Designing a great lottery logo isn’t easy. You’ve got to convey the idea that the average person could win a crap ton of cash — and that you’re not completely throwing your money away by entering. I collected all the U.S. state lottery logos I could find (plus an international one), both new and old. Some states have definitely left their lotteries in the 1980s, but a few states stand out with bold design solutions.
Here are some of my favorites — Washington State’s simple lottery logo reminds me of an embossed seal:
Colorado’s bold lottery logo reminds me of a beer label, and it plays up the mountainous landscape of the state. Idaho’s lottery logo is a close second in the mountain category:
Washington, DC’s lottery identity has a gorgeous palette, and the stylized cherry blossom evokes the outline of the District:
Conveying the idea of luck is hugely important — that’s why I like Oregon’s simple logo of crossed fingers:
I believe the United Kingdom’s National Lottery logo used to be exactly the same, but I couldn’t find a photo. Here’s the current UK lottery logo, and the Virginia lottery’s crossed fingers also make a nice V:
I present the rest of the lottery logos without comment. Which are your favorites, and which are just incredibad?
It’ll be like a live FAQ, from 6 to 7 p.m. Sunday, March 24. The link is below, and if I get the Google+ Hangout to work correctly, it’ll be available to watch afterward, too!
Thinking about content strategy for creative businesses is seriously my jam right now — my background in magazine editing and my long-running craft business are kind of colliding in a creative supernova, and I’m working on some ideas to roll out to the world.
I contributed a post over at CraftyPod on content strategy, and I’ll be hanging out with Sister Diane tomorrow, Wednesday, March 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific to chat about content strategy!
If you’ve got a full-blown creative business, content strategy can be taken even further to help you work a lot smarter.
Would it blow your mind if I told you that everything you do online can be part of your content strategy? That includes your website or blog, your Etsy storefront, your public Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and other social media, plus your e-newsletters.
The main reason I love content strategy so much is that, when you do it right, it saves you a metric crap-ton of time. Content strategy is all about being prepared, having procedures in place and knowing what needs to be done when.
I’ve been thinking a lot about getting paid lately. Not only because I’ve been a self-employed editor and writer for the last six months, but because the internet blew up this week over an incident in which The Atlantic asked a writer to adapt a hella long story for zero dollars. Freelance writers went into conniption fits; magazine editors went into damage-control mode. (As far as I can tell, the people who actually control the budgets stayed out of the fracas.) Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic shrugged with his response piece saying “the biz ain’t what it used to be.” But I disagree with one of his main points: The digital journalism world isn’t what sucks — the entire journalism business model sucks.
The outrage moved from Twitter onto this epically long Branch started by Choire Sicha called “How Much Should A Writer Be Paid, If Anything?” But that’s not the right question. A better question is: How do people who create things for a living convince the public to pay for content that is valuable to them? How do providers of editorial services convince publishers that our work is worth paying for?
Editorial content is the whole point of a publisher’s business, and, yet, the outfits that can afford to pay at least $1 per word (which seems like the tipping point of profitability for freelance writers) are by far in the minority. The biggest magazines and blogs have staff writers or reporters, but such a luxury is a dream for most publishers. Full-time staffers are awfully expensive, and many publishers have already doubled or tripled the workloads of their editors. So we get more churnalism, more aggregation, more noise and less meaning. The quest for ever-growing traffic drives publishers to (generally) go for quantity over quality in online articles. But when advertising sales or monthly unique impressions decline, the whole business model collapses. Editorial budgets shrink, web presences decline, print publications shutter. Ad infinitum.
The Atlantic’s sorry-not-sorry response keeps coming back to the idea that people should be able to work for free if they want to. That’s so not the point. Coming up with acceptable excuses for not paying people does nothing to fix the faulty journalism business model that relies on a bottomless pool of people who aspire to be writers and are willing to work for peanuts.
On the Branch thread, some people make a distinction between the work that goes into “reported” writing. Being a freelancer is sexy. Being a reporter is just hard work. My main freelance gig right now is as a copy editor for a Capitol Hill newspaper that publishes a print paper as well as constantly pushes news items out on the web. What its reporters excel at is finding information no one else has; we’re talking about wearing out shoe leather like an old-school reporter in the movies. Though you can’t own facts, that kind of reportage seems inherently more valuable than a post explaining when the Oscars are being televised. But how do you calculate the ROI on editorial quality? Publishers like hard numbers, and that’s most likely going to be circulation or unique visitor stats.
Opening up the can of worms about who pays what feels like a good first step to fixing the business of journalism. (Who Pays What is a Tumblr you need to follow.) Transparency helps freelancers know the marketplace bettere, and sharing strategies will help all editors and publishers see what business models work (I hope). It’s interesting that some of the publishers on the Branch thread are saying they allocate a certain standard percentage of their overall budget for freelance editorial expenses. (I really wish we could look at the business models for all of these startups trying to make the focus of their publishing business the actual editorial content:
So what’s the solution? I think it’s the idea of patronage. I subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition so I get the big issue on the weekend and unrestricted access to the website, but also because I believe in the newspaper’s work and I don’t ever want to see it go away. I donate to my local NPR station for the same reason. Being a subscriber to a magazine, newspaper or website is a transaction. Being a patron is a partnership. When we convince the public that editorial content is valuable, publishers will follow suit.
tl;dr: Subscribe to a damn magazine or newspaper or website. Someone’s got to pay.
Bonus
I started making this list of the bess kiss-off responses to people asking you to work for free a long time ago, and it seems like a great time to put it up:
I’ve got a real backlog of magazines on my end table, and yet I just can’t stop reading. Here are 12 things I read and loved (or at least couldn’t stop thinking about) this past month. (See the previous things I’ve read here.)
Germany’s Racist Present (Quartz) — despite a dedication to preventing another Holocaust, Germany has a blind spot when it comes to racism
The Busy Trap (NYTimes Opinionator) — life is too short to always be busy
Concierge Medicine (Bloomberg Businessweek) — with America already having a shortage of primary care physicians, the trend of concierge doctors is really troubling
Askers vs. Guessers (The Atlantic Wire) — this theory on interpersonal relations explains so much about my life!
A Guide to Internet Hoaxes (Longform) — Manti Te’o wasn’t the first guy to fall for something on the internet
Michael James Brody Jr. made the news in January 1970 as he offered to give money from his $25 million fortune to anyone who needed it. Newspapers called him a “hippie angel,” a “giveaway millionaire.” But as the attention grew overwhelming and checks started bouncing, he withdrew from the public eye, resurfacing only occasionally amid legal problems, killing himself three years later in Upstate New York.
When turned 21 on Oct. 31, 1969, Brody got access to his part of a trust fund set up by his grandfather, Chicago oleomargarine millionaire John F. Jelke. Brody had graduated from Butler University that year, where he’d been a member of Phi Delta Theta.
On Jan. 10, 1970, Michael James Brody Jr. — arriving back in New York with his new wife Renee after a honeymoon in Jamaica, for which they’d bought out all the seats of a Pan Am 707 for more than $7,000 — announced he wanted to give away his fortune. He broadcast his phone number and home address and welcomed all comers. By some accounts he was worth $25 million or $26 million or $10 billion; in a report on NBC the fortune was $50 million:
His wife, Renee Brody, says of her husband, “Michael has always had Cadillacs and Corvettes. He thinks everyone should drive them. All he wants is a chicken farm and 13 children.” …
Mr. Brody is seen playing his guitar. After the performance he claims that he is a wizard at the stock market. He kisses his wife then talks about wanting to build a spaceship but says he needs time to “get his organization together.” He then states that he has received millions of dollars in pledges for his “Harlem project.”
Brody said, according to the New York Times:
“Money hasn’t made me satisfied. I wasn’t satisfied until I found Renee. Now I have everything I want — love, fresh air, food. So why shouldn’t I give my money away?”
The New York Times reported on Jan. 11, 1970, that Michael and Renee, married Jan. 3, had met only three weeks before, at Brody’s home in Scarsdale, NY. (The Times reported Renee had sold him hashish.) The Times reported on Jan. 17 that many people were taking Brody up on his offer of free money. Hundreds of telegrams poured in from Western Union; the Scarsdale police said their switchboard was tied up with calls from around the country. Brody opened up an outpost office at 1650 Broadway in New York City.
He is reported to have given $2,500 to a man with mortgage trouble, $1,000 to a taxi driver, $500 to a heroin addict, $100 to a barber who opened a door for him and $100 to a newsboy who sold him a paper — all on Thursday.
But as the flood of money-seekers overwhelmed the office and phone lines, Brody briefly disappeared, and the Scarsdale National Bank and Trust Co. said his accounts didn’t have enough money to cover his checks. Brody’s interactions with the hungry public alternated between “kneeling before them on the sidewalk,” playing his guitar to the crowds and “shouting obscenities,” the Times reported Jan. 18. He shouted at one point in Midtown:
“If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll kill myself and you’ll all die. I need seven days and then I’ll save the world.”
Brody’s estimation of his fortune was grandiose — his father said the inheritance was about $3 million; his uncle said it was less than $1 million. As Brody escaped to Puerto Rico on a charter flight with close friends and a reporter, the needy and the curious stood vigil at his Broadway Avenue office.
Brody was reportedly paid $3,500 to appear on the Ed Sullivan show on Jan. 18, 1970 — alongside June Allyson, Muhammad Ali and Minnie Pearl — and play a Bob Dylan song, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” In this recording of an original song called “The War is Over,” he said all the proceeds from would “go to peace”:
Songs about Vietnam and Nixon weren’t in short supply in 1970, but some of his lyrics are worth noting:
“President Nixon, if you’d seen me in Washington DC last week, we could’ve ended it all
I’m really not a freak, I’m just trying to do my thing and end the war in Vietnam
I’ve no bitterness against you for locking my friends away too
Let your Secret Service kill me if that’s what you want to
Makes no difference, I’ll be reborn in Biafra”
RCA Records signed him on Jan. 21, and newspapers reported his first single might be out by the end of the week:
On one side is the unpublished Bob Dylan song that Brody, 21, sang without any particular distinction on the Ed Sullivan television show last Sunday, accompanying himself on a 12-string guitar he learned to play a few weeks ago. On the other side he sings one of his own songs, “The War is Over.”
Brody mostly fell out of the public eye, until April 21, when the Times reported he was being held temporarily in a Bay Area psychiatric center. At the San Francisco Airport, Brody had claimed he was kidnapped and injected with drugs against his will for a number of days prior. In May, he was arrested on drug charges in New York. He later said much of his conduct was the results of hundreds of doses of LSD. Michael and Renee had a son, Jamie, later in 1970.
In December 1971, Brody was arrested for calling the White House and threatening President Nixon’s life in a series of phone calls.
[US Atty. Randy] Roeder said Brody first called the White House Sunday and said he was coming to Washington on Christmas and burn himself as a form of protest.
He repeated this call Monday, according to Roeder, and gave the Secret Service agent on duty the telephone number he was calling from.
Secret Service agents went to the South Norwalk, CT, home where Brody was staying to talk to him. Then, Thursday, Dec. 23, 1971, he called the White House three times.
First he said he had called off the self-immolation, then he said he was just going going to burn his thumbs, and it was during the third call that he made the threat on the President’s life, according to Roeder.
Roeder quoted part of Brody’s final conversation as, “This is Michael James Brody, I’m going to kill President Nixon tonight … don’t bother to come and get me because I’ll be gone.”
He was arrested two hours later, and released later Thursday on a $10,000 bond. But hours after being released from jail, the home he was living in with his sister in burned to the ground. Police found him sitting on the front lawn, and he was arrested and held on a $100,000 bond.
The next time Brody appeared in the New York Times was July 1972 — Roeder said he was going to ask for a dismissal of the charges of threatening the president. Brody had been in psychiatric care since December, according to his lawyer.
Michael James Brody shot himself on Jan. 26, 1973 — 40 years ago today — in the home of his father-in-law Robert Dubois in Shokan, NY. Newspapers reported he was separated from Renee the previous year. The Village Voice reported rumors that he’d been talking about suicide for months before the final act.
All that exists of Michael James Brody Jr. online, aside from copious newspaper articles in archives, is a tribute website with fewer than 50 views and a YouTube channel with the one video and similarly few views. I only found out about the story from this tiny item in a 1970 encyclopedia supplement:
In a 1991 New York Magazine article, his former wife, Renee, said:
“It’s so hard to believe that we all lived through that. My attraction to Michael was almost supernatural. I really felt as if it were destiny — that we were meant to live through these things. … It was a very idealistic time for America. It seemed like a great idea to give away all his money. At least in theory.”
Join me for a casual Google+ Hangout about getting started in freelancing for magazines! All are welcome — both newbies and experienced journalists.
On one side is the unpublished Bob Dylan song that Brody, 21, sang without any particular distinction on the Ed Sullivan television show last Sunday, accompanying himself on a 12-string guitar he learned to play a few weeks ago. On the other side he sings one of his own songs, “The War is Over.”
