Category: psuedo

Changes

Last month everything changed.

Instead of waking up at 5am, lying in bed and checking the overnight news and media releases on my phone, I was able to lie in, consider going to the gym and wandering into work at a sensible hour.

My two years as Mumbrella’s news editor had come to end.

Modern digital journalism is not for the lazy or the faint hearted. The tyranny of a daily newsletter means the editors are always hungry for stories and stressing about scooping the opposition.

The hours up to sending the daily newsletter – around 10.30am for Mumbrella – go in a blur.

After the newsletter is sent, the duty editor’s challenge is to keep the website up to date while keeping a beady eye out for breaking news, story ideas for coming days, complaints about earlier stories and moderating the often defamatory comment stream.

Lucky editors have great reporters in their teams. In my case, I had Zoe Samios and Abigail Dawson who both awed and scared me with their work ethic and ferocious competitiveness.

I was very lucky.

That luck held in working alongside Josie Tutty, Mumbrella’s deputy editor, whose editorial sense and attention to detail saved me from countless shocking howlers.

With that team, Mumbrella managed to score its highest ever traffic in 2018.

Those opportunities, privileges and challenges came at a cost, though with stress an every-present problem for everyone in editorial teams.

One former editor of an industry website told me they had PTSD after four years of running one site.

Despite the stresses, those two years had been interesting. I’d learned a lot and I’m eternally grateful to Tim Burrowes for the opportunity to have a deep, if short, dive into an industry which I didn’t really understand along with the privilege of working with some of the smartest and hardest working young journalists in Australia.

It was also the opportunity to be on the editor’s side of journalism, a challenge I genuinely thought I would never get.

However when Zoe, Abby and Josie decided to move on for their own individual reasons, it was time for me to move on as well.

Again, I was lucky. A role at the Australian Computer Society opened up which allows me to get back into tech in a position that gives me the opportunity to help raise the IT industry’s importance to the nation’s and political leaders.

This has been my passion and was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Added to the attractions were a much shorter commute, nicer offices, more civilised working hours and far less stress.

I’ll miss the hipster vibe of Chippendale, even though I was probably the oldest person in the suburb, let alone the office, along with the opportunity of dressing like an extra from Mr Robot.

Now I’m at Barangaroo (the towers in the featured image) I have to dress like a sensible, middle aged adult.

The last two years were at times fun, at times dispiriting and at times infuriating. On the latter point, it’s remarkable how sensitive those outwardly hard-nosed agency bosses, journalists and publishers can be when relatively trivial stories upset their fragile egos.

I won’t miss those panicked phone calls from hysterical publishers, journos and agency bosses who, quite frankly, were old enough to know better. You know who you are.

But on balance, my time at Mumbrella was a challenging and fun adventure. I wish the new team, as well as Tim and his co-founder Martin Lane, all best in navigating a business reporting on an industry that doesn’t understand its own challenges.

So I’m thankful for the opportunity, and I’m grateful for the change.

I hope to see many of you around in the new role.

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Building great work

Mediocrity is something we have to avoid if we want to do great things.

“You have to understand Paul that we are building a structure designed to last twenty-five years,” sneered the consulting engineer as we sat in a site meeting on a high rise construction site just inside the City of London.

I sighed deeply and let the matter of cladding fire protection water tanks slide and pondered nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, wondering what Christoper Wren would have thought about the mediocre architecture being thrown up around his masterpiece.

The consulting engineer was a suitable person to build mediocre buildings, he and his firm were only on the project by virtue of the property developer being from the same masonic temple and the calibre of their shoddy and visionless work reflected their suitability for the project.

Apart from the pedestrian architecture and engineering, the lack of foresight extended through poor design right through to not allowing enough for future expansion of the building’s communications – by the early 1990s it had already become apparent modern office towers were going to need plenty of space for network cables and the lack of which probably contributed to the structure being totally refurbished in the mid 2000s.

That day was the beginning of the end of my engineering career as I found I didn’t much care for being patronized by mediocrities all too often encountered in the building industry in the mid 1990s.

At the time most of the architecture in London was pedestrian and bland late Twentieth Century mirror glass. The real tragedy being that modern construction techniques give architects and builders possibilities that Wren couldn’t have dreamed of.

Thankfully London snapped out of that era of mediocrity and today building like The Gherkin, The Shard and London City Hall show what’s possible with imagination and modern building techniques, although things can go wrong.

Mediocrities patronizing those who don’t share their narrow, bland look on life will always be with us, thankfully we don’t have to accept them in our lives.

If we want to build great things that push the boundaries or change the world, then those grey mediocrities have no role in our lives.

Where that consulting engineer and his masonic friends are today, I have no idea but it’s not likely they built any of the iconic buildings that now dot London’s skyline.

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Black

Sometimes you get lucky

Some days you wake up and it’s black.

If you are lucky – and sometimes you are really lucky – later in the day you get the opportunity to speak to folk who are really changing the world.

Those are the folk who can light up a dark world.

And sometimes you’re lucky enough to speak to them.

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Creepy business

There’s a place and time for business networking

In Entrepreneur magazine, writer Alina Tugend suggests we forget networking and become connectors and gives the reader some ideas on how to build connections.

One of the suggestions is, quite reasonably, to eschew networking events and join organisations you have a real interests in, like a sporting club.

Alina quotes Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, who says he has never been to an official networking event.

“I have a friend who is the executive vice president of a large bank in Charlotte,” he writes in his book. “His networking hotspot is, of all places, the YMCA. He tells me that at 5 and 6 in the morning, the place is buzzing with exercise fanatics like himself getting in a workout before they go to the office. He scouts the place for entrepreneurs, current customers and prospects.”

Prowl gym locker rooms for business prospects? Sounds a bit creepy and you may end up with not quite the connections you expected.

I guess we could call it the Village People model of business development.

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