them.

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Back in traffic. “Netscape,” he said. “You said AOL is for losers.”

Well, yes, I did. I stand by it. More importantly: “Dad, what about the Internet?”

“No, I can’t say. I gone and done it.”

Long breath from me. “Just tell me.”

And then he gave it up. “Rusty, I gone and broke the Internet.”

I almost drove into a guardrail. Finally, I said, “Dad, I don’t think so.” But I wasn’t completely sure.

See, my dad came from nothing. Our family had lived in poverty for centuries until fate and grit got us over a hump so many families see in their headlights. He married a woman of higher station – and then made her disbelieving parents proud of a blue-collar Chevy man. He ran for office and rose to become the most powerful man in Clark County – and I have many forgiven speeding tickets to thank for that, because I also inherited my father’s lead foot. He retired at 48 with the certainty that he could make that work over the long haul. He took my mother on the road for that long haul for 16 years in motor homes and saw all 50 states – sometimes calling me from Winnemucca when I thought he was in Birmingham. He had the audacity to become an artist late in life, carving and turning wood to sell at craft shows. He ran thrift stores and churches without ruffling feathers – until he needed to. He became a fixture at St. Leo basketball games and sometimes attended a baseball game with me, even though he hated baseball.

If anyone could break the Internet, it was my dad.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t think you broke the Internet.” I began to mansplain. “The Internet was built by the Department of Defense to connect scientists and governments in the event of nuclear war. It’s –“

He interrupted: “Nope. It’s broke. I gone and done it.”

I tried another tack. “Dad, what are you seeing?”

He said, “I shouldn’t say. The authorities –“

“Dad,” I said, “what are you seeing?”

He let out a long gust of air. My dad is one of history’s epic snorers. I share this. He said, “I see a gray screen. Like metal. It says ‘404 NOT Found.’”

Traffic cleared in front of me. I said, “Dad, it’s a bad link. Hit the back button.”

“No,” he said. “That won’t do it. I gone and –“

“Hit the back button.”

A moment passed. I heard his finger clack on the plastic key of the Toshiba. Then:

“Never mind. It’s back. Bye.” Click.

My dad had gone and done it. Again.