Great Blog

Great Point will wind down for a while now.  In the beginning of 2010 I will begin as the CEO of Kotimaa-yhtiöt, a media house owned by the Lutheran Church of Finland. The company publishes newspapers, magazines and books, as well as builds organs and sells clothing and  accessories to local congregations. I’ve loved just about every day as a consultant, but the possibility of putting some of the things I’ve learned in this business into practice in this particular context was too hard to resist. In the emerging new media landscape there should be amazing opportunities for companies serving interest-based and value-based information needs.

Great Point will not go away though. It will just become even more boutiqueish than it has been before.  A few great relationships with great clients will continue, maybe something new will be picked up on the side. Not much. Just a few pet projects.

I want to sincerely thank Great Point’s clients for the wonderful ride we’ve had during the last few years. It’s been great. Let’s keep in touch.

Cheers everybody,

Jaakko

The press release about the job at Kotimaa-yhtiöt can be found here.

I was first introduced to new journalism, or narrative journalism, during my high school exchange year at Princeton Day School in New Jersey in 1981–82. Reading Tom Wolfe and Michael Herr as a history class assignment put me on a path that I’m still on.  Back then, as a 17-year old school boy I decided that real was cool. The better it was told, the more real it felt. Since then great writing has never meant an escape to me, it has always meant an  intense relationship with the reality.

Bonnier Publications, the publisher of Olivia and Divaani magazines, is organizing a seminar  on narrative journalism  called Storytelling 08 on Thursday November 6th. The seminar will feature two Pulizer Prize winning Americans, Thomas French and Jacqueline Banaszynski, and a few local fans of the genre, including me that I have the honor of giving the first presentation of the day. I’ve been given the title: What should we learn from American journalism?

I will be talking about the concepts of craft, journey and community, in American society and in American journalism. I think these concepts also capture the big questions of who you are, how to do your work, and what your job actually is. A narrative journalist  is a craftsman reporting on the journey of an individual or/and a community or a society. When you do this, when your stories  take your readers on journeys in the the world they belong to,  you are actually crafting  that world. This is an intense relationship with the reality.

I look forward, not only to a great and much needed seminar, but also to its impact on Finnish journalism. And, hopefully, reality.

It was a turbulent week in Finnish book publishing. A week ago two of the most respected publishing professionals in the country left their long-time employer WSOY saying they were going to start their own house. The two men are brothers Touko and Aleksi Siltala, respectively the (now former) literary director and the non-fiction director of Finland’s biggest publishing house. A few big names from WSOY’s list, among them three former Finlandia Prize winners, have said that they would follow the brothers to their new venture. A few other big ones have already rushed to say that they will not.

Something similar happened on my watch at Tammi Publishers when some key employees left and founded Teos Publishers. In the quiet garden of publishing something like this is always a storm that rips and rearranges. The way I see it in retrospect is that literature needs big publishing to stay relevant, but it also needs small publishing to stay good. Big publishers keep books in the stores and in the media, but at times they forget to give passion and curiosity the role they need to guarantee the long-term vitality of the program.

“We are the good guys, but they are not the bad ones”, said an (American) independent publisher to me once when we were talking about big publishing. “They are boring – and that is even worse.”

The best guarantee against boredom is probably a healthy undergrowth of competent small publishers.

Another somewhat dramatic piece of book news was that Finland is not going to be the Guest of Honour country at he Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011. Well, if not in 2011, why not a few years later, I hear people saying. Sometimes setbacks are needed to sharpen your approach.