Thanks to Lenslinger for sharing a story that is one of the best pieces of local TV news I've ever seen. You don't often hear the term "duty-bound" anymore.
Duty-Bound
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Category Archives: Media
Branded
I am not a Russell Brand fan, and I can honestly say that his comedy just doesn't do it for me, but after seeing this interview I was reminded that you should never, ever, underestimate the intelligence of the average comedian.
Breaking News via Facebook
There's a bit of a political kerfluffle brewing right now in Greensboro over a recent redistricting vote by the City Council. It's been a hot topic at Ed Cone's blog, which everyone in Greensboro knows is where you go to be seen, er heard, er read when you want to vent your spleen about the goings on in what is likely North Carolina's whiniest city. What's interesting to me is that Ed just broke the news that one of the City Council members announced that she's going to ask that the vote be reconsidered, and she made the announcement via her Facebook status.
It would be easy to just say that this is a sign of the times, and it is, but upon further examination I think there are some fairly interesting ramifications in this simple act. Here are some that have come to mind:
- Any reporter "friended" by a public figure who uses Facebook as a primary communication vehicle will have a competitive advantage over a reporter who isn't. Public figures have always had preferred members of media and I suspect they've always cherry-picked who they leak news to, but this is a very public way to play favorites with members of the media.
- Of course the public figure can also completely "disintermediate" the media by friending everyone but the media, thereby communicating directly with their audience and excluding the media.
- Whether or not a member of the media is included or excluded, the news will be old to a healthy chunk of the audience by the time the 5 o'clock news airs or tomorrow's paper is printed.
- This development has only reinforced my conviction that "news" operations need to move away from the shallow "breaking stories" MO and move quickly towards deep and analytical stories that provide context and avoid titillation and tattling. In other words most of us now know what happened with the Greensboro redistricting, but few of us really know why. Giving us the "why" is where the professional media can make hay.
- In another interesting twist I've found that most of the really good comments on Ed's blog are posted by the professional journalists (I'm thinking of Joe Killian here) who often provide context and expert understanding of the issues in response to other commenters on Ed's posts.
Verbs
Reading one of Lenslinger's posts I came across some valuable writing advice:
"Ease off the adjectives. Good writing is all about the verb. Forget everything the jackholes with the MFA's and elbow patches have to say. You're a blue collar, Southern writer and they can't teach that shit in schools. Fiction, Memoir, you can write it all – but you CANNOT hold back. Readers will see right through it and you'll be stuck dodgin' lion piss 'til your back finally gives out…"
If I had an ounce of free time I'd also wonder how to score an invite to the next BOOKUP. Sounds like a lot of fun with some very interesting folks.
Think About This the Next Time You Complain About Being Stuck Behind Your Desk
I've had my share of rough days on the job, but I can honestly say I've never been peed on. That I know of. Longtime blogging brother Stewart Pittman, aka Lenslinger, had a heckuva day on the job yesterday that makes me feel like I've never had a truly bad day on the j-o-b.
Okay, I Was Wrong
Back in the dark ages, maybe five or six years ago, I argued pretty strongly that the local paper should allow unfettered comments on its stories. I thought they needed to follow the lead of blogs and embrace the idea of having a conversation with their audience. Oh how smart I thought I was, and oh how wrong I now believe I was. It's not that I've given up on the idea of having a conversation with your audience, it's just that comments on news stories don't generate conversation – unless you consider inviting dozens or hundreds of people into a room and watching them insult each other to be conversation.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was this story in the Winston-Salem Journal. The article is about non-profits seeing an increasing need for their services, but the general public not seeing it because people are putting up a brave front. Somehow that article generated a comment string that veered off into anti-Semitism various other rants and I don't have the stomach or time to read them all to see how it happened. Sadly, it's par for the course for the Journal's site and it's indicative of the tiny minds that frequent the site and leave behind turdballs also called comments.
It might be a better situation if news sites treated story moderation as community moderation; they could impose some order if they actively moderated the comments, but that's more than a full time job and I just don't think they have the staff or budget to do it. That's why I'm going to reverse course and say that if I were king of the world I'd turn off story comments UNLESS active moderation was possible.
It Must Be True Because I Heard It On the Radio
Strangely, I'm not shocked by this:
The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.
Real World Impact of Crappy Journalism
From David Cay Johnston at Tax.com:
When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining.
Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.
Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.
Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.
Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.
How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services…
The collective bargaining agreements for prosecutors, cops and scientists are all on-line.
Reporters should sit down, get a cup of coffee and read them. And then they could take what they learn, and what the state website says about fringe benefits, to Gov. Walker and challenge his assumptions.
Netflix, How Do I Love Thee?
We've been Netflix subscribers for years in our household, and I have to say that we came close to cancelling a few times because we'd get in DVDs and forget about them which meant our $20-ish/month plan was sometimes costing us $20 per DVD on average. But we held on and a few years ago Netflix started offering online viewing of some old movies and TV shows for no additional charge, which was kind of cool but we still didn't use it that much because we aren't the kind of people who will watch "TV" on our computer. We considered buying something like a Roku to enable us to watch Netflix on TV but we never got around to it. Then we hit some kind of tipping point and we're now uber-users of the service because we:
- Have teenagers who will use their laptop to watch shows and movies all the time.
- Put an Xbox 360 with a Live subscription in our family room at Christmas so we're watching all kinds of stuff there.
- Have an 18 year old son who bought his own Xbox 360 with Live and uses it to watch all kinds of stuff in between hours spent playing various war games.
- Have kids who no longer ask to have their movies added to the DVD queue so that mom and dad can watch what they want to watch. Currently we're having our own "The Pacific" marathon (okay, okay that's really just me but I do make sacrifices like suffering through Mama Mia!).
What's been interesting has been seeing what happens to the streaming quality at different times of day. Some weekends when I get up early and stream a movie I'll have an HD quality picture because no one else in the neighborhood or in the house is using the high speed internet service (Time Warner Cable), but later in the day the quality degrades dramatically once the bandwidth has to be shared. And my wife, who does bookkeeping from home, often has to kick our kids off of whatever they're doing, whether it's playing Live or watching a movie, so that she can access her clients' VPNs. All of that leads me to share this interesting tidbit from an article about Netflix's 4Q10 report:
One more interesting tidbit: Netfix says it will publish on Thursday “which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix.” In other words, if any cable broadband services under-perform, Netflix will let the world know.
I love this idea because it would be nice to know how different ISPs do in comparison to their competition. Of course that's assuming that there's good ISP competition where you live and that you can do something about it if your ISP stinks, and that's often a bad assumption.
There's also the not-so-insignificant issue that's been brewing for years regarding the impact that Netflix and its ilk are having on the available bandwidth, and the use of this impact by the ISPs to argue for capping bandwidth for their subscribers. (BTW, a couple of years back Greensboro's tech crowd was at the forefront of fighting successfully against Time Warner's proposed bandwidth caps.) I truly hope nothing like this comes to pass because I'm really liking the evolution of this service. If it keeps going in this direction I can see the ISPs becoming a utility, there to provide the pipe, and the Netflix's and Hulu's of the world being the content providers. Not that this is really much of a prognostication since Netflix says it already has more than 20 million subscribers, which is more than Showtime or Starz and isn't far behind HBO. I'm thinking we'll see Netflix pass HBO in pretty short order since Netflix lets people choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. Yep, my and my 20 million Netflix compatriots' future couch potato-ing is going to be very interesting.
Lazy Teenage Superheroes
In the evolving world of digital video the dollar is becoming much less important when compared to talent and imagination. Case in point is Lazy Teenage Superheroes, a short film that the filmmaker says cost him $300 to make. Embedded is a video of the behind the scenes action during the making of the film. A warning about the actual film: don't watch it if you're put off by bad language, references to VD or juvenile humor of any kind.
Befuddled 