Born on the left

"Kirk" is a Scottish word for church. Admittedly, an odd name for a Jewish kid whose grandparents fled eastern Europe and wound up in the Midwest — Toledo, OH, and Detroit. But I feel sometimes like I grew up in a church — one where our religion was civic and social, based on believing in equality and freedom, not God.

My grandparents and parents taught me the Jewish traditions of social liberalism and a devotion to freedom. They were links in a cultural chain anchored in millennia of Jewish ancestors who were targets of persecution and genocide. So, my education began with our escaping slavery in Egypt in the 13th century BC and moved forward to the Nazi’s almost-successful efforts in 20th-century Europe to eradicate the Jewish people. I also learned of mass enslavement and genocidal holocausts of other peoples throughout history — a history that sadly reveals how the foundations of America were built on stolen land with stolen labor — the genocide of Native Americans and the theft of their homelands and hundreds of years of Black slavery. My parents and grandparents taught me that none of us is free unless all are free. My parents, who met in the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, as 20-something agitators and organizers in the labor movement, showed me the power of organizing people of all kinds and colors to demand justice.

The stories they told me—and the examples they set in living their lives—made me understand that Jews were not white people as far as most white people were concerned until after World War II. Even then, discrimination, intolerance, threats and violence against Jews continued. To this day, our status as part of white America is tentative and likely temporary because white supremacy remains alive in America. I point all this out only — let me repeat: only — to underscore the deeply problematic nature of racial identities, which were, after all, invented and defined by European white culture as a weapon to justify and advance the subjugation of every other kind of person in the world.

I have a dear friend who tells of overcoming the narrowness and prejudice of her family, who are very conservative, evangelical Christians. I am in awe of her. My apparent history of rebellion against injustice includes getting thrown out of a tony prep school for denouncing the school administration’s hypocrisy, getting tear-gassed during the Days of Rage in the Sixties, and so on. As I once told my friend, she had the courage to overcome her upbringing; I’ve just been doing what I was raised to do. Protest is my inheritance from my family. I try to keep that in mind no matter what I’m doing.

You can find the compact, job-by-job version of my life on LinkedIn. What follows here is more about what I learned at the revolution—the media revolution, that is. And how understanding the revolution in media helps connect ideas with audiences.

My skills

I’ve worked for a decade or more as each of the following: a narrative expert, writer, editor, commentator on narrative and media, journalist, strategist, marketer, entrepreneur, and corporate manager. I’ve always been a close observer of pop culture and a student of history. I originated the term "post-advertising" and helped create modern content marketing.

Some lessons learned

I've been present for the constant media revolutions that began with TV in the '50s and accelerated in the '70s with the computerization of newsrooms, typesetting and printing, followed by the advent of the World Wide Web in the late ‘90s and the plethora of formerly unimaginable problems and advances that came with it. Since then, it's been an unending series of brutal lessons about the ever-changing world of media — news, entertainment, publishing and marketing.

My first full-time journalism gig came in the early '70s at The Morning Herald, a daily paper in Hagerstown, MD. Back then, the paper used 100-year-old technology, including the 19th-century press that had printed the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Type was set on a now-forgotten invention: the Linotype—that astounding late 19th-century machine that forever changed communications by miraculously using molten lead to create an entire line of type at one time. The Linotype's power to revolutionize communications caused Thomas Edison to call it "the 8th wonder of the world." (The Atlantic celebrated Linotype's 125th birthday in 2011 with a great story. You can read it here.)

IT'S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND INSTRUCTIVE TODAY that nobody knows anymore what the hell a Linotype was or what the term "hot type" means. This is important only because understanding the Linotype revolution prepares us for the revolutions since and the ones yet to come. Especially the ones to come.

For better and worse, I've had a front-row seat for the nonstop media revolutions that continue today to utterly destroy and reshape all the technologies and business models of human communications. These rolling revolutions have been remaking all media — publishing, broadcasting, music, movies and advertising — for a long time. I've been privileged to ride the whole modern whirlwind that decimated newspapers and magazines, reshaped the music business, ate broadcast TV's lunch, and is now busily dismantling cable, all while devouring the traditional advertising business everywhere. This has totally disrupted our notion of what a “national dialog” about anything might look like and upended our belief that there is any longer a “public space” where people can discuss and find consensus on solving common beliefs. Lately, artificial intelligence, the newest technology, has raised real, urgent questions about the potential domination of communications by machines, not human beings.

While it’s important to understand how all these technologies have been changing every 15 seconds, it's even more critical to remember what hasn't changed in the last 50,000 or 100,000 years and won’t change for as long as the human race survives — and that's that way people understand the world through stories. 

Some things I've done

I've done a bunch, actually. Journalist, author, editor, publisher, M&A guy, entrepreneur, advertising exec, serial innovator in digital and nontraditional marketing. I've followed an unorthodox path across media businesses and careers.

Story Worldwide, which I started in 1999, is the original brand storytelling agency, the first international content shop and a leading digital content agency. In 2014, I sold Story after running it for 15 years as an independent agency. In late 2016, I left Story to pursue writing and working on progressive politics.

While running Story, I remained a journalist at heart and in 2010 co-founded Detroit143, an experimental non-profit news operation in Detroit with the mission of helping to stabilize low-income neighborhoods with hyper-local news and small business marketing services. My work on improving journalism’s impact on democracy and urban issues has been funded by grants from the Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the International Press Institute, Google and others.

I began my media career as an assistant director for 20th Century Fox in Europe. I was 17.  Back in America, I worked on documentary film. In my 20s, I moved to print journalism, where, as a reporter and bureau chief, I was a Pulitzer Prize finalist at the Detroit Free Press.

Along the way, I wrote a business book for Simon & Schuster, Thinking Inside the Box, which was published in five languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Story, I'm pleased to report, won dozens of awards for its leading-edge, multi-channel content work in print, television, web film, social, digital and more. Story was named one of the top-40 social media agencies in the world and one of the top global integrated marketing shops by international consulting firm R3 Worldwide.

I used to speak about, write about and teach content marketing, brand strategy, journalism, media, advertising, technology and the “post-advertising age,” a term I first used in early 2007 and subsequently popularized in the blog Post Advertising. My writing has appeared in the Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Content Officer magazine; PandoDaily, the Silicon Valley blog; Huffington Post; Brand Republic’s social media blog The Wall; the Harvard Business Review blog, Fast Company and elsewhere.

I was an early member of the Global Advisory Board of the Wharton School of Business’s Future of Advertising Project and a contributor to the Project’s book “Beyond Advertising.”

Marketing and advertising, with their big budgets and insistence on tangible results, taught me invaluable lessons about the need for rigorous research, disciplined processes and the paramount importance of measuring everything so you know what works and what doesn’t. Since 2016, I’ve left marketing behind me, but I’ve held tight to the lessons learned and the processes tested.