Photo credit: jypsygen

Over the next few months, I’ll be blogging entries with the theme “City Girl Moves to the Country.” Oh, wait, has that been done?

Seriously, though, after growing up in the fourth largest city in the country, then living ten years in the undisputed largest — notwithstanding three years in the SF Bay Area — I am slightly nervously packing my bags for a hamlet with a total population of 1,600. We’re going from a Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood with a population density of 47,716 per square mile to a town with 57 people per square mile. Can’t you just imagine the tumbleweeds rolling by?

OK, so, I’ll admit, this tiny town is on the outskirts of a pretty darned cool, and fairly populous, city — Austin, Texas. You know, the place where SXSW is held. The place with the amazing start-up scene and the burgeoning social media community.

I’m a Native Texan, and most of my family still lives thereabouts. We’ve loved living in New York and San Francisco, but, as the years have gone on, we’ve missed being close enough for family barbecues, pool parties, weddings and baby showers, not to mention the occasional hospital visit or funeral. We want our kids to have the kind of family relationships I grew up with, and have grown to cherish even more as I’ve gotten older. It just didn’t seem possible to give them that living so far away. (With the lower cost of living, we hope to be able to visit our Scottish family more often, too.)

It’s hard for me to believe that we’re at this point, given that this move has been more than a year in the making, but, by next week, we’ll be in the Austin area, with the kids settled into their new schools and us unpacking at our new house on three acres out in the boonies.

As for work, I will be leaving Federated Media at the end of the week (after 4 years!), but I’ll be doing some part-time consulting work for the company and continuing some of the key projects I’ve been a part of — after I take next week off to get my bearings and unpack a few boxes, of course. I also expect to do some freelance writing and editing, and am keeping my eyes open for interesting projects. Feel free to get in touch with ideas! (pamela *at* pamelaparker.com, @pamelaparker, http://www.pamelaparker.com)

Austin peeps, I look forward to getting in touch, or getting back in touch, in the coming weeks and months! Let’s do lunch or coffee!

I suspect more than a few folks are scratching their heads about the whole #motrinmoms scandal du weekend. As my friend @fuzheado said, the divergence in reaction might make a good Mars/Venus case study. He didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but his wife honed right in on the problem.

Not surprisingly, I’m with the wife. Like the super-vocal moms who took such offense, I immediately “got” the problem with the ad — its tone. As a mom with a 5-month-old, I “wear” my baby all the time. But it’s not because it’s “in fashion,” because it’s “supposedly” is a good bonding experience or because I want to look like “an official mom”, as the Motrin ad implies. It’s because it works. The kid doesn’t cry and I can do whatever needs doing. And of course it’s a bonding experience, because any time you meet your child’s needs that’s the case.

And, yes, sometimes my back hurts. Others out there are admitting this, too, even though the conventional wisdom is that babywearing doesn’t hurt if you’re doing it right. So, I don’t think J&J is far off in targeting moms who wear their babies. They’re just going about it wrong. (And let’s not dismiss this as a Twitter crisis. For everyone that’s tweeting about this, there are many others that are hearing about it, or just seeing the ads themselves and having the same reaction. Twitter is just surfacing the word-of-mouth that would have been happening anyway. )

But all is not lost for the brand. Right now, everyone’s saying they will boycott Motrin. This bodes ill for their product for adults and may also impact their product for kids, given they’ve now offended the target that controls the purse-strings.

The silver lining is that Motrin has gotten everyone’s attention. They need to grab this opportunity, while they’re in the online spotlight, to connect in a positive way. They need to apologize and retool their condescending message about babywearing. To make sure it gets seen, an ad spend on mommy blogs is in order. Motrin have shown that they’re not the experts on babywearing, but they can certainly get involved with and sponsor conversations on the topic — a topic that inspires an amazing amount of passion. Whaddaya say, J&J?

Other links:

Sarah Evans on Mashable has a prescription for Motrin, as well.

In case you’re wondering.

Ah, it’s only been 3 short years since I last posted about moving. And… here we go again — in the other direction.

In an eerie coincidence, we’re probably going to be taking off within a week of our 3 year anniversary of moving West. And our new digs are within 1/2 mile of where we lived before (in Brooklyn). But, boy, have things changed (one 2-year-old boy changes everything) in the intervening time.

This move is also due to my husband’s job, but, thankfully, as occurred in my last move, I’ve got an office — FM’s NYC satellite — to land in, upon my arrival sometime in December. I’m really looking forward to seeing all of my NYC-based professional contacts again, and I’m excited about returning to the city I never stopped loving.

Sad news about CNET editor James Kim. Searchers found his body a few hours ago. As a parent, and as a human, I feel for the Kim family.

Checking out the blogosphere this morning, I see a lot of people are posting their memories of that day, five years ago, when the unbelievable became reality. I’ve been dreading this anniversary in some ways, partly because coverage still makes me cry — the way I shed tears in Union Square (NYC) reading “Missing” flyers in the days after the tragedy.

I lived and worked in New York City on September 11, 2001. My office was on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. It was far away from the downtown events, but, because of the towers’ height and the geographical lay-out of the city, we could, and did, step outside our doors to look down Fifth Avenue and see the fatally damaged towers, while they stood, and the sickening black smoke after they fell.

Some other memories:

• Despite just being a couple miles away, I found out about the WTC attack via instant messenger. We had an editor working from home that day, and he’d seen footage on CNN. He IMed those of us in the office and kept us updated regularly. We didn’t have a TV in the office, and the Internet (being totally clogged with traffic) was next-to-useless.
  
• After doing what we could at the office, I walked home, straight down Fifth Avenue. Along the way, people were actually snatching up postcards of the WTC from tourist-oriented shops.
  
• Restaurants started running out of food in the days after the attacks, as Manhattan is an island, after all, and shipments of fresh food and produce weren’t exempt from security restrictions that kept everyone out.
  
• My brother reached me by phone after the first plane hit, but before the second one did, so he was able to relay news to my family that I was nowhere near the buildings. My then-boyfriend, now husband, still living in the UK, didn’t find out I was OK until he got to a place where he could IM me.
  

May add more as I get more time today.

Well, the day has finally come. Yes, there’s been a big build up, but it’s ending with a whimper. I’m here at the subleased office by myself, packing up the last of my stuff (including the famous goose). When I finally shuffle out the door and turn off the lights, it’ll be goodbye to ClickZ after nearly 5 years. And goodbye to daily news reporting about interactive advertising, which I started doing in 1999. (Well, I’ll be blogging, but, still…)

Instead of getting all sentimental, I’ll just keep it short and sweet. In my years at ClickZ I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the most hard working, talented journalists and columnists (not to mention all-around good people) I’ve ever met. (See their blog here.) It’s been a great experience to be associated with such a strong brand, and such an influential publication, through the years when the interactive advertising industry has seen so much innovation. There were ups, downs, and, now, the resurgence. I’ll miss them, but I’m sure ClickZ, and the team, will be just fine without me. Goodbye!

P.S. I don’t expect this blog to continue the way it’s been going the past few days (with lots of personal and FM-promotional stuff). So, if it’s not to your taste (and even if it is), stick around.

Yes, it‘s true (as if you doubted it). I’m joining FM Publishing as author services manager, to work with John Battelle and his team on developing this next-generation publishing company.

Why? One of my earliest experiences in the Internet ad world was as intern/writer/ad sales person at @NY. I got the ad sales part of the job (and all the rest) courtesy of Tom Watson, who I’d met while finishing up my masters in journalism at Columbia. One of the more important things I learned (besides that I was not cut out for selling) was how difficult it was for agencies to buy ads across niche Web sites. No matter how engaged and influential their audiences, it was just plain logistically difficult to buy across all those sites. And that was 1998, before the explosion in blogs, and their accompanying engaged, influential (but niche) audiences. That’s one of the issues FM is looking to address.

Why else? I’ve spent the years since that experience thinking and writing about interactive advertising, watching the boom, the flameout and the subsequent rise. Joining FM is an opportunity for me to apply everything I’ve learned over the years about advertising and about managing writers. It’s also a great chance to work with brilliant, dedicated people who have a strong vision of the future of publishing. Needless to say I’m especially looking forward to getting to know the authors, many of whom I feel I know already through reading their compelling writing. I’m really eager to start helping them realize their dreams for their sites.

One of the things I had to really look at when considering this opportunity was whether I’d miss writing. I’ve helped with writing news and authored a bi-weekly column since 2001. I looked back recently over the archives of what I’ve written for ClickZ, and the sheer volume is amazing. Thankfully, FM, as you might expect, is supportive of my blogging, so I’ll have The River as an outlet for my musings. Not sure exactly how often I’ll be posting or what shape it’ll take, but give me time to get my feet wet and together we’ll see what emerges. (Feedback is always welcome, of course.)

I’m still at ClickZ for the next week. Then I’ll take a whole day (!) off to do yoga and nap (or something equally relaxing), and I start at FM on August 1. To all you FM authors out there, I look forward to working with you!

I’m in NYC for the next couple of days, culimnating in ClickZ’s inaugural Online Video Advertising Forum on Friday. I’m really looking forward to the show. It’s the first new standalone event we’ve launched under the ClickZ brand since being acquired by Incisive Media, and it’s looking like attendance is going to be excellent. I’ve already run into Gary Stein on the plane on the way over, and I’m looking forward to catching up with more folks while I’m on the road.

BTW, I’m moderating the “Publisher Perspectives” panel Friday afternoon.

So, apparently it rained 25 days out of 31 in March. And now it’s rained every day in April, thus far. So, one of my office neighbors looked at a 10-day forecast, hoping to cheer himself up with the prospect of sun in the future. But nope. The best that’s predicted is partly cloudy.