Scenes from a dot-com dynasty family gathering:
Scott (ex-son-in-law of the family’s wealthy patriarch): “Far be it from me to try to be included in a family discussion. I learned my place long ago …”
Dorothy (ex-wife of Scott): “You also ruined any chance of being a part of this family a long time ago.”
Scott: “Well, Dorothy, I am ready. Let ‘er rip. Give it your best shot. I am ready for my tongue-lashing.”
Dorothy: “Who is the new 11-year-old you are fooling around with now?”
Scott: “Actually she’s 5 years old and her name is Gametech.com.”
Outtakes from a new prime-time, Silicon Valley soap, implausibly populated with “Baywatch” beauties and pumped programmers? Dialogue downloaded from an Internet sitcom? Nope. Scott and Dorothy are actors in a scene from “Grandpa’s Little Secret.com,” a play conceived with a very special audience in mind: the families of the superwealthy.
Not what one might have expected from David Kersnar, director, playwright and co-founder of the famed Lookingglass Theatre Company. But in an era in which national funding and patronage for the arts have been all but gutted by Bible-thumping senators, Kersnar has come up with a way to continue doing what he and his partners are good at, and still keep his family out of the poorhouse: Shaking the Tree — a company formed specifically to produce plays for the viewing pleasure, and instruction, of wealthy family audiences.
Kersnar and his colleagues at Shaking the Tree are commissioned to write and direct plays that teach wealthy families how to get along. The commissioners are usually financial institutions seeking to minimize the damage that their rich clients tend to inflict upon themselves through family feuds and bickering. So the income generated by Shaking the Tree is considerably better than what Kersnar is used to — sometimes five or six times what he made as artistic director at Lookingglass. In addition, the money gives him the financial freedom to take on other, less remunerative projects.
And the plays work.
“I have seen the light bulb go off, the look on people’s faces when what they’re watching resonates with some problem they’ve been grappling with. It’s a really effective method of education,” says Kersnar.
The “morality” plays that Kersnar and his colleagues at Shaking the Tree construct to teach wealthy families how to get along aren’t exactly like the final scenes from “Hamlet.” They aren’t designed to produce hair-raising moments of personal revelation or peel back sinister motives. Instead, they gently prod their audiences into self-recognition via encounters with archetypal characters and scenarios — like the prodigal son reluctantly primed to take over the family steel mills, or the mutinous granddaughter whose choice of badass boyfriends is not exactly to her grandfather’s taste.
The key here is not the details but the universality of the underlying issues. “Rivalry, fairness, trust and communication — these are concerns of everyone,” says Kersnar.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “Yes,” Ernest Hemingway riposted, “they have more money.”
Different or not, richer or not, they also have families. And families — no matter what the price tag — have the potential for money squabbles, resentments, politics and just plain old difficult behavior. The difference in rich families, though, is in the Carnegie or Mellon scale of their disagreements. When millions or even billions of dollars are involved, often it’s not just the family that is affected. Many wealthy families have philanthropic foundations set up to channel money into worthy causes. So family decisions can have a profound impact inside and outside the family.
“Wealth is popular culture,” says Kersnar. “One of the things that wealthy families grapple with is a keen sense of stewardship or responsibility about their money or their companies … Money just amplifies, really turns up the volume on, the communication problems that families encounter.”
Olivia Boyce-Abel should know. Members of her family sued and countersued one another for 13 years, striving for control of her mother’s large estate. “We only recently settled the matter,” says Boyce-Abel. “I honestly believe that if my family members had experienced one of these plays, it might have changed things dramatically.”
As a consequence of her own experience, Boyce-Abel has become a professional facilitator for estate planning and wealth transfer, and serves as an advisor to Shaking the Tree.
“What I’ve learned is that every family has to deal with communication issues,” she says. “But in our society, money is just about the last taboo. Nobody wants to talk about it.”
So the actors in a Shaking the Tree production do it for them. But the show doesn’t stop at the edge of the stage. Unlike conventional theater aimed at corporate audiences, the Shaking the Tree “case studies” are interactive. At the end of a production, the audience is encouraged to pose questions to the actors while they are still in character. Audience members might ask what a character’s motivation was for behaving a certain way toward another character. They might even ask technical questions about inheritance or charitable foundation matters.
“The actors are trained to be able to field financially technical questions as well,” says MaryAnn Fernandez, who is a vice president in family education for Chicago’s Harris Bank, one of the original sponsors of Shaking the Tree.
She heard about the novel, interactive theater work that Kersnar was doing in public high schools, teaching kids about AIDS and drugs. Fernandez, who has also helped organize “wealth management” conferences, thought the technique might work with her wealthy clients.
And even though the case studies are geared more for Wall Street war rooms than the Great White Way, Kersnar doesn’t skimp on production. The scripts are complex and carefully plotted, sometimes taking up to a year to write and produce. Kersnar uses only professional actors, and they are costumed and made up — all the way down to the right nail polish — as persuasively as they would be in a Broadway play.
“We try to make it look like a real family,” says Kersnar. “Everyone comes to the table with a different agenda and motivations. There’s never just one bad guy.”
As a result, audience members can feel detached enough from the characters to be moved by them, without being offended.
“It was a really profound moment when an audience member, a daughter of a wealthy family, who felt she had been treated unfairly by her father, stood up afterward and addressed questions to the actor/father figure in the play with the same intensity as the actor/daughter’s character had addressed him,” says Kersnar.
A case of life imitating art, perhaps, but also a demonstration of the power of art to reach into the heart of its spectators. Rich or poor, there must be a moral in there somewhere.
A decade ago, business writing had the reputation as a refuge for geeks and freaks.
Now, I’m one of those scribes tethered to Dow Jones, a Palm Pilot and P.R. harassment on my cellphone. Yikes.
At least for me, it happened by accident. I washed up on the shores of San Francisco after being a freelance writer in South Africa for four years. My then-boyfriend — a freelance photographer — was in tow, but two freelancers under one roof made for shaky financial times. One of us had to get a job. And since my ex didn’t have a green card, the risumi-sending task fell upon me.
Soon enough, I found a job at Wired, one of two national magazines in town at the time. It seemed like an amusing place to the work, even though at that point, I barely knew what the Web was. When fellow staffers called me a “newbie,” I had to ask what the word meant.
But it was at Wired where I absorbed the “business of the Web,” the locomotion behind the new economy. When I started to freelance again, I found that subject had become my specialty.
Five years later, I’m still making a living writing business and technology stories. But instead of being a journalistic outcast, I’m now among a large and growing group covering one of the hottest beats around.
What happened? Why did business journalism suddenly become sexy?
Much of it has to do with the veering economy and the obsessed audience business journalism has garnered in the past few years. Half of all Americans now own stock; tens of thousands, inflamed by the Wall Street gold rush, are trading stocks online; and market talk has supplanted politics as popular dinner-party natter.
Indeed, those who only a few years ago had absolutely no interest in business news suddenly find themselves waiting anxiously for corporate earnings or Alan Greenspan’s latest uttering on the economy. “IPO” and “venture capital” have become household words, and high-profile CEOs and dot-com entrepreneurs are covered like celebrities, making front-page news with their latest follies.
“The whole culture is more business-oriented,” says Stuart Silverstein, a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a USC journalism instructor. “More Americans have a stake in this stuff than ever before.”
The media isn’t complaining, because all this has meant a bigger, richer readership with divine demographics, which equals fat ad revenues and voil` — more business journalism.
Business and trade magazines, as well as a plethora of financial Web sites, have emerged in force — not just creating journalism jobs, but reaping cash for their creators. Now, these publications are among the fastest-growing magazines around. For this year’s first eight months, Red Herring’s ad revenues jumped from $7.9 million to $40.9 million compared to the same period last year; the biweekly Business 2.0′s revenues leaped from $6.1 million to $44.1 million and the weekly Industry Standard vaulted up from $11.5 million to $90 million, according to Publishers Information Bureau.
And the year isn’t even over yet.
Newspapers, many of whom for years saw its business departments as brackish backwaters, also want in on the ad money and money-hungry readers, and are beefing up their own coverage.
“Just in the last year, we have gone from four to five pages of business coverage a day,” says John Elsen, business editor at the New York Post. Says former business reporter turned baseball writer Howard Bryant of the San Jose Mercury News: “The attitude at our paper is that business is the biggest story going.”
Now even journalism conferences tout seminars for biz writing with the verve formerly reserved for investigative stories against corrupt politicians, for instance, a recent panel discussion at New York’s Asian American Journalists Association conference titled “Business Journalism is Hot! Hot! Hot!”
“It took me a while to appreciate the excitement of business journalism,” says Elsen, a metro reporter who fell into financial writing five years ago. “But after freelancing for a while and deciding to take a job at a financial newsletter in New York City, I realized how it relates to everything, especially in a city like New York.”
After reporting on the courts, cops and local politics, Elsen suddenly found himself writing about mergers and acquisitions — a subject he initially knew nothing about. “It was a riot,” he says. “It took me about six months to learn what the hell these Wall Street guys were saying to me in interviews. But then I began to see that it’s all about raising capital, and that that activity is the underpinning of everything.”
That kind of experience — sort of falling down the rabbit hole into business writing — happens to a lot of reporters. And in the beginning, the learning curve can be downright dizzying. (Elsen says he went so far as to approach financial analysts and say: “Teach me.”)
But many editors are unconcerned, since they feel business — like other subjects — can be learned on the job. Even the Wall Street Journal, the daily bible of business, is known to hire writers with strong writing and reporting skills, but little business experience.
The hunt for people to cover business and technology during these boom times has meant boom pay, at least for some. “At the San Jose Mercury News, there was a lot of controversy over the ‘haves’ — the business journalists who made significantly better money — and the ‘have-nots’ — other reporters on other beats,” says Bryant.
For some journalists, there is also the lure of dot-com riches; people who cover technology and business often get a jump on lucrative dot-com jobs.
“There are a lot of people out there writing about this stuff with that agenda in the back of their minds. When stock options start to become as important as your lead, that seems really sinister to me,” said Bryant, who went from covering business to baseball partly for that reason.
But there are also solid, non-financial reasons to get into business journalism, Silverstein says. “I tell my journalism students [that] if you want to write about ideas, business journalism is the way to go. With business journalism, you’re not just writing about events, you’re talking about the impact that business or technology has on people’s lives. You have to translate, to articulate developments in the industry and figure out what it really means to people and society at large.”
Quick: What comes to mind when you think “day trader”?
A paunchy kid just out of college, boasting about all the dough he’s raking in? A salt-and-pepper ex-Wall Streeter with a taste for slick action? Or maybe even, as with a recent true-to-life case, an imbalanced fellow whipsawed into a murderous rampage by the market’s mercurial behavior?
How about a 69-year-old retired grandmother in Florida?
“It’s why I get up in the morning,” says the 18-month-long trading enthusiast, who prefers to be known as “Harriet.” Harriet spends at least six days a week, 12 hours a day, on the bucking e-ticket ride that is electronic day trading, where fortunes are made or lost on percentages of a point within a matter of seconds.
Harriet rises every morning at 5:30 to do some market research before she begins trading at the Street’s 9:30 opening bell. After the market closes at 4 p.m., she’s usually still online, ferreting out data for the next day’s session. “I love it because it keeps my mind sharp and alert,” says Harriet, who says she’s making good money after a rocky start, though she won’t say how much. “I plan on doing it until the day I die — or until I’ve lost my ability to reason and concentrate.”
Don’t think it’s just the older generation cracking into the day-trading world. It’s women in general: In a field long dominated by men, especially young men, the number of female day traders is rising, at least based on anecdotal evidence.
“Last year, 12 percent of our customers were women,” says Mike Dunn, director of public relations at Datek, a New Jersey online trading company. “This year … it’s 19 percent so far, and climbing.” Dunn says roughly 20 percent of the firm’s customers could be called day traders. As a result, Datek is conducting a survey of its female clients to find out more — and to attract more of them.
But there’s something even more significant than the number of women traders: In the opinion of several industry observers, women may have the upper hand when it comes to making money.
“More often then not, women are better because of the psychology of day trading,” says veteran market watcher Merlin Rothfeld, who also teaches at the day-trading boot camp at Online Trading Academy, one of the oldest and most respected programs in the country.
“Successful day trading is all about risk management,” adds Rothfeld, who has seen the percentage of women in his classes rise from about 2 percent to 10 percent in the past few years. “That means knowing when to get out, knowing how much you can afford to lose and not pushing your luck beyond a certain predetermined boundary.”
Rothfeld and others say women day traders tend to possess a degree of humility and willingness to learn that many “cowboys” in the trade don’t. “For example,” he says, “when a stock is tanking and you have to cut your losses and get out, many new male traders don’t like to admit that they picked the wrong stock.
“So they’ll hang on,” Rothfeld adds. “Then, instead of losing $1,000, they’ll lose $10,000, out of sheer stubbornness. Women don’t seem to have as much difficulty admitting they made a mistake.”
Karin (who didn’t want to give her last name), a 48-year-old day trader in Long Beach, Calif., has witnessed this bullheadedness among men at trading shops. “The men in the shops were always losing their temper — which can be really distracting to you when you’re trading. It got to the point where I had to start trading from home instead.”
She says women usually just don’t get as frazzled. “I tell my girlfriends that you can generally never tell how a woman day trader is doing from moment to moment. They have poker faces.
“In fact,” she adds. “I think that day trading could be the ultimate dating litmus test. Before I got married again, I’d consider insisting that the man take a block of money and trade for a month, and see how he reacts under that kind of pressure.”
Karin, who has been day trading for seven months, says she meets her modest goal of about $200 in profit every day. By the end of the year, she hopes to net $1,500 to $2,000 a day by dramatically increasing the volume of her trading.
Still learning, Karin says she completely changed her trading style after she lost $8,000 on a single stock overnight. “I learned never to hold a stock overnight, to babysit one stock only per day and to trade at a lower volume until I got more comfortable and knew more.”
Toni Turner, the female author of “The Beginner’s Guide to Online Trading,” believes women inherently possess the skills needed for a career in day trading. “Women, it’s been shown, are better at multitasking, and day trading is all about that,” she says. “When you day-trade, you have to watch many, many market indicators at once.”
And how does the average male trader feel about the swelling presence of women in their midst? Well, according to some women, they’ve learned to be more accepting.
“I remember checking my Cisco stock in 1992 using Quotek, one of the first hand-held, real-time stock monitoring devices,” says Jeanette Szymona, a San Francisco Bay Area computer programmer who hopes eventually to quit her job and alternate day trading with traveling around the world. “A colleague of mine walked by and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he didn’t believe me, because he didn’t think a woman would ever be interested in trading.
“‘You must be secretly watching soap operas on that thing,’ he said to me. These days, when the men that I work with find out that I’m a trader, they ask for my advice on the market.”
A few days ago I found myself running late for a book party. In the old days, the punishment for such tardiness would have been a tapped-out open bar and canapes curled up like toes.
But tonight’s book blowout was an altogether different affair. If I turned up late to this party, my punishment would be far more serious: I’d be turned away… from the chat room.
On May 16, the tweedy world of publishing changed yet again as AOL’s The Book Report hosted the world’s first online book party. The guest of honor: self-published author extraordinaire M.J. Rose, an ad exec turned erotic-novelist.
Last year, Rose proved that rejection in the Internet age is hardly the final word. After traditional publishers deemed her book “Lip Service” too racy, she started aggressively promoting electronic and print versions on various erotic and romance sites.
Rose quickly generated buzz that attracted the attention of the Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild, which listed “Lip Service” in their print catalog. Eventually, the e-publishing poster girl snagged a high five-figure deal with Simon and Schuster’s Pocket Books; recently, she found herself added to Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2001 and #4 on Barnes & Noble’s list of best-selling e-books.
With “Lip Service” now available in paperback and e-book, it only seemed logical to commemorate Rose’s dazzling gifts of Web promotion. In publishing, that usually means a book party. “I always dreamed of having a book party,” Rose says. “Even when I was a child.”
In keeping with her Web success, Rose decided to throw the party online. The folks at Pocket Books were only happy to oblige; they gave free copies of the e-book to the first 50 pilgrims who bellied-up to the cyber bar. (Rose arranged for another online first — she “autographed” each book sold that evening with an “e-signature.”)
What would have probably cost Pocket parent Simon and Schuster several thousand bucks didn’t even cost a dime. Carol Fitzgerald, co-founder of The Book Report, a Web forum for readers and writers, sponsored the low-cost party as an experiment.
Could the terra-firma book party be facing extinction? “I see this happening more and more in the future,” says Kate Tentler, the publisher of Simon and Schuster Online. “Marketing budgets are only getting tighter, and this is a great alternative to the traditional book party.”
Perhaps, but the online party experience leaves a little to be desired. Take for example, boozing and star gawking — crucial elements of the terrestial party. At this party, guests had to settle for “cyber champagne,” as we learn in the following official excerpt:
Marlene T: Please lift your cyber champagne glasses and clink your mouse.(Dozens “clink” to MJ’s success.)
CKCF: Congrats MJ…(clink)
Not quite the same as a real glass of bubbly.
And as everyone who’s done the chat thing knows, people have a tendency to keep their true identities disguised online. A creative chat name frees up visitors to be as candid — or nasty — as they wanna be. Which makes hosting an online book party a little like staring down an audience of people with bags over their heads. “It is a little disorienting as a result,” admits Kelly Milner Halls, journalist and veteran chat host of four years.
But in many ways the online book party was business as usual — full of cruising, schmoozing and industry gossip. At the height of the party, the “room” was filled with 66 visitors — a relatively big crowd, says Hall. And virtually all the guests praised Rose and her accomplishments, though most had never met her before.
Rose was thrilled.
“Before the Internet, authors were incredibly removed from their audience, ” she says. “The cyber party is a great, democratic way to get in touch with people who wouldn’t otherwise get to come to a regular book party.”
Now, if they could only digitize the dip.
