Remembering the man who broke the Internet

The luckiest of us, I believe, count our parents as our greatest mentors. Other generous souls have nurtured and coached me through the years, but no one influenced me more than my father, Larry G. Coats. Dad died September 24, 2018, with family at his side and a legacy that will outlive us all. On September 29, I delivered a portrait of his life in the eulogy below, and only wish I’d nailed it as firmly as he’d landed so many speeches. Onward.

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I was on a business trip in 2004 to California’s Silicon Valley to visit clients now worth more than most nations when my father called. I was in a freeway snarl headed out of San Francisco Airport, brake and gas, brake and gas, and I picked up the line.

“Well,” he said gravely, “I’ve gone and done it.”

Most of you know my father. “Done it” could apply to an entire calliope of notes – some that inspire us, some that lilt, some that clank, some that arouse a greater purpose, some that just go bam, bam, bam. 

I avoided rear-ending a car on the 405 and said, “Gone and done what?”

He was silent for a while. “Nope. I shouldn’t say. I’ve gone and done it.” Another long pause. “The authorities are probably headed this way.”

Well. My Bay Area commute just became amazing.

Because with my father, you never knew.

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 Larry Gene Coats grew up as the child of a single mom, because his father was overseas in World War II. My grandmother worked odd jobs – including a drive-in theater – while my grandfather, Carl, was on the USS Missouri when the Japanese signed the Instruments of Surrender. Carl was headed into combat if Fat Man and Little Boy failed. “Gone and done it” meant surviving with Marjorie, and raising his little brother, Keith, on whatever food was the cheapest kind.

As a teenager, “gone and done it” meant something different. Mostly fast cars, cigarettes and Elvis Presley. I’d add “fast women,” but I’m his son, and we don’t speak of such things. Dad bored out a ’55 Chevy Bel Air and lowered it by torching the springs. A fast car for a short guy. Dad barely graduated high school – he was Summa Cum Cut-Up – at 5’1” (I followed closely in those footsteps, graduating at 5’4”) but he gassed up with aviator fuel and raced on abandoned runways. 

After graduating, “gone and done it” did not include college. It involved a parts truck and a lube gun at Willcox Chevrolet, after he was turned down for the same job at other dealerships in Southern Indiana. He’d lost his teeth by then – we forget how rural dental care really has its roots in fluoride and the idea of brushing with something other that foot powder – and took to the job with gusto. He was a hot rodder. Parts got there on time.

Back to California traffic. I said: “The authorities are headed your way? Dad, what did you do?”

I heard my mother in the background, in their motor home, somewhere in the back roads of America, say “Tell him, Larry.”

All my dad would say was, “Gone and done it. It’s done.”

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What “got done” from there was this: My father, with a poorly earned high school diploma, worked his way up from parts driver to a parts clerk at Willcox. (This is a big promotion.) And after World War II, my grandfather – thanks to FDR’s CCC program – had enough skills to get a factory job, rather than the agricultural life that had kept my family in poverty, pretty much since 1630. These skills also allowed my grandfather perspective on the United Autoworkers Union and its regular vacations, otherwise known as wildcat strikes.

 Which is why my grandmother continued to work odd jobs. And one of them was at an insurance agency run by George Hinton.

Some of you can see what is about to “get done.”

Marjorie was the receptionist for George and his partner, Corby. George had a daughter, who was at Indiana University. She graduated from Silver Creek High School the same year as my dad. Her name was Lin. (It’s actually Vera Lin, because that was a popular singer – “the Forces’ sweetheart” – but mom hates “Vera,” so Lin it is.) And Lin was home from Bloomington on Christmas break. 

“You should get in touch with Larry,” Marjorie said. She was black Irish. She had flint in her eyes and love in her veins. “He’d be happy to see you.”

Less than two years later, they married. Mom, raised Republican and known about town as being from a “good” family; dad, raised yellow-dog Democrat and definitely on the ready-to-be-gentrified side of the tracks. Coatses were elated. Hintons were skeptical. Willcox needed its clerk back, pronto.

Back to San Francisco traffic. “What’s done, dad? What did you do?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m on the computer. That one you gave me.”

Ah. I have been tech support for my father since I was a boy. Once, I was on a Cub Cadet in the front yard of our farm – my corners were sloppy – and my father appeared on the front porch. He rang the cast iron bell until he got my attention. I shut off the engine and ran to the house, where he was already in his recliner. He pointed at our pre-cable TV – four channels on two dials – and said, “Change this channel, Rusty. I can’t watch this shit.”

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After I and my sister, Pam, were “gone and done” being born, my father’s life went into overdrive, like downshifting that ’55 Bel Air. He went from parts clerk to General Manager at Willcox in a blur of promotions – it turns out you can run the table if the guy who owns the table doesn’t enjoy the game. He started building a network in the fraternal ways of old – Moose, Optimist, Elk. He helped like-minded politicians turn out the vote, then decided to seek a vote of his own.

Like-minded. That’s an interesting phrase to say now, when we seem so divided. But my dad didn’t view party lines as enemies, although we short guys are competitive to a fault. Instead, he looked at what needed to be “gone and done.”

So he ran on that. What are we going to get done? Roads? Jails? Reform? Education? I’m pretty sure our first “Vote Coats” campaign pins were stolen from Bacon’s, a department store. They were having a sale on parkas. Dad saw an angle. He saw an angle and he ran.

And won.

Back in San Francisco, I hear my dad say, “I was on the Internet.”

Traffic is a horror show south of San Francisco. Café motorcycle riders split lanes as if they want to eat mirror glass. I said, “Netscape or AOL?”

Don’t judge. It was 2004.

My dad spent 16 years in public office and influenced Indiana politics across three decades. He also was my inspiration for being a hacker. One Monday night at Willcox – I worked in the body shop and the sales floor stayed open until 11 pm, I think to sober up some of the salesmen from their weekend blackouts – I air-gunned my jumpsuit and came up to meet dad. He was in the sales clerk office, sitting by the first computer Willcox installed. It was the size of a hatchback.

“Look,” he said, staring at the square green lines of text. I saw serial numbers, makes and models of familiar cars. He said, “That’s how our competition is pricing those cars.” And then he reduced the prices of similar models at Willcox. And sold them.

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Back in traffic. “Netscape,” he said. “You said AOL is for losers.”

Well, yes, I did. I stand by it. More importantly: “Dad, what about the Internet?”

“No, I can’t say. I gone and done it.”

Long breath from me. “Just tell me.”

And then he gave it up. “Rusty, I gone and broke the Internet.”

I almost drove into a guardrail. Finally, I said, “Dad, I don’t think so.” But I wasn’t completely sure.

See, my dad came from nothing. Our family had lived in poverty for centuries until fate and grit got us over a hump so many families see in their headlights. He married a woman of higher station – and then made her disbelieving parents proud of a blue-collar Chevy man. He ran for office and rose to become the most powerful man in Clark County – and I have many forgiven speeding tickets to thank for that, because I also inherited my father’s lead foot. He retired at 48 with the certainty that he could make that work over the long haul. He took my mother on the road for that long haul for 16 years in motor homes and saw all 50 states – sometimes calling me from Winnemucca when I thought he was in Birmingham. He had the audacity to become an artist late in life, carving and turning wood to sell at craft shows. He ran thrift stores and churches without ruffling feathers – until he needed to. He became a fixture at St. Leo basketball games and sometimes attended a baseball game with me, even though he hated baseball.

If anyone could break the Internet, it was my dad.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t think you broke the Internet.” I began to mansplain. “The Internet was built by the Department of Defense to connect scientists and governments in the event of nuclear war. It’s –“

He interrupted: “Nope. It’s broke. I gone and done it.”

I tried another tack. “Dad, what are you seeing?”

He said, “I shouldn’t say. The authorities –“

“Dad,” I said, “what are you seeing?”

He let out a long gust of air. My dad is one of history’s epic snorers. I share this. He said, “I see a gray screen. Like metal. It says ‘404 NOT Found.’”

Traffic cleared in front of me. I said, “Dad, it’s a bad link. Hit the back button.”

“No,” he said. “That won’t do it. I gone and –“

“Hit the back button.”

A moment passed. I heard his finger clack on the plastic key of the Toshiba. Then:

“Never mind. It’s back. Bye.” Click.

My dad had gone and done it. Again.

Caregiving, servant leadership and heroes

A mentor introduced me to servant leadership in an unconventional way: We spun our wedding rings like tops on a conference table and let them joust. It was how we unwound after 14-hour days in the early dot-com era.

I’d just been promoted over peers and was in the first weeks of the new mantle. Some members of the team were open about their lack of enthusiasm regarding their new boss. Some were passive aggressive about it. Some were snide. One put comments about the “redhead wannabe” in the html source code of the newspaper’s homepage. We’ve all been there.

I weathered it until my mentor and I went to the conference room to battle wedding bands. Then I opened up to him about my insecurities and doubts. I was 31, finding my feet in a new city, with hour-long commutes at both ends of the day. Sometimes, it can be lonely in the middle.

While the gold rings chipped at each other, my mentor said, “If you think it’s their job to make you feel successful as a boss, you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. It’s your job to help them succeed. When they feel successful, that’s when they’ll respect you.”

His ring whacked mine and it careened off the table. And I never looked at leadership the same way again.

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These past months have found me in another form of servant leadership: caregiving.  My father had a stroke two months ago, and doctors found a small mass resting on his thalamus – a part of the brain I like to call Grand Central Station. It’s a place neurosurgeons tread very carefully, if at all.

That started a journey familiar to many: Ambulance, ICU, diagnosis, treatment, graduation to a “regular room,” re-hab, physical therapy and, thankfully, discharge.  I arrived an hour behind the ambulance and began another journey familiar to many: Advocating for one parent with medical teams – and sometimes cajoling the patient to do what he did not want to do – while caring for another parent whose memory loss makes every day a blurry canvas.

I would make eye contact with other caregivers in the infrequent moments outside the hospital rooms. Catching up on work and the outside world – or just adding a few steps to the lonely FitBit – we’d nod at each other. Get another cup of coffee, maybe a Kind bar, and get back at it.

Didn’t I wear this shirt yesterday?

Thank god the vending machine outside radiology takes Apple Pay.

I wonder if the Shell station sells wine?

The world narrows in times like that. Everything focused on helping one parent heal and another parent cope. Acting as the node for what I called The Sacrament Telegraph – the communication chain of their church and community. Ending the day drained – but always a few thousands steps shy of my FitBit goal – and passing out on a recliner. All the while thinking about those battling wedding rings.

It’s your job to help them succeed.

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Now my father is on home PT and walking regularly, with Meals on Wheels delivering more food than they can eat. (Favorite quote from my father: “It’s good for you and almost as cheap as Wendy’s.”)  We’re all inventing a new normal.

Completing projects with deadline extensions, thanks to understanding clients. Exploring home-assistance programs. Re-engaging the business pipeline. Launching two kids in college, one in law school, one in post-graduate work and one in 8th grade. Logging into medical portals to look at MRI results. Negotiating new contracts and talking to attorneys. Selling a house. Calling to see what meals were delivered (fruit salad, barbecue chicken, baked beans and dessert). New normal.

Taking a moment this week with a friend who also has been in the role of caregiver, we had a glass of wine – not from Shell – and I told him the story of the battling wedding rings. We talked about how being a caregiver is its own form of leadership. You’re helping people be the hero in their own story.

While they’re helping you be the hero in yours.

We clinked our glasses.

Cheers.

Fatherhood, leadership and those who came before

When my first daughter was born, I pretended that Father’s Day was about me.  When my second daughter was born, I felt I could fully occupy the holiday’s space, and my appreciation of my own father rode the dugout pine. I was the one with the children. I was the earner and the participatory parent. This was my day.

But a divorce, remarriage and three stepchildren can set a man’s ego right. My first wife relocated nearly 2,000 miles away, so my presence in my daughters’ lives diminished considerably – while my presence in the lives of my stepchildren soared. As father figure but not father to these three, I was shown a new seat while continuing to reach for my daughters. Creeks dry and rise and flood.

This hard life lesson more than 10 years ago – fatherhood is not about you, it’s about them – did more to influence my leadership style than any book or mentor. And here is the lesson:

As a father – and a leader – you are a bridge between the past and the future. No one should be expected to celebrate the present; that’s called GSD, or Getting Shit Done. You honor what came before and you create what comes next.

In both cases, you are occupying a present where other people are the heroes of their stories, past and future.

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So here’s what came before: My family immigrated to North America in 1630. The ship logs – which my father dutifully collected like an archaeologist on a dig – show only that a grandfather and grandson made the passage. No mention of a father or any women – but then, not acknowledging women is kind of a Western tradition.

After staying in New England long enough to fight in the Revolutionary War, the family moved into the Midwest territories – and stayed largely in the same 100-mile radius for several generations. In absolute poverty. There is a hill in Southern Indiana where you’ll find the tombstones of people bearing my last name, buried way too young. Irish people can be loyal to a fault, particularly to a land that doesn’t love them back.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps was the beginning of what changed the course. My grandfather shipped off to Oregon and learned enough skill to secure a non-combat post in the Pacific Theater and, after the Japanese signed the treaty on the USS Missouri – my grandfather was aboard, as fortune would have it – he came home to a manufacturing job at International Harvester.

Think of that for a moment. It took 300 years for a family to climb from immigrant and agricultural poverty to an industrial-age job.

That is what it means to honor the past. Not because of great achievements, though they sometimes occur. But because progress is a hard bit of business. It takes generations. A transformative breakthrough is as rare as a shark attack. That’s why people talk about them.

Ask anyone trying to transform a company – or an industry – just how many similarities there are to that.

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My father, whom I honor this Father’s Day, graduated high school while working the pump and lube gun at a gas station, then got a job as a parts driver (that’s how car dealerships used to ship parts around, before anyone invented FedEx) at a Chevrolet dealership. My parents had me when he was working behind the counter in the parts department. It was a big promotion.

But he climbed, eventually to become General Manager of the dealership. Since the owner was largely absentee, my father ran the business. He also got into politics – southern Indiana was blue-state country in those days, owed largely to the fact that many families were saved by FDR’s policies. For 16 years, he ran Clark County and was the most powerful person in the region. Creeks dry and rise and flood.

And he sent me to college, the first in his family, 12 generations after we arrived.

And my career has been, from the beginning, about what’s next. About creating the future, not looking back, so I’ve moved nearly a dozen times since leaving Indiana and have, for nearly two decades, had a travel schedule that rivals George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air.”

As a journalist, it was three stories, plus briefs and a working Sunday story every day. When I convinced Orage Quarles III in the mid-90s that The Modesto Bee needed to be online, in a time we used the word “cyberspace” without irony, everything went into hyperdrive.

Digital. Breaking News. Real-time. Data journalism. Behaviorally targeted ads. Corporate-wide content management systems. Cascading stylesheets. Portable widgets. Mobile. Apps. Partnerships with Yahoo, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. AR, VR, A.I., machine learning. Building a future so we could sustain journalism solely from digital revenues.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I’ve built my career on tomorrow. And my leadership style, too. What is our moon shot? Let’s get there together. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Let’s create our own future.

I will always be pulled by that siren, always chant the mantra of “Onward.” But, especially on Father’s Day, I think all leaders, innovators and disruptors need to pause and honor the generations that plowed the ground to create this present – which was the stuff of science fiction when they drove the till. 

We should honor what came before as loudly as we celebrate the IPO. I have generations of men and women who made it possible for me to be writing this in an air conditioned home, with food in the refrigerator and two kids with college degrees, two on their way and one in the wings. 

That’s science fiction if you lived on Daisy Hill in 1840.

Families and industries grow and shift over time. Creeks dry and rise and flood. The best fathers – and the best leaders – drive forward with confidence and purpose, while always tipping their hats to those who came before.

Four words for local media

Saving local media has been the mantra for more than a decade, especially through the double-barrel recessions of the aughts. How do we save local media? Who – or what – will protect it from the secular changes of digital, platforms, mobile and social? 

Many would-be saviors rushed in. And, like many digital executives, I was lured into that call. My friends know that I’m drawn to the Superman mythology, and not because of the godlike Kal-El who protects Earth with an S-shaped crest that means Hope. It’s because of Jor-El, who risked everything to save his dying Krypton but ultimately only saved his son.

At E.W. Scripps, I launched a program in 2008 called “56/2012,” a vision that would pay for all journalism in the company (which at the time totaled $56 million) with digital revenues by 2012.  We were on track to make that goal until I exited in 2010, and the goal was shelved.

In rebooting the Local Media Consortium from a sunsetting, Yahoo-focused concern in 2010, I led a disbanding board to the idea that local media could occupy a seat at the table with all major platforms if it united – strategically and economically. When I left in March, the LMC represented nearly 80 percent of all U.S. local media and generated hundreds of millions in digital revenue per year.  

It wasn’t enough.

After each of these occurrences, I was stuck in a failed Jor-El funk. And I’m not alone.

A number of media industry groups recently crafted an open letter to Google, saying it waan't doing enough to help publishers protect themselves from General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It’s serious shit if you serve targeted advertising to European audiences, and requires publishers to notify users what data it and its ad platforms collect on users. The industry groups say Google isn’t doing enough; Google says, “They’re your users, so notify them.”

The News Media Alliance has lobbied the U.S. legislature to give media companies “safe harbor” to negotiate with GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) to extract revenues back to local media. I’ve spoken and written against this we-are-weak approach, but acknowledge that the thrust is to save media.

There are countless others trying to ride in as saviors. Technology platforms, audience monetization efforts, local concerns hoping to buy their newspapers away from predatory hedge funds and anyone who says “blockchain.” 

They want to protect local media.  They want to save it.

I want to say this carefully, but emphatically:

It can’t be done.

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I spent the weekend in North Carolina watching my stepson graduate from Davidson College, a small private liberal arts college founded in 1837 by the Presbyterian Church but better known more recently for giving basketball the gift of Steph Curry.

Graduations are composed of the expected and unexpected: The reminder that the word “commencement” means a beginning and not an end; the faculty receptions; the parties that unwisely mix students, parents and a beer keg; the baccalaureate service that draws a third of the graduating class and their dutiful parents. 

As the father and stepfather of five children, I have experience with all, and my least favorite is baccalaureate. It’s generally when schools founded by faith organizations remind the graduating class of its religious roots, often with a cudgel. These messages come across to me as too little, too late. The graduating class of Davidson spent more time in the weeks walking up to commencement talking about what would happen at the “Beer Truck” and not its Presbyterian roots.

But the Lord – or Universe, or Spirit, or Love (the Presbyterians are pluralists, after all) – works in mysterious ways. And I found the homily by Davidson College Chaplain Rob Spach resonate not only with the graduating class of 2018, but also delivering needed guidance to the state of local media.

Namely: Will God save me from bad things?

The answer is no.

Using Psalm 23 as a launch point – The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want – Rev. Spach took graduates and families through the roots of the Psalm, leading to the question: When 9/11 happened, we heard stories of people who worked in the Twin Towers but were delayed by traffic jams and daycare dropoffs and flat tires, and therefore saved. Do we assume that God protected them? If so, why did he not protect the others?

The answer is haunting but clarifying: “God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything.”

This resonated with me in my quest to protect – and, yes, save – local media. It isn’t a martyr’s quest; it's a solvable puzzle we haven’t cracked. I’ve said it’s our Manhattan Project, but lately I've seen it as our equivalent to cracking the unbreakable cipher, Enigma.

God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything. 

Local media does not need to be saved. Our efforts are noble, but saying it that way – saving local media – creates an expectation that there is a magic bullet, a tax on Google and Facebook, a specific level of consolidation, a gizmo.

We do not need salvation. We need to sustain ourselves.

Local media has lost itself. When the editorial page editor of a media chain is fired for expressing his First Amendment rights, there is a cancer in the industry that can’t be healed with the touch of a savior. When media companies force their anchors to read editorials denouncing the basic journalistic practice of afflicting the comfortable, those companies can’t be saved by better play on Apple News. When industry groups look to Capitol Hill to force the GAFA quartet into a green-grocer payoff, we’re not talking about salvation – we’re talking about desperation.

God protects us from nothing, but sustains us in everything.

I grew up in faith but migrated to altruism, hard work, the idea that love is a physical force and, yes, capitalism. I do not look for salvation. Instead, I seek solutions.

And solutions come from within. From trusting that the changes in our lives require us to bob and weave, to react and create, to accept and defy. It means we are on our own, but there are forces in the universe – again, the pluralism – that want us to succeed, if only we’ll take up the reins.

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Rev. Spach pulled the Davidson class back to his original thread by tying in the Lord’s Prayer, which is a merging of two verses, one from Matthew and one from Luke. (The Presbyterians are big on doxology.) And, in so doing, offered that the prayer – and Psalm 23 – presented the same four words for humanity. Or, for local media.  

Come dance with me.

We will have ups and downs. Some will be spared, some will not. There will be lava and hurricanes and poverty and turmoil. There will be secular changes and disruptive technologies that pull the foundation out from under your feet. There never will be stability, and you are a fool to ask for it.

Don’t ask the universe to save you from any of it. 

Instead, ask the universe – and your industry – if it would like to dance.

Living by the entrepreneur's mantra

I was 5'4" when I graduated from high school. Or maybe I was 5'3". I told everyone I was 5'6" because, somehow, that made me feel better.

You learn a lot of things when you're short. I learned to cut 2x4 blocks, paint them black so they'd blend with the carpet, and bolt them in as lifts under the bucket seats of my 1968 SS Camaro so I could see over the dashboard. I learned how to be quick-witted and funny so I could joke my way out of a fistfight, and I learned to be scrappy and full Irish if that failed.

I also learned to hustle.

I was jealous of guys who were taller and naturally athletically gifted, but refused to stay on the sidelines. There hasn't been a week since I was 12 that I haven't lifted weights, if only to stave off black moods. And while that practice never has netted the physique promised by Charles Atlas, it always serves as a reminder: Short guys have to hustle.

I finally got my growth spurt in college but never lost that outlook. And I've found that in business, hustle is the quality that most separates leaders from laggards. (And a hat tip to Tom Peters, co-author of "In Search of Excellence," who gave me those distinctions.) 

The world is full of people with higher IQs than you. Who went to better colleges. Who have better connections in the industry. Who look, on paper, like they could wipe the floor with you. 

And they will. Unless you hustle.

It's not about selling or moving your feet. It's about putting in the work and not resting on laurels. Doing the tasks others think are beneath them or will take too much time. Showing up early to the breakfast meeting even if you were howling at the moon the night before. Viewing obstacles as opportunities. Embracing the entrepreneur's mantra: Today is the day.

When my wife and I started our consultancy in 2010 after years in corporate and executive jobs, we started from scratch. There's no end to the minutiae when you run a small business, from legal registration to do business in multiple states, payroll, tax filings, occasional DNS attacks, chasing down clients that owe you money, dealing with multiple bureaucracies with multiple ways of processing contracts, you name it. It's easy to get overwhelmed by it - it's tedious shit - unless you see it as another opportunity to hustle. An opportunity to say, Today is the day.

I keep an Evernote file on reminders and inspirations for focusing on hustle and reminding myself of that mantra. Here are some of my top go-to quotes and tactics.

• Always shine your shoes the night before a speech or presentation. My friend, close-up magician Alfonso Acetuno, taught me, "Magic is all in the feet." Even though people are looking at his hands, he is mindful and precise about where they're not looking.
• Alfonso also kept a Post-It note on his three-way mirror, where he practiced for hours each day. "When you are not practicing, remember: Somewhere, someone is practicing. And when you meet him, he will win." - Peter Bergman
• "You can worry, you can pray or you can do something." - Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Steven Berglas and author of multiple books on entrepreneurialism and overcoming burnout.
• "People who are busy make time. They don't find it." - Anonymous
• "Always know what your attack is going to be, but have three or four other attacks you can do without thinking about it." - My friend and former coworker Michael Fibison, who wrestled competitively. His advice works equally well on the mat and in the workplace.
• I once asked author Tom Robbins his writing routine. "I sit down every morning at 10 o'clock. Sometimes my muse shows up. Sometimes she doesn't. But she knows where I'll be if she decides to come."
• "Success is never owned. It's rented. And the rent is due every day." - Anonymous 
• I used to drive by Stephen King's house on my way to work at The Bangor Daily News. He'd stop by the newsroom occasionally to razz the sports editor over Boston Red Sox coverage. The prolific writer - and my seasonal neighbor in Southwest Florida - said, "Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
• On my first journalism job out of college, I asked my editor at The Evansville Courier how I could get more front-page play. (This is what consumed all print journalists.) She told me, indirectly, that it was a numbers game. "Three stories a day, plus briefs, and always be working on a Sunday story."
• "You can't drown in sweat." - any one of my baseball coaches

My father gave me the best example of being the person who does the work when I was in middle school. My dad ran a Chevrolet dealership in Southern Indiana and was the most powerful man in local politics. One day, I was sent home from school for, shall we say, an obedience transgression. My dad picked me up and drove me to the dealership, where he informed me that I was acting a little big for my britches, thought some things were beneath  me, and so I was going to spend the day painting the mechanic's filthy and porn-ridden bathroom. 

A mechanic we knew only as Weird Richard came in, saw me covered in paint inside the stall. He said, "You're Larry's boy, right?" I nodded. "The General Manager's son?" I nodded again. "And you're painting the shitter?" Another nod.

Weird Richard smiled approvingly. "That's awesome."

That's learning to hustle.

How I learned to fire myself

I sat across the enormous desk from my boss, Modesto Bee Publisher - and industry legend - Orage Quarles III and wrung my hands in my lap. I'd just told him that, uh, I had an offer to run online news for The Sacramento Bee, McClatchy's flagship paper. And, uh, I was very appreciative that he'd given me the chance to build ModBee.com, but, uh, this was a good offer, and, uh, I didn't want to seem ungrateful and -

Orage held up his hand to silence my ham-fisted attempt at being a grown-up executive. I was 30. 

"Not only do I think you should take this job," Orage said, "but if you don't take it, you're fired."

I gaped at him. This was not how the three business books I'd read said this would go.

"Because if you don't take it, that tells me how little you think of your own value. And I don't want that person working for me."

It was the second time Orage taught me a great lesson as a manager. First, when he'd plucked me out of the reporter ranks to build the company's digital future, he taught me that great leaders see more in their team members than their team members see in themselves.

The second was knowing when to fire yourself.

In the 20-plus years since Orage taught me that amazing lesson, I've exercised it a few times. Each time was bold, scary, honest and ultimately the moment that propelled my career - and personal life - forward. And, rising in the ranks of the media industry, I've also seen plenty of examples of executives and CEOs who never learned that lesson.

The water coolers - or Slack channels - have plenty of unkind phrases for such a leader. Out of touch. Out of step. A great leader for last century. Waiting until he can retire. Hiding out. Rudderless. And, if your industry is facing secular changes, extreme market pressures and total disruption - as the local media industry is - those phrases come with a salty spin, but that would make this post NSFW.

Firing yourself, to me, never has been an admission of failure but an acknowledgement of reality. Of fit. Of recognizing that all things have their season. It's also not a rash decision - my wife and I have one child out of college, three in and one in the wings. We have extended families and the financial obligations that come with those blood entanglements. Nothing is a rash decision. 

Firing yourself takes ownership of who you are, what your contribution is and what the organization needs. If those things are not in alignment, firing yourself should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention.

But all of us can get distracted and not look for the breadcrumbs. That's why I keep a file in Evernote and add to it as other crumbs occur to me. They include these questions:

Did I accomplish what I wanted to in this position? If not, stay. If yes, and you can't see the next hill to take, don't. Picnics are for parks. 

Do I reflect the culture of my boss/board/ownership? These change over time, and so does the culture. If it doesn't align with your own mission, character or values, beware. 

Do I have credibility with my team? Being an executive means making difficult and sometimes painful decisions. The best handle them with grace and dignity. The worst just look like shills.

Does this still excite me? Does it make my brain itch? Or has it become a job? Because you're not very good at hiding that.

Have I ever thought - let alone said - "I'm just holding out until ..." (I used to think this was only time based or had a specific dollar amount until I heard an exec tell me he was waiting until he received a specific accolade. Seriously. A plaque.)

When attending industry conferences, have I sat in a session covering the same topic featured in the past three conferences, with no new information presented? Bonus points if I was the presenter.

Do I have a gag reflex every morning before going to work because what I'm being asked to do compromises my integrity? This is your body telling you what your brain won't admit. (Personal experience, sorry to say.)

Have I created a business that will sustain and thrive without me, or have I made it solely dependent on me? Codependency doesn't look good on anyone.

Do I have a personal line? I generally have two: A red line I will not cross (lie to the team) and a finish line (landing on the moon). It's why in business coaching for entrepreneurs, my first challenge to them is to define their exit strategy. (You wouldn't believe how confrontational that can be. I didn't, and, hell, I've done knockoff courses of Werner Erhard's EST.)

I have others that are more personal, and have studied others by better business thinkers. Perhaps you have your own. Maybe it's time to review them.

---

A footnote regarding Orage: I saw him years later, when he was Publisher of the News & Observer in Raleigh. We would have lunch whenever I was in town, which was frequent. At one lunch, I did what business people do too rarely: I told one of my mentors how much he meant to me, and retold the story from his office, and how he'd taught me two of the best leadership lessons of my life.

He blinked slowly, then said, "I don't remember doing that, but you're welcome." And then he finished his meal - and taught me a third great lesson in leadership:

You never know when you're going to change someone's life.

Ad fraud is a news killer -- and publishers are letting it happen

A few years ago, after a week that included a lot of activity but no – to my judgment – tangible accomplishment, I started a daily regimen of walking five miles and doing 100 pushups and 100 situps. That way, I’d always end the day knowing at least I’d accomplished that.

Because executive life is like that. Some days you’re slaying dragons. Other days you’re trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. And if you’re a results-oriented Type-A person, that can be infuriating.

Five miles. 100 pushups. 100 situps. Done.

I’ve rarely missed a day – until about a month ago. Even though I’d had a flu shot, the B-strain – the flu’s evil little brother – knocked me out. No energy. It didn’t matter what I wanted to accomplish, I was sapped before I even started the day.

I thought of that feeling last week, speaking at a World Economic Forum summit in San Francisco focused on combating fake news and the role of user data privacy in rebuilding a society jaded by disinformation, misleading ads, retargeting chumboxes that lead readers to data-hijacking cesspools – don’t lecture me that this is how you’re paying the bills at the expense of your only real differentiator: trust – and general Macedonian malware mayhem. I thought of that weakened state I was just recovering from, particularly when we started talking about the real cost to publishers.

And that’s ad fraud.

Juniper Research predicted that ad fraud would cost online publishers $19 billion dollars in 2018. Forrester Research and Borrell Associates put similar numbers to it. It's a real-dollar cost to the conversation of fake news - or what I've called digital propaganda - and it's spreading faster. At the WEF summit, Deb Roy, MIT associate professor and director of the Media Lab's Laboratory for Social Machines, presented frightening evidence of the largest-ever study on fake news, showing that false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories.

This is where we are: It is easier to build audiences on falsity than on veracity. It is easier to make money from fraud than an honest day's work.

Rogue code inserted into a publisher’s site – or layered in, unbeknownst to the publisher – siphons off billions of dollars every year that otherwise would pay for quality journalism and entertainment.

That’s like having the flu. That's like having the equivalent of Captain Trips, the superflu in Stephen King's sprawling doomsday novel "The Stand" - a flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the human race. Publishers are working at a fraction of their energy because a large amount of their revenue is being shunted away from them, weakened and falling face-down in their soup. It's a funny tableau until it's you.

And, too often, publishers aren’t doing enough to protect themselves.

Last year, I invited Google to hold multiple webinars for members of the Local Media Consortium to educate local newspaper and broadcast companies about how to better protect their interests – and their readers. These centered on two practices/platforms: Ads.txt and Project Shield.

Ads.txt is a text file at the server level that basically verifies which advertisers are approved to run on your website. It’s very simple and straightforward, and is a protection against ad fraud.  Project Shield is a layer of protection developed by Google to protect news and human rights publishers from DDoS attacks – a hijacking of websites by hackers at home and abroad, which were all too common in the last presidential election.

When I left the Consortium last month, less than half of the members had installed ads.txt files to their sites. Only a handful even asked about Project Shield.

Too busy. Other priorities.

A newcomer to the fraud protection space, Dev/Con Detect, is the brainchild of former newspaper executive Maggie Louie. It detects fraud within encrypted and exploited ad calls and site widgets. This fraud happens sometimes by accident, sometimes by internal malfeasance; Dev/Con Detect’s platform should be a no-brainer in recovering lost dollars – and holding people to account. But too often, Louie said, the pitch is met with “not a priority right now.”

$19 Billion. This year. Before you even get out of bed.

We have a moral obligation to our communities to provide quality, verifiable information. We also have the moral responsibility to do everything in our power to prevent our users from being hijacked, their data leeched out of them and used against them. And media companies have a fiduciary responsibility to plug every hole so that their revenue efforts don’t start each day in a hole dug by fraud.

It’s the flu. And it’s killing the industry. Even if it isn’t your priority.

Innovation vs. Execution

I taught myself how to swing a baseball bat on our small farm in rural Southern Indiana. I'd toss the ball in the air and take my cut with a splintery bat wrapped in electrical tape that I'd bought at a flea market. Our front yard was bigger than any ball park, so I had ambitions to hit the paved road.

It was a long time before that happened. I thought it was the bat. A shiny aluminum bat or a new Louisville Slugger - which they once manufactured less than five miles from my house - would make all the difference. The right bat and I'd knock it out of the park. Or farm.

It wasn't until I got into Little League that I learned why my batting stunk. 

I was holding it wrong. I'm R/R on the Pitch/Bat Jumbotron profile, and as a 7-year-old, I didn't know my left hand needed to be at the hilt of the bat. I'd been swinging with my right hand at the hilt, basically twisting my body into a pretzel. 

Once my coach taught me the right way to grip the bat, it took a year to re-learn my swing. But once that became natural, back on the farm, I started hitting the asphalt. My father rewarded my home runs in Little League with banana splits from Dairy Queen. He still owes me.

It was not the bat. It was poor execution.

As a media executive, I have been reminded of this lesson daily. The allure of the new bat is universal. It's the shiny object. The savior. That new (platform, widget, multimedia, VR, AR, Super Bass-O-Matic '76) that's going to transform the company. 

It won't. Not if your swing stinks. And too often, that's the case.

Clayton Christensen's 1997 book, "The Innovator's Dilemma" came at a perfect time for local media. Newspaper and television companies were launching websites. Barriers to entry for much of their business model were falling, and some would be wiped out completely. The book became a bible - and deservedly. I'm in the camp that agrees with the assessment that it's one of the most important business books of the 21st Century.

Several media companies launched Innovation Funds. I oversaw the management of one when I joined E.W. Scripps in 2008. It had funded a lot of ideation, brainstorming throughout the company, some niche websites - Mommy sites were the new black - but showed no signs of launching sustainable, disruptive businesses. So I shut it down.

Instead, we focused on the basics of sales and execution. And Scripps went from 9th place in digital sales compared to peer companies in the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium to consistently on the gold-silver-bronze dais. Because we relearned how to grip a bat.

The biggest hurdle for local media companies isn't Facebook or Google or Amazon or Apple. It's their ability to execute. There is no shortage of new opportunities, platforms or digital products. There is a shortage of bandwidth.

Several CEOs have told me that they can only execute three or four new digital strategies per year. That can range from getting their content into Apple News to dropping a javascript on their pages to harvest money from a content-recirculating chumbox. Opportunities abound, but human capital - and the ability to execute - is scarce.

If we could work together - with each other and with the major platforms - to increase our ability to execute, that would be something worth funding. That would be our Manhattan Project. Not a vision quest for the Next Big Thing, but a means - a path - to move forward. To more effectively move from signing a contract with a new vendor to taking it to market. To create shared baselines and dashboards for performance. To strip it to the studs and build it anew.

Let's work on our swing. You can keep the bat.

The unchecked box

I've never been very interested in awards.

The last one I really coveted was The Pulitzer Prize, in my mid-20s, for a series we did at The Modesto Bee, where I lived with in homeless camps for a week to highlight how far - and how little - we'd come in the 50 years since John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." Our paper won several other awards, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, but came up short. 

Since my 20s, I haven't given it much thought. It seemed more important to accomplish things. Investigative journalism, exploring new technologies in the early 1990s called "interactive media," launching websites in the mid-90s in Modesto, running them in Sacramento and Minneapolis through the start of the 21st Century, then conducting media research and doing consulting for media companies for M.O.R.I. Research - an imprint of Magid - as Director of New Media, back when that meant something.

I won the Online Innovator Award in 2005 for my work with dozens of media companies and for the road that led there. Given by what was then the New Media Federation of Newspaper Association of America, it was considered the highest honor in digital media for the industry. Many people referred to it as a "lifetime achievement award." I was 39.

It freaked me the hell out.

Because if you're not into awards, that sends a signal that all boxes have been checked. You've done more than most, and now it's time to step aside. Here's something for the desk. It can join the other baubles you will spend your life dusting and reliving glory days.

No thank you.

In my early 30s, as the father of young girls in a city I didn't like with a corporate ladder that seemed more and more compromising - you've been there - I took a knockoff of the Erhard Seminars Training, or EST. It involved no small amount of confrontational group work. A career counselor recommended it, saying I needed to confront what really motivated me, because it sure wasn't the ladder. What I most came away with was one of their catch-phrases:

"In the end, you either have results or reasons."

I lump awards into the same bucket as reasons. I lump accomplishments with results, which are boxes that have been checked so decisively they can't be unchecked, like a cleft in a rock.

And, once checked, open your eyes to the unchecked boxes. 

I've worked in local media my whole life. I've also written novels, fathered two children with my first wife and parented three more with my second. I have worked with major technology platforms and helped the diaspora of local media come together under a shared mission. I re-learned to ride a motorcycle in my 40s - which is much different than learning as a teenager. I threw a baseball 73 miles per hour in my early 20s - and then never went near a radar gun again. 

I've checked boxes. Rechecking them sounds as interesting as painting the same car three times, and I last did that when I was 19.

There are so many opportunities. So many boxes left to check.

Results or reasons? Awards or accomplishments? It's a binary choice.

Choose wisely.