this i believe

I believe in television men. Because they have jobs. They do stuff like solve crimes, save lives and develop surefire advertising campaigns in past eras. Most of them anyway. The good ones. They don’t sit around in fake jobs that apparently don't require them to do too much because they always seem free to sit on the phone with their girlfriends more than they are doing something productive.

Television men come home to Frank Sinatra and a glass of scotch neat. Or a quick witted best friend/room mate or a dog or a coffee house. For non-television men coming home means...more time with said girlfriend and watching said television. Only not really good, quality television. Old testosterone filled movies or porn.

Television men read. Every so often there's a book or a newspaper or a thick magazine in hand. Even if they're fake reading that's more than the men who have spent all day talking about how much of a goal it is for them to be sixteen again and really nothing much more than that.

Find something to do. Build a shelf for chrissakes. I believe in television men.

The well written ones of course, not "The Hills" ones or the "Rock of Love" ones.

On television, to watch our fictional female counterparts try to figure out the inner psyche of the television man is actually refreshing. What's he thinking, they wonder. What does he want? He didn't call me today, he went out, he's on a boat in the Caymans and doesn't care if I'm there.

In small towns like this one – men don’t really play games. We say they do because we attribute game playing to the complexity and realness of a situation but that's pretty much all bullshit. There's no maybe we'll go out or maybe we'll meet for drinks and later they may want you to leave at the end of the night and keep things casual.

Here, by the end of the first date they are handing you a key, telling you there's no need to knock, introducing you to their mother and basically taking in a new roommate.

If the men sound scary...to me, so are the women who jump right in.

So I believe in the television men. And the movie men. With the things to do. And the jobs. And moves for the dance that is a balance between love and a life.

the bigger picture

My plan for this week’s column was a preview of the Waterfront Film Festival which I’ll be attending this coming weekend. However, I will be writing a review of the festival for next week and in the mean time – I would encourage anyone with time to kill this weekend to make the drive up to Saugatuck, Mi. to take in a movie or two.

These are independent films with big names, including Robin Williams, Jeff Daniels and Daryl Hannah and the event brings in thousands of visitors to southwest Michigan each year. Check it all out at www.waterfrontfilm.org and look for a review next week.

As a journalist, covering events like the film festival are fun. But when the day is done and we sit up into the wee morning hours reading articles and books and watching newscasts to try and learn as much as we can about what goes on in our world, the fun is just a part of the bigger picture.

A bigger picture of true point of journalism – to be a voice. Whether to the children on our inner city streets, the shop workers in our factories, the teachers, the parents, the doctors or the businessmen and women. Here, next door, abroad. I’m pushing the column on movies to address a far more serious subject – that of the sentencing of two American journalists to 12 years of “reform by labor” in a North Korean labor camp.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee were handed those sentences by an alleged North Korean court after they were apprehended by North Korean soldiers nearly three months ago, as they were working for the San Francisco news outlet Current TV, reportedly on a story about North Korean defectors.

Korean officials say the two young women committed a “grave” crime against the country. Just what they did, however, nobody knows. The sentencing sent shock waves through the news media, put a harsh spotlight on the Obama administration and was an obvious taunt from a country with no plans to live in peaceful coexistence with anyone.

Since the news of Ling and Lee’s conviction there has been an endless supply of reporting, analysis and comment on the situation – painfully and obviously now one that will see these two young Americans as pawns in what is turning out to be a nuclear game of "mine's bigger than yours".

It was weeks prior – even as the two reporters awaited their “trial” – that North Korea turned its back to those nations who wish to live under ideals of peace, humanity, freedom and liberty and repeatedly conduced missile tests and furthered their nuclear aspirations. Still, the current presidential administration was quiet. North Korea acted and they hesitated.

There’s no denying the delicacy it takes to navigate a country in a world filled with countries. There’s no denying the fragility of what is at stake – human life. America can not simply turn its nuclear weapons North Korea’s way threaten an offensive of Sylvester Stallone, Rambo-like proportions. There are consequences and nuclear arsenals to contend with. However, while this situation elevated – the perception doled out by the Obama administration has been: Um…maybe we should put those guys back on the terror list.

Um…really? Washington now has to admit they’ve been checked in North Korea’s chess game…and getting Lee and Ling out of the labor camps they are purportedly being sent to, where prisoners are said to have to try and trap rats for food, transport human waste and live with torture, will not be an easy task. Because obviously – North Korea now has an upper hand.

What the administration must do is chalk up their blatant failure to perceive North Korea for what it is – a living, breathing terrorist entity – and actually do something. It seems almost as if we are dangerously close to adopting a “if I don't look at it, it's not really there” philosophy. There should be more tough talk coming from our nation's capital and less desire play nice with bullies.

The Middle East is a territory of religious ideology. North Korea is not so narrowed. North Korea’s ideology is domination.

In reading the analysis and the articles that are addressing this issue, what struck me beyond the country’s reluctance to be a strong arm when a strong arm is needed – was the reactions of readers to these journalists who “should have known better” than to break another country’s rules. Just because we have freedom of press here, they say, doesn’t mean we should be so daring as to assume those liberties elsewhere.

As a journalist, I agree. And I believe we recognize the dangers. But it is not known if Lee and Ling were actually in North Korea at the time of their capture. Also not known – the circumstances of their “trial” which was held in secret. It is true that the freedom of the press provided for us so valuably in our constitution does not transcend our borders. But true journalism does not live in the constitution.

True journalism isn’t just trying to “get the story” as if they were trolling for the picture of the next celebrity baby. True journalism is to record our world. To give a voice to the people and to report on the actions of those who govern those people. To tell the stories of the goings on in our worlds.

When the world’s journalists are taken, locked up and punished for reporting the truth – we must ask ourselves what that says for the countries behind such acts. Right now, countless journalists are being held in prisons across the world for doing nothing more than what you and I take as a right and a freedom every day.

To those countries, North Korea included, every journalist muted results in an army’s worth of reporters whose voices will only gain in strength and whose missions will continue to expose the atrocities, abuses and infringements on not just a western philosophy, not just an ideology…but the bigger picture. Humanity.

Jessica Sieff is a reporter for The Niles Daily Star. Email her at jessica.sieff@leaderpub.com, or visit her on Twitter @jessicasieff

resistance, it is the “antithesis to nature”

Though the true beauty is lost behind the glossy finish of the magazine's pages, a photograph taken by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel in last month’s National Geographic depicts the rooftop of Chicago’s City Hall.

Rather than an expected sparse landscape of black tarred top and twisted vents – lush green sits against those vents as well as a backdrop of sky on the verge of night and surrounding skyscrapers lending light via offices still illuminated after hours. The municipal building in the windy city is just one of the world’s examples of a living roof. Forgotten spaces suddenly renewed.

Living roofs, which provide energy efficiency in utilizing spaces that often do little less than get hot as they sit in the sun, according to National Geographic's Verlyn Klinkenborg, in “Up on the Roof,” aren't new. In Germany flat roofs have been required to turn their tops green since 1989. On the surface, one sees what is a beautiful urban garden. But just beneath the surface is the real beauty. Some specifically designed systems collect rainwater, filtering and trapping it rehydrating the soil, a fully functioning ecological system creating a new habitat for plants, birds, insects and yes – even a few amphibians – and reducing the world’s carbon footprint one roof at a time.

And that got me thinking. Change is everywhere. And in no way is it limited to what’s above our heads.

Right now, no single industry in the country or around the world is escaping the need to reinvent itself. And it's rather exciting. Because it means new ideas, new methods, new products and ultimately new ways of being will evolve. And call me partial, but personally I think the change in how we exchange, produce and provide information to the general public is the most exciting of all. I entered this industry with my soft spot for printed newspapers, the smell of newsprint and the heroic images of the newsmen depicted on television and in movies. Because I thought nothing was more classically American than a man or woman tossing a few quarters up on the counter of a newsstand on a busy street and tucking a paper under their arm on their way to work.

But times have changed, as is painfully clear every day in our industry. And the conversation among all of us news hounds never seems to end. But the direction of our talks are changing. The topics started out troubling and thick – like really bad fog. In the annual State Of The News Media Report put out by The Project of Excellence in Journalism an overview of the industry says it all in the first sentence: “some of the numbers are chilling.”

And the first of several major trends reported, “the growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.” Journalists are losing their jobs and fighting for freelance opportunities, newspapers have thrown in the towel on a tangible product completely – jumping feet first into online media.

They’re going to make mistakes as they navigate these change filled waters. A lot of the papers that have turned their heads solely to the online avenue also assume they don’t need to write anything, pulling feeds and headlines to other services rather than keeping the valuable minds of their own reporters. But they’ll figure it out.

Brainstorming what can turn out to be a brilliant new idea, taking daily processes and whipping them up and tossing them around, pulling a fresh take on an old practice – is all part of the romance of change. So why do we fear it so much?

Because the reality is that change sucks.

Because once we figure out we need to start changing…we realize that we need to start changing. It’s a challenge. It's a process. It's work. We're uncertain of the outcomes. It’s painstaking. We build a new product and we have to be patient and wait for it to take off… We start changing our own behavior and we have to wait for the change in belief and in mood to come. We leave a bad relationship and we have to wait and see if a better one awaits.

We get frustrated and we fall down. More than once, more often than not. But the thing is, what was once wonderful, sometimes has to remain what was once wonderful. So we can be awakened to a new kind of wonderful.

Who would have thought…as those skyscrapers burst into the skyline decades and half centuries ago that eventually one day, they would house a lush green meadow? “When we go to the rooftops in cities, it's usually to look out at the view,” Klinkenborg writes. “...I can't help feeling that I'm standing on the view...” What an interesting perspective. Change is everywhere. Navigating it is hard. But resisting it is pointless and frankly, harder. In resisting it, we're the only ones who lose.

For those of us down on the ground, in the newsroom, we have so many opportunities ahead of us to reach you, the priceless reader. We can come into your living rooms, be stuffed into your mailboxes and paper boxes, upload to your iPod, Blackberry or mobile phone. We can be delivered to your PC or Mac in a matter of seconds – one example of the newspaper's future: the New York Times has introduced the the Times Reader 2.0 – the entire paper uploaded to your computer in a matter of seconds, with a paid subscription, so you can carry the news anywhere you go.

Imagine that. A news publication delivered to you, providing revenue and exercising the invaluable act of journalism all at the same time. Novel.

No matter the landscape, a rooftop, a newsroom, an auto giant, a government, your own home, we never know which changes will be good changes until we try. But we figure it out. It’s just going to take a new perspective – and a few changes. And who knows. As painful as it may be to change, when it's all over, the view on the other side may just be a bit greener.

one thing that never goes out of business

I’m writing from the dark place.

The dark place happens when deadlines are looming and weekends fill up with errands and the trash needs to be taken out but there is very little time to do so and there seems to be so much more ahead of what one really wants to do – fun things like catching a good summer blockbuster movie, or scouting out cheap tickets to a summer concert, reading a good book, visiting with friends or letting a mind turn to mush in front of pointless television.

The dark place happens when problem solving takes the front seat and innovation takes the back.

In matters of business, if economic pressures of a changing socio-economic climate is the dark place – it is, as a matter of fact – that innovation that is the light to help us find our way out of the tunnel.

I have a thing for entrepreneurs. Maybe it's just the fancy title or the fact that they have their own magazine. But then, writers and musicians and sock puppets have their own magazine, so come to think of it...that's probably not it. I have a thing for entrepreneurs. Because it seems like such a rush to, one afternoon, be sitting in a leather arm chair somewhere, pondering one's business, one's direction, possibly a glass of scotch in hand and the next day – putting that plan into action. Developing that idea into a bona fide business, scouting out space and strategies, turning one simple idea into the next big thing.

There are probably plenty of ways to describe an entrepreneur, but that seasoned figure, sitting in a leather arm chair…mind as electric as a lightning storm…that's how I romanticize them. I could romanticize a turkey sandwich, but still... I have a thing for entrepreneurs.

When I first thought up a series focusing on some of the area’s own savvy business minds, I thought the least I could get out of it was a handy mini-slate of stories. At the very least, maybe a better idea of whether or not all the talk about the nation’s innovators would have a strong impact generating new business throughout the country, thereby aiding in a rebound of the economy, carries any weight.

What I got, however, was one of the most inspiring projects I have had a chance to work on yet.

Some businesses may be faltering. Car sales are down and home sales are down and they trickle down to the machine shops and the real estate firms and before you know it you’re muttering to yourself as you head home, thick in the dark place, that you’re lucky to have a job.

But one business that will never suffer – one commodity that will always be in demand – are ideas. Good ideas. Brilliant, creative, innovative ideas.

Walking into Veni’s Sweet Shop to pick up a few delicious treats at the end of a hard day, driving past Tem-Pace’s facility in the heart of Niles’ industrial area on Terminal Road, peeking at the products being thought up over at G&H Machine Group – and as you’ll hear Monday, learning about how the guys at Thesis in Three Oaks are taking other people’s ideas and giving them tangible identity to make them visible to their target markets, may all sound like business as usual. But it is not.

Each has, standing behind the curtain, an innovator whose passion is evident in every aspect of their business. Each is a brain child of an idea that was thought up in living rooms, libraries, offices or during a break from work when a little stress needed relieving.

Through the cultivation of these ideas, businesses are created, a need is provided for and sometimes – just sometimes – our world is changed by the products and services these entrepreneurs put their blood, sweat, tears and dollars into creating. Without such innovators – we might not have an automobile industry just waiting for us to re-imagine it. We might have an industry of news just waiting for a creative new way of getting to people. We might not have television or movies to lose ourselves in. We might not have that designer handbag that we covet or our favorite pair of tennis shoes – or Starbucks.

I have a thing for entrepreneurs because they are risk takers. Savvy in their industries and tireless workers. Their passions are their business. And it shows. It shows in a unique quality. In a desire to constantly make their businesses better. Be it through finding stronger methods of human resources, finding good financial advice to weather a tough economy, developing a diversity or even just hanging on to a faith that keeps them going when they fear they’ve put everything they have into something that the masses just need to be exposed to.

Their businesses are true reflections of themselves.

Each month, Entrepreneur Magazine highlights businesses such as these. They offer up advice on everything from venture capitalists to building a better website. I read up their articles like candy.

Because they’re all based in ideas.

No matter what your passion is – whether it is what you do every day – or just what you long to do…there is something to be learned from these brave businessmen and women who are one by one, storefront by storefront, office space by office space and endeavor by delicious endeavor – changing our world.

Instead of focusing on what is not working – on what the masses no longer seem to be drawn to – innovators focus, rather, on what might entice. And they go after those ideas with reckless abandon.

It is a warm thought. A light in the dark place. That dream business you always wanted to start, the nonprofit organization you always wanted to put your time into, the product you always thought would look good on a shelf in a store somewhere – now is the time to pull out the drawing pad, even as the sun sinks below the horizon and the day’s hours grow long – and just start sketching it out a little bit. The idea of an entrepreneur, for some, for me anyway, has always emitted a “lone ranger” quality. Those seasoned men and women work tirelessly and furiously on their own to turn their vision into tangible reality.

But that’s not true. Ideas breathe in the like-mindosphere I’ve mentioned a time or two before.

Take the chance and begin throwing them out there – and you might just find a talented resource in the form of a counterpart, or a colleague or a supportive spouse. Each of them a face you’ll see when you look back at the forefront of your dream. Be sure to read about the guys at Thesis (www.designbythesis.com) on Monday and check out www.entrepreneur.com the next time you’re in the mood for a little inspiration.

Better yet – tempt your sweet tooth at Veni’s, indulge in the art of glass at Tem-Pace’s Carapace, take a second look at www.ghmachinegroup.com or step inside any of the unique businesses right here, right outside your door.

one year later - still living the dream

There's a thing about writers. Novelists, screenwriters, poets, essayists, journalists. We have a thing. And I can't quote this as my own - I read it long ago, in Nora Ephron's novel "Heartburn." The thing is: everything is copy.

We writers pass you on the street as you're window shopping, picking up groceries, picking your kids up from school. We take notes. We watch your eyes. We look for the joy and the sadness. We jot it down in our mental notepads and when you close your eyes to sleep, we hang on to those little details. We put them all together in fictitious tales where you are the hero - or we remember the reality of them when we try to tell the stories of our world.

We try not to eavesdrop when we're sitting next to you in a café, but we can't help it. And we hear you divulge your greatest secrets, your vulnerabilities, your annoyances to the people you trust - or those you like just enough to tell them so. They make up the characters in our plays, the heroes in our comic books. That's what we writers do.

There's a thing about journalists. We don't just write up stories to fill pages. When this whole gig started, the founding fathers of our craft built a platform of truth and poignancy. Our job is not just to inform and to tell the truth - but to present the world as it is - as it matters.

And it all matters.

We tell the stories that can't be made up. From the long lines for corn dogs and the way a child's eyes light up the first time they see the county fair to the way to shelling of war torn villages in lands far, far away.

We sit back and we watch - and more often than not - we try to give a voice to those who may feel they have none. We try to keep them informed. We put it down on the page and we hope against hope that at the end of the day, we have done a good job at whatever story we have tried to tell.

This week marked my first year here at the Niles Daily Star. And one year later ... I try to think of everything that has changed my world since then.

The dream, originally, was as romantic as Cary Grant following after Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday." Wake up to the sound of the bustling city, the grumblings and the heavy trucks and the sirens and the heartbeat of the streets. Step out into a crisp morning and wonder, where are the sirens headed, what's the grumbling about, how's the heartbeat today as you pick up a cup of coffee and tuck the competitor's rag under your arm and head into the newsroom. And the sound of the rustling of the pages is like the best soundtrack.

Well, dreams change.

In a year, several presses have gone quiet. It's a wonder how many will ultimately survive a world that used to churn out so much newsprint that children's hands were stained with ink after an afternoon of "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" It's not that the world doesn't read anymore. It's just that they want to read everything in 140 characters or less.

And that matters.

When the gig started, there was no question of its relevance. And there was no need to be punchy. Martha Gellhorn wrote more than just reports on the shelling of Madrid in 1937. Without falling into bias like just about every other journalist that comes out of college with the dream of being the next coiffed morning talk show host, she wrote searing descriptions of the men and women and children who remained amidst the rubble. Who continued their walk to the market under a charcoal grey sky.

She wrote the world as it was. And it was enough. And it inspired the dream.

Some dreams change. Today, for instance, Cary Grant would likely be uploading a tweet on his Blackberry while chasing after Rosalind Russell through a newsroom with several empty desks and ergonomic office furniture and a bunch of writers who aren't sure what the dream is anymore.

When I lose the dream, I look back to Gellhorn and remember that original dream. And all of the others that I have stored up in a special file. The streets of Havana. The back alleys of Gaza. The cliffs of Santorini. The streets of New York City. Madrid. And everywhere in between.

More and more industry heavyweights are grasping at finding the new in the dream. They're busy, "reinventing" the magazine, trying to make their websites profitable, putting their presses to bed, trying to figure out how to make advertising lucrative again. And more and more journalists are getting worried that there may be no platform in the future for their words.

We writers have a thing. We watch you, we build on you, we tell your stories. The best we can. In one way or another. The relevance of that can only end in all of you. If you choose not to find any relevance in each other.

One year ago, I came in with a little dream. When I started, all I wanted to do was write for a newspaper. Check.

Thankfully - I'm reminded today of how much that dream has grown. I want Cary Grant. Rosalind Russell. Martha Gellhorn. Madrid.

I don't want to reinvent the art of journalism. I want to recreate it. Just as it was meant to be. Because even when the presses go quiet and shrink to the size of a microchip - the stories we tell are bigger and better than ever. They're you.

Everything is copy. It all matters.

Extra, extra, tweet it up - get thee to a blog - but most of all ... read all about it.

Jessica Sieff is a reporter for the Niles Daily Star. Reach her at jessica.sieff@leaderpub.com.

the battle to save the shop around the corner

“Let’s take a better look/Beyond our storybook/And learn our souls are all we own/Before we turn to stone…” ‘Turn to Stone’ - Ingrid Michaelson

There are those who live for what they do. And they know nothing but. And now, in a time of such economical and cultural change, we realize that sometimes, we have to be able to expand ourselves, our skills. We have to be able to be diversified. Still, there is a mourning in this shift, which is shaking the futures of Americans in industrial shops across the country.

I have written before about the soft spot I have for industry. The small mom and pop machine shops where mornings consist of thermoses of coffee, uniforms with names embroidered over where the heart lies not far underneath, beating with the hum of large, bulky, various machines.

My affection for this integral part of our country’s heritage has only strengthened since last I wrote about it. Because we have something in common those industrial, tool and die, machine shops and me. Both of the mediums in which we work are in serious danger of becoming obsolete.

I think as a country, we all thought bailout money would bail us out. The big auto dealers would turn around with brand new cars we would have never thought they would come up with. And we would all want to buy them. And the money would just appear in our pockets. And the lines would run again.

And thanks to those lines, the rest of the world of industry would pick up. People would be all about building things and making things and developing things and it would all consist of heavy machinery and construction and manual labor. And parking lots would be full. And families would be secure. And our engineers, machinists, welders, etc. would not be facing the threat of their own extinction. But things haven’t turned out that way.

The all too recent example is 450 lives that hang in the balance of Tyler Refrigeration. Elsewhere, industrial parks sit all but abandoned. Plants have gone dark.

The New York Times recently went to Grafton, Wis., to sit in on a layoff at a family owned tool and die manufacturing company in which the vice president of administration, with the final list of those who would have to go, sank into tears after she had informed them all of the unfortunate news. The Washington Post took a look at areas such as Michigan, which had once thrived off of an auto industry that has all but gone away, searching for industries that might put people back to work in the future. Healthcare. Green jobs. But the future's classification stings. “Uncertain.” At www.toolanddieing.com, almost every moment of this struggle is chronicled with updates, stories of businesses across the country and links to resources within the industry.

I can appreciate community colleges that are reaching out to help those shop workers who may find themselves in need of “retooling”... But I am sincerely afraid to lose our industry. Because the fact of the matter is, if we lose our industry – we will have turned our backs on our own legacy. We will have built a history on the backs of our grandfathers and our fathers, who know this crazy world of steel and sweat better than we could ever hope to learn from history books, only to tear it down without so much as a Plan B. We have to save the shop around the corner because our grandfathers and fathers don’t have a Plan B.

Many small businesses, tool and die, CNC, precision machining, are looking for help in order to survive. Yet as a country, we don’t have so much as a method of CPR. Loans are tough to accept as a resolution when you’re struggling to keep employees. And if you’re looking for any help beyond that – coming from someone who has seen the frustration of many trying to do just that – good luck.

We have to save the shop around the corner – because it means starting with the big businesses uptown. Those who would have us all believe that the future of innovation couldn’t possibly gain anything from wearing a blue collar. It means pooling our most valuable resources, the men and women of the line and taking another look at what this country can do to build itself back up again. It would mean building a future workforce that can benefit from the teachings of the old school and the capabilities of the new school. It would mean enticing entrepreneurs to find new ideas that could put men and women back to work.

Because it can't all be that bad. It can't be that this is how their story ends. It means thinking hard, lending a hand, taking a chance on a new idea. We should save the shop around the corner because it would mean looking at our priorities. Priorities are goals for the future and truly inventive ideas. Stop-gaps are not truly inventive ideas.

Most of all – we should save the shop around the corner because it’s about the ideals. Those ideals are what built our railroads, mined our coal, generated our power, laid our brick, built our cars, our homes…our past. Our present. That our best asset is our hands, our minds and the ability to use them both at the same time. We have to save the shop around the corner – because if we don’t – what will be the next thing to go? Will our work ethic evaporate like fine dust that sloughs off metal shavings only to settle corners of the shops that now sit empty, nothing but natural light and shadows and locked doors. Will we no longer feel the need for inventiveness? Will we lose our convictions?

We have to keep looking for solutions. We have to keep asking for help. Put in the hours. Burn the midnight oil. It sounds so incredibly melodramatic, I know.

So how about this…we have to save the shop around the corner, because if we don’t, we will have a hard time meeting our neighbor’s eye when we pass them on the street. And because when our shops shut down – the silence will be deafening.