Okay, I wasn’t thinking when I booked this trip. I’m flying out of Dulles this evening to return home, and although it is still 5 hours until my flight departure I’m a little worried about getting through traffic and then getting through security in time to get to my flight.
Yep, not one of my brighter moves.
Okay, meeting doesn’t quite describe it. I was in the audience at the annual American Society of Association Executives SpringTime event to hear Kwame Jackson’s keynote speech. Mr. Jackson came in second place on "The Apprentice" (first season), and hasn’t looked back since.
His speech was better than I expected, and it’s nice to see that he’s doing a lot more than just riding his "Apprentice" fame on the speaker’s circuit. His Legacy Holdings LLC venture looks interesting, and I think Prince Georges County, Maryland (just outside D.C.) where they are building the Rosewood mixed-use development can really use a lot of the energy and promise that Kwame exudes.
One interesting thing he talked about was how his buddy, and current business partner, David J. Smith actually called him, told him about the show, and talked him into applying for "The Apprentice." And he convinced Mr. Jackson that this would be their ticket to a successful future, even though they both already had lucrative positions on Wall Street.
Instead of just going through the normal channels Mr. Smith picked up the phone and called the casting director for the show. He convinced the casting director to come to New York and meet with the two of them, and from that point on they had an inside track. They still had to send in a videotape and application, but basically one of them was pretty much a sure bet to be one of the 50 called to Hollywood to audition for one of the 16 spots on the show.
Now it looks like Mr. Smith was prophetic, and things are going just as he and Mr. Jackson planned. Actually I think it would be just as interesting, if not more, to meet Mr. Smith as it would be to meet Mr. Jackson. I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from both of them in the future.
This piece comes from the Online Sun (which, by the way, will continue to be the liberal thought leader even after the New York Times starts charging for access to their editorialists):
TWO Star Wars fans suffered horrific burns in a mock battle with home-made lightsabers filled with PETROL.
Shelley Mandiville, 17, and Mark Webb, 20, made the weapons with fluorescent light tubes.
They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid to act out a Jedi Knight fight scene from new movie Revenge Of The Sith.
They lit the liquid to illuminate the makeshift toys.
But it exploded — covering them both in the burning mixture.
Firefighters discovered Shelly and Mark with serious burns after being
called to woodland near Hemel Hempstead, Herts, on SundayPolice were studying a video camera found at the scene. It was
thought that a third person was taping the “duel” — who fled in terror
when the disaster happened.
Update: I also found this story on the BBC site which I’m glad I didn’t cite first, since I find the BBC to be a sensationalist news organization that uses images of scantily clad women to attract eyeballs.
Here in North Carolina we’re on some kind of roll. First we had the young minister of a small church in a small mountain town who said that anyone who voted for Democrat John Kerry in last fall’s election is basically voting against God. Now we have this guy (source News & Observer):
A Baptist minister refuses to apologize for a church sign saying the Muslim holy book should be flushed.
"I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that
it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does
not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible
teaches it, is wrong," said the Rev. Creighton Lovelace of Danieltown
Baptist Church. "I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up
that there would be people who wouldn’t agree with it, and there would
be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what’s right."and he continued…
"If we stand for what is right and for God’s word and for Christianity
then the world is going to condemn us and so right away when I got a
complaint I said, ‘Well somebody’s mad, somebody’s offended, so we must
be doing something right,’" Lovelace said.
Well that certainly redefines Christianity for me. But I digress. What I love about the online world is that you can immediately find divergent viewpoints about the same issue. Here are two takes on this story:
Ed Cone, blogger extraordinaire from Greensboro, NC:
From Rutherford County comes this touching story
of ecumenical outreach and understanding: "A sign in front of
Danieltown Baptist Church…reads ‘The Koran needs to be flushed,’ and
the Rev. Creighton Lovelace, pastor of the church, is not apologizing
for the display."Most of the North Carolinians interviewed for the article disagreed with Lovelace. Please, world, note that fact.
Then there’s this headline from Fark.com which is filed under the category "Stupid". Fark is unabashedly sophomoric and always with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but it is also consistently conservative in terms of politics:
NC pastor defends sign at church that reads: "The Koran Needs to be
Flushed." Muslims in an uproar — some even delay scheduled beheadings
to voice complaints
It’s never dull.
In my previous post I talked about how broadcasters are as vulnerable as newspapers to the threat of the evolving online media. I also said that I thought that newspapers posed an imminent threat to local news broadcasters because "Newspapers have the reporters and the editors, they just need to add
some audio-video production staff and some decent video editing
software and they’re good to go." With this post I’d like to expand on this point a little more.
As you probably know most newspapers and broadcast outlets are owned by large media conglomerates. Think Tribune Company, Knight-Ridder and Gannett.
For regulatory reasons (in the US at least) media companies could not own a
TV station and newspaper in the same major metropolitan market. Now, with some decent software and a digital video production staff you could have the newspaper property of one media company going
head-to-head with the news operation of a local TV station owned by a
rival media company. You could argue that since the newspaper wouldn’t
be broadcasting, per se, that it’s an apples-oranges thing. But if you look down the road to what media consumption will probably look like in five or ten years you can see that it’s more of a tangelo thing (tangelos are hybrids of grapefruits and tangerines).
Right now most of us consume our media in ways that are markedly different from 15 years ago (see my previous post for an example), and our consumption will change again over the next 5-10 years. Right now we still watch TV, browse our computer and thumb through a newspaper.
Soon our homes will be networked and we’ll have some sort of server type computer that manages the intake of media (audio, video, text, phone calls) and distributes them to a variety of devices. We’ll probably have flat screens for viewing, wireless devices (probably something that looks like the Sony PSP with a stylus for writing) for interacting with the computer and then a device like a Blackberry or Treo to take our stuff with us. Essentially all of our media will be a data feed.
Do I think all printed materials will go away? No way. For one most of us will never read something the length of a book on a screen, but as the hardware for PDA type things get better, and wireless networks become ubiqiuitous you’ll see less need for newsstands or TVs in airport terminals. We’ll be able to get our news, video and audio on our devices.
To take a current example look at Gannett. Right now I read one of its newspapers (USA Today), sometimes visit its website and watch their TV (local station). In the near future I expect I’ll consume their content in some sort of blended text/audio/video offering.
For a report on Congress I can imagine a Gannett reporter writing her story, recording an interview using some digital recording device and then sending the file to a production team that would then imbed links and tags to supporting audio, video or text files and package it for distribution.
On the consumer’s end I would have subscribed to a syndication feed from Gannett for anything related to Congress. As soon as they "broadcast" it I’d know about it and could access from that point on.
Back to the newspapers vs. broadcasters issue. Gannett doesn’t own a newspaper in my local market (Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point, NC), but it does own local broadcaster WFMY. Media General and Landmark Communications own the newspapers in the market, but no broadcast stations. Landmark’s paper is the Greensboro News & Record and they are starting an initiative that is putting the power of digital video in the hands of it’s reporters. How could WFMY not see this as a threat in the near future?
The News & Record is already experimenting with blogs, RSS, and other big changes on the media landscape. By pushing the envelope with what I’ll call blended media they are positioning themselves to dominate the local media landscape in the future. The reason they’ll dominate is:
But that’s local. On the national scene I don’t see one company having a particular advantage over another right now. The same opportunities are open to each, just in different markets. The advantage will eventually go to the company that is most aggressive in taking the News & Record’s lead and creating a truly blended, "tangelo" media operation.
***Update: Steve Rubel links to an NPR piece about newspapers getting into Podcasting. The first step?***
We, we being people that think alot about newspapers dying due to the online media revolution defined by blogs and news aggregators and stuff like that, have taken too narrow a view. We really should be talking about the impact of online media on all traditional news media outlets.
If you look at it from the consumer’s point of view in three different time-frames here’s what you see:
1992 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer
2000 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer
2005 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer
While reading the RSS feed from one of my regional newspapers I notice that they’ve posted some audio from a contentious town council meeting last night. Not sure if local news had it last night at 11:00, but don’t care. Then I notice that the newspaper is starting to outfit its reporters with digital video cameras and they are teaching themselves how to integrate audio and video into their stories. Hmmm.
Make a resolution with myself to figure out the whole Podcasting thing, and find something I like so I can add it to my menu.
Check my RSS feeds throughout the day. Also visit my "regular" websites CNN (old habits die hard), MyYahoo (check fantasy league stats), Fark (need a good laugh).
Okay, I’ll admit some of the changes in my media consumption habits were due to my lifestyle changes. But the big picture I’m trying to illustrate is that while we’ve beaten the "newspapers are dying" horse until it’s died twice, we’ve tended to ignore what’s also happening to broadcasters.
First, I’m tickled pink that at least one newspaper is starting to invade the local broadcasters’ territory. (Poetic justice I think). Because digital videography is becoming cheap and ubiquitous there’s not much of a barrier for someone to come along and take the broadcasters head-on.
Now the online food chain still hasn’t changed much. Most bloggers do little original story creation or reporting. They compile facts gleaned from secondary sources (i.e. mainstream media), add their own opinion/spin/analysis and then broadcast it to the online universe through RSS. While there is plenty of good, original writing, there isn’t much original reporting.
The same is true with video. Most news video feeds you find online were originated by a mainstream media outlet and then linked to or copied and re-posted by bloggers, independent websites, etc.
What’s happening now is that mainstream media companies have determined that they can’t continue with business as usual. They’ve also recognized that their competitive advantage is no longer the printing press, or the hugely expensive video production facilities. Their competitive advantage is their "talent": reporters, producers, editors, etc.
The reporters know how to find a good story, the editors know how to package it and the producers know how to pull it all together and sell it. What they are trying to figure out how to do is protect their advertising revenue stream.
Ironically, I think the largest immediate threat for news broadcasters are newspapers. Newspapers have the reporters and the editors, they just need to add some audio-video production staff and some decent video editing software and they’re good to go.
Just about anyone can set up a digital video production facility these days. Much more daunting is the task of setting up a viable news gathering and reporting operation. The newspapers already have the hard part taken care of, now they just need to do the easier part.
I’ll address what I think is going to evolve over the years in my next post.
This story in the Winston-Salem Journal just blows my mind:
A man stole a TV ($140 value) in North Carolina in 1970 and was convicted of second-degree burglary and sentenced to life in prison. The law has since been changed so the most you could get now for the same crime is three years.
Apparently this guy wasn’t a model prisoner so his parole was denied 25 times. His 26th parole application was approved after some lawyers heard about his case and got involved. Now at age 64 he’s out of prison and heading home to Georgia.
Here’s a fun game: in 1996 the average cost for housing an inmate in North Carolina was $58.58 per day (it’s up to $65.80 now). For arguments sake let’s say that the average cost-per-day over this guy’s stay in the prisons was $35. That works out to $434,350…for a $140 TV set. And I suspect the $35 average is probably low.
And people wonder why we have overcrowded prisons, and budgetary crunches.
I’m not a big fan of the sensationalist American political shows, from the right or left. I think Rush Limbaugh’s a blowhard and Al Franken, while sometimes funny, comes across as an ass. But Franken’s point in this post of the $8.8 billion that was mis-managed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and how it completely disappeared as a legitimate "big story" is a valid one.
Unfortunately in the same post he also wonders (conjectures?) if all the security alerts in ’04 were politically motivated on behalf of the President’s re-election campaign. If not why haven’t there been any since the election?
It’s that kind of silliness that kills these extremists’ legitimacy with middle-of-the-roaders like me, and so we tend to miss their valid points. Too bad.
Rex Hammock, one of the leading bloggers out there, is doing some guest blogging for American Business Media (ABM), a trade association of which he is a member. In his introductory post on the ABM blog he shared this nugget:
As a note of transparency, my company works with several large national
associations in publishing their member magazines and providing online
editorial services to them. (ABM is not one of these.) And
so, in addition to my willingness to serve in another voluntary role
for ABM, I also have a professional interest in trying to understand
the role of participatory media (I call it conversational media) in the
context of associations. I believe associations have a unique
opportunity to serve as neutral platforms for conversations — they
certainly do so when they host meetings. I’ve spent the past decade
trying to encourage clients and other publishers to embrace ways to
amplify the voices of those they serve, rather than view those voices
as threats or competition. I hope the blogging committee and this blog
can help me keep ranting on discussing that topic.
Here’s one of the cooler youth sports stories you’ll ever see. An 11 year old girl in New York is the only girl in her league. According to this article she threw the first perfect game anyone involved with the league can remember. Oh, and she struck out all 18 batters she faced.
It gets better. In her first game this season she threw a one-hitter, striking out 14 of the 15 batters she faced. The 15th out was a come-backer and she threw the kid out at first. So in two games she struck out 32 of 33 batters and no ball got past her. She’s also hitting .714 for the season.
Here’s the scary part: she wasn’t going to play baseball, but she missed the deadline for signing up for softball and had to stick with hardball. I can think of 30 or so boys who wish she’d made the deadline!
Befuddled 