In Prague

I’ve been in Prague for almost 24 hours now. Here are the highlights so far:

1. Finding a copy of LP’s Turkey 10 in a bookshop in the Frankfurt Airport. For some reason, the somewhat surreal experience of looking at my author photo and reading my bio in a foreign country thrilled me to no end.
2. Stumbling across a bookstore in central Prague last night – it was sometime after midnight – and finding a large crowd of Czech teens waiting to buy the new Harry Potter book, which is supposedly the final installment of the series.

There was a newspaper photographer taking shots of the most excitable kids, who jumped up and down with glee after their purchase had been paid for and bagged. And of course there were a handful of hardcore Potter fans dressed up in wizard costumes and such. But the thing about this event that truly blew my mind was the realization that this exact same scene was being played out at thousands of other bookstores around the world. According to a story in yesterday’s International Herald-Tribune, the initial print run of the book was 12 million. That’s almost hard to believe. 

Shouldn’t J.K. Rowling be given a MacArthur Grant for having encouraged such a huge number of children and teenagers to read? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that some of her books are nearly 1,000 pages long. Personally I think the woman is close to saintly.

Pittsburgh City Paper Interview

Interesting day today. I was interviewed by Bill O’Driscoll, the A&E editor of the Pittsburgh City Paper, about my recently published Moon Handbooks guide. Bill is an interesting guy; when I worked at the City Paper myself, I remember him always taking his interviews very seriously, and today, we must have talked for close to an hour. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing the finished piece.

I naturally have no idea what Bill’s opinion of the book is, but I’m sure the piece will be well-written if nothing else. In my opinion, the guy is one of the best arts journalists in the city. A few years back he won an award of some sort from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) for a feature about cage fighting; Bill has also written for The Nation.

At any rate, the City Paper piece comes out in either one or two weeks from today; I’ll be sure to post it here as soon as it shows up on the CP’s website.

I fly out of Pittsburgh International tomorrow afternoon around 4pm, and after layovers in D.C. and Frankfurt, I’ll land in Prague around 9am the following day. I don’t think I mentioned this in my previous post about the Foreign Correspondence Training Course, but one of highlights is that we’ll actually be sent out into the streets at some point to report — and then write — our own stories. All the course participants were asked to do a bit of preliminary internet research in order to come up with topic ideas and potential contacts before leaving home, and I ended up discovering that the citizens and government of the Czech Republic have been squabbling lately over whether or not prostitution should be legalized. So I’ve decided to take a look at the current prostitution situation in the city, and hopefully an interesting story will come out of it. We’ll see.

About Page Updates, and Why All Writers Should Blog

PITTSBURGH — I recently made all sorts of interesting updates to the Labor Party’s About page; if you’re a regular reader, or if you’re simply interested in learing why this blog exists and what it’s all about, you might enjoy taking a look.

At the very bottom of the page, you’ll also find a few interesting links that lead to articles arguing that all writers should also be bloggers. Some of them are fairly convincing, so if you’re a writer yourself, and if you’ve been giving some thought lately to launching your own blog, you may find these worth your time.

Free Motivation from Henry Rollins

PITTSBURGH — I’m a self-employed journalist, and I like to think of myself as an especially ambitious person. A driven, goal-oriented, hard-working writer – even when I don’t particularly want to work hard.

But of course, even the most earnest and enterprising fellow will face days when it seems as if he simply can’t self-motivate. And if this fellow happens to work from a home office, where there is no supervisor in a nearby cubicle, and in fact if there is no cubicle at all, but instead a rickety desk purchased from the As-Is department at the local IKEA, well … this is exactly the sort of person who might find himself in need of a serious shot of positive motivation every now and again. I could be wrong, but I seem to bump face-first into days like these with a bit more frequency than your average go-getter. And while I used to be able to heal myself with loud music, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to work too well these days.    

I have a fairly large library of self-help and personal growth books that sometimes help, but you can only read the same tips in the same books so many times. Which is exactly why I was so thrilled when, a few weeks back, I discovered that Henry Rollins maintains a blog on his website. Odd as it may sound, this blog is actually what I often turn to now when I’m feeling helplessly lazy.

Rollins’ blog is the sort that’s generally known as a “What I had for breakfast” blog. He  simply writes a few sentences about what it was he did — or didn’t do – on that particular day. Although the unusual thing about the blog is this: I almost never cease to be amazed at the things this guy accomplishes in 24 hours.

It is absolutely unreal, the things this man manages to get done in the space of a day, not to mention the unbelievably long hours he works, and the intensity with which he appears to do it all. I would absolutely love to know where all this intensity and energy actually comes from. It certainly isn’t alcohol or drugs — anyone who follows Rollins’ career knows that the man consumes neither. And yet something he often notes in his posts are the times he wakes up in the morning, and when he goes to bed at night. If you read backwards in the blog for a week or two, you’ll see that Rollins appears to almost never get a full eight hours. Here’s a recent quote:

“Got up at 0430, got 3 hrs of sleep, but I had to prepare for my interview with [obscure hipster artist you're not cool enough to have heard of], so I’ll catch up on sleep tomorrow. Actually make that next week. I’m too busy. Actually … scratch that. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Got that? OK. WHOO-AH!” 

Seriously: Spend some time reading Dispatches, as Rollins calls his blog, and see if you aren’t immediately inspired to finish some random project you started but never finished some months ago. And if anyone reading this happens to know Rollins personally and can shed some light on why he is the way he is, I’d be more than thrilled to hear about it. Email me at dan@youngpioneers.com, and I’ll post any especially interesting ideas right here on The Labor Party.

Tin Tin’s Hanoi Hustle on lonelyplanet.tv

PITTSBURGH — I’m not sure how many of you out there are aware that Lonely Planet recently launched a website with user-generated video content. LonelyPlanet.tv, as it’s called, is essentially a travel-themed YouTube, and if you’re something of a travel addict yourself, you’ll probably find this site to be endlessly addictive.

One of the most insane videos I’ve seen on the site lately is something called Hanoi Hustle, a music video featuring a guy by the name of Tin Tin. I’m guessing Tin Tin to be a Hanoi expat, although I really don’t know anything at all about the guy because when I clicked on his vlog last night, it crashed my computer.  

By the way, this is one of the most hilarious videos I’ve seen in ages, and I have no idea whatsoever if this is a complete joke, or if this guy is for real. Take a look and decide for yourself.

BREAKING NEWS! Dishwasher Pete, aka Pete Jordan, to Appear on CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman this Friday, July 20, 2007

PITTSBURGH — Any of you out there with even a passing interest in author Pete Jordan, the man formerly known in zine circles as Dishwasher Pete, will certainly want to pay close attention to this Friday’s episode of CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman. Pete himself, if you can believe it, is a scheduled guest.  

Those of you not familiar with Jordan’s work will probably not find this information unusual in the least, but as someone who has obsessively followed the man’s career for the better part of a decade now, I nearly had to lift my jaw off the floor when I read this news.

The backstory is that during the height of the zine explosion, Jordan became something of a minor underground celebrity. He was working as a dishwasher at the time, and his goal was to dish professionally in each one of the 50 United States. He naturally found himself in a number of especially odd and amusing situations — his dished on an oil rig, for instance, and on a dinner train, at a fish cannery in Alaska, at a summer camp — and he documented these experiences in a self-published zine.

Once the mainstream media discovered the zine culture, they started digging for work that was well written, or well designed, or unusual — in other words, anything that would make their own audience sit up and take notice.

Jordan’s story was certainly one of the most fascinating, but because he was wary of being exploited by the corporate class, he consistently refused to play ball when the magazines and the news shows came knocking. He was legendary for turning down any and all interview requests. I once attempted to set up an interview with Jordan myself — I was putting together a little pamphlet about independent travel culture — and the guy even turned me down!

At any rate, I suppose Jordan had simply had enough of all this by the time letters from the David Letterman crew began appearing in his mailbox, requesting that he appear on the show. But as it happened, Jordan had a good friend — Jess – who had always dreamt of being on TV, and so the two cooked up a plan. It was simple enough: They would both go to the studio, although Jess would claim that he was Pete, and Pete would claim that he was Jess. Since Pete was also famously camera shy, the two never figured they’d get caught; there were very few photos of Pete in which his face was actually exposed.

Long story short: They got away with it, for a while. Jess did appear on the show, and he essentially made a mockery of both himself and Letterman. Jordan tells the entire story in full detail in his new book, which I highly recommend. And on Jordan’s website, you can watch the actual video of Jess’s Letterman appearance. It’s an absolute classic. As far as I know, the only other guests to ever successfully prank Letterman were actor Crispin Glover (who was supposed on acid during his appearance) and comic book author Harvey Pekar.

It’s anyone’s guess, of course, what will happen when Jordan stops by the Late Show set for the second time. Jordan now lives in Amsterdam, where he has a wife and a child, and he even published his book with a mainstream house. So it’s unlikely he’ll be causing any trouble himself. But who’s to say what Dave might decide to cook up? I received an email from Jordan yesterday, in which he wrote the following:

“Originally the producers seemed cold to the notion of inviting me again to ‘appear’. But it seems that the big guy himself is the one who thought it’d be a good idea to have me back. I guess he has a sense of humor after all. But this time I’m going into it knowing that the joke may very well be on me. So I don’t know what to expect. (An ersatz host?) Tune in Monday night to find out… “

Foreign Correspondent Training Course in Prague

PITTSBURGH — Back when my journalism career was essentially something that existed only in my imagination, there were two blogs I checked on an almost daily basis: Rolf Potts’ Vagablogging and Jen Leo’s Written Road. (Interestingly, both Rolf and Jen have become so busy with other work lately that they no longer even write their own blogs; they use a rotating cast of guest-bloggers instead. Those are two wonderful examples, I think, of bloggers who were tenacious and dedicated, and who ended up reaping valuable rewards as a result of all those long hours spent in front of their computers. Jen, for instance, now blogs about travel bargains for the L.A. Times, and I’m fairly certain that job came about as a direct result of the travel advice she so often dished out for Written Road.)

Anyway, it was maybe two or three years ago when I found a post on Jen’s blog about an annual 10-day training course for would-be freelance foreign correspondents. It was based in Prague, and put together by Transitions Online, a Czech news organization which, according to its website, covers “all of the region’s 28 post-communist countries”. As someone who has always wanted to attend J-School, but who probably never will because it costs too much, I thought this idea was fantastic. And while it’s true that I’ve been busying myself almost exclusively with travel journalism for the past year, my most important career goal has always been to become a traveling writer, as opposed to a travel writer. In other words, instead of being a journalist who goes to specific places and then writes about those places, I’ve always preferred the idea of being able to go anywhere, and to then write about anything. Which is essentially what a foreign correspondent does. 

I doubt I even had the money to spare on the Prague course back when I first learned about it (it costs US$1,350, and then there’s the round-trip airfare), but I can still vaguely remember the disappointment I felt after scrolling through the organization’s website and discovering the class was reserved for university students or recent graduates only. I don’t remember why I didn’t send an email asking if they could make an exception. That seems like the sort of thing I would normally do. But at any rate, I forgot about the whole thing, and that was that.

And then a few weeks ago, just after I’d wrapped up my LP assignment in Thailand, the course popped back into my mind. Now that I think of it, I suppose it seems a little obsessive that I had been out of the country for nearly three months and was already thinking about my next opportunity to leave. But nonetheless, I hopped online because I couldn’t quite remember what time of year the class was scheduled to take place. As it happened, I was in luck: It was coming up in about a month, and this time around there were no age or education requirements. You simply had to fill out a form, write an essay about why you wanted to attend, and that was that.

My acceptance letter arrived via email in less than a week. I’ll be flying out of Pittsburgh International this Thursday.

Aside from maybe a dozen emails that have come from a Christian Science Monitor correspondent by the name of Michael Jordan, I really don’t know what all to expect. TOL tells us that aside from Jordan, we’ll be schooled by Rob Cameron, who covers the Czech Republic and Slovakia for the BBC ; Edward Lucas, an Economist editor who writes about Central and Eastern Europe; and Aernout van Lynden, a war correspondent who has covered the Middle East for the Washington Post, BBC Radio, The Observer, Sky TV, and who knews what else.

That’s quite a line-up, so I’m guessing that no matter what sort of information these four choose to impart, we’ll all be getting our money’s worth. After the course ends and before flying home, I’ll be spending roughly three days each in Berlin and Kiev, where I may even put some of my newly acquired knowledge to good use. More updates about this trip to come, so stay tuned. (The folks in the photo at the top of this post, by the way, are former graduates of the course.)

Current work

PITTSBURGH — Apologies for the lack of blog activity; I’m on deadline. Current project: A three-part feature about travel opportunities in Thailand for Venture, a UK-based magazine published by the same good folks who put out Travel Africa. As is quite often the case in the freelance field, I got the job through a connection; Travel Africa’s newly hired editor is none other than former Lonely Planet wunderkind Matt Phillips. I met Matt sometime last year, at an LP authors conference in Oakland. (Cheers Matt!)  

Next up is an essay I’m writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about what it was like to write an entire first edition of a Pittsburgh city guide for Moon Handbooks. Talk about a favorable assignment: Not only am I getting paid to promote a book for which I’ll be receiving royalties, but the essay is scheduled to run in the Sunday paper’s Next Page department. The Next Page is an impressively creative op-ed section that publishes some of the P-G’s strangest and most interesting work; each piece is accompanied by an equally creative graphic element – maybe a funky line drawing, or a mixed-media collage of some sort. Sounds weird, but it almost always looks good. Check it out.  

A Labor Party contest: Rename this blog!

I’ll admit that ever since I started this blog — or at least, ever since I started taking it seriously — I’ve felt a little quesy about the fact that it doesn’t have a clear focus. When I’m ready to file a post, I don’t go to my Idea Folder or scan the internet. I just pound out whatever happens to be on my mind at the time.

That isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with maintaining a diary-style blog. But the fact of the matter is that I launched the Labor Party specifically to further and to market my own writing career. 

But the more I think of it, the more I realize I never had much of a goal to begin with. After all, a goal needs to be specific enough so that anyone can tell without any doubt whatsoever whether or not the goal has been successfully met. But how can I possibly know if a blog I’m maintaining on non-specific subjects has done anything to raise the profile of my career? The answer is: I can’t.

And so I’ve decided to make some changes. Seeing as I’m attempting to improve the quality of my writing life, I figured it might make good sense to blog about exactly that – the writing life, that is. (Which, incidentally, is one of my favorite subjects.) I’ve been immersed in the fields of journalism and publishing for many years now, and I’ve had some impressive successes along the way. I’d like to use this blog as a way of sharing some of those secrets. And believe me, I’ve got quite a few.

I’m a Lonely Planet author, for instance, and nearly everyone who hears that tells me I have their dream job. After I smile and nod my head, they want to know how I got the job in the first place. It’s actually a rather long and complicated story, but at some point I’d like to share it right here.

I’m also rife with information about how a generalist writer can become a travel writer, because I did exactly that. What else? I’ve written a guidebook that was recently published. I worked as a music editor at an alt-weekly. I wrote and edited for an English-language traveller’s magazine in Istanbul. I’ve had a huge number of magazine and newspaper articles published as a freelancer. I published my own magazine, and in the process learned about desktop publishing, public relations, and working with printers. And perhaps best of all, I’ve managed to make writing my full-time job for the past four years.

I know there are thousands of aspiring writers out there who want very badly to transform their lives and their careers like I did. And by taking advantage of this incredible instant-publishing creation, I’d love to help them out. But first, I need your help, and here’s my question:

What exactly should I call this thing?

Yes, I know: I’m a professional writer and I should certainly be able to come up with a name for my own blog. I realize it’s not that tall of an order. But for some reason I’m just not good at this sort of thing. Whenever I submit magazine articles, for instance, I try my damndest to invent a witty title and an even wittier subhed. But in almost every case, my editor is able to whip out something both smarter and funnier in a matter of seconds. When I worked as a staff editor, my cubicle mate would do this time and time again. It was humbling.    

But I no longer sit in a cubicle, and so I’m appealing to you, my modest readers: What would you call a blog about writing secrets and the writing life if you were writing it? Or even if you weren’t writing it — even if you were just reading it — what would you like it to be called?

Oh, and don’t forget: I also need a subhed. That’s the explanatory sentence (it’s usually a fragment, actually) that comes right after the title. It’s there to explain what the item you’re reading is actually all about.    

And since I am calling this a contest, I suppose I’ll have to provide a prize of some sort. I’ll be honest: I haven’t quite decided what the prize will be. But it will be good. And it will be appropriate. And if you happen to be such a smarty pants that you not only pick the perfect name for my blog, but also the subhed to go along with it, I will reward you with an extra-special fantastic incredible bonus prize. And that’s a promise.

One more thing: If there’s anything in particular you’d like to read about — if you have any specific questions, or if you’d like to see me cover any specific subjects — go ahead and let me know. If I’m planning on helping, I might as well be open to requests, right?

Outrageous publicity stunts!

I started reading a fantastic book last night — it’s a sort of 21st-century PR manual born of the ‘guerilla marketing’ school of public relations. It’s called “Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work — and Why Your Company Needs Them”, and was written by Peter Shankman, who owns a rather unusual agency in New York known as The Geek Factory.

I picked up the book for two reasons: One, I have a newly-published guidebook to promote. And Two, I’m about to start a media company called Young Pioneers. YP Media, as the company is also known, will largely concern itself with covering entrepreneurs — but not just any entrepreneur. We’re interested specifically in the odd, the unusual, the extreme, the ballsy, the brave, the bizarre … you get the idea. Anyway, my thinking was that if I’m going to start a company that documents wildly unique business people, I ought to do my very best to become a wildly unique business person as well. And so I went searching through the business books at my local Borders in search of something wildly unique, and I came home with Peter’s book.

By the way, I just now stumbled upon Peter’s blog, which I’m guessing might be worth your time, assuming you also have something to promote — even if it’s just yourself. To read it, point your browser here: www.prdifferently.com.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of PR stunts because to me they’re very much a child of the infamous media pranksters of the 1960s and 70s. (To read about a few recent media pranks, click here.) Richard Branson in particular seems to use PR stunts to his advantage quiet often, and has earned millions of dollars in free publicity for his various Virgin companies in the process. Read the following excerpt from a Booz Allen Hamilton case study by Glenn Rifkin; it outlines just a few of the stunts that resulted in newspaper articles and prime-time television coverage for Branson and the Virgin Group:

His trademark is outlandish publicity stunts. He will do almost anything to promote the Virgin brand: driving a tank down Fifth Avenue in New York to introduce Virgin Cola to the United States, risking his life in high-profile hot-air balloon adventures or portraying a drowning victim on television’s “Baywatch.”

Indeed, so crucial is the continued high profile of Virgin that Mr. Branson says his highest paid and most important employee is Will Whitehorn, his public relations and communications director. “I suspect in most companies, the public relations person is down at No. 20 in the pecking order,” Mr. Branson says. “But, here, he is fighting incredibly important battles. If a negative story starts running away with itself in the press and is not dealt with fast, it can badly damage the brand. And so we put enormous weight on our public relations people.”

Mr. Branson reportedly sets aside at least 25 percent of his time for public relations activities, and Mr. Whitehorn has a staff member whose sole responsibility is devising the headline-catching publicity stunts for which Mr. Branson has become known. “If your staff works enormously hard to create something they are proud of, it’s foolish if you don’t let the world know about it,” Mr. Branson states. “Using yourself to get out and talk about it is a lot cheaper and more effective than a lot of advertising. In fact, if you do it correctly, it can beat advertising hands down and save tens of millions of dollars.”

Pretty interesting stuff. Personally, I’d love to hear more about outrageous entrepreneurs and CEOs, as well as interesting guerilla PR tactics worth trying. Anyone care to share an idea or two?

Finally, here’s a great photo of The Geek Factory’s Peter Shankman (photo deleted; so sorry), taken from an equally great site called 365 Portraits, in which a New York City-based photographer by the name of Bill Wadman takes a new photograph of an interesting person for 365 days in a row. Now that’s what I call a fantastic, wonderfully creative idea for a project! Bill certainly sounds like a Young Pioneer to me …