Monday, September 29, 2008

Spin Prophet? Guccione Jr. speaks

Founder of Spin magazine, Bob Guccioni Jr., the son of the Penthouse founder, knows the media business from the inside. So his predictions, recently listed in a Huffington Post blog titled "The Future of Media: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying that the Internet will consume Print" are worth taking a look at.

There are four main predictions he lists in this article, and I can see all of them happening at some point. But if I had to guess which one will definitely happen: a cable channel will almost certainly pass one of the big four networks, if only because the best programming is on cable today. It's just a matter of time. If I were forced to disagree with one of predictions, however, it might as well be the one where he says the Internet will not consume print, because "it's not strong enough, its not better, and its too busy consuming itself."

One thing I've noticed over 12 years of writing for an audience of between 45-60,000 is that, by and large, younger generations coming up do not read, nor are they particularly interested in critical thinking or challenging the status quo.
Like cattle, they've been fattened on video, raised since birth in a highly stimulating visual world of TV and computers. Maybe the relatively new medical condition known as ADD is simply the phenomenon that occurs when you take a person used to quick moving images, and place them in front of another human speaking. Usually the speaker is too slow, the ADD mind too fast, or unfocused, or both.

Not only will print have a harder time paying the bills, but (sadly) I think it will almost completely lose sight of its fundamental journalism goals out of financial necessity.
There simply won't be any readers left. We are clearly moving back to more of an oral culture. But video trumps the printed word. Not to mention that most people now prefer the speed and ability to skip through stories at their own pace--taking them in bits or pieces rather than whole. It's impossible to compete once the brain has been trained to receive information in short quick blasts. Non-stop advertising has also played a role in training us this way.

Magazines and weeklies will probably fare better than traditional daily newspapers, unless they can, as Guccione suggests, get truly creative and find not only ways to make their papers more visually exciting, but also get creative in content, and provide useful information in a timely manner that the Internet cannot.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Examining online award winners

The Online News Association recently named its 2008 winners award winners. Awards were handed out in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 13.

Checking out the student winners first, one sees some excellent rising talent.
South of Here is "a documentary multimedia project produced by students from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Facultad de ComunicaciĆ³n at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. It explores the history, people and communities of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and Chile, the surrounding waterways and their critical relationship to the environment."
Looking at this site, one is first struck by the impressive photography and simple layout of the site. It's very easy to navigate and features large photos, quick point and click summaries, and lengthy, well-produced slideshows. The producers did a good job with subtitles and natural sound, but may have overused titles a bit (see the "Last of the Yagans" whose titles can break up the flow of the slideshow). Nonetheless, the photos really carry this production.

Looking at the winner for investigative journalism from a small site (The Times Herald Record in Middletown, NYC), one can see just how much online video presentations are beginning to take on the production values of TV.
This story about the murder of a prostitute, and a botched investigation which led to a man's conviction, features a nice use of text and video, with small, easily digestible chunks of information that allow the viewer to skip through the story details at his or her own pace. A comprehensive piece that really ties together the paper's exhaustive coverage of this story.

Another interesting winner (outstanding use of digital technology - small site) with some pretty major implications was Everyblock, a site devoted to delivering the news on a city block basis. So far the site was focusing on major cities: Boston, San Fran, LA, New York, DC, Charlotte, a few others.
Using a fairly simple interface, this site allows users to keep tabs on things like crime in their respective neighborhoods, building permits, restaurant inspections, and of course, news articles.
With most print outlets undergoing budget cuts, a site like this is destined to take off, creating new citizen journalists in its wake. This is a revolutionary new means of tailoring news to personal concerns, while also allowing watchdogs to spring up from within the concerned community itself. Will be interesting to watch how many people use this site and how it expands (city council coverage????)

You can even find lost pets (click image below).

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Meet Alana Taylor: Another College Whiner

Recently, a junior at NYU named Alana Taylor made some noise with a whiny, naive article she wrote slamming the journalism program at her school for being behind the times in terms of embracing every new Internet phenomenon that comes down the pike [her product placed, advertisement-raised generation's claim to fame].
Most of the article seems primarily concerned with celebrating Taylor's own "social media maven" skills, the number of trendy technologies she knows how to use--while at the same time illustrating that her writing and critical thinking skills are fairly pedestrian.

"The truth of the matter is that by the time my generation, Gen Y, gets into the real world there will be a much higher demand for web-savvy writers and thinkers than traditional Woodwards and Bernsteins. I was hoping that NYU would offer more classes where I could understand the importance of digital media, what it means, how to adapt to the new way of reporting, and learn from a professor who understands not only where the Internet is, but where it’s going."

Hmmmmm. Clearly, Taylor already thinks she knows where things are headed. The problem with people like her is they ignore the real function of journalism and writing--they don't want to do investigative work or learn how to communicate with mass audiences, instead preferring to ramble only for others who think like they do, or subscribe to the same social networking.

By ignoring real reporting (a la "Woodwards and Bernsteins"), Taylor seems to thumb her nose at the important historical function of the journalist's job of telling truth to power. Indeed, she seems more interested in blabbing on and on about her own, inexperienced opinions: what most of the millions of online blogs do.
Sadly, she is woefully mistaken if she thinks blogging alone will make money. She makes it clear how naive she really is with statements like these:

"What surprises me further is when Professor Quigley informs us that people actually get paid to blog. That they make a living off of this. For me this was very much a “duh” moment and I thought that it would be for the rest of the students as well. They should be fully aware at this point that blogging has become a very serious form of journalism. Furthermore, they should be aware that it is the one journalistic venture that requires little or no ladder-climbing. You can start at any age, with almost no experience, and actually get published instead of fetch coffee."

Taylor needs to understand that ladder-climbing can be another name for learning your craft or gaining experience. Most bloggers out there today do not get paid. The ones that do are typically established journalists who earned their reputation in print, or sometimes online, with good reporting and writing skills--which Taylor clearly has none of, or she might have cited statistics in her story, or done the slightest bit of digging about the phenomena she hopes to understand.

Taylor and other newbies need to understand that most bloggers simply comment on news they get from mainstream sites, where traditionally trained journalists are still climbing that old ladder. Without real reporters, and newsrooms around the world with budgets to report, bloggers would be left with very little to talk about. There are very few bloggers that do their own reporting, even less that do it well.
See this Pew study from 2006 that shows bloggers are most interested in talking about themselves.

This may be reading too much into it: but Taylor seems representative of a new "me" generation that believes socializing is a legitimate life's calling. She is part of a generation already earning poor reviews in a variety of fields for a lack of work ethic and inability to focus on anything that requires sustained effort or sacrifice. Taylor's generation has been fed from an electromagnetic teat since birth and immunized to critical thought by billion dollar ad campaigns that quite literally run their lives. That's not to say that J-schools shouldn't be teaching modern technology trends--but the key is to put them into the service of good journalism.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Presidential campaign getting nasty

It's officially underway now, folks. With polls calling Obama/Mcain a dead heat, the rhetoric between the two camps is starting to heat up.
I couldn't believe it when I heard that McCain is running an ad claiming that Obama is for comprehensive sex education for kindergartners.
Is it me, or does every ad that this guy runs throw an outright lie in the face of the American public? He's still running ads that say Palin was against the bridge to nowhere, which is clearly not true as the record shows. Even CNN admits it.
For his part, Obama is starting to get a little pointed in his attacks, as this Politico article addresses.
Hey, if The Daily Show can run video of McCain and Palin contradicting themselves, why can't the Obama campaign?
Maybe its because he was in Lebanon, VA the other day, but Obama made a comment about "putting lipstick on a pig" that is sure to have Republicans crying foul in the next few days. The New York Times looks into how Obama's lipstick line was taken out of context:

"With a laugh, he added: "You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it's still going to stink after eight years."
In the latest sign of the campaign's heightened intensity, Mr. McCain's surrogates responded within minutes and called on Mr. Obama to apologize to Gov. Sarah Palin for the lipstick remark. But to those in the audience, it was clear that Mr. Obama was employing an age-old phrase -- lipstick on a pig -- and referring to Mr. McCain's policies. He had not yet mentioned Ms. Palin at that point of his speech."

The dirt is flying, folks. And it's probably going to get a lot muddier from here on out. I just wish they would spend a little more time talking about the issues.
Both campaigns have raised a lot of money so far, and it looks like a lot of it will be spent on slurs.
This is a crazy election, and one in which bloggers will be playing their biggest role yet. In my opinion, we've already seen them have a major impact, driving the vetting coverage, and steering mainstream media into Palin's family matters, when it really should be addressing her judgment and questionable, hard-right, extremely religious viewpoints. I've already heard Palin compared to Bush, but she may be a bigger tough guy than he ever was. And scarier too. I'm still waiting for her to do some real interviews and put herself up to the media scrutiny that Obama and Biden have been facing for years now.


Friday, September 5, 2008

Podcasting assignment

This is a practice podcast for a class:

Thursday, September 4, 2008

MySpace vs. Facebook (A Friend In Need)

I’m two months away from turning 37, but I did something recently that should qualify me for senior citizen benefits at the multiplex, or at least Hometown Buffet. After months of ignoring my MySpace page, I finally made the jump to Facebook. Finally! One more magazine article about the site’s filthy-rich genius, Mark Zuckerburg, and the disgruntled Harvard coders who despise him, and I was going to puke.

That I’m only now getting on Facebook probably says something about the college I attended, my former church, or where I get my ideologically-tailored news online—I’m not sure. But could someone please explain what all the fuss is about?
On Facebook, I have an articulate, bright, and clean site, without any music or other frills, that looks like it was creatively inspired by a corporate shill in conjunction with my middle school computer tech. I get to read little comments about what my (scoff) 29 friends are doing at any given minute. Right now, Sarah is “shooting moose with her AK 47 while singing cumbaya,” John is “soooooooo tired” and Karl is “torturing a recently rescued shelter poodle with a lit cigar.”

In August, The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press issued a hefty new report: “Audience Segments in A Changing News Environment” that looked at new trends in online and digital news. Aside from some odd references to something called “the traditional print media,” the study mostly confirmed what I already suspected: You are nothing if you do not have over 1,000 friends on Facebook.
It took me several years to get up to 200 friends on MySpace—and now Facebook is telling me I have to start all over again? That’s like getting yanked back into junior high, given a braided rattail mullet and the name Erskine Patton-Dick. Not good.
It got me thinking about this whole friend thing. Some people out there will befriend anyone. Celebrities, porn sites, anime characters, video games, fast food chains. Shouldn’t there be some requirement to determine whether the friendship is actually human (and according to Wordnet) “a person known well and regarded with trust and affection?” I doubt that Naomi Klein, Javier Bardem, or Werner Herzog feel that way about me, but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think the crazed fans running sites in their names have a much better idea, either.

So I’m offering a brief friendship quiz, free of charge to Mr. Zuckerburg—provided he does not try to claim the idea was his—so geeks like me will stand a fighting chance in this brave new social order.


QUESTIONAIRRE

1. Your sister just had a nasty break-up with her state trooper husband. You would:
A. Plant crack in the state trooper’s locker.
B. Prank call 9-11 all night with your slumber party friends.
C. Challenge the trooper to a game of pick-up basketball for your sister’s future.
D. Get the trooper fired and if not that, fire his supervisor.


2. Your 17-year-old, unwed child is pregnant. You would:
A. Comfort her with a new SUV wrapped in a giant red bow.
B. Make her high school boyfriend the head of FEMA.
C. Beg her to visit a single teen mother and help for a week.
D. Take her on a whirlwind media tour of the United States.


3. Your friend joined a fringe group that believes, after the coming apocalypse, that Alaska will be the only inhabitable place on earth, populated by a race of super-warriors who know the riddle of steel. You would:
A. Call producers at Jerry Springer.
B. Have your friend abducted by The Promise Keepers.
C. Shoot your friend in the face while hunting.
D. Encourage your friend to run for vice president of the U.S.


4. Your friend is being investigated by the liberal national media. You would:
A. Get her to change her hairstyle.
B. Bring her some fresh moose pie.
C. Dump a bucket of pig blood on her head to make her angry.
D. Help her figure out how to sink back into obscurity.


5. Your friend was raped and impregnated by her father. You would:
A. Help her pick out baby clothes.
B. Keep it a personal matter.
C. Suggest baby names like Javelin, Skagway, Snowmachine, and Geo.
D. Have the father fired, and if not him, then his supervisor.