Mission

I just returned from the 30th anniversary luncheon of my alma mater, D Magazine. It was a much-needed dose of inspiration... [section redacted -- irrelevant]

The speaker and cover subject for the anniversary celebration was Bishop T.D. Jakes (whom I named "best preacher in Dallas" in a 1998 issue of D). The good Bishop talked a lot about how partnership and collabaration make great things happen -- and even almost directly stated one of our core tenets:

Communication should be a coversation, not a monologue.

It also occured to me... [section redacted -- irrelevant] that the stark dividing line between a job/business and a mission/crusade is one of the key differences between the dying and the remarkable enterprise. In yesterday's discussion of streamlining, there was never even a passing reference to how this was going to better enable us to serve our customers -- it was all about operating margins. I seriously doubt that the folks at Newsday or Belo were thinking about how to enable conversations between their customers when they were ginning up their circulation numbers.

Even I've been guilty of missing this line. One of the main reasons I left D was that once we got out of relaunch survival mode, I was still so blinded by everything but the income statement that I couldn't think about anything else. I had spent so much time worrying about making payroll and paying the printer that once those were in the bank, I still thought all that mattered was racking up more nickels fast so we'd have them to rub together on a rainy day. My boss/mentor, Wick Allison, knew that once we emerged from that mode, that the real work of hosting a civic conversation could begin. I couldn't see it, and couldn't understand that there was more than the bottom line. In the intervening years, D has grown and prospered quite nicely.

This is not to say that one can or should operate a business solely on passion without regard to economic realities -- income is an easily discerned metric of success, and, more importantly, the fuel that enables us to create more and better conversations. But nothing more. Otherwise, we should go make widgets.

Conversations are much more interesting and impactful than widgets. Conversations allow a small-town West Virginia preacher to change the lives of literally millions of people; they allow a Dallas kid to change the direction of civic discourse over three decades; and they allow us to deliver local news and information that enriches lives untouched by the legacy media.

That's why we're here.