It all started innocently enough, one sunny Tuesday morning in April, without any forethought or planning. I had awakened early -- at about five a.m. -- for no apparent reason. Okay, stress, probably. Picked up the papers and a few news items caught my eye.
 In the quiet of the six o'clock hour, I wrote some quick notes about what I saw as their significance and emailed the scratch to maybe two dozen of my closest friends in marketing.
Well, they said they liked it. So I did it again. Next thing you know, I'm getting emails from people I don't even know, asking if they might be added to my list. List? What list? Oh, a good idea. A list. We had already been publishing Reveries.com for more than a year. Why not a daily newsletter to go with it?
That's how Cool News of the Day got started, in 1998. It pretty much self-ignited one day and just kept going. What keeps Cool News running is a quirky sensibility that ideas are what we make them, and the fun goes to those who think.
I was surprised, at first, to find that the most relevant stories frequently are not published on the business pages or in the marketing columns. Actually, they more often are found just about everywhere else. The real magic happens when ostensibly unrelated ideas find their connecting points -- that's what I'm hoping readers get out of Cool News.
It's not about product or service categories, or advertising versus other kinds of marketing. It's about the insights that lead to big and exciting ideas. Getting at that means cutting across the artificial boundaries that business people sometimes set up for themselves.
Cool News certainly cuts a wide path in terms of subject matter, including as it does stories about art, people, economics, fashion, prices, communication, cars, drugs, music, money, tactics, media, retailing, design, humor, management, health, strategy, loyalty, food, sports, colors, poetry, sex, technology, culture, behavior, attitude, life, death, love, hate, triumph and tragedy. That sort of thing.
The style and substance of Cool News actually owes a lot to my radio days. In fact, I write Cool News dispatches in much the same way I once wrote copy for WMMM-AM in Westport, Connecticut, in the early 1980s. We had no budget to send reporters to cover local news events, so we re-wrote what the newspapers published for the air. I had to write the same story three or four different ways, so I wasn't repeating myself over several newscasts.
What keeps Cool News running is a quirky sensibility that ideas are what we make them, and the fun goes to those who think.
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That discipline is at the very center of what Cool News is all about -- you know, I frequently find my lead in the sixth or seventh paragraphs of my source material! And I love it when people say that they read the original story, but got something different out of it when they read the Cool News version. That's what I'm going for, most of the time.
The realization that getting up at five a.m. doesn't feel all that different from getting up at six a.m. is another critical epiphany. There's nothing quite like the quiet of the six o'clock hour to decide what's cool that day.
As you might imagine, most Cool News readers are marketing types -- thousands of them -- at the world's biggest brands and their agencies, from all over the world. But Cool News also attracts a fair number of just plain folks who seem to take to the energies that lurk within. A few people have asked me whether a daily newsletter makes sense as a book. Isn't the material dated, they said. What's the shelf life, Kenneth? Frankly, I was a little taken aback by the question because, from my point of view, there is no expiration date on insights and ideas. But I suppose different people get different things out of reading Cool News. More power to them.
Would that it were possible to take all that is Cool News of the Day and tie it up into a neat sentence that captures what all of these stories mean! The simple hope is that the stories make you think -- and better yet, you can make them work for you somehow.
Have a thinking good time,
Tim Manners, editor@reveries.com
P.S. If you'd like to order a copy of the book (hint, hint) please click here. Everyone in your company really should have a copy. All of your clients or customers, too! Seriously.
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