The Stories that the Facts Tell

There are the Jack Webbs of Pittsburgh, people who work on Pittsburgh's future by focusing on just the facts. I'll call them data visionaries, and they include my blogospheric colleagues Chris Briem and Harold Miller, as well as John Craig of the Regional Indicators project (and, of course, formerly of the Post-Gazette).

There are, by contrast, the storytellers of Pittsburgh, people who work on Pittsburgh's future by weaving narratives that connect past to present and near to far. I'll them the back-to-the-futurists. They include Carl Kurlander, the filmmaker behind "My Tale of Two Cities," Doug Heuck, publisher of Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine, Jim Russell, tireless promoter of the Pittsburgh Diaspora, and Abby Wilson, a core and local part of the Great Lakes Urban Exchange.

I've idealized the two groups; there is overlap. The back-to-the-futurists respect the data visionaries, and the reverse, at least generally. Occasionally members of one group will pop up in the other, via a blog post or an op-ed or a public appearance.

It's important to remember, though, that neither group has all the answers. Facts are seductive because they convey the illusion of objectivity. But it's almost always a mistake simply to trust the scientists, or the economists, or the statisticians, or the planners. Stories are seductive because they seem to make facts irrelevant; if we can imagine it, we can make it happen. That's equally problematic. It's almost always a mistake simply to trust the poets.

Whatever Pittsburgh's future may be, it has to be built from the resources of both groups. The best scientists, economists, statisticians, and planners know that they are storytellers, too. The best storytellers know how to use what's true, and what's not, to challenge our imaginations.

I'm reminded of this by seeing the announcement of the upcoming CityLivePgh event on Wednesday, September 10 (New Hazlett Theater, North Side, and RSVP here), described this way:

Pittsburgh cannot know where it ought to go unless it knows where it is.

While we sali towards a new future we hear statistics that are daunting. Not enough immigration. Young people leaving. 50,000 jobs with no-one to fill them. Are these numbers really accurate? And can they be interpreted in different ways?. How can we understand them, and use them to know where we ought to go?

The speakers are Harold Miller, John Craig, and Lisa Kuzma of the R.K. Mellon Foundation. Go and listen to their stories.

Pittsburgh's Internationalization, Again

I have one foot on the Penguins' Stanley Cup bandwagon these days. I really don't get ice hockey, and I don't get the fanaticism of its fans. But I watched some of a couple of the games of Penguins/Flyers series, and I'm happy that the team won. Remember, though, that in most of the United States and in most of the world, professional ice hockey is not a major sport.

Around most of the world, though not in the U.S., soccer is a major sport, and in most places, though obviously not in the U.S., it is the major sport. And soccer has a substantial tradition and a substantial following in the Pittsburgh region, especially if we focus on Pittsburgh's various international communities. All over the region yesterday, there were bars and family rooms filled with fans screaming at their televisions while watching what some Americans refer to as the Super Bowl of soccer, the UEFA Champions League final.

The Champions League is a tournament in European club soccer that features the top teams from the previous season in the top division of the various European domestic leagues. Given the quality of European club soccer, in effect, the Champions League final pits the two top club teams in the world against one another.

Yesterday, those two teams were Manchester United and Chelsea, two top-flight English Premier League clubs which, not coincidentally, also dueled to this finish this season in League play. By day's end, Man U had accomplished a rare double: It took the League title last week, and yesterday in Moscow it topped Chelsea to take the Champions League title as well.

In this morning's media, the game and the result attracted major coverage in The New York Times. If that's consistent with the stereotype of the Times as serving the elite and effete consumer (even though soccer is traditionally a working-class sport in most of the world), then note that the game and the result also attracted major coverage in USA Today. The final play of the match, in which the Man U goalkeeper stopped a spot kick by Chelsea's Anelka and decided the game on "penalties," was the number one play of the day on ESPN's "Top 10 plays" this morning.

If you get your news from Pittsburgh's print media standard bearer, the Post-Gazette, you would know little of this. Coverage of the Champions League final was relegated to Page 9 of the P-G's Sports section, in the "Morning Briefing" column, in the third item of the column, and in a single short paragraph.

The Post-Gazette wants to sell newspapers, and clearly it believes that it will sell more newspapers to hockey fans and baseball fans and golf fans and basketball fans and football fans and high school sports fans than it will to soccer fans. In business terms, the paper isn't xenophobic; it's rational.

Neither is Pittsburgh xenophobic, despite occasional evidence to the contrary. Rather, the major institutions that shape Pittsburgh's public sphere often seem to be completely unaware of the fact that there are large constiuencies of people here who don't care about hockey, or the future of Downtown, or the Allegheny Conference's celebration of Pittsburgh's 250th birthday. There is an international population in Pittsburgh and a population of people here who are deeply involved in international business, culture, and even sport. And much of the time, they are invisible in the broad public portraits of the region that we watch and read in the media.

Soccer coverage in the Post-Gazette, in other words, is a symptom rather than a problem in itself. With the Internet, cable TV, and other newspapers, I can find all the soccer news I want in other places; its absence from the local paper just gives me another reason to ignore the irrelevance of most of the PG. (As an aside, the frustrating thing about the paper, which I'll write about eventually, is that it has some extraordinary but underused writers; it occasionally turns them loose on real and important stories where they do amazing work, as in the WVU degree scandal; and the publishers' fundamental instincts about urban journalism are mostly sound.)

So I'll close with a related anecdote. The other day I met a colleague for a meal Downtown, and we were talking about the entrepreneurial landscape in Pittsburgh, from professional services firms to funding infrastructure to successful and up-and-coming entrepreneurs. This lawyer works for one of the top high tech law firms Downtown and is very knowledgeable about the well-known players and their strengths and weaknesses. And then I mentioned the Indian tech community here. This drew a blank stare. Again, this is not xenophobia, and it's not really ignorance. This person wants to know what's happening around town, and generally does a pretty good job keeping up -- no doubt better than I do. Instead, I believe that it's the failure of the public sphere to tie together some less visible but important strands of regional culture. TiEPittsburgh, the local chapter of an international organization that supports entrepreneurship, especially among Indian communities (TiE stands for "The IndUS Entrepreneurs"), was last mentioned in the Post-Gazette, according to its search engine, in March 2007.

Let's go Pens. What the hell.

Pittsburgh Quarterly and IntoPittsburgh

The newest issue of Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine is out and online, and with it editor/publisher Doug Heuck is making PQ the communications and media home of the IntoPittsburgh initiative.

From Doug's Letter from the Publisher:

A little over a year ago, on a frigid Saturday in January, I had what you might call a date with destiny. I'd agreed to meet three men in a bar in East Liberty. I'd never been there, but I'd read about the place. As I looked for the street and then the number, I considered what I really knew about these men. Very little. All three, however, had developed a reputation in certain circles for their “activities.”

I got out of the car and walked quickly to the door. I hesitated, then took a deep breath and walked in. I quickly glanced around the place. The front room was empty with a faint smell of old cigarettes. Around the corner, I heard laugher, and there they were — all three of them just sitting there — bloggers.

Yes, bloggers — those flouters of journalistic tradition. Well, we had a great talk, and an idea began to emerge. And as the months rolled by, the group grewand the idea did too. The idea is simple: build a bridge between Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers everywhere. Connect Pittsburghers far and wide with this city and region. Welcome their input and effort in the ever evolving quest to build the greatest city in the world. That's my version of it at least.

The effort now has a name — Into Pittsburgh — and you can see an early version of the logo on this page. You'll hear more about Into Pittsburgh as time goes by. For now, you can start to get involved in the dialogue by going to ittsburghquarterly.com. We have a growing community of bloggers represented, many of them writers whose work you've seen in the magazine.

Pittsburghquarterly.com is undergoing its own renaissance, changing from a sleepy little site to one that we hope you agree has a lot to offer. We have a weekly report from web editor and veteran Pittsburgh journalist Jeffery Fraser. If you want an excellent writer's report on the most interesting and pertinent events of the week, try Jeff's blog.

I was one of those three people having lunch with Doug a little over a year ago, along with Jim Morris and Jim Russell. Since that meeting, we've moved slowly but deliberately, simultaneously figuring out what the message is and what the group can do. We assembled the document still known as the Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh (still online here), enlisted the growing band of like-minded souls now collected under the IntoPittsburgh umbrella, and identified some more concrete but still related projects -- among them Jim Russell's Diaspora initiative, and what I've been writing about here as Pittsburgh 2.0. The Tech Council is part of the loop, and IW, and alumni organizations at local universities, and community organizers. It's a big pool of energy, and it's getting bigger all the time.

What is IntoPittsburgh? My version of the message is this: It's a group of people around the world who want to leverage Pittsburgh's distributed social and financial capital to improve the Pittsburgh region itself -- economically, culturally, and socially. How can you be a part of it? One -- self-identify. Tag your blog posts. Ask me to put your name on my "Pittsburgh 2.0" list to the left. Two -- reach out. Go to LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com), sign up, and search for and join the IntoPittsburgh group. Three -- get involved. IntoPittsburgh is a message, not one specific program. Figure out how your organization (network, family, friends) can participate -- socially, culturally, economically. Click on some of the Pittsburgh 2.0 profiles to the left for examples.

PQ gives all of this a great platform, with one foot squarely in the world of traditional media and another exploring the blogosphere and related new media. One of PQ's commitments in this area is "PQ Blog Central," which includes posts by PQ staff (as Doug notes above) as well as by Jim Russell and Chris Allison. Watch that space as IntoPittsburgh evolves.

The Revolution Will Be Networked

It's not a revolution, but progress in Pittsburgh does proceed, one node at a time. It's not political progress, but -- here and there -- economic development progress.

Innovation Works has launched AlphaLab,

AlphaLab provides funding, free office space, expert business advisors and services through an intensive six-month program in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab helps companies rapidly develop their technology, gain user feedback from early alpha or beta releases and move toward successful commercial launch. . . . The application deadline is March 31, 2008.

I'm not wild about the name of the project, for reasons that become clear when you run a Google search, but the core of the idea is terrific. This baby belongs to Jim Jen at IW, who has the right background and outlook for this enterprise.

Relatedly, in recent weeks I've learned about Pittsburgh Equity Partners, a venture fund that is looking to fill an important gap in the Pittsburgh capital landscape: Entrepreneurial companies that have outgrown the resources of F&F, seed, and angel funding but aren't ready for larger venture investments. PEP is run by Ed Engler, founder and chairman of Summa Technologies and GP in Summa Venture Works, and Steve Robinson, of Robinson Venture Works. PEP is the current evolutionary stage of the Pittsburgh Angel Fund, with sponsorship by the Commonwealth and the involvement of IW, PLSG, and other players around town. Here's some history.

Competition in capital markets is a good thing. Investors in entrepreneurial markets measure deals by primarily by level of risk rather than primarily by level of return. Pittsburgh needs more of these folks, and it needs more of them to be visible players in the economy of new firms. The banking mentality, which expects every deal to pay out a return discounted by some level of risk, doesn't suit the entrepreneurial environment.

Last but not least, I'm late to the party celebrating Bill Toland's update on IntoPittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Diaspora from last Friday's Post-Gazette. Bill has some excellent info and links about projects to connect grassroots economic developments initiatives in the so-called Rust Belt, including the Pittsburgh Diaspora and IntoPittsburgh (search this blog's archives and Jim Russell's Burgh Diaspora for more information on IP).

What might be called the "rustroots" movement has a challenge. How do we take it out of the blogosphere and out of column's like Bill's (where it gets flattering coverage but is nonetheless marginalized by the paper itself), and how do we connect it to real economic momentum? If IP and the Great Lakes Urban Exchange and the Rust Belt Bloggers Network come across as a bunch of outsiders trying to fell trees in their own forest, then the movement is a non-starter, amusing to its own members and to no one else.

IP has to follow the money, to borrow a phrase from a different time and a different context. Grassroots activism needs to connect, in specific ways, to folks who not only are of like mind but who are of better economic standing. We have to persuade them to put their money where our mouths are.

Jim Jen at IW and Ed Engler at PEP are two of the people in Pittsburgh who get that connection, which is why I've assembled these items in this one post. If others like them stand up and are counted, then IP will have something to show for itself.

Pittsburgh 2.0 Update

I've added a couple of names to the slowly-expanding roster of Pittsburgh 2.0 volunteers at the left: Jim Berardone, major domo of the Product Strategy Network, and Mike Woycheck, co-founder of Pittsburgh Bloggers and proprietor of Wear Pittsburgh. You, too, can get on this list! Commit to a pay-it-forward ethos and become part of the group of Pittsburghers who want to share the wealth hidden in the region's tacit knowledge networks.

I like the whole idea of WearPittsburgh so much that I think that the t-shirts should be the unofficial uniform of the Pittsburgh Diaspora and IntoPittsburgh.

If you're in Pittsburgh on Friday (that's this Friday, February 22), don't miss the chance to meet some of the region's finest bloggers at Blogfest 13. That's at Finnegan's Wake, the now-traditional home of Pittsburgh blogfests. Note the info and instructions here. Hoist a Guinness for me; I'll be trekking through the Middle West this weekend.

Infrastructure

Comments on last week's sushi post ended sort of as I hoped they would, with some simple observations on what Pittsburgh really might do to attract new development. It's all about the infrastructure, wrote Bram: At the grand, dreamy level, a transit cluster among Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Detroit would help. At the more pedestrian level, it would be a good idea rebuilding connections between Downtown and the Hill District and the Bluff/Uptown/Soho.

Those ideas were responses to my comment, which was:

Pittsburgh has deep-seated economic problems that can be cured -- if they can be cured, and that's a very big "if" -- only with sustained growth. It is doubtful that Pittsburgh's growth can come entirely or even largely from within -- from local material and knowledge resources, local investment, local labor. What will it take to bring those resources, investment, and labor from outside the region? "Sushi" is a semi-serious proposed answer to that question.

Commenters dissed sushi, though I did hear privately from one Silicon Valley entrepreneur who agreed with me: Sushi is da bomb. (How did he find the post?)

I'm happy to leave sushi on the "semi" side of the "serious" line here, but bullet trains and maglev aren't answers either. I don't want to host another debate about this (look through the archives, and do the same at Null Space), but I suspect that the maglev reference was, like sushi, semi-serious. And as much as rebuilding the fabric of Pittsburgh's central neighborhoods would be a good thing, I doubt very much that it's more than a very modest start.

Infrastructural improvements are, however, a good place to look. What are genuine hooks for attracting economic development and growth to Pittsburgh? (And, as Harold Miller points out, for nurturing the firms that are already here.)

-- Prime the Uptown corridor for development. It's too late in the day to suggest restoring (light) rail service along Fifth Avenue, but with UPMC taking over Mercy Hospital, there are players in town with good economic reasons to invest in the area.

-- Find outside investors willing to put money into local businesses, that is, to compete with local firms. Right now, I'm talking with a friend who invests in small manufacturing enterprises. He's not based in Pittsburgh, but he's intrigued by my general description of the strength of manufacturing here.

-- Build out Pittsburgh 2.0, a social infrastructure for the economic development community. Since putting my line in the water at the beginning of the year, twice I've been contacted by or on behalf of what are now called "C-level" folks who are interested in relocating to Pittsburgh and starting or running companies here. I've passed them on to local lawyers, C-levels, and ED folks who, feedback sez, have been extremely helpful at getting them plugged in. And I'm just a law professor; imagine the kind of impact that someone in the economic development community could have if they publicly adopt a "pay it forward" strategy for Pittsburgh. While I'm at it, note the upper left column of this blog. Feel free to send me your contact info, so that I can add your name.

Critique those, and add your own.

250 Birthday Candles

Amid inaugural public celebrations of Pittsburgh 250th year that run from dry to drier, don't miss Ken Thompson's letter to the editor of the Post-Gazette:

Pittsburgh's 250th birthday is clearly upon us. We have a year of exciting events to look forward to.

A line from Kate Dewey's Jan. 6 Forum piece "Past as Prologue" struck me and, I think, bears scrutiny. She wisely suggests that we "cannot afford to be insular and parochial." Yet, I wonder if our approach to the 250th has not been just that.

Who besides ourselves are we inviting to the celebrations? A good Pittsburgh birthday party usually involves good friends and family in equal measure -- people who care about us and who we care about.

Whom are Pittsburgh's "good friends and family?" Let's start with family. Our parents come from every distant shore -- we are a child of the world. Clearly Eastern Pennsylvania is our oldest sibling, if a bit estranged. Since our birthday is also the birth of the gateway to the west, the cities and towns of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys are our younger siblings. We have close cousins in every industrial and post-industrial region in America and distant ones in similar regions around the globe.

Our friends -- people who have been touched by Pittsburgh, its story and its people -- stretch the world over. It seems to me that, in celebrating ourselves, we are celebrating them, too. Perhaps we should let them know that, and specifically invite them, to rekindle our deep historic relationships. We have a lot of candles to blow out and could use their help. Roll out the carpet and roll out the barrel!

In short, the risk evident in Pittsburgh 250 is that the region veers madly from inward-looking self-flagellation ("Our navel is a terrible navel") to inward-looking vamping and preening ("Hey, our navel is pretty great!"). Pittsburgh's birthday isn't just about us. It's about reaching out.

IntoPittsburgh: A Motto?

At Burgh Diaspora, Jim Russell is blogging up a storm about IntoPittsburgh, our evolving real/virtual Pittsburgh diaspora connectivity project. There are a lot of irons in the fire, which suits Steelers country.

We could use a motto, and I came across a quotation recently that may suit us well:

"What you have as heritage, Now take as task, / For thus you will make it
your own,"

from Goethe's Faust. In the original: "Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen."

IntoPittsburgh

We have a name: IntoPittsburgh.

BurghDiaspora's Jim Russell explains:

IntoPittsburgh isn't an organization or a marketing campaign. It is a collection of people (and existing initiatives) who matter and who are into Pittsburgh. Feel free to self-identify. I did exactly that.Blogging is an exercise in humility. I didn't invent the idea of leveraging the Burgh Diaspora for purposes of regional economic development. But not only do the like-minded fail to find each other, we fail to do something once we connect. My vision for IntoPittsburgh is doing by connecting.

What IntoPittsburgh will do depends on the people and organizations involved. I'm part of IntoPittsburgh to help people motivated to return to Pittsburgh to do so by becoming entrepreneurs or freelancers. I'll continue to advance this initiative via this blog.But I will also link the world to other IntoPittsburgh projects, many of which are already in the pipeline. Alan Paul is a Pittsburgher thriving in China. We should celebrate his success. He's sharing IntoPittsburgh with the rest of the world and I want to take this opportunity to say that all you natives should be proud.

Jim's reference to Alan Paul is a reference to this column in today's Wall Street Journal Online. Alan is a Pittsburgher and expat living in China. Alan writes about the special importance of place, emotionally as well as physically. He's the embodiment of the Pittsburgh Diaspora. Congrats, Jim, for making that connection.