The zine was, well, a classic zine: handmade and rough around the edges. The contributors had a range of educational backgrounds, native languages, and writing skills. A friend at the time laughed at me for “editing” a document like this — wasn’t editing anathema to the radical, punk, anarchistic aesthetic/ethic?

In response, I quipped, “Hey, even the revolution needs good grammar.” I wanted to help make sure that their messages were intelligible, both within the community and outside of it. The New Yorker has a great piece this week that sums it up well:

“Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.”

In other words: “Even the revolution needs good grammar.”

Read the whole New Yorker article

The project from the start required rethinking how to define the people that Macon Money aimed to reach, a task that is easily transferrable to “newsrooms that want to engage their constituents,” Goldfin said. When you start reconceptualizing how communities can be grouped, you can innovate cost-effective ways to reach them — whether it’s through games, content sections, events, tweet-ups, or some other channel.

“We usually define audiences or communities by very traditional demographics, but that no longer needs to be the limitation,” she said. “You can define communities through interest, rather than age. It’s the bigger picture. One size doesn’t fit all.”

Read the whole story

The University of California at San Diego (UCSD) has a long history of self-reliance when it comes to energy. Opened in 1960, the university came of age in an era of energy awareness, and its founders sought to position the campus as a home for leading-edge science and technology research.

Today, by embracing clean energy technologies in its operations and by collecting data to build an ambitious long-term sustainability plan, UCSD offers a glimpse into the future. While academics and research are at the core of UCSD’s energy initiatives, the university has also worked to integrate advanced energy technology into its campus. An on-site cogeneration plant, completed in the 1990s, produces more than 87% of electricity consumed. But beginning in 2006, the campus challenged itself to go further and develop an energy-independent microgrid.

Today, the campus produces 92% of its own energy. It’s striving to go further with a combination of new clean energy resources, additional on-site generation and storage, and innovative demand-reduction strategies. The cornerstone of this effort is the OSIsoft PI System, which gathers data from hundreds of sensors, serves as a universal translator that synchronizes and coordinates operations of the campus’ complex energy assets, and supports UCSD’s efforts to create a sustainable environment for learning and innovation.

Download the case study from Sustainable Industries

“Cultivating the Landscape of Innovation in Computational Journalism“

Before I started reading the paper (via Nieman Journalism Lab), I had some knee-jerk negative reactions to the premise of this paper (a computer scientist deciding that journalists just don’t get innovation—that they need some help from the real innovator; i.e., people in his field). But upon starting to read it, I’m inclined to be more charitable than that.

If you feel like reading it and sharing your thoughts, please do.

“…It’s just plain spectacular, from content to design to delivery, and I’m proud to distribute it.

[T]his past week, my visit with [a potential client] included two lead communications people. The report stopped them in their tracks, and in the best way, brought the meeting to a halt. [...] They poured over every page and raved about what a top drawer job this “magazine” is. I love that they call it a “magazine”.

At [potential client #2], the CEO, who summed up our meeting with the words “Would somebody please tell me why we wouldn’t do this?” was so drawn into the report that I don’t think he heard a word of my presentation.

Kudos and thanks for a really great job which, once again, makes me proud to be on the B Corp team.”

— Yola Carlough, Northeast Community Development, B Lab

The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have the opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are a few owners, or, as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that the truth becomes elusive and the light fails. For a citizen in our free society, it is an enormous privilege and a wonderful protection to have access to hundreds of periodicals, each peddling its own belief. There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases. The reader is free to range around in the whole editorial bouillabaisse and explore it for the one clam that matters—the truth.

— E.B. White, letter to W.B. Jones, director of communications at Xerox, 1/30/76

The Letters of Note blog has a wonderful three-letter piece up today featuring E.B. White’s criticism of “sponsored content” in the magazine business and other print media (in response to a Xerox-sponsored feature in Esquire magazine) — including a sort of elegy for a free, independent press that serves the public.

As someone who does a fair amount of work on business models for media companies — and specifically works with publishers who are looking for non-advertising revenue opportunities — I loved reading this. White’s very eloquent about his qualms: ”If I felt a shock at the news of the Salisbury-Xerox-Esquire arrangement, it was because the sponsorship principle seemed to challenge and threaten everything I believe in: that the press must not only be free, it must be fiercely independent—to survive and to serve.”

How, exactly, we support media without a complete reliance on advertiser and sponsor dollars, is, well, what I spend a lot of time thinking about. There are a lot of different approaches to using corporate dollars to fund journalistic enterprises, and I’m not sure I agree with White that sponsorship is always a first sign of evil for an independent publisher, but blurring the lines between editorial and advertising, which sponsored content often does, is a dangerous game.

I have encouraged projects at various employers and client publishers that were only able to go ahead with the support of a sponsor, but I admit that I have reservations about the effects of sponsorship on publishers and media in general. I do think there’s a certain amount of creativity-killing that happens when publishers continuously turn to sponsors for revenue, and I think White’s right that, no matter how subtly it happens, it does transform the writer’s relationship to the topic at hand.

Publishers need new models, particularly in an era in which readers are unwilling — or at least no longer being asked effectively — to help support the costs of producing content. Obviously, there are a lot of smart folks thinking about this today, but so far there are only some glimmers of success, a lot of failures, and no knock-out successes. I’m often disappointed by the number of these “emerging” models that are just attempts to bring advertisers into more efficient communication with readers (e.g., this week’s failure of the Village Soup). A big part of what I liked about our work at GigaOM Pro was that we were (and the team still is) genuinely trying to find ways to connect readers with useful content using cost-efficient production models* and, y’know, marketing content and information services that people actually wanted/needed enough to spend some of their own money on it.

…This isn’t actually a complete thought, but mostly I just wanted to share the Letters of Note piece, so I’ll leave it there and hit Publish.

* – On a related note, I enjoyed reading this piece (h/t Anand), which called into question the reasons why producing content is so damn expensive. I don’t think this model can work for all things — journals publish research papers written by authors who keep themselves fed and sheltered with income from other academic and professional jobs. But I do think it’s important to unpack what, exactly, costs so much about producing content in any publishing environment.

A complicated bird feeder on the High Line. Photo by Steven Severinghaus.

I’ve been a casual cross-country observer of New York’s High Line project for some time. I must have read about it in Metropolis magazine, back in 2004/2005, when I was a religious cover-to-cover reader. But the fame of the project seems to have reached a fever pitch over the last few months, and I’m constantly seeing little updates about it. For example, I saw a bunch of linkbacks to The Dirt, which published this interview with one of the co-founders of the project. And now, this week, new designs for the rail yards section were unveiled. Also, my friend Steve has taken some lovely photos at the High Line since he moved to New York. I really enjoy his photography, in general, and this seemed a good excuse to link to them.

It’s interesting to see this project unfolding over all these years; I feel as though it’s very unusual for projects of this sort to hold such engaged public attention over such a long time period. I like it. I don’t have anything really substantive to say about it, but — yeah. I like it.

But my favorite pieces in this year’s report are those that show off the B Corps themselves. The “Best for the World” feature looks at companies that have achieved top scores on the B Impact Assessment, both overall and by category. “Rockstars of the New Economy” profiles companies that have performed well on both financial metrics and the community, environmental, and employee impact areas that earn companies B Corp certification in the first place. There are some wonderful, creative people running B Corps, and I loved getting to chat with them about their work.

Check out the full report here.

See select press coverage on the report here.

Specifically, I’m thinking about acquiring the American Heritage Dictionary that was released last fall.

It’s a strange thing to do in 2012, I realize, but this Boston Globe article summarizes many of the reasons that resonate with me. An appreciation for “what print does well,” a Usage Panel that makes me go weak in the knees, and a seriously thoughtful effort to tie a beautiful physical object (that has its own usefulness) with digital tools that I could actually use.

But let’s be honest. Mostly, I want this dictionary because of Alison Bechdel, whose blog and writing I adore.

Interesting read.