Cooking; I have to admit, that from the time I was a little boy playing with the thick aluminum pans on the floor of mom’s kitchen, I have always had a fascination with food and cooking.  Not just eating mind you, which I love oh so much, but the actual process of cooking.  Everything about food, from the artistry of how it looks on a plate, to its color, textures on the tongue and the combination flavors. I probably should have gone to culinary school and started a restaurant of my own but, no doubt, I would have ate and drank up all the profits.

Mom was a very good cook.  She made the basics and followed recipes to a tee.  I don’t ever remember a bad meal.  But Mom colored between the lines and rarely experimented with a dash of this or that.  Mom was precise; she was a registered nurse, and during certain periods of our growing up, she would have the 3PM to 11PM shift and dad would make us something to eat.  Dad, on the other hand, colored outside the lines.  Granted, he only made two things; omelets and pancakes, but he made these with flair.  He would add chocolate chips or bananas or anything else that seemed fitting to his pancakes; he would put whatever was in the fridge in his omelets, as long as there was cheese. Most of these dishes were successful, some were not, but maybe that is where I learned to experiment.

When I was in college, I often cooked for my 3 college roommates, albeit on a college student’s tight budget; always mindful of saving enough money for the important things like skiing and beer.  Sometimes, I would buy one of those large cans of Chef Boyardee; add browned ground beef, garlic, basil and other spices lying around the kitchen; serve with a wedge of iceberg lettuce and some Viva Italian along with a cheap glass of vino fino. My roommates thought I was a male Julia Child; and all for less than $2 a head.  I loved the Crockpot and experimented with everything in the slow cooker, which ideally lent itself to the skiing and college lifestyle.  You’d put everything in the pot in the morning, and it would be ready for the hungry hippos when they returned home from a day on the slopes, er college classrooms.  I tried everything from the simple pot roast, stews, roast chickens to the headier boeuf bourguignon.  I loved experimenting; I had some successes and I had some disasters.

People pleaser that I was, I quickly realized that you could win the hearts of others through cooking; that it pleased people immensely; plus it usually saved money.  Enter my bachelor years after moving back east from Colorado.  You know how the saying goes, ‘a way to a woman’s heart is through her tummy’, or something like that.  I loved to cook (and show off a little), they loved to eat. I bought my bachelors pad, for its kitchen, nestled away in Queen Village, the old section in Philadelphia near Independence Hall and bordering the famous eating and drinking strip called South Street.  A charming little brownstone built in 1842 with a kitchen to die for.  I couldn’t afford living room furniture, but the kitchen was fitted to the 9’s.  Center island cooking, beautiful pans, Sub Zero refrigerator…all the gadgetry; I was in a bachelor’s cooking heaven. 

Sharing the experience; But I digress; I jumped from my short bachelorhood of cooking and eating head-long into a relationship with Kathy. Oh man could she cook.  Up until now, I had somehow managed to date only women who couldn’t cook; who needed a man to cook for them.  Love changed all that and, alas, my cooking prowess was no longer special; and what’s more, there was now competition in the house.  I married that girl; winning each other through our love of cooking (and eating).  After we got married, Kathy cooked the lion’s share of meals, relegating me to the role of sous chef pulling out my pots and pans, only for those times we entertained or the occasional weekend dinner.  When Kathy cooks, no two days are the same; new dishes almost every night, new experimenting; never a dull moment and rarely a weak dish. When we would entertain company, we often fought over who got to cook what.  Over the years, on these occasions, it has generally evolved that I cook the entrée plus the salad, while Kathy whips up extraordinary appetizers, usually a soup and the dessert.  For a time, we even auctioned off dinners in our home for charity auctions.  We love cooking and sharing something you both love that much, makes the bond even stronger. 

Before we had our two daughters, we had a sailboat on the Chesapeake bay; we cooked up a storm on the boat every weekend; sharing our love of food and life.  Then came the kids; how the products of our genes could end up eating only 3 things is still one of life’s great mysteries; no matter how hard we tried, they would only eat grilled cheese, pizza and chicken fingers.  Kathy tried almost every day to get them to try what she and I loved so much.  These two little girls, and otherwise joys of our life, ruined just about every possibility of a good meal you could hope for.  Dining in or out, food with my little princesses was anything BUT a pleasure; for nearly 17 years, Kathy became a short order cook.  She and I would eat our version of a gourmet meal, and the girls would have pizza, chicken fingers or grilled cheese.  That’s it!  Period.  It severely limited options for going out too; please no green stuff (parsley or basil) on the pizza.

Happy Ending and the confessions of a Food Channel addict – Alas, over time, exposure to watching their parents eat and cook well, our two daughters have grown to have some pretty remarkable palates. It took each of them nearly 18 years to get there, but both not only try new things now, but they even cook!  If there is a TV on somewhere in the house, you can bet good money that someone is watching the Food Channel or a PBS cooking show.  And while I normally loathe reality TV (except for Deadliest Catch and the occasional Ice Road Trucker) I have become a closet addict of the reality cooking shows.  I almost never miss an episode of Top Chef, Hells Kitchen, Iron Chef or the Next Food Network Star.  Admitting the latter is really kind of embarrassing, as it would be more fitting if I bragged about watching every episode of Nova or the McNeil Lehrer report.  I do watch more than my share of business news, the History Channel and Discovery, but I find it a little liberating to come out of the closet and confess of this love of cooking shows.

The happy ending is that, now, when the girls are home from school, on nights like tonight; the four of us will sit together and watch the final episode of the Next Food Network Star; we will discuss flavors, textures and presentation.  We will kibitz about who did what, wrong and how the editors try to use their teasers to make you feel that the wrong person is going to get Chopped (another good cooking show).  But we will do it together, as a family.  I don’t know if it was the genes, the environment, the cooking shows, or what finally got the girls to eat, but now we all share a passion for cooking.  What was once a love for cooking that I had as a young man, is now something we share as a family.  Life is good (and tasty).

My first real love was the Jersey tomato.  I fell in love with this sweet and juicy masterpiece of Mother Nature long before I fell in love with my wife or had my two beautiful daughters.  For those of you who have never lived in the Northeast, or had a Jersey tomato, I can only describe it as a little piece of heaven. The Jersey tomato is so remarkable (lasting only a few short months), that it has virtually ruined eating tomatoes for me, during the remaining 9 or 10 months of the year.  Up there with the white truffle, the perfect baby back rib or Angus prime steak, eating a Jersey tomato renders the Californian, Floridian and Chilean tomato eating experience to something that can only be described as digesting a wet woody red piece of cardboard.   

During the period of nuclear winter, known as the off-Jersey tomato season, other worldly tomatoes can only be experienced with long cooking periods and copious amounts of garlic, basil and olive oils to make them anything like palatable.  I confess, I am a Jersey tomato snob.  And the same can be said for Jersey corn, rendering corn eaten in the other 9 months, only suitable for cows as feed.  What makes Jersey corn and the Jersey tomato so unique, I’m told, is the combination of salt, sandy soil, hot days and warm nights that bring out the sugars in both.  For me, the end of July is like a culinary Christmas, marking the beginning of food nirvana available for the picking in my own backyard or at the neighborhood farm stand; never more than two minutes away.   New Jersey is often maligned, and in some cases, especially with our ridiculous politics, deservedly so.  But it is often overlooked for its, produce (didn’t get the nickname ‘Garden State’ for ‘nutin), its seafood and incredible neighborhood food.  Eating is good on the Garden’s plate.

Boy vs. Girls; One of the great mysteries of this great life we lead, especially to the keen (tongue in cheek) observer like me, is the remarkable differences between boys and girls.  Beyond the obvious, I often wonder why guys are so sloth like, slovenly and generally unremarkable in their approach to creature comforts.  When I headed off to college in Max, my ’69 Beetle with green shag carpeting, a Coors tap handle for a stick shift and a killer stereo, I needed only to worry about few things to satisfy all my creature comforts.  I needed my stereo speakers (the small 24” tall pair, as opposed to my 3 foot Cerwin Vega’s that could take the roof off a dorm room); an amp; my turntable; a dozen or so albums (they were vinyl, so they took up more room than CD’s or the 2,000 songs that fit snuggly in your pocket on an iPod); 3 pairs of jeans; some t-shirts, flannel shirts; sneakers; boots; sheets, towels & a pillow; my Crockpot; a typewriter (no laptops or desktops back then) and my ski gear.  Except for the skis, all of that fit neatly into the back seat of my tiny little bug, still leaving room for at least one other person, if I so chose.  My shopping list for ‘new things’ needed for the 3 ½ hour trip to school, and for the next three months until I got home for Thanksgiving, were things like shampoo, deodorant, a new comb, several 3-packs of tightie whities from JCP, a pair of cords if I needed to dress-up (I didn’t), and a new tomato crate to hold my record albums. 

I was talking to a good friend yesterday, who is my age and has two boys the same age as my two girls.  His boys, like my daughters, are both going to be in college this year, one a senior and the other a freshman.  When I asked if they were all prepared to go off to college, he said that they were both working up on the Cape this summer, and that he expected them to come home next week, pack a suitcase and some essentials, and they would be off a few days later with, maybe two suitcases worth of stuff in toto. 

My girls on the other hand, which I have on good authority are pretty similar to most girls heading off to college are an entirely different story.  Daughter #1 (D1), is my rising senior, a communications major/sociology minor, who is moving into her own apartment with another girl; and Daughter #2 (D2), is my actress who will be a freshman BFA acting major in the fall. D1, for the past 3 weeks, has taken over the better part of our dining room and ½ of a two car garage as a staging area for her trip down to Washington.  For this pilgrimage we have rented a 14’ cargo truck, which appears likely be filled to the roof top.  Understandably, this is an apartment, and it does require the requisite, couch, kitchen/coffee tables, bed, bedroom set, desk, etc. etc. The cost of rental and fuel will likely be double the value of the contents of the truck, and I am anticipating that we will need to rent one again in the spring after she graduates.  Not a good return on investment, but it makes her and her mother happy.  There is lots of priming, painting and re-finishing going on in the back yard.  Dad, the resident sysadmin and networking expert, is busy working on computer stuff for the two girls; I just finished cutting and sanding a top to D1’s new (old) coffee table and will start building the necessary framework for a fabric wall (hate to tell you how much this is going to cost) to separate the dining room from the living room, which is being fashioned into a 2^nd bedroom of this formerly one bedroom apartment.  I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg of the ‘dad work’ that will be required in the coming weeks before we shove off to Washington DC. 

D2, has commanded the living room as her staging area.  It blows my mind how much attention to detail one’s (remember this is a girl) first dorm room requires.  Duvets, and duvet cover, matching pillow sham, dust ruffles, bed risers, fabric covered bulletin board that coordinates perfectly with the aforementioned bed décor; desk accessories; pots, pans, plates & other kitchen stuff (note, the dorm does not have a kitchenette); vacuum cleaner; iron & ironing board; additional bulletin boards; magnetic board; posters, prints & wall hangings (plus special no-stick 3M wall hangers); TV (roommate is bringing the fridge); computer & printer; iPod & docking station/clock radio combo; pillows galore; lap-desk; clothes, clothes and more clothes.  This will easily fill 75% of our 8 passenger Honda Pilot SUV plus a roof rack carrier barely leaving room for the driver (Moi), D2 and her mother.  No doubt much more will be bought at Target when we arrive in Boston and discover what’s missing, not to mention what’s to be shipped in the following weeks. 

Then vs. Now; Permit me to reflect on what a difference technology has meant to our new college students.  I had the latest in cutting edge technology when I shipped off to school; my Crockpot, turntable, speakers, Abbey Road, Layla, Dark Side of the Moon, an alarm clock and my brand new Royal electric typewriter that I got for high school graduation plus 12 sheets of correction paper for the nights of typing and retyping from sleep deprived mistakes and my, less than ideal typing skills.  Communication needs were much simpler (and cheaper) then, I needed only a couple of dimes (in the even I lost one) for the payphone to make my requisite collect call each Sunday to tell everyone I was fine and to occasionally ask for a little money.   

Today, TV’s, DVD players, laptops, printers, printer cartridges, paper, iPods, cords, cords and more back-up cords for everything that isn’t wireless or Blue Tooth; mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards, and internet access have completely changed the technological landscape.  I asked Casey my good friend and techno mentor if I should get the girls Mac’s or PC’s; and after thinking about it for a minute, he suggested PC’s.  This bemused me as he is a total Mac OS nerd. When I asked why he would recommend the lowly (in his mind) PC, he asked me if I wanted to hear from them when they went off to school.  I replied in the affirmative.  He said that they would always be having problems with their PC’s and would be calling Dad, the sysadmin, to fix them over the phone.  I thought long and hard about what he said … and bought the PC laptops. 

NOTE regarding the difference of going to college with today’s technologies: Back when I was getting ready for college and we got our assigned roommate, we called each other to introduce ourselves over a land line (touch-tone mind you) one-time and it was ‘catch as catch can’ when we met for the first time in the fall.  Today, it is an entirely different story.  D2 received notice of her roommate and within 24 hours they were email and Facebook pen pals.  D2’s RA contacted her within 48 hours of the room assignment and half the kids assigned to her floor were already in contact with each other via Facebook comparing everything from majors and social preferences to things that were going to happen on day 1 when they arrive.  They will probably know each other better before stepping out of the car onto campus than I knew of my peers when I left after my first entire year at college.  Email, IM, texting, Facebooking, Tweeting and other messaging technology like Skype have completely changed the college experience.  Daily calls from their unlimited family text and minute plan mobile phones, thrice daily, or more, text messages back and forth, have completely eliminated the line at the payphone a the end of the dorm hall on Sunday’s.  I kind of like that; it lets you know they are alive and takes the mystery out of wondering if you will hear from them on Sunday.  The Paradigm has shifted indeed; WiFi, Bluetooth, WAP, XML over HTTP, high speed VOIP, internet and cloud computing have long since changed everything.  Long gone are the days of White-Out and correct-it paper. Today’s only caution is to not print too much in color because your $45 color ink cartridge needs to last a full semester.  Even D2’s printer is WiFi.  The cords are primarily for power and back-up when all else fails. Music, words, pictures and film are all digital.  D2 is still taking Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon and Eric Clapton’s Layla, along with 2000 more songs neatly packed in 4 ounces of hardware plus earbuds.  While, the old soul that she is, has a turntable and all of my favorite records, there will be no more vinyl at college, or falling asleep with the needle of the record player clicking back and forth over and over on Stairway to Heaven, until you wake up. 

I have to admit; I love the new technology and vastly prefer the iPods and Pandora to my cherished vinyl.  Staying in touch and hearing that my girls are ‘alive’ on a daily basis will be a great comfort when their mother and I face our first season of ‘empty nesting’.  And if this year is anything like D1’s first year at college, we will hear from them regularly.  That may be another astonishing difference between boys and girls.  According my friends with college boys, they do have the same technology to communicate with home but they don’t use it like girls do and that, for this father of two daughters, is a good thing.  Yes we are pushing our daughters out of the nest in a few weeks, albeit more like driving them out of the nest with truck loads of accessories and appropriate décor, but we know we are never more than a click away from touching them and knowing their okay.

 Memorial Service Eulogy for my friend Sam… 6 JUNE 2009 

Mark Twain said … Let us endeavor so, to live… that when we come to die… even the undertaker will be sorry.

And the undertaker is surely sorry… Probably nothing describes my friend Sam and his impact on those around him, in a better way.  

Sam and I knew each other for close to 20 years, and like two little old ladies, probably spoke to each other most days, for more than half those years.   We met when I worked at the Packet, and he for the A&B.  I remember hanging out at the Jazz Festival on Palmer Square.  We argued for the longest time on how to make the best baby back ribs.   He grilled his first with barbeque sauce and then slow cooked them in the oven … I did exactly the opposite cooking the rack for hours and then a quick fire on the grill.  We each tried the other’s way… only to be more convinced that our way was better.   We shared the love of our families … He and I both loved being Dads;   we shared the love of food… of eating and of cooking …he was probably a better cook, though I would never admit that; we often shared our love of music … he sang and played in the band, the Shaxe, although I merely listened to music on the stereo and sang in the shower.  We were both very passionate about our golf games, but if I am being honest, neither of us did that well.    Sam was honest to a fault.  He always admitted doing things or saying things he regretted and held himself to a high standard…except with golf.   Golf frustrated us both to no end. Whenever he played with his friend Tom, he would tell me he that he shot in the 80’s, but whenever he played with me, he like me, rarely broke a 100.  You do the math.

Sam was, without a doubt one of the most caring human beings I ever knew.  He was oh so kind and would give just about anybody, the shirt off his back.  Everyone that knew Sam felt that they had a special relationship with him and that he always treated them like family.  He was a modern day Will Rodgers and ‘never met a man he didn’t like’.  When I talked with many of his friends and acquaintances this past week, I heard comments like…

• “You never had to look around for Sam…he was always there and always full of warmth”.
• Another said… “There was a kind of richness and depth to Sam.”
• Colleagues and patients from Princeton House where Sam worked as a counselor all commented on how helpful, selfless and loving he was.  One said, and I quote, “He was like an anchor for his patients.” 
• One mutual friend commented just this week, “come on, do you honestly know anybody that didn’t love Sam?” 

Like many of us, he smoke a little too much… on occasion he drank a bit too much, but he never, NEVER stopped using that to help others.  In the ironic and tragic loss of his life…it is important to tell you, that he helped to save many other lives.  And this week, numerous people have come to me to pass along these stories.

How lucky we have been to have had such a friend that makes saying goodbye so hard.  I can honestly say that there are only a few people who have walked into my life and changed it forever.   Of course there is my wife and my two daughters, but also, there was Sam.

Sam, to you I say … I am angry that you left me, your family, Sue and your friends so soon … because I’m really not ready for you to go.   But go my friend.  I love you and will miss you.  Your daughter Kate; your son Jonathan; your soul mate Susan; Nan, Sim and the rest of your family and friends are in good hands.  You have graced my life more than you will ever know.

So in the words of the Irish blessing that my Dad so often imprinted on my memory…

May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back.  May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again (in heaven), may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

More and more start-ups and re-starts are looking for advice on getting funded in this challenging economy.  So many founders/CEO’s have asked for advice so I will try to memorialize my feedback to them in a single letter to my friends and colleagues caught up in this scary maze of securing finances.

Dear Entrepreneurs, Founders and CEOs:

As I explained in our recent conversation, and it is worth repeating, there is plenty of money out there if your skin is thick enough and if you have the time, patience and the moxie to stick with the process.  The window or pipeline for capitalizing your venture is extraordinarily narrow and the many excuses for not considering and investment in your company will be numerous and plentiful.   Most companies that I meet like yours, or maybe it’s just my perception, are long on hope and short on capital.  Many, if not most, won’t get funding.  But some companies and entrepreneurs like you, who have the following abilities and company characteristics, can get funded; you must be relentlessly persistent; you will need to be flexible; your company will have strong management with that supports your vision; you will have to have some actual sales, contracts and a pipeline of sales that validates your business model; and finally your business model will exhibits significant upside for an exit.    

You’ve got all these strengths you say?  Then read on… raising private equity today is very much like the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears. For most VC’s, even the ones with money to burn, the value proposition must be JUST RIGHT.  It can’t be too big, it can’t be too small, it’s gotta be just right.  For private equity to take notice of your business venture today, your company has to be the perfect fit.  Recently, I introduced, what I thought, was an ideal prospect to a venture firm that seemingly fit all their required key performance indicators (KPIs), where all the metrics for the investment fit.   It complimented their portfolio & mission; the management and founders were solid; the valuation and exit expectations fit like a glove; the prospect company could virtually guarantee $5mm in revenue in 2009; it seemed nearly perfect.  But alas, this prospective portfolio company only generated $750k in revenues in 2008; the VC wanted $2mm, and the metric for just one out of seven KPI’s, was too low.  So the final analysis from ‘Goldilocks’ was, “come see us in 9 months”.  Just this morning, after meetings and some serious due diligence for a company that I had introduced to another VC, they passed on an investment because they could get their arms around the market size.  In this case their perception of the potential market was that it couldn’t be big enough.  I have seen this situation repeat itself time after time.  Like the character Goldilocks, most venture capital firms today, have to have just the right portfolio prospect; it has to be just the right size, with the expected revenue the previous year and the proper hockey stick of projected revenue over the next five years; the perception must be that your management team can deliver your value proposition; that they or a respected investor are willing to take the initiative to be a investor; the expected exit opportunity must fit their timetable; and the pre-money valuation needs to be a ‘great value’ in this economy, although they won’t tell you that.  If you are persistent enough, you meat their criteria of a strong management team, value proposition and have revenue validating your business model, you may very well get funding in this economy. 

But I digress.  Your first choice for raising capital, if you are at, or even close to EBITDA positive, is to finance.  If your business model is growing, is sustainable and has real legs, by all means, finance, finance, finance.  This is, almost always, the first and best choice, if you can qualify for terms and you can afford the payments.  Banks rarely, if ever, require a board seat; they won’t tell you how and when to spend the money; and they are generally happy with a modest, by private equity standards, return on their investment. 

Running up the ladder of preferences, your second preference should be trying to land a strategic investor.   Strategic investors are terrific; they are usually an existing customer or prospective client that likes your company enough to pay for your product or services and then to consider investing with your company.  Ideally, they need your product or service to strengthen some aspect of their own offering.  Again, generally speaking, strategic investors seldom have any desire for a board seat or a strong urge to tell you how to use your proceeds; they rarely put much emphasis on valuation; they don’t tell you how to run your company; and best of all (next to the money that they are putting in) they become one of your best references.  For those of you who remember, it’s a little bit like the Gillette razor commercials in the 70’s, where Robert Kraft (who owns the New England Patriots) said, “I loved the razor so much, I bought the company”.  And, to that end, here is another bonus of strategic investors; they can often be one of your best potential ‘exit’ prospects.

Your third and final choice will be venture capital, aka Goldilocks, who come bundled with the added burden of the ‘perfect fit’.  Be prepared to contact firms with a ration of 10:1 just to get an appointment.  You should target first, if possible, prospective investors that might be to willing to lead the round.  As you probably already know, to lead a round of investment, they will have the resources and inclination to do comprehensive due diligence on your company prior.  Other investors will respect that ‘lead’ mentality and jump in at the agreed upon terms after due diligence. For some VC’s the expectation for ROI at exit, is 2-3X on multiples of investment; for another it might be 10X.  For most venture firms, and I think this still frustrates them, long gone are the expectations of 20X (even though we can always dream).  To be considered by a VC firm today, the expectation of pre and post money is not critical at the beginning, because the market will set the value in due diligence.  You just have to decide if you can live with it.

So, in conclusion…try not to let your company get undercapitalized, or you significantly run the risk of failure.   If you can get the money now get it, and get as much as you can, even if it means a little added dilution.  You don’t want to spend the majority of your time, and I have been there myself too many times, raising the necessary capital to pave the runway for a longer takeoff.  Be persistent; use all your network and social networks like the hundreds available on networks like LinkedIn.  Go for financing first, if you qualify; strategic investors second; and VC’s third.  You may have to give up a little more equity if you have to.   There is the right capital option out for almost any business solution or offering; how much of your company that you have to give up will be dictated by market conditions; expected exit value and whether or not you have validating revenue.  Don’t give up, but don’t be greedy either.

Good Luck (you will need a little).

Best regards,

PLEASE NOTE: That this Blogengine blew up this week.  I am making every effort to recreate the pages, but unfortunately all the responses, ratings and relative cloud was lost.  If you were one of the respondents whose posts were lost, please feel free to re-post if you care to. 

Michael

1.)        Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. - Voltaire

Waiting for the fat envelopes to come is a form of madness.  Fat envelopes – with words like ‘On behalf of our entire faculty and staff, I am pleased to inform you…’, ‘Congratulations’ and ‘take time to ‘Celebrate’, as opposed to the little skinny window envelopes – with words like ‘we’re sorry to have to tell you this’, ‘not everyone’, and ‘we’ve had more applications this year than there are words in Webster’s Dictionary’… you get the picture.   This is the year that daughter #2 (D#2) graduates from high school and heads off to college.  Oh happy day, save for the minor inconvenience of tuition costs (more about that later), Mom and Dad have finally reached that well-deserved and coveted stage of life; empty nesters!   

But wait, there is this little thing called the college application process (CAP).  The CAP began 18 months ago with the beginning of the happy college visits.  School after school, town after town, all pre-vetted for academic excellence.  Unfortunately at the beginning of this process, those of you who have college aged children realize that more hinges on the quality of the tour guide, the schools colors and what the name looks like on a sweatshirt than much of anything else. 

The CAP then migrates into worrying about the junior/senior year class load; whether or not you have enough AP or honors courses; and of the dreaded SAT exams.  The angst of the latter can be smoothed out a little by taking the SAT prep course.  The stress of the former however, is designed specifically to punish D#2’s father and give him gray hairs.   

The next phase, having selected the schools that pass all the strictest criteria such as town, sweatshirt, food, dorms, tour guides, what the other students look like walking around campus, and occasionally, to indulge her father, the institutional academics; is to submit the college application.  That is an amazingly complex process in and of itself.  But wait; there is the essay, the recommendation letters, and the decision of whether or not to apply early decision.  ED NOTE: For those of you who have not yet gloried in the CAP process, I highly recommend pushing your child, with all the credibility that you have left with your rising college student, to accept the early decision process.  Our dear D#1 did this, was accepted by her 1^st choice back in that December a few years ago; the rest of the applications were withdrawn and everyone had a college sweatshirt, auto window sticker and I, my logoed golf cap, under the tree by Christmas. 

2.)        Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence. - Edgar Allan Poe

 Poe’s definition of madness came to mind after spending more than we had originally planned to spend on college, on college prep schools pushing, year after year, to make the grades that would be good enough to get D#2 into med school.  And then, she has an epiphany and decides, instead, to become an ‘actress’!  Since our daughters were old enough to speak, her mother and I have told them that they could be anything they wanted to when they grew up; to follow their passions and to never look back.  With D#2, the plan was right on track, and up until maybe five years ago, she was almost assuredly going to be a scientist or doctor.  I was already planning my early retirement because she could then take care of Mom and Dad in their old age.  Despite her mother and father’s limited intelligence, D#2 is really a brilliant kid.  But D#2 had a religious conversion three years ago, when she got a semi-lead in a high school musical, almost by accident, after the original actor had to drop out.  And the rest as they say is history.  In the past three years, D#2 has been in probably a dozen productions and, in many of them had the lead.  She is so in love with the theater that she has written and is directing a play that is being staged at the end of this month; and I have to admit, D #2 is really a good actor.  She’s passionate, dedicated and curious about the craft. 

Back to the application process; when, at a recent audition for college (yes, I said audition – it isn’t enough to have the grades, the boards, the essays and recommendations to get into a BFA Acting program; as an ‘actor’ you also have to audition in order to earn your fat envelope) a father asked “how will you help our children get placed after college?”  The admissions director for this prominent northeastern university thought for a moment, crossed his arms and replied, “I am not sure you understand sir, (long pause) this may be the only college major where we train your child to be professionally unemployed” in other words, preparing your student to be a waitress at Denny’s.  I think that is the kind of madness that Poe was referring to.   

3.)        Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. - Freidrich Nietzsche

I am pretty sure college is not worth the money that they charge now days.  But I am absolutely certain that we, as a society, would probably not have allowed the cost of tuition to rise as it has, if it were not for peer pressure and cultural expectations.   

4.)        The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means. - Napoleon Bonaparte

There is nothing that prepared D#2’s mom and I, for the cost of college. When my girls were born, our insurance man said, if your child was to go to an Ivy school, it will cost X; and state schools would be ½ X, or less.  Certain that it would be unlikely that a child of mine would actually grace the ivy covered halls of the ‘league’ we saved ½ X.  But unfortunately, we spent more than that on prep school.  What’s wrong with this picture?  Today, most state colleges actually cost more than our financial genius advisor projected the Ivy League schools to be.  College tuition costs have actually out performed inflation for the past 20 years by a ratio of 2:1. This is surely the madness that Napoleon was speaking of. 

We live vicariously through our beautiful children in hopes to give them a little edge over what we had when we were their age, so we press on.  After all, what are parents for?

 5.)        There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.  - Aristotle

Oh, and here is the madness of the fine print for BFA actors.  One would think (I know I was a little guilty) that a ‘mere’ acting major would be a step or two above ‘basket weaving’ for the admissions process; that you only need to be able to spell your name to get into an acting program…not so fast, no, no, no.  Get this; the likes of the top private universities in the northeast accept about 30-35% of their applicants; state schools 45-60% acceptance rates; and Princeton, just down the road, along with the rest of the Ivy’s accept about 10% of their applicants.  Are you ready?  The good BFA acting programs at the same universities admit only 2% of their applicants...talk about stress at our house…argh!!!  She could have more easily gotten into medical school.  

6.)        No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. - Aristotle

So because these acting programs audition all their applicants in venues all around the good old USA, the schools don’t send out their letters until the end of March, beginning of April.  The period between auditions in January and delivery of the letters in April, seems to age student and parent 10 years.   But alas, the letters have come; some fat…some skinny.  D#2 is thrilled with her choice and the ‘acceptance’ has been made.  My daughter and her mother are happy.  I’m happy (and broke).   

And all is right with the world!

Like me, you are probably tired of hearing the death knell of the newspaper and print industry, in general.  But I have to admit that I am now coming to the very reluctant conclusion that the ‘printed’ form of newspapers, like the old videotape recorder, will most likely cease to exist within the foreseeable future.  There is simply no practical reason for (printed) newspapers and magazines to survive.  And, unless the news/journalism industry finds a realistic solution to create real substantive revenue to fund the generation of online news stories, especially good investigative journalism, news coverage as we know it is at risk.  A good solid enterprise investigative piece can easily cost a newspaper tens of thousands of dollars and it is not unusual for them to run well into six figures, before all is said and done.  Additionally, financial costs aside, this does not consider the risks taken by journalists being put into harms way in remote corners of the world.  Good investigative pieces will no longer be de rigueur.  The compensation to file a story from a war zone, for example, will simply not justify the costs and the personal risks. 

‘Rip and read’ broadcast news will no longer be well fed from the trough of story lines generated by the print media from which they have been feeding from over the past 40 years.  Aggregators of content, the new online paradigm, may have nothing to link to, since 80% of the words online come from a print originating story.  

So what happens in the new digital paradigm, one with out print?  We have already seen a host of new content aggregators including Andrew Breitbart’s breitbart.com and Michel Wolfe’s Newser.  And I have had the privilege of working with a new company in Eastern Europe with a promising predictive content personalization technology that uses behavioral targeting to aggregate stories. As a recent story in Advertising Age¹ illustrates, the seeds of news content comes from a prevalence of poaching stories.  In one month of Politico 14,749 web sites excerpted all or part of Politico stories.  7,101 of these websites sold ads around those stories, and 29% of the average story amounts were excerpted. For one particular Politico story followed for this article, 50 individual sites excerpted all or part of the story; 30 websites provided links back to Politico (40% did not link back and likely had no attribution); 13 copied more than 50% of the story; and only 1 website, Yahoo, has a formal distribution deal.  

A great deal has been said and written in recent weeks regarding content aggregators.  But, if there is no good income model online; if nobody will opt for micropayments; if nobody subscribes, how long can (good) journalism survive?   Understandably, there will always be a dearth of opinion, blog and excerpting of the viral web.  But what happens if we lose field reporting in areas of conflict or undercover pieces that cost many thousands of dollars?  Will news become so homogenized that we lose any real investigative substance?  The vast majority of news content online today originates from a newspaper which thereby creates the very thread of stories and opinion that make up online content/opinion as we know it.  New age publishers are going to have to figure out a way to generate revenue in ways that don’t involve dead trees, or they will fail.

So I pose this hypothetical question:  If a strong news core goes the way of VCR’s and film cameras, will there be anything left to aggregate online?  

¹http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135627

Too funny - http://ginx.com/-ELmkh

I didn’t want to like it; I don’t want to use it; but I feel a perverse sense of guilt when I don’t update it; Doctor, I have a new addiction and am ‘powerless over Twitter’.  I do it not so much to feel the narcissistic pleasures of telling others what I am doing but, instead, I tweet so that the cycle continues and I get fed more ideas.  So it is with a peculiar sort of ‘awareness’ of others and their thoughts that I trudge forward with a tweet here and a tweet there.

Thankfully, a lot has been written recently, about the business uses and efficacy of Twitter, and I am now just beginning to see the light.  This past Friday, I read the terrific blog ‘4.5 things Twitter teaches us’ at http://tinyurl.com/c7k88f, and it helped to assuage my guilt.  What I realized, is that what I really get out of using Twitter today, is ideas.  Of late, I have bookmarked more good reading, great websites, insightful vlogs and cool blogs from my Twitter followings than I have through traditional resources.  For example, I am now following my digital mentor’s tweets, Howard Rheingold (BTW - he doesn’t know he’s my mentor, and probably doesn’t care and that’s OK).  I mean this is the guy that got me into the internet game in a big way back in 1993 with his book the Virtual Community (see my blog from March 15^th).  And as if speaking directly to me, last Friday a little ‘tweet’ from @hreingold, and I am peering into his mind, a virtual voyeur, at http://tinyurl.com/bexwha with his postulations about the Public Sphere in an Internet Age.  As geeky as it seems, I cannot wait to hear more musings on the subject plus continue to follow the tweets of this extraordinary mind.   Also worth noting, and in the same vein of cerebral academics, Clay Shirky, @cshirky, a consultant and adjunct professor from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) comes into my world via Twitter off-and-on all day. 

My head is being filled with snippets and peeps into the minds of some very intriguing people.  Yes there is the mindless blather of the day to day snippets of life, but there is more, way more, substance to it.  The tweets on Twitter of those I choose to follow, force me to think and sometimes that is more thinking than I want.  But like looking at a car accident in the opposing lanes of the freeway, you can’t but help but stare.  I follow tweets from Walt Mossberg, @waltmossberg, from the WSJ and Peggy Noonan @peggynoonan, a former Bush speechwriter who I regularly follow in the Journal and who I had the pleasure of participating in an interview with, at the New York Press. Then there are friends and family like Laird, @laird, and my sister-in-law @jackieOMy, whose tweets are restricted to only those who she gives access to.  I could add dozens, if not hundreds more, but it would seem unfair to follow more than I can read; so I will chose to add some and delete others who don’t seem to write as substantively, or prolifically as I need at any give time.

And as JOHO says, Tweets go scrolling by when you are not looking, and you are never going to see them and that’s OK.   For those who think that Twitter is just a game, just a self centered narcissitic platform; or peephole for voyeurs; you just don’t get it.  I tried Twitter at first, to see what everyone was talking about; as more of a social experiment. But now I relish in the daily morsels of the brain-food that it offers me.  Much like Pavlov’s dog, I keep coming back for more.  Twitter is like a raging river of continuous thought.  From time to time I stop and sit by an eddy, spun off of this river and drink from it, deeply satisfying a thirst for insight and knowledge.  And sometimes I splash a little on my face for fun because, at that moment, it is a little ridiculous.  Sometimes, I just ignore it because it is not always refreshing and is often just the white noise of the river.  But it really is very different that I had expected.  Not sure how I will use it going forward, but for now, it is more than I had hoped for. 

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. George Bernard Shaw

We have been bombarded this week by an unusually large number of blogs, articles, emails, links, Tweets, and social networks prosthelytizing about the future of online content, the demise of newspapers as we know them, subscriptions, micropayments, and lack thereof.  One particularly well written opinion worth reading is Clay Shirky’s piece http://tinyurl.com/bpxulr.  Newspapers are, or at least can be, alive and well.  The main distinction going forward will be the format by which their content will be delivered.  And the very same can be said for all forms of print, broadcast, and online-only content purveyors.

Let me start by saying that, in my opinion, the downfall of the newspaper business model can be traced back and distilled down to one, and only one, main cause; the loss of classified advertising.  While there are many problems stemming from this principal culprit, which started the chain reaction of the dominoes falling, resulting in lost readership, reduced revenues, and aging demographics, the reason newspapers specifically began their decline, was the loss of classified advertising.  Back in the early 90’s, probably 1993, I read Howard Rheingold’s ‘Virtual Community’ http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/.  Rheingold is one of digital content’s foremost visionaries and he was one of the few people back then who predicted that the internet would actually bring the world together rather than enabling a disenfranchised Orwellean group of nameless, faceless, cubicle dwelling automatons typing their missives in this new frontier.  Rheingold suggested that a woman, who’s lying awake at night stewing about her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, could connect in the middle of the night and with a virtual gathering of like minded people helping each other through their angst.  These meetings on a BBS called the Gate in San Francisco became predictive of what we know as today’s social networks.  Most of the world’s naysayers at that time (and yes many of them were newspaper publishers) preferred to wait until the jury came back before getting started on the internet in any big way.  It was the little guys that really embraced the power of this new medium.

After reading Rheingold’s book, being that I was in the newspaper business managing a group of more than a dozen community and weekly newspapers, I felt that without major changes that the newspaper industry was at risk of great peril.  My fear was that the real loss would be classified advertising.  We started online classified advertising and daily content shortly afterward.  With our small group of newspapers located within earshot of the New York Times, I knew we could lose our lineage to any number of larger publishers, each with the ability and finances to aggregate classifieds across a wide network of owner-operated publishers; or to a competitor that was even scarier, a kid with a server in his basement, with little or no overhead and no ‘iron in the basement’.  Looking back now, I realize that kid’s name was Craig. 

But I digress, back to how classifieds killed the newspaper as we know it.  You see, almost every time a newspaper study that came out, including our own proprietary readership studies, always stated that more people picked up a newspaper for an ad than a story.  With some personal experience that validated that theory, we realized the ads that were referenced by these studies, were rarely the big department or appliance stores double trucks, but rather the garage sales, real estate, automotive and help wanted ads.  Think about it hypothetically; even if someone believed that the writers, editors and publishers of their local newspaper were fascists, or as far from their ideology as could possibly be, if you needed a job, wanted to rent a new apartment, buy a car or buy a home, the only place to go was the classified section of that newspaper.  If you wanted to look for homes in multiple communities, especially here in the northeast, you probably would have had to buy multiple newspapers.  The loss of classifieds meant so much more than a loss of revenue (which hurt newspapers for sure), it meant way more; it meant the loss of newspaper readers.  There has been much discussion and speculation about why and how newspapers blew it.  But in my mind there has never been one single issue that started the whole ball rolling down hill like that of the loss of readers generated by the loss of classified.  Without becoming worldwide aggregators of classifieds themselves (it is important to note that newspapers were more worried about the competition from their fellow newspapers instead of the kid in his basement) newspapers gave away the very reason that new readers were introduced to their newspapers.  This is the main factor with the loss of younger demos not reading newspapers, they don’t have a compelling reason to pick one up.  Most of us, I would suggest, were first introduced to our daily newspaper because of a used car or a job; only then did we grow to enjoy our editorial pages, favorite columnists and front page styles.  That’s gone now, gone forever, at least as a print only version.

But I am not going to be a doomsayer like so many pundits, about the future of newspapers.  The newspapers who do survive will be 24 X 7 X 365 news bureaus.  The delivery of their content will not be by a 13 year old on his/her bike, but rather a mobile device/phone, laptop, Kindle, or a TV on your credenza.  The delivery of content, and that includes what we used to call classified advertising, will be platform agnostic; it will be primarily pull and not push, like newspapers of old.  With the exception of niche magazine content, readers will want what they want, when they want it, on whatever medium that they choose.  Successful content providers formerly known as publishers, broadcasters and direct mailers will succeed in local, regional, state and niche journalism because they chose to give their readers/viewers what they want, not what they want them to have. 

Don’t ever forget that ads are content too; a successful business model will derive its revenue from ads that are tailored to the reader. Behavioral targeting, or BT as it’s known, will be critical to successful business models.  Think about display advertising in any bridal magazine; I would suggest that this advertising is as, if not more, important than the articles themselves. Whether editors and publishers of old knew it or not, advertising and good journalism always worked in harmony with each other despite the belief of many. Findings from research at the major media associations, including the NAA, SNA, RAB and NAB, have been stating the obvious for years.  It is only because the economy is in the toilet and newspapers are going bankrupt, that we are finally heeding the prophecies that hit me between the eyes in Rheingold’s Virtual Community. 

Irrespective of revenue, appropriate advertising is, was, and always will be, a fundamental component of successful journalism, electronic, analog or digital.  The jury is still out and the target is still moving on what the ultimate business model will be for the new content publisher.  I don’t know if micropayments, subscriptions or other content related revenue streams will be the adoptive models, and I kind of doubt it because it would have to be universally adopted and accepted to be the norm.  I do think we will be reading the printed word for years to come, but the model won’t succeed without the thoughtful publishing of content by those journalists on any and all methods and repositories of content.  Successful content providers will be the new broadcasters in every sense of the words.

Like it or not, this interview with Charlie Rose & Mark Andreesen is a must view for anyone in the news business http://tinyurl.com/d72y32