Dan Oshinsky is a 2011-12 RJI Fellow, and the founder of Stry, a news service launching in Spring 2012. Here on the RJI blog, Dan's putting himself inside the fishbowl to document a year in the life of a startup. Dan hopes that by being transparent with the process, others can learn from his successes, mistakes and failures.
I am standing on a stage in front of 200 people. I am talking. I am supposed to be talking about the company that I have created and how it is radically changing the face of journalism.
Instead, I am talking about a dead guy from Mississippi named Skeet.
This is the story of how this moment came to be.
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I didn't expect the email. I had no reason to.
Back in May, a tweet came across my feed from someone who works at USA Today. It mentioned a newish event being held at Gannett Headquarters just outside Washington, D.C. The event was called Disruptathon, in which a handful of companies would present their businesses to an audience of reporters, entrepreneurs and media types. They were looking for applicants. Apply, and I'd be given two free tickets to the event.
The event had an open bar.
I applied.
And then, two weeks later, in the midst of a complicated bit of travel, I opened my inbox and found that I'd been invited to speak at Disruptathon. I'd been given seven minutes to talk about Stry.
Which is about the moment in which I realized that I'd never really spoken to a large group of people before.
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That's not to say I'm not a decent public speaker, or that I'm unpracticed. My 10th grade speech to Mrs. Buckingham's English class, in which I used an anecdote about nearly destroying my car to illustrate the power of anecdotes, went well. I'd breezed through the speech at my bar mitzvah.
And, well ... that's about it for my record of public speaking with prepared remarks.
So: I'm supposed to be staring down a 200-person room at Gannett HQ? Investors, lawyers, and the Washington Post in the audience?
And me?
Me?
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Disruption is one of those weird words that used to be a bad thing but isn't anymore, at least in media circles. Disruption used to be synonymous with interruption -- "We're sorry, Mrs. Johnson, about the disruption in the delivery of your morning paper" -- but now disruption has this positive vibe. Disruption is about breaking the norm and building something newer, stronger, better.
Disruption is kind of cool, actually.
For this Disruptathon, I'd been given the following guidelines:
1. I had seven minutes to talk.
2. I should not spend my seven minutes pitching this business to investors or potential customers.
3. I should describe the disruptive qualities of my business.
That's what I had to work with -- or, rather, all I had to work with. And looking back, this really wasn't enough. I didn't know my target audience, but I assumed they'd be media-savvy and enthusiastic about journalism. But what if they weren't? Stry's been easy to pitch to reporters -- this is their business, after all -- but it's much harder to explain to other audiences.
That's not because it's a particularly difficult concept to understand. In eight words, this is Stry: We report. We distribute our stories. For money.
But ever since journalism became a commodity that people don't pay for -- wasn't my idea, for the record -- something like Stry has become harder to explain. To me, news is like any other commodity: it's something I can sell.
To a lot of people, it isn't. It's just information, and information is free, and if it's free, how are you going to make money, Dan?
Not knowing the audience presented an obstacle. I knew I needed a way to get into the concept of Stry.
I needed Skeet.
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I learned about Skeet back in Biloxi, Miss., in the summer of 2010. I was at the local library, photocopying a few pages from an old newspaper. The photocopier broke, and while the librarians were fixing it, I pulled a book off the shelf. It was a history of Biloxi as written by a longtime Biloxi resident. I asked the librarians a question that I found myself asking a lot that summer: This person -- is she still alive?
She was, and that's how I ended up meeting Biloxi's historian emeritus, Murella Herbert Powell.
She's the one who tipped me off to this amazing story about Skeet, a Biloxi resident back in the '20s who built an offshore casino only to watch it sink six years later. He'd built the casino on an island, except that it turned out the casino wasn't on an island -- it was on a sandbar. The sandbar moved, and his business just disappeared into the sea.
The landscape upon which his business sat changed radically and forever.
I remember thinking: I don't know where, I don't know when, but one of these days, I'm going to need this story. So I tucked it away for later.
And then Disruptathon came along, and well, here was my opening: a big, obvious, belt-high-fastball of a metaphor to open up this speech. Now I just had to write the rest of it.
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The Monday before Disruptathon, I sat down for an hour with a DC-area public speaking advisor. She'd come highly recommended from some family friends, and I was hoping she could offer some tips on how to sound less terrified on stage.
She asked me to run through the speech quickly. I started off with the story about Skeet, and his casino, and how it sank, and how the landscape of his business changed radically and forever, and how maybe to this crowd of journalism lovers, the whole "radical change in the business landscape" story might sound familiar.
The counselor said I absolutely, positively should NOT start my story with Skeet. She was emphatic. She just didn't get it.
We spent the hour arguing about the Skeet story. She relented slightly, and I left even more convinced that Skeet was the right place to start. (Of course, I never did get to chat with her about how to be less nervous on stage. I ended up following the lead of the other presenters and getting to the open bar as soon as it opened. Seemed to work alright.)
But what I was only starting to grasp was this: This counselor wouldn't be among the target audience for Disruptathon. She wasn't a reporter or a journalist. She read the Washington Post in the morning -- that was her connection to the world of news.
But in a way, she represented a major blind spot in my presentation. I was about to stand up with seven minutes about an organization that I feel could radically alter the landscape of national news. And yet, the pitch was still focused toward people who work directly with news and with stories.
This turned out to be a problem.
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This is the part where I'm supposed to show you video of my presentation. Disruptathon had a professional film crew on site to record us all. Only problem is, something went wrong in post-production. The video never saw the light of YouTube.
So you'll just have to believe me when I tell you: I was good.
In seven minutes, I stood, I delivered, and I survived. Eight of us presented. I was named runner-up for Best Presentation, and I was pretty damn proud of that.
It wasn't a surprise, really. I'm loud, charismatic. I had mostly stopped sweating. I made good eye contact, and I kept the hand gesturing to a reasonable level.
In short, I spoke well.
But a few days after it was over, the Disruptathon team emailed me with some data. They'd handed out iPods at the door, each pre-loaded with the official event app. On the app were eight buttons, one for each company. When each of us spoke, the audience pushed on the speaker's button and rated the speech on a few factors. Then they were allowed to add a few comments on the speech.
From this feedback, I learned two things about the pitch I'd just given.
1. People LOVED my presentation.
2. People did NOT understand my presentation.
And I asked myself: How could this be? How could you love my presentation but not understand it? It felt like someone going up to Pavarotti after a show and saying, "Your voice was so beautiful! Shame I don't speak Italian."
So what happened?
1. I didn't know my audience: The audience was not, as I'd expected, journalism-focused. There were a handful of reporters in there, but the majority of the journalism-employed in the crowd worked on the tech side of things, many in the world of mobile apps. It didn't help that the previous Disruptathon event had focused entirely on mobile technology -- several of my post-speech comments asked why I hadn't spoken more about my app. (There is no app.)
After the speech, a handful of reporters came up to me and were glowing with praise. The speech got to them -- but they might've only been 10 percent of the audience. The rest just didn't get it. I could've juggled copies of "All the President's Men" while reading my mission statement and have gotten just as far with 90 percent of the audience.
In short: it was a good pitch.... but to the wrong crowd. There is no one-size-fits-all-audiences pitch. Reporters, editors, investors, everyday news consumers -- they need to be pitched differently. At Disruptathon, I missed the mark, and in doing so, I missed an opportunity to take a room of 200 people and make them evangelists for my company. That hurts.
The other side effect of failing to understand the audience: It affected the close of my pitch. I got to the end... and didn't know what to say. What could I? At the end of a typical pitch comes the call to action. But at the end of this speech, I wasn't asking for money or a sign-on-the-dotted-line guarantee. Most of the other presenters had this same issue -- they just kept talking about some aspect of their business until time ran out.
2. I told them, but didn't show them: I spent all my time talking about the basic bullet points for Stry. But I didn't show them anything. No product. No words. No photos. Nothing for them to connect to.
And that's kind of a problem moving forward. How do you give someone a quick taste of long-form journalism? Could I do what the movies do and make a trailer for my stories? Should I have handed out copies of my stories to everyone in the crowd?
Whatever the solution, I didn't show them, and I didn't really engage the audience on an active level. I could have asked them to use a Twitter hashtag, or to post something on our Facebook page, or to even raise their hands. Anything to get them engaged.
3. I didn't use my time well enough: When I broke down the speech later, I was surprised to find how little I'd actually spent talking about Stry. In practice, the speech took about six minutes. At the event, I went even faster than that, and only about three minutes were actually devoted to addressing Stry. I had seven minutes, and I didn't even use half to discuss my business. That's not good enough.
But there's good news here. Next time, I'll be better prepared. Next time, I'll find out more about my audience beforehand.
Next time, I'll have to find a new excuse to fit in Skeet.
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