The 5-Minute Freelancer Q&A #8 – Alison Garwood-Jones

In this regular feature, Story Board asks Canadian writers to share a few details about their work habits and their strategies for navigating the ups and downs of freelance life.

1. What’s your strategy for generating story ideas?

A lot of it is just looking at the landscape and seeing what inspires me, what enrages me and seeing if I can respond to it in an engaging way. It comes from everything. I flit around from the computer to magazines, from print to digital, just trying to stay aware and trying to stay engaged myself and then seeing if I can spin it through my own sensibility on my blog. It’s everywhere. It’s based on what I see when I go to the AGO, it’s based on what I experience when I’m hanging out with friends at a restaurant, what are they talking about? What’s the latest app they’re using? My blog covers a wide range of topics, I put it under the umbrella of human nature, but I think what’s happening in the digital world is a good example of how human nature responds to new toys and new forms of communication.

And I’ve had several blog posts turn into pieces because editors have gotten in touch with me saying “that was really moving or really interesting, do you want to expand on that into a print piece?” I’ve always found that if something really gets me going, I’m probably not the only one.

2. What’s the most important thing you’ve done over the years to develop your writing skills?

Probably start blogging. I was reluctant in the beginning. I got into journalism late in my career. I had a whole other life as an art historian. And then I decided I wanted to be less of an academic and get into journalism and write for a broader audience. Write for the common reader, as Virginia Woolf said. I just wanted to engage on a more sort of visceral level with people through writing. The nice thing about getting into journalism in 2005 is that I was right on the tail end of the golden age of journalism. So adapting to a new environment in social media and web 2.0 wasn’t as hard for me. I wasn’t as invested in the old way. I hadn’t been in it long enough. A quote I put up above my desk was “I’d better flee into the future as fast as I can.” So the smartest thing I did was build a website, start blogging. I wouldn’t say getting on Facebook was necessarily a smart thing! But Facebook and all the social media platforms like Twitter and Pinterest are great for alerting people when you’ve got a new blog post and that’s how you drive traffic, obviously, back to your homepage.

I’m finding now that blogging… whereas before I was a little wary, like “what’s this all about, it’s devaluing the work of print journalists,” now I feel more like, wow, this is the biggest revolution for writers in I don’t know how long. And I’m really in agreement with Craig Silverman when he wrote last year on Facebook in a comment, he said “I see my blog emerging as the primary focus of my work, with the print column representing a unique extension and opportunity.” And when I read that I instinctively knew that’s exactly how I’m feeling as well. I honestly feel like my blog and my website is a sandbox for me. It’s where I workshop ideas and really work on my craft.

3. Do you think there’s ever a situation when it makes sense for a writer to write for free, and if so, when?

For me it makes sense on my blog, obviously. The fact that I haven’t entertained any advertisers is important. That’s deliberate. I want complete freedom. With my own work, I don’t have an attitude that every word I write is worth so much. Now outside of that it is a little more complicated. I definitely don’t think writers should undersell themselves. I think we’re at a watershed period where what’s happening right now with contracts – the all-rights grabs – is definitely an opportunity for writers to step back and say “no, this is unacceptable.” And it’s a scary step to take and a lot of people have shown an enormous amount of courage, Amber Nasrulla and Jay Teitel, and they speak for so many of us and they have my full moral support. This is a time where you almost have to live your life as a writer assuming that all publishers will go this route and will try and grab all moral and digital rights. So it means that we have to be really smart about looking for ways to pay our bills that don’t necessarily involve writing for magazines. Hopefully we can continue to do that and not all publishers will go with these kinds of contracts.

But I think you have to, as a businessperson, be really smart and say “okay because I refuse to sign that, let’s figure out how I can create a patchwork income doing a whole bunch of other different things so I can continue to write.” It may mean only continuing to write on your blog, who knows. But right now we’re going through such a transition period with so many interesting possibilities. Derek Finkle’s brought this up: self-publishing is becoming a really interesting and, as he said, a subversive tool for writers. A writer can take a larger cut of the royalties through self-publishing than they can through the traditional route. And that’s never happened before. There’s never been that much opportunity for writers to have control over their content and their royalties. So it’s a big transitional period, I find it really exciting.

Would I write service journalism for free? No, because I’ve already been on staff and you get to a point in your career where you know you have a certain skill level and it would be so regressive. Like the old saying goes “you can’t eat exposure.” At some point you don’t need more exposure. That’s not your goal. It’s about a business relationship and a respectful one on both sides. It’s tough. And I think it’s something they need to teach. They need to have these hard business-type discussions with students. It’s not all about crafting stories and narrative arcs. It needs to be, okay, you have to think about how long you’ll accept writing for free and at some point know that you can up the ante and start negotiating. And it needs to be earlier than I think what people have been doing. It’s amazing what you can get if you just ask for it. And not enough writers are doing that.

4. Work can take over your life when you’re a freelancer. What do you do to try and maintain a healthy work-life balance?

I walk a lot. I go out in the sunshine. I have a part time job at a bar downtown and that takes me outside of my head, helps me pay my bills and is a complete change of pace for me from the solitary life of writing. I think it’s important to mix up the kind of work and play that you do so that it’s not all surrounding writing or talking about writing. I just try and do things that are the polar opposite of what I might do at my desk. And that’s a good mental break.

• Alison Garwood-Jones is a Toronto-based writer and blogger. Her writing appears in the current issues of Glow, Azure, and House and Home and her blog, Society Pages was nominated for a 2013 Canadian Weblog Award. You can follow her on Twitter at @AlisonGJ.

“Surround yourself with people making mistakes and surviving.”

It’s by Penelope Trunk. She says, “The reason entrepreneurs hang out with each other is because it’s inspiring to watch people work on problem after problem.”

So to all you indie entrepreneurs (writers, illustrators, visual journos, home stagers, food truck operators): start hanging.

StudioMates, DUMBO, Brooklyn. Apparently plaid is the office dress code with these indies.

Post-Internet 

Design: Chad Michael Lawson

Photo by Jordan Taler with Brushes drawing by Alison Garwood-Jones

Newsstand sales of magazines and gum are both down. There’s a connection

David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, is calling it “the mobile blinder effect.” Talking to the Financial Times, he said that people waiting in line at the grocery store and the newsstand are staring at their phone screens during this key impulse purchasing window, rather than looking at the magazine racks and candy spreads. The latest reports show gum sales in the US are down by 2.7 percent (or $3.5 billion) while sales of consumer magazines dropped almost 10 percent (8.2%) in the second half of 2012.

Adding more screaming headlines to the newsstand and more flavours of gum, like Eclipse Polar Ice and Extra Dessert Delights, are not bringing readers or chewers back. In the case of the gum, the dizzying explosion of flavours over the past few years actually cannibalized sales rather than attracting new consumers. “We’ve made shopping for gum very complicated,” Casey Keller, president of the North America division of Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. told The Wall Street Journal. ”We have 50 different varieties of gum in a convenience store, and that’s just Wrigley.”

Gum makers, including Wrigley’s, are considering a return to the classic flavours (remember mint?) and re-marketing gum as a “concentration aid” — something that will help video game addicts, students studying for exams and other high-strung types focus on the task at hand. They also want to make the packs small enough (6 pieces per) to fit into a smart phone pocket and cheaper than the cost of downloading an iTune (i.e. less than $1). Last year, the average price of a pack of gum in the US shot up to $1.58, whereas the average download was .99¢.

Magazines are also playing with pricing, offering cheap digital downloads. Whether they can make the consumer stop and stare, or care, is the current challenge. My pal Kat Tancock put it  best. Commenting on this story on D.B. Scott’s Canadian Magazines blog, she said:

“Competing in a busier space just means magazines have to prove their value rather than just taking advantage of impulse buys. Frankly, if bored shoppers are the only reason a magazine can keep going, it probably isn’t that good a magazine. Instead of trying to protect the old, dead business model, let’s work on creating great magazines that people really want to read.”

Otherwise, magazines could all come polywrapped with a pack of gum inside to help keep readers focused on the contents. I dunno, I’m chewing on it.

UPDATED: January 30, 2013

Yesterday, The Globe & Mail, “Canada’s national newspaper,” fired took its literary editors, the crusty and intelligent team of Martin Levin and Jack Kirchhoff, off Books. I pounded my fist on the desk when I read this. Then I let out a cry in my condo that was heard only by the dogs down the hall. By the end of the day, word broke that Levin had been moved to Obituaries (the symbolism there is unfortunate). Kirchhoff’s new location in the building has yet to be determined (updates from insiders welcome).

What appears to be clear is that The Books Section will be no more will be a shadow of its former self. Last year it lost a ton of weight, going from a 20-plus page supplement (like The New York Times Book Review), to a handful pages in Focus, to … well, that too has yet to be determined. But it sounds like it’s living off sugared water.

These corrections were issued at the end of the day in a letter by Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse who claimed Now Magazine got the story wrong, sending an army of bibliophiles on a rampage through social media. The veteran writer at Now didn’t even call the paper, Stackhouse noted. He went on to reassure readers,

“The Globe is as committed as ever to both books coverage and book reviews. While space and style continue to change, the importance of books to the Globe does not. I continue to look forward to opportunities to innovate in this space as rapidly and creatively as possible, with the sort of energetic leadership that 21st-century book readers and publishersdeserve and demand.”

I hope Jack and Martin dust themselves off. Every day there’s something fresh to make print journalists uncomfortable in their own skin.

I’ve lost many writing jobs because of the economy and the rise of digital media, including a column in a national magazine shortly after the economic collapse in 2008. But even though we’ve known for years where the stampede is going too many of us are still crying, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!” Yesterday, I noted the number of journalists screaming their disbelief on Facebook when this story broke. “Everything’s going to rat shit,” was the general tenor of the comment stream. Many of these journalists, I silently noted, were folks who have openly admitted on other occasions to no longer subscribing to The Globe.

I stopped subscribing to the paper I’ve written for many times (including full-page features with commissioned editorial cartoons) back in 2010. My reasons were the same as theirs. It dropped its freelance rates to a handful of nickels and it switched to more advertorial-style articles after the net highjacked breaking news, a move that has seriously diluted the quality of the commentary. The paper build-up on my coffee table goes without saying. But for many writers, the cachet of being in The Globe has been lost. That peaked, in my opinion, in the late nineties when competition from the new National Post sharpened everyone’s analysis and wit. What a line-up it was: Robert Fulford, Val Ross, David Macfarlane, Bronwyn Drainie … sigh.  I wasn’t even a journalist back then, just a hungry reader.

The literary geek in me misses the late nineties. Music geeks tell me they feel the same way. Music had a similar burst of creativity before Napster unearthed our cannibalizing tendencies. Today, with Books gone on a potentially meat-free diet, Ian Brown and Ivor Tossell are the only two reasons I’d go to the Globe‘s website, but two reasons are not enough to make me invest in the entire package. My news consumption is messy and piecemeal. Just like yours.

So to my colleagues who hiss that things like blogging are ruining us, I say, you’re right.  But, as the aphorism goes, “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” There are no guarantees of success in anything (including blogging or what follows after achieving the “All Star” status on LinkedIn), but there are even fewer results if you don’t try.

I coined this saying in my twenties, and believed it through that entire decade of my life. Back then, men my age reacted to me in two ways: sexual heat or professional competitiveness, but usually they offered the package deal. Keeping an eye firmly planted on me (and my rotating outfits), they monitored the pace of my success and roared ahead if they saw the needle on my speedometer twitch ahead of theirs. None of them presented themselves as the sort who, when really tested, would sacrifice their own schedules or ambition to support the dreams of a woman they were interested in. I probably would have thought they were putzes if they did. There’s the rub. Antagonistic is how things felt back then.

Still, I forged ahead, hellbent on self-actualization while my mum and dad whooooped uproariously from the sidelines. I couldn’t help thinking that a smart, ambitious young woman could count on her deepest support coming from the people who had no intention of  sleeping with her. And so, standing in the box next to my parents were a gaggle of gay guys, wagging their index fingers and screaming, “You Go, Girl!”

In the interest of balance I searched for exceptions to this rule. But they’re hard to find because almost no one reveals the truth behind two-career marriages while they’re in progress, other than celebrities and politicians. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s publicized compromises and indignities have been felt by more than some. Women watch Hillary — wondering what she’ll do — not because they’re shocked by what’s gone down, but because they can relate.

Billary in the hairy 1970s.

Not long ago, the thrice-wed Nora Ephron had some relationship advice for Lena Dunham, the 26-year-old writer and creator of the hit TV series, Girls. As Dunham recalls it,

I was sheepishly describing a male companion’s lack of support for my professional endeavors. Nora nodded in a very “don’t be stupid” way, as if I already knew what I had to do: “You can’t possibly meet someone right now. When I met Nick [her third husband, and a charm], I was already totally notorious”—note: Nora was the only person who could make that word sound neither braggy nor sinister—“and he understood exactly what he was getting into. You can’t meet someone until you’ve become what you’re becoming.” Panicked, I asked, “How long will that take?” (read the full article here).

Lena Dunham

There are some who would argue that men’s monomaniacal focus on their own progress is actually meant for the women and children (or future women and children) in their lives. It’s part of their need to provide for us while we focus on raising those babies. It’s why they don’t notice their underwear on the floor. And it’s why we write dialogue in movies like this, between a working mother and her husband,

“But I want you to want to take out the garbage.”

Men zone in and out based on their interests and attention spans and some of that is probably baked into their being. Extreme effort at work is followed by extreme laziness at home. For women, the need to maintain a stylish, orderly and safe environment at home (free of underwear heaps and raised toilet seats that babies or cats might slip on or drown in) is also built into our makeup. But so too is our need to need to achieve beyond housekeeping and biology.

We are all creatures of biology — men deliver sperm, women deliver babies. But the consequences of those native functions continue to fall too heavily on women. Biology either buries a woman’s individuality or thoroughly exhausts her as she scrambles to keep it alive.

Right now I’ve got my fingers crossed because it looks like we’ve reached a very public tipping point in male-female labour relations. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s stunningly confessional account of her struggle to balance work and family, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published this month in The Atlantic, will go down as the most important feminist tract since Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

Slaughter is a Princeton professor, mom to two teenage boys, and the former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department where she worked under Hillary Clinton. Both Slaughter and Friedan’s accounts, though 50 years apart, describe why women, then and now, are more dissatisfied than men about how their lives have unfolded. While the women in Friedan’s survey were bored and antsy about being stuck at home in 1963, the women Slaughter describes, including herself, are frazzled and stressed by decades of trying to fit themselves and their children into the inflexible timetable and structure of a working world designed by and for men (with wives).

Feminism harshly judges women who give up too soon, but Slaughter was willing to be the first to say in 12,674 words, ENOUGH! More importantly, she’s called on the workplace and society to accomodate women’s needs because we aren’t going back into the home full time. Men on their own don’t earn enough to support their families any more. In fact, a study released last week by Prudential Financial found in a survey of over 1400 American women that a majority (53%) were now the breadwinners in their family. And, yet, children are still let out of school at 3:30 pm, as if moms are at home waiting to greet them.

Extending school hours is one of many changes Slaughter and others have called for. That and more freedom to work from home. Let Skype handle face time. And c’mon, email conveniently replaced actually talking to your fellow desk jockeys years ago. It shouldn’t be a problem.

Social media instantly picked up on Slaughter’s story and her cri de coeur ricocheted around the globe. Every time this happens I feel like change might actually be possible. Many a dinosaur has been felled by Twitter: Hosni Mubarak and, one can only hope, Rob Ford. But wouldn’t it be something if the pressure of our tweets could force family-friendly changes on the 20th-century workplace we’re still tethered to?

At this point, I’m really encouraged by the way men are reacting to Slaughter’s story, guys like Kunal Modi, a thoughtful writer and public policy expert. The questions and points he delivers in his blog show that men are realizing they have no choice now but to make changes in their own lives to accommodate the new economic normal that includes women on a grand scale. He also knows that women have done all of the twisting and turning over the last 50 years to balance work and family life, while men across the generations have been consistent in their sameness. Here’s a round up of Modi’s observations from his most recent  Huffington Post blog:

• “Our office parks and corporate organizational charts still resemble the Mad Men era. Men, just as equally as women, must take ownership of  family issues, which are core to economic competitiveness.”  So men, learn the facts:

• Women earn 57% of undergraduate degrees and account for nearly 60% of all graduate school enrollment. But they comprise only 17% of Congress, 16% of Corporate C-Suites and are underrepresented or misrepresented in media and popular culture. [Yay Kunal! He throws a link to the must-watch doc, Miss Representation]. Also, despite earning the majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees, women hold only 16% of Fortune 500 corporate officer positions and board seats, according to the latest Catalyst Census.”

• “In a study of men and women in professions most likely to run for political office, women take sole responsibility for household tasks 43% of the time compared to 7% of men. Also, women take primary responsibility for childcare in 60% of cases compared to only 6% of men.” Is it any wonder that political representation in the U.S. stands currently at: 83% male in Congress, 88% male in state governorships and 92% male in mayoral offices in the country’s 100 largest cities. Men are still crafting the majority of workplace policies, and thinking largely from their own perspective, not a woman’s.

Modi calls on men to “do your job at home.” Tag-team with the woman in your life after work and pull your weight during the  so-called “second shift.” But before that happens these behavioural patterns (and stats) will have to change:

•  On the average workday, employed husbands typically found 30 more minutes for sports and leisure time. [I know this to be true. I work part-time at a bar and I watch working fathers arrive at 5:00 pm for two or three hours of drinking time with their buddies. Meanwhile, their working wives are holding down the fort at home. "Yeah, yeah. I'm coming," they grunt into their smart phones as their friends do a collective eye roll in support of their choice and right to kick back. Somehow these guys are still confused and disappointed when they come home to a tired and frustrated spouse].

• In addition to helping out during the second shift, “men must also increasingly take ownership over the morning school carpool, the mid-day doctor appointments, parent-teacher conferences, meal preparation and waiting for the cable guy. Working women don’t clock out as ‘Mom’ between 9 and 5 and you cannot expect to clock out as ‘Dad’ either.”

Modi concludes, “For the sake of corporate performance and shareholder returns [and, I might add, happier relationships], men must play an active role in ensuring that the most talented young workers (often women) are being encouraged to advocate for their career advancement. In a 21st century economy, talent is king, and companies cannot afford to lose the next Sheryl Sandberg [or Anne-Marie Slaughter] to archaic organization charts and male-centric policies. Flexible work arrangements and high-quality, on-site child care should become staples of corporate work structures to attract and retain millennial workers .

“Let’s get involved right now,” says Modi to all the guys out there, “and not in a patronizing manner that marginalizes this as some altruistic act on behalf of our mothers, wives and daughters — but on behalf of ourselves, our companies, and the future of our country.”

The good news is: women really love men who pull their weight instead of checking out. The rewards should be worth it, guys, so take heart.

As punishment, Ina Drew, the Chief Investment Officer whose London office orchestrated the trades, was promptly kicked to the curb. That lowers the ratio of male to female traders on the London Stock Exchange from a high of 260 male traders to 4 female to 260 to 3.

CEO Jamie Dimen remains. He’s been doing the rounds on the Sunday chat shows saying his company was “sloppy” and “stupid.”  Meanwhile he’s been unapologetically leading the charge to prevent the caps on market speculation recommended by Obama.

And, so, for the third time in three years I’m reprinting a post I wrote on Wall Street culture shortly after the first U.S.-led economic crash.

Like I said before, if you think our elected leaders are in control of the economy and our futures. Think again. The stock jockeys are.

Being an average citizen sure feels powerless.

First published in March 2010

It’s been 18 months since the economy tanked, and the average investor who hung on during the worst stretch of stock market bucking and kicking has already regained most of what they lost. For many, then, it’s business as usual.

But if market corrections were inevitable, social ones are still pending, but possible, according to one of journalism’s best financial reporters.

I’m talking about Michael Lewis of Vanity Fair. He continues to doggedly turn over the rubble of 2008, assessing every detail with a coroner’s gimlet eye so he can come back and tell us exactly how traders back then were measuring risk and following abstruse formulas cooked up by their bosses to increase profits.

Still, after reading Lewis’ most recent VF features I couldn’t summarize his technical explanation of the machinations of subprime-mortgage bonds if my life depended on it (I’m referring to his articles,”Greed Never Left” and “Betting on the Blind Side,” both in the April 2010 issue). But that’s not because Lewis’s prose style isn’t clear or engaging. I have troubles remembering blow-by-blow descriptions of how people cheat (maybe because my instincts run counter to this). But I pounce on explanations that take a stab at why they do.

Lewis, a former Wall Street broker turned chronicler, is part of a growing contingent of journalists (Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times is another) whose strict objectivity has taken a back seat to their impassioned analysis of human nature. “You have to be careful how you incentivize people,” Lewis told Steve Kroft last Sunday on 60 Minutes in a discussion about traders and money managers. “If you pay someone not to see the truth, they won’t see it.”

Both Lewis and Kristof are gathering their data and making their astute observations from the epicenter of the best behavioral test labs imaginable: extreme greed in Manhattan and extreme poverty in the developing world. Kristoff , for example, cites studies that have found when “women hold assets or gain incomes [in the developing world], family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.” But when men hold the money, and this is “the dirty little secret of global poverty,” he says, more often they spend it “on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts,” not on their families.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone, the son of an honest Wall Street broker, is another surprise addition to this group of creatives pushing to see human nature’s better side come to the fore. Despite what most people think, the notoriously difficult Stone never intended to make Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s character in his 1987 blockbuster Wall Street, a hero, but that’s exactly what he became in the minds of so many guys working in finance, he tells Lewis in VF’s April issue. Douglas still gets Wall Street hot shots coming up to him and saying, “’Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko.’”

Stone shakes his head at this. So does screenwriter Stanley Weiser. Both feel like their cautionary tale was hijacked by a misinterpretation that helped create the culture that led to 2008. Now Stone wants to use the sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which hits theatres in September, to correct that initial misreading. By bringing back Douglas as Gordon Gekko and setting the sequel in 2008, Stone wants to show, in his words, ”the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society.”“Our way of life is going to change,” he tells Lewis. I couldn’t tell if that was his hope or a prediction.

Change only happens, though, when new points of view are folded into the mix. And while women aren’t new (!), hearing their voices in the halls of power is still unique. No one knew this better than America’s First Lady Abigail Adams. In 1776, just as legislators were gathering in Philadelphia to design a new independent American government, Adams, in her flowing cursive, famously instructed her husband, U.S. President John Adams, to “Remember the ladies.” Well, they forgot. But Abigail kept pushing anyway. “Don’t put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands,” she continued. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”

The more Abigail wrote, the more philosophical she became. “[John], you tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time, lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.” You’d think she was referring to a room full of slick-haired stock jockeys high-fiving each other over a run of questionable gains (they were in powdered wigs and buckled shoes — all the same without their clothes).

Due to unfinished business, the ghost of Abigail Adams is still with us, touching down all over the globe and pushing for change.  I’m convinced her spirit crashed the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland last winter. All of a sudden, and quite out of character, the participants (most of them, almost dead white men, except for the sprightly Rev. Desmond Tutu) began asking, “Would this economic crisis have happened if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters?”

Journalists like Michael Lewis, Nicholas Kristof and Charlie Rose (proud feminists, all), gloved that spectacular sound bite and refused to drop it, posing the question not once but again and again and again until what started as a clever quip turned into an outright challenge from the media aimed at a corrupt financial system.

The financial culture …is a pool of sharks, and women just despise [it],” Kristin Petursdottir told Lewis in his 2009 VF feature on the collapse of Iceland’s economy. In 2005 Petursdottir was Iceland’s lone woman in a senior banking position (she was deputy CEO for Kaupthing in London). But she has since quit and now runs a financial services business staffed entirely by women. “People thought I was crazy [to quit],” she says, but Petursdottir was determined to bring “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Science agrees, saying our financial wellbeing depends on it.

To my male readers, I say at this juncture, stay with me on this. We all want a better world. And if that doesn’t grab you because you secretly like the way things are, then I’m guessing you lost money in the crisis, so listen up!

The latest data from Vanguard, the American mutual fund company, reports that during the financial crisis of 2008/09, more men than women sold their shares at stock market lows. “There’s been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they’re doing, even when they really don’t,” said John Ameriks, head of Vanguard Investment Counseling and Research, in a New York Times article published last Sunday. The article by Jeff Sommer, called “How Men’s Overconfidence Hurts Them as Investors,” also said, “Gender differences appear to extend to other financial behavior. For example, women who are C.E.O.’s and company directors tend to pay lower premiums in corporate takeovers, saving their shareholders a bundle.”

It makes me wonder what would happen if we reversed the male/female ratio on the floor of the stock exchanges? In 2008, for example, the London Stock Exchange consisted of 260 male traders and 4 females. After a period of, say, five years, what patterns would emerge in the economy if this were reversed?

What’s more, a growing number of researchers in the last two years have been combining neuroscience and economics (neuroeconomics) to understand the roles testosterone and cortisone play in financial risk taking. In the spring of 2008, a research team at the University of Cambridge studied the spit of a group of London traders over 8 days and confirmed what most of us have always suspected: that testosterone rises in an economic bubble and these raised levels lead to irrational choices.

The researchers said that the relationship between market events and the male endocrine system was like a relay race. “When traders experienced acutely raised testosterone [levels] … they made higher profits, perhaps because testosterone has been found, in both animal and human studies, to increase search persistence, appetite for risk and fearlessness in the face of novelty.”

Like the “winner effect” in professional athletes, testosterone rises in the winning athlete (Tiger), but falls in the losing one. “This androgenic priming of the winner,” say researchers, “can increase confidence and risk-taking and improve chances of winning yet again, leading to a positive feedback loop.”

But, the Cambridge team also found that “if testosterone continued to rise or became chronically elevated, it could begin to have the opposite effect on profit and loss, exaggerating the market’s upward movement.” Similarly, in volatile times, a rise in cortisol levels in these guys — often by as much as 500 % by day’s end — exaggerated a downward swing (resulting in massive sell-offs). “These steroid feedback loops may help explain why [male traders] caught up in bubbles and crashes often find it difficult to make rational choices.”

The question remains, what can female investors, golf wives and rational male investors do to diffuse the extreme male behavior of a select group that, clearly, is capable of  running us all into the ground?

Do you put each trader in a single enclosed office space away from his buddies? I say that because researchers at theUniversity of California published a study in March 2008 that found that men in group situations, like trading floors, are more likely to engage in risky decision making because they get caught up in issues of relative social status and dominance.

Or, do you pay female traders big bucks (big bucks because most hate working in hyper-competitive environments) to infiltrate this boys club and diffuse the cloud of testosterone hanging over the floor? A study from 2000 published in The Journal of Economic Theory found there was “a strong consensus that diverse groups perform better at problem solving,” than homogeneous ones. And, anecdotally, we all know that the presence of women is often the only way to diffuse extreme male behaviour.

Then again,  putting more women on the trading floor would probably just spike testosterone levels even higher.

So here’s my solution: Spray estrogen in the air at regular intervals on the trading floor, play classical music, and enlist the mothers. Have the moms make daily desk-side visits with their boys so they can stroke their hair and feed them homemade lunches. “Now, Dear, stop drinking that Red Bull and eat this casserole. And why are you  sniffing so much? Do you have a cold?”

We have to do something to calm them down and protect our assets.

Looking back, I’d love to say I was an early adopter. The truth is, I arrived late to the social media party and hardly mingled when I got there, choosing, instead, to mope alone in a corner nursing my cup of dread on the rocks. I couldn’t stop thinking about how my existence as I knew it was over. Like, forever.

As with most journalists who had tasted some success the old way, I was suspicious and resentful when all of these seemingly stupid new platforms started taking time, attention and funding away from real reading material  — i.e. newspapers, magazines and books.

How was I going to be an OpEd columnist now when newspapers were hemorraging so much of their influence and advertising dollars?

Finally, I said to myself (in this order):

1. Snap out of it

2. Adapt or die

3. And flee into the future as fast as you can

From then on I entered a brand new headspace, one in which I spent countless hours trying to figure out the difference between wasting time and revolutionizing the way I wrote and did business.

Slowly, that old feeling that blogging was something I did under duress (and for free) was replaced by a new sense of excitement and possibility. My penny-dropping moment came when a friend said, “Blog what you want to be known for.” The same goes for tweeting. So I started writing what I wished editors would assign me, but weren’t. In short, I took control of my ambition.

Sure enough, editors started reading my blog. So did filmmakers and designers and corporate types who thought I handled social media well, and why wasn’t I teaching workshops on it to the uninitiated? All of them offered me writing work or paid speaking engagements, which is to say, my blog is now playing a significant role in covering my food and rent. And I’m doing it all on my own terms, without sacrificing my integrity or sabotaging my talent or adopting a photogenic cat. Sorry, I’m a dog person.

So when Hugh MacLeod published his latest book this week, a funny and insightful collection of essays called Freedom is Blogging In Your Underwear I read it as a true believer.

“Having a blog, a voice, having my own media, utterly changed my life,” says MacLeod.

Mine too. “Having my own media” … hmmm, take note of this concept, fellow journalists and novelists.

“That’s what the Internet is REALLY about,” continues MacLeod. “Finding your freedom. Finding your wings. Using a computer instead of a guitar.”

Blogging is the new rock and roll.

You, me, we’re all on one end of the wire, MacLeod concludes. “But worry less about the wire,” he warns. “Worry less about the shiny objects in the middle [Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, blah, blah, blah], and, instead, think about MAKING your own stuff, and the rest of the Internet will look after itself.”

And you.

and

#FreedomIsBlogging

After four decades of earning a buck a word  for writing magazine features — that’s like minimum wage staying put at $1.65/hour — and pocketing 5% of the profits for printed books, writers are now starting to sell their longer articles directly to the e-reading public for more, much more, via the “singles” format available on Kindle, Kobo and iBooks for smartphones and tablets. Writers opting to do this can earn anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the revenues. That’s unheard of.

Call it yet another example of how the digital revolution is unceremoniously dropping the middle men and women from the equation and paying the people who actually conceive of and create the content a much higher cut. In cases like Kindle, the authors set the price. As the observer.com noted, “the result is brand-based reading, where the writer is the brand.”

And just when I was starting to despise the term “brand,” I love it again!

Yesterday, The Canadian Writers Group (CWG), the agency that represents my work, swung open its doors to a shiny, new e-boutique and introduced the first in a series of non-fiction digital books it plans to sell in 2012. Up top is a picture of its inaugural e-book, Blindsided by Russell Smith, which is now available on Kobo, with Kindle and iBooks soon to follow.

Smith, a novelist and weekly columnist for The Globe and Mail, is a self-confessed partier extraordinaire. For years, he chronicled the underground party scene in Toronto and by his forties was continuing to live like a man half his age, going out every night, revelling in the latest fashions (and the women in them), sipping and sniffing the latest drinks and drugs and falling into bed at sunrise. Rather than eroding his writing, his lifestyle fed it.

But Smith knew something was amiss two years ago when he began to gradually lose the sight in his left eye. Not long after the shade began to fall on his right eye. When one doctor, who knew very little about Smith’s past, suggested that he protect his remaining sight by avoiding certain things — like drugs — Smith began to wonder if his lifestyle had brought him to this point?

For now, Smith has no idea how many more times he’ll have to increase the size of the font on the things he’s reading and writing, or how much further he’ll have to lean in to see his computer screen before the whole picture fades to black. The thought of switching careers terrifies him.

An excerpt from Smith’s story appears in the print edition of the April issue of Toronto Life magazine, which I read in one sitting without blinking, it’s that good. The excerpt is not available online, so I can’t throw you a link. But, you can purchase the full story at Kobo for $1.99. iTunes for news and stories has finally gone from a prediction, first uttered two years ago, to a reality.

Last night I had this vision of Canadian writers stampeding to e-boutiques to sell their work and abandoning the magazines they were once were so desperate to appear in. “Buying into the promise of prestige for a handful of peanuts doesn’t work for us anymore,” I imagined some famous writer uttering into a forest of microphones. Like a movie, panicked publishers lured them back with much, much, much higher rates, and the music swelled.

It would be amazing if the internet finally righted this wrong. As Derek Finkle, the founder of the CWG (a superhero to many of us who write for a living), told the Quill & Quire‘s Jason McBride, “No one is fostering and paying talent in this country.” Major American magazines pay writers three to 10 times as much as the most profitable Canadian publications. But here’s the kicker:

“Finkle can imagine publishing, say, a controversial story about a Bay Street law firm that would potentially be downloaded by tens of thousands of lawyers taking the train home from work, with each reader actively contributing to the writer’s bottom line. ‘It’s that subversive,’ he says. ‘It’s an entrepreneurial opportunity that magazine writers haven’t had before. If you can make $40,000 on a story, that’s a game changer.’”