Local TV News on Social Media

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I have a question for local TV news folks.  Do you think your social media outlets, Facebook in particular, should reflect your station/corporate values?  I would imagine the answer is yes, and if it is you really should be careful what you post or link to on your Facebook page.  Although I think it's perfectly appropriate to link to stories you don't air on your regular broadcast since, like your website, your Facebook page is a great way to expand your coverage, I don't think it's appropriate to link to stories that you wouldn't air on your broadcast because it's simply too racy. 

If you'd like me to give you examples I'll give you two just from this week: a story about a guy having unnatural relations with a dog, and another story about a guy who got a tattoo on a certain body part that resulted in him developing an unexpected condition normally associated with a Viagra overdose.  Sure, some people will find them funny, and I've been around long enough to know that stories like that grab attention, but if they aren't an accurate reflection of your organization's values then you really shouldn't post them.

By the way, the same can be said for any organization in any industry.  Just because they're a different venue that might have a slightly edgier audience than your norm doesn't mean that your social media outlets should not reflect your values.  Remember, you are what you post.

The Mind is a Powerful Weapon

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Wake Forest's men's basketball team has had a rough couple of years.  Last year was coach Jeff Bzdelik's first year at the helm and he inherited a situation that was challenging to say the least.  I don't care if Wake had hired the love child of Adolph Rupp and Bobby Knight, last year's squad was going to have a losing record and the only question was how bad.  It ended up being VERY bad and as you can imagine Wake fans weren't too happy.  I can recall many a conversation with fellow fans throughout the season who were highly skeptical of the program and of the coach.  My refrain was, and will be for the foreseeable future, that Coach Bzdelik cannot be fairly judged until at least year three of his tenure; it will take that long before he can have his own recruits in place and his system instituted.  

Coming into the current season I think any reasonable fan would say that in order for the team to be considered successful it would need only improve on the number of wins, be competitive in more ACC games and look like an actual team on the court.  So far it's looking good for the Deacons.  As you'd expect with a very young squad the team has been inconsistent, but compared to last year they're a dream to watch.  On the days when they're bad they look like a high school team out there, but they look like a team.  On the days when they're good they look exactly like what they are – a team that is trying to climb the ACC ladder and is a dangerous foe on any given day to all but perhaps UNC and Duke. And yes, they look like a team.

Obviously the jury's still out on Coach Bzdelik's program, but personally I'm liking what I see.  I also think every player and coach in every sport should listen to this blurb from the coach's press conference after his team's win over Virginia Tech last Saturday (found at Dan Collins' excellent My Take on Wake blog). He's spot on about the power of believing in yourself and the mind being a powerful weapon:

Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow

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I catch The Colbert Report every once in a while, but after reading this article about Colbert's (real) Super PAC and the way he's using it as a kind of grand performance art experiment/exploration of our current political environment, I think I need to add him to the old DVR list.  This is just brilliant:

In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

“It’s bizarre,” remarked an admiring Jon Stewart, whose own program, “The Daily Show,” immediately precedes “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central and is where the Colbert character got his start. “Here is this fictional character who is now suddenly interacting in the real world. It’s so far up its own rear end,” he said, or words to that effect, “that you don’t know what to do except get high and sit in a room with a black light and a poster.”

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”

 

In Sickness and In Health

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There is an excellent piece in the Washington Post that I found to be at turns heart warming and heart wrenching.  It's a story about love, the vows of marriage, and at the most basic level, love.  I don't want to provide any excerpts for you here because quite frankly the story is too well written as a whole to be sampled in pieces. I've shared it with a few people and have been fascinated by their varying reactions; people I trust and with whom I almost always agree have disagreed with me and each other on certain aspects of this story. Despite those disagreements I feel safe in stating that after reading it all of us found our own "issues" paled by comparison.

Here's the link to the story – I can't recommend it highly enough.

NewsRight

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I just read a story on the Winston-Salem Journal's website that its parent company is one of a group of news organizations spearheaded by the Associated Pres that's launching a company called NewsRight.  The purpose of this company is to track the usage of news stories on "unauthorized" websites, blogs and other newsgathering services and turn those users into paying customers.  Later in the article the president of the company talks about using the data to inform advertisers about who's reading which articles, but let's be honest here – they're going after folks they think are impropertly profiting off of content they've created.  

On the surface I have no problem with the idea of content creators getting paid for their content*, but I get a little tired of newspapers ignoring the flip side of the coin.  You see there are a lot of people out there who use content appropriately – they quote a paragraph or two and then provide a link to the source material.  Are the news organizations compensating the people who are providing a free reader to them?  Remember, if someone clicks a link from this blog to a story in the Winston-Salem Journal the Journal gets to count that reader towards their ad count. Even if they only make a penny on that reader that's a penny I gave them and I didn't get compensated for it.

My point is this – they might want to view people who are properly using the information they produce as partners rather than customers.  You know, maybe reward people like me for bringing you readers rather than assuming I'm stealing your content.  Maybe that's what the company president meant when he mentioned the advertising, but I didn't take it that they were going to share ad revenue with "partners", but that they were going to use the data gathered to raise ad rates.  

I'd love to know what John Robinson (recently retired editor from the Greensboro News & Record) and Lex Alexander (was responsible for the News & Record's online initiatives before he jumped ship) think about this.

*Back in the early days of my blogging ('04-05) I thought newspapers were wrong-headed for going after blogs that copied and pasted stories wholesale – basically I thought it was overkill – but since then I've changed my mind.  There's no reason for them not to protect their product, but at the same time I think they truly missed an opportunity to develop a new business model that used those very same people to build their audience and profit.  That's a longer post for another day.

BTW, if you're reading this and you work for Media General you're welcome for the link. 

I’ll See Your Bible and Raise You a Pagan Spell Book

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Last month a public elementary school in Buncombe County, NC was in the news because the school's administrators allowed Bibles to be distributed to students. Here's an excerpt from a story in the Asheville Citizen-Times:

Jackie Byerly, principal at North Windy Ridge, defended the availability of the Bibles. She said they were not handed out, and students had the option to take them. She checked with Superintendent Tony Baldwin and was given permission to make them available.

She said the Bibles arrived Monday morning from a local group of Gideons International, and the box containing the books was opened in the main office. Byerly said the students picked them up during their break time.

“If another group wishes to do the same, I plan on handling that the same way as I have handled this,” she said.

When I read that last quote I said to myself, "Self, I sure hope someone calls her on that." Thankfully my wish has been granted.  From today's news:

Ginger Strivelli delivered on her promise to bring Pagan spell books to North Windy Ridge after the intermediate school made Bibles available in December. She said school officials said they would allow for the availability of her materials, just as they did the Bibles from a local group of Gideons International.

When Strivelli brought the Pagan books to the school Wednesday morning, she said she was told “a new policy is being crafted.”

In all fairness the policy review is a direct result of the backlash from the Bible incident so I don't think this is necessarily an anti-Pagan move by the school system. I'd be seriously worried if they didn't have a policy review.

Having had three kids go through public schools I can tell you that elementary school was an interesting experience – the kids were like sponges soaking up what the adults at school spilled out of their mouths and I can tell you there were a few times I wondered what their teachers were thinking. My favorite example was when my son, who was in 1st grade at the time, asked me who I was voting for in the 2000 election.  I asked him why he wanted to know and he told me he really hoped I'd vote for Bush because his teacher told him Al Gore killed babies in Vietnam.  Seriously.  After several similar experiences through the years I came to the conclusion that elementary school teachers should stick to the same rules we have for polite party conversations: whatever you do don't talk about religion, politics or sex.

Rumor Mill – Trader Joes to Winston-Salem?!

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SueMo has shared something on Facebook that I pray is not wishful thinking or a cruel joke: Trader Joe's coming to Winston-Salem in early 2013.  Could it be?

Seriously this is a definition of a rumor – SueMo shared the status of a friend on Facebook who'd received a text from her friend that works at Trader Joe's and who'd told her that Winston-Salem was on the company's "store bulletin."  So don't get too excited yet, but maybe we'll get confirmation from something more official – like Twitter.

BTW, I was just checking out the website and it appears that there's a Trader Joe's on the same road as our oldest son's apartment in Charlotte.  I feel like a total idiot now that I know we've been within a stone's throw of the place and didn't even know it.  Guess we've got another reason to visit him!

The Boring Stuff

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At work I'm called the King of BS, which stands for "boring stuff."  My job is to pay attention to things that most people don't want to think about (ordinances, regulatory agencies, market/economic issues, etc.) and I'm such a geek that I even volunteer my time to pay attention to the same kind of stuff on the Lewisville Planning Board.  I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm doing it for any kind of noble purpose – I get paid for it at work and I don't consider the Planning Board work a sacrifice because I'm truly interested and for the most part I find it enjoyable.

What I've learned is that studying and debating issues like how far apart driveways should be and how to handle stormwater in developments can be incredibly tedious, but if we don't think about these things we could end up with at best an aesthetically unappealing town, and at worst a town with broken infrastructure that's literally a hazard to live in.

That's why I read the Washington Post story on the country's crumbling infrastructure with such interest.  We're literally in deep sh** and I think most people are totally unaware:

And just like roads and bridges, the vast majority of the country’s water systems are in urgent need of repair and replacement. At a Senate hearing last month, it was estimated that, on average, 25 percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before reaching the faucet. The same committee was told it will take $335 billion to resurrect water systems and $300 billion to fix sewer systems. 

So we need $635 billion dollars to keep our water and sewer systems going strong. Not so long ago I'd have found that number very daunting, but when you consider we spent $700 billion to bail out a bunch of bankers I think spending $650 billion to make sure we don't all die of dysentary isn't such a bad idea.  Of course it's probably a terrible idea because it would be a, gasp!, public works project and by God we can't have one of those socialist atrocities around here.  I mean why would we want to do something that's literally an investment in our community, would put people to work, and would go a long way towards insuring continued good health for future generations?  I know, I'm just a wild-eyed radical.

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class

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Below is a video of a speech Elizabeth Warren gave at the University of California about the stress on today's middle class families.  She provides lots of interesting data, but what I found most compelling was her comparison of a middle class family of four (two parents, two kids) in 1970 and 2003:

  • In 1970 most families had a single earner, in 2003 the vast majority were two-income families.
  • Average incomes were up in 2003 compared to 1970 due to the second worker, but fixed expenses (mortgage, health care, taxes, child care, cars) were 50% in 1970 and rose to 75% in 2003.
  • Discretionary expenses for items like clothes and food actually went down significantly between 1970 and 2003.  

It's a long video (almost an hour), but it really is worth a look to see how much pressure is on the middle class these days.  Even if you aren't a fan of Warren's it is still worth watching to get a sense of how things have changed in just one generation.

Last point I'll make is that this speech was given in 2007, before the economy tanked. I wonder how some of these numbers would look now.