Breaking News via Facebook

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There's a bit of a political kerfluffle brewing right now in Greensboro over a recent redistricting vote by the City Council.  It's been a hot topic at Ed Cone's blog, which everyone in Greensboro knows is where you go to be seen, er heard, er read when you want to vent your spleen about the goings on in what is likely North Carolina's whiniest city. What's interesting to me is that Ed just broke the news that one of the City Council members announced that she's going to ask that the vote be reconsidered, and she made the announcement via her Facebook status.  

It would be easy to just say that this is a sign of the times, and it is, but upon further examination I think there are some fairly interesting ramifications in this simple act. Here are some that have come to mind:

  • Any reporter "friended" by a public figure who uses Facebook as a primary communication vehicle will have a competitive advantage over a reporter who isn't. Public figures have always had preferred members of media and I suspect they've always cherry-picked who they leak news to, but this is a very public way to play favorites with members of the media. 
  • Of course the public figure can also completely "disintermediate" the media by friending everyone but the media, thereby communicating directly with their audience and excluding the media.
  • Whether or not a member of the media is included or excluded, the news will be old to a healthy chunk of the audience by the time the 5 o'clock news airs or tomorrow's paper is printed.
  • This development has only reinforced my conviction that "news" operations need to move away from the shallow "breaking stories" MO and move quickly towards deep and analytical stories that provide context and avoid titillation and tattling.  In other words most of us now know what happened with the Greensboro redistricting, but few of us really know why.  Giving us the "why" is where the professional media can make hay.
  • In another interesting twist I've found that most of the really good comments on Ed's blog are posted by the professional journalists (I'm thinking of Joe Killian here) who often provide context and expert understanding of the issues in response to other commenters on Ed's posts.

Digital Pig Lipsticking

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After any event we host at work the most popular person in our office is Rachel, our Director of Communications.  She's a Photoshop whiz so people flood her with calls making sure that any picture they might be in is properly doctored before appearing on Facebook.  In other words she makes us all pretty, or at least as pretty as possible.  In the case of yours truly it's the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig, but I long ago learned to accept the fact that I'll never be asked to be anything other than a "before" model for some faux-plastic surgery scam so it doesn't really bother me much.  My attitude is that I'd at least like to be the best looking pig possible.

Before the pictures ever get to Rachel they actually have to be shot and thanks to the camera companies' arms race to make their cameras as idiot-proof as possible we're seeing an explosion of Ansel Adams wannabes and thus an ever rising tide of pictures being submitted.  I'd fear for Rachel's sanity (and time) if I wasn't so sure that at some point the camera companies are going to take care of the prettifying of portraits by introducing features that automatically "Photoshop" the pics much like they already automatically adjust for lighting conditions.  Think I'm nuts?  Check out the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP7 digital camera (found via BookofJoe) with the "Beauty Retouch Mode."  From the NYT article that Joe references:

"The FP7, which costs just over $200, has a tool called 'clear skin' that blurs blemishes and wrinkles. Another, called 'shine removal,' is the digital equivalent of powdering your nose. A third whitens teeth. (There are still a few kinks to work out; an in-house test of that last tool whitened only the lower half of this writer's two front teeth.)"

"Another set of tools retouches makeup: digital foundation and lip color can be added, along with rouge and eye shadow. The effect can be surprisingly subtle (but downright clownish if overdone)."

Automated pig lipsticking…I like it.

It’s All Good ‘Til Someone Gets Hurt

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Nice little Wall Street Journal article about the Carolina's varsity basketball players taking on all comers at the courts outside the campus dorms.  Pretty cool but I wonder how long it will last if one of the kids blows an ankle or knee while playing? 'Ol Roy might have something to say about it at that point.

Lewisville, er, Western Forsyth Development Almost Complete

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Did any of you catch the interesting play by the town council of Lewisville, NC to annex roads just outside its current borders?  You read that right – Lewisville's town council tried to annex roads, but not the land surrounding those roads, and in the process ticked off just about every state legislator from the area.  Basically the town was trying to control the access and delivery of services in the immediate vicinity because it wasn't granted extraterritorial jurisdiction and it wanted to prevent a development being put right outside its borders, thus increasing use of Lewisville's resources without contributing to its tax base.  You ever wondered what might have prompted this concern? I'd venture a guess that the soon to be completed Lake at Lisarra development had something to do with it:

Construction on the upscale Lake at Lissara residential development in western Forsyth County is slated for completion this month, capping a more than $60 million project.

Lake at Lissara, a 254-acre project developed by Lang Wilcox, Brant Godfrey, Pete Ramey and Beau Dancy, features a man-made lake and 102 lots off Shallowford and Conrad Roads. Homes prices range from the $400,000s to more than $1 million.

Read more: Forsyth development nearly complete | The Business Journal

 

Good News at the Day Job – PTAA Wins Two National Awards

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Today was a banner day at the office.  We found out that our association, Piedmont Triad Apartment Association, was named the winner of two Paragon Awards by the National Apartment Association.  In our world that's like winning two Oscars.  We won in the following categories:

Community Service – This was for our Labor of Love project at The Children's Home in February, 2010.

Communications – For our annual food drive for Second Harvest featuring a really cool partnership with WXII, Winston-Salem Dash and Greensboro Grasshoppers (and a special shout out to Mayors Joines and Knight for filming the commercials for us).

I can't tell you how proud I am to be part of a great team including the staff and volunteer leaders at PTAA.

Verbs

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Reading one of Lenslinger's posts I came across some valuable writing advice:

"Ease off the adjectives. Good writing is all about the verb. Forget everything the jackholes with the MFA's and elbow patches have to say. You're a blue collar, Southern writer and they can't teach that shit in schools. Fiction, Memoir, you can write it all – but you CANNOT hold back. Readers will see right through it and you'll be stuck dodgin' lion piss 'til your back finally gives out…"

If I had an ounce of free time I'd also wonder how to score an invite to the next BOOKUP.  Sounds like a lot of fun with some very interesting folks.

Sometimes I’m a Self Hating Loser

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I was catching up on my reading and came across this post by Seth Godin titled "Turning the habit of self-criticism upside down."  I've done enough 360 reviews to know that he's spot on when he writes:

When it's time to write a resume or talk to a boss or discuss a project glitch with colleagues, the instinct is to spin, to avoid a little responsibility, to sit quietly. Put a best face forward, don't set yourself up.

When reviewing just about anything you've done with yourself (in your head), the instinct is to be brutal, relentlessly critical and filled with doubt and self-blame.

What's equally interesting to me is how those habits are affected by the people you interact with.  For instance if you work for someone who's hypercritical you're much less likely to be self-critical because you can be sure that your hyperritical boss is going to pile on.  That's why I've never understood leaders/bosses who are hypercritical – you might get short term gains from running a tight ship, but in the long run you're going to have a team of people who work defensively and cover up small problems that will fester and grow into big problems.

I also believe that hypercritical personalities can actually inhibit the performance of those around them.  For instance I play a lot of tennis and my lifelong modus operandi is this: I can play four straight games of stellar tennis and then throw in one or two bad points and fall apart because all I can think about is what a loser I am for making that one mistake.  Pretty soon I've spent so much energy beating myself up that I've turned one or two bad points into a lost set or lost match. Over the years I've played on lots of teams and had literally dozens of doubles partners, and since I'm a head case to begin with, if you give me a partner who's going to get on me when I make mistakes then I'm going to absolutely implode.  On the other hand if you give me a doubles partner who's positive and a "shake it off" kind of player I'm much more likely to concentrate on the upcoming points and actually put together a solid match.  Heck, just the other night my partner and I won a tight match in a 3rd set tie breaker despite each of us double faulting twice in the tie breaker.  We just laughed and shrugged them off and proceeded to win.

So yes I can be a self-hating loser sometimes, but given the right atmosphere and the right team I tend to overcome my self doubts and actually produce something worth talking about.  As Godin pointed out I'm not alone in having this habit, but I feel like I'm one of the lucky people in the world because I'm surrounded on a daily basis by positive and inspiring people.  That's one of those blessings that's easy to take for granted, but never should be.

 

Good News, Bad News for Tarheel State

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According to these graphs the good news is that North Carolina has the most organic Christmas tree farms in America, but the bad news is that North Carolina has the fewest librarians per capita of any state in the 'ol US of A.  

By the way, how do you tell the difference between an organic Christmas tree farm and a non-organic Christmas tree farm?

Not So Desperate Housewives

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The latest article from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, the preeminent Wall Street basher, is titled The Real Housewives of Wall Street and it's a doozy.  First there's the story of two wives of Wall Street bigwigs who put together a company in 2009 to take advantage of federal bailout funds:

It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment…

In the case of Waterfall TALF Opportunity, here's what we know: The company was founded in June 2009 with $14.87 million of investment capital, money that likely came from Christy Mack and Susan Karches. The two Wall Street wives then used the $220 million they got from the Fed to buy up a bunch of securities, including a large pool of commercial mortgages managed by Credit Suisse, a company John Mack once headed. Those securities were valued at $253.6 million, though the Fed refuses to explain how it arrived at that estimate. And here's the kicker: Of the $220 million the two wives got from the Fed, roughly $150 million had not been paid back as of last fall — meaning that you and I are still on the hook for most of whatever the Wall Street spouses bought on their government-funded shopping spree.

But this exploration into the adventures of two wives of Wall Street scions leads to bigger questions:

And then there are the bailout deals that make no sense at all. Republicans go mad over spending on health care and school for Mexican illegals. So why aren't they flipping out over the $9.6 billion in loans the Fed made to the Central Bank of Mexico? How do we explain the $2.2 billion in loans that went to the Korea Development Bank, the biggest state bank of South Korea, whose sole purpose is to promote development in South Korea? And at a time when America is borrowing from the Middle East at interest rates of three percent, why did the Fed extend $35 billion in loans to the Arab Banking Corporation of Bahrain at interest rates as low as one quarter of one point?

Even more disturbing, the major stakeholder in the Bahrain bank is none other than the Central Bank of Libya, which owns 59 percent of the operation. In fact, the Bahrain bank just received a special exemption from the U.S. Treasury to prevent its assets from being frozen in accord with economic sanctions. That's right: Muammar Qaddafi received more than 70 loans from the Federal Reserve, along with the Real Housewives of Wall Street.

I'm still waiting for the Feds to launch JERP – Jon's Economic Relief Program.  When they do I'm hitting the beach baby.