This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

I’ve decided to call it quits as a Huffington Post Chicago blogger. A charter blogger at that–I was among those personally invited to scribe for the site shortly before its August 2008 Windy City debut. But after fourteen months, nonstop theft of my content by spam sites has left me weary and wanting out. It’s not just a HuffPost issue, either. As print media interests across the country continue to launch blog content networks, why don’t their resident bloggers receive the same vigorous infringement defense as newspaper and magazine writers?

For me, it was a good fit while it lasted. HuffPost bloggers aren’t compensated, but retain the copyright to their work which can be used in other places. So for the past 14 months, I’ve used my HuffPost byline to cross-post stories of civic interest that simultaneously appeared in the pages of my personal blog, Chicago Carless. The large audience of the national content network gave those stories a wider reach than would have been possible on Carless, alone.

However, for the past several months, almost all content that I have published on Huffington Post Chicago–content that originated here on my personal blog–has been stolen and reposted on domestic and off-shore spam sites. From time to time that has happened with Chicago Carless, and in most cases I have been able to have the stolen content removed, usually by filing DMCA complaints with the relevant web hosts. It has happened rarely enough that I don’t find it too much of a nuisance.

However, in the past few months every single entry I have published on HuffPost Chicago has been stolen and reposted. I take my copyright very seriously and defend it vigorously–but I don’t have the time or the patience to follow up every HuffPost entry I publish with a DMCA complaint and the research required to file one. And, frankly, I’m tired of watching my copyrighted Chicago Carless posts infringed solely because I allow HuffPost to use them.

This would be made easier if Huffington Post Chicago defended the copyright of its bloggers in some way. However, the content network places the onus of copyright defense squarely with its scribes–even though my content is being stolen–and consistently so–from their servers, not my own. Given the longstanding controversy that continues to surround HuffPost’s practice of posting questionably long excerpts from third-party news articles–a form of content scraping–I don’t expect them to damn the irony and rush to defend the copyright of their own bloggers.

But they should. And while you can still manage to benefit from infringing scraper sites (see good recommendations here and here), I’d rather beat them than join them, thanks.

I wish the Huffington Post Chicago editors and bloggers my best, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to borrow their pulpit for awhile. However, I can only wonder how large a problem this is. I can’t be the only Huffington Post Chicago blogger being infringed on a post-by-post basis. Hopefully, HuffPost will look into the issue and offer its bloggers a better defense against infringement in the future.

It’s worth noting that in guidance given to its own copyright-holding bloggers, ChicagoNow also places the onus of infringement defense on bloggers. It remains to be seen whether this will pose a problem in the future for me or my fellow ChicagoNow scribes.

What does seem obvious is that copyright infringement (as in: cut-and-paste theft of entire blog posts) will only get worse as content networks like HuffPost, ChicagoNow, and their ilk continue to forge virtual publications from the work of modestly paid (or unpaid) online writers. Letting bloggers keep their copyright is cold comfort if a content network won’t to step in when their words are stolen–especially for bloggers who are monetizing those words in other venues.

I’d bet money on copyright defense for resident bloggers to become a touchstone issue in the not-so-distant future. That is, if content-network bloggers are actually paying attention to theft in the first place. Word to the wise content blogger: Google yourself. You may discover bylines out there you never knew you had.

An alternate version of this post appears on my Chicagosphere byline.

I’ve decided to call it quits as a Huffington Post Chicago blogger. A charter blogger at that–I was among those personally invited to scribe for HuffPost shortly before their debut in the Windy City in August 2008.

It was a good fit while it lasted. HuffPost bloggers aren’t compensated, but retain the copyright to their work which can be used in other places. So for the past 14 months, I’ve used my HuffPost byline to cross-post stories of civic interest that simultaneously appeared here in the pages of Chicago Carless. The large audience of the national content network gave those stories a wider reach than would have been possible on Carless, alone.

However, for the past several months, almost all content that I have published on Huffington Post Chicago–content that originated here on my personal blog–has been stolen and reposted on domestic and off-shore spam sites. From time to time that has happened with Chicago Carless, and in most cases I have been able to have the stolen content removed, usually by filing DMCA complaints with the relevant web hosts. It has happened rarely enough that I don’t find it too much of a nuisance.

However, in the past few months every single entry I have published on HuffPost Chicago has been stolen and reposted. I take my copyright very seriously and defend it vigorously–but I don’t have the time or the patience to follow up every HuffPost entry I publish with a DMCA complaint and the research required to file one. And, frankly, I’m tired of watching my copyrighted Chicago Carless posts infringed solely because I allow HuffPost to use them.

This would be made easier if Huffington Post Chicago defended the copyright of its bloggers in some way. However, the content network places the onus of copyright defense squarely with its scribes–even though my content is being stolen–and consistently so–from their servers, not my own. Given the longstanding controversy that continues to surround HuffPost’s practice of posting questionably long excerpts from third-party news articles–a form of content scraping–I don’t expect them to damn the irony and rush to defend the copyright of their own bloggers.

But they should. And while you can still manage to benefit from infringing scraper sites (see good recommendations here and here), I’d rather beat them than join them, thanks.

I wish the Huffington Post Chicago editors and bloggers my best, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to borrow their pulpit for awhile. However, I can only wonder how large a problem this is. I can’t be the only Huffington Post Chicago blogger being infringed on a post-by-post basis. Hopefully, HuffPost will look into the issue and offer its bloggers a better defense against infringement in the future.

It’s worth noting that in guidance given to its own copyright-holding bloggers, the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow blog network, where I have my online-media byline, Chicagosphere, also places the onus of infringement defense on bloggers. It remains to be seen whether this will pose a problem in the future for me or my fellow ChicagoNow scribes.

What does seem obvious is that copyright infringement (as in: cut-and-paste theft of entire blog posts) will only get worse as content networks like HuffPost, ChicagoNow, and their ilk continue to forge virtual publications from the work of modestly paid (or unpaid) online writers. Letting bloggers keep their copyright is cold comfort if a content network won’t to step in when their words are stolen–especially for bloggers who are monetizing those words in other venues.

I’d bet money on copyright defense for resident bloggers to become a touchstone issue in the not-so-distant future. That is, if content-network bloggers are actually paying attention to theft in the first place. Word to the wise content blogger: Google yourself. You may discover bylines out there you never knew you had.

Or wanted.

(Photo: Half of the Oak Park Metra ramp sprint that turned off a new rider on Tuesday night. Credit: Karla Kaulfuss.)

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline.

I give Overly Frank a lot of credit for deciding this year to sell his suburban tract house on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and relocate to the corner of Clark and Fullerton. Along with the move to one of the densest urban neighborhoods in America, the lifelong suburbanite also sold his car.

Speaking as a lifelong transit rider with no desire to ever learn how to drive, rarely do I encounter mobility bravery like that. After all, I’ve lived in this town for years. I know the kind of shenanigans the CTA is capable of. (For example, this, this, this, this, and this.) But ever since moving here three months ago, Frank has happily made his way around town on buses and ‘L’ trains with no regrets.

That’s a help, since he’s become a regular at my gang’s Tuesday night coffee klatsches at Lido’s Caffé in Oak Park, also known as the end of the line on the Green Line. Not once on our shared trips out and back have I heard him complain about not being able to drive the 12 miles from Clark Street on the North Side to Marion Street in the near west ‘burbs. In fact, it’s usually me grousing about the Green Line’s 14 stops between Harlem and my home station in the Loop at State/Lake. The trip may only take 22 minutes, but travel time is magnified when you’re sharing your car with a drunken crowd of youth fresh from a nighttime basketball game in Garfield Park.

Last night, I suggested we take Metra back home, instead. A couple of weekends ago, Frank had his first taste of Chicago’s double-decker commuter rail system when I dragged him to the Brookfield Zoo on Metra’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe line. He liked it. (Really, who doesn’t like comfy trains with bird’s-eye views and bathrooms?) So even though the evening was cold and blustery, it was pretty easy to talk Frank into waiting 15 minutes for an inbound Union Pacific-West train at downtown Oak Park’s Marion Street station.

I’ve taken the UP-West line home from there in the evening several times over the past two years and never had a problem, so I figured taking Frank on Metra was a pretty well-laid plan. Unfortunately, it went astray like one, too.

When we arrived at the breeze-swept, wind-chilled platform, a UP freight train was parked on the inbound track. That’s an ordinary occurrence I’ve seen before, and I said so to Frank and the drug-addled addict who came up to us to ask whether we were all waiting on the wrong track. I assured them both we weren’t. Either the freight will move in time for the commuter rail train to pull in, I told them, or Metra will make an announcement–usually well in advance–to await the train on the opposite platform. Unlike the CTA, Metra’s usually very good about making system announcements, so not to worry, I said.

As we shivered the time away to the 9:28PM inbound train, Frank suggested we wait in the platform waiting room to keep warm. It was a good idea. The waiting room was clean, and well illuminated, and heated. Oh yes, and for some inscrutable reason, locked. We could have headed down the long, narrow access ramp to wait in the main Green Line/Metra station area, but then we would have had to run back up the ramp to catch the train, with only the rumble of its sudden passage overhead to signal its arrival.

So we dealt with the cold and waited. As 9:28 drew closer, we expected the freight to begin moving away with every wheeze and whir of its stationary dual diesels. Frank was starting to get anxious about the freight’s continued appearance, considering that if we missed our Metra train, the next one wouldn’t arrive for another hour, forcing us back onto the Green Line that we were studiously avoiding. But I told him I’d never missed an evening train at Oak Park because of Metra not making a station announcement.

You can see where this is heading.

When 9:28 arrived with the freight train still standing on the inbound track, I told Frank to be on the lookout for a spinning white headlight down the track to the west–Metra’s trademark nighttime luminary signal. I suggested we wouldn’t see said light for another few minutes since the UP-West line tends to run a few minutes late after rush hour.

I was wrong. No sooner did the words leave my mouth then Frank and I turned to see the spinning light on the nose of a Metra diesel that was quickly pulling an inbound train into the station on the outbound track, with no announcement warning whatsoever.

All I had time to say was, “Run!” And in the next moment, two overweight men with little athletic preparation for doing so were sprinting down a 100-foot entrance ramp, up another, and along half a Metra platform, only to watch the sliding doors slam shut in our reddened, gasping faces. The Southern-bred Frank just stood there, incredulous. This native New Yorker, however, was pissed. Before the train could move off I ran to the nearest window with a conductor behind it and pounded on it for all I was worth.

Probably more incredulous than Frank at the site of a crazy person beating the heck out of the side of his train, I watched the crewman radio for the train to remain, then head to the nearest door to let Frank and me on board. When the doors opened, I told the conductor what had happened–Metra hadn’t made an announcement that the train was arriving on the wrong track, so we had to run to catch it.

Now, Metra blowing off the announcement was unacceptable. But what happened next was appalling. Instead of apologizing, the conductor–all six-foot height and three-foot dreadlocks of him–gave us a withering, dirty look and walked away without saying a word. He would repeat the same silent sneer when we passed him on the platform at Ogilvie Transportation Center at the end of our trip.

Another conductor took our money, listened to our story, and shook his head in sympathy. He didn’t apologize, either. But unlike the other conductor–not to mention the Metra employee who didn’t bother to do their job and make the station announcement–he did recognize that we were, in fact, customers and treated us with respect.

Frank and I didn’t say much during the 15-minute ride downtown. How could we? We didn’t really get our breath back until the Merchandise Mart was coming into view. As we rode the escalator down to the ground floor at Ogilvie, I apologized to Frank for having suggested we take Metra instead of the CTA.

I didn’t bother to say Metra usually doesn’t sneer at its customers so thoroughly, that its service tends to be quite good and its employees polite and respectful. I was still too angry to offer the transit agency the benefit of the doubt and Frank was still too annoyed to hear it. I also didn’t tell him I was going to file a complaint with Metra about our totally negative commuter rail experience. I thought that went without saying.

It didn’t. Later in the evening, I called Frank to tell him I wasn’t bothering to file a complaint. For all the recent crowing from Metra Chairwoman Carol Doris and Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano about the transit agency’s nifty new homepage, the site’s online contact form limits written complaints to 500 characters. Not words. Characters.

To me, that seemed a pretty severe restriction on the telling of a story involving a seasoned rider assuring a new customer that Metra never lets its passengers down, only for both riders to be given a one-two sucker punch by the transit agency. After all, arbitrary space limitations or not, some things don’t go without saying. Most importantly, that flagrantly ignoring your responsibility to inform your own customers of service diversions that could lead to them shivering in a 45-degree wind chill for an extra hour and then treating them with open contempt for daring to complain about it is a really good way to turn off of a potential new rider.

Not that I’m trying to speak for Frank. As we exited Ogilvie Tuesday night, he said it all, himself.

“Next time,” he told me, “I’m taking the Green Line.”

(Photo: Sometimes movie classics don’t stand up to the test of time.)

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline. (Where on 9/22/09 it made it to the national Entertainment page, squee!)

Ever since I became an official Netflix couch potato, I’ve been spending my evenings popping one Hollywood back-catalog movie after another into my nifty new Blu-ray/DVD player. The mail-me-a-movie service is a godsend for ADDers like me. I almost never see first-run films–the idea of sitting quiet and still in a room full of strangers for an hour and forty-five minutes is too much for my restless psyche to bear. The joy of my new-found ability to plop on my futon in the comfort of my own apartment and progressively watch my way through a list of movies any human being should have seen by now tells me Netflix has an untapped market in anyone on drugs starting in Adder- or Rita-.

So I’ve been getting caught up with movies you’ve likely seen before, many times, and/or a long time ago.  I particularly enjoy suspense and horror “classics”. Flip on the original Halloween, the original The Fog, Poltergeist, anything Hitchcock, and I’ll be there with popcorn before you have time to put down the remote. So when I got the Netflix email telling me Roman Polanski’s 1968 mega-hit Rosemary’s Baby was on its way, I was particularly excited. At the time, Roger Ebert gave the film adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1965 devil-worship novel four stars. Movie fans on Rotten Tomatoes rate the film 98% fresh even today. Even one of Marina City’s couch ladies told me how scary a film it was.

So it took a while for me to figure out why I was bored out of my mind watching it last night. All two hours and 16 ponderous minutes of it. This morning I awoke to two reasons wobbling around my noggin. For starters: maybe the shock value of first-of-their-kind movies pales over time?

In his period review, Ebert applauds the way the movie’s persistent telegraphing of a “horrific” and “inevitable” conclusion brings the audience along for a frightening ride. I doubt he’d write the same review today. In 1968, the mere idea of a woman being raped by a creature from hell so that a coven of witches could steal her baby and raise it as the anti-Christ would be inducive of shudders. But forty-one years of graphically violent splatter movies since then have reduced the power of such images to shock much of anyone anymore.

Having seen it all time and again, Polanki’s persistent early plot giveaways just made Rosemary’s Baby seem predictable to me. A groggy woman tied to a bed and pounced on by a figure covered in red scales in the second reel? Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s giving birth to Satan’s son somewhere before the credits roll–as Rosemary, or course, did, while I waited around another hour for something unexpected to happen. (The same thing happened to me watching 1973’s The Exorcist for the first time in the 1990s–head spinning, green vomit, and subliminal shots of demonic shapes weren’t going to make a Clinton-era cable-watcher rush from his living room in fright the same way they made Nixon-era moviegoers rush from theaters.)

My second noggin-wobbling reason was the real clincher for me, though: maybe you just have to be Christian to really be scared by movies like Rosemary’s Baby (or The Exorcist, for that matter)? And in particular, Roman Catholic?

Whether in 1968 or today, ominous religious ideas like hell, Satan, and demonic possession have the power to give pause to individuals whose personal beliefs give credence to them. The adult Buddhist in me watched these themes flit through Rosemary’s Baby and yawned. Having been raised Catholic, I could clearly understand how as a child I would have been terrified by a move that played upon the religious beliefs that my family believed in. Believing in a wholly different view of the universe today, however, reduced the move to an overly long exercise in camera angles for me, rather than an engaging evening.

While I’m on the subject, why do religious thrillers always seem to revolve around Catholic cosmologies? You can count Jewish, Lutheran, Mulsim, and Buddhist thrillers on one hand, but you can swing a cat and hit a theater showing a movie that features something coming up from hell and dragging off someone holding on to a cross, saying a “Hail Mary”, and praying to a saint for dear life. In a country with a Protestant majority, for that matter. Why is that?

For fullest disclosure, I have a healthy spirituality, have a close relationship with my concept of God, and  respect the multitude of religious traditions that guide the people closest to me and those with whom I share the planet. But I’d pay money to see Hollywood make a horror film that acknowledged a wider religious cosmology than the one blessed in Rome. It can’t just end with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Vesak Terror Train, anyone?

(Photo: The CTA wants to know what you’re thinking…that is, if you can figure out what they’re asking.)

UPDATE 7/6/09: Welcome to readers today from TransitTalent.com!

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline.

This week, the Chicago Transit Authority is surveying riders on the front page of its website. As you might expect (especially in the still-turbulent wake of Ron Huberman’s exit), the agency is doing a rotten job of it.

Especially for a transit provider with a historically bad relationship with its riders, customer surveys should be brief, friendly, well crafted, and easy to understand. The CTA’s current survey is none of those things.

Instead, it is full of industry jargon (how many of you take “CTA Rail” to work?), double-barreled questions, and closed-minded assumptions about its own ridership. And if you work in a number of fields including communications, the very first question tells you they’re not going to trust your answers–no matter how regular a CTA rider you are.

This unfortunate survey is obviously a rush job. CTA just lost $35 million from its budget by dint of an RTA vote last Thursday and needs to figure out how to prioritize the money that’s left and lobby for aid in the future. You’d think the agency would have been attending to both issues already. The haphazard nature of this survey says otherwise.

Maybe CTA President Richard Rodriguez should spend less time driving to work and more time attending to the system that 1.5 million riders a day depend on to get around Chicago. In the Sun-Times article linked above, he says he does it to spend more time with his kids. Hands up other captive CTA riders reading this who’d like to have the same option? How dare the head of any transit agency drive to work in his own city?

Here’s the comment I submitted to the CTA near the end of the survey, when they finally asked my opinion. Of course, I work in communications, so who knows if they’ll ever get around to reading it.

“I cannot believe how badly written and edited this survey was. It was obviously a rush job, and if it wasn’t, then it’s even more of an embarrassment you took time on it and it still resulted in such a wooden, wordy, badly written document.

You have jargon dropped in all through it. You ask riders to rate ‘Your CTA Rail’? Our CTA Rail what? You mean our local L line? The L line we use most regularly? Do you honestly think your riders use the same jargon your internal planners do?

In the question asking why riders use CTA, you were so closed-minded you didn’t even include the potential answer, ‘Because I prefer to.’ I do. I don’t drive. Don’t know how. Have never paid a gas tax in my life. I am the kind of rider who should be your biggest advocate.

Congratulations on creating a customer-aimed document so badly realized that all I intend to do now is show it to my friends as yet another example of how clueless the CTA is internally. Your lack of commitment to your own agency seriously makes me want to learn how to drive.”

Though I’d probably never follow through on that last part, I meant every (other) word. Rodriguez, if you don’t mind, get out of your car and attend to our transit system, please.

And hire a new survey writer while you’re at it.

Last week, Chicago independent media sought the key to a sustainable future by sitting down to study their collective navel. Two industry conferences a day apart brought together journalists, bloggers, public relations professionals and interested academics to explore the state of local media — especially online media — and figure out how to keep news coming to the masses in an era of declining revenue for traditional media outlets.

I attended both conferences. Overall, the agony outweighed the ecstasy, with the latter being largely confined to Community Media Workshop’s mid-week Making Media Connections 2009 conference hosted at Columbia College. I schmoozed my way through a day-and-a-half of panels and meet-and-greets, and had the pleasure of moderating a discussion on the sustainability of online neighborhood news (with panelists including Daniel X. O’Neil of Everyblock.com, Geoff Dougherty of the Chi-Town Daily News, Silvana Tabares of Extra Bilingual News and Dan Weissmann of Vocalo.org.)

Besides naming my personal blog, CHICAGO CARLESS a Top 20 community Web site, the Workshop’s conference made clear that the future of news dissemination lay online, and substantially with smaller community- and niche-news sites. However, as I reported Friday on Chicagosphere, the conference also pointed out a pernicious lack of understanding about the nature of the blogosphere on the part of some traditional media types.

That alone was enough to drive anyone with a virtual clue about the Internet (pun intended) to drink. So Friday night I wasn’t surprised to find myself holed up in a dank corner of Boystown’s favorite over-rated Mexican dive, Las Mananitas, with my neighbor, Mattcountant, trying to shed the stress of the week. Though when you wait an hour for your meal and have to go on an expedition across the dining room to find where the waitstaff absconded with your still-unlit candle, how much stress can one really leave behind?

“Let’s order a pitcher of margarita, top shelf,” said Matt, to my hesitant gaze. “I had a rotten day, so don’t worry. I’m paying.”

It’s amazing how much more sloshed the good stuff can get you, especially when you’re a two-drink-maximum lightweight like me. The next morning my doorwoman reminded me Matt had to escort me all the way up to my apartment. That’s the moment I realized I’ll never be able to drink like the Windy City columnist I dream of becoming.

(Video: What Chicago’s blogging community really needs these days: a voice of its own.)
___
From its title, alone, Saturday afternoon’s Chicago Media Future conference (impressively organized in a teeny timeframe by Mike Fourcher, founder of Purely Political Consulting, Barbara Iverson, Columbia College journalism professor and publisher of ChicagoTalks.org, and Scott Smith, Senior Editor at Playboy.com) should have been four hours of deep discussion about ways to make local news sustainable online, over the air and in print.

Unfortunately, most of the day’s two panels were bogged down in discussion of what once was, what might have been and what’s never coming back in the world of journalism. The few questions from the audience regarding potential ways to make online news pay were by turns rebuffed, shrugged at or glossed over.

Given the power crowd that was in attendance, what a shame.

The conference Web site linked above chronicles lots of as-it-happened action (including a live blog and Twitter discussion). Out of the schaff, a few observations stuck in my mind from each of the two panels:

“Consuming the News”
(Panelists: Rich Gordon, Medill Readership Institute/Director of Digital Technology in Education, Medill School at Northwestern; Andrew Huff, Editor and Publisher of Gapers Block; Amanda Maurer, Social Media Producer, Chicago Tribune; Daniel X. O’Neil, People Person, Everyblock; Hilary Sizemore, Interactive Content Manager at Barrington Broadcasting Group | Moderator: Dan Sinker, Columbia College professor, founder of Punk Planet.)

The first panel doted on the decline of the 20th-century media industry, with Gordon almost incessantly moaning — and sharing statistics about — the past. It was informative, but not helpful.

Gordon’s observation that the current informational “sea of abundance” makes it hard for the media to help citizens act as citizens was particularly irritating. Whenever old media bitches that it’s no longer the public’s conscience but somehow has a right to be, it’s the equivalent of telling the public that they’re intellectual children with no innate capacity for rational thought. Uh-huh. I and most people I know do a good job discerning real news from bull shit, thanks.

Equally useless was a belabored discussion about the definition of journalism. We get it, there’s hard news and opinion. Always has been. Always will be. The real question, as Maurer pointed out, was whether online media have the capacity to tell the whole story and tell it correctly.

More relevant were admonitions to be where your online audience is (Maurer), stop fretting about distribution (O’Neil), and learn the rules of the Internet community (also Maurer), as well as Huff’s observation that the death of geographic news monopolies doesn’t mean that local news, itself, isn’t still there, waiting to be told.

“Selling the News”
(Panelists: Brad Flora, Publisher and Founder, Windy Citizen; Tom Lynch, Director of Client Satisfaction at IMP!; Steve Rhodes, Founder, The Beachwood Reporter; Patrick Spain, CEO, Newser | Moderator: Barbara Iverson, Columbia College professor, Co-publisher, ChicagoTalks.)

This should have been a discussion of potential financially sustainable models of local news gathering and dissemination on the Internet. Mostly, it turned out to be a discussion of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices. As ChicagoTechNews scribe Todd Allen pointed out to me after the conference, SEO practices are a way to attract page views, nothing more. Whether and how you monetize those page views is another story.

This panel concentrated on the practices and largely ignored the whether and how.

The best part of the panel was its first half, with the live Twitter feed projected over the heads of the panelists for all to see. As the real-life discussion devolved into useless SEO posturing, the virtual debate was far livelier — including dissatisfaction regarding the panelists’ answers, annoyance at the racial makeup of the room and disgust at the inclusion of anyone other than journalists at a media conference.

(That last bit of pure nonsense was from, ahem, recently laid-off Trib food writer Emily Nunn, whom, as Chi-Town Daily News blogger Lou Grant notes, I accused of trolling the live Twitter feed for locally bridge-burning tweets such as this, this and this. I originally encountered Nunn when she personally smeared me as part of her ongoing troll — for example, here, here, here, here and here — of the Trib and ChicagoNow bloggers. Axe Grinder, party of one, your table is ready…)

Even so, panelist Spain proved the day’s most notable participant. He largely and very obviously ignored, talked over, interrupted or derisively gazed sideways at the other panelists, especially bloggers Flora and Rhodes. His open dismissal of the potential for any news site without 5 million viewers, SEO-crafted headlines or a distaste for narrow-casted content–i.e. any site different from Newser — was obnoxious. It was also untenable — the jury’s still out on Newser’s future lifespan, just like every other news site on the Internet.

Rhodes was the hero here, rebuffing Spain’s SEO-heavy-handedness by saying, “I don’t want to live in that kind of world. My brand couldn’t be what it is without [satisfying headlines].” He was also the only panelist to elucidate an approach for reaching sustainability: Creating a stable of six to eight sites and seeking partners, collaborators and investors, instead of wasting time chasing meager local advertising dollars.
___
In the end Chicago Media Future was yet another missed opportunity for real discussion about survival. Why are we afraid of talking about the problem head on?

As I spent a post-conference dinner at Opera with advanced-urban-thinker Aaron Renn (blogging as The Urbanophile) and his lovely wife, the three of us spent some time debating the uneven impact the Internet has had on metropolitan versus rural areas. I couldn’t help but realize our increasingly tipsy discussion was more relevant than most of the four hours of commentary I had heard earlier in the day.

I could be wrong — that moment of remembered collective media hubris could have been the result of the thankfully watery Singapore Sling I was sucking down (or the giddiness from the transcendent Kung Pao tofu it was accompanying.)

Either way, sobered by a Sunday of doing nothing for the first time in a week, here’s what I think this town needs: a blogosphere roundtable: We local bloggers ought to get together for a strategy charrette one weekend afternoon in a modestly-sized group in a shabby conference hall surrounded by pizza, beer and a phalanx of flip charts and have a frank discussion amongst ourselves about where we want our sites to go, how we’re trying to get there — and most importantly, how we can work cooperatively to make sustainability happen.

Then we should take we we’ve learned from each other, package it into a manifesto and vet it at a community-wide conference. Now that would be a conference I’d want to attend.

When you get right down to it, the point isn’t to recreate billion-dollar mid-century media firms or copy self-aggrandized national sites. The point is to find the happy intersection of building community, sharing the news and making a living in Chicago for Chicago bloggers and Chicago audiences. I wish sites like Newser loads of success, but I’d much rather hear what my blogosphere colleagues have to say.

Without being pushed towards a non-profit solution by the luminaries of the local foundation community or pestered by some self-important Internet CEO trying to talk us down.

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

(Photo: My neighborhood, your destination–how do we meet in the middle? The Nichols Bridgeway from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing.)

During their windy City visit last week, Seattle’s coolest couple, Kasey and John, waxed giddily about the fun and frolic of my downtown Chicago neighborhood. Their reaction stands in stark contrast to the one I normally get from native Chicagoans when I tell them I live downtown. It’s almost like telling a New Yorker you never ride the subway. The response is always the same: no one’s stopping you from doing it, but why would you want the hassle?

Outer-neighborhood Chicagoans tend to think downtowners suffer through our central-city lives. How on earth do we live without backyard barbecues, front-door parking, and a cricket on every window ledge? It’s hard to describe the devotion some of us feel for our high-rise Chicago ‘hood.

It just widens the rift to try and explain the dreadful boredom their pastoral images of suburban Lincoln Square life bring up for us. And woe to us if we do express an iota of dissatisfaction with life at address numbers below 1200. (“If you don’t like it, then leave,” is a common Windy City answer for all sorts of questions when the Chicagoan doing the answering can’t think of anything else to say.)

So just why do I live in downtown Chicago? Last fall, before warm weather headed towards 17 below, I took a walk to ponder an appropriate answer. I came down to earth from the 38th floor and found the couch ladies sunning themselves in the late afternoon on the Marina City plaza overlooking the Chicago River.

“I never get tired of sitting out here,” said Proud Mary, gazing across the river at the Loop. Beyond 70 now, she’d lived in the towers since she was just beyond 60. “To be able to see skyscrapers like this from your front yard never ceases to amaze me.”

“Living in Marina City is pretty interesting, in and of itself,” said Great Kate, of similar age but far longer longevity in the towers. “What with Gary Kimmel, House of Blues craziness, and Vincent Falk, there’s never a dull moment.”

I left the ladies to their reverie and headed through the blooming former IBM Plaza to cross the river on the wooden planks of the Wabash Avenue Bridge, hearing the drone of tour guides from the architecture cruises passing below. Since I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, I thought about dropping into Emerald Loop, the Vaughan-family pub tucker under the Jeweler’s Building at the south end of the bridge.

When I moved downtown, I never expected a hoodie two blocks from my house. Servers who recognize me, a mean rare burger (as long as it isn’t the weekend), and a good head on a pint of Smithwicks in a downtown pub that isn’t overrun by tourists is hard to turn down. But I was on a mission, so I passed by and walked over to Michigan Avenue.

As I crossed Randolph, I ran into a film crew outside the Cultural Center. Coming from New York City, I’ve always found filming in my neighborhood bothersome. (Whether in Park Slope, Brooklyn, or downtown Chicago, who wants to delay their emergency pharmacy run for allergy meds so yet another Batman film crew can line up a shot?) I dodged the crew hand trying to stop me from crossing the street and proceeded through their shot and on my way.

Music led me across the street into Millennium Park. A free evening of open-air ballroom dancing had taken over the lawn at the Pritzker Pavilion. I found the rhythmic movement of the crowd mesmerizing–and a bit more calming then the rock fest that wafted through the flowers of the adjacent Lurie Garden during my (attempted) sunset meditation the day before.

I continued across Monroe into Grant Park. It was seven o’clock by now. In the distance, I could see Buckingham Fountain begin its hourly geysering. Ever since moving to Chicago, I’ve headed to the fountain whenever I’ve felt the need to ponder my life. That evening was no different. As usual, I sat on the benches in the southeast corner of the plaza and watched the fountain erupt across the backdrop of the Loop skyline to the delight of tourists from parts elsewhere. Most likely all of whom–like me, to this day–unable to watch the spectacle without hearing the theme from Married with Children in their heads.

But even my trusty fountain offered no way to explain to others why I live in downtown Chicago. So I headed back towards Michigan Avenue, past the ball fields along Balbo. They gay softball leagues were playing, so I paused to happily gape for awhile, then continued south on Michigan towards Roosevelt. The border flower gardens were still blooming along the way (thanks to Chicago’s favorite gardening lesbian, Christy Webber, and her Far South Side urban-landscaping empire). Tourists always seem to keep to the sidewalks at the edge of Grant Park. Instead, I made like local stroller pushers and dogwalkers and wended my way along the grass between the rows of plantings.

Hunger finally won out at 11th Street. I turned back into the street grid, knowing exactly where to head. Corned beef with a schmear of chopped chicken liver and an egg cream (taken away early by the waiter, meaning–score!–second egg cream on the house) hit my ex-New Yorker spot at Eleven City Diner. I noshed until after eight.

It was well past dark as I exited the eatery. Ordinarily I’d have walked home. I find the mid-evening hours in the Loop after the theater crowd has headed in off the sidewalks a time of quiet potential. But that night I was too pooped–and stuffed–to continue pedding.

Instead, I headed to the Roosevelt CTA station and plopped down on a cloth-covered Orange Line seat for my 10-minute ride home to State and Lake, without an answer, thinking maybe I had it all wrong.

What was the big deal about downtown Chicago, anyway? I could just picture my suburban friends marveling–and rolling their eyes–at walking two miles (“Why bother?”) through a city park (“Was it safe?”) to go to a diner (“Don’t they deliver?”) and come home on an ‘L’ train (for suburbanites, that speaks for itself).

As the train hurtled north through the South Loop ‘L’ canyon, I was brought back to my senses by a glimpse of a State Street billboard sporting a single sentence, laid out in large letters over a big bullseye:

“Living in Berwyn Makes Life Easier.”

And I’m sure it could. But for the life of me, I just can’t figure out how.