The Global Mail story: “Sources Of Tension: SourceBottle and online sourcing”, April 2012

A story for The Global Mail, published in April 2012.

Excerpt below; click the image to read the full story on The Global Mail website.

Sources Of Tension
by Andrew McMillen

Times have changed for journalists, and some have changed the way they get their information. It’s time to let readers in on one of the shortcuts.

Pre-internet, journalists had it tough. If they needed quotes, they had to use initiative, combing their existing contacts, working their telephones, or wearing out their shoe leather meeting people face-to-face. Often, all three tactics were employed simultaneously.

In 2012, not only are supremely useful online tools such as Google, Facebook and Twitter making the hunt for sources a much more efficient process, there are now entire digital businesses built around connecting journalists with sources – namely, the “real people” you find dotted throughout broadcast, print and online news stories. While Facebook and Twitter are useful for this purpose, they can be limited by a journalist’s existing network of “friends” and followers. So, aiming to streamline the process by offering volume and efficiency, new digital services will push a journalist’s message out to a large audience as quickly as possible.

At face value, such businesses may appear no more than a slick machine pushing the antiquated skill of personal sourcing into the interconnected present. But the media-consuming public usually are unaware of how the voices in news stories have been gathered, knowledge that might colour the way readers interpret the quotes. To examine the ethical complexity of the issue, The Global Mail looks in detail at one such direct-connect business: an Australian website named SourceBottle .

A cursory scroll through the website’s Twitter account, @SourceBottle , offers a depressing insight into the way some Australian journalists are using the service. On SourceBottle’s Twitter feed, wedged among requests for the generic (“Magazine seeks Gen Y girls who ditched the city life for the country”), the hopeful (“Magazine seeks people to lose 5kg in 2 weeks”) and the plain lazy (“Magazine seeks details on the Titanic for article”) is this jaw-dropper, tweeted on December 10, 2011: “Mag seeks women who have rejected a 6-figure salary, gone blonde, adopted a rescue dog or converted to Islam #beasource.”

It’s a shame that the link leads to a dead-end on the SourceBottle website — the journalist’s deadline has long since expired, and so the “call-out” is shielded from public view — as that story sounds amazing. (Imagine if they found one women who’d done all four disparate tasks?) Mirth aside, it also sounds like an Australian women’s magazine has planned an article and then attempted to find sources to fit their idea of reality, rather than using reporting to inform the outcome. It’s the journalistic equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.

SourceBottle, founded by former PR rep Rebecca Derrington in July 2009, advertises two functions. Firstly, it helps journalists and bloggers find sources for stories. These voices are essential across all forms of journalism: without sources, we’d only ever see, hear and read fiction or opinion. In order to find people to interview for their stories, journalists are allowed to post a “call-out” on the site. If all goes to plan, the journalist can “sit back and sources will find you”, according to the site’s bolded marketing spiel.The concept is instantly appealing to any time-strapped journalist (as most are, after all).

Australian Penthouse story: “The High Road: Silk Road, an online marketplace like no other”, January 2012

A story for the January 2012 edition of Australian Penthouse, reproduced below in its entirety. Click the main image for a closer look (which will open a PDF in a new window), or read the article text underneath. You can click any of the below images and screenshots for a larger version, too.

The High Road
by Andrew McMillen

Silk Road is an online marketplace like no other. Totally anonymous, the website uses sophisticated encryption software and a digital currency to facilitate the worldwide sale of prohibited items, particularly illicit drugs. Australian Penthouse investigates.

“Imagine how exciting it is when you get something in the mail; even the shittiest thing, like a free sample. But in this case, you’re getting drugs that you really want to take, and get high on. It’s a compounded experience of excitement; an exponential high.”

A 24-year old man who lives in an inner-city suburb of Brisbane is describing what he felt upon opening his mailbox one day in 2011 and discovering a package containing one gram of cocaine. It was addressed to a person who does not exist. He does not know the source of the substance beyond its country of origin. This was not the first time he had purchased drugs online; his first order was for one gram of MDMA powder. That package was sent to a house that he knew was unoccupied; it took around nine days to arrive from Canada. He checked the vacant mailbox daily. “I’m still waiting for some undies off of eBay from Hong Kong,” he says. “[The MDMA] arrived way quicker than that.”

Why the alternate address in the first instance? “Because having something illicit sent in the mail seems fairly thick,” he replies. “It seems so simple; too good to be true. I wanted to put some form of buffer between myself and the order I made, as a ‘test run’.

“One day it was in there and it hadn’t been intercepted. I didn’t get immediately arrested when I took it out of the mailbox. Since I didn’t use my real name, it didn’t seem possible to get traced back to me. It still hasn’t been.”

These orders were made using a website called Silk Road. It can only be accessed after installing anonymity-enabling software called Tor. All purchases are made using Bitcoin, a currency which only exists online and whose public transaction history can be untraceable if handled correctly.

My interviewee randomly discovered online mentions of Silk Road in May 2011, and pursued the intriguing concept all the way through to installing Tor and trading Australian dollars for Bitcoin; a process he calls “semi-prohibitive” owing to the persistence and tech-knowledge required to check all the boxes before users can place an order. In four transactions, my interviewee has ordered three grams of MDMA and three grams of cocaine at a cost of “close to AUD$700”.

So what motivated him to take a chance on buying illicit substances online from a complete stranger?

“I’m interested in taking drugs casually, but I hate the process,” he says. “I don’t know any dealers. Even if I want to get weed, I don’t know anyone, so it always becomes this drawn out process of finding someone who knows someone who knows someone. It’s a real pain in the arse. Whereas this way, it’s so direct and private. I didn’t leave my room, and then nine days later there was something in the mailbox that was for me. It’s discreet and exciting. Imagine the fun of shopping on eBay, but then you can also get high.”

Visiting Silk Road for the first time, I feel a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. After downloading the correct Tor software bundle, I connected within five minutes. A warning appears at the bottom of the registration screen: “Be advised: This website is experimental. We do not guarantee your anonymity, protection from law enforcement in your jurisdiction, or protection from other users of this service. You and you alone are responsible for the risks associated with entering and using this website.” The site does not request any information from its users beyond a username and password; not even an email address. And then, you’re in.

The site’s bright, clean design displays images of nine items for sale; among them, ‘red joker’ ecstasy pills, one-ounce of the ‘purple kush’ cannabis strain, a $50 Australian banknote and syringes. When I first visit the site in late August 2011, one bitcoin is worth USD$11.15; a fortnight later, the exchange rate has dropped to USD$6.18 per bitcoin.

The nine ‘featured’ items change upon each page refresh. A column on the left categorises the goods for sale: ‘drugs’ is split into sub-categories like ‘dissociatives’ (11 items for sale), ‘psychedelics’ (123 items), ‘stimulants’ (65) and the most popular category, ‘cannabis’ (237). Other categories include ‘digital goods’, ‘money’, ‘XXX’, ‘weaponry’ and ‘forgeries’.

At first, it’s a little overwhelming. What Silk Road [SR] offers is the online equivalent of strolling down a dim-lit alley filled with surly guys wearing heavy trenchcoats, except that you can contemplate purchasing their goods while lounging in your underwear, without fear of being stabbed.

Each page on the site generally takes a few seconds to load, regardless of the user’s connection speed, due to an overcrowded Tor network. A page called ‘how does it work?’ describes the site as “an anonymous marketplace where you can buy and sell without revealing who you are. We protect your identity through every step of the process, from connecting to this site, to purchasing your items, to finally receiving them”. Lengthy guides for both buyers and sellers are freely available. The latter guide states that “every precaution must be taken to maintain the secrecy of the contents of your client’s package. Creatively disguise it such that a postal inspector might ignore it if it was searched or accidentally came open.”

It concludes with a ‘final note’: “Regardless of your motivations, you are a revolutionary. Your actions are bringing satisfaction to those that have been oppressed for far too long. Take pride in what you do and stand tall.”

There’s an active and boisterous SR forum community, which is hosted off-site and requires an additional registration; this process requests an email address, but a note states that it doesn’t have to be a legit address.

After poking around the site and smirking at some of the items for sale – condoms, an e-book of Neil Strauss’ pick-up artist classic The Game, military training manuals – I decide to engage with a few sellers by requesting interviews using the site’s private messaging system.

Within 10 minutes, three sellers respond enthusiastically to my request; one says, “I’ll even give you a media discount if you order.” The website’s administrator, who goes by the username Silk Road, also responds. “Sorry, we aren’t doing interviews at the moment,” he says. “Good luck.”

Of the 27 SR sellers I approach during a two-week period on the site, seven respond thoughtfully and at length to my questions. They are mostly based in the US and Canada, though one is Australian. All seven request that I don’t mention their usernames. A few prefer to conduct the interview using PGP text encryption, which adds another element of spookiness to the situation. Most of the sellers found their way to Silk Road after the site was covered online by Wired and Gawker in June 2011.

When I ask what they like about Silk Road, I’m met with a range of responses. “Being able to provide a safe and anonymous way for someone to purchase that they choose to put into their body,” says one seller. “It’s nice how it turns drug dealing into an office job, with less risk and more stable demand while interacting openly with customers,” replies another. This focus on administrative duties is echoed by another seller, who says it’s “nice to have everything so organized and centralized, it really cuts down on the time spent per order which is a huge plus when you’ve got a mountain of them to work through.”

One source remarked aloud, ‘this is the future’, upon finding the site. “The free market has provided for one of the oldest needs in human history,” they elaborate. “[SR] removes the elements of danger that exist in in-person black market arrangements, and offered anonymity for all parties involved.”

I ask what sellers don’t like about the service. One tells me, “while the majority of users are honest and trustworthy, you always have to keep your guard up. There are plenty of scammers here on SR.” Another is frustrated by the long wait between making a sale and receiving the bitcoins in their account. “It can take a while for people to finalize transactions, so the money gets stuck in escrow until the customer remembers to finalize, or it auto-finalizes after like 20 or so days.”

One seller is concerned about the silo-like nature of the site: “Having everything organized – vendor statistics easily accessible, reliance on a single server, etc – all makes any vendor, or even SR itself, a juicier target for LE [law enforcement].” An Australian seller replies, “I don’t like being out in the open. Even though I feel rather anonymous within SR, I could always make a simple mistake with my packaging or use of encryption that would give me away.”

A few of my respondents reveal that they have sold drugs in the real world. One dubs the online process “much easier” than face-to-face sales. “SR buyers have no info about me whatsoever. Whereas with a face-to-face transaction, a buyer might know my name, what I look like, the car that I drive, or the city that I live in. So if they get caught, LE goes up the food chain. Here on SR, there’s nowhere for LE to go.”

Another seller says SR is preferable because it “takes potential violence right out of the equation, and mitigates theft; you can’t exactly take someone to court for robbing you during a black-market trade, which is why there is so much violence. I prefer SR to offline, any day of the week.” One seller candidly replies, that SR is “better and cleaner. Customers are more educated and nice, and it leaves you more spare time to study, play with the kids, and clean the house. It’s telecommuting at its finest.”

None of the seven sellers I interviewed would detail how they package the illicit substances sent through the international postal system. A couple mentioned that it’s an unwritten law among SR sellers to not disclose such methods, though I learn by reading the forums that vacuum sealing is common. The young man from Brisbane who received MDMA and cocaine in the mail didn’t want to discuss the appearance of the packages he received, either.

All this illegal activity must be a rush, even if the process does become somewhat normalised due to the volume of orders that some sellers process. I have one final question. What does it feel like to sell illicit drugs over the internet to complete strangers?

One replies, “honestly, it can be quite nerve racking. I have no idea if I just sent some illegal items to LE. That’s why it’s so important for a good vendor to use all precautionary tactics to keep important info away from them. Leaving no DNA or fingerprints, and sending from an area where you don’t live. It’s not unusual for a vendor to be wearing hairnets and multiple layers of gloves while packaging the material. If there is even a one-percent chance of some identifying marks on or inside that package, it will be thrown out.”

Another says, “It’s awesome. Most of the users on Silk Road are good people, and it’s always been a pleasure providing them goods that their corrupt governments have denied them. By simply living our lives and doing what we want to do, we break the government’s iron fist. It’s pretty satisfying.”

“It feels great,” agrees another. “I get to make a positive contribution in the lives of people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to drugs, such as old folks, and people in remote locations.” The seller shares some feedback received by a buyer that they found “really touching”. The feedback reads, “I don’t want to sound all sentimental and crap but in all honesty, my friends and I have become closer and happier with ourselves and each other, thanks to you and your stuff. It’s really been a bonding experience for everyone. We aren’t really the partying type and instead like to chill and talk for hours. Thanks to you, we have shared some amazing experiences.”

The seller tells me that “getting feedback like that makes those nights spent sweating over a hot vacuum sealer seem worthwhile!”

For more on Silk Road, visit its Wikipedia page.

A conversation with Ryan Holiday: blogger, former marketing director of American Apparel, soon-to-be author; October 2011

Ryan Holiday is one of the most influential people in my life.

His blog, RyanHoliday.net, is one of the most valuable online resources I know of. This is a statement that I know will make him blush, because Ryan is a modest guy. I know this because when I first approached him for an interview in January 2010, he deflected my questions – which were extremely detailed, potentially to the point of exhibiting stalker-like behaviour. He wrote that when he felt he deserved an interview, he’d give it to me; he also said that mine was “the most in depth, investigative email I’ve ever gotten”.

At 24, Ryan [pictured right] is a year older than me. I’ve viewed his blog as a kind of counsel since I first became aware of his work. His thinking and writing has, in turn, shaped my thinking and writing. It is fair to say that I wouldn’t be on the path I am now if I hadn’t been closely studying another young male on the other side of the world, fearlessly kicking down doors in search and pursuit of his goals. For a couple of years, Ryan’s ambition, persistence and confidence all directly influenced my day-to-day thoughts and actions. Which is another statement that will make Ryan blush, because it’s a pretty fucking weird thing to type, let alone think.

Ryan first attracted my attention by attracting the attention of someone who I was closely studying at the time: Tucker Max, the American blogger-turned-author who is best known for his 2006 book I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and the 2009 film adaptation of the same name.

Ryan wrote a review of Tucker’s website – which, at the time, was a collection of stories about Max’s drinking and sexual exploits – for his college newspaper, and sent the link to the author. Soon after, Max posted the review on his message board, which was a fairly popular corner of the web; it was deleted a couple of years ago. I immediately became interested in figuring out who Holiday was.

That review led Tucker to hire Ryan as an intern at his company, Rudius Media (now defunct). It led Ryan to work with the acclaimed author Robert Greene as a research assistant on the strategy book The 50th Law, co-written with rapper 50 Cent and released in 2009. And it led Ryan to be hired by the clothing manufacturer American Apparel, where he worked as Director of Marketing for a couple of years. He still works as an advisor to American Apparel, but moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans in mid 2011 to work on a book project of his own.

Since January 2007, Ryan has consistently used his blog as a platform for discussions about writing, running, online PR, media, philosophy, and stoicism, among other topics. I’ve consumed every word that he has written since his first post, ‘The Business Of Running‘. I often re-read his posts multiple times, which is something I rarely do online. That first post remains a valid starting point for understanding Ryan’s way of thinking and writing. I’ll quote the opening paragraph below.

“I run 5 miles every night. It’s where I go to digest my day, hash out the multitude of information that’s been poured into me in the last wild six months or so, and to try and condense it down to some sort of cohesive strategy to live my life by.” – Ryan Holiday, January 31 2007

When I visited the United States for the first time with my girlfriend Rachael in September 2010, I asked to meet up with Ryan in Los Angeles. We met at a burger joint on Melrose Avenue and talked for an hour or so. It was a huge thrill for me to meet a guy who’s been something of an internet hero to me for nearly five years. Rachael didn’t really understand why it was so important to me at the time.

Neither did I, really, now that I think about it. All I knew then, and know now, is that Ryan Holiday is one of the most influential people in my life. It’s an honour for me to publish the below email interview.

Andrew: When you wrote that review of Tucker’s website, what was the intended outcome?

Ryan: I’m not sure if I ever told anyone this, but I’d noticed that Tucker tended to link to or write about any press he got (at least back then) and so I thought, “I’m a writer for a college newspaper, why don’t I try it”? It didn’t really go much further than thinking about it at that time. Then a couple weeks later I had the opening line of that piece floating around in my head: “If Hunter S Thompson had read this site, he probably wouldn’t have killed himself.” I figured I had something and eventually sat down and wrote it.

So the intended outcome was that I’d send it to him and he’d link to it (I reposted the article on my blog) and that would be it. But the reaction totally blew my mind. Within about 20 minutes he’d responded and… I went back to my Gmail and found it:

From: Tucker Max

[November 28th, 2005]

“Jesus Christ. Dude, that is fantastic. Seriously, I am awed by your grasp of me and my material. I am going to post this as THE example of a great review of me and my work.”

It’s funny to me now because that reaction has become a pretty routine occurrence for me since then. I obviously thought I wrote a pretty good article but I was still reluctant to send it off. Is he going to like it? Did I go overboard? What are the chances of it getting a response? Turns out I had nailed the target and didn’t quite understand the extent. That seems to happen a lot to me. You’d think I’d anticipate it by now, but still other peoples’ reaction (positively, anyway) tends to catch me by surprise.

What did that response change for you? Was that one of those ‘Fight Club moments‘ I remember you writing about years ago?

I think it was the opposite of one of those moments. I think of a Fight Club Moment as something that breaks you down and demolishes the pretense and bullshit entitlement you have in your life. This wasn’t that. It instilled a lot of confidence in me. It was like, “ok, I am better than I knew. That’s awesome, maybe I can build on this.”

What happened next between you and Tucker?

I think after he had the publisher send me a copy of his book to review, which I did, and after it was published I asked for his thoughts on the writing. He went over it on the phone with me about ways I could improve my voice and tone.

I stayed in touch—I think in my post about advice a couple weeks ago I called this ‘staying on the radar’, and that’s basically what I did. I would pop in and ask questions, for advice, send links etc. Any excuse I could think of to keep that connection alive. Only an idiot would waste that chance.

A year or so later I was in New York, where he was living and I told him I wasn’t looking for a job, or a salary or a handout but I had some thoughts on ways I could contribute to his company, Rudius Media. After the meeting, he offered me an internship, which 6-8 months later become a job. But it was all a very fluid thing, like I was saying.

[Andrew's note: that post he mentioned, 'Advice to a Young Man Hoping to Go Somewhere (Or Get Something From Someone Successful)', is an absolute must-read.]

To me, the act of writing the review and showing Tucker is a pretty solid example of figuring out what you want, and pursuing it accordingly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that lead to him offering you a job, you quitting college and moving to LA, and then working for American Apparel?

Haha, I mean you pretty much figured out exactly what I was doing or trying to do with the last question, probably with a better sense of clarity than I really had at the time. But yeah, it was the door that ultimately led to the opening of all the other doors. I have him to thank for all of it. When I see a path to an opportunity–like a lane in basketball–I sort of put my head down and the next thing I know I’m through it and it took me somewhere I didn’t totally anticipate.

With the Tucker thing, I knew I wanted to one day be a writer like the kind of writers he was working with at the time – I’d known this since I first saw his sites in high school – so I did that article, and then I was working for him, and then I was working for the people he was working with, and then the people they were working with, and so on. I don’t think any of them every solicited me for a job either so much; it was just that I was around all the time, doing stuff and offering to do stuff, and then it eventually became official.

How did you come across Robert Greene’s work? Was it Tucker who first showed you?

Yeah, I’d heard of the books obviously but I think Tucker recommended The 48 Laws of Power so I read it. I marked up my copy so much and had a million questions to ask Tucker.* Then the first time I met him, Tucker walked me to a bookstore and bought me The 33 Strategies of War and said, “if you’re going to work for me, you’ll need to have read this.” I think that’s how I found out I got the job. All I took from that exchange was: “I better read this book on the plane ride home and know it backwards and forwards.”

* Ryan’s sidenote: that copy of The 48 Laws is priceless to me. Someone stole it out of my office at American Apparel. I was fucking distraught. It makes no sense because Dov [Charney, AA chairman and CEO] has a million copies laying around. Why would they want my marked-up personal copy?

How did the opportunity to work for Greene arise?

The three of us – Tucker, Robert, and I – had lunch in L.A. a few years ago and it kind of arose from that meeting. Although it almost didn’t, because I was so nervous I accidentally messed up when I gave Robert my phone number.

I have a suspicion that working on The 50th Law might have inspired a sense of validation, given your regular documentation on your life via the blog, and your personal reading and research via your Delicious account. Am I right, or way off?

I mean, it was very cool to have the privilege to be allowed to peek inside of project like that. But I don’t think validating is the right work. What it was was educational, from top to bottom. Researching for someone–particularly someone like Robert–crazy because you get pointed in all these directions that you’d never have gone by yourself, given a very firm objective to gather from that direction, and a tight deadline with which to do so. When you read or research for yourself, it is kind of this wandering, directionless thing. For the book, it was like getting a crash course in a million different subjects. I was interested in all of them so I would mark down the stuff I would want to go back and look at later.

So it’s funny, when I see the book, it reminds me of loose ends I still need to tie up for myself and am interested in looking into.

Your stoicism guest blog for Tim Ferriss in April 2009 attracted a lot of attention. What did you get out of it? What did you learn from the experience?

More than anything, it helped me clarify my thoughts. Tim is awesome and he’s got a very impressive commitment to expanding the scope of blog all the time. He starting writing about productivity and got all these people hooked and the next thing you know he’s totally revolutionized how they think about health and science. I was lucky that he gave me the microphone for one of those digressions.

I got quite a few new readers out of it and he also was gracious enough to give me two more chances to write about similar topics. ['The Experimental Life: An Introduction to Michel de Montaigne', October 2010; 'Looking to the Dietary Gods: Eating Well According to the Ancients', July 2011]

What you learn in a setting like that is how to tailor your message to different mediums. When I write for my site, I can be as self-indulgent as I want. When you write for someone else or on a bigger platform, you have to be much clearer and you have to catch them right from the beginning. They’re not YOUR readers, so you have to meet them where they are if you’d like to bother listening to your message. At the same time, it taught me that I don’t want to have to perform like that all the time which kind of freed me up to not have to chase acquiring that audience for myself. If didn’t learn that, I’d be spend all my time working to build something that at the end of the day, would make me miserable to have.

Could you tell me about your working space?

When I was in LA, I had a big office with 5-10 employees at any given time at the American Apparel factory. I had an office at my house at well.

Now, in New Orleans, I sort of went in the completely opposite direction. I’m in a studio apartment so I don’t work much there. I like working and reading and writing out of the library at Tulane or, I belong to an old school athletic club in the French Quarter that has like a library/parlor work space that I use.

On Mondays, I try to do all my administrative stuff—conference calls with employees, meetings, paperwork and then during the rest of the week I respond to AA emails in the morning and again at night. The middle of the day is mine. I try to write, go to the gym (run, box or swim), and read—in that order.

I still have the same quote, the one from Marcus [Aurelius], above my desk:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

The other quote above my desk is from Seneca:

“Some lack the fickleness to live as they wish and just live as they have begun.”

In November 2007 , you wrote that “you have to be happy with you”. I understand it’s a work in progress, but are you happy with you in October 2011, nearly four years later?

Happier for sure. It’s not so much that it’s a work in progress as it is a process. I forget who said it, but someone smarter than me said that “happiness ensues, it cannot be pursued”. And I think it was Aristotle who said that happiness was the result of excellence.

Either way, I take that to mean that you’re happy when you are doing whatever it is that you’re doing, well. So: are you doing well at your career? Is your relationship the best it can be? Are you handling adversity or a difficult experience with excellence? Are you behaving honorably? Etc etc.

These are all opportunities to excel in the moment and cumulatively these moments create a sense of happiness. I’m fucking 24, there’s no way I’m doing well all the time at everything but I do feel I am getting better and more consistent.

I want to close on a cliched question, which I hope you’ll humour me on. What advice would you give to yourself five years ago, when all you really knew about yourself was that you ‘wanted to one day be a writer like the kind of writers Tucker was working with at the time’?

Fucking breathe. It’s not as precarious as you think it is. There’s no need to be anxious. See, it’s really easy when you’re that young and you don’t have a safety net to thing you have to cling to everything for dear life, everything is a crisis, everything is mission critical, nothing else can be the priority.

When you’re in that space, it’s really hard to have the patience and compassion or even empathy for the other people in your life because you’re fucking fight or flight all the time. In reality, it’s not as dramatic as all that. Taking a more relaxed and accepting approach might mean losing a couple opportunities here and there but down the road, you end up turning down plenty of those anyway, so what does it matter if a couple never arrive?

If I told myself this and really listened, I feel like I’d have been happier along the way and be able to be prouder of how I behaved and the decisions I made.

++

For more on Ryan Holiday, visit his blog. Hopefully he’ll soon post some news about the publication and release of his first book.

[Edited on November 18: the first news of Ryan Holiday's book has been announced.]

The Courier-Mail author profile: Melissa Gregg and ‘Work’s Intimacy’, October 2011

A short author profile for The Courier-Mail’s new Life section, which is included in the Saturday paper. Click the below image to view the version that appeared in print.

The text I’ve supplied underneath is the full article, which was slightly edited in print due to space restrictions.

How to leave work at home: Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg

If the office exists in your phone, how is it possible to claim the right to be away from it for any length of time?

This question is central to Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Gregg’s book is the result of a three-year study of information workers – including broadcast journalists, librarians and academics – which took place in Brisbane between 2007 and 2009.

“That question captures the twin tensions in the book’s title: the idea of work being something that we’re invested in, in a way that’s pleasurable, and the way that technology allows that relationship to be available wherever we are,” she says. “Mobile devices are increasingly marketed as this desirable object because it gives us access to every pleasure we could possibly imagine,” she laughs. “The more portable the device, the more intimate the device, right?”

If we’re to believe the companies that market these devices, that’s absolutely correct. Yet Gregg’s book contains dozens of examples of salaried professionals struggling to draw barriers between their work and leisure. This behaviour extends to checking and replying to emails outside of the workplace, in preparation for the actual workday.

“That was extremely common,” Gregg says. “It seemed to point to a sense of unpredictability in people’s work days. We once thought of the office as a mind-numbing routine of 9-5, of always knowing what’s coming, and that being part of the problem. This tendency to check email outside of the office seemed to suggest that, individually, people did not know how to cope with the pace and the unpredictability of the workplace today.”

For Gregg [pictured below], being based in Brisbane for the duration of her study was a blessing. “As someone who’s always been a bit of an outsider to any city I’ve lived in, I saw this as a great chance to look, from an outsider’s point of view, at changes that were happening in Brisbane at that time”; namely, the way in which the city was positioning itself within a creative economy.

This confusing transitional period was reflected in the workers Gregg interviewed. She met a 61 year-old university professor, Clive, who said “I worry that I’m going to miss something” if he doesn’t check his email constantly. “I’m a bit addicted,” he said. “Partly because I don’t want email to swamp me. If I had a weekend off the Internet, then on Monday, I just have a huge inbox.”

Similar anxieties were expressed by Patrick, a 24-year old part-time radio producer who barely sees his partner, Adam, since their schedules rarely align. Yet Patrick admitted “I do get a pang of sadness” when the pair were home at the same time, but both absorbed in their individual computer screens. The author dubs this being ‘together alone’.

Gregg says that maintaining an emotional distance in these scenarios is “one of the challenges of this kind of research, because you’re always needing to retain objectivity in the moment of the interview, and to say as little as possible to affect them telling you what’s really going on.”

She says that “a number of the interviews were quite shocking to me, and did make me feel that there was merit in having people talking about these issues, because they could at least become prominent in their minds for a while, to see just how much they could recognise their relationships had changed within the family structure.”

Though Gregg says she’s “no shining example” in contrast to the work/life issues raised by her interviewees, she hopes that people “take a little more independent action to refuse the pace of their workplace. Teamwork culture is very coercive because of the rhetoric of collegiality and friendship, so it does make it very difficult for people to resist. But that’s not going to stop me recommending that people do it.”

Work’s Intimacy can be ordered via Polity Books’ website.

Talk: “Team Bondi, L.A. Noire and The Truth: The Perils of Online News”, October 2011

This is the transcript of a presentation I gave at the Brisbane Emerging Writers Festival on Saturday 15 October 2011, as part of a panel discussion around the topic of “Writing online – How different is writing for an online audience, how can you do it creatively, and what are the challenges and opportunities for writers working in this field?”

Footage of my presentation is embedded below.

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Team Bondi, L.A. Noire and The Truth: The Perils of Online News

by Andrew McMillen

This is a cautionary tale about online journalism. It’s about learning first-hand how the internet can be a beautiful and terrible place to break news. It’s about choosing what kind of writer you want to be.

In June, the biggest story of my career was published. It was the result of four months of investigation, based on my interviews with 11 former employees of a company named Team Bondi, who made the biggest, most expensive video game ever made in Australia, called L.A. Noire. These 11 sources all spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. Between them, they’d spent a combined 24 years at Team Bondi. They each alleged that their experiences working there were uniformly terrible: long hours, no overtime pay, a praise-free workplace led by a guy who treated them like crap. As a result of these factors and high staff turnover, the game took seven years to make, which is an incredibly long time in the games industry. I put these allegations to the Team Bondi founder, who did not deny what his former employees had told me, and made no apologies for his style of management.

My story encapsulated all of this, and was published on the gaming website IGN. Within 24 hours it received over 120,000 hits, and was being reported and analysed by the gaming media around the world. My four months of patient work – including building trust with my sources, and many conversations with IGN’s editors about the story’s final shape – were reduced to a handful of quotes and rushed summaries rewritten by other gaming journalists. To my knowledge, nobody tried to track down my 11 sources and verify what they were saying, nor did anyone seek additional comment from Team Bondi.

Soon after the story was published, two other former employees emailed me, and provided some more information, including company emails they’d saved from their time at Team Bondi. This new information shed more light on the fact that the company had been stringing their employees along for years, consistently saying that the game was close to being finished, even though it clearly wasn’t. I combined this new information into a supplementary feature that was published on the gaming website, GamesIndustry.biz.

One of the more interesting comments made by one of my sources in this second story related to the breakdown of the relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar Games, who published L.A. Noire. You might know them as the guys behind games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. My source said, and I quote:

“I’ve heard a lot about Rockstar’s disdain for Team Bondi, and it has been made quite clear that they will not publish Team Bondi’s next game. Team Bondi are trying to find another publisher for their next title, but the relationship with Rockstar has been badly damaged.”

Now, keep in mind that these are informed comments made by a person who worked at this company for a few years. Still, these are some pretty strong allegations to make, about some high-profile businesses. My source has inside knowledge, for sure, but it’s very easy to start these kinds of rumours – namely, that one of the world’s best-known videogame companies has decided to cut ties with the Australian studio that they’d sunk millions of dollars into. In the eyes of every sane and rational person in the world, though, allegations and rumours stay just that until they’re either confirmed or denied by those in the know.

Over the next couple of days, I was surprised to find that many websites were not exercising caution when publishing these additional rumours. Some sites didn’t even acknowledge the source of these allegations, instead simply saying that, quote “Rockstar have decided not to publish Team Bondi’s next game”. Full stop. It was alarming and disappointing to see my work skewed beyond its original form, purely because other writers didn’t care enough to provide full context.

To complicate the situation, neither Rockstar nor Team Bondi made any public comments on any of these matters. I learned during this process that their silence bred a kind of quiet acceptance of ‘the facts’ of my stories – which is a really shitty thing. To this day neither company has publicly commented on what I reported.

This whole experience was simultaneously exhilarating and depressing for me. Exhilarating because it was the first real newsworthy story I’d worked on, and I got a kick out of watching it being passed around the world. Depressing because I also watched commenters misinterpret my findings, and fellow journalists misrepresent my work in their editorials. It made me wonder what would’ve happened if I was less restrained with my own analysis and storytelling. Arguably, my stories would never have been published if they didn’t meet editorial standards, but the manner in which other online publications were loose with the facts made me wonder how far I could’ve stretched the truth and gotten away with it.

This is an interesting thought to entertain. And I should point out that my two published stories on this topic did not stretch the truth in any way. But hypothetically, let’s say that I’d fabricated a few quotes that were supposedly made by my anonymous sources. The reader wouldn’t know any better, and it’s doubtful that I’d even get found out. The story was re-reported with such breathless enthusiasm, often containing only the most inflammatory and controversial quotes, that it would barely have mattered. The success of the stories, and the additional opportunities that have since been offered to me, might have led me down an entirely different path. I might have become addicted to seeking easy controversy in my journalism, had I made that choice.

I didn’t, and I haven’t. I’m glad I was thorough and responsible in my reporting, but the alternative is still fun to think about occasionally.

This experience taught me a valuable lesson, about how quickly people tend to believe what they read online as the truth, especially in the absence of denial from the parties in question. The more the story was reported around the internet, the more true these allegations became to most readers. This is reflected in the comments sections of these articles. I watched the tide turn from acute doubt, to utter contempt for Team Bondi and Rockstar, in a very short period.

This experience taught me that no matter how thorough and careful I am with my own work, once a story is published online, it’s completely out of my hands. I think that, in the rush to ‘first’, some web publishers are a little loose with their words. This is troublesome, because whoever reads their articles may not have the time or inclination to read the initial source material, and if a website has their facts wrong when re-reporting a story, then the reader’s understanding of a situation may be compromised. It’s hard to shift facts in people’s minds once they’ve come to a conclusion, and I think web journalists, editors and publishers have a more pronounced responsibility than their print counterparts to check the facts and exercise caution before hitting ‘publish’.

It’s tough, though, because on the internet, there is little incentive for this kind of cautionary, responsible journalism. Inflammatory and controversial stories spread much faster than their circumspect alternatives. This has always been the case, with any kind of news, but the trouble with the web is that the publishers of these kinds of stories are rewarded with traffic, which in turn directly benefits them, as advertisers are more willing to pay them to run ads on their sites.

A few thoughts to close. Writing for the web, it’s very easy to become swept up in instantaneous, inflammatory, controversial reporting. But I urge you not to go down this road. To do so is to toss away your integrity, to swallow your pride and sense of self-worth in favour of short-term gratification. It is a fucking shame that online journalism appears to be built on this principle, and that it is so ingrained in our day-to-day web browsing that you probably don’t even notice.

Like I said, there’s little consequence for following the path of ‘publish first, fact-check second’. But if you have even a shred of integrity, again I urge you: do not take the path of least resistance. Always err on the side of caution before pressing ‘publish’. You owe it to your readers, your sources, your fellow journalists and yourself.

Andrew McMillen (@NiteShok) is a freelance journalist based in Brisbane, Australia. http://andrewmcmillen.com/

The Weekend Australian feature: ‘Independent bookshops: Holding the line’

A feature story for The Weekend Australian Review. Excerpt below.

Independent bookshops: Holding the line

Some of the big boys may be in trouble, but independent bookshop owners are stubbornly hanging on, writes Andrew McMillen

“We’re all a little bit crazy. We’re all a little bit obsessive. We all work far too hard. We’re really passionate about what we do. We all do a huge amount of unpaid work in the community. We’re all literary award judges. We talk to schools. We’re passionate about literacy.”

Fiona Stager, co-founder of Avid Reader in Brisbane’s inner south, is describing the sort of people who own and operate independent bookstores across the country.

Suzy Wilson, owner of Riverbend Books in Bulimba, an inner-east suburb of the Queensland capital, wouldn’t argue with that assessment. There’s “a certain addiction to doing this”, she says. “I love it and believe in it. I believe in how important bookshops are in communities, to the extent that I’m not prepared to disappear.” With a laugh, she adds an afterthought, “Which my accountant thinks would be a really good idea.”

Entrance to Riverbend Books is gained by passing through the bustling Teahouse, Riverbend’s cafe. Monday morning business is brisk and walk-ins are hard-pressed to find empty seats. Inside, dozens browse the shelves; among them, young professionals and mothers with babes in arms. The sound of children laughing and playing echoes throughout the space. Handwritten staff recommendations hang from every other shelf. Overhead, a jazz soundtrack is played at just the right volume.

A former schoolteacher, Wilson knows “a lot about literacy and the ways of leading children towards books”, but had “less than zero” business knowledge when she decided to open the store in 1998. Based on what she gleaned from books on the subject — and what other medium would a prospective bookshop owner use to increase her knowledge? — it became clear that since her business would not be based in a shopping centre or an area with a high passing trade, Wilson needed “some other thing to make it a destination”.

Hence the Teahouse. Initially, a relaxation of Bulimba’s town planning laws allowed her to sell coffee, sushi and sandwiches, but not hot food. Since then, the overall store space has doubled and the Teahouse is now a restaurant in its own right, serving breakfast and lunch daily. Its earnings account for about 30 per cent of Riverbend’s overall business, but Wilson hopes the books and food split will return to 50-50, as it was in recent years. The two operations “complement each other really nicely”, she says.

Visiting authors have commented on the bookstore’s atmosphere. Children’s author James Maloney regards it as the “community church”, and another writer compared it with an English pub, referring to the store’s power as a social space. “I really like that role,” says Wilson, eloquent and generous in conversation, and with her praise of others.

For the full story, visit The Australian’s website. Thanks to all of the helpful independent bookshop owners I spoke with for this story, many of whom I had to omit. Please note that the above photo was taken by Lyndon Mechielsen.

 

Cumulative Advantage and Social Currency

A straightforward online exchange: Matt Granfield tweeted a link at @waycooljnr, the Twitter account I run with Nick Crocker for music and marketing links. It was an interesting link worth sharing, so I thanked Matt via Twitter and left a comment on David Gillespie‘s blog post.

Simple, right? And, at first glance, pretty nerdy, especially when I describe what took all of 30 seconds. But it got me thinking about what is, in my mind, the real value of social networking: shortening the distance between people.

For the last couple months, I’ve been reading a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called The Black Swan. I’m not going to feign complete comprehension, as frankly, it’s the most challenging thing I’ve read since Robert Greene‘s 48 Laws Of Power, which took me over a year to absorb.

Among many taxing topics, Taleb discusses the ‘Matthew effect‘, otherwise known as cumulative advantage. It’s the concept whereby it’s easier for the rich to become richer, and for the famous to get more famous:

This theory can easily apply to companies, businessmen, actors, writers, and anyone else who benefits from past success. If you get published in The New Yorker because of the color of your letterhead or attracted the attention of the editor, who was daydreaming of daisies, the resultant reward can follow you for life. [p. 218]

The earlier Twitter exchange allowed me to bridge the gap between that concept and social networking. Put simply: the more you interact with someone online before you meet them, the greater the chances that you’ll get what you want for them, be it friendship, mentorship, or a job.

Let’s run with the third option. Picture two undergraduate job candidates. One spends his days at university and his nights on the couch watching television. The other spends his days at uni and his nights online, reading blogs, participating in relevant industry conversations via social media, and identifying local influencers within the industry he hopes to begin a career.

An ideal employer advertises a junior role. Until they shake hands at the interview, Dude #1 is nothing more than a resumé and a cover letter to the employer. But Dude #2 has been sharing valuable links and commenting on the company’s blog, so he strikes an easily rapport with the employer based on their mutual interests and knowledge. Their social currency.

Which one’s going to get the job? [An aside: I'm as surprised as you that I autopiloted into a university-based thought exercise, given my past admonishment of its worth.]

Okay, the scenario’s not applicable to every industry. A chemistry undergraduate would find it less pertinent than a web designer. But hell, everything’s online these days. It kinda blows my mind that so many people still don’t get this.

I’ve been online for like 10 years, and I’m only just beginning to consciously pay attention to this stuff. Cumulative advantage dictates that the more time you spend online building meaningful relationships and contributing to the internet, the easier it’ll be to get what you want.

At the top, I wrote that it was kinda nerdy to describe a Twitter interaction. But when you’re using these tools to establish yourself as an influencer within the industry you’re passionate about, well, who the fuck cares if it’s nerdy? You’re winning.

One of Australia’s top indie record labels today advertised a job via Twitter. You wouldn’t hear about that while watching television, would you?

Three quotes occurred as I wrote this. The last one’s the most important.

Ryan Holiday, December 3 2007:

[If I was starting all over again today]l I’d become a personal RSS reader for one or two of the big bloggers. “You’ll like this article.” “Do you read this blog? He hits a lot of the same themes that you do.” “I’m hearing rumors that ____ is going to acquire ______, just wanted to give you a heads up.” And I would tailor the results for that person based on what I know they like. I would kill myself doing it. Every day, 5-10 articles. And then I would start to integrate commentary or questions. Become the guy that they get their information from, the person that keeps them connected to the pulse. Maybe one week I’d take a break and send nothing, just to highlight the difference. The ultimate end game being that they would start to send you out to find things for them: “What can you tell me about ________” Yes, you’re a research bitch but in the end, you come away with something that even the person you’re serving doesn’t–not just a vast reserve of knowledge but the ability to find out where it is coming from.

Ryan Holiday, June 11 2008:

One day you’ll probably want something from the internet – you’ll have a book to promote, a business that needs customers, someone you need to meet, an ebay auction you’re trying to sell, a job you’re after. It’ll be too late then. You have to start before. And there’s only one way to do that.

Tait Ischia, April 17 2009:

You have to prove to business owners that you are good and that you’ll make them money. And of course the best way to prove it is by doing stuff. Blogs are the easiest way to do stuff. It’s basically like maintaining a Facebook but isn’t a complete time-wasting exercise in vanity. If all the kids these days spent the same amount of time writing blogs that they did on Facebook, then [the advertising] industry would be a hell of a lot more competitive.

A Conversation With Neil Ackland, Sound Alliance Managing Director

Sound Alliance. You mightn’t be familiar with the name, but most Australian web users will be aware of their music communities: inthemix, FasterLouder, and recently, Mess+Noise. The alliance was formed when Neil Ackland joined Libby Clark and Andre Lackmann, who launched dance music community inthemix out of a spare bedroom in 2000. They’ve since expanded to a team of 45. Their influence on the Australian web industry is huge, so when the opportunity to interview Neil arose, I jumped at it.

Andrew: Neil, you’ve obviously had a lot of experience with planning, goal setting, and so forth for the Sound Alliance. When planning a new venture, have you found it’s best to shoot for the top, as opposed to aiming for a less ambitious goal?

Neil: I think it depends on how you value success, really, in terms of shooting for the top. I think we’ve taken a very long-term view to a lot of the ventures that we’ve launched. I think the game we’re in is not a make-a-quick-buck game, by any stretch of the imagination. I think our intent here is of running inthemix, for example, and sites like FasterLouder, and Mess+Noise, and [gay/lesbian community] SameSame require constant energy, nurture and investment – both in terms of time and money – to get them to continue to grow and to continue to flourish.

I don’t think we ever went into this thinking that it was going to be a massive success [when inthemix first began in 2000]. We just saw an opportunity in the market to do something a little bit interesting. We saw some gaps there, and fundamentally just believed that online was the way of the future for the way people were going to consume content. Whether that happened in a year or ten years, we were confident that was eventually going to be the way it was going to go.

Over the last couple of years, it’s started to really bear fruit. I think we’re an ambitious bunch and we obviously want each of our media properties to be the leading destination within that category. We didn’t come into it saying, “Let’s go global, and take in the world and become the next MySpace,” or whatever. It was always much more about providing a good solid base for Australian music fans, I suppose.

What were your goals with Sound Alliance for those first couple of years?

I’ll put it in context for you. Before we had Sound Alliance, inthemix [ITM] was the first business that we launched. It was set up as a hobby. We came together, the three partners here, and we’re all really passionate about dance music and electronic music, and we set it up as something that we do in or spare time, outside of our day jobs, and very humble beginnings.

We never really had any great aspirations of it becoming Sound Alliance, at that time. It was more a case of wanting to do something we were really passionate about. All of us had day jobs that didn’t really fulfill our entrepreneurial flair, our passions, or our interests. They were just day jobs. We wanted to do something a bit different outside of that.
It just flourished from there. The first couple of years were about were trying to establish enough of a business model around inthemix so that one day we could stop doing our day jobs and do it full-time. That was the first goal and the first dream that we wanted to achieve.

It must have been an amazing time, at the point where you could quit your day jobs and focus on inthemix and Sound Alliance as a business.

Yeah, I actually got fired from my job, so…

That was convenient!

[Laughs] It was actually the best thing that ever happened, to be honest with you. It was a good time. It was really exciting. I think whenever you’re launching a new business, you’re young, enthusiastic, and you are confident in your ideas and you want to go out there and have a go, it’s a really exciting time. I think that is what I love about setting up new businesses, that feeling of something new. I think ultimately, the three of us are all entrepreneurs at heart. We get a real buzz from seeing things, coming up with ideas, or working with other peoples’ ideas and taking them through to fruition.

I look back on that stage of my career very fondly, because at that time, the game was much more about something that you’re really passionate about. I was just bouncing out of bed in the morning, really enthused and excited about the day. Working all the hours, going out on the weekend and getting amongst it and really immersing myself and seeing, and enjoying something that was very fresh and new at the time.

inthemix was one of the first online communities in Australia that really had some momentum behind it. It was really exciting to be a part of that. You really felt like you were part of something bigger than just a business. It was much more than a business. It was a bit more of a movement, I suppose, at the time.

So from starting as a part-time hobby, and not really measuring your goals in any specific way, how has that changed since Sound Alliance has become a profitable business, of late, with its numerous ventures?

It’s changed a lot in a sense, but now there is a lot more responsibility. It’s far more professional and the scale of it has changed dramatically over those ten years. The same fundamentals exist; we’re still passionate about our product and our sites, and we’re really passionate about the subject matter: the music industry in general, and being a part of that.

I think that running a team of 45 staff is a big responsibility. I think our business skills have probably expanded and evolved over time, quite a lot. I think we’ve really been able to refine our business model and our business skills, and learn about quite a diverse range of areas within the music industry. It’s become a real business now, rather than just a hobby.

That’s good, because if you do the same thing for a long period of time, it has to constantly evolve and change, otherwise, you can’t stay engaged at the same level. I think for the three partners in this business, it feels like every year we’re almost taking on a new role and a new challenge. We’re constantly engaged, so it doesn’t feel like we’ve been in the same job for ten years because we haven’t; we’re always doing something new and fresh and interesting. It keeps us focused and really engaged with the business.

You and your Sound Alliance co-founders were recognised as ‘Creative Catalysts’ earlier in the year. Are you often approached by young people who view you as a source of creative inspiration, or was that a new experience for you?

We were really surprised by that. We were quite honored to be included in that list. I wouldn’t say that type of thing happens very often. I think we probably try to provide as much inspiration as possible to the people within our team: our staff, our contributors, our state editors and that type of thing, whenever we get an opportunity to speak to them face-to-face, or get some time with them. I think inspiration is really important.

We put a lot of effort into trying to nurture talent within our business. We’ve had a lot of staff who joined us as contributors. Tim Hardaker joined inthemix as a part-time writer when he became a contributor while he was at uni. He’s been with us for six years and is now the General Manager of inthemix. Those are the types of things that we are quite proud of, in terms of not just giving people inspiration, but giving them opportunities to succeed, as well.

In the early days of Sound Alliance, who were your sources of inspiration?

I was inspired by quite a few people in a lot of different areas, just generally people around me. I was quite inspired by different promoters and DJs. When I first came to Australia in ’98, I met quite a few different people around the Sydney scene. I found it really vibrant and really open and welcoming, versus what I’d experienced in the U.K.

There were some interesting inspirations. Jon Peters, who was the brainchild of kGrind, back in the day. He was a really interesting guy who had some really stretched thinking and really out-there ideas. He managed to get people to buy into his ideas and I found that really inspiring at the time; that the power of an idea could be enough to bring a whole group of people together behind something. That was quite inspiring. I was always inspired by people who had come from not much, but who had still been able to achieve a lot with a bit of street smarts and because they were passionate about what they did.

Did you have a mentor during that time?

I didn’t, actually. I’ve always relied heavily on my business partners, and them on me in return. I don’t think it would have been possible to do what we’ve done with just me running the business, or just the two of us. I think the “alliance” part of Sound Alliance is one of our key strengths.

There are so many facets of running a business and getting a business from where we were to where we are now. It’s not just beyond my own skill set, but just things I’m not passionate about that my other partners are, the technical or legal aspects or financial or accounting aspects of the business. All these different areas, I would look at any one entrepreneur who was able to launch a business on their own and try to do all those things and think that was pretty amazing, because the skill set required is really quite broad and quite vast. That’s why I always felt that I had support and a different skill set requirement amongst the three partners in the business.

We help each other through the tough times, and we share in each others’ successes.

Despite being the head of Australia’s largest independent online publisher, your personal online presence is reasonably subdued, in that you don’t tend to blow your own horn too often. Was this a conscious strategy from day one, or are you naturally modest?

I’m not crazy about being thrust into the limelight, it has to be said. I prefer to let the results and our products do the talking rather than me, always. In the last year or so, I’ve probably taken a bit more outward approach to getting our name out there. I’ve had some success around that, but I don’t know. There is so much to our business that is just about the team effort. I’m happy to fly the flag for the team, but I don’t really see it being something that’s about any one particular person.

You can see where I’m coming from though. Guys in their sales and advertising fields don’t tend to let their achievements speak for themselves too often. I respect that you’re pretty low key about your achievements. That’s really awesome.

I suppose I’m very aware of the tall poppy syndrome in Australia. I’ve seen a lot of people come and go, over the years, who have come out telling a big story and shouting from the rooftops about not a lot, in terms of actual delivery, or the reality of what they’ve got. I’ve always looked upon that type of thing with a bit of cynicism, and I just think it’s never really been our style. We’ve got a slightly different approach to the way we do things and that’s worked for us so far. We haven’t really felt the need to go shouting too much.

Is there a particular reason why you don’t share your business and motivational thoughts with the world, in the form of a blog, or is it just a matter of being time-poor?

It’s funny you say that. I am actually setting up a blog at the moment, which will be probably going live in the next few weeks. We’re going to combine blogs, so there will be a developers’ blog, which will be Andre [Lackmann] who is the CTO here. He and his development team want to share some of the work that they’ve been doing and invite input from other developers, around some of the social media tools. Myself, and Stig [Richards], who runs the agency [Thought By Them] here, will be updating our side of the blog, which will be coming at the music industry from amarketing/brands/advertising/digital kind of perspective.

A lot of it does come down to just being dedicated to something and being very time-poor. I’m interested in changing. I do read a lot of blogs and I follow some people whose opinion I really value. I think we’ve got some interesting stuff to share. I don’t think we’ll be updating it every day or anything, but I’m sure there will be some interesting tidbits coming through.

Definitely. I think you’d attract a significant audience if you guys told the story behind what’s going on with Sound Alliance and how you got there. That’d be a great story.

Cool, thanks for the feedback. Let me know what you think of the blog when it goes live.

I will do. Personally, my connection to Sound Alliance began when I started writing for FasterLouder in June 2007. I now write for Mess+Noise [pictured below right, in magazine form], and I’ve always thought it was interesting that one of these sites pay its contributors, while the other doesn’t. What’s the difference between the two?

When we were initially presented with the opportunity to acquire Mess+Noise, we were really interested in the community. We really loved what they’ve been able to create and recognized how unique it was, in the sense that it really didn’t take a lot of time and a lot of different factors to create success in terms of doing a community online. Those guys have achieved that really well.

One of the things we were really attracted to about Mess+Noise is that it had a real focus on allowing its writers to focus on quality, and not be constrained by either an advertorial approach to content or word limits, or the speed at which they had to respond. They very much did things their own way, at their own pace, and they said exactly what they wanted to say. We really respected that. I liked that about what they were doing.

I think FasterLouder, for us, is a great platform for writers, photographers, and creative people to start engaging with the live music scene. I think the way we would view Mess+Noise is that it was less about the immediacy of having the gig review and photos up a couple of days after the gig; it was much more timeless, and focused on quality over quantity.

We wanted to take a different approach with Mess+Noise and try to focus on that; really try to nurture some of the great professional writers and professional photographers who are out there, and bring them across to Mess+Noise to engage with the site.

Our reason, I suppose, is that a young writer could hone their skills, cut their teeth if you like, by contributing to FasterLouder, and eventually when they’re ready, they’ll be able to move up to start writing for Mess+Noise, and start to be paid for what they do. That’s the path we’re hoping we’re able to take young writers and young photographers on, and that they can see that we can nurture those skills, give them feedback, and pass them through that process to a point where they can hopefully become professional writers or professional photographers.

That’s really cool that you talk about it like that because I’d like to continue the discussion along those lines. I found my experience to be exactly what you said. Taking the time to contribute for free is wonderful and a great opportunity for people who are just starting out in web publishing; often the experience, the community feedback and the industry freebies are seen as a reward in themselves. But as you know, there comes a time when these free contributors decide to move onto paid work. I think the Australian street press has a similar staff turnover: writers learn the ropes and then tend to leave within a few years.

I think it’s really tough. It’s changed the dynamics and the economic structures of a whole range of things. The one thing I do think something like FasterLouder helps provide is an opportunity for feedback. It gives a great feedback loop and an opportunity for writers to see how many people have viewed their articles, and to get people to ‘heart’ and comment on it, discuss it. I think that is one of the great things that FasterLouder offers, in terms of being able to get some feedback on your writing.

You could put something out on a blog about a gig that you went to on the weekend, but the number of people who are likely to see it is quite limited. I think you get to expose your work to a broader range of people and the pressure is not as intense, and as high as it would be as if you were writing for a very critical, discerning audience on a site like Mess+Noise. The parameters are not quite as restrictive.

I think that’s really cool that you guys have kind of had that strategy from the start at FasterLouder, and then progressed on to Mess+Noise when the time was right.

I think we tried to adopt that approach even before we had Mess+Noise, in the sense that the heads of the talented and the really passionate always pop up above the crowd, and we try to bring them in. As I said before, we’ve got staff here who came through that contributor process, and have now come through to be full-time employees down the line, or just contributors being paid by Mess+Noise.

There are not millions of opportunities, but they do come up occasionally. Where possible, we always try to include the people who’ve worked with us over that time.

The people who are really outstanding do tend to rise above the crowd and receive more opportunities, so it’s kind of a natural selection process. That’s cool. Moving on; your LinkedIn profile states that you’re adept at establishing profitable business models from niche social media.

You’ve done your research!

How long did it take for inthemix to become profitable, broadly speaking?

Off the top of my head, I’m not entirely sure about inthemix. I think inthemix was probably more of a phenomenon than even we thought it was going to be. Our approach with what we did with our business was always to reinvest. inthemix, in isolation, had we just kept that company running as five or six people working on the business, it would be an extremely successful business, but what we’ve chosen to do is to build our company out, create Sound Alliance, and reinvest all that money back into building the business we have today.

I think in isolation, inthemix is still a fantastic company, business, and community; all of those things, and it continues to grow. Every time we think we’ve definitely reached our maximum audience at the site, it defies belief and keeps on going. That’s a really solid business model right there. I didn’t really answer your question, did I?

No, not specifically, but that’s okay. [Laughs] Has Sound Alliance ever sought venture capital funding?

Yes, we have. We’re one of the few Australian companies in our industry who have succeeded in getting venture capital funding. I know a lot of people who have tried and failed. The process is exhausting, and it’s a whole new world out there, I can tell you.

We managed to get a round of funding last year, and the partner is Albert Investments Group, which is a parent company of Albert Music, the publishing and recording business. They have music studios over in Neutral Bay; they’ve got AC/DC and Dallas Crane, and a few other acts. They’re a really great fit for us.

We’ve really seen eye-to-eye with them in terms of the cultural sphere of our business and the fact that they’re family-run. They’re one of the oldest music businesses in Australia, and they ended up being a really great partner. There were a lot of companies fishing around out there when we were entering that ‘boom’ period just before the financial crisis There were a lot of conversations going on. I don’t think there was a single online company worth its salt that hadn’t been approached by numerous people, at that time. It was just the way it was back then.

We’re very fortunate. We managed to take on a partner as a minority shareholder in the business, who shares our goals and our vision for what we’re trying to achieve. They are hugely supportive in getting us there, and have been able to provide a lot of value and not just in terms of capital investment, but in terms of the network they’ve been able to open us up to, their skills, and knowledge of the music industry have all been invaluable.

So you guys had pursued that for most of your time as Sound Alliance, but you only found a partner, just last year?

No, we’d only been out there looking for about nine months, or something like that. It wasn’t something that had been a priority prior to that.

Returning to yourself; do you have a daily routine?

Not really. If I had the choice, I would probably a lot more routine focused. My day is pretty irregular, in terms of what happens. I have a lot of regularly scheduled meetings that happen week in, week out but outside of that, I could be pulled in any number of directions, depending on what’s going on at any one time.

In a way, I kind of like that aspect of my role, in that it’s very dynamic and it requires me to use left brain/right brain, and switch on and off in different occasions and at different times. It’s what keeps it really challenging. No, I don’t have a massive routine in terms of the way I structure my day.

Has this changed since you started ten years ago?

I wouldn’t say I’ve always been a massive routine person, in terms of what I do. I will always try and dedicate some of my day to researching into keeping up with what’s going on out there. I don’t always do it at the same time every day, but I’ll always spend some of my day doing that whenever I can sneak it in; when I’m on a cab checking my phone, checking out news stories and blogs, or when I get home before I go to bed at night, or however I can squeeze those types of things in. I don’t say “At 9:00 in the morning, I’m going to do this for twenty minutes.” I’m a bit more sporadic than that.

Do you ever struggle with procrastination?

When I’m tired, yeah, but I tend to make quite quick decisions. I’ve learned over the years that you can’t dwell on things too long. You have to use your instinct and your gut to make a lot of your decisions, where when you’ve got time to procrastinate and pore over the details, that’s great, and sometimes I’ll do that. But generally, my instincts will tell me which way to go and I just don’t have the time to procrastinate.

So you don’t have any trouble remaining focused on the task at hand? You just devote the time necessary and then move on?

Yeah, I think I can get through quite a bit of stuff quite quickly. I can process a lot of things during the day and move through quite a few things in a short space of time. If I have to focus on something, I’ll go home and work from home. If I’m writing something really important or working on numbers or spreadsheets, I’ll put my headphones on or get out of the office and try to focus on it there.

Let’s talk about [Sound Alliance marketing consultancy arm] Thought By Them for a moment. Is it at the stage where companies and events come to you for consultancy or do you guys still submit proposals for these projects, like regular businesses?

It’s a lot more people coming to us now. It used to be, in the early stages, us going out there and trying to tell people about what we’re doing. We’ve never really been out there in terms of pitching all the time, and trying to win big pitches. We have taken the approach that what we’re offering is quite a specialist thing and it doesn’t suit all brands; it only suits certain types of brands at some stage in their lifecycle. More often, they’ve kind of found us rather than us finding them.

With Thought By Them, we didn’t want to get too big, too fast. We try to focus on delivering really good value and really good ideas, and constantly innovating, rather than exploding and taking on too many clients. We’ve really focused on having one client in one brand category, rather than having a lot of different clients in the same category.
It’s been a really organic approach. I think that’s really suited us because we’ve been able to learn a lot during that time, and really hone our skills, like how unique our position is in the market.

How did the music licensing and CD production arm of Thought By Them come about?

We don’t do too much of that at the moment, to be honest. It was really more a case of just seeing opportunities for brands. We don’t tend to work within strict disciplines, in terms of our work arrangements and that type of thing. We tend to be quite fluid, and try and react as things are going on amongst consumers and provide our solutions right to that, rather than sticking within a mandate of just being a digital agency, or an events agency, or a music agency.
With music licensing, and that type of thing, if it’s the right solution for what one of our clients is looking to achieve, then we would recommend it. It’s not something that we roll out as part of any standard product offering.

I’m assuming that digital music distribution has affected the CD production aspect that you guys offer.

Yeah, but the CD production stuff is such a small part of what we do. We’ve only really done it a few times for specific clients when it’s been a requirement, but it’s not really a core part of what Thought By Them is doing.

You’re a few years older than me, so you knew a time before the web dominated our means of mass communication. Something that I’ve been doing more and more in the last year is reaching out to individuals who inspire or fascinate me, such as yourself. Do you have any tips for approaching these seemingly ultra-busy, really important figures?

[Laughs] I can only look back on the people who have approached me, and the ones that have had success in doing so. I’ve never shut the door on anybody or denied anybody my time, if they’ve been polite in the way they’ve approached me and I think I can assist them. If they’ve taken an interesting approach, then I’ll always give my time.

I’d be surprised if many other people who are in the industry would take a much different approach to that, but I’m sure some people do. Generally speaking, I think if people were reaching out, asking for information and advice, I’m more than happy to try and provide it, if I can squeeze in the time.

With Nick Crocker [pictured right; Native Digital owner, and my mentor], for example, when he first got in touch with me, it was a matter of a mutual friend saying, “Hey, you should catch up with this person. It’s worthwhile meeting up with him,” as he came to me through Luke at Universal. There was never really an agenda. It was just an interesting guy worth catching up with, much the same way as he now passed your details along to me, and we’re talking today.

I think it’s good to really try to work on your network. You don’t always have to start by targeting somebody who is right at the top of your inspiration tree. You can find your way there by other means.

It’s best to just have a go. I think you’d be surprised; a lot of people have this misconception of “Oh my God, I could never just find that person’s email address, or contact them through LinkedIn or Twitter, and ask them if they fancy coffee.” There is no harm in trying. I think you might be surprised. I’ve probably had a couple of people approach me with an ulterior motive; maybe they were a recruiter or something like that and I might not have got back to them, but generally speaking, if I think it’s somebody who is doing it for the right reasons, I’ll always respond.

I’ve definitely found what you mentioned about being surprised about who will meet up with me. It’s an approach that Nick introduced to me this year, and I’ve definitely been blown away by the response, the respect and attention that I’ve received from some people I would have never thought would have given me the time of day. It’s pretty amazing.

There is this outward perception that the music industry is so unapproachable, and that all these people are up on a pedestal, but it’s not like that at all. I think they’re all just real people doing their thing, and one of the things that always attracted me to work in the music business is that I saw this bunch of people that had all come together of their own steam. Their own entrepreneurial tendencies and flare are at the core of what the music industry is all about. It’s a whole bunch of people who are really passionate and determined, and they really love what they do and really love the industry itself.

I’ve found it’s quite consuming and quite seductive to be so drawn into a space by that. That’s why if you’re talking about getting someone’s time, they’ve all been in that position before, so I think most of them recognize that and they’re happy to pass on any pearls of wisdom they might have, to do their bit.

Much as you have, today. Did you have any specific tactics that you used to connect with inspirational or motivational figures when Sound Alliance was starting up?

Not really. I would just try and make sure that I was very present. I think if you’re really passionate about working in the music industry, you have to walk the walk and talk the talk. You got to do your research, get out there, go to the gigs, go to the clubs, or whatever your particular genre interest is. Meet the people, network, and get amongst it. That’s how opportunities and many things arise. I think you’ve got to live the life and get amongst it if you really want to be taken seriously in getting into this space.

We’ve just been interviewing some staff this week. We invited some junior staff members to come back in and do a presentation to us on some ideas of how they would help promote some releases. The presentations yesterday were from this young guy and girl, and I was blown away by the amount of research they’d done, and how they seem to know our product. They’d gone into this great level of detail to understand what it was they were coming back with, even though they hadn’t really been given direction. Even though their ideas were slightly off in some areas, it was so impressive just to see people going to that level. I think that’s what it takes to get your foot in the door in this industry: you have to really stand out, and be really prepared to go the extra mile.

There are a lot of people who just think “Oh yeah, it’d be cool to work in music,” or cool to work in fashion, or whatever, but it’s not really the right reason to be involved in something.

My final question, Neil, I understand that Sound Alliance has a new web project on the horizon. Can you give me any hints on its focus?

We’ve got quite a few actually. I don’t know which one you’re talking about. [Laughs]

I can talk about a couple of things we’re doing. We’re re-launching inthemix towards the end of this year, though there’s no specific date set yet. It’s a fairly major sort of overhaul for inthemix, in terms of functionality, tools, the design, and what it offers.

I think it will send that whole community off onto the next level, in terms of their engagement with the site, what they can do with it, and what it can give them. That’s something really exciting, whether you’re a DJ, producer, or just a punter, we’re going to offer a lot of things on those levels that are going to enable them to connect to other people in the same space and really take the essence of what ITM’s strengths are and style them up a little bit more.

inthemix has been running on the same platform for about four years and we know it’s a little bit tired and dated; it’s not exactly Web 2.0. We’ve been honing a lot of those tools on our other sites and seeing how people use them and interact, and getting them ready to roll them out on the big beast [ITM]. That’s a pretty exciting project for us, pretty massive, and it brings to an end about a four-year development schedule.

We’ve basically been putting all of our sites onto one codebase, one unified codebase. It basically means you’ll be able to make a change or add a new piece of functionality and they’ll all simultaneously go across all the sites. It will just have a slightly different front-end design look and feel. It will mean we will be able to get new developments to the market quicker, cheaper, and much more effectively without reinventing the wheel every time. This is quite a big launch for us.

We’re also working on a whole heap of mobile stuff at the moment; we’re just about to launch a mobile site for Mess+Noise, to give that a try. We’ve launched mobile sites for inthemix forums, and we’re going to be rolling out a whole range of mobile stuff, possibly some apps, and a few things down the track, as well.

We have this other thing called Sound Alliance Labs which we just launched recently, where we’ve allocated a budget every year, and our staff can pitch their own ideas for development. We have a monthly meeting where they have to come in and pitch ideas, not necessarily revenue-generating, not necessarily great business ideas, but just things they’ve seen or things they think would complement what we’re doing. They can either pitch them to the management team either individually or as groups.

If we like their idea, we give them a budget and they can work on it outside of their hours. So if the developers come up with a great idea for an iPhone app or something like that, we give them a budget and pay them outside of their standard work hours to go away and develop it. We’re going to give an award for the best lab project every year, based on all the submissions that come through. We’re trying to maintain a focus on innovation and make sure that our staff have an opportunity to do all the things they’re really interested in outside of work, while bringing the benefit back to Sound Alliance, for the greater good of the overall company rather than going off and doing them on their own. We can just see a lot of our team working on some really exciting things, and we wanted to bring that within these walls, rather than see that innovation go off elsewhere. It’s things like that which are exciting and fun and challenging.

And it’s fascinating for an outsider. It’s been really interesting to hear you speak about your past, the present, and the future. It’s been great to speak with you, Neil, and I thank you for your time.

Cool, happy to share with you. I hope it’s been useful, and I look forward to seeing what’s ahead for you.

If you’d like to get in touch, Neil Ackland is on the emails and the Twitters. Coincidentally, Denise Shrivell of Digital Ministry published an excellent interview with Neil earlier this week that focuses on the business side of Sound Alliance. Take a look.

A Conversation With Jess, Sydney Digital Strategy Director and SomethingChanged.com.au blogger

It just so happens that Jess is Digital Strategy Director at a mysterious Sydney advertising agency. She won’t say which, and she also won’t let me publish her surname. Or at leaIt’s not because she’s scared or nothin’, but on the internets, Jess is best known as the curator of a rather excellent blog called Something Changed, about which I wrote lovingly for FourThousand:

“Something Changed acts as Jess’ digital scrapbook, where she posts about new media, advertising, online campaigning, representations of the self, kids today, words, writing and books, funny things on the internets, politics, art, ideas, music, work, food, and sydney. The result is an aggregate of content that you’ll probably find either funny or fascinating if you’re a twenty-something who spends a lot of time online – and since you’re reading this, it’s not an unfair assumption to make.”

Jess, why did you start Something Changed? Was there an influential person or moment that encouraged its creation?

I started Something Changed almost two years ago because I was fascinated by people’s behaviour on the internet and I wanted to document my discoveries. It was partly so I could archive and remember facts, figures and links more efficiently, and partly to have something to show for the immense amount of reading and research I do! I discovered Tumblr through Gawker’s exhaustive coverage of Jakob Lodwick and Julia Allison‘s relationship which largely played out on the Tumblr platform. Tumblr was perfect for me because I like to present raw data that interests me as I find it, rather than crafting long posts.

Where do you find the majority of the articles that you link?

On Tumblr you can post stuff you create, post stuff that you find online, or use their reblog feature (which is sort of an automatic “retweet” feature) to post other’s content with a link crediting them. About 75 per cent of what I blog is from the second category. I find it by either investigating a topic that interests my by searching and following links, setting up RSS feeds to my favourite blogs and websites, and by following people who I respect and who will post things I find interesting.

Does your exhaustive online presence ever spill into your professional life? Do your workmates know of the blog?

In fact the internet IS my job, lucky me! I work for an ad agency where I am the digital strategy director. Since I work on campaigns and strategy it’s considered part of my work. My workmates and bosses definitely know of the blog, I bang on about it exhaustively. In fact my boss promised to buy me a cake when I passed a big milestone in the amount of readers I had, but I passed it ages ago and he is still yet to come through. Two of them have started Tumblrs themselves. We all love the internet at work.

Why the anonymity?

Well I’m not really sure now! I was doing some big work for clients around which there is some sensitivity, and I didn’t want any posts to be taken out of context and my personal views being ascribed to the client. I think in the next few months I’ll probably get with the times and put up my full name. I’ve noticed all my peers in my industry do.

Do you often give thought to how you portray yourself online and the legacy you’re building, or do you just throw it all out there?

Something Changed started as mainly a vehicle for professional development and research and largely it still is. I barely ever talk about myself (apart from “I saw this, I read this, I ate this, I visited this”) or my feelings. So at worst it will be a record of what interested me at different stages of my life, which is fine. Thank god I have never posted a poem or ruminations on my relationships.

What do you think Something Changed adds to the web?

Lots of people in marketing and advertising view the internet from very very far away with a telescope. The world does not need another “how to be a powerblogger” blog or post on “how to measure social media ROI”. I like to think I see the raw internet – the amazing stuff people create, the intense stuff people say about their lives and feelings, the fascinating ways they represent themselves online. Then I try and distill that onto my blog. It’s like a little field study from an anthropologist completely embedded in the culture they observe. Having said that, I don’t recommend people see my blog as anything special – instead they should set up their own!

As you said, you barely ever talk about yourself. But you also barely ever talk about why you find something interesting, or worthwhile posting.

You’re right. I tend to like information that I view as primary sources – people who produce things from scratch, whether it’s blog posts about their lives of feelings, collating things that inspire them, producing amazing things likes videos or songs. Or academic analysis- people who take rigorous, well-informed approach to analyzing the internet and its sociology.

I don’t have time for anything in between, that whole raft of “people who don’t really understand the internet talking in vague general terms about the internet.”

I have things I definitely won’t post, like anything about swine flu, anything about that Best Job in the World tourism campaign, or tips to become a Twitter poweruser.

Do many of your non-ad agency friends follow the blog? How do you describe the blog to a real-life friend?

None of my friends that I’ve known forever are in the ad industry. They all read it, sporadically. When I refer to my blog I adopt a stupid mocking tone and say “my blawg.” If they ask about it I give a knowing smile and say, “I’m so famous on the internet you guys.” If a waiter takes ages to take our drink orders I’m like, “this would never happen to me on the internet.”

You and I both spend a lot of time online. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve develop a kind of bias in the way that I access information online. I start to overstate the way that I operate and assume that others follow similar methods; if they don’t, I become either amused or frustrated, depending on my mood. But that’s a curious aside. When did you become a heavy internet user, and how did your skills develop to the point that they’re at now? (Because let’s face it, good internets is a skill.)

I know exactly what you mean. Good internet is definitely a skill. I am totally self taught, I didn’t even have email until 2000 or 2001. In 2003, someone at uni said, “email me a draft of your paper” and I said, “oh it’s pretty long for an email,” and then attachments were explained to me. I couldn’t use a digital camera until 2004. I couldn’t pirate music! It all sounds a bit embarrassing now.

It was in 2005 then that I started using the internet heavily because I joined some forums. Before that, I had always thought of the “web” quite disparagingly, “who are these people? Read a book, or go outside.” Now it’s completely a part of my daily routine. It’s really changed my life – how I think, what inspires me, how I work, the people I’ve met.

It’s helped that I can do it all day everyday at my work. Spending ten hours a day on something is a good way to get quite good at something. In every role I’ve had in my career, to do a good job I need insight into what people think and feel, a creative spark to generate ideas, and a plan to my implement strategy. So the internet is crucial to every single element, and my employers have always let me have free reign to work that way.

Do you keep a private journal?

No! I’m too self-conscious. If I want to remember how I felt about something, I do a keyword search in my Gmail and cringe at old emails I wrote my friends.

How did you become digital strategy director at your agency? Was ‘good internets’ part of the job description?

I met the CEO of my agency when I consulted on online strategy on a big national campaign he was working on. A few months later my position was created for me when I said I was ready for a new job – so there was actually no job description! I’m so lucky now that I get to do what I love with the cleverest team and the best clients.

The career path to Digital Strategy Director was not an obvious one. I was a journalist, then moved to Melbourne and could not immediately get a journalism job so I got a job doing the overseas publicity for Neighbours [pictured right *snigger*]. I only got the job because at the interview I told the producer, “You know it’s not too late to make Izzie’s baby Jack’s,” or something. Since I was spending my days trying to get freelance writing work I had had plenty of time to watch Neighbours fortunately.

Of course part of my job was to look after the BBC’s Neighbours website. It was my first taste of a really intense online fan community. They had a forum and everything. I learnt so much from that job. That an official website will never be as fascinating as a fan website unless you let go of the PR reigns (why would you want to read about an actors’ theatre aspirations on our site when you could go to an unofficial site to read about their love life?). That fans create the best material, that fans really get upset if you make changes without consulting them. It was a crash course in Internet.

Then I got to do my dream job being the Online Director doing national political campaigning, where I learnt about building movements – uniting people around taking action online and offline to achieve social change. Then I consulted on another big campaign, then I got this job. I always think of that thing people say, “the jobs the youth of today will be doing when they grow up haven’t even been invented yet.” At our Careers Centre at school they basically said girls could be Lawyers, Accountants, Gallery Curators or PRs.

I’m assuming that you went to university. Tell me about your time there.

I did! I went to uni to study English thinking I would have a career doing some kind of writing. In first year I became interested in social justice issues and for the first time paid attention to politics and current affairs. Before then I was strictly a reading, writing, art galleries, theatre type of person. So uni was fun, I did the student politics/share house/shop at Salvos/“feed yourself on $5 a day” thing until my last year. Then I got a full time newspaper journalism cadetship, and had to do my Honours year full time at the same time.

Was that a difficult year? Did you ever question what you were doing?

It was difficult. Fortunately it was things I loved doing – researching and writing. I’m also one of those people who needs to be busy to get things done. I like approaching big tasks (daily deadline of journalism combined with a yearly deadline of handing in a thesis) and strategically breaking them down in an efficient way. Having said that, I am never studying again. And whenever my friends say “I’m thinking of going back to uni,” I always say “NO! YOU FORGET HOW HARD IT IS!”

How did you land the cadetship? Was it shit or awesome?

I decided suddenly I wanted to be a journalist so I got a two week cadetship at a newspaper. I was lucky they gave it to me because I think now they only take people studying Proper Journalism at uni – a bit short sighted in my opinion, but I think it’s because the universities provide insurance. I got a story in the paper almost every day, including a huge feature on mobile phone use that was published in the Features liftout on the Saturday. The story is completely lame and I am so glad it’s not accessible by Google.

After my two weeks the Chief of Staff said they were hiring a cadet, and would I like to apply? I said “yes”. I interviewed and didn’t get it – someone else did. But a few weeks later they phoned and said I could be a cadet anyway. So that’s how I got the job, and now the other cadet is one of my best friends. The cadetship was amazing. Every day as a general news reporter is different and being a journalist is like having a license to walk up to anyone and ask them anything you want.

Do you read newspapers? Could you imagine being a full-time news reporter?

I only read newspapers on the weekends: the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Sunday Sun Herald and Sunday Telegraph. I get rid of all the Drive, Careers, Business and rubbishy sections. Then read the news, then the Lifestyle, then glossy lifestyle supplements. It’s a habit. Print will never die while people have weekend brunch routines to uphold.

I can’t imagine being a full-time news reporter. I would love the thrill of finding a big story but miss the calming routine of planning and strategising in advance. I get a nice mix of thrillingly busy versus long term planning in my current work, so I wouldn’t go back.

Lots of people view their time at university as instrumental in their personal development. What did you learn about yourself during that time?

I learnt the same thing at uni that has proved true in the workplace. Studying and work (doing your actual job as per your job description) teaches you nothing. You have to do it and do it well. But everything fun, amazing, professionally exciting or leading to personal growth has always been thanks to things I do on the side. Whether that’s groups I joined at uni, friends I made on the internet, ideas and projects I’ve suggested at work, or new career opportunities I’ve conjured up. When I think about what my life would be like without my blog that I randomly started a few years ago… I just can’t imagine it!

Something Changed is my favourite Australian blog. You’d best subscribe via email or RSS. Unsurpisingly, Jess is also quite lively on Twitter. Thanks for the interview, Jess!

A Conversation With Ross Zietz, Threadless Art Director

I’ve worn Threadless shirts almost exclusively since 2006. So I when I found out that their Art Director, Ross Zietz, was visiting Brisbane on Wednesday, 27th May as a guest speaker for the Portable Film Festival, I hooked up an interview with him for FourThousand. I researched like a good journalist and found that I owned two of his designs, ‘Pandamonium‘ and ‘Loch Ness Imposter‘. So I wore one of them when we met, to show that I’m a fan. Kind of like how gangs wear colours so that they know who not to fight.

But Ross wouldn’t fight anyone. He’s a gentleman. He spoke with me about t-shirts for 45 minutes, before speaking about t-shirts for another 70 minutes to the Portable Film Festival symposium crowd of 40. During the discussion, Ross had to repeat answers to a lot of the questions that I’d asked beforehand. Poor guy. 

A: Hey, Ross. I read that you joined Threadless as the janitor.
R: (laughs) Yeah, back in the day. Do you know that whole story?
A: Well I knew that you had submitted designs to the site. Then an opportunity came up at the company, and you took it.
R: Yeah. I went to school at Louisiana State University, and studied graphic design there. One day I was researching for a project at a bookstore, and there was a little blurb in a magazine about Threadless. So I checked the site out, and submitted a shirt that night. It was a really bad shirt, but I kinda just got hooked. It was a cool way to get feedback, and it was outside of what we had to do for school. It was like an escape, where I could just do what I wanted.

It was a year or two after that, right after I graduated from design school, when they posted a blog about how they were looking to hire somebody. It wasn’t for a graphic design position, it was for a – as they worded it – “helper dude”. I was about to accept a design position at a place in New Orleans, but I looked at the Threadless opp and thought – “why not?” Because I’d been to Chicago, and really liked it, and kind of wanted to get out of Louisiana as I’d been there all my life.

So I applied, and got an email back from Jake [Nickell, Threadless founder] the day after. He said that they were interested in hiring me, so they flew me out a couple of days later on St Patrick’s Day. The job interview was actually at a bar, and we drank some green beers. So I got the job the next day, and I was like, “All right! I guess I’m gonna move to Chicago!” I moved there the next month, and when I started there, I was like the ninth person that they’d hired. And I was probably the first person to join who wasn’t already a friend of Jake. Jake and Jacob [DeHart, Threadless co-founder] both had their own friends, and that’s how they brought the company together. That’s why everybody’s so close in the company. So I was one of the first that wasn’t part of the clique. At that time, we all packed and shipped shirts, and kind of did everything.
A: So Threadless had a warehouse space at that time, I take it.
R: We had a warehouse space, but it was like a quarter of the size that we have now. That’s when we were doing our early growing, I guess you could say. That was 2005.
A: So there were only nine people in 2005, and now you’re up to..
R: Around 80. 80 during the sales. We hire a bunch of temps to help us ship out shirts. And a lot of the time, the people who work as temps end up getting normal jobs, too.
A: When you applied, were Jake and Jacob aware of your design skills?
R: They were, yeah.
A: Had you had a few designs printed?
R: At that point I four or five printed. And that was one of my stipulations when they hired me. I told them that I really wanted to still be able to submit shirts. Because to me, it seems like if you work for the company, and you get chosen to be printed, it still kind of looks shady. So when I was hired, I started doing designs under different aliases. But yeah, that’s how I got the job!
A: Do you wear your own shirt designs?
R: I feel weird wearing stuff I designed. I don’t really own any of my designs. I let my mom, and dad, and girlfriend wear them, but I’d feel weird wearing them myself. Imagine if someone saw me wearing it, and came up to me: “Hey, you designed that shirt!” I don’t know if that’d really happen, but I’d just feel weird doing it.
A: But it’d be advertising for your work.
R: That’s true. If somebody was like, “Hey, I really like your shirt!” But that’s one of the great things about Threadless, when people say that kind of thing. Because we don’t brand it at all, so when people see the shirt and complement the design, that’s when you tell them about Threadless.
A: That’s the reason that I got into wearing Threadless. I used to wear surf brands and stuff when I was growing up, and I got sick of that. So I started wearing band shirts and Threadless. I found the site in 2006, and I really got into it, because I’d rather wear a cool design that I know someone made, rather than wearing a brand that I’ve never associated with.
R: Exactly. I think that’s really cool. Especially when the shirt designers are from all over the world. That’s really neat.
A: Does it still blow your mind to see people wearing your designs?
R: It does. The first time I saw someone wearing one of mine was ‘Pandamonium‘, and it was a girl at concert. I was with some friends, and they told me that I should go and talk to her.. because she was kind of cute too (laughs) But I didn’t do that, because I didn’t want to be like “Hey, I designed that shirt!”
A: “That thing you’re wearing? I made it!”
R: “I’m on your shirt tag!”
A: Really, man? I totally would approach people like that if I were you. It’d be a great introduction, because they’ve obviously taken the time to find your artwork, like it, and buy it. You’re too modest!
R: That’s true.
A: I saw that you’ve done some band work for Dashboard Confessional, Dave Matthews Band and a couple of others.
R: The first one I did was for Hellogoodbye. All of those artists, or their managers, saw my shirts on Theadless and got my email through the site. They said they liked my style, and asked if I’d be interested in doing some shirts for them. I was like, “Hell yeah!”. Because when you get a gig like that, it just seems awesome. It all happened though Threadless, and it happens with a lot of other designers. Once they get printed, and their name is out there and on the shirts. I know a bunch of others that’ve gotten to do shirts for bands. I know that Dave Matthews has done a bunch of Threadless designers. I’m actually doing some for Phish when I get back. That was through the Dave Matthews people.
A: Do they give you design briefs, or do they ask you to come up with something?
R: They tend to show me a bunch of stuff that they like, and have me go from there. It’s always interesting, because when you do a t-shirt for a big band like that, the most you’ll get paid is.. I did two shirts for Dashboard, and they paid me $1500 total. I thought that was a lot. But when you compare that to Threadless paying out up to $2200 for one design.. I know it seems strange to some people, but that is a lot of money for a non-spec work. And I know there’s no guarantee that you’re going to win, but at least you can have fun doing it.
A: Who would you most like to design a shirt for?
R: Doing something with a band who have a crazy, art attitude would be cool. Someone like Radiohead would be awesome. Any stuff like that where you can have more freedom. It’s fun doing that stuff; it’s fun to challenge yourself. I have no idea what I’m going to do for Phish. I’ve seen their older shirts that have fish smoking weed, but I’m going to try and come up with something cool. Right now, Patagonia is a company who I think is really cool. They’re kind of like an outdoorsy brand, and they’re really green and organic and all of that stuff. They’re based in Ventura, California, so they’re really into surfing and stuff. They work with some designers, like Geoff McFetridge, and I think it’d be really cool to design some stuff for them. I don’t think I could though, because I work for Threadless.
A: Do you get many bands approaching Threadless to do contract work through the site?
R: Yeah, we’ve done some Threadless Loves promotions.
A: I saw you had Hot Chip on there recently.
R: And a lot of other bands, like Josh Ritter and The Decemberists. I think we’re gonna start doing some more stuff like that, and maybe even do some bigger bands, too.
A: It sounds like a pretty good idea to me, for musicians. To source artwork from a crowd of people who’re likely fans of the act, in most cases. And if a fan’s artwork wins, they’ll tell all their friends about it.
R: Exactly. The bands that approach us are really cool about it, but the ones that aren’t cool about it are the ones that want the band’s name on the shirt. We haven’t really done a shirt with a band’s name. We run it so that the band will give a theme, and then the design community will take that theme and go nuts with it, and then the band will pick a winner.
A: I saw that Design By Humans have been doing that a lot lately.
R: Yeah. I’m not going to talk shit about them. They go through one merch company that uses a kinda weird licensing thing. But they do a lot of huge bands.
A: Fleetwood Mac, Kings Of Leon.
R: Lil Wayne, too. It’s cool, but I didn’t like the shirts that got chosen. They got some amazing subs [submissions], but again, those artists require that the band name has to be pretty prominent on the design. It’s not to say that we wouldn’t do that in the future, but I think that we like it so that when you see the shirt, you think of the band, but it’s not necessarily overt.
A: You take more of a subtle approach.
R: Yeah, that’s it. Subtlety!
A: I guess that’s something that not a lot of artists would be down with that.
R: Yeah. That’s why the artists that we partner with are more into the whole ‘art scene’, I guess.
A: So you score a lot of designs each day. How long does it take you to know if you like a design?
R: I think it’s cool if when you see a t-shirt, and you don’t have to get it right away. When you walk by somebody, you usually see it for like two or three seconds. So it needs to be something that’s pretty simple and straight-forward. That’s just what I like, or whether it looks good or pretty. But the ones that are really intricate – the ones you have to look at real close – I think they’re cool, but that’s kind of more stuff to hang on a wall, rather than to wear on a t-shirt.
A: That’s funny, because I told a friend of mine that I was doing this interview. She said that she thinks that she prefers plain shirts to any kind of design. She thinks that designs just belong on walls, which I totally disagree with.
R: I guess I kinda see that, because I wear a lot of plain t-shirts too. I like the idea of being able to express yourself with a t-shirt.
A: Because a shirt is a statement.
R: Yeah. I like spicing it up a little bit, rather than wearing the same plain, uniform kind of shirts each day. It keeps people different, I guess. I do love some shirts that are really crazy, but I like simple stuff. My favourite artist is Geoff McFetridge. Do you know who that is?
A: No.
R: He’s pretty amazing. He does a lot of real simple, kinda goofy stuff, but I’ve always been a fan of his. Check him out – he actually just did a Select shirt for us ['Frowns Are Flesh', pictured below right]. That was pretty damn amazing – this guy, who I’ve idolised for so long, did a shirt for us. That was cool.
A: I’ve noticed that most Threadless shirts over the years have relied on a centre image on the chest, whereas elsewhere there’s a bit of a trend to use the whole shirt.
R: Yeah. We do that [giant designs] more now. Our best-selling shirts lately have been the all-over prints. One thing that I really like about Threadless is that we print enough shirts that there’s a range. I don’t mean to put down Design By Humans, but it seems like their shtick lately is just kinda giant prints.
A: Definitely.
R: It’s almost too much, and I think it alienates some people. It’s kinda cool that we can spread out. This [points to shirt - 'Party Animal' by John Hegquist] is a new one. Just a real basic, simple print on the front. But we’re working all these new printers now, too, that have presses that can do these crazy big prints. But there’s not many in the Midwest. We’re based in Chicago; they’re more in LA, which is where Design By Humans is located.
A: American Apparel are there too, aren’t they?
R: Yeah. They’re the ones that make our shirts. But we use two printers out of Chicago, and one of them is getting a brand new giant press, so we’re looking forward to seeing what we can do with that. But lately we’ve been doing more big prints, because that seems to be the trend that’s been coming for three or four years now.
A: Do you think that centre, chest designs kind of define Threadless’ style? Because when I think of Threadless, I think of the simple, character-based shirts, or the clever situations.
R: In the past, yeah, but I think we’re doing a bunch more random stuff now. If you look at our homepage, you can see that a lot of our new ones are trending toward giant prints. And another cool thing that we do is the Bestees, where you can vote on the best t-shirt that we print each month, and the winning designer will get another $2,500.
A: Oh yeah, I heard about that. That’s ridiculous!
R: It’s crazy. Three out of the three that’ve won so far this year are giant tees. [he shows me on his laptop]
A: Oh yeah, that red one is awesome. ['The Red' by Dina Prasetyawan]
R: Yeah, these big prints are all the rage right now. And I think they’re cool, but I like simpler stuff.
A: Do your designs have a particular style?
R: I don’t really have a style. When I come up with something in my head, I have to make it look like that. And I think that is probably one of my problems, that I don’t have a distinctive style. I’m more about the idea than having a style. But no, I’m styleless. (laughs)
A: I’ve seen your stuff, and it’s pretty varied. You range from character-based ones like this, to ones like ‘Infinity MPG’.
R: I found out that one ['Infinity MPG', pictured below] just got ripped, actually. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, you probably don’t care.
A: No I do, because I saw that ‘Pandamonium‘ got kinda ripped off a while ago too.
R: They basically just stole the idea and made another shirt called ‘Infinity MPG’. And I was like, “oh well”.
A: How do you feel about that?
R: It sucks.
A: I guess there’s a good way to look at it – it was such a good idea that they wanted to take it off..
R: It’s kind of flattering, yeah. There are even people who started a website called ‘Infinity MPG’ after I got printed, and sold bumper stickers and all these things. It’s not like I invented the idea that by riding a bike you use less gas. (laughs) I can’t get mad at that. I think it’s cool. As long as it does something beneficial, it’s cool.
A: When people submit to Threadless, they still own the copyright of the image, don’t they?
R: The only thing we get is garment rights. So basically, we can put it on a t-shirt, or a hoodie. But the artist can make prints of the design and whatever else. We have some wall rights for wall graphics. We work with a company called Blik, and they do crazy wall coverings. They’re a great company to work with, and that’s why we have some of those rights.

But there’s been times when people have had their design printed on a shirt, and they came back to me saying “hey, I want to do something with this design”, like making a print out of it. We just talk to the artist and they’re fine with it. That’s the cool thing about being so close with all the artists. If they have a want or a need, they can just talk to us, and make it happen.
A: Here in Australia – and I’m sure you’ve heard of similar things in the US – I saw some designs for sale at a music festival market stall, and the majority of the shirts were Threadless rip-offs.
R: They were telling me about this yesterday in Melbourne, too. I have heard that. There’s a lot of places in Asia that have that same thing. And we can’t really do anything about it. It’s so hard to do stuff outside of the United States with that kind of law. And especially if it’s just at a market. Were the shirts tagged and everything? Did it seem like a legit brand, or like they weren’t making too many of them?
A: No, they just seemed like limited runs.
R: Yeah, see, it sucks, but we can’t really do anything about. It sucks for the artist, too, because they feel like they’re getting exploited more than we are, because they’re not getting any credit for it.
A: For sure. What’s the most important part of running an online design community?
R: I like being open and honest. When we fuck up, we let people know that we messed up. We keep our community ‘in the loop’, and that’s what is most important. I also like being able to be close with the designers. In my position as Art Director, I receive their art, and I get to work with these amazing artists to try and make what they envisioned work on a shirt. And at the same time, if the community sees something like a fake Threadless shirt, they’ll blog about it and kind of police for us.
A: It really is just a dedicated community built around t-shirts.
R: I know, and who would have thought? And seriously, when Jake came up with the idea, he never, ever in his wildest dreams thought that it would get as big as it has. The growth was organic, and it’s just turned out really cool.
A: Tell me about the Threadless retail stores.
R: We have two now. They’re both in Chicago. We opened the first one around 18 months ago, and then the second around six months ago. The second one was just for kids shirts, initially, but we’re going to change it so that it’s for both kids and adults.
A: So the kids idea didn’t work out so well?
R: Well it did, but parents would come in with their strollers and want to buy shirts for themselves, too. It makes sense to have everything there, rather than just do a kids store.
A: I read that the first store didn’t have a lot of stock, but tended to focus on art instead.
R: We tried to replicate the feeling you get when you’re on the website. We have a bunch of digital displays where you walk in, and you can get a headshot of yourself taken. We have a bunch of monitors on these mannequins in the window, so your head will show up on the mannequins.
A: Is that a popular feature?
R: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It’s a pretty busy walking street, so a lot of people walk by and stuff. We do two weeks of stock at the store, so we only have like 18 shirts in the store at a time. I mean, right now we’ve had like 2,000 shirts printed, and in stock we have probably 300 designs, so we can’t necessarily have 300 designs in stock at the store. But it’s a pretty small little shop, and we just decided to do the most recent shirts, and cycle through.
A: Do you have plans to expand the store range?
R: Eventually, we’d love to. It’s just that right now, it’s just so hard with all of the money issues going on. But we definitely plan to do some more stuff overseas. And the cool thing is that Australia is our #4 country, sales-wise. It goes US, UK, Canada and Australia, so y’all are up there on our list. This is my first time here; it’s been great so far. I really love it!
A: The whirlwind tour – you’re here for what, three days?
R: I know! So quick. I was in Melbourne for the past two days and basically jetlagged the whole time. Tomorrow is Sydney, and then I have two days to relax. Actually, another Threadless guy is coming from New Zealand to meet me there. His girlfriend lives in Sydney, so we’re gonna hang out for those few days. He’s a cool guy. The community has these meet-ups once per year in Chicago, and we have designers and members from all over the world coming to meet us.
A: The online community in real life.
R: I know, it’s nuts. It’s nuts that they travel – well, not nuts – but it’s really cool that they travel that far just to come and meet everybody.
A: Dedication! Brand loyalty! Hey, how many votes does it to convince you that a shirt you don’t personally like should be printed?
R: We have a brand management team, and so when we look at the scores of shirts, we can see the highest scoring ones, but then we can break it down into how girls scored it, how guys scored it, how people that buy a lot of shirts scored it; all these different factors that we get to look at. That’s how we decide what gets printed. So there’s a lot of times where designs that I’m not really too keen on score amazingly, and I can’t deny it just because I don’t like it. If a lot of other people like it, it’s worth printing.
A: How many shirts does Threadless print per week?
R: A single batch is right around 1,000. But before we print them, we ‘weigh in’ the amount of votes. So if it scored well with girls, we’ll print more for them, and if it didn’t score so well for guys, we’ll print less. One single batch is usually between 800 and 1,000. Once they sell out, you can request a reprint, and the artist will get another $500 if the shirt gets reprinted.
A: How many requests does it take for reprint?
R: It varies, but if we do a shirt that sells out really fast, we’ll push that to reprint a little bit quicker, especially if it’s like a hot topic, or a hot style at the time. But when we look at a reprint request, we usually get more than 2,000 requests before we reprint.
A: But you only print around 800 or a thousand at a time.
R: A lot of times when people make a reprint request, they’ll do it multiple times.
A: I guess that Jake and Jacob learned that the hard way.
R: Yeah. (laughs) And a lot of the time when people request a reprint, they changed their mind when it’s back up on the site.
A: The site has those $5-10 shirt sales throughout the year. Is that just to clear out the inventory?
R: Yeah, it’s to keep everything clean. We’re starting to have $9 shirts on the site almost all of the time, now, but we tend to only drop to $5 for the crazy sales. But we do that just because we release so many shirts a week that stuff gets lost of the site, if we don’t clear it out. Like if we printed more than 800-1,000 shirts, the different designs that we have would just get too much, and too hard for people to find on the site. And that’s another thing that’s really hard: a lot of the time, shirts have titles that don’t really fit, so when people are looking for it, it’s kind of hard.
A: Maybe that’s something that could be built into the site – shirt keywords.
R: We do some keywords, but it’s always hard to keep track of that.
A: I was submitting some photos on the site last week [note: uploading a photo of yourself wearing a Threadless shirt earns $1.50 in store credit] and it took me a while to figure out their names.
R: It’s tough. It’s one of the things that we’re constantly working on – better ways to keep it so that shirts don’t get lost. Some really great designs get lost on the site.
A: How did the Twitter tee range come about?
R: We have a pretty good relationship with the Twitter guys. Our Chief Technical Officer Harper Reed is friends with them. Twitter put us on their ‘suggested users’ list, and now we have over 500,000 followers. It’s crazy for a little t-shirt company out of Chicago.
A: It’s such a powerful medium when you have that kind of a follower base. Every time you post a link, it goes out to a huge amount of people.
R: That’s the thing. We’re trying to figure out the best way to use that. We don’t want to drive people crazy and post too much. We don’t want to be annoying. So we’re trying to figure out what people react to. Because, yeah, when you have half a million people following you, you have to think about everything that you’re sending out.
A: There’s guys like Trent Reznor who have a similar amount of followers. It’s the kind of thing that could be abused so easily. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
R: Exactly.
A: Would you wear a Twitter shirt?
R: Um.. (pauses)
A: Come on!
R: I’m not a big ‘words on t-shirts’ kind of guy..
A: I didn’t think so!
R: Me and two other guys are designing all of those Twitter shirts, and all of the Type tees, but I like more of the subtle stuff. Less ‘in your face’. I wouldn’t be too fond of wearing the ‘I’m huge on Twitter‘ shirt. But there’s definitely an audience for that stuff. It’s just not my cup of tea. But we are going to start doing more Twitter shirts that are going to be less about Twitter, and more about funny things that people said on Twitter. I think that we probably shouldn’t have done the launch using four shirts about Twitter.
A: What can you recall about your first time on the site?
R: I remember that first night that I went on Threadless, I studied the site for a little bit, and studied the designs that had been submitted. And I came up with a design, and thought “man, this shirt is going to be so awesome!” It was a heart on a sleeve, and it was the worst design ever.
A: That was it? Just a plain shirt?
R: Yeah, a plain shirt with a heart on the sleeve. I was like, “That’s so clever and creative!” So I subbed that, and it just got tore up. It was hilarious. But that’s what got me hooked, because I was like, “All right, I’ll prove these guys wrong! I can do some stuff that they’ll like, that I’ll like too!” And that got me hooked. But the community can be brutal. They can be mean. If you put some stuff up that they don’t like, it can be a real reality check sometimes.
A: That’s a good thing though, right? You’d want criticism rather than praise?
R: Exactly. You want honest criticism. That’s one thing I noticed when I was in design school. Our teachers would give honest feedback, but the students would never really give feedback. They probably just felt that they were trying to say good stuff. And so when you put it online – especially with people you don’t know – and they give you feedback, that’s when you feel like you get more of the honest truth from people.
A: Was that hard to deal with at first, as an artist who’d been otherwise praised?
R: Yeah.. no.. (laughs) I think you need that. It’s what keeps you humble, and what keeps you in check. You don’t want to get a big head about anything.
A: The site gets over a thousand subs per week – what percentage is printed?
R: We’re printing six new sub shirts per week, and we’re about to add two more per week. So it’s less than a 1% chance of being printed.
A: But it’s not really chance, though.
R: Yeah, it’s more based on skill.
A: That’s the beauty of it: the most popular, or the best designs, will win.
R: That’s one of the things that’s tough, because I do feel like there is a little bit of a popularity contest within the community. It’s not as bad as it could be, but you do notice that people who score well tend to always score well. I mean, a lot of times it’s because all their stuff is so good, but other times they just figure out what people want and they just duplicate that style, to make it work on a t-shirt.
A: What’s your favourite printed Threadless design?
R: The one you’re wearing is pretty great ['Pandamonium']. I also like ‘Loch Ness Imposter‘.
A: I’ve got that one too. It’s pretty subtle, it takes people a while to get it.
R: Yeah, it’s great. The one shirt that I designed that I wear is ‘Piece Of Meat‘, the one with just the steak on it. I don’t know why, I just really like that shirt. One of the shirts that I’ve been wearing a lot lately is a Select shirt that wasn’t even that popular, it’s a green one called ‘The Hills Have Eyes‘ [by Clayton Dixon]. It was like this little mountain scene with these hills that all have eyeballs, and this guy in a station wagon driving by. It was illustrated really well. It just looked cool on a t-shirt, and I liked the green colour. That’s the one I wear the most. [he points at a bowl of Smarties that I've been snacking on throughout the interview] Are these chocolate?
A: Yeah, they’re called Smarties. When you were at college, did you imagine that you’d make a living off of directing the art that appears on shirts?
R: No, not at all. I know that I basically just lucked out, and every day when I come into work, I think “this is an awesome job”. And now I get to come to Australia and talk about it!
A: Again, it wasn’t luck, though. You were chosen for this. It was perfect for you!
R: Yeah – it found me! (laughs) But no, it is really cool. When I was at college, I thought that I’d eventually get a job at a design firm or at an ad agency. Which still wouldn’t be bad, but it’s just that I like what I’m doing now.
A: What advice do you have for young designers?
R: Oh, man. (pauses)
A: Would you recommend following your path – not to become Threadless Art Director, but in terms of getting printed?
R: Do what you want. Do what you enjoy doing. I mean, for kids in school, it’s tough now, because you have to do these real strict assignments and stuff. But try and make each project your own, if you can. Use a grid. I love using a grid, even in strict illustrations, I’m real weird about that.
A: Can you explain that? I have no design knowledge. What’s the advantage of a grid?
R: It’s a sort of really anal thing, I guess. It’s a Swiss thing. But when you start working on a piece, imagine if there was like gridwork and lines going through it. If you can get ‘em to match up and stuff, it’s a lot more pleasing to the eye, usually.
A: What, so being symmetrical?
R: Not symmetrical. Just – at points. It’s one of those weird things that I’ve always done. There are definitely design teachers who are like, “Break the grid. Don’t use a grid.” For illustrations, you don’t have to use a grid. But when you’re doing stuff with type, and type mixed with imagery, I think it’s important to have some structure to it. That was one of the first things that we learned in design school.
A:Tonight’s discussion [for the symposium] is a bit different to last night, right? I’m told that you’ll be speaking about the entrepreneurial side of things.
R: I think so. Which is not really my expertise, but..
A: You can bullshit, right?
R: I can do my best (laughs) But Portable [Film Festival], where Andrew [Apostola, Creative Director] works, they’re the ones that flew me out here. What we do with Threadless, they kind of do with films. They allow filmmakers that’re just getting started to get their films out there, so that people can see them. That’s kind of like how designers who’re just starting out can put their designs up on Threadless and get people talking about their work.
A: That’s gotta be one of the best parts of the internet, how people can group off in different sections and just talk amongst yourselves. People who care about a topic can find their own niche.
R: Exactly. All over the world. It’s really great.

Aww. Thanks again, Ross. That was probably my best interview so far. If you want, you can stalk Ross on Twitter, Flickr, and Threadless.