Dan’s Diner

SOPA’s Potential Impact on eBook Publishing

A lot has been said about how SOPA would impact Web sites, but not the nascent eBook self-publishing movement. I’m cross-posting this from BookBrewer.com as part of today’s SOPA protest. Feel free to repost it with attribution.

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This morning you’re probably hearing a lot about SOPA and PIPA, which stand for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. You can read more about them on Wikipedia.

Wait, did that link work? Not if you clicked it on January 18, 2012. Wikipedia has temporarily shut down its site in protest to show what would happen if these laws were passed. They and thousands of other sites that allow anyone to publish content could cease to exist due to SOPA provisions that let copyright holders block sites that they accuse of aiding piracy.

BookBrewer is a self-publishing service, so that includes us.

We’re not shutting BookBrewer down in protest today, but we do feel it’s important to take a stand on SOPA and PIPA with respect to eBook publishing. We fear that SOPA would largely nullify the “safe harbor” copyright provisions that allow us and other companies like us to operate self-publishing services. That could effectively stop the eBook self-publishing movement in its tracks — a real travesty given the proven potential for eBooks to fund content creation.

How Current Copyright Law Makes BookBrewer Possible

BookBrewer and services like it exist expressly to help anyone publish content to sell as eBooks and on-demand paperbacks. Like Wikipedia and Facebook, our publishing tools are set up to allow you to work on your content without external interference. We don’t — and in fact, we can’t — review and edit every book that goes through our system (and you don’t want us to). That’s what makes us a publishing service and not a traditional publisher.

In order to operate such an ecosystem, we require authors to agree to common-sense terms, such as “you agree that you own the copyright to everything you’re publishing” and “you agree that you aren’t engaging in plagiarism.” We take them at their word and only investigate if someone notifies us or files a notice under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) Safe Harbor Provisions.

In our 15-month history we have only received one such DMCA notice, despite having thousands of books go through our system. Following the DMCA process, we promptly removed that eBook from circulation and nicely informed the author of the claim. It turns out she had inadvertently used “Dummies” in her book title (a term trademark owned by Wiley), so she renamed the book and republished it. It was an easy, straightforward and fair process for everyone involved.

How SOPA Would Change Things

How would this story change under SOPA? That one complaint could cause BookBrewer to be labeled a piracy site, and the author as a pirate. Our domain name could be blocked, effectively shutting down BookBrewer, and payments we receive through PayPal could be shut off.

The same could happen to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo and all the places where the eBook is sold. In fact, selling content with copyright violations is even more dangerous than distributing it due to the potential for monetary damages. We wonder if eBook retailers would even accept self-published content anymore.

Say Goodbye to In-Book Links

But believe it or not, it gets even worse. BookBrewer includes an RSS import feature for bloggers that lets them quickly import their blog posts, edit them and publish eBooks from their blogs. That includes the links from the imported blogs.

SOPA requires sites in the U.S. that link to offshore “rogue web sites” to remove those links or face legal action. Since an eBook is essentially a mobile Web site, who’s the pirate in this case, and what’s the Web site? Is it the eBook?

Let’s look at blogger Brad Feld, who agreed to let us use him as an example in this post. He’s published two books in the past (Do More Faster and Venture Deals) through a traditional publisher. His third book about Entrepreneurial Communities will be self-published.

Since the eBook is based on Brad’s blog posts over the years, you can bet that it will include plenty of links to external sites. If he happened to link to something that contains copyrighted material that was used without permission, guess what? Brad’s eBook itself could be considered a party to piracy. Say “Arrrr,” Brad!

To those who say that SOPA applies to Web sites and not eBooks, we beg to differ. Every eBook is essentially a self-contained Web site that you can copy to your device of choice. How many already published eBooks would need to be rewritten to remove hyperlinks? Could we as BookBrewer continue to host them? Could anyone? The legal liability would be too high.

In the End, It’s About You

We’ve explained how SOPA would impact BookBrewer and our business, but that’s not what bothers us the most. We worry about what will happen to you, the self-publishing authors who are redefining what it means to “get published.”

It’s one thing for a startup to get shut down, but even worse for an honest individual to be made out as a criminal. The average self-published author is over 40 years old, and is someone’s mom, dad, grandmother, uncle or teacher. We’re increasingly seeing books from college students and teens, and even a few art eBooks from elementary school kids publishing with their parents’ permission.

We understand that piracy is a real problem for large publishers, but there are more effective and fair ways to deal with it. Tying the hands of honest writers and allowing them to be labeled as criminals is not the solution.

If you agree, please call or write to your member of Congress and let them know what you think of SOPA.

Dan Pacheco
Founder, BookBrewer.com

CU Journalism: Looking Ahead to a Bright Future

This week the University of Colorado Board of Regents finally voted to close the School of Journalism. It’s a difficult decision that makes a lot of people nervous, including me at one time (after which I changed my mind). But now I have to honest. I feel more than ever that this was the right decision, and I’m looking forward to what happens next.

For better or worse, I’m closely connected to this years-long saga. I’m a CU-journalism school alum, and I’m also one of a majority of advisors to the school who signed a letter one year ago recommending its closure. It’s quite ironic given that the topic here is journalism, but there’s a bigger story here that is being under-reported — and in some cases misreported — by trained journalists.

As explained in our original letter recommending closure, the main reason for closing the school was to break up a dysfunctional organization that actively resisted change at every step of the way over many years. We also felt that the school had become too inwardly focused as its own entity and, as a result, was largely unaware of and even dismissive of the digital innovations that have reshaped the media landscape over the last decade. When I say this I’m talking about the school as a whole, as there have always been individuals — usually non-tenure-track instructors or staff — who bucked the trend. But it was the larger trend and culture that had to be changed.

Shutting something down is never any fun, but now that closure is final, the second and far more interesting and exciting phase of reinvention can finally begin. I and others on the now disbanded advisory board have met with University of Colorado Provost Russell Moore and come to believe that the larger goal of interdisciplinary, experiential learning is more possible now than ever before.

CU’s leadership is committed to bringing the study of journalism and media together with other disciplines such as computer science, art and design, marketing, entrepreneurship and even natural science. But more importantly, there seems to be a growing desire to give undergraduate and graduate students from different disciplines more interactive laboratory-like experiences that mirror what students must do to succeed in the real world. That’s music to my ears, and I say “bring it on!”

As someone who started at CU as an engineering student, dabbled in the College of Music, ran the editorial and business operations of the college newspaper, and finally graduated with a degree in journalism, I think CU now has an opportunity to make things easier for the next generation of students. I should not have needed to hop between silos in order to get a well-rounded education in media and technology. Now it appears those walls could fall down for good so that future students can learn the basics of reporting and storytelling while also learning about, say, molecular biology or business law.

In an age when millions participate in the “act” of journalism — whether through Facebook, Twitter or the Huffington Post — I think it’s a good thing for anyone in any discipline to receive the training and experience that is currently only available on an island of a journalism school.

We still need trained journalists, but more importantly we need a more socially responsible and empowered information society. Mashing up journalism training with other disciplines reflects not just where things need to be within a university setting, but where they are in the world today.

So I’m optimistic, but as someone who was trained to be a skeptic, I also have a warning. Those of you in Colorado who care deeply about living in a well-informed society need to pay attention to how CU “walks the walk” it has been talking for the last year. The risk over the next few years is that despite good intentions, budgetary concerns will lead to cuts and consolidations that take things backward.

At our final advisory board meeting, graduate school dean John Stevenson, who is now responsible for the “Journalism Plus” program that will house journalism faculty before the full ICMT vision is executed, said something that characterized this well.  Stevenson said, “We’ve basically taken a crisis situation and used it as an opportunity to move forward.” That’s exactly what CU has done here, and its leaders need to be commended. But they also need to be encouraged and supported to continue to move forward.

It’s important to pay attention, but more importantly to get involved. Regardless of your background, if you care about journalism and media and feel you have something to add, let the University of Colorado know that you care and give them your ideas. I think this is especially important for entrepreneurs and technologists. While I no longer have any official connection to journalism at CU, I intend to at least stay informed, and will get involved in ways where I think I can be helpful. If you’ve read this far you’re also one of those people, so join me and do the same.

Apply to the Denver Founder Institute

Dreaming of your own startup? This is your moment. The next Denver Founder Institute starts in May, and it’s now accepting early applications.

As an alum from 2010 I can tell you that this is a great program that comes with a top-notch network of entrepreneurs from around the world. We entered the program with a fuzzy idea and emerged with BookBrewer. Some other cool companies were born too, including JetJaw, VisuTalk and CipherPoint. I recommend FI to anyone who is serious about starting a company.

This year’s Denver session will be co-lead by Jon Nordmark, CEO of UsingMiles (founder of eBags) and Jim Franklin of Oracle Crystal Ball fame. They’re two of Colorado tech’s best, but they’re also joined by a strong lineup of CEO mentors. You can see past mentors from Denver and other FI programs here.

If you’re not in Denver, there may be another Founder Institute program near you, as it currently operates in 17 cities worldwide. Learn more and sign up at http://founderinstitute.com.

What Makes Founder Institute Unique?

The Founder Institute isn’t the only technology incubator program out there, nor is it in competition with them. In fact, some of the CEOs who mentor Boulder’s excellent TechStars program also get involved in FI (including Franklin, who’s also a mentor in TechStars).

If you’re serious about starting a company and think an incubator is right for you, you’re looking into many programs. So what makes Founder Institute different and unique?

For one, you don’t have to quit your day job, as all of the weekly sessions are at night. Most start around 6-ish and go until around 9. You get to hear the real-life stories of people who started companies and succeeded, then talk to them afterward (sometimes over beer). This is way more fun than it sounds, and your mind will be buzzing every night with ideas from what you learned.

For another, the goal of the program is not necessarily to lead you up to an investor pitch day or to get funded right away — although there are opportunities to talk to investors. You’ll learn a lot about how to get funding should you needed it, but you’ll also learn about how to “bootstrap” — which in some ways is more effective at first because it shows potential investors that your business has legs. Most of the focus is on your idea, your product, your business model and your ability to execute. How you choose to run or fund your business after that is completely up to you.

And finally, while I don’t know enough about the other programs to know how they compare in this regard, in Founder Institute you get a lot of feedback from your fellow class members. You’re assigned to three different working groups of 4-5 people throughout the semester and are encouraged to share information about your businesses, collectively brainstorm and poke holes.

I personally found the small-group aspect to be the most helpful in the end, because let’s face it. Entrepreneurship is hard and often lonely. Having a community of peers makes a big difference in the end. Having to constantly talk about my business with others in a safe, non-threatening way helped me identify problems and other opportunities early on before spending my hard-earned money making mistakes (although I did make some of those, and you will too).

The most unique aspect that I don’t believe exists in other programs is shared ownership. After a certain date in the program your peers get a small fraction of your business, and you theirs, so you all have an incentive to help each other succeed. In my view this is largely symbolic, as the percentages are so low to make a big payout unlikely unless someone is sitting on the next Facebook. You primarily help each other because of your friendship and shared goals, but I won’t exactly complain if one of the companies in my class makes it big and I get a check in the mail as a result.

And that gets to the best thing about Founder Institute, which I suspect other programs share. After “graduation,” you’re part of a global community of other entrepreneurs who are always ready and willing to help each other out. What you’ll find as you embark on a startup is that anyone crazy enough to have founded a company before is always happy to help newcomers. Founder Institute takes that a step further by also knitting together a community of entrepreneurs who help each other long after graduation.

Recent Thoughts on CU’s Journalism School

Hey, Journalists. It’s Time to Publish eBooks!

Some of you may have heard that I’m now running a startup called BookBrewer that makes it easy for people to create and publish eBooks that can be sold right next to John Grisham or Norah Jones. The project grew out of my Knight News Challenge Printcasting project. It has the same “anyone can be a publisher” message, but with a different output.

We also now power the eBook creation service for Borders called Borders Get Published: http://borders.bookbrewer.com.

Borders and BookBrewer are interested in promoting all quality content that comes through this co-branded service. Given my jouralism background, I’ve been telling Borders that news organizations have a a lot of good “bookable” content that people would buy if it were presented in eBook format, including:

• Multipart investigative news packages.
• Collections of stories and photos about major events, such as big disasters, elections, sports events and the like.
• “News you can use,” such as financial advice and car-buying tips.
• Columnists who have a following and/or blogs that could be brought together and sold as a book. I point to this collection of hiking guides from a former Boulder Daily Camera columnist as an example.
• Collections of celebrity interviews, biographies and even celebrity obituaries.

Borders is now promoting Get Published in e-mails that reach tens of millions each week, as well as on its Web site. One of my favorite things to be able to say about this job that I’ve created for myself is that I have the ability to recommend content for Borders to feature. They’re actually asking me for suggestions, but they want to know that it came through their Get Published service.

So I have two questions for journalists:

1. What type of content are you aware of that newspapers or non-profit news organizations have that could be packaged and resold a book — especially an on-demand eBook?
2. What specific news organization-provided content are you aware of that you would love to see as a book?

And then there’s the question that I’m NOT asking, which is the inevitable “Why would anyone buy content that’s available for free online?” That’s the wrong question to ask because the fact is that the eBook market is exploding right now. People are buying all kinds of content as books, even content from Twitter feeds like “Sh*t My Dad Says.” If you don’t believe me, here are the stats: http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm

eBooks are a great opportunity for news organizations, and as a previous News Challenge winner nothing would make me happier than to see some news organizations and especially freelance writers use BookBrewer to fund their great journalism. It’s also a great opportunity to shift the paid-content debate away from paywalls (which I still think are a terrible idea) and toward a paid-content model that is already working. We have the power to harness the energy from that decade-long debate and refocus it on a proven model.

My CU-Boulder J School Letter, Part Two

On the eve of the University of Colorado’s expected recommendation to close its Journalism School (for which I’m an advisor), I just sent this letter to Provost Russell Moore and Exploratory Committee chair Merrill Lessley. I copied Chancellor Phil DiStefano.

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Russ & Merrill,

I want to thank you for meeting with the CU Journalism School Advisory Board last week. It gave me a better idea of what the exploratory committee is thinking.

I was particularly happy to hear that you are not, in fact, proposing a faculty-only research institute — something I believe would be a tragedy if done at the expense of undergraduate and graduate education. A state-funded university should always be first and foremost about its students, and any research and development must also include students as much as possible.

You may remember me as the angry board member who spouted off about his discontent with the SJMC discontinuance / exploratory process at a public hearing, then expounded on my blog. I’m still dissatisfied with the process, but just to be clear, I am 100% in favor of the reinvention of journalism education — and then some — and I am still in favor of the school’s discontinuance.

More to the point, I’m passionate about the need to give CU students rich, interdisciplinary, project-based experience. Why? Because that is what I received from CU 16 years ago (more on that later).

What You Have to Gain

CU now has a unique opportunity to not only teach students about responsible and effective uses of digital publishing, but to help them “learn by doing” with other students from business, computer science, law and even art & design. These are the important roles in any startup, business and even non-profit, and the most novel innovations always come out of companies where people of such different and complementary backgrounds work together.

If you set up this new entity the right way, I think it’s likely that the next Google or Facebook will come out of CU — but with much more thought put into their desirable effects on society.

Why should you believe me? I have a unique background as a Boulder entrepreneur who attended the School of Engineering and College of Music for two years, then graduated from the School of Journalism. Think of me as someone who created his own ATLAS experience before ATLAS existed.

Since earning my CU degree, I have worked on the leading edge of user-contributed content and social networking at iconic brands like The Washington Post and Knight Ridder, as well as “pure-play” Internet companies like America Online and now my own Boulder-based startup, FeedBrewer.

Thinking back to my college days, it was interdisciplinary experiences with other students that best prepared me for my career. Through what was then called the Campus Press newspaper (now the CU Independent), I digitized all operations and put the “paper” online for the first time — quite literally stumbling about in the dark of Macky Auditorium and learning as I went along. This experience prepared me for a career in the digital operations of iconic news brands, and now my own startup company.

But thanks to my journalism classes, I was also well prepared for the responsibility side of providing digital news and information. My training in writing, research methods, accurate and fair reporting, ethics and media law gave me valuable skills that I use to this day. And while I didn’t take any advertising classes, what I learned about business while running the Campus Press — which under my watch was brought out of $50,000 in debt for the first time — gave me a good grounding in business and marketing.

What You Stand to Lose

So now let me get to the point of what I am most concerned about, which speaks to what Merrill Lessley means when he says that what’s at stake is the future of human society. And it speaks directly to the main reason I supported discontinuance.

As legacy media companies and “media forms” falter and fail, the core needs that they fill for communities are being taken up by  entrepreneurial startups (both for- and non-profit). This is a great thing, but these organizations are in large part unequipped to deal with their new responsibility to society.

I personally feel a sense of guilt about this, because at AOL and now even at my BookBrewer.com startup, I fanned the flames that allow anyone to publish to a community of interest — something that not that long ago was only possible for a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station.

I firmly believe that digital self-publishing is the purest expression of Democracy and I’m proud of what I’ve helped happen, but where our society is gaining in some ways, it’s losing in others. People are increasingly getting their news from ideologically filtered sources, and even from commercial brands like consumer packaged goods (yes, now even Tide is a source of news and information!)

These new types of organizations and companies need the same basic training in truth, accuracy, fairness, research, and good writing that are taught in journalism schools — and currently ONLY journalism schools. And how will they get these skills? From their university.

This is About Society, Not Industry

Where I probably differ from some is that I really don’t care what happens to legacy media companies anymore, or the “news industry” as it is currently organized. Despite a lot of attempts (including by me) to help these companies innovate from within, I now feel that most are destined to disappear. Their problems go beyond their ability to embrace technology, and go straight to how these companies are managed and the business models upon which they’re built. Most will fail because they simply cannot save themselves.

Realize that this is quite a statement from someone who only a few years ago receive a “20 Under 40″ award from the Newspaper Association of America. It’s not that I dislike newspapers — I just don’t think their organizations have been able to change quickly enough.

This makes training the individuals and startups that are already replacing these organizations all the more urgent. As a society, it’s in all of our best interest to ensure that the next generation of “journalists” however that is defined are trained in the most important values that the news industry has fostered for centuries.

The Path Ahead

In closing, I urge you to think hard about how to provide the right mix of journalism education along with ample opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students of many disciplines to collaborate and learn together. If CU can graduate seniors who have hands-on experience working on projects — or even developing products — in conjunction with students who have different backgrounds and expertise (software engineering, business, content, community, and even entertainment) they will be the most sought-after graduates in the country. And society will be all the better for it.

If, however, you kill your journalism school and create a faculty-only research institute (an expensive playground), you will be part of society’s problems and not their solutions. Please choose the right path!

Thoughts after 8 months in my own startup

It’s been nearly eight months since I co-founded FeedBrewer, Inc., and five months since drawing a traditional salary.

In the days leading up to the company’s formation, and especially before leaving the comfort of having someone else paying me, I’ve learned that I was actually better prepared than I thought. I should have started my own company a long time ago. But I’ll never forget the sleepless nights in the early days when I would wake up in a cold sweat, heart thumping, wondering if I was making a big mistake for myself and my family.

A good friend just moved to Boulder, and I’ve been telling him that he’s a startup waiting to happen. After he shared some of his fears with me I sent him the following in an e-mail. I’m sharing this more broadly in the hopes that others will benefit (but with personal information removed.

Are You Ready for Your Own Startup?

If you’ve always dreamed of running your own startup company, your temptation will be to think that you’re not ready. After 8 months I’ve learned that you’re ready if the following are true:

1. You have planned ahead financially, which means having savings to draw on and reducing your expenses. Every true startup has to go through the “ramen phase.” No real startup is sustained on steak dinners. (The 1990s were an aberration in that regard).
2. Your family and support network is on board. If they’re not you need to either get them on board (which can take a while), or change course. This can take time. Looking back, while my wife was supportive of my startup, I can’t say that she was necessarily excited about it. Something changed after a few months and she started to see that I was making traction. She started coming up with ideas, then asked to be involved. Then other friends, family and even neighbors did the same. This is the biggest factor in my startup’s success that I never considered in the early stages, but now consider essential.
3. You’re passionate about what you’re trying to do. Your startup has to be something that makes you get up every day with a smile on your face because you know you’re building meaning, and because it makes you proud. Note that I didn’t say anything about money here. The promise of making a lot of money has to come second in my opinion, because otherwise the ramen doesn’t taste so good.
4. You are passionate about building something that you own and fully control, and you’re comfortable with taking responsibility for its successes and failures.
5. You want true personal freedom and financial independence. Someone once told me “Money is stored up choices.” If you think of money that way, you know that all the time and sacrifice you put into a startup will pay off one day with freedom. You can look forward to not feeling like you have to do certain things just to maintain your lifestyle, whatever it may be. My personal financial goal is to one day be able to focus my energies solely on things that I feel are making a positive difference in the world and/or are just fun. Everything else is secondary to that.
6. You have a Plan B if your startup doesn’t work out on a predetermined timeframe. If my startup were to fail (and I seriously doubt that now based on recent developments), my plan has always been to create so much heat and light during its existence that it makes me infinitely more employable should I need to go back to work for a traditional company. Nobody ever faults someone for giving something their best, and every noble effort is experience that you can put on your resume.

I suspect most future entrepreneurs reading this will be able to say yes to 80% of the conditions above. The trick is to get past 1) and 2), and that takes planning and time. But in my experience, if you’re truly passionate about what you’re trying to do, you will do it. Maybe not today, but when you and those around you are ready.

And my last message to my friend was this: “When you’re ready I will be right down there in the trenches with you cheering you on and helping you any way I can!”

I will do this for any entrepreneur who I know and respect. Why? Because so many others have done it for me. I never understood the value of community to entrepreneurship and small business until I ran my own startup. Giving back to other newbies is my way to pay back what I received from the Karma bank.

The Future of the University of Colorado’s Journalism School

It has been a while since I was a journalist, and truth be told most of my career has been more about supporting journalists or helping everyday people publish their stories without the aid of gatekeepers. But despite that, I am still a product of the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication (class of 1994). I received a lot of help from CU in my younger years, and because of that I will always feel a sense of obligation to help other CU students realize their full potential.

I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on the school’s advisory board for the past four years, and signed a controversial letter in the Spring of 2010 recommending the school’s closure. Many were surprised at this, but it was a nearly unanimous board decision that was made based on the key assumption that “discontinuance” was a necessary step to create a more ambitious, cross-functional entity that brings technology and media closer together.

I put my faith in the multi-headed hydra that is the University of Colorado to hold true to that promise, and I backed it with my reputation. I’m sad to say that based on how things are unfolding, CU is failing miserably at keeping that promise. But I think there is still a last chance for the school to do right by its students and alums like me.

Tonight I delivered the following message to the “exploratory committee” that is considering what to do with the pieces left behind after CU’s J-school is shut down. When I learned that the committee is considering an institute meant purely for faculty and graduate students to collaborate on projects they want to work on with no opportunities for undergraduate students, I could no longer stay silent.

My message to the committee, and to CU’s administration — especially Chancellor Phil DiStefano — is simple. Don’t allow this horribly bungled process to destroy an opportunity to create a new, world-class educational opportunity for students who may very well create the next Facebook or Twitter. And I have to tell you, you’re really close to doing that. I’m profoundly disappointed in you and the way you have handled this situation, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt in hopes that you can make it whole.

The rest of my message speaks for itself:

____________________________

Comments to the University of Colorado Exploratory Committee for Information, Communication and Technology
Dan Pacheco, October 20, 2010
Four-year member of the Journalism School Advisory Committee

Good evening,

My name is Dan Pacheco, and I am a CU alum and a product of the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication (class of 1994). The education and opportunities I received at this school allowed my career to blossom in ways that have had a large and storied impact on the increasingly dynamic and cross-functional field we call “media.” While my work spans multiple industries – including journalism, but also Web technology — I’m often cited as an example to budding new journalists about what’s possible for them and their future careers.

You may have heard of or even used some of the projects I championed:

• Soon after graduating, I found a job on the team that launched Washingtonpost.com.
• I spent six years at America Online managing innovative community and user-contributed content services that were used by tens of millions of AOL members in their day.
• I pioneered the use of so-called “citizen journalism” and social networking within the newspaper industry at The Bakersfield Californian and have been invited around the world to help other newspapers launch similar programs.
• I am a past recipient of an $837,000 Knight News Challenge grant to democratize magazine publishing, and as part of that fraternity I regularly blog on the PBS Web site.
• Most recently, I have my own brand new startup off Pearl Street called BookBrewer, an e-book creation service which Borders just chose to power self-publishing for its audience of 37 million.

For these reasons and more, I’m regularly invited to speak to students about my career path as well as my views on the future of media. It’s also why I’ve sat on the advisory board of the J-school these past four years.

I’m not one of those wealthy individuals who sits on a board in order to direct the use of his millions (I have none), or because I’m looking for ways to fill my time (none of that, either!) To be honest, I’m so busy these days in my career that it’s an ongoing struggle to give extra time to CU on my own dime. Still, I give on average a few hundred dollars a year at the full discretion of the dean, and this week alone I talked to three different classes for 90 minutes.

I sit on the J-school’s advisory board for one and only one reason: I am passionate about helping afford those same opportunities to students who sit in the same chairs I did 15 years ago.  And in this age of rapid change, it’s why I have increasingly advocated for different, cross-functional and ultimately more integrative approaches to journalism education.

But enough about that. Let me share with you my frustration with CU and the bungled process that is alternately referred to as “discontinuance” and “exploration.” Then, I want to clearly outline what I personally believe CU needs to do in order to prepare students for the Digital Now.

But first, let me just clarify something. I want to make it extremely clear what I as a signatory on the Advisory board’s letter supporting discontinuance intended by that action.

With one exception, we unanimously supported discontinuance because it was seen as an important and necessary step to create a more multi-disciplinary program that would afford new opportunities to primarily undergraduate students, and secondarily to graduate students. Where it included research, it would be more focused on solving the problems of today and tomorrow, and less on studying nearly-dead media models from the past.

I personally also wanted CU to be able to offer a top-notch program that was focused on experiential learning and even research and development. I wanted students from other, non-content-related disciplines such as computer science and entrepreneurship to be able to work together. Why? These are the disciplines that are currently causing the most disruption and change to media, and causing legacy media forms to fall. They are also its future, if not its present.

But I’m also an optimist. Before signing that letter, I spent four years advising the school on ways to effect such change from within. Despite a few incremental improvements, the pace of change has been abysmal when compared to what’s happening outside the halls of academia. From my perspective, change has been periodically and systematically stifled by various self-interested constituencies within the CU Journalism School and CU overall, and these groups have grown adept at routing around change. After one or two semesters of incremental improvement, the organism always inevitably settles back into its old rhythms.

So it should be no surprise that after four years, I gladly jumped at the opportunity to support an even more radical change. I and all of my advisory board colleagues were led to believe that through discontinuance, CU could take down the cozy walls that allow professors and students to maintain practices that last made sense 20 years ago, then reorganize those disciplines in a more natural way that reflects the world we live in now.

And what are the changes that I personally felt needed to be made? To anyone outside of the Armory building, they’re obvious:

1. A breakdown of artificial barriers between CU’s content, technology and  business programs, just like in the real business world.
2. More experiential learning opportunities for students that focus not just on learning the how and the why, but providing hands-on opportunities to create new monetizable information products that are focused on specific audiences and communities of interest.
3. Less focus on research per-se, and more focus on research and development. It’s long been my belief that by pairing CU’s best and brightest student programmers, business and marketing mavens, and content creators that this school would create the next Facebooks, Twitters, AOL’s, Yahoo’s, and even Googles that would change the way people send and receive information.
4. And perhaps most importantly, a continuance of instruction around the civic responsibility side of content creation – which is another way of saying “journalism.” Things like truth, accuracy, fairness and media law are more important than ever in today’s fragmented media world. By including the basic training and values of journalism at the center, we could also ensure that these future platforms create the kind of change that’s good for society. That is what journalism is fundamentally about in the digital age.

That was my hope from this process. What I’m seeing does not reflect those goals in the slightest. In fact, it disgusts me.

What I see happening after the discontinuance process began is so far from the vision I and many other advisory board members shared that it makes me want to publicly wash my hands of the entire affair, set the record straight about my own intentions, and leave you to destroy what was otherwise a golden opportunity to create a world-renowned university experience.

However, as I said I am an optimist. So I reach out to members of the exploratory committee and offer my hand to help you help yourselves, and by doing so to help students. I hope that you will rise to that challenge and really help the undergraduate student body, rather than create an expensive playground for faculty and graduate students.

Let me end by putting this in the personal perspective of a father.

I have two bright, beautiful little girls, 4 and 7, the first of whom will graduate from high school in 10 years. Like many children, both are extremely interested in creating content and having other people validate it – which is to say, they are future publishers. My youngest recently used her father’s “BookBrewer” product to publish her own eBook on Amazon.com, and was amazed when she saw it not only up in the Amazon store, but that it was purchased by four people.

Ten years from now, if my daughter is still interested in media and wants me to spend her college savings account to send her to a school that will help her be successful in communication-focused businesses, what will I be comfortable paying for? Let’s say I have two choices:

• Door number 1: A program that teaches her about the latest communication technologies, and also gives her the opportunity to work with students with complementary skillsets (such as coding) to create new ways to share information, and uses business students to apply cutting edge revenue models so that those products can ultimately continue beyond their university years. In a city like Boulder, which is now a world-renowned tech startup Mecca, I know such a program would give her both the skills and experience to choose her own job, and even the working knowledge to start her own company should she so choose.
• Door number 2: A media studies program that teaches her nothing about creating anything, but sets her up to be a critic of other peoples’ work. It sits alongside a research institute that has no opportunities for her other than, perhaps, making photocopies (if copiers even exist then). She graduates with few choices other than to enroll in graduate school in hopes of getting a Ph.D. and maybe being a professor, who maybe one day gets tenure (but most likely won’t).

My challenge to you: put yourself in the shoes of my bright young daughter and look at the students who thousands of parents pay good money to send them through your doors every year. Put them first, and you will also put CU first, as well as Boulder and Colorado.

Conversely, if you sacrifice these childrens’ future for your own career goals you will end up in exactly the same boat that the Journalism school is in today. You will be even more irrelevant, you will be deemed a failure, and you will close. I will gladly put the last nail in that coffin.

One year after the second worst financial crisis in the modern world, when unemployment is hovering at 10 percent, the University of Colorado simply can’t afford to sit comfortably in its ivory tower and remove opportunities for undergraduate students to learn and grow. This state-funded institution needs to do the opposite: give students an edge in the growing field of entrepreneurial technology-driven media.

This is what I expected of you when I supported the discontinuance process. Given what I am seeing, I now regret ever signing that letter. The most I can do now is to appeal to those who have been given the ball and urge them to do the right thing for the CU student body.

Dan Pacheco
Entrepreneur and Former Journalist

Brewing eBooks with Borders

This has been one of the most amazing, rewarding and surreal weeks of my life.

Borders has chosen BookBrewer — the first product of my startup, FeedBrewer — to power the engine for its eBook self-publishing service.  You can read about our partnership in the official press release, or in media coverage from a variety of sources including Fast Company, Publishers Weekly and PC Magazine.

We made the announcement at BlogWorld Expo, one of the largest confabs of bloggers and new media enthusiasts in the world. The response at our booth was enormous and even overwhelming at times, with people lined up to talk to me, my team and Borders’ eBook manager Kelly Peterson about how they can turn their content into sellable eBooks. Their response is not surprising, given the explosive growth in eBook sales in recent months.

Some highlights on the partnership:

• On October 25 the same technology and user experience will be  surfaced on a separate site called Borders Get Published, Powered by BookBrewer. You can enter your e-mail address on the form on Borders.bookbrewer.com to be notified as soon as the service launches.
• Books published through both BookBrewer and Borders Get Published will be available for purchase on Borders.com and viewable in Borders-branded apps (such as Kobo), but will also appear in other eBook stores that BookBrewer has relationships with. Those include Amazon.com and KoboBooks.com, with more on the way.
• Borders will use its marketing muscle to encourage thousands of new authors to get published, and will promote promising new authors in its weekly emails and on its Web site. This is a huge boon for self-published authors because Borders reaches more than 30 million people per week in e-mails alone.

From left to right: Todd Levy, Laurelie Ezra, Kelly Peterson, Dan Pacheco.

BookBrewer, which only launched last week, will operate as its own entity. We will serve customers through both sites, and will roll out more strategic “Powered By BookBrewer” services throughout the year that benefit our company and partners, in addition to other services for authors and content providers.

Some people are surprised that Borders would want “their” eBooks to show up in competitors’ stores, but it makes sense when you think about the self-publishing customer. They want their content to be everywhere that people want to buy it.

I can tell you from spending two days in a booth with Kelly Peterson and talking extensively with others at Borders that they’re one of the most customer-focused companies around. They understand that authors — a category that now potentially includes each and every one of  you — don’t want their content to be defined or confined based on which service or programs they use to create it. The customer always comes first for them, and with self-publishing the book always belongs to the author.

Kelly put it best over dinner: “If you buy a piece of clothing at a store, you expect to be able to wear it everywhere, not just in the store where you bought it.” You can see that evidenced with the wide variety of eBook readers and apps Borders promotes, beyond the Kobo reader the company invested in last year.

I’m also excited to work with Borders because they, and bookstores in general, are part of the fabric of local communities — that rapidly disappearing third place that has been so important in the history of civil life. Other types of third spaces exist online, but at a local level physical meeting spaces are still important. Digital community engagement is the common thread in my most meaningful endeavors (Bakotopia, Printcasting and AOL Hometown as just a few examples), and as a previous recipient of a Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation I’m a proud public champion of helping the news and information needs of communities in the digital age. I see BookBrewer and Borders Get Published being strongly connected to those goals.

On that note, I want to once again thank the Knight Foundation for its role in the Printcasting project, which evolved into my company FeedBrewer, Inc., from which the Knight Foundation will one day benefit thanks to a voluntary 6% gift to the Knight Media Innovation Fund. While the Knight Foundation didn’t provide any funding for our proudly “bootstrapped” BookBrewer (and we did not ask for any), BookBrewer is an example of how non-profit seed funds can light a spark that continues to burn later. It’s my sincere hope that future successes from BookBrewer will go to help fund other startups that help local news and information.

The technology for BookBrewer is all new and distinct from Printcasting, but the thinking, methodology and customer insights evolved from it. In fact, thinking back, the biggest thing we learned from Printcasting was that even first-time print publishers really wanted to be multi-platform digital publishers, but didn’t know that until they got their feet wet. In the space of a few weeks after publishing a PDF magazine, they would start asking us if they could publish the same stories into Facebook or as a blog, and they would tell us that they saw print as only a small part of their future business. They also started asking about eBooks as the Kindle and, later, iPad grew in popularity.

The feedback we’re getting with eBooks validates that. People occasionally ask us if we can provide print-on-demand paperbacks for their books, but when we say we’re currently focused on digital books they’re fine with that. Most just want to make sure older readers who don’t have eReading devices, iPhones or iPads to have a print option (and we will be looking into that, by the way).

What I’ve learned through this process is that when you have an idea that you’re passionate about, people will step in at the last minute to help you out. I think the BookBrewer product engenders a desire to reciprocate after authors see how much it can do for them. We even had the leader of a writer’s group in Florida buy an ad in a conference program for BookBrewer with her own funds — a first in my 15 years of working on digital products.

I also want to thank Jon Nordmark, the co-founder of Wambo.com and founder and former CEO of Denver-based eBags. He facilitated Denver’s inaugural class for Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, an intensive technology and mentoring program. For four months, I would spend every Tuesday night from 5:30-9 p.m. with him, other startup CEO mentors, and founders of 17 other companies. We would sound ideas off each other, refine them, give and receive brutal feedback, and delve deeply into the business behind our businesses. While I had a lot of ideas before, I can safely say that without the Founder Institute program I never would have been able to create this product at this time and get it in front of Borders. Nordmark also helped with the Borders introduction.

Fellow Founder Institute graduate Todd Levy, co-founder of BloomWorlds, and his girlfriend Laurelie Lee Ezra also stepped in at the last minute to man our BlogWorld Expo booth and talked to hundreds of people about BookBrewer as if it was their product. I will never forget that, and can’t wait to talk more about BloomWorlds once it launches. Todd, when you need more people to evangelize for you at a conference, you know who to call.

And then of course there’s Don Hajicek and Andy Lasda, my amazing team of co-founders, who have worked tirelessly on this alongside me with no pay other than generous equity. You learn a lot about people when you’re down in the trenches with them, and these two are solid. In addition to their incredible development and product design skills, they’ve shown incredible faith and dedication. And a big thank-you to our advisors, especially Kit Seeborg from BumperTunes.

Last but not least, there’s my family. My wife Kendall Slee and two daughters have given up many nights and weekends with me, and also helped with ideas and feedback. (My 7-year-old Lauren even published an eBook that was for sale in Amazon, and she’s now perfecting a second edition.) My mom and dad even pitched in at the end to handle the logistics of ordering last-minute t-shirts for our BlogWorld booth.

But I guess you should expect that from a community-focused product. BookBrewer is and will continue to successful thanks to the community of people behind it. Hopefully that also includes you. Start brewing your eBooks so we can help you Get Published and featured by Borders! This video shows how easy it is.

[vimeo 15598761]

BookBrewer Wins CrowdPitch Award

More good news from BookBrewer. Last night I was invited to present the concept and business model at a Denver event called CrowdPitch run by Funding Universe. Five companies were selected to give 4-minute presentations to a crowd of about 50 people, plus a panel of finance/investor types.

At the end of the pitches, attendees got to dole out Monopoly money to the companies they liked most. And they chose … BookBrewer!

We were totally surprised by this, as some of the other companies, like Sand-Off, had great businesses. We take it as yet another sign that average people identify with the concept of self-publishing eBooks.

Thanks to Edward Reynolds and Shane Van Cott for running such a fun, informative event. My only regret? I couldn’t take the monopoly money home to give to my kids.