First, the context

A few days ago, Brian Sierakowski published an exit interview with Baltimore entrepreneur Paul Capestany. Paul (who, alas, I don’t personally know) is a smart fellow who recently decided to leave Baltimore to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams in San Francisco.

I’m grateful to both Paul and Brian for taking the time to do that interview. I think all of us in Baltimore periodically struggle with the question of why we’re here. It’s nothing but healthy for the growing Baltimore tech community to understand why some people feel the world beyond offers greener pastures.

This morning, as part of the conversation, my friend Mike Subelsky published his own take on the question: “Should we all move to Silicon Valley?”

Now, why I’m adding my two cents

After I read Mike’s post, I checked out the comments down at the bottom.

Down there in the comments, a person by the name of “bhalliburton” shared the following thoughts:

1) There is a difference between a small business start-up and a scalable start-up. (Stephen Blank terminology)

A scalable start-up has to target markets > $500m in size because it intends to become a >$100m revenue company in a few years time.

You can start a small business start-up (a business that feeds your family by serving a known customer with a known product) anywhere – it probably pays to start it in a geography where your customers are.

A scalable start-up needs to be in a place that maximizes your access to highly specialized talent and a place that makes you appealing in an acquisition.

I think the ecosystem for scalable start-ups in SF is simply extraordinary [...]

I don’t actually disagree with the core point of this comment. I think it’s framed in a rather patronizing way, but I don’t disagree that this specific kind of “scalable” start-up is probably going to have some kind of advantage in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the context in which this advice is framed, patronizing as it is, is not unusual. I’m learning to ignore this attitude, because we clearly share different motivations, and that’s okay.

But.

After some solid arguments on the advantages of San Francisco for “scalable” start-ups, we arrive at the conclusion, which is simply this:

SF is the best place to start a tech company.

And on this point, I’m motivated to reply. ‘Cause that just ain’t true.

“If you want to be an actor, ya gotta be in Hollywood!”

Mike shared with me an early draft of his post, and it included this quote, which he had heard from another Baltimorean who chose to move west to Silicon Valley.

This quote, to me, pretty well summarizes the attitude that “the best place to start a tech company” is in San Francisco.

This quote also, as it turns out, epitomizes everything I’m trying to avoid in my artistic and entrepreneurial life.

The implication of that quote is there is only one kind of actor: Hollywood megastars, or people who aspire to be Hollywood megastars. It implicitly dismisses all other actors. They don’t even qualify for the name.

There will be (a few) Hollywood stars, and if you want to spend your life pursuing your 0.0000001% chance of being one, you’re probably ever-so-slightly statistically better off moving to Hollywood.

That’s not invalid, but jeebus, how stifling! Are we seriously idolizing a vision in which all actors live in Hollywood? That’s the path to success?

I think San Francisco is probably the Hollywood of certain kinds of tech companies.

And I think Figure 53 is almost certainly better off in Baltimore.

Moreover, I think it’s irresponsible to argue that one city in all the world is the place you should move to start a tech company.

bhalliburton implies that my vision of a tech company is cute but not worth the time of serious entrepreneurs.

I get really tired of that. 37signals gets really tired of that. Other awesome tech companies who are changing the world and making good money doing it, I would venture to guess, get really tired of that too.

If startup culture means fostering crowds of high-aiming, high-risk tech companies that absorb lots of money but rarely succeed, making Baltimore a hub for startup companies isn’t that interesting to me. The drive to cash out leaves me cold. I don’t know exactly what a Baltimore-specific tech culture could look like, but I’m totally okay if it doesn’t look like that.

I’m also totally okay if that’s the culture that some people love. That’s cool! I think those kinds of companies are important!

But let’s not needlessly count out a diversity of creative activity. There’s a lot of ways to succeed. Let’s celebrate, and pursue, all of them.

This morning I finally got around to reading last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Turns out the day I was busy building Seymour was the day this article appeared on my doorstep:

And now, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is starting a dual-degree master’s program in journalism and computer science. [...] One goal of the Columbia program, according to Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs, is to produce journalists who will “take it several steps beyond — to where they’re creating a lot of their own new tools.” That means learning enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation — or enough, at least, to see what technology can do for journalism. Henning Schulzrinne, a computer-science professor at Columbia, says he hopes students will also leave the program with “tools to assist in gathering, processing and presenting news.”

Emphasis mine. Full article here.

Today I improved the layout of SeeMoreB.com when viewed on an iPad. (The photos are larger, and the header is simpler.) I also went ahead and signed Seymour up on Twitter.

Scott requested that I share the code for Seymour. It’s nothing special, but once I have a chance to clean it up and put some kind of open source license on it, I’ll put it on GitHub and let you know.

The Story

This morning around 11 AM a man, unhappy about his mother’s spine surgery, shot a doctor.

This incident is still in-progress, about 5 blocks down the road from my house [Edited: Oops, I was confused about where this was happening. Johns Hopkins is at the end of my street, but not their hospital.], and the details may change as the day progresses. But that’s the current story. (The doctor is reported to be expected to pull through.)

Why the Sun in particular is doing a great job, and why this is fascinating in general

In brief:

The Sun’s Crime reporter Justin Fenton appeared very quickly on the scene, providing a trustworthy direct account of what he was seeing.

Justin was able to take several powerful photos of the scene. (That’s down the street from me. [Edited: Nope, it wasn't.] You better believe I am consuming those photos voraciously.)

Justin is sifting through first-hand Tweets from hospital employees on the scene. He is incorporating those accounts into his coverage.

The official account of the @BaltimoreSun is, meanwhile, working through other channels to gather information from the city and police.

The Sun created an impromptu Twitter list of all Twitter accounts they feel are providing helpful coverage of the incident.

Now, here’s where things get especially interesting…

We begin to see multiple official news organizations covering the incident from Twitter. We even see DC-based @TBD publicly request permission to use Justin’s sniper photo, and the Baltimore Sun publicly granting them that permission.

When Justin’s cell phone dies, we see another Sun reporter say she’s bringing him a new one.

We see the official account of the Baltimore Police department releasing updates from their account.

We see a more complete photo gallery appear on the Baltimore Sun website.

We get traces of information from the television outlets, whose reporting is bleeding into Twitter as well.

We continue to get a smattering of first-hand accounts from people on the scene.

We are, in short, watching an unprecedented amalgam of voices, from private citizens to news organizations to official city government, creating an in-the-moment multi-view story, cooperatively and extraordinarily quickly. No single voice must be trusted above all others. Perspectives may be balanced from multiple sources, with varying levels of trust.

What’s more, the voices of the first-hand accounts are fundamentally different from all other forms of reporting. The accounts are not given as an interview to a camera or an on-the-record quote for tomorrow’s front page, they are offered without knowledge of whether the account will actually be “broadcast”. To my reading, the voices of those accounts are more direct, more authentic, and more useful than any printed or recorded interview after the fact.

Hell, even the 140 character limit of Twitter seems (to me) to encourage a plainness and straightforwardness in the accounts that might be lost with a less restrictive medium.

And across it all, I see a tendency toward transparency that I feel I don’t usually see in other reporting formats. That transparency is the basis of trust, or at least the basis for letting me make decisions about where each reported account is coming from.

This isn’t just about the buzzword of “crowdsourcing”, although there is something special about gathering many first-hand accounts in seconds from whereever the news is happening. (I first learned about the recent DC hostage situation from the tweet of a lighting designer who was working across the street.) This is about a fundamentally different story structure, where a professional news organization like the Sun becomes a weighty voice among many voices, serving as a professional reference point, an editorial guide, and a critical source of information in what is nonetheless a collection of disparate voices.

….I see that in the time I’ve taken to write this post, the incident has reached a conclusion. The gunman has killed his mother and committed suicide.

Despite the apparent good news about the doctor (and my personal relief that my wife works at a different hospital), that’s a heavy ending to the story.

Maybe I’ll see this whole series of events with less wonderment in a day or two. But I feel like I just saw a glimmer of something new in the news, and it was remarkable.

I ventured into the drizzle this morning to buy myself a Baltimore Sun.

I wanted to see the new Sun Magazine. It was restored to life today after a fourteen year hibernation.

I will admit to you some measure of excitement as I strode through an unexpectedly chilly rain.

Is that nerdy? Perhaps that’s nerdy.

But my paper and my breakfast were waiting for me at the store, my coffee and my couch were waiting for me at home, and nothing else worth noting pressed for my attention.

I was, therefore, excited (nerdy or no), and you might even say I was in the perfect mental state for consumption: Eager and ready to fall in love with my purchase.

“User Experience” is just a hip phrase for “how’d it go?”

Well, it went okay.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just “okay”?

Yeah. Just okay.

Why?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The problem with trying to explain “why” is that the answer is strung up on so many thorny bits of the modern news-reporting apparatus that to do the answer justice would:

1. Take weeks.
2. Send me quickly onto ground where I can only speculate.
3. Make this post unreadably long.

Therefore, in lieu of trying to be complete, I will try to simply follow

The First Thread of my Experience

The first thing that happened, after I picked the paper out of Eddie’s wireframe newstand, was that the slippery advertising section fell out of the middle of the paper and plopped into a heap upon the floor.

Lying there on the floor, it provides us a convenient place to start.

Advertising

First things first: I am not, at the present time, judging advertising. I am not making conclusions about advertising. I am not arguing for or against the necessity of advertising.

What I am doing, at the present time, is cataloguing the size, shape, and general outward appearance of advertising as it is presented in the Baltimore Sun.

Bring Forth the Scale

By weight, the advertising inserts of the Baltimore sun consume 44% of the thing I bought.

Without the inserts, the paper weighs 14 ounces:

The inserts themselves weigh 11:

Of course, the actual percentage-by-weight of all advertising in the Sun is much, much greater than 44%. If I cut every ad out of every page of the “normal” part of the paper, and add that to the inserts, we’d get something a great deal higher.

But I won’t do that, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The Main Attraction

Let’s move on to my original enticement, the new Sun Magazine.

Below you’ll find a visual representation of the advertising in the magazine. A red block covers each ad, and the pages are arranged in a rough order of “less ads to more ads”.

Out of 44 surfaces available in the magazine, roughly 53% of them are employed to sell products and services.

Naturally, in the real layout, these ads are not sequestered to the end, but are instead mixed about equally throughout.

Moreover, it is important to note that the ads are not marked clearly in red. Many times they are dressed to look like stories.

So What?

Well, this ever-so-cursory analysis tells us a few things. The design of the advertising, as it currently exists in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, leads to the following facts about the reader’s experience:

1. When I open the magazine, it is better than even odds that my eyes are looking at an ad.
2. If my eyes do land on an ad, there is no quick, guaranteed way to know this has happened.

These facts are a very simple, very incomplete, but very incontrovertible part of the user experience of the Baltimore Sun Magazine, as it exists in paper form.

Back to this Morning

I got home, I filled my coffee cup, I pulled out my sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-a-croissant, and I happily sat down to browse the news.

And the first thing that happened? Someone is making a pitch to me. And then I get pitched again. And again. Ah, is this finally a story? Oh, nope, that’s a pitch that looks like a story.

I am, in short, engaged in a gentle yet very real struggle with the product I have purchased, to make it do the damn thing it’s supposed to do: deliver me the news.

This process leaves me ever-so-slightly frustrated, and my very first impression of this new magazine is flavored by the sense that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t much care whether I read their stories or not, as long as I read their ads.

Which, I am saddened to realize, is probably actually true, for someone over there.

The Hard Thing about Details is that There are So Many of Them, and So Many of Them Matter

There’s a saying in software: “Software is nothing but a collection of details.”

It’s hard to talk about the design of a user experience, because, like software, it is nothing but a collection of details. Some of them may even be quite poor without sacrificing the overall experience of the product — and no one gets them all right.

But similarly, some of the details may be done very, very well, and yet a collection of less important details done poorly conspire to render the whole effort moot.

For example, you may write an absolutely superb article about Baltimore, but if you deliver it in a package with just enough little frictions in just enough places, you push the probability further and further toward the chance that a given person will never read your article at all.

The challenge of designing a successful, sustainable product is finding how to lower that friction without destroying the way you eat.

This is not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Generating income is always a force in opposition to the perfectly smooth user experience. This is the trick of it.

The slippery sloshy slurry of product design is a big ol’ mess, and you won’t get it perfect, and it’s hard.

But Principles Can Help

Somewhere in your gut is a guiding principle. The reason you’re making what you’re making. The change you want to see in the world. All of the power and all of the force of your creativity is tied to this principle. This principle is the fountainhead of your energy and the anchor of your resolution.

The burning clarity of a principle can melt away the slurry. Some of it, at least.

Take reporting. I won’t presume to offer a defining principle for a reporter, but I’d be very comfortable in assuming it generally involves a relationship of trust between the reporter and the reader. When the fortunes of the newspapers began to wane, and the managers began to turn the knobs on the dying business model this way and that, searching for the magical combination that would unlock the new prosperity, it should have been clear that trickery was fundamentally incompatible with the presentation of the news. And yet advertisers are given more and more leeway to trample onto the turf of the reporter — in the case of online news, literally trampling, obscuring, or shoving aside the story. And they are permitted the grossest kind of trickery — creating ads that look like reporting — with only the meekest protestation of a tiny “ADVERTISEMENT” printed in the header to show that the original principle is, by someone’s estimation, still followed.

These kind of choices represent a shift in principle, and it’s poisonous. It doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be part of the solution^[1], but it does represent a sign that the redesign of the news is not in touch with the core principles of the news, and that’s both frustrating and scary.

Principles, and Friends

It’s easy enough to talk about these things from the outside, but it can be terribly hard to see them from the inside. I was humbled to be reminded of this only a few days ago, when my entrepreneurial energies sent me speculating down a perfectly reasonable business path. Reasonable, that is, until my teammates pointed out that, for all its merits, it would necessarily become a huge distraction, and thus poison our existing efforts. It was hard to hear, at first, as critical messages often are.

So clarify your principles, but don’t assume you can follow them alone, either.

In the Meantime

I continue my search for a pleasant way to read the stories of my city. The new Sun Magazine, as a rather watered-down style mag with enough advertising incorporated carelessly enough to make it hard to find the stories, is not a draw, and I don’t expect to walk down to Eddie’s for a paper again soon.

I want to read the news. I care about my city. I feel connected to individual reporters at the Sun, hard-working folks like Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and Justin Fenton. I want to read their stories. I just haven’t found a good way to do it yet. There are enough frictions, in enough places, to push me away from the paper and, heaven forfend, the the website. These products fight me when I try to use them. They get in the way of their own mission: for me to read their stories. Not just because of how they integrate advertising, but with their overall design, format, and delivery mechanism.

Of course, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m extraordinarily picky. On the other hand, it’s the role of a product designer to develop an extraordinary pickiness. Your raw sensitivity to the tiny pin-pricks of the experience is what guides you to file away the splinters. And the splinters, in aggregate, are the thing that bleed your product of greatness.

[1] I used to think advertising was necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe that anymore, in part because of some great counterexamples.

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Discovered via Scott Walters.

That post ended with a screenshot of Baltimore’s trends, which included not a peep about the technology topics that were sweeping the rest of Twitter:

“Oh, Baltimore,” I thought. “It’s why I love you. With all this noise about your emerging tech scene, Tequila still ranks higher than iPhone 4.”

Well, Baltimore, honey, I take it all back. Twitter has been slandering you. Witness today’s trends for Baltimore:

There we are, like some surrealist painting frozen in time: Lady Gaga, Harry Connick, and a bottle of Tequila sit gathered ’round the table while clocks melt over the Washington monument.

It is, and it shall apparently always be, about that time.