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.

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.

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.

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”

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.