America's Future Foundation

By day, Lee Doren works at CRAFT Media and Digital, a full-service media agency located in Washington, DC. By night, and by weekends, Lee is the instigator behind the popular conservative YouTube channel, “How The World Works.” Lee is also the author of the ninety-nine cent e-book “Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoiding Indoctrination at College.”

Despite this success, Lee is far from where he saw himself in college. After graduating from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Lee wanted to become a prosecutor in Chicago. He also confesses that he use to be a liberal.

So how did this liberal student who wanted to be a prosecutor in Chicago end up becoming one of the most famous conservative faces on YouTube? Well interesting story.

When things don’t go as planned.

Lee told Townhall in an interview for the December 2011 magazine, that he experienced a philosophical wake-up call when the liberal lobbying organization he was with made the Sunoco oil refinery in Toledo, Ohio their target.

I realized that most of the people who were there against me were not big CEOs or big corporate titans – they were everyday Americans who liked the fact that the refinery provided jobs and made life a little bit easier for a lot of them in terms of paying their bills… That was just kind of a shock to me when I actually met these people.

He dedicated a lot of time after this experience to understanding free-market principles, and to fleshing-out the new conservative philosophy to which he found he belonged.

Also, after law school and passing the bar, Lee found an unfriendly job market in the midst of the recession. That’s when Lee decided that he wasn’t going to wait for opportunity.

Instead of sitting around all day waiting for interviews, I decided to upload some videos to YouTube. And since YouTube had just announced that they were offering revenue sharing, I figured I could justify my time.

Lee started making videos and uploading them on his channel “How the World Works.” He began developing an audience and drawing attention. The liberal left on YouTube started making attack videos against Lee’s fledgling channel, as he was pretty much the only conservative channel on the block. These liberal channels had bigger audiences, which brought traffic to Lee.

Eventually, Fox News picked up his critique of Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff. To discuss the story, Fox News interviewed Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Lee again took the initiative, reaching out to Horner, and was offered a job at CEI. This brought him to Washington, DC, only a few short months after the launch of his channel in the summer of 2009.

It takes initiative, not expertise.

Lee Doren is entirely self-taught in video blogging.

I had no experience whatsoever in making videos. But as I started doing it over and over again, and started to see the entertainment channels, and see what their format was for what works on YouTube, I just started experimenting and found what worked.

The return on investment for Lee’s time has been enormous. “The amount of money I’ve spend on these videos basically zero over the years in terms of the money they have paid back through the advertising.” While Lee chooses to have a day job, he says that many people who have pursued make videos as a full-time job have been very successful. This is only the beginning for YouTube careers, he believes, as the internet is going to be replacing traditional television.

It’s getting to the point where [YouTube channels] have larger audiences than basic cable news. Much larger. And that’s why I always laugh at people who thumb their nose and say “Oh, you just make YouTube videos.” Because these people have smaller audiences on some cable channels.

People look down on YouTube videos, but their full-time job is to write something or make videos for something and they aren’t getting close to the viewership… Keith Olbermann supposedly had something like 50,000 views. That’s like a D-level YouTube video, and he is getting $12 million dollars or something like that?”

Eventually the paradigm is going to change in terms of where ad-buys are going to go. Television isn’t going to be able to sustain those kind of paychecks… Once they start merging television and the internet, that’ll basically make it where there is no difference.

How to develop an audience.

Lee says that a video blogger should focus on marketing a video first.

Forget about content for a second. You need to figure out where you are likely to be getting your audience from. Where is your traffic going to come from?… Because if you just go and decide to upload a random video, you are literally a needle in a haystack and someone has to be able to find your stuff. And that’s not easy. So you might have the greatest content in the world, and you might be able to make it really well, but you need a strategy of figuring out before you even upload your first video for how you will let people know.

Most videos on YouTube that go viral are planned to go viral… It literally is five to ten bloggers on big blogs with enormous audiences will post it on their blogs… Ten human beings decided to clip the URL and post it in a WordPress blog. It isn’t magic.

Having a marketing strategy is more important now than ever, because YouTube has grown exponentially since Lee started in 2009. He says that his success is partially attributable to the fact that he recognized the window of opportunity was “very, very short.”

Networking is a key part of marketing.

What is most important, according to Lee, is to make personal connections with other young professionals.

The best advice that I could give anyone, it has worked well, and I’d recommend it to anybody, is to find young people who you think are going to be successful in DC. They will give you the time of day, and they will listen to you, and they will be very willing to meet with you. They will be the people in the next five or ten years who will be offered positions to make decisions.

Lee Doren’s story is an inspiration because few of us find ourselves doing what we thought we would be doing in just the few short years after college or graduate school. While there is social pressure to feel bad about taking new directions, Lee’s story is a testament to the fact that these turns may lead to better places than our original plans.

Make sure to subscribe to Lee’s YouTube channel, “How The World Works,” check out his book, “Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoiding Indoctrination at College,” and follow Lee on twitter.

A final piece of advice from Lee.

Long-term planning is very difficult in new media… because you have no idea what the new media world is going to look like ten years from now. Ten years ago, YouTube didn’t exist.

 

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Jacqueline Otto’s shelves at home are lined with used-book store finds; just a few of her favorite authors include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, and George Orwell.

She first read F.A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat at 16. Her political affiliation on Facebook is “Freedom,” and she hopes to always be known as a lover of liberty.

Jacqueline is on Twitter at @jacque_otto.

 Jonah Goldberg is one of the most prolific and unique authors of the modern conservative movement. His nationally syndicated column appears regularly in newspapers across the United States. He is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a member of the board of contributors to USA Today, a contributing editor to National Review, and the founding editor of National Review Online.

His first book, Liberal Fascism, quickly became a New York Times bestseller, and he has been frustratingly cryptic about his forthcoming and much anticipated second book.

In addition to his many print appearances, Jonah Goldberg can been spotted on a regular basis making snarky comments as a contributor to Fox News.

Mr. Goldberg has a wealth of knowledge that is informed by his very unique experiences. His advice for young conservatives and aspiring conservative writers should be considered an excellent resource for the conservative movement.

No such thing as wasted time.

There is no such thing as truly wasted time if you aren’t spending it entirely sitting around playing video games.

Talking to someone as much on the forefront of the political debate as Jonah Goldberg, one would expect to be instructed about focus, and determination, and hard work. It was a surprise then, and somewhat of a relief, to be told by Goldberg that there is no such thing as wasted time.

One of the things that younger people in Washington get too obsessed with is this idea of ‘wasted time.’ They feel that if they are not perfectly focused on the path to their end goal then they are wasting time. I don’t know anybody who ended up working a weird job that ended up not being the job for them, that felt like they wasted time. They are really glad for that experience. Having a diversity of experiences, whatever you end up doing, it only helps.

And if anyone does, Jonah knows about a “diversity of experiences.”

After college, Goldberg and some friends had a failed experience trying to start a newspaper in New York City. From there he went to Prague, where he had a failed experience being a starving writer. “I didn’t starve and I didn’t write!” After coming back to the United States, he worked as Ben Wattenberg’s research assistant at AEI, which eventually led him to producing Wattenberg’s show Think Tank on PBS.

It was after coming through this diversity of experiences that he learned of and appreciated their value.

One of the reasons why I came home early from Prague is because I had convinced myself that I was wasting time. In retrospect, that just seems idiotic…It was a good time-out. A good time to play a lot of blackjack in European casinos, but also to read books that I otherwise wouldn’t have read.

One of the things I like about writing, with the caveat about editors notwithstanding, is that basically whatever comes into my head shows up on the piece of paper or on the screen. I’m responsible for the words that are down there. That’s not the same thing with television, but I’m really glad that I learned that. I’m really glad that I didn’t go years thinking that I could be a good television producer. It’s a very valuable experience to find out what you are not good at or what you don’t love.

Goldberg also had his first book contract in the mid 1990’s to write a book about the 100 most influential conservatives. He never wrote the book and actually gave the advance back to the publisher.

I don’t consider it wasted time because I spent a lot of time thinking hard about what I thought about conservatives. The process of trying to figure out how to rank them meant that I had to develop a ideological filter of how I see these things, and it was a very useful process for me. I learned a lot. I also learned that writing a book you really don’t want to be writing is just about the most horrible thing you could do other than eating broken glass.

I’m really glad I did [give the advance back]. Because you only write your first book once.

The need to love your craft.

As an author who has navigated many unique experiences, Goldberg has useful and practical advice for young writers.

They should be buying many copies of my books.

While that bit of advice was said in jest, it is not a bad idea. Much can be learned from Goldberg’s work about how to develop one’s voice as an author.

I wanted to differentiate my voice from a lot of other writers. The goal is for an editor to put their hand over the byline and say “this sounds like Jonah Goldberg, or “this sounds like Jacqueline Otto.”

In rapid-fire succession, here are some more tidbits of advice that Goldberg has for young conservative writers,

■ Don’t always go for the funny stuff. There are a lot of writers out there who want to be P.J. O’Rourke. The reason P.J. O’Rourke is P.J. O’Rourke is because he is freaking P.J. O’Rourke. He is really good at it.

■ Writing weird stuff, which is different than funny stuff, is hugely useful. If you can find some subject that is interesting that no one else is writing about, you aren’t competing with anybody.

■ When you are young and unknown, it is better to be in print. When you are older and established, it is better to be online… Editors understand that dead tree and ink is a finite resource. They understand that if you have a clip from a paper publication, that you made it through more hurdles than if you had made it onto the web.

■ Do book reviews… It allows you to become an expert about whatever it is you are reading about… If you do five to ten book reviews on a related field, you are basically as expert as any journalist on that field.

■ This industry cannot sustain the number of pundits it already has, but there is always room for reporters… You can always get around to doing the opinion stuff, if you learn how to get the facts right, learn how to use the telephone and not just email.

Goldberg also stressed the importance of loving your craft. He told the story of a painter in Connecticut who painted seascapes. This women would say ‘If you are going to be a painter, you have to like smooshing the paints.”

What she meant by that was that before you figure out if you are going to paint a crying clown, or a car wreck, or a seascape, you got to like taking the paints out and smooshing them around. You have to like the process, because if you truly hate the process, you can’t really love painting. It is sort of the same thing with writing. That doesn’t mean it can’t be hard; writing a book is just the crappiest thing in the world. But at the end of the day, you have to like writing at some level. Or you are just some poser who likes to say that you are a writer.

A Final Piece of Advice from Jonah Goldberg.

I’m a great skeptic about the glories of being young, and fetishising youth (no offense to the America’s Future Foundation). But the one thing they have over everybody who is married or has kids, is that they have the ability to be entrepreneurial with their time.

I use to say in college and high school that if it made a great story six months later, it was worth doing. I still think there is some wisdom in that. Create the narrative of your life so that when you look back on it, you feel that there wasn’t wasted time.

On Wednesday, February 8, 2012, Mr. Goldberg will be debating Matt Welch of Reason Magazine on the question of “Are libertarians a part of the conservative movement?” This debate is co-hosted by America’s Future Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and will be hosted at the AEI conference center.

Make sure to watch for Goldberg’s second book, and follow him on twitter at @JonahNRO.

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Jacqueline Otto’s shelves at home are lined with used-book store finds; just a few of her favorite authors include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, and George Orwell.

She first read F.A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat at 16. Her political affiliation on Facebook is “Freedom,” and she hopes to always be known as a lover of liberty.

Jacqueline is on Twitter at @jacque_otto.

Conventional wisdom used to be that the political left had control over the online sphere. This sentiment reached its zenith after President Obama’s new media focused election campaign in 2008. Since then however, due to the efforts of those like Erik Telford, conservative bloggers and activists have won over the Internet and set a new standard for the successful use of new media. New York Times political reporter Trip Gabriel even concluded “that the passion of bloggers seems to have swung towards conservatives.”

Telford made his mark early as a social media pioneer in conservative politics, allowing the grass-roots organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP)  to fill the need for national leadership in new media activism for the Tea Party.

In addition to being the director of membership and online strategy at AFP, Telford served as the executive director of RightOnline, an initiative aimed at cultivating online activism among center-right bloggers and organizations. Telford organized four national conferences, drawing thousands of attendees and national media attention as RightOnline squared off against the older and more established left-wing Netroots Nation convention four years in a row (in Austin in 2008, Pittsburgh in 2009, Las Vegas in 2010, and Minneapolis in 2011).

In 2011, Telford moved to the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity where he currently serves as the vice president of strategic initiatives and outreach. His work has been featured in news outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Washington Times, and online at the Daily Caller and Townhall. However, one his most notable accomplishments  may have been in April, 2009, when he was named Keith Olbermann’s #2 worst (“worser”) person in the world for his role in advancing the Tea Party movement (which, as a friend of mine has been known to say, “is like being kissed on the forehead by Ronald Reagan”).

Finding a niche in political communications.

Telford’s friends and family could have told you that he would be politically engaged. He was, in his words, “a political nutcase from a young age.” But his interest in communications and new media surprised him in graduate school at George Washington University.

I knew that I wanted to work in politics, but I always thought I wanted to work more in the campaign and party-oriented sphere. My work study job was at the graduate school at GWU that hosted Crossfire for CNN at the time. And I just loved the media stuff, and seeing the behind the scenes I just thought was so cool. That developed an interest in media that I didn’t necessary have prior than that.

To satisfy this growing interest in communications and media, Telford took several political communications courses including courses in new media.

Like many graduating in 2006, Telford did not find a friendly hiring environment for conservatives. As he was trying to find out how to make the best of the situation and his multiple degrees, he picked up a flyer about Americans For Prosperity at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by America’s Conservative Union. From there he found out that AFP was hiring a new media director; he applied and started shortly thereafter.

Accepting the position as AFP’s New Media Director,

Took me in a direction I never would have anticipated going, but I love the grassroots stuff. I love the work that AFP was doing, and it allowed me to stick to my issues and ideals rather than having to compromise ideologically. That really defined for me the path that I wanted to go in, and it wasn’t one that I would have chosen out of the blue, but I’m really glad I found it.

No need for preconceived notions.

He says there were many “preconceived notions I found when I came to DC, like you have to go to law school, you have to work on the hill, you have to work on a campaign.” But being in a position that allowed him to explore the media that fascinated him and do work that he found interesting, Telford found himself saying no to the campaign-style opportunities that he thought he had wanted to do in college. It allowed him to defy the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC.

At the time I went to do my masters degree, a lot of people were saying that you should go to law school even if you don’t want to be a lawyer. But I knew for sure I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and I didn’t want to spend three year going through the pain of law school and then have to pay for it afterwards… Some of the most brilliant people I have met through work have dropped out of college or didn’t do anything after high school, and they are achieving more than people who went to Harvard.

Telford was cautious to warn young people that while a college degree doesn’t determine your success, not to underestimate the value of pursuing higher education in today’s weaker employment market. “I think it is a lot tougher now with employment being lower,” he says that you will always be competing with the “vanity of needing a college degree or a professional degree just to get your foot in the door for an interview.”

Pioneering the realm of new media, Telford says that he found that the old conventions were not there to hold him back.

I was in the new media realm which was so new, there were opportunities to excel at a higher rate because there were no standard orthodoxy, no gatekeepers. When you are an early adapter to a field, you get to be a pioneer and you don’t have to follow the rules that other people made.

Of course, when Telford was staring out in 2006 “new media” was Facebook and MySpace. He recalls that he knew he was facing an uphill battle when he was asked if he would get them on that “MyFace.”

Networking is more than social networking.

Even though Telford of all people understands the value of social networking, he says that it can never replace the good, old-fashioned in-person kind.

A lot of people rely too much on the online stuff, and it is important to connect with people online, but if you never meet them in person, it never ends up being as effective.

He recommends finding people who are a little bit older or more experienced than yourself and asking to go to coffee or lunch with them.

I would sit down with these consultants who would be giving the same advice to clients for hundreds of dollars an hour, but just because I bought them lunch and picked their brain they felt honored because someone was respecting them and wanted to get their input. It was helping me in terms of just getting advice, but also as they would learn what I did, they would start connect me with other people.

Similarly, he recommends being someone who likes to connect other people, and not to just look out for your own connections.

Some people get protective of their connections, they don’t want their peer to out-network them. But people like people who are connected, and the more you are connecting with people and connecting them to other people enhances those bonds, and those relationships, and your standing.

For more networking advice, Telford recommends reading Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. To find out more about Telford, check out the Franklin Center’s website. Also, follow him on twitter at @BlameTelford.

A final piece of advice from Erik.

When at an event such as an AFF happy hour or roundtable discussion, cold card-collecting “is good for collecting cards, but bad for establishing connections.” People don’t want to know that they’re going in your card catalog before they get to know you.

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Jacqueline Otto’s shelves at home are lined with used-book store finds; just a few of her favorite authors include C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, and George Orwell.

She first read F.A. Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat at 16. Her political affiliation on Facebook is “Freedom,” and she hopes to always be known as a lover of liberty.

Jacqueline is on Twitter at @jacque_otto.

Gene Healy is vice president of the Cato Institute. He is also a self-described recovering lawyer from New Jersey.

What makes Gene Healy unique is the success he has found in writing on libertarian issues. Gene’s work can be found in his weekly column in the Washington Examiner and in other outlets including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Legal Times.