Vid: Motorcycle Classics and Team MOMBA
I edited this little vid for Motorcycle Classics magazine.
Support Striking “Top Model” Writers
I get a lot of press releases for activist campaigns of various kinds. Having worked for years as a writer and editor at a lefty mag like Utne, that should come as no surprise. I’m in many a progressive PR flack’s Rolodex.
Most of them go straight to the trash. But this one from United Students Against Sweatshops made me chuckle. So does this mean we can add “union buster” to the list of busty hostess Tyra Banks’ accomplishments?
From: organize [at] usasnet.org
Subject: Tell America’s Next Top Model to support its writers
Date: September 11, 2006 7:42:03 PM CDTDear Leif Utne,
As you may know and have seen on the news, the writers of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) are on strike and need your support. So, take a few minutes of your day and show the writers some support by telling their bosses that they deserve the right to form a union.
The writers do not receive any health care coverage, pension benefits, or residuals for their work on ANTM, unlike writers who are covered by the Writers Guild (union).
The writers unanimously requested that ANTM producers recognize their request to be represented by the Writers Guild of America, west and begin to negotiate on July 12, 2006. The show producers have refused to honor the writers’ request and negotiate with the union. On Friday, July 21, 2006, the 12 writers unanimously launched a strike to achieve union rights.
So, take a few minutes of your day and show the writers some support by telling their bosses that they deserve the right to form a union.
You can take action on this alert either via email or via the web at:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/antm_strike/6bgb7brq7xn6d8?Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/antm_strike/forward/6bgb7brq7xn6d8?We encourage you to take action by October 7, 2006
I don’t mean to make light of the ANTM writers’ plight. They deserve support, as do unions generally. Please take a moment to take the action above.
By train somewhere in Sweden
I'm posting this straight to the web via the wireless connection on a
high-speed X2000 train en route from Stockholm to Växjö, in southern
Sweden.
World War 2.5: The Game
Nearly three and a half years ago, during the runup to the invasion of Iraq, we posted a link from the Utne Web Watch to a clever flash game called “Gulf War 2 (aka World War 2.5).” Billing itself as “the mother of all Flash games,” the site spins a nightmare scenario in which cartoon versions of Cheney, Rummy, Condi, and Powell rush us to war, only to find that our actions turn Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists and ignite a wider regional war.
In light of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East today, with Israel bombing the bejeezus out of Lebanon, the designer of Gulf War 2 may turn out to have been alarmingly accurate in his predictions.
The UtneCast Podcast is Live!
I may have left the staff of Utne magazine, but I’m still working there freelance, as host and producer of their podcast. As of a couple days ago, I’m happy to say, the UtneCast is now live. Woohoo!
Like the magazine, the UtneCast is a regular taste of an eclectic mix of independent ideas, people, trends, and music and art. Each episode runs around 12-15 minutes and includes one longer feature, usually an interview, followed by short reviews of music and other kinds of stuff you might find in the pages of Utne.
Check it out via the UtneCast blog, or subscribe through iTunes.
And please let me know what you think of it. Post a comment here or on the UtneCast blog.
On the Sale of Utne Magazine
People keep asking me how I feel about the sale of Utne Magazine, my employer for the past 8 years and the family business for the past 23, on June 1 to Ogden Publications of Topeka, Kansas. I left the staff the day of the sale. Rather than continue typing out the same email over and over again, as I’ve been doing for the last 3 weeks, I’ll just summarize my thoughts here, so I have a place to point people.
I feel, in a word, good. Really good, in fact.
I’m happy for Nina Utne, my beloved stepmom and former boss, because she gets back a chunk of the change she sank into keeping the place afloat for the past 7 years, and she’s no longer burdened with endless fundraising and nail-biting cash flow meetings.
I’m happy for the magazine because it gets to continue sustainably (and hopefully profitably) into the future as a crucial platform for launching ideas into the culture. I think Ogden’s a really good fit and I trust that publisher Bryan Welch will be a good steward of the Utne mission. They also publish Mother Earth News, Natural Home, Herbs for Health, The Herb Companion, and several niche collector magazines. I’m confident that I’ll be able to look with pride for a long time to come on the publication that still bears my family name.
I’m happy for my former coworkers, who got to keep their jobs (well, all but 5 of us), and, according to Ogden, will stay in their very cool workspace in Minneapolis.
And quite honestly, I’m happy for myself. After 8 years at the magazine, I had already been thinking for awhile about making some kind of professional move. My wife, Cilla, has been commuting to Seattle for the past year to attend grad school. Now we’ve decided to spend the coming year out there, living on Bainbridge Island while she finishes up her green MBA. Plus, I get to keep working for Utne as a freelancer, contributing story ideas, writing articles, and producing podcasts.
I’m not sure yet how I’ll be spending most of my time over the coming year, but opportunities have been coming at me from every direction ever since the moment I left the magazine staff. There are some exciting possibilities in the works, which I’ll be sure to update you on here.
Of course I have mixed feelings about the sale. The magazine my father founded, the family business for 23 years, is no longer owned by my family. That makes me sad. And it’s sad that an independent, single-title thought leader (that’s Utne’s category in the advertising world) magazine publishing company cannot be sustainable under a for-profit model in this country. Just about every other one in our category — Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive — has either been sold to a larger company or gone nonprofit.
Like so many other industries, the economics of the magazine business have changed so much in the past 2 decades that small independent publishers are an endangered species.
But all things considered, I’m really happy about how all of this has gone down. And I’m excited to start my new life. To mark the occasion, I even shaved my head. I’ll upload a video of it soon.
Outta my Segway!
Faster than a strolling crack dealer! More maneuverable than a mountain bike! It’s cops on … Segway scooters?!
Just when I thought life couldn’t get any stranger, I was walking down Hennepin Avenue last Wednesday and saw this:
According to the officer facing the camera, the scooters can do about 12 mph–faster than most people can run, at least for sustained periods.
A block down the road, I saw these guys using boring old human-powered transport.
In a game of chicken, who do you think would win?
P2008: Tagging the Race for President
Potential presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Russ Feingold have all been slapped recently with the tag “p2008.” And no, we don’t mean graffiti artists spraypainting their campaign buses.
“Tagging” refers to the growing practice on websites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and thousands of blogs of letting users attach their own descriptive keywords to images, videos, links, books, blog posts, and articles. Tagging harnesses the wisdom of the crowd to classify and organize information. The practice has even given rise to tagging campaigns, where groups encourage web users to tag certain kinds of content with specific keywords.
For example, the folks at E-Democracy.org, a clearinghouse of online political information, are urging bloggers, linkers, and other netizens to apply the tag “p2008″ to anything related to the presidential race — campaign sites, political blogs, news sites, etc. — thereby making such content much easier to find with search engines.
“World-changing” is now a marketing term
My friends over at www.worldchanging.com will get a kick out of this. The inside front cover of the July/August issue of Sierra features a two-page ad for Honda’s Civic Hybrid. Under the banner “Environmentology” (not quite sure what that means, but it sounds nice) artistically rendered in images of plants, the company rightly touts its 32-year history as a fuel-efficiency innovator.
Here’s the passage that caught my eye:
In 1974, Honda introduced the ingeniously simple Civic CVCC. World-changing (sic) for its fuel efficiency and low emissions, the CVCC demonstrated our spirited commitment to environmentally responsible technology…
“World-changing”? Maybe. While Honda has been a leader in green car technology for a long time, it’s important to note that average fuel economy across the industry, even for Hondas, is unsustainably low. Appopriation and imitation are of course the sincerest forms of flattery. Kudos should go at the very least to Alex and Jamais at WC for changing the lexicon. It’s nice to see Madison Avenue’s taking notice.
