Great Blog

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.

I will be chairing a two-day seminar on trends and brands at Wanha Satama Conference Center on Katajanokka on October 28th and 29th. The free seminar, organized by MTL (The League of Marketing Communications Companies), will feature key experts from the Finnish scene as well a exciting representation from abroad. Without recent changes in the economic environment this  would have been a solid seminar on current marketing and communications thinking. Now I’m looking forward to an x-ray of an industry that, together with the rest of the economy, will go through some major changes. Today, trends are radically different from what they were just two months ago. Only a few brands will not be touched by this.

While the official documents for the new Aalto University were being signed at a prestigious ceremony at the centre of Helsinki on Wednesday June 25th, another kind of groundwork for Finland’s future innovations was laid a few hundred meters away at Katajanokka’s Wanha Satama. A three day seminar, organized by Sitra and Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation, that brought together almost a hundred design thinkers around the world came to an end.

A closed seminar, with very open working methods, was trying to tackle the new paradigm of design and what it means for education, industry, governments and of course the design profession. The new thinking stresses design as a method and a process that can be applied to a lot of things, instead of seeing it just as a way of giving a form to an object or a service. According to this new school of thought, design and designers can help to solve wicked (enormous) problems like health care, global warming or national competitiveness in addition to their old role. Design can be seen as working method that brings together a wide range of experts to tackle specific problems and challenges.

What the seminar accomplished is yet to be seen. We can for example expect a Helsinki Design Manifesto to stem from the work done during the Lab. What is clear and welcome is that the role and nature of design is being rethought, as Finland gets ready to apply it’s new national innovation strategies and to launch the Aalto school that will combine the existing tech, business and design universities in the Helsinki area.

The new paradigm – that design is everywhere and can be applied to just about anything – reminds me of the shift in the role of marketing a while back. For long marketing meant marketing communications, then all of a sudden everything that the customers needed and therefore a company should provide was called marketing. It made sense but was also a struggle for hegemony, the fun people from the marketing department wanted to invade the corner offices, or at least be invited in for a chat.

Now designers want to do the same, and not only designers, there are other powerful forces – like Sitra, some of our industry and some behind the Aalto school – that are pushing for design nation Finland to take its design more seriously. It is difficult to expect anything but good to come out of that.

It was a fun and intense spring, mostly spent working on designing and crafting communication for design and craft. The biggest customer was Onoma Shop in Fiskars that after ten years of operation wanted to renew its strategy, layout, displays and communication and build a web shop. Great Point was responsible for the project and did it together with Lauri and Lotta from Eriksson & Company and Mari Vatanen. The project was financed by Uudenmaan TE-keskus and the Fiskars co-op.

If you are into ethical luxury, like things local, like stories, admire artists and craftsmen and have been to Fiskars, 90 km west of Helsinki, go again, and check out the all new Onoma Shop. If you just cannot make it this season, don’t worry, you can get into that Fiskars state of mind by visiting www.onoma.fi.

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.

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it”, says author and blogger Seth Godin in a great little video shot by Nic Askew. “…a curious person explores first and then considers whether they want to accept the ramifications.”

For anyone wondering about creativity and quality of work on personal, on organizational or on national level, the five minutes it takes to watch this video are well spent: “Curiosity”

At a seminar the other day the speaker mentioned that Google’s market share in Finland is one of its highest anywhere: roughly 90% of Finns use Google as their default search engine. The same day, as I got home, I experimented a little. I first googled (http://www.google.fi) my company Great Point, and it came up as number six on the search. But when I yahooed it (http://fi.search.yahoo.com), it came up as number one! Google 0 - Yahoo 1, since these are search engines customized for Finland, and here my Great Point is the only one. On the Finnish search engine www.fi it came up second. Former Ask Jeeves, now just Ask (http://www.ask.com) did not find it at all.

Then I googled my own name to find out how relevant the search engine thought Great Point is if someone is trying to learn things about Jaakko Tapaninen (it is by far the best source). After all sorts of references to all possible things related and not related to me, link to www.greatpoint. fi came up as number 92 on Google. Not very good. No one looks at anything that ranks 92. When punched my name into Yahoo!, www.greatpoint.fi came up as number 9! And what was just as interesting was that most of the stuff on the first page was far more fresh and relevant than the oddities that Google dug up. When I asked Ask.com, it did not find my Great Point at all, but all sorts references to English-Language sites where my name is mentioned. It was interesting though, since this was stuff I did not know existed. But how about the Finnish engine www.fi? When the first 50 references did not link my name with my company, I gave up.

So, the next time you want to know how you look in cyberspace, try yahooing yourself for a change. And if like what you find, hey, maybe you should use it for other stuff too.

It feels like 2008 will be a truly new year. New meaning different. So much ended in 2007 that a lot of new must be going on in 2008. The era of cheap money and cheap energy came to an end. The denial of the climate change came to an end. The era of George W. Bush started fading away. The the idea that there will be and era after Vladimir Putin faded away. In my change of the year column for the newspaper Aamulehti I listed seven things that will be different in 2008, or things that we will just see more of.

1. Quality. In the financial markets a phenomenon called flight to quality exists. During uncertainty investors want assets they understand and trust. Expanding on that we could think that, as energy and money get more expensive, the focus of global capitalism will start shifting from quantity to quality, from the cheapest to the best, from unnecessary crap to what is useful and solid.

2. Local. Rising energy costs and increasing carbon emissions will force us to rethink the travel and transport. Local will become trendy again.

3. Real. Whether it is luxury items, food or family time, things that are real, authentic, traceable, preferably man made or even self-made are making a comeback. In Finland this trend is partly enforced by parents worrying about the consequences of their children’s life on-line. Legos 1 - game consoles 0.

4. Small. The bigger the better. Outside of cell phones and some other electric devices this has been the mantra of the consumer society. Rising gasoline and electricity prices may well change that. Small will become chic, smart and affordable.

5. Teleconferencing. Big companies are cutting down on travel and installing expensive teleconferencing equipment. Individuals are finding iChat and Skype’s video calls.

6. Electronic ink. Amazon’s Kindle may have it’s flaws and be ugly but it is a step into an inevitable direction. In 2008 we will probably see many more paper newspapers die, but it is about time we saw an electronic newspaper emerge.

7. Nato. So far the Finnish public opinion has been against Nato membership. In the coming year there will be presidential elections both in Russia and in the US. Russia will probably get even more autocratic, while the US will hopefully move to a more democratic direction. This shift will probably make Nato look much more inviting to the Finns than it is today.

Happy New New Year!

The annual mega gathering of publishing professionals ended in Frankfurt last weekend. I did not go, but those who did, say it was a good book fair. For me it became a great fair when I received an excited phone call from the fairgrounds telling me that the our Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin had submitted Finland’s letter of intent to the Buchmesse to become the Guest of Honour in 2011.

It is bold move for Finland. It is going to cost a lot, and it is going to take a lot to put together an interesting presentation, but it is also an amazing possibility. I did a feasibilty study on The Guest of Honour programme for the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in the spring and - although I have visited the bookfair nine times - I had never before understood what an amazing reach the Guest of Honour status and programme have in German-Speaking Europe. It is like buying the Super Bowl half-time ad in the cultural life of Germany. No one can escape you. The book Fair is the biggest annual cultural event in Germany and 40% of the media attention is dedicated to the Guest of Honour. This is because the the guest country is the news every year, everything else stays pretty much the same.

So it is not really an honour, or an exhibition - it is a huge medium, and it is available to the guest country for the whole year, all around Germany. For Finnish literature, Germany has been the spring-board to the rest of the world for long. If Finland gets the status – Iceland is applying too but we remain convinced of our chances – well have much more than a spring-board, we’ll have a literary trampoline the size of Germany to show what we’ve got. Better start getting ready for the show…

“The most important thing is the wording of what we do, the creation of vocabulary”, described Kjetil Thorsen, one of the founders of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta their way of working to me when I interviewed him. The whole interview can be found in Helsinki Design Week Magazine that is just out. What stuck with me from the interview was the role of a common vocabulary in the work of these architects. They are best known for the library in Alexandria, Egypt and for winning the commission to design a museum at the WTC site in New York – and for working collaboratively. Their way of making collaborative designs is to start by talking until they share a vocabulary, and first after that start drawing. If the process is done right, what they come up with belongs to all of them and no one at the same time. Common words lead to common deeds.

There is an important lesson here, not only to designers but everyone involved with projects. So many go wrong because those involved don’t spend enough time developing a common language. People think they do but find out too late they did not.

Norwegians seem to be a nation of great communicators. Today I had the honor of interviewing Princes Märtha Louise of Norway at the shopping mall Sello in Leppävaara. She was absolutely wonderful and engaging before and audience of a few hundred children, adults and elderly that had gathered to see her. It is interesting that as good as she is, she seems to have great trouble explaining to the Norwegians what she actually does at her school. In Finland she could have told the crowd anything and they would have loved her.