I recently had a chance to emcee the 50th Anniversary Celebration for the Kennedy Heights Community Council. It was a nice night at the Kennedy Heights Presbyterian Church, filled with a few of my neighbors I had met before and a lot of new faces too. The theme of the evening was "Passing The Torch." It was a night to look back at the long history of the Community Council and look ahead to the leadership tasked with keeping the community a vibrant place to live.

There was a lot of history in the room. At one point when I asked for people who had served as the Community Council President to stand and be recognized, I anticipated a small group to be recognized. I was blown away by the number of people who had taken on that post. As we passed the mic around the room and gave people a chance to introduce themselves, something interesting happened - stories were told.

I heard stories about the roots of the Community Council going back more than 50 years when there were very divisive racial politics at play in the real estate market in Kennedy Heights. I won't do the history of the effort the injustice of trying to explain it in such a brief space. But I will say that I was impressed with how deeply connected the Community Council history is to the idea of racial harmony. It was not a piece of history that I was aware of, and I'm a Cincinnati guy.

I think it is very interesting what can be built, and how long it can endure, when a group of committed people come together for a common purpose. May we all have a chance to be involved in something like it, and may we all have the courage to get involved in the neighborhood we call home.

It's a bad time to be a newspaper photographer in Chicago. The Sun-Times just slashed their newsroom by firing all their full-time photographers. That doesn't mean they're going photo-free in the paper or the web, it means they're just going to use photos shot by reporters on iPhones instead.

Check out this article from the cross-town rival Tribune for a little more info.

As a reporter who contributes a lot of photos to our website, I can tell you it's not an easy task to collect information and snap photos at the same time. And that's why it's likely a huge mistake for the Sun-Times.

Technology is a game changer. Even if you are not on the bleeding edge of new tech, you can certainly look around and see how much more we can do with smartphones and laptops that we would never have dreamed of a few years ago. Whether you're talking newspaper or TV news, it's possible to shoot an event, edit the photos and video, and send the finished product back to your boss all from your phone, tablet or laptop. The quality is improving, the speed is improving and the cost is shrinking with every new generation of software and hardware.

    The Cincinnati.com contest to rate your favorite news, sports and weather people got hacked this week, essentially killing it. See John Kiesewetter’s post criticizing the click-bot attack on the contest only designed to get clicks here. It was March Madness for local TV, and pretty ridiculous at that (Randi Rico and 8 seed!?!) but it also points out something that kind of drives me nuts - our tendency to quantify, rate and review everything.

    Everything is all about the stars and thumbs. How good the reviews are for a new movie, a restaurant, or a new TV show plays a big role in whether you give it your time and money. One of my favorite authors, Harlan Coben has a new book out and I checked out the reviews on Amazon before I bought it. I did this because his last book was kind of disappointing, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t get burned again. A funny thing happened – I found myself clicking to read the one-star reviews first. When something is eviscerated by reviewers, it’s generally not a good sign. In this case, the one-star reviews are really just people complaining about the price of the e-book, but it still soured me on the book in general a little bit. (I’ll probably still buy it, probably used.)

    With so much information available at our fingertips, it’s easy to check and double-check before any potential purchase. I find myself doing that with a lot of products. I distrust the positive reviews because I know they can be bought and paid for, and I look at the scathing ones.

    We have access to so much data that we can form an opinion of something without ever using it or experiencing it for ourselves. That movie got a bad score on Rotten Tomatoes – it stinks. That restaurant only got two stars on Yelp – skip it. Entertainment Weekly says C+ for that show – it’s not worth my time.
    How to fix it?

The Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien debacle is still fresh enough in everyone's minds that this seems like a joke - but NBC is reportedly thinking again about bouncing Jay Leno from the Tonight Show. The Hollywood Reporter says an announcement will come soon that Leno is out, and Jimmy Fallon is in, starting in the 2014 TV season.

We've been here before right?

Skeptics may think that it's a bad idea all over again, but here is why the Leno/Fallon switch makes much better sense than it did when NBC bounced Leno for Conan. First of all, Jimmy Kimmel is a major threat now that he's moved to 11:30. Jay and Dave are the old guys of late night - Kimmel is the upstart and he has the potential to pick up a lot more momentum by being exposed to a whole new audience thanks to the earlier time slot.

You may not know this about the glamorous life of a TV reporter, but my job consists of spending a lot of time in a van. A lot of that van-time is spent waiting for things to happen: live shots, media briefings, quitting time.

You know, important stuff.

Now I know this sounds exciting, but there is an unexpected side effect - I spend a lot of time wondering where to find the nearest restroom. Restaurants, gas stations - whatever is nearby and open at 7am.

Oh, and you gotta serve coffee too.

Anyway, since I'm stuck in a van and that van goes all over town and I drink a lot of coffee I feel like I have an above average amount of experience in this field. With that in mind, I offer this exhaustive if not comprehensive amateur field report: some people are disgusting.

I have seen restrooms that look like crime scenes. No, I will not elaborate. I'll spare you.

But my observation leads to my point: if you own a business why would you forget such an important part of the customer experience? If your restroom is dirty, I assume your kitchen is dirty. I assume your employees don't give a crap about much of anything if you can't take care of something so basic.

My advice, make the restrooms a priority. I'm not saying a four-star experience, but something cleaner than an alley and nicer smelling than a port-a-John in August would be a good place to start. There is no direct profit margin on the bathroom experience, but if someone skips your place the next time because your restroom is a biohazard then you're missing out on money.

Also, don't have one of those horrible hand driers that forces me to wipe my hands on my pants. I'm in a hurry. There's news waiting.

As a homeowner, the only thing more frustrating than an unexpected home repair is the feeling that you're being ripped off by the guy who comes to help you you. Earlier this week I had the sewer main back up in my house. The main carries all the waste away from your house. If you've never experienced this, I'll spare you the details - but yes - it can get as nasty as you're imagining.

I had been through this before, so I called around several different plumbing companies trying to get a quote on a repair price. I wanted to know over the phone how much the repair was going to cost, but I learned that plumbing companies don't operate that way. They're more than willing to come to your house to have someone look at it, then give you an estimate.

That's right, when a guy with a truck full of tools is already in your house, he'll tell you how much fixing something will cost. When you've got drains backing up and a mess in the basement, you're likely to agree to just about anything. I agreed to what I knew was an overpriced repair - because the guy who could do it was already there.

$570. About twice as much as I was expecting.

But he was there and ready to go to work. Fine. Just FIX it.

One evening's worth of work turned into a return trip because he didn't have the equipment to snake the drain far enough, which turned into what I considered to be an up-sale for a different piece of equipment and eventually I told them to forget it. I paid their $79 service fee and went with someone else. I went with the small independent plumbing contractor I'd worked with before. I didn't call them the night of the back-up because I didn't want to wait for them to get to my house from about an hour away in Kentucky. Big mistake.

What I was hoping to get fixed on Wednesday night wound up delayed by the Big Guys plumbing company until Thursday afternoon. Then I told them off. Then the Little Guys plumbing company showed up for me on Friday afternoon and got the job done in less than an hour.

The price - $175.

That's right.  The Little Guys cost me 2/3rds less. Not counting the service fee for the Big Guys. Lesson learned.

Fast forward to this morning, when I wake up with my furnace not working. 6AM and I'm freezing so bad I can't sleep. I've got family in the HVAC business so I wasn't worried about getting jerked around for repairs, but I didn't really want to call in a favor either. A little investigating, a little Googling and I was able to figure out that the fresh air intake pipe outside my house was iced over. A trip outside to knock the crust off and we were back in business.

Score another one for the little guy.

I recently found a video of a presentation by illustrator Rilla Alexander, and it's a great watch for people who are creative and find themselves stuck in the mud. She looks pretty deeply at the trap of being so precious about one's ideas that you fail to act on them.

If you take away nothing else, take away these two ideas:
"Without the doing, the dreaming is useless."

and...

I share this, because these quotes get across the idea I was trying to communicate in my last post so much better than I did. And right now, I'm going through making revisions to the draft of my book after letting it sit for a month. And that's an interesting process because I'm finding parts of it much worse than I remember, but other parts much better. I'm finding new ideas, making revisions and notes to do a full second draft that I think will be pretty strong and will match my expectations for my work much better.

If I'd never started, I'd still be dreaming.

Rilla Alexander's talk:
http://99u.com/videos/7268/Rilla-Alexander-Without-the-Doing-Dreaming-Is-Useless

During November, I wasn’t the most attentive guy. I’m sure my family noticed. But I had a good reason, I was chasing a dream.
 
I was busy pounding  out a horrible novel. 

November is National Novel Writing Month. It was created years ago, to encourage people to go ahead and write that novel they always wanted to write. It’s a dream for a lot of people, and I’ve counted myself among that camp for years. This year, I finally stopped dreaming and actually sat down and wrote.

For me, writing has been a dream for years, and a very comforting one at that. The best way I can explain it is to compare it to buying a lottery ticket. You know that moment that you find yourself daydreaming about how you’d spend your millions after you buy a ticket? I get that way sometimes about writing a novel – dreaming about having done it, and what it would be like if I did. And for years, that’s about as far as it went –dreaming.  I’m always jotting down ideas for short stories or novels, and writing has always stayed on the top of my list of things I’ll do someday, but I don’t get around to doing it.

I think the idea of the dream became very precious to me – so precious that I wanted to hold onto the dream more than I wanted to achieve it. Just thinking about it brought me so much joy that I couldn’t bring myself to the point of actually writing something, because that would mean confronting the fact that it might be horrible. Just going after the dream would mean that the dream might die.

So what?

I finally did it.  I wrote something. I wrote about 50,000 words about a guy with psychic powers, searching for a missing girl. It features a lot of Cincinnati flavor. It also features a lot of ridiculous stuff added in to keep me interested or break through writer’s block – like a chase involving a little person riding in a motorcycle sidecar. You’ll never read it, because I doubt I’ll ever push it past the second draft. That, and even if I got it to a finished product, it’s probably not something anyone would want to publish. It’s bad. 
 
But that’s okay.

It’s okay that I didn’t reach perfection on the first go. Because I bothered to write something, because I took a step towards something I want, I made that dream much more likely to come true. And the next one will be better. It will be better because I learned a lot writing this one. Most importantly, I learned that there is a big difference between a dream and a goal. Those things that you think about maybe doing someday should really be called fantasies. They live in a make-believe world. Things that you are trying to do right now, those are goals. It is okay to dream, and it is okay to set goals, but don’t confuse the two. If you want to start bringing your dreams into reality, that means you have to start actively working on them.

Maybe you’ll get a chance to read my second novel, or maybe my third. Who knows how long it will take to write something good. All I know at this point is that I’ve stopped dreaming and started working. And that’s big.

I've moved my site from tumblr to Weebly.  I've tried to move most of my content over and keep at least approximate original post dates connected to them.
Hope you like the new des

Engage. I hope you read this with sincerity - not sarcasm, because I truly mean it. 

To the viewer who called me 17 hours after I mispronounced the name of Tommy Tuberville, UC’s new head football coach during the 4:30am news Monday morning - thank you. You didn’t leave your name or number, or I would have called you to thank you in person.

Seriously. 

I’m glad someone is calling me on my mistakes. It’s something I should have known, but didn’t. My producers had my back too, and corrected me before I could repeat the mistake, but I’m glad to know that you were paying attention. First of all, it was 4:30 in the morning, and at that hour of the day I sometimes wonder if anyone is watching. Second, I’m glad to know that people are genuinely paying attention to what we do. It means that we’re not working in a vacuum. 

You would be surprised how few people actually reach out to get involved with the news product we put on the air. Wewantto hear from you. 

No, not snarky criticism about how we look. But we really do like to hear what you think about the stories we put on the air and the way we cover them. 

Don’t like something that we cover? Tell us. Think we’re missing something we should cover? Tell us. And for heaven’s sake, if there are times you’re watching the news and see something you really like, that’s the best time to reach out. 

You, as viewers, get the news product you demand. And if you demand coverage of a certain story or a certain part of town, I sincerely think you’ll get it. If you demand we change the way we do what we do, I think you’ll get that too. 

News, done well, is a two-way conversation. We are not reading off stone tablets delivered from on high, we are people who live and work in this community. I was born and raised in Cincinnati. I’ve made a conscious decision to stay here, and keep my family here.

I covered the hell out of Butch Jones leaving on Friday, and I should have known how to pronounce his replacement’s name on Monday morning. (For the record, it’s Tubber-ville - not Toober-ville)

My bad. 

Engage people, engage. We’re counting on you.