Money Trees

Around 2006, it seemed like every single magazine on the market was publishing ecology-centered issues. The Cosmo/Marie Claire/Allures of the magazine world featured articles on environmentally-friendly beauty products. Bride magazines talked about throwing a green bridal shower - I'm sure even Dog Fancy analyzed your puppy's carbon pawprint. Basically at that point if you wanted a new angle on an old piece, you just had to "green" it.

Well, that era has passed, it seems. And while I'm glad I won't have to see any more plays on "Green is the new [pink is the old] black", I'm not so happy the environment has been eked out of people's minds. Instead, a great multitude of articles now focus on saving money. Eco's been replaced by econ, and I guess saving green is the new black. These penny-pinching issues have become more and more frequent as the nation's economy has looked more and more bleak. Still, I was surprised to open my New Yorker Wednesday and find an article on the both the economy and the environment. The article, a short piece in The Talk of the Town, focused on the inverse relationship between economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Author David Owen writes:

"The world's principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don't spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk."

Even though the media and individuals aren't focusing on the environment, they're actually doing much more to prevent global warming than they were when it was the actual concern. I've definitely noticed this in my own life - specifically with my work. My company has prided itself on being green for quite a while now - but it's always been quite a battle for me, sometimes feeling like the sole eco-cheerleader (I know, Mom and Dad: you must be so proud/shocked). Getting people to reuse paper or make fewer copies is hard to rally support for, but when cuts are being made and you bring up the cost of all that paper, suddenly there are many more proponents.

While much of the article falls into the kind-of-intuitive-if-you-really-think-about-it category, it also does a nice job of taking things a step further. The article begs the question: if the environment and the economy do have an inverse relationship, how can we fix the economy without losing the footing we've made on the environment? For so long, the U.S. has been such a society of prosperity and excess. While many economists have suggested me may never go back to that level of superabundance (and I personally don't see that we need to go back), there is a happy medium in there. Is there enough money and jobs to be made out of green industries? It seems like now is the time to start looking for solutions that won't have us back to square one if the economy ever does go back to the "normal" of the past decade.

Cold Medicine and Media

Today Tommy, a friend from work, came in to start his shift and informed me he'd seen something on TV about the death of newspapers the night before. And thought of me. Overhearing this, another coworker looked at me nervously and hastened Tommy to be careful, as I might start crying - again.

He was only half joking. Last Tuesday, when the news officially broke that Wednesday would be the last print edition of the P-I, I sat at my desk reading article after article about the paper's demise. It was not a surprise, but it still was hard to swallow.

Sunday, an editorial ran in The Chronicle - conceivably the next big paper to fold - about the outpouring of ideas for how the save newspapers. John Diaz, the article's author and editor of the opinion page, wrote about how many conflicting ideas people have for what will save print media. On a daily basis, people email and write to tell him they have the answer for how to save the Chron. If the paper leans more to the right it will be saved; if it becomes a vocally liberal progressive paper it will be saved. If it stops publishing/starts publishing news on controversial subject matter...First big-city gay daily! one Gawker commenter suggested. The newspaper also gets its fair share of people writing to extrapolate on the solitary reason the Chron will fail. Diaz writes:

If we fail to run their favorite syndicated columnist or continue to run one they loathe ... "that's why you're losing money." If we are perceived as favoring the Giants over the A's or one political philosophy over the other or give too little or too much space to celebrity gossip ... "that's why you're losing money." My favorite link between personal interest and our financial predicament was the freelance writer who, after having his opinion-piece submission rejected, wrote: "That's why this newspaper is failing."

As much as these letters are amusing and, at times, frustrating, it's good to know that people - not exclusively journalists, editors, and publishers - are brainstorming on how to fix the current and predicament of print media. And that they care. I know many people have thought little about the impact of 'the end of days' for daily newspapers on their lives. And maybe it wouldn't affect them. I think my college journalism professor instilled and particularly romantic view of journalism in me, so I fall hard onto the belief that it will be truly detrimental to society. As a writer at salon.com advised a journalism professor struggling with the guilt at teaching students in a seemingly hopeless profession:

Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless...leave it to your students to create new modes for the buying and selling of this information. Their generation will do this. I feel confident about that. Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important. Then you will have done your job and given them the gift of a lifetime.

But then, I've taken a lot of cold medicine tonight so maybe that's why I find that particularly stirring.

Economics for Dummies

Not to throw two radio shows at you in a row - but if anyone has yet to check it out, last week's This American Life is worth a listen. The show has made a name for itself examining the minute and unexamined - making even the most mundane life seem interesting. But they also do a really excellent job with hard news. Last year, they did the most thorough report on the mortgage crisis - detailing from the very micro to the very macro level about what went wrong. The report, The Giant Pool of Money, is absolutely worth checking out for anyone that hasn't heard it yet. I honestly think it was one of the best pieces of reporting I heard all year, not because it was uncovering anything profound or groundbreaking, but because it really explained something that so many other articles glossed over. With this week's episode, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, who produced the first one as well, do another great job - well, dumbing this whole "economy" thing down for people like me. Just today I was reading a New Yorker article that was talking about toxic assets and balance sheets and liabilities - and while I could generally get the gist of the whole thing before, it was nice to actually really understand it. Give those two a listen. And support public radio.

Finding Plan B

A lot of my hesitance to initially start a blog came from a stigma I held about blogging from when it first started - at least as far as my experience with it is concerned. The first blogs I knew were live journals. These were essentially a chance for people to post their diaries - complete with indulgent soul searching and melodramatic overshares - with, um, everyone. The voyeur in me would occasionally read these 'live journal blogs,' but not without a lot of tsking and judging. Blogging has clearly morphed and developed and grown up a lot. But it still easily becomes a platform to (over)share Feelings. Capital F. Which is, admittedly, where today's post comes in.

I was listening to This American Life on my train to work yesterday in a particular mood of frustration with my professional life. The episode that happened to come on my podcast was about life's change in direction and how, more often then not, we don't end up where we originally thought. Our lives don't turn out how we imagined them at 18 or 21 or 25, even. Ira Glass starts off:

There's a short story by the fiction writer Ron Carlson in which a guy loses his job after ten years. His boss tells him 'OK, go to Plan B,' and the guy says 'This was Plan B.'

Which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully to Plan A and Plan A turns out to be completely different than we thought it was going to be. And so we switch to a backup - and then the backup plan becomes our life.

Glass continued by telling about a speech he gave to a group of around 100 people. He asked them how many of their lives had turned out how they'd expected. How many of them were still on Plan A. "Out of 100, only one person raised her hand," Glass said. "Everyone else was like, Plan B? what about Plan C and D and F?"

I don't really think there's a lot of narration I need to add to this - especially with my desire to resist complete livejournaliness. With the current state of our economy there's a lot of uncertainty in the future holds. A lot of people that were pursuing jobs that seemed like safe bets are now forced to completely change direction. Journalism never seemed like the "safe bet" job, but right now its future seems particularly shaky. So the question is, at what point do you start to really think about Plan B...

P.S. Are you just mocking me now, Gawker?

Good thing I'm not in J-School, I guess.

Miss, Can I Take Your Coat?

My friend Anthony, a fellow reporter at the hanging-on-to-its-last-limb Free Lance, sent me a link to an article lauding his current, far cooler employer, VentureBeat, as one of the 25-most valuable blogs. I'm proud of Anthony for his successful foray into this crazy "new media," a none-too-easy feat. But besides being a nice little bragging piece for Anthony, the rundown of the economically successful blogs was also an interesting read. I do enjoy reading most of the top 25 (Gawker and The Huffington Post, No.1 and No.2, respectively, are both on my quick links tool bar at the top of my screen.)

Still, reading the article was also incredibly depressing. For one thing, the supposedly "most profitable blog" has a listed staff of 7 on its' editorial team (OK, OK, I know this isn't including the staff at Jezebel, etc., but you get my point.) So its' profitability is partially due to keeping costs, such as employing poor, lowly writers, to a minimum while simultaneously making a lot in page views and advertising revenue. They also just had cuts - folding both Valleywag and Defamer into Gawker. So even the most profitable forms of media are making cutbacks and having layoffs, a depressing idea for any unemployed writer. Also, while Gawker is an entertaining and enlightening round up of the day's news with some insightful analysis to boot, there is pretty much zilch original reporting. The Huffington Post, which does have quite a bit of actual reporting, still only has 50 full-time employees. It's hard to imagine, once all is settled with this new media that there will be many jobs for the overabundance of j-schoolers. In the epic game of media musical chairs, we'll be left with hundreds of players and only a handful of chairs when the song ends. Perhaps a friendly reminder that I should get out of the game now. Did you come with me on that metaphor? I'm thinking no, but ah well.

On a completely different note - one that more directly relates to what is paying for my second cup of coffee today. Last week, the New York Times had an article about my second form of income - coat checking. I've been supplementing my shrinking office managing hours at Vento with two weekend shifts where I run up and down stairs (in heels, no less!) carrying piles of perfumed furs and Burberry jackets, praying for $2 in exchange for my efforts. The article notes wealthy New Yorkers' hesitance to part with their precious dollars for someone to hold onto their coats even after eating a $180 dinner. A true and frustrating observation. On an average Saturday night, when I check about 225 coats (450 times up and down the stairs) I usually average about $100 - 45 cents a coat. Keep in mind, there are some people who tip $5 and large groups who tip nothin' (French tourists! I'm looking to you, here.) I find coat checking to be a really interesting experience, mainly because - try as I might to find a rhyme or reason behind who tips me what - there are really no trends. For one thing, I think many people don't realize that that's my job: taking, holding and then retrieving his or her coat. They don't realize that their tips are essentially my only income - I'm not a host making $15 an hour, I'm making $4.85 with the assumption that I'll be making some money for each coat I check. It's interesting how many large, bachelorette-esque parties of girls, each of which checks her name-brand-wool-coat-with-matching-scarf-and-gloves, forget to tip the girl who ran up and down the stairs nine times to fetch each one of their coats individually. Even after they just spent hundreds on carafes of hangover-inducing sugary cocktails.