Volunteer mush

When I found myself (through no fault of mine, the gentlemen who released me and two dozen others assured me) with time and talent to spare, I turned to a newish organization called Volunteer Match to help me dispose of said time and talent. Having made a commitment to the nonprofit industry by obtaining a master's in nonprofit management and finding paid work in the field, first at an arts center and then at a health charity, I can't very well turn up my nose at volunteering. This is my chance to "give back," as the saying goes, "to the community."

I found half a dozen opportunities that seemed interesting and wrote to each organization via the Volunteer Match contact form. Some never responded. One responded so quickly and enthusiastically, expressing such confidence in me based on my online portfolio, that I began working for them literally within minutes.

The oddest reply came from a group that I just don't know how to assess: Daily Source. There's no doubt I can help them: they need news judgment and editing skills to put together a daily feed of articles from various online sources, and these are skills I have been using my entire career. In a series of follow-up questions, however, I got the sense they were more interested in the degree to which I agreed with their philosophy than in my availability and expertise.

After a few days of back-and-forth I called a timeout and wrote to the volunteer recruiter:

I've been trying to figure out what makes Daily Source different/better than any of the very many other aggregators out there, and I'm not seeing it. Since you do no original reporting, I am having an especially hard time understanding what makes Daily Source a charity worth supporting with money or donated labor. What am I missing?

Certainly Daily Source's mission statement -- "Bringing high quality news and information from across the Internet to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in order to educate the public and improve our world" -- offers no hint of different-ness or better-ness. But the recruiter didn't answer my questions, so I instead posed them to Daily Source founder and executive director Peter Dunn, who, three days later, has yet to reply.

I was particularly intrigued by a page called How We Choose Articles, which offers a critique of the mainstream media that verges on paranoia (and which is therefore mainstream for the Internet) but goes a step beyond, by asserting that articles on DailySource.org are more fair, more accurate and more compelling than what the mainstream media produces. Since Daily Source plays no role in assigning, reporting or editing the material it publishes, I just don't see how that figures.

The page says in part, "We seek articles that have accurate information and are closest to the known truth." I can't get the phrase "closest to the known truth" out of my head. Daily Source is staffed by people with impressive journalism résumés -- these days, finding people who used to have great media jobs isn't that hard -- but this simply is not something I can imagine coming out of the mouth of any journalist I have ever met. It strikes me as a form of orthodoxy that disallows the possibility of dissent or even novelty.

What really really concerns me is the possibility that Daily Source is merely a clever way of generating salaries for the site's paid staff by exploiting donors and under-employed editors who think they're helping create the future of journalism. If Daily Source is a scam, I suppose it's a modest one: Dunn told the IRS he received $54,103 in salary and benefits from The Daily Source Limited in 2007; and he has loaned the organization almost as much as he has earned, in effect funding much of his own salary without charging any interest in return.

Which seems downright charitable.

Even if I'm wrong to doubt the way Daily Source spends donations, I still don't get it: Why does this organization exist? I am a huge believer in the potential of nonprofit journalism; if any segment of society is going to assign itself the mission of fact-seeking and truth-telling, it's the likes of NPR and ProPublica. A nonprofit aggregator, on the other hand, merely hastens the already hasty demise of the for-profit news sources that have served us more or less competently for more or less a century.

A summer flick to give thanks for

Like its progenitor Monty Python's Life of Brian, the summer flick Year One is good for a few yucks -- and a timely reminder of the fragility of freedom.

All right, all right, nothing's so tiresome as a too-serious reading of a funny work, but I don't want Year One to be dismissed as vacuous. Like all of Judd Apatow's films, all the farts and boobs can't disguise the deeply moral nature of the tale. The source of the humor is, of course, the anachronisms, and not just the Biblical/historical nuttiness like making Cain and Abel contemporaries of Abraham and Isaac. Jack Black's Zed and Michael Cera's Oh are men out of time because their modern idiosyncratic expressions -- even the way they raise their eyebrows and roll their eyes -- are infused with an individuality that must have been unthinkable for most of human existence (and still is, in many places). Imagine the self-confidence one has to possess to be able to tell a superior: "Whatever."

Yes, Year One is a disgusting romp, but a disgusting romp with a noble purpose: to remind us that, having eaten the forbidden fruit, we had better, as a race, use our knowledge wisely.

Wal-Mart's new math

Aside from the endlessly repeated word "relationships," the only important thing I remember from marketing class is that, whether you're a consumer products company or a charity, you never, ever want to be perceived as the bargain brand. What you want is to be perceived as offering value, so that customers (read "donors" if you're a nonprofit) feel that the more they spend, the more value they obtain.

Taking this advice too literally could lead one into a dumb mistake like shorting Wal-Mart. If it's a marketing axiom that there's no future in cheap, how did Wal-Mart build such success offering nothing but cheap?

I see two possible answers: 1) Marketing gurus are stupid and wrong; 2) Wal-Mart's brand is actually more complex than its longtime slogan "Always Low Prices" allowed, and you need a marketing guru to explain why. Let's explore option 2.

I would argue that decades after its founding and many years after being universally acknowledged as one of history's most important (for ill or good is merely a matter of opinion) economic entities, Wal-Mart is only now revealing its true branding.

(An aside: the stores, you may have noticed, have migrated from "Wall*Mart" to "Walmart." But the company remains "Wal-Mart Stores Inc.")

Sure the new ads mention low prices, but now in the form of a call to action: "Save money." More importantly, the new slogan continues, "Live better." Thus low prices are repositioned: Once they were an end; now they are a means. We don't go to Wal-Mart for low prices after all -- we go for happiness, security and prosperity. Low prices are the way we get what we really want.

So far, so truistic. But there is a risk to Wal-Mart's strategy, and you'll see it when you recall the grade-school arithmetic concept, the transitive property of equality. Expressed as an equation, Wal-Mart's old branding is:

Low prices = low prices

N equals itself -- end of discussion. The new branding is:

Low prices = a better life

The transitive property reminds us that any number of things that at first seem very different can equal one another. 2+2 is the same as 100-96 which is the same as 4 quaqdrillion/1 quadrillion and so on. So the Wal-Mart shopper may now find herself wondering: What else equals a happy life? What if tariffs made imported goods just expensive enough to cause the re-introduction of manufacturing to America, causing more of us to be employed, causing more of us to live happily? High prices can equal a better life just as easily as low ones can.

(Granted, if Karl Marx were alive today, he would be the only person alive today who seriously thinks Wal-Mart customers may be asking themselves this. What if, is all I'm saying.)

I'm certainly not advising shorting Wal-Mart on grounds they've suddenly decided low prices are a bad idea after all. Monkeys will sooner fly out of my ass. I am saying that if you want a crash course on the psychology of spending -- including the psychology of donating -- listen carefully to Professor Wal-Mart.

Wounds

As a gunshot victim, I feel justified in committing to the screen the magic words that might actually get this blog some attention:

NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION

I'm not taking a position on the NRA, mind you -- I don't want to get shot at again or anything! -- I'm just simply saying: National Rifle Association.

Let me hasten to add that I'm a "gunshot victim" in a rather loose sense. Sometime Sunday night or Monday morning a bullet penetrated a decorative window shutter and the north wall of my home, and came to rest on the carpet of the guest room about four feet from the window. The bullet's apparent lack of velocity suggested to the responding officer that the gun was fired several hundred feet, and as much as half a mile, away. This in turn suggested that we were not targeted.

This came as a great relief to my wife, who thought the incident may have had something to do with the Obama-Biden sign that remains in our window more than half a year after the election -- a clear violation of our homeowners association's rules. In a way, though, I feel worse about bullets falling as unpredictably as meteorites than I would if we had been targeted. If we had been targeted, I could put my energy into learning who our tormenter was and dealing with him. (We live within walking distance of many gun shops.) This is the same logic that leads my Israeli friend Gigi to assert that her children are safer in Israel than they would be in the States.

There's nothing at all one can do about random violence, on the other hand. My children, who were sleeping feet away from where the bullet entered, may never feel safe again in their own home, and they'd be right.

Why is it, though, that there's nothing at all one can do to correct a social problem when the evidence is all around us that social problems are susceptible to intervention?

National Rifle Association. That's all I'm saying.

Why can't school be more like camp?

My son can drift away in school so far, DPS should hire the guys who hold down the Macy's Parade balloons to tether him. He is completely present on stage, however, so once again this summer I find myself wondering: Why can't school be more like camp?

Dog House Music rock and roll camp in Lafayette, Colo., to be specific. We were skeptical that this was a worthy way to spend a week (and $425) but he begged and we caved. He's having fun, but more than that, I'm witnessing an educational model that schools would do well to study. Despite the staff's laid-back attitude, they work with startling efficiency and a level of attention to the kids that I have never seen.

Monday morning, campers are divided into bands based on the instruments they can play (or want to try), level of experience, and gut instinct for who'll get along with whom. The beauty part: each band gets its own "producer" for the entire week. That's one staff member totally dedicated, full time, to each group of 3-5 campers.

During the week each band writes and rehearses several original songs -- only one cover is allowed -- and at the end of the week there's a concert at the Boulder Outlook Hotel. Check out these ripped-from-life lyrics by Noah, which he wrote for his band The Undicided (cq):

No computers or TV

Why is this being done to me

Can't sleep over at a friend's

When will all this torture end

These are the things that make me mad

The worst of the worst I've ever had

Make me so mad I might explode

Just leave me be in chill mode

The audience laughed with him -- a great moment for any performer.

On the way home Noah vocalized what I'd been thinking: that it was amazing to accomplish so much in a week, whereas after a typical week at school it's hard to say what you've got to show for it. The key clearly is the staffing. A ratio of one-to-four? It's almost like having your own Greek slave for a tutor. Later I did some arithmetic to see what would happen if a school were organized similarly.

Say there are 38 weeks of school and four kids per class, each paying $425 per week. That's $16,150 per student per year, or $64,600 in revenue for the class. Give the teacher $30,000 and benes and let's say there's $15,000 left over for administration. For economy of scale multiply the whole arrangement by, for the sake of argument, 50 classes. That means the school needs to scrape by on a not-at-all shabby $750,000 per year.

$16,150 is neither cheap nor expensive in private education. But remember, this scenario assumes one teacher for every four students. Can it be done?

I'm beginning to think so. Dog House Music is doing it.

John Bunzli

For as long as I've known him, I've known that John Bunzli is a great talent. As a storyteller, songwriter, singer and guitarist, he can transfix a room or cause it to get up and party. His skill is on brilliant display in his new album, The Well.

On first listen -- which is happening as I write -- I can't be sufficiently analytical to provide an explication de texte. Perhaps the title stems from John's habit of beginning songs with the phrase, "Well, I..." But it wouldn't surprise me if it refers to the well of perseverance he has had to draw from to reach this point. I have had the privilege of hearing him perform live several times over the years and have seen him connect with the audience -- but fail to persuade the house to give him a second beer for his troubles. Whoever the hardest-working man in show business is, isn't. John is.

Sometimes you'll think you're listening to Harry Chapin, sometimes the Dead, sometimes Clapton. John Bunzli now lives in my iTunes library between Joe Cocker and Johnsmith, and he's right at home there. If you're in the mood for a little political commentary, a healthy dose of humor and a great beat, peer into The Well.

Gerunding

Hearing it here first: I believe we're about to enter the Age of the Gerund.

Depending how you were raised, a gerund is a) stupid, b) the amazing hybrid part of speech that blends the best features of the noun and the verb, or c) a small furry mammal often mistaken for a hamster. It's this flexibility that leads me to predict we will all soon be gerunding.

Imagine a single word that signifies both a thing and an action. The cost savings alone are staggering! What a powerful tagline any of the following would make:

• Being
• Hearing
• Eating
• Tasting
• Feeling
• Loving
• Playing
• Thinking
• Going
• Coming (this one could get a little sticky...)

See? I mean -- Seeing?

Nike and the lamented Kinko's got us halfway to the Age of the Gerund by giving prominent play to verbs. The next step:

• Officing
• Doing

English has already turned lots of nouns into verbs for us so adding "ing" won't cause a lot of fuss in many cases (shipping, batting, phoning, scouting, planning, penning, etc. etc.). But, taking a cue from Kinko's "to office," I think we're going to see brands concoct new verbs out of nouns, only to turn them into nouns again:

• Computering
• Devicing
• Televisioning
• Couturing
• Leathering
• Improvementing
• Timepiecing

Grab your gerunds, folks, before someone else does.

Just say no to druggists

As someone who believes patronizing local businesses is the most virtuous form of economic development, it grieved me to find a note taped to the door of Urban Harvest, formerly the locally owned coffee shop at the Lowry Town Center in Denver, saying they'd closed due to rising food costs and general economic suckiness (my word). An Einstein's Bagels is taking its place.

My grief was moderated by the realization that I would now have decent bagels and coffee within walking distance. Try as I did to love Urban Harvest, I found their baked goods uninspired, their coffee expensive, and the atmosphere dull. Thus I forced myself to confront the reality that no business is worth supporting merely because it's small. Anyone who wants my money had better actually be good. And sometimes -- often, it must be admitted -- quality depends upon efficiency, which in turn depends upon size.

I have for about 8 years benefited from this truth when it comes to health care, and I think (hope, anyway) the nation as a whole is starting to clamor for efficiency. Coming from a family of doctors in independent practice, my wife had a visceral if vestigial hatred of Kaiser Permanente, and refused to allow me to sign up with Kaiser when it was presented to me as one of several choices by my first employer in Denver, 10 years ago. Instead we went with a more expensive plan that allowed us to choose our own doctors -- but also allowed those doctors to prescribe any drug on earth with no regard to whether it was on the formulary, sometimes forcing us to make two midnight trips to the pharmacy to treat an ailing child. What was covered and what wasn't, was pure guesswork.

After enough of these disappointments we finally did sign on with Kaiser, and have liked it so much that for a time we actually paid more to keep it (indirectly, through a series of flex-plan choices that summed out to having fewer dollars for other benefits; Kaiser itself was always the cheapest option). To translate the decision to coffee shop terms: we chose Einstein's over Urban Harvest.

"Kaiser horror stories" are legion, and they effectively scared us away from the plan for a time. They almost always involve somebody who died (or worse!) because Kaiser denied them some experimental treatment. That the person probably would have died (or worse!) anyway never, of course, figures into these cautionary tales. Plans built on the independent contractor model pay doctors more for doing more procedures, while a genuine health maintenance organization -- the way the HMO was originally conceived of in the 1970s -- conserves resources by sharing information and overtly discouraging over-use. How odd that the communal model is, at heart, the more conservative.

It seems that the health care debate is shifting from private-versus-public to integrated-versus... well, disintegrated. Kaiser is a private plan, yet it functions much the same way as the public plan I used when I lived in famously healthy Japan. I can't let nostalgia for small businesses stop me from recognizing the savings generated when I can take care of an exam, a lab test and a prescription (heck, even new glasses if I plan ahead) on a single visit, in a single building, with my electronic chart preceding me to each stop.

For years the guy at our local pharmacy called my mother "Mrs. H." and for years she resented it. How fortunate it now seems to have been able to buy baby aspirin from a merchant who bothered to learn and remember a customer's name, even if only one-sixth of it. Perhaps nobody at Kaiser will ever honor me with over-familiarity by calling me "Mr. H," and for this loss, like the loss of Urban Harvest, we may suffer a pang of regret. But Kaiser's efficiency is keeping me healthy, and the entire country deserves to know the same sense of security.

Sorry about destroying the American newspaper industry

Now that Warren Buffett has said it, it must be true: American newspapers are dead, at least as a money-making proposition. If anybody’s wondering about the killer — you got me.

In the early 90s I was part of a small band of editors working at Prodigy, then the world’s largest consumer online service with a whopping one million members. Imagine that: Nearly one-half of one percent of Americans could get news, stock quotes and even lumpy, stick-figure-like illustrations from the comfort of home. The service was available a solid 18, sometimes even 20 hours a day, for a reasonable monthly fee, and all you needed to get started was a few K for a computer, a dial-up modem capable of transmitting several words a second, and the willingness to go without phone service.

We were a motley gang: Emmy-winning TV producers, experienced magazine editors, young freelancers like me unable to land reporting jobs — for even then the traditional media were doing a fine job destroying themselves. We refugees shared none of our bosses’ evangelic zeal for what were coming to be known as new media. We’d have been perfectly happy if the fad had passed, and newspapers, magazines and TV stations started hiring again.

One of our jobs was helping newspapers “repurpose” their “content” for reading on a computer screen. Editors from the LA Times, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and more trouped through our little newsroom in White Plains, N.Y., puzzled and awed that home users could access literally five or six articles in a matter of minutes. Pretty soon we had dozens of newspapers online. I was present at the revolution, and I’m here to tell you, it was executed by a handful of people, all of whom had a vague sense of destiny but a willful inability to think through the consequences of their actions.

One day an executive went to a conference and came back screaming about something called the Web. Nobody else in the building had seen this Web, and for a few months we tried ignoring it: what do you mean, content would be free? That doesn’t make any sense! With Prodigy’s closed-network model — also in use at our small upstart rival, America Online — at least there was subscription revenue to be shared.

But the rock, having been pushed from its ledge, couldn’t stop rolling downhill. The newspapers that went online just kept going.

The results were perfectly predictable, yet nobody wanted to predict them. Being a lowly journalist I always assumed that the suits upstairs knew how to run a business. Boy, was I was wrong. It turns out, just like Mr. Buffett tries to tell people, the fundamentals of business are simple. You cannot give stuff away for less than it cost to make it.

Did I mean to kill the American newspaper? Honest, officer — I had my finger on the mouse and it just went off. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. But like everybody who loves words, I sure am sorry.

What IS in my wallet?

After swearing vertically, horizontally and laterally that I would never apply for a Capital One card in revolt against the Amazonian volume of direct mail they were sending me during the credit boom, I finally got one because they were the only card issuer I could find that didn't charge a foreign transaction fee. This feature alone was enough to win my loyalty, for now that travelers' cheques have vanished from the face of the earth, cards are the only way to safely carry a significant amount of value while traveling (or even when doing any intercontinental cyber-shopping). Though I have recognized the futility of forming attachments to objects since reading Siddhartha 25 years ago, I quickly found myself falling in like with this card and using it whenever I could, even when I had enough cash for the purchase.

Aside from nifty accounting features that a solid back office operation makes possible -- like choosing how frequently to receive your cash-back bonuses -- the cleverest aspect of my new card is the ability to upload my own photo. We happened to have just had a delightful holiday card photo taken, so I uploaded that. Now my card elicits delighted coos from clerks all over Denver (though they still sometimes ask to see ID). When I take it on upcoming trips to Quebec and Argentina, I'm sure clerks there will coo in their native Romance tongues.

The emotional reaction the card has provoked in me and others got me thinking about the co-branding experiment Capital One has launched. That credit cards are brands at all is something of a miracle in its own right, for Visa and MasterCard aren't products at all; they're payment transfer mechanisms. Can you imagine anything less marketable? Yet it's common to speak of having "a Visa card" or "a MasterCard" (or, more correctly I suppose, "a MasterCard card") rather than "a credit card issued by Such and Such Bank whose transactions are facilitated by the MasterCard payment transfer protocol." That's branding.

Then comes CapitalOne going to great effort to put more air between itself and the brand by allowing me to insert my image into the equation. If Volkswagen allowed customers to customize cars with, say, square roofs, would they still be Beetles? When we're told that consistency is the key to brand equity, offering inconsistency as a product feature defies logic.

So is it a Capital One card? A MasterCard card? Or my card? Can one thing really be, by the business relationships and personal desires it evokes, three things? The question is more apt than I at first realized: What IS in my wallet?