Posts Tagged Under ‘Media’

Clever Photo Essay

I’m not into pushing work projects on this site per se, but this photo essay is clever on the for real. Be sure to check out Darren Garnick’s effort to get his baby photographed with all the presidential candidates.

Bill Kristol at the Times

This announcement reads like a parody of lefty self-flagellation:

The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist

Echoing this thing, it’s pretty tough to argue that rightist media is more self-critical when you examine this dealie: you have a commentator dude who’s not only kept up his unflinching pro-war thing even as the rationale looks worse and worse, but has called for criminal prosecution of the very “liberal” media outlet that just hired him on as a commentator. Meanwhile, the media outlet both hires him anyway and makes a point to echo his past denunciations of said outlet.

Assuming you think the Times opinion page editors are liberal, I’ll echo walking-in-snowy-woods dude Robert Frost on this one: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument.”

Strangest Brand Partnering of the Day

I just saw this today:

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/fox-news-for-iphone/

Fox News and Apple? That one just strikes me as a really unlikely pairing. But maybe Apple devotees have become so contrarian-cool that they’ve abandoned the leftist political views of the urban traditional-cool and embraced right-wing viewpoints as a sarcastic collective paean to right-wing America.

The New Slate Widget

We just launched a new app at work, the random Bushisms generator:

Feel free to grab it and spread it around on your own site / Facebook page / MySpace!

Very Moving

I just read this piece by Christopher Hitchens from Vanity Fair and thought I should post it:

A Death in the Family

It hit a little close to home, I think. I come from a liberal Irish family too and have a brother in the military, and as a result I really got the part about the existence of pure motives in a world of cynical sloganeering.

It’s a very serious responsibility to have to put guys like that in the midst of mayhem, and it’s a leader’s role to make sure that attitude is honored and used wisely. But lost amidst the yelling and screaming on both sides of the aisle, there are still people who take a position because of reason and good intentions. The hope that people like Mark Daily will get to positions of power is the only thing that keeps me believing in politics.

Bold Move

Could have told them two years ago that Times Select would do more harm than good:

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Website

The bosses at the old job had us set up a similar walled-garden movement that was later abandoned for similar reasons (lost eyeballs ultimately = lost ad revenue). Opinion’s a commodity online (see this blog?) so charging for it didn’t make a lot of sense, particularly when so many people are out there searching for Paul Krugman, Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd’s latest. That’s lots of eyeballs that are going to bail out the minute they hit that subscription wall.

Letting the archives go for free is an interesting one. Post-1995-or-so content—after the web really came into force—makes sense to give out as free, but people will pay a small fee for research purposes if you want to charge for the pre-1996 stuff. And even if they did give it all out for free, as a researcher, I’m probably going to that publication’s site looking for one specific thing, and I’m unlikely to go, “Hey, while I’m here looking for a Times article from 1944, I think I’ll take a largely unrelated interest in their current events coverage, even though I’m not here for that purpose.” Sure, a small fee for individual articles is just a trickle, but it’s a trickle that you don’t have otherwise and that isn’t really costing you new users.

Regardless, smart. And that’s from someone making his living off of web media. What.

Quick Hits

• Back in my New York days, it seemed that every time you turned around, someone was praising the independent, gritty spirit of 1970s-80s New York, the culture that produced hip-hop, tagging, Reggie Jackson, Taxi Driver, CBGB-OMFUG, The Warriors and other art inspired by the city’s crushing, nigh-bankrupt bleakness. While I acknowledge the period as one of the truly great creative eras in the American scene, one that I think I can explore forever, the nostalgia to me seems to overlook the big, fat suckitude of crime, urban decay, poverty and a general pessimism that pervaded New York in the 1970s and 80s. Does anybody really miss this? John Carpenter didn’t make Escape From New York because it was a great logical leap from reality. People suffered greatly in those days.

  But let’s assume that you believe despair breeds the greatest art (I tend to agree), and you’re an urban hipster who craves the dangerous, anything-goes spirit of the 1970s. There’s another town out there for you long past its mid-century glory days; one with miles of burnt-out dwellings, a suburban population that’s afraid to go downtown, weak political leadership and an economic death spiral to boot. Plus, it’s been this way for a good three decades, so it’s not likely to have changed by the time you arrive.

  So what I really want to know is, why isn’t Detroit seeing a nostalgia-driven hipster influx?

• Esquire magazine (to which I have a subscription; I hit my news/business base with The Economist, my sports base with SI, and my man-of-the-world, well-read, how-to-buy-suits-I-will-never-afford base with the big E) had the cover line this month “Can a white man still be elected President?”

  Sometimes, one can take provocative cover taglines a little too far from reality, to the point that the reader says, “Man, they are trying way too hard to get my attention.” Then, to take a journey of rhetorical absurdity that’s hemispheres beyond that, one can write, “Can a white man still be elected President?”

• The more President Bush’s approval ratings drop, the more I fear what the government might do in the name of “Hey, we’re hated lame ducks anyway.”

Out.

Sports Illustrated: Run by Snobs From Mt. Lebanon

Hey, Internets.

Don’t hate.

This week, Sports Illustrated had a big piece about Miami Dolphin and Pittsburgh native Jason Taylor. Not only did the article improve my opinion of Taylor a great deal (check out the part where a pro athlete puts sports into perspective with politics), but Woodland Hills H.S., the alma mater of JT and your resident author, even got a name-check. (Taylor was home-schooled but played senior year football for the school team as a district resident.)

That was cool, and I was pumped reading the article. Then I got to this part:

Yet as much as Taylor, in this instance, is guilty of stereotyping his fellow pros, he bristles when others’ expectations of how an athlete should act are used against him … And don’t get Taylor started on the notion some have that his unabashed ambition makes him something of a sellout to his roots. (He grew up in a largely underprivileged neighborhood.)

Huh say what???

Woodland Hills has its nasty areas (shoutout to Rankin and Braddock!) but it’s otherwise smack dab in the middle of American socioeconomic strata. Both Jason Taylor and myself are from Wilkins Township, one of the municipalities in WHSD (read this old Akron page), which I don’t know how someone could see as being “underprivileged”. (Peep these housing prices).

Woody High has a pretty battered rep in the local media, and it’s true that I have plenty of weird stories that I probably wouldn’t have gotten at Upper Middle Whitebread High. But some writer-reporter here is painting the whole district with a pretty broad brush that makes for a better story, but isn’t quite true.

What more can I say: The streetz is a mutha.

Random

• I’ve got a little Short Bus from Filter playing on the iTunes right now. What happened to industrial rock? There was a glory era from about 1992-1999 or so, and then it really faded away. Nine Inch Nails are still around, but they just don’t have the prominence they used to have. I blame Clear Channel Communications, because why not.
• There really aren’t many people who are happy with the direction of the United States at the moment. Whose fault is this? The media? The Republicans? The President? The Democrats? The military?

  I feel like our wise commentators are afraid to call out the common cause behind all of those: the citizens of this currently misguided nation. Because in our society, the people are the ones putting their government in place, consuming the media and shaping the economy, and I just can’t help but think that most peeps have been pretty derelict in their citizenly duties.

• Speaking of that, I gotta read this.
• Luckily though, you readaz are bright people. So I know you’ll go check out Slate’s new video magazine, Slate V, when it launches soon. Help a blogga out: I’ve been working like a mug to get this thing ready to go on a really tight deadline.
• It’s not quite new anymore, but I still think Dirty Jobs is one of the best cable shows in years. Watching a dude get all mudded up and covered in sludge for the sake of good television has a great, dumb appeal, but to roll Gompers-style for a minute, I gotta give it up for the matter-of-fact, highly popular, non-preachy throwback glorification of the American worker in this age of obscene fetishization of the horded wealth of the few. I didn’t like when Mike Rowe shilled for Ford, but otherwise the show is a high-quality effort to remind us bourgeois slobs that societal consumerism doesn’t come easy.

  Also, I like to watch people smash things.

I’m out.

Paris Hilton’s Jailing is a Worthwhile News Story

High horses are one thing, readaz, but reality is anutha.

My journalism education came from the mother of all ivory-tower purist j-school institutions, that being the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. We were always taught that what matters in the media world is ethics, proper sourcing and the pursuit of objective truth without fear of those controlling the money or the power.

Tru dat; I can’t belittle that sentiment because the shred of a hopeful idealist in me still clings to it. It’s why I went into my chosen profession. But being in the real-world media market has taught me that two other things are just as important, and possibly moreso: a proper business model and a sense of cultural relativity.

That’s why, despite the usual cries of “Look at this garbage the media pushes on us,” media peeps are right to flog Paris Hilton’s arrest, jailing, release and subsequent re-jailing.

The lede from this story in the New York Times perfectly summarizes the knowledge I’m about to drop. This story is important because it’s a collision of the two aspects of the media that we learned in college: spinach and ice cream. (Quick explainer, and thanks to Prof. Craig LaMay for the well-named concept: Spinach is politics, foreign affairs, policy, science and economics, a.k.a. the stuff that’s good for citizens but they hate to consume. Ice cream is sports, fashion, celebrities, lifestyle and entertainment. We all enjoy it, but it makes you into a fat slug of a citizen if you consume it in more than moderation. Most of the ice cream could be construed as “chick crap”, but dudes, you need to stop lying to yourself about this “glory of human endeavor” bull and admit that sports coverage is the exact equivalent in frivolity.)

In the Hilton story, we have a direct trump of ice cream by spinach: Paris, embodying the frivolity obsession perhaps more than any other human ever, clashes against the spinach-fueled legal system and ultimately loses. The story here isn’t something normally in the realm of valid disgust with the media like “Paris Hilton insulted Lindsay Lohan’s genitals,” but instead is a larger lesson on eating only the ice cream of life: we have here the real world (jail and judges) ultimately proving more powerful than the celebrity world, which while built up in popular culture to the point that it seems to float above the real world on a cloud of great importance, proved in this case to be a defeated paper tiger.

Cynics up in this piece will note that the judge had no choice but to take harsh command of the situation: Al “I’m all up in everything, everywhere” Sharpton and John Edwards publicly questioned Hilton’s release, as did commentators and public moralists everywhere. (Holla back, New York Post.) This backlash represented the other side of the country’s celebrity-obsession duality, that being the part that wants to burn these muthas down and force them to live in the same world as the rest of us, instead of lifting them up high like we do otherwise. Regardless, the end result is the same: the subjugation of the celebrity world’s greatest “I’m rich, I do what the hell I want, and I’m famous for it” icon at the feet of the real world.

That is the type of story that symbolizes the clash of cultural paradigms. And paradigm clashes that are so easily embodied have sociological significance. Significance = media organizations should get their coverage on.

Say what.

Why Media Companies Shouldn’t Go Public

What up, web.

Last night the Bancroft family, controlling owners of Dow Jones and its flagship paper The Wall Street Journal, seems to have thrown in the towel and potentially opened up to the takeover bid from News Corp., owned by NY Post-Loc Rupert Murdoch. They haven’t sold yet, and a sale isn’t guaranteed, but DJ did issue several statements saying their current structure is untenable and the company would better accomplish its mission “in combination or collaboration with another organization that may include News Corporation.”

That sounds like B to the S to me. The Bancrofts hadn’t been shopping the company around pre-bid; they then very publicly turned down Murdoch’s unsolicited offer earlier in May, hardly the move of a company that needs to sell. The real reason the family is willing to consider a sale is because the shareholders are hardcore leaning on them to do so. The share price of Dow Jones jumped from $36 clear up to $58.47 on May 2, when Murdoch’s bid became public. Shareholders in Dow Jones, like T. Rowe Price, stand to make a lot of windfall if the sale goes through.

This is the worst aspect of publicly traded media companies. The current ownership doesn’t even want to sell to News Corp., chiefly because they legitimately fear that Murdoch will turn their distinguished paper into another vehicle for his own politics-of-the-moment. (That can mean either appeasing the communist government in China or stoking war fever here in the U.S.) Yet the dictates of the public market are forcing their hand. DJ’s investors, seeing the cash to be made from the sale, are more than willing to throw the product itself under the bus, and one of America’s best newspapers—arguably the best—might start to undergo a subtle and disheartening shift. You can read better arguments against News Corp. buying the Journal here and here.

I think the market usually does decide what’s best, and while solvency is a necessity in any economy, an unregulated market will occasionally run roughshod over the very things that society most wants to protect. (Re-read The Jungle sometime.) I’m going to climb back up the j-school ivory tower and state that an independent—note that I didn’t say “objective”, even though that’s important to strive for—press is one of those things. A media that’s solely under private ownership will be more inclined to take risks with reporting, political angles, styles of coverage, technology and business models than a large, public company that’s beholden to shareholders. It’s not the drive for solvency that creates problems with media companies, it’s the drive for constantly increasing returns in a field that has always been more about viewpoints and information than it has about profitability. In theory the extra capital that comes with public ownership could be used to create a better news well, but anyone who follows the press will notice that newsrooms are laying off employees as fast as they can these days and relying more and more on centralized news sources.

Crazy rich guys have always gotten into the media business for the vanity that comes with loudly voicing one’s perspective, not because they see it as a highly profitable investment. They make their money elsewhere, then get into the media. That emphasis on viewpoints is a good thing, because unlike a capital market, the media is nothing if not the marketplace of ideas. I would hate to see the Wall Street Journal be forced into a partnership they don’t even want.

Haters

Hey readaz.

Geeta and I were talking this weekend, and we noted that we’re in two of the least-respected professions in America. It seems 38% of respondents to a Gallup poll rated lawyers as a low or very-low respected profession, while the same survey in 2004 found only 16% of people rated newspaper reporters as “high or very high” in respect. (TV reporters had 23% approval - WTF?)

What’s up with this? My theory is that lawyers and reporters are most visible at the same time that they’re at their worst. People tune in to the news when something bad happens, so there’s already the subconscious association of reporter = bad happening. Then you add in the endless TV shots of victims crying while being asked, “How do you feel?” and things look even more invasive. (Nevermind that there’s a huge demand for such stuff.) Why are newspaper reporters ranked lower than TV? I think the negative side of TV washes off onto the newspaper, as a newspaper frequently breaks the negative story in the first place (when was the last time TV news broke a scandal of any kind that required number-crunching analysis?) and print reporters generally aren’t the polished, beautiful people we see on TV. It’s a lot easier to forgive and forget with a blow-dried smiling dude than it is with a gruff, cheap-suited newspaper bulldog.

As for lawyers, when I hear “attorney”, the first person who comes to mind after Geeta is Edgar Snyder (”391-2101!”), accident and injury lawyer from the Burgh. Edgar apparently has one of the bigger ad budgets among Pittsburgh law firms, with Berger and Green seemingly in a close second. These guys are in every city, and their advertising is ubiquitous, so ambulance-chasing isn’t hurting for brand recognition. The other time lawyers make a major media appearance is with high-profile criminal trials. When it’s a case where the public has made its mind up in favor of a guilty verdict, they’re going to have a hard time liking the defense lawyers who are arguing the opposite.

Anyway, all you readaz should remember that for every Geraldo, there’s a Helen Thomas; and for every Berger and Green, there’s a well-respected judge. Peace.

The Poisonous Comment Snake

I just read this phat piece by Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian and found myself nodding a “Hell yeah” in agreement. Freedland really nailed the problem with comment sections on blogs, news articles and nearly everywhere else online, and I’m in full agreement that a set of orderly online debate rules would be nice.

I can’t remember the last time I read a full comments thread on a large-scale news blog or media website, as the instant I see “144 comments” at the end of a piece, I know I’m going to wander headlong into a vitriolic swamp that I’d rather avoid. The people who “win” these kind of debates are usually those most willing to spend hours at work hitting F5 and typing out “Go crawl back in your liberal/Zionist/fascist/terrorist/Fox News hole and die a slow death.” Every publication at which I’ve worked gets loads of this in e-mail format each day as well, often fired off with no name. Yet nearly 100% of the time that I’ve responded to these irate people in a polite fashion, I get an apologetic e-mail back. So yes, commenter: you did know it was wrong to address somebody in the illest way, and when you were called on it, you knew better.

While you can’t force people to use a real name when commenting, I’m of the belief that those who spew awful venom without using their real name should be shunned by other commenters. It shouldn’t be an official policy of websites to block people from using anonymous handles, because as Freedland points out, sometimes this really does allow for real-life freedom that wouldn’t occur otherwise. (And I mean the good, democratic kind, the type they don’t have in Egypt or China.) But if you’re a Westerner living in a free society, you need to accept the fact that actions have consequences, and that freedom of speech isn’t freedom from irate reaction. Our democracy runs on both freedom AND order.

If you want to throw bombs at other people that don’t address the subject of their arguments, man up and use your real name.

Say word.