On a Mission
Learning how to build a crowdfunded content business
A friend who once interviewed for a job with Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post said he greeted her with a string of expletives. She gave it right back, which ignited a chorus of laughter followed by a legacy of meaningful and award-winning work. I’ve always been drawn to people who think outside the box. Even for something as simple as how they express themselves.
I believe words and images can inspire and do change the world. Sometimes it’s as simple as an unexpected funny phrase creating an atmosphere of bonding laughter. Or an insightful quote leading to profound personal reflection. Or an image capturing a moment or person in time. Or even a single word, such as welcome.
WELCOME
CUNY accepted a diverse cohort of multinational student professionals into an accelerated graduate certificate program that began with an email that essentially read, “welcome.”
"You've been selected from a strong, international, and remarkably competitive pool of applicants to participate in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program (EJCP) at CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. We are pleased to invite you to join us for this 100-day program as part of a stellar cohort of journalism innovators worldwide."
Say what? I never get into these things. Yet here it was. Disbelief. Joy. Gratitude. This opportunity is magic for a guy who once hitchhiked 150 miles to take a college entrance exam after getting out of jail. Who eventually graduated with a business degree and has since worked as a journalist for over 20 years. But the path to get here, reaching back generations, has been anything but traditional.
My mother grew up a daughter of sharecroppers in a family of twelve. It’s surreal when your mom explains picking cotton in granular detail, right down to the bloody fingers. And my father, whose great-grandmother died on a ship fleeing Nazi Germany while giving birth, lived in orphanages until he was ten years old. My father was adopted by a man who had just returned from five years of battle in the South Pacific during World War II.
There was an intense fear of poverty in my childhood. Thus, this rich experience and privilege to study and be a part of the EJCP with others who also “want to build something” felt like a winning lottery ticket. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Once stretched by a new idea, one’s mind never regains its original dimensions.” That has been my experience; an open mind aligns more with giving. A giving spirit is the heart and soul of my business model that I call “On A Mission.” My mission statement is simple: stories of people making the world better.
EJCP’s final assignment was to share what we learned. Pretty cool. Except I felt paralyzed as writer’s block grabbed the reins. Then I realized I’d already confronted one obstacle to success during class — the fear of sharing in a professional context. There’s a reason why personal experience is central to my business model. Yet, my conundrum remains. Do I share openly? Do I talk about drugs or machine guns or having a bullet from a 9mm wracked in the chamber in my mouth during a drug deal gone bad? Maybe. I guess it depends on the story. It would be far more comfortable to hide behind an HR-friendly veneer or maybe humblebrag about work success or my real estate business. But I find it’s not humblebrag that opens people’s hearts during interviews. It’s the “I understand what suffering feels like” relatability. Hardships engender compassion and empathy.
TAKEAWAY #1 — TELL ME A STORY: FINDING RAPPORT
Several years ago, I shot two iPhone stories the day before a job interview. The first was about stifled millennial voting, and the second was about cars nicknamed SLABs (Slow Loud And Bangin). My ‘Slab’ subjects initially felt muffled. I had a hunch, so I asked the group of men, “Have y’all ever heard of Judge Poe? He almost sent me to prison as a teenager.” They erupted, “hangin’ judge.” After finding some rapport, the story told itself. They, too, had experience with the former judge and former U.S. Congressman, Ted Poe. My slab story shifted gears. It ended up being less about cars and more about overcoming judgment and finding redemption through lives well-lived.
The interviewing news director, although complimentary, smiled and said, “Great stories. Excellent work. But you don’t fit into our puzzle.”
A short while later, I saw the same men in an Anthony Bourdain episode with their slabs. There are times when an ounce of validation goes a long way.
I’d suggest that being able to relate or get people to open up to make sense of hardship or tragedy is a storyteller’s superpower. It consistently offers some catharsis. You know what I mean if you’ve covered these types of stories. It’s why “journalists go home” signs don’t make an appearance until about three days after a mass shooting.
My first takeaway from EJCP was learning to share who I am within my storytelling. And why that matters in the context of my business.
TAKEAWAY #2 — UNIQUE APPROACH
Remembering the first day of school brings back age-old anxiety of feeling like an extraterrestrial.
Just like it felt in the first grade.
Which was terrifying.
Especially since I’d skipped kindergarten.
While other 5-year-olds learned to socialize, I taped pennies to the bottoms of my shoes to practice tap dance alongside Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. People are not all the same. Academic programs are not all the same. Differentiation — whether in branding, academia, or content creation, is a gift. It’s why all major US broadcasting companies now have some version of a “new innovations” strategy to compete with the democratization fuse lit by social media.
EJCP CUNY’s practical approach to education fostered creativity beyond “report cards.” If the measure of success had been a traditional metric, such as “memorize gobs of stuff and get an A,” I would have hated it. I also found the delivery pitch perfect. Combining a myriad of disparate elements in unison — no easy task — but handled deftly by our professor, whose style felt like the conductor of an orchestral ensemble. I can’t imagine having had a better maestro than Professor Jeremy Caplan for our cohort. His unique approach truly elevated the program experience.
TAKEAWAY #3 — STRADIVARI: TOOLS FOR THE AGES
Jeremy Caplan’s ability to harness a newly selected cohort of international students is quite remarkable. As Caplan taught, he made necessary adjustments, guiding our ‘accelerated’ academic path forward. For me, there was a sense of shaping the learning process in real-time, juxtaposed with a powerful digital toolkit. Takeaway: The mastery of modern digital tools is a form of contemporary digital literacy that can transformatively become an extension of one’s process. Not a ubiquitous “technology is great” but something far more dialed-in, like a master mechanic’s organized toolbox that can facilitate real-world workflows. The digital tools we learned enhance many aspects of entrepreneurial endeavors. Their power to boost efficacy might elicit an apologetic response to a compliment such as, “But without this technology… ” The reality is a Stradivarius is a museum piece without musicianship.
A few great tools I picked up from our class include:
(1) Riverside.fm is like Zoom on steroids. Uses A.I. to enhance A/V streams. An extraordinary piece of tech whose timing and execution are spot on: https://riverside.fm/homepage.
(2) Multitude-Podcasts, by Amanda McLoughlin. An extraordinary podcaster who shared her step-by-step recipe. She covered real-world outcomes, obstacles, metrics, and more.
(3) GMass. One lecturer, former Buzzfeed executive Dan Oshinsky, shared that he emailed his entire Gmail contacts list when he started his new business. Brilliant doesn’t have to mean complicated.
(4) Pitch. Excellent storyboard tool for clean presentations. Pitch removed start anxiety via templates that quickly guide toward finished presentations.
My goal is not to create one-off stories of people on missions to improve the world but to help them continue by liaising with financing sources. By the way, if a friend happens to be the CEO of a crowd-funder, I’d love to meet them!
The story below tells the tale of a former world banker and his wife re-engineering at mid-life. They traded an affluent Washington D.C. lifestyle for a home in Brazil with neither electricity nor running water. They’d driven 5K miles to start a new life in Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest. Over several decades, they have since built a campus where they educate children and adults about the environment. Their story is how I’d envision a first episode of On A Mission. Change a mind, change the world? You be the judge.
My purpose in studying in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creator’s Program was to move the needle for my business model from concept to action. And to take steps to make On A Mission sustainable vis-a-vis monetizing stories of hope through crowdfunding.
Wait — did I say monetize? Yes, I did.
Sounds journalistically heretical. It feels that way too.
Here I’d remind you that storytelling is expensive. People “saving the world” need financial support more than publicity.
As such, one of the most important tools of all? Finance.
TAKEAWAY #4 — DALE CARNEGIE WOULD BE PROUD
EJCP provided opportunities to build new professional relationships with many professionals in the business-academic-journalism ecosystem. One assignment utilized an app that felt like speed dating for business networking. It connected students to an impressive list of journalism entrepreneurs. I have since developed relationships with several of them.
We also learned from a stellar group of guest lecturers who provided different takes on journalism entrepreneurship. The lecturers openly shared foibles, obstacles, victories, successes, and the entirety of their processes.
TAKEAWAY #5—BE LIKE JON MAYER — SAY WHAT YOU NEED TO SAY.
One day in my news director’s office, my daydream was interrupted by shouting, “I am your boss. Are you not processing what I am saying?” I wasn’t. Daydreaming for an ADHD’er is kind of like breathing.
As a student in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creator’s Program, I explored my struggle with ADHD in a professional context for the first time. The idea arose organically during class. Professor Caplan observed students’ reactions to an assignment, saying, “Other students responded strongly to your narrative.” So I thought, why not explore taboos and take a few exploratory chances? After all, isn’t that part of the nature of the educational process?
SWOT analyses explore strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Part of my SWOT make-up is that I can consistently pull creative from thin air, yet I’m painfully disorganized. Although the ADA codifies ADHD, most employers don’t understand it. The reality is that you are judged. It feels like a perpetually misinterpreted invisible disability. Could examining workplace ADHD destigmatize it? Maybe. It has done so for numerous formerly taboo topics such as sexual violence, human trafficking, trauma, and depression.
GOOD ENDINGS MAKE GOOD BEGINNINGS
Events often give “gift bags” to attendees with contents that range from meh to yum to wow. The EJCP version invoked the wow response with gifts powerful enough to use over a lifetime, a season, or for a start-up.
My EJCP bag of swag included:
(1) A robust network of relationships to nurture.
(2) Potent new digital tools with some know-how to apply them.
(3) An assortment of tried-and-true frameworks, such as Ariel Zirulnick’s Membership Puzzle Project.
(4) Ongoing access to EJCP class tools, including Coda, Pathwright, Canva, and recorded lectures.
(5) The gift of being able to see that now is the time.
One of my dearest friends often says he is “rich in things that money can’t buy.” I feel the same way. And I count this shared journey in the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creator’s Program, amongst friends, as a part of those riches.
