Spinning and Being Spun: The Idea of Journalism in a Postmodern Age

Television

What hath Topix wrought?

Will be interesting to see, eh? Will it be an OhMyNews for US audiences, finally?

From reading Skrenta's blog, I see they sure threw a lot of research at the subject, honest, really want to know research, not that wanker research that is designed only to bolster something some exec already decided by fiat (you know, like most of the Nielsen ratings machine and focus-group-land for the entertainment industry).

It was odd, because I really discovered Topix back-asswards. Meaning, I wonder if anyone actually started on the Topix site as an actual reader. I got there from following my site tracking software referrals backwards, and Topix kept coming up. I was never sure if that was a compliment or not, because the site looked a lot like other spammy scraper sites. But it wasn't, really, so like Skrenta says, I couldn't tell what it was, just that it was throwing me traffic, mostly any time I mentioned a place name or a celebrity on one of my blogs.

Link: Topix reinvents itself as citizen journalist site | CNET News.com.

Topix reinvents itself as citizen journalist site

News aggregator redesigns its home page, encourages volunteers to  contribute and edit features.

Screenshots: The new Topix Elinor Mills  

  Published: April 1, 2007, 9:01 PM PDT  

Topix is reinventing itself from a software-based news aggregator site to a citizen journalist hub where anyone can submit news and photos and sign up to be a volunteer editor selecting featured stories.

[...]

 

Topix is following the user-powered models of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project (ODP) of Web links in which volunteers are responsible for creating and editing entries. Topix will avoid the spam problem that sites like Digg have by requiring people to sign up with their real names, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer. Skrenta is co-founder of the ODP.

Anyone can submit local news by ZIP code through the Web site or from their cell phone. The citizen journalist idea came to executives after they unearthed hidden in the site's forums a posting from a Texas Minuteman of his first-person experience patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, something that wasn't published anywhere else, Skrenta said.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which launched as a mainstream news aggregation site in 2004, hit a plateau last year. It reached 10 million monthly unique visitors, putting it in the top 25 news sites, but users typically visited few pages and weren't sticking around long, Skrenta said. Allowing for more interactivity will create more stickiness on the sites, which is what makes social networks and other social media sites attractive to advertisers.

[...]

Murdoch admits he tries to sway public opinion for political purposes

Pretty disquieting, even if he does think his efforts were less than successful.

Link: Crooks and Liars: Rupert Murdoch admits manipulating the media…Surprise…Surprise.

Link: Hollywood Reporter: Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet.

Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet

By Georg Szalai

Jan 27, 2007

NEW YORK: Big media companies and governments ultimately can't stop or reverse their reduced agenda setting power brought about by the Internet and digital media, but must learn to live with it and embrace it as an opportunity, a panel at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland said Friday.

Big media conglomerates have less influence amid the continued explosion of news sites, blogs and podcasts, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in the session moderated by Charlie Rose and available via Webcast. "It's so pluralistic," Murdoch said. "We all have less power, much less...(we) the big companies."

Not only are there many more places from which to get news and opinion thanks to the Internet, he said. He said traditional media are also "put right immediately" these days when making mistakes, citing the example of the CBS News affair surrounding allegations against president George Bush last year.

Similarly, Murdoch said "government now has to be much more open" because of the Web and suggested, along with Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and the possible future prime minister of the U.K., that governments should try to see it as an opportunity for them.

"We just have to let this go," Murdoch said. "We can't reverse it."

Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried." Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution."

The News Corp. CEO also once again signaled that he sees much more change ahead thanks to digital media. "We're in the very early stages of it," he said.

[...]

Juan Cole rakes Murdoch over the coals pretty good.

Link: Informed Comment.

Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right, by his ownership of a vast media empire, admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?

 

TVNewser's Brian Stelter is Media Web's Online Journalist of the Year - MarketWatch

This guy earns every accolade he gets. His success is simply an amazing story, and his blog is at the top of my "must-read" list, and has been for several years.

Link: TVNewser's Brian Stelter in the Online Journalist of the Year - MarketWatch.

JON FRIEDMAN'S MEDIA WEB

TVNewser's Stelter is Online Journalist of the Year

Commentary: He's THE TV news authority - at, yes, the ripe old age of 21

By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch

Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Dec 15, 2006

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Brian Stelter, the founder and leader of TVNewser.com, is a star in the blogosphere.

In the television news industry, Stelter is often a first read for people who want to know what and how their colleagues and competitors are doing at that minute. Because TVNewser.com has had so much impact, Stelter is Media Web's Online Journalist of the Year.

That's only part of his saga. He is also one of the most improbable success stories around today. He is a solid professional at a point when most of his peers are learning the craft by writing for their campus publications. If his counterparts were really lucky, they'd be freelancing as university correspondents for the local big-city dailies.

You see, the most remarkable aspect of Stelter's success is that he is only 21 years old. Stelter attends Towson University in Maryland (where he has edited the school paper, to boot).

Stelter is the rarest kind of media blogger. He is respected for his knowledge of the industry and the serious subjects that he writes about. Stelter provides useful information to an adult audience. Plenty of other bloggers get their kicks by cranking out mean-spirited gossip.

[...]

Loyal following

Stelter founded the blog in January 2004, originally using the name CableNewser.
While he is half the age of many of his sources and readers, he has steadily built a loyal following of some of the biggest names in the TV biz.

TVNewser.com has about 250,000 unique visitors and 900,000 page views a month and it receives some 200 emails a day from anonymous tipsters and people who like to scream and yell their opinions.

Fans appreciate that Stelter's blog gets right to the point and presents crisp headlines, always concentrating on providing information, not mindless quips.

"You'd think he was doing this for 10 or 20 years," Dorian Benkoil, mediabistro.com's editorial director, noted.

 

"He gets scoops that most beat reporters don't," said Laurel Touby, the CEO of mediabistro.com, the Internet empire that acquired TVNewser two years ago.

[...]

 

Interesting NBC/MSNBC news items on TV Newser

I don't know if I see a trend here or not, but it certainly is an interesting confluence of events, pulled from different times, etc.

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment.

Tuesday, Dec 05

Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment

Last night, for the first time in the program's 37-year history, NBC Nightly News had a sole sponsor: Philips Electronics. With less ads in between, 'Nightly' had longer-form pieces and expanded segments.

As noted below, the viewer response was big. And the ratings are reflecting that: According to 6:30 affiliate time period numbers (which represent about 75 percent of the country), Nightly News delivered 10,329,000 total viewers last night -- almost 1.2 million more than ABC's 9,156,000 and over 2.3 million more than CBS's 8 million...

[...] 

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC.

Wednesday, Dec 06

Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC

After signing off on NBC, Brian Williams continued anchoring on MSNBC. Tim Russert had this to say:

"I was so taken by the bluntness and how bleak this report was. When you hear someone, former Chief of Staff Leon Panetta say, 'we need one last chance.' When you hear Jim Baker, former Secretary of State, saying 'we have traded one nightmare for another.' Lee Hamilton saying 'we're not sure this is doable.' What they're doing is saying, 'this is our best effort. It may not be enough, but time is of the essence.'"

[...]

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week.

Wednesday, Dec 06

MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week

"All the news networks do miserably" in the 18-34 demographic, Reese Schonfeld rightfully notes. But with that disclaimer out of the way, it's worth noting that MSNBC "led all four cable news networks in viewers 18-34 in both prime and total day" last week. Schonfeld says MSNBC's primetime lineup has brought in a younger audience.

MSNBC actually had the top nine programs on cable news in the 18-34 demo last week. They were all taped shows, like To Catch A Predator or Lockup, and most aired late at night.

The #1 18-34 program was Sunday's 8pm special "Beyond Conviction," which averaged 142,000 in that demo. The second highest ranked was a 3am repeat of Lockup on Friday morning, with 134,000 in the 18-34 demo...

[...]

A Military Halloween Scare: Pentagon decides its PR staff isn't up to snuff

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Could you call it Pentagon 2.0?

Or should we prepare ourselves for a new media propaganda campaign that will plant stories virally, deep in the Blogosphere, to bubble up for "placement" in mainstream media through a back door?

A standard PR technique of the Bush administration has been to circumvent the national/Beltway media, and to primarily give audiences to local media outlets in various sites the talking heads visit. The presumption of such a technique is that the local media are "rubes" who are less critical and more suseptible to heavy-handed spin and message control. I am not saying I believe those things. I've been one of those local media people. I'm just saying that appears to be the overt the presumption behind such a strategy.

Are local media getting wise to that trick? Are Bloggers their new "rubes?"

If we can assume the GOP PR machine is faltering (given those bad poll numbers we see daily), a person can draw one of two conclusions:

1. Bad policies and incompetence in Iraq (and previous lies exposed) have derailed the previous good public opinion of this administration.

OR

2. The PR process (largely generating fiction) is faltering and failing to do its job properly in the current environment.

Generally, if I were the folks in charge, I'd lean more heavily on the first option and look to fix those issues. That's because the guy who taught me PR drummed it into me when I was in my 20's: Truth is the Best PR. Honestly, it works amazingly well.

Hurricane Katrina provided a big reality check and a turning point, and if the folks in charge couldn't get a clue through their insulated bubble for that one, they surely aren't going to figure out what a disaster they've created in Iraq. I suspect they're currently locked into a position of believing their own spin. Drinking their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

Sort of like those last weeks of George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign, when his falling numbers could not penetrate the insistent "Go team!" optimism he'd worked himself into at the end of the campaign against Clinton/Gore.

So it appears from the article below that the Pentagon has chosen a PR assault on Option 2. Perhaps the situation in Iraq is so utterly hogtied and stalemated, the Pentagon has no other option besides intensifying the spin. But one would think actually getting the power on in Iraq, or the hospitals and ambulances running properly, would go a long way toward keeping people in the U.S. from thinking the situation there isn't being completely botched Katrina-style. I mean, we are half a world away. Just a token effort at competence in Iraq would have easily conned a lot of people, but even that was too much for this administration.

Iraq appears to have been botched Katrina-style from the very beginning, but since Iraqis were dying instead of people in New Orleans, the fictional spin held the upper hand for audiences half a world away.

I'm not hopeful that a New Media PR campaign can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, in this case. And on the more paranoid side, I shudder at the power of the military behind a massive propaganda campaign. It invokes images of Goebbels to me, the master propagandist.

But the masses lining the streets in Nuremburg, creating those striking images in "Triumph of the Will," that's a POPULIST movement, even if it was a manipulated populism. It had bodies. Masses of bodies, willingly cheering.

And next week we'll find out how easily manipulated the masses of bodies in the U.S. can be. Not because masses of people will be gathered in the disappearing public common spaces in our culture. We gather around our electronic hearths. Populist mentality in crowds has been factored out of the equation.

The Pentagon isn't seeking to actually influence masses in crowds. As Noam Chomsky would say, it seeks to "manufacture consent" among the masses individually, in that nearly one-on-one communion with both our electronic hearth, and now with the interactive screen, the viral social media spaces of the blogosphere.

The question is, freepers be damned, are interactive, viral social media spaces amenable to new Pentagon 2.0 PR tactics?

Maybe instead of asking what Lee Atwater would do, we should ask, "What would Goebbels do?" I found a neat clip on him from Wikipedia I'll paste in below the article excerpt.

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media"

by Jim Mannion

Mon Oct 30,  3:28 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon is expanding its public affairs operations to counter "inaccurate" news stories and editorials and exploit "new media" to get its message out, its chief spokesman said, denying the effort was linked to the US elections.

The initiative comes amid plummeting domestic support for the war in Iraq and just before crucial mid-term congressional elections in which opposition Democrats are contesting Republican control of the Congress.

Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, insisted that the new public affairs program was not prompted by either the elections or polls showing that only about 37 percent believe the war is going well.

"What were looking at doing is, 'How can we get better, how can we get faster, how can we transform public affairs?'," he told reporters.

"And we're looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news. Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements," he said.

"And we're looking at this whole issue of new media -- podcasting, and IM-ing and all those kinds of things, where people are basically running circles inside us," he said.

Ruff disclosed the expanded operations after questions were raised about a wall being built in the Pentagon press operations center that will separate the new unit from Pentagon public affairs officials who deal with the media.

He denied that the intent of the new operation was to go around the mainstream news media.

Ruff said he did not know how much the operation is costing or how many people were being hired.

The unit includes a rapid response team, a "new media" group, and a team that specializes in getting Pentagon officials booked on radio and television shows.

[...]

But US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a strident critic of media coverage of Iraq, also has pushed for a sweeping overhaul in the way the military communicates with the public.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in February, he called for 24-hour press operations centers and an approach that would give Internet operations and other channels of communications equal status to "20th century press relations."

"It will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press, just as publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principal source of information," he said.

Efforts to expand the military's use of "information operations" overseas aroused controversy following disclosures last year that a private contractor was used to secretly plant paid stories in the Iraqi media.

"Information operations" is a military term used to describe propaganda aimed at influencing foreign publics. Traditional Pentagon public affairs, on the other hand, is bound by laws that prohibit propagandizing of Americans.

Asked whether the new Pentagon operations fell under the category of "information operations," Ruff said, "I've not looked at it that way at all."

[...]

So what made Goebbels such a master? What did he do that was so revolutionary? Turns out, according to Wikipedia, at least, one of his greatest innovations was employing new communications technologies ahead of others, in ways others hadn't started doing yet.

Link: Joseph Goebbels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Goebbels technique, also known as argumentum ad nauseam, is the name given to a policy of repeating a point until it is taken to be the truth (see Big Lie). Goebbels also pioneered the use of broadcasting in mass propaganda, promoting the distribution of inexpensive single frequency radio receivers (the so-called Volksempfänger (People's radio) to the German public which ensured that millions of people heard the output of the Reich's propaganda ministry while being unable to receive news and other broadcasts from outside Germany. Meanwhile his ministry busily broadcast Nazi propaganda around the world by shortwave radio. Newsreels, movies and books were impossible to publish without prior approval and censorship by Goebbels' ministry. He is credited by historians with developing the techniques of modern communications and propaganda.

[...]

[Kinda makes him sound invincible, doesn't it? Which is even more interesting in light of this next excerpt from the same Wikipedia entry.]

Goebbels is often remembered for his Sportpalast speech, given on February 18, 1943 (sometimes called the Total War speech) in which he tried to motivate the German people to continue their struggle after the tides of World War II had turned against Germany. By this time many Germans privately believed Germany was irrevocably on its way to defeat.

There was strong animosity between Goebbels and the popular Hermann Göring, whose political influence waned following his disastrous management of the Luftwaffe early during the war and Goebbels became the third most powerful leader in Germany (after Martin Bormann, of whom most Germans were not aware). As Germany's military situation collapsed, the increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda brought discreet ridicule from the German people who nicknamed Goebbels The Malicious Dwarf and The Wotan Mickey Mouse.

[...]

Soooo, it appears the moral to this story is...

That the Big Lie is not all-powerful if reality gets so strong it breaks through? Sure, everybody remembers the Big Lie theory, but they FORGET Part 2, where the dismal reality-based universe breaks through and the Big Lie is exposed. But note, the "increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda," in utter denial even though the Big Lie had been exposed.

Hey, why turn to the truth when you can go down lying, right? Take a leaf out of the book of every hard-core alcoholic or other abusive family system. Deny, deny, deny, in the face of ALL evidence to the contrary. Drink so much Kool-Aid (spiked with whatever) that you are incapable of believing anything BUT your own fictional reality.

Then shoot yourself in a bunker, after poisoning all your children with cyanide. That's what Goebbels did, at least. Few alcoholics or other abusers get to hang out in bunkers with Hitler.

If you're feeling a little deja vu on the way the Germans finally realized their military situation was collapsing, read this bit below on the Big Lie, and feel deja vu again.

It's Halloween! It's supposed to give you nightmares! Boooooo!!!!

Link: Big Lie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the phrase big lie. In this theory, the English are attributed with using a propaganda technique wherein they had the mendacity to "lie big" and "stick to it".²

There is an uncited rumor to the effect that Goebbels also offered up his version of the big lie technique without attributing it to either Jewish or Allied propaganda. That uncited quote is the most wide-spread attribution of the big lie, and it is usually given in a context where the implication is that the propaganda technique was invented by Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister for the Third Reich.³

The phrase was also used (on page 51) in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile [1]

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2]

"Maximizing Shareholder Value" by any other name still stinks to high heaven

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

When last I wrote about media layoffs (by whatever euphemism they were going by at the time), the bloodletting was in print, New York Times corporation and Knight Ridder.

MSNBC has had some great scoops lately, and a great voice in the form of Keith Olbermann. Too bad my monopolistic cable company (Comcast) has decided I should get the useless CNBC instead of MSNBC, in my cheapo tier of service.

Regardless of those who gain most from newsroom purges in quarterly profit reports (shareholders who demand 20-30% returns, and "growth," above all else), I actually suspect an overt political motive. In the name of maximizing shareholder value, newsrooms are being gutted, turned into naive, sonambulistic, drooling receptories for Enron-like PR and marketing corporate and government snow jobs.

My poly sci professor in college drummed something into my head that will always be my touchstone. Those who watch the endless crime dramas on primetime know this game too. You ask the questions: WHO RULES? WHO BENEFITS?

The answers to those questions reveal the true motivations behind the decisions, regardless of the bullshit PR "TV 2.0" name attached to it.

So are shareholder demands for that high of profits enough to justify the purge of an entire industry (over a 20-year period, as well)? Or are there much BIGGER benefits, BIGGER beneficiaries who are cleaning up on a far bigger scale than mere shareholders?

I can't help it. I watched the Enron documentary the other day, "The Smartest Guys in the Room." It is wonderful. And demoralizing. Because you know that for all this fraud committed as the "big lie" (Hitler's henchmen advocated this approach as superior for propaganda), we know there are thousands of smaller instances of these frauds, cloaked behind the veil of PR obfuscation. Man, that Enron PR and propaganda machine was one piece of work.

Halliburton's subsidiaries are making money off Iraq (that used to be called "war profiteering, when people with knowledge of history still had jobs in smart newsrooms) on such a massive scale, I think the corporate imperative to utterly co-opt all honest journalistic enterprises that could penetrate that veil of propaganda far outweighs such insignificant things as "maximizing shareholder value."

I learned from the Enron film how little regard for shareholders and shareholder value actually exists inside many corporations. Using that for a "reason" is nothing more than a scammer's rationalization for a kind of wholesale corporate crime syndicate, operating on a global scale. I think corporations in the world today have turned criminal to the extent that they make the mafia or yakuza look like bit players.

CBS basically got gutted after Rathergate. ABC News has been co-opted since Peter Jennings died, due to the Disney masters, not because individual journalists there aren't trying. So this rounds it all out. Target: NBC. Currently the only evening newscast I can stand to watch most of the time without flinching.

New York Times Corp: limping. Knight Ridder: gutted. Village Voice... so sad. L.A. Times taking a beating. What's next? The Washington Post?

When will the "Pravda-ization" of U.S. mainstream media be final and complete?

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

THE IDIOT BOX

Plucking Party at NBC News

The massive layoffs at NBC that we predicted a month ago were announced this morning: The network will eliminate 700 jobs company-wide over the next year. And Radar has learned just how bloody a day it will be for the news division: NBC News plans to fire 220 staffers.

It's unclear how the cuts will be distributed across NBC News, but that number includes employees of the news staffs at the network's owned-and-operated local stations. The job cuts are part of "TV 2.0," a network-wide re-evaluation that NBC executives have described as updating the network for the 21st century and insiders call an excuse for massive layoffs.

Among the hardest hit areas will be MSNBC's production staff—NBC is expected to move MSNBC's operations from Secaucus, N.J., and consolidate with either CNBC in Englewood Cliffs or NBC's headquarters in Manhattan—and Dateline NBC. An NBC News spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.

This is an interesting commentary on the move as well, from September:

Who's Afraid of TV 2.0?

THANK YOU, AND GOODNIGHT

If you work at NBC Universal, beware the ides of September. Peacock staffers are sweating bullets over the impending release of what the company is calling TV 2.0, a proposed top-to-bottom reorganization of the network to streamline it for the Internet age. While NBC Universal Television Group honcho Jeff Zucker is pitching the project—recommendations are due mid-month, according to one source—as a visionary look to the future, staffers suspect it will be a merciless look at the bottom line. "Everyone is waiting for the ax to fall," says an NBCer. "There was a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the word was, 'How much can you cut for the fourth quarter?'"

"Zucker says we don't want to be like the music industry," says another staffer. Translation: "They want to squeeze money out of this place."

And there's less and less money to go around. NBC, which dropped from first place in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic in 2004 to dead last for the past two seasons, sold $1.7 billion in ads for its non-sports programming last May at the Upfronts, when advertisers place bets on the networks' new shows. That's a 10 percent drop from its 2005 take, and a whopping 41 percent drop from 2004, when hits like Friends and The Apprentice raked in $2.6 billion.

An NBC Universal executive, speaking on background, insisted that no decisions have been made: "They're looking at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing has been decided yet." Staffers at the network's news division are particularly on edge because news budgets are a large and easy target, and because Jay Ireland, a former GE auditor and bean-counter at the company's plastics division who now runs NBC Universal's station division, is the exec tasked with wedging NBC News into the TV 2.0 scheme.

[...]

 

Is the coveted youth demographic too smart for current news programming decisions?

Link: Variety.com - Newsies are a punchline for young auds.

The people I'd like to see called into account in response to this Variety article below are the ones who develop programming wisdom, who make programming decisions, who set the over-arching philosophies and policies for strategies to reach that much-coveted 18-35 demographic, across the industry.

It seems to me that these people operate in a black box, and I really know nothing about how their process works. It isn't transparent at all, and falls, I think, into the land of trade secrets, special sauce, voodoo, what-have-you. Add water and stir. Shake and see what pours out. Then send the troops to marching to carry out these directives. That's how it looks from where I stand, at least.

But what if the methods used to arrive at these over-arching programming decisions are poorly constructed? Use unvalidated statistics? Suffer from shortness of vision, or assumptions about the audience that can be easily disproven? Any of these things could be rampant inside the black box (and it would seem shareholders who have an interest in programming successes would care about this), and presented as a finished and polished "wisdom" beyond where it can be questioned, on any level, except with another crap shoot, with interchangable overpaid CEOs or a new regime that descends again into the black box until it emerges again with some new "wisdom" or "brilliant youth demo programming formula," and no one knows how they arrived at it.

One reason I'm so fond of the tendency for transparency with blogs.

Link: Variety.com - Newsies are a punchline for young auds.

Newsies are a punchline for young auds

By BRIAN LOWRY

MEMO TO TV NEWS: You know all that time and energy you've invested hoping to amuse, divert and entice younger viewers with frothy "news you can use," scary "It could happen to you" segments and imperiled teens?

Sorry to break the news, but they're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you.

Traditional news isn't just being ignored by savvy younger audiences. It's become a punchline. NewsLab exec director Deborah Potter notes in this month's American Journalism Review how Web sites like YouTube circulate TV's gaffes and bloopers in record time, but such mistakes often draw fewer guffaws than the inane antics newscasts pull intentionally.

Pundits have already fretted over "The Daily Show" effect, citing research positing that Jon Stewart's satirical program has heightened disdain for politics and media, potentially reducing participation in the process.

Yet that conveniently ignores how much news organizations do to undermine their credibility without Stewart's help, exacerbating the disconnect between them and an educated Internet-age crowd that they desperately yearn to reach.

[...]

Colbert fired back on "The Daily Show" last week, unleashing this devastating faux tirade: "What are you implying, Jon, that O'Reilly and Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities onto the world around them, inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance -- itty-bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!"

The audience howled.

[...]

Still, Fox News is hardly alone in the crosshairs, however ripe its targets might be. ...ABC News [was] rightfully lampooned for contemplating whether Armageddon is near, and for [another's] silly "Countdown to Cease-Fire" clock on Monday. Stewart's producers also hilariously caught ABC following a promo for its prestigious news Emmy nominations with a breathless blurb for the "medical mysteries" series -- about a boy who resembles a werewolf.

When ABC junked its scheduled "Primetime" on Thursday to focus on London's thwarted terrorist attack, I gasped aloud, "Oh no! When will we learn more about werewolf boy?" Not to worry. "20/20" returned to form a day later, focusing on a con artist who married multiple women.

[...]

O'Reilly and Geraldo, however, preach to an audience that's predominantly over 60, whereas fully a third of "The Daily Show" contingent is under 30. And if many of those younger folks have soured on TV news, it's because cable and broadcast networks keep rolling out lemons, not because Stewart and Colbert bitingly turn them into lemonade.

[...]

Why slavish "balance" reduces journalists to formulaic automatons, an easy tool for spinners to manipulate

Link: When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost | csmonitor.com.

I know I've been preaching this gospel for a while now, as do most journalism school textbooks, but I've been in newsrooms where this very idea, that balance is too mechanistically-applied, is blasphemy, and oddly, these newsrooms seem to be the most vulnerable to direct manipulation by forces that not only want to control or influence story selection, but also want to influence whether a given bit of information is higher or lower in a story, or, with limited time and space, whether a piece of a information gets ignored or left out altogether.

Each decision of what bit to include or exclude is a political decision, an ethical decision, a journalistic decision. To make such decisions based on a mechanistic, deterministic formula is anti-intellectualism of the worst sort. I think those who advocate such a thing could very well be duplicitous and know exactly what kind of system they are putting in place, a system they can manipulate to their own ends, even as their job titles imply that their expertise and responsibilities lie elsewhere. Managers who set up such systems can easily appropriate greater editorial control in the newsroom, in other words, for their own agendas, while ostensibly masking what they are actually doing.

I really enjoy the Christian Science Monitor's take on it here below:

Link: When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost | csmonitor.com.

Commentary

Dante Chinni
from the July 11, 2006 edition

When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost

All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts.

By Dante Chinni

WASHINGTON – A few weeks ago in this space I asked you for your thoughts on the news media - what you don't like and don't understand about how reporters and news outlets go about their work. A few dozen responses later, it's safe to simply say there's a lot.

But if, as reporters always defensively say, the media are not a monolith, that is even more true of media users. Some of you turn to and trust the biggest media and some of you dislike them. Some of you think blogs are more honest news sources and some of you are leery of them - others don't use them at all and don't understand the fuss over them. Some happily sample a large number of outlets on the Web and others purposely restrict their choices.

But several of you raised the same point of concern: The media need to do a better job with "balance" in the news. That's not surprising considering the nation's current political divide that has led to considerable talk of bias in the news.

Again though, readers came at this issue from different vantage points. Some of you (and this came from conservatives and liberals) said that the stories are often too one-sided. Others felt that the media was too worried about giving "both sides of the story" at the expense of the truth and that this itself represented a form of bias. Still others said the media did a fine job of giving two sides of stories, but that there are often many more sides than that to give and those points of view are neglected.

Who's right? Well, that depends.

[...]

So it is with any number of stories. Just because there are differences of opinion doesn't mean both sides are equally correct. When reporters don't make the effort to sort through the evidence and simply fall back on "this side says this, and that side says that," they are being lazy.

That doesn't, however, mean giving "both sides" of an issue is inherently lazy.

With some issues the answers are simply unknowable - this is particularly true when a person proposes something and says it will have a specific impact, such as a policy proposal - and asking supporters and opponents what they think is useful. The actual impact of a proposal at a specific moment in time is unknowable. It hasn't happened yet.

Or consider scientific debates where the academic community is legitimately split. Giving both sides is essential.

But it isn't giving one side or giving both sides that has been journalism's biggest "balance" shortcoming in recent years. It is refusing to recognize that there are usually more complicated views on most issues. There simply aren't many issues that boil down to a nice, neat Hegelian dialectic where the possible answers are two clearly delineated opposites.

[...]

In other words, despite its prominent place in many media debates, "balance," as it is usually understood, is often not particularly useful in journalism. All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts and "both sides" leaves a lot of sides out.

• Dante Chinni, a senior associate at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, writes a twice-monthly column on media issues. E-mail Dante Chinni at: Dante Chinni.

One of the most dramatic examples of how pseudo-balance can be used to manipulate and spin a story is in the film I just saw last night, Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth." (INCREDIBLE piece, RUN, go see it right now!)

The scene I'm referring to is where Gore gives the statistics from a study of the number of scientific journal articles that doubt that global warming is actually happening. Out of 925 scientific journal articles, 0% had any reasoned doubt in the science behind global warming.  As the Monitor writer points out above, such articles need to entertain conflicting views in order to test whether the objections can be supported by the data (scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals are by definition an argument, an argument that carves its main path by negating or disproving all the faulty hypotheses and faulty paths along the way, so that the best truth is the path that remains).

The embarrassing indictment of the field of journalism follows, however, as apparently the same study looks at a much larger number of news articles on global warming, to determine the percentage there that represent serious doubt of the theory's viability. The number shown on the screen was 57%.

In other words, very nearly perfectly balanced, perfectly formulaic. Journalism is revealed above as more slavishly adherent to the concept of balance than to an accurate representation of the truths of a given scientific debate. (BTW, I'm interested in getting the full bibliographic citation of that study, if anyone has it)

Imagine if journalists had to cover a boxing match this way, so as not to give preference to either side, even if the boxers were hopelessly mis-matched. Imagine quoting sports commentators who spoke glowingly or critically of one boxer or the other with perfect balance, to make it look that either side could have won, even if one boxer has a longer reach, a 20-pound advantage, and just flat-out K-O'ed the other guy.

Imagine if the media weren't allowed to report sports scores at all if one side were to happen to beat the other, because that would break with the principle of balance!

You think you don't see this going on all the time? A court case is like that boxing match. Journalists cover the courts because, like with sports, there is a built-in agon, a struggle, with winners and losers. Unless representing the case thus breaks with the principle of balance on a topic that has some strange vibration about it in this curious media climate, the vibration of the sacred cow.

Consider Ken Lay, the notorious founder and defrauder of Enron. Coverage of his recent trial was heavily spun. I dunno, perhaps he was advised by the guy who dressed up Tom DeLay and had him smiling like a car salesman for his booking mug shot. Lay was totally upbeat going into his trial. He had some bad-tempered days in court, which were duly reported, but very few court analyst journalists I heard ventured to figure out which boxer in that agon (struggle) had the longer reach, the 20-pound advantage. The jury had a far easier time coming to a decision than people who had to follow the trial throught the television filter.

And then came the verdict, very very bad for Lay and Skilling. Did they let on that they understood they were going to jail for a long time? Oh no, they were confident in their appeals, as always, as if none of the evidence that easily convicted them had any weight, logical force, anything that could not be shamelessly denied, as if a person standing knee-deep in water could feasibly and continually insist, "It's not flooding."

Ron Suskind knows what kind of universe this happens in: the non-reality-based universe. You know, that Wonderland wilder than any dreamt up by Lewis Carroll (a political satirist, truth be told) where the Enlightenment never happened. And perhaps Lay and Skilling did know something we don't, where figurative bodies were buried, some trump card that read "get out of jail free."

Then Lay died of a heart attack (please tell me, did anyone hear if the coffin was open or closed? I just want to know if there is anyone outside of the reach of Lay's payroll who actually saw the body. I don't believe it is a conspiracy, or not a conspiracy. I just want to hear from someone who saw a real body. If Thomas could doubt Jesus, we ought to have MORE than enough doubt to go around for a known criminal like Lay).

How did the obituaries cover Lay's apparent and conveniently-timed passing? Good god, he was eulogized! Like Gorgias working to redeem Helen of Troy, and with good manners, broadcast media in particular sat and talked about Lay as if a great statesman had passed, and not a criminal who had deprived many people of their life savings.

And I had this odd feeling that somehow the media was slavishly applying the principle of balance, as if the outcome of the boxing match were even more unreportable once Lay was dead, because of its presumed bias.

What happens if "quality" online video journalism trumps anything on broadcast or cable TV?

Link: 'New' media have an old look - Los Angeles Times.

Ooh, this is fascinating. There's a new online Emmy award for news and documentary programs produced for web sites (I wonder if this will also include photojournalist's narrated slideshows, which are hot on many newspaper web sites, including the New York Times, with that sort of studied introspection that you often get with high quality print photo essays).

The things made for this web-video medium differ substantially in pace and content than what's produced for broadcast deadlines and the 24-hour cable news cycle.

These would also be stories that don't bubble up through the filters of television news editorial meetings, right? They don't deliver ratings in the way that missing white girls or runaway brides do. They may actually even involve STORIES told with an arc, with depth, with something more than competing sound bites trading jabs on a seesaw, implying that every issue has exactly two sides and two sides only.

Or maybe not. Newspapers appear to be willing to support this kind of work, but it is notable that grassroots media aren't necessarily delivering on their promise here yet.

But I'm just so excited to see a medium emerging for the kind of full-page or multiple-page photo essays I used to work on in the 1980s. These pretty much vanished, swallowed up by template-driven, space-conscious chain newspapers in the late 1980s, essentially putting me out of that business of telling those kinds of stories with both words and pictures.

Link: 'New' media have an old look - Los Angeles Times.

'New' media have an old look

An Emmy category was created for emerging media, but newspaper websites dominate its nominations.

By Matea Gold, Times Staff Writer
July 4, 2006

NEW YORK — When the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences created a new Emmy award this year for news and documentary programs produced for websites, mobile phones and iPods, the group aimed to recognize the best of new media. But when the award is presented in September, the winner will likely be old media.

That's because five of the seven nominees for the so-called emerging media Emmy announced Monday were actually reports done by websites of the New York Times or the Washington Post. The traditional television news divisions were shut out of the category.

The fact that two newspapers dominate the nominations for an Emmy award speaks to the sea change currently underway in the media, noted Av Westin, co-chairman of the television academy's news and documentary awards committee. Rapidly changing technology is erasing the long-established boundaries between newspapers and television, creating new opportunities for print journalists, he said.

"The traditional networks, if they send somebody out to do a story, essentially their priority for the moment is to service their primary outlet of television," said Westin, a former ABC News executive. "Newspapers, I think have always wished they could be in television, but they didn't have a television network. Now they essentially have one: it's called the Web."

This is the first year that the television academy is giving out Emmy awards for content produced for new media platforms such as computers, mobile phones and iPods.

According to the academy's rules, the content had to be created specifically for viewing on new media and could not be a reconstituted version of a program that had already run on television.

[...]

The news and documentary "emerging media" award will be presented at a Sept. 25 ceremony in New York. Of the 48 entries, about 18 came from major television networks, Westin said. But none of them made the cut.

Instead, the website of the New York Times racked up three nominations, including one for a Web documentary about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan created by columnist Nicholas Kristof. A Web-exclusive video piece on Bolivia and a broadband interview series with a victim of child pornography were also nominated.

Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com, said one advantage the website may have is that it has sought to produce reports that do not resemble television pieces, noting that Web viewing requires different pacing and editing.

"We're not a television network," Schiller said. "For us, it's not just video — it's podcasting and slide shows and multimedia and blogs. It's certainly our present, and it's going to be more and more of our future."

[I'm sort of wondering why Yahoo! wasn't mentioned for the somewhat innovative form taken with "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone." I don't know that the site is grab-you-by-the-arm-compelling, but I know I found the different approach very interesting.]

[...]

Westin said that he believes one factor that may have given newspapers an edge in the competition was the quality of their writing.

"I think writing for television news and documentaries has declined in its style and in its content because the pictures so dominate what the reporters work with, whereas a print reporter has to do it all with words," said Westin, noting that almost all of the nearly two dozen judges who selected the nominees were from television.

"I imagine that this will have network folks on Wednesday morning calling in their broadband or Web people and saying, 'There is a serious award out there — we better get in the game.' "

 

 

 

How threatened should traditional media be by viral video?

Link: NPR : NBC Plugs into YouTube's Viral Growth.

Great piece on NPR's Morning Edition on what may end up being called "The YouTube Effect."

But what I found the most interesting was the fact that a YouTube pirate video posting (that funny rap about cupcakes and the "Chronicles of Narnia") awakened interest in the moribund Saturday Night Live that NBC could not manufacture on its own.

Since then, of course, video-blogs have exploded. Every big commerical site and its big brothers are whipping out viral video posting sites, flipping the video into Flash. But just as so many wanted to be the next MySpace.com and tried to whip out MySpace knockoffs, where the kids actually ARE is where the buzz is. Will anyone be able to trump YouTube?

It must be simply maddening for folks online who are still stuck in the old media marketing paradigm, where building a lookalike site means you can actually grab market share because you push all the right buttons on passive sheep-like users. Getting online citizens to react that way to the standard marketing approach is far more akin to trying to herd cats.

YouTube's video sig branding helps, as the video migrates far and wide from the original site. I don't think they've got a business model yet, but crowds of actual USERS will trump a "horseless carriage" business model any day of the week. Just ask the folks at Six Apart, who went from the once-free Movable Type, to Typepad, LiveJournal, and now in development, Vox (which also has YouTube wannabe aspirations).

On other fronts, the big mass media producers are falling all over themselves to post their content online on proprietary sites, a flood started by Steve Jobs and ABC at iTunes. Nobody wants to give Apple the big edge with video that it grabbed with music because that industry was too brittle to see what was happening in interactive media.

Link: NPR : NBC Plugs into YouTube's Viral Growth.

Media

NBC Plugs into YouTube's Viral Growth

by Laura Sydell

 

Brooke Brodack -- known as Brookers to her fans -- is seen in one of her videos.    YouTube.com

• 'Brookers' on YouTube

Morning Edition, June 28, 2006 · YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site, was an underground phenomenon just a few months ago. Now, with millions of viewers and millions in venture capital, YouTube is entering into a deal with NBC to promote the network's programming on the site.

Like most Silicon Valley success stories, YouTube started in a garage. Founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley got frustrated when they were trying to share video with friends on the Internet and found the process too complicated.

They officially launched YouTube in December 2005. So far, they've raised more than $11 million in venture capital. The site is so popular that about 60,000 videos are uploaded to it each day. Fifty million videos are posted on the site at any given time, Chen says.

The site's fare ranges from the very silly -- teenagers lip-syncing to pop music -- to the deadly serious -- soldiers' videos of the war in Iraq.

[...]

Like other services where average people share content, YouTube has run into some copyright issues. YouTube got the attention of traditional media when a video of a Saturday Night Live skit, called "Lazy Sunday" showed up on the site.

The spoof, featuring SNL regulars Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg rapping about eating cupcakes and going to see The Chronicles of Narnia, was viewed millions of times. Nonetheless, NBC asserted its copyright and asked YouTube to take it down. It's now available for viewing on NBC's own Web site.

[...]

But NBC had to acknowledge that the viewing of its "Lazy Sunday" video online brought Saturday Night Live more attention than it had seen in years. 

On Tuesday, NBC announced a deal with YouTube to post previews of its shows on the Web site. 

Brian Haven, a senior media analyst at Forrester Research, says the challenge to traditional television comes from consumers who are starting to look to one another for entertainment. It's part of a trend he calls social computing.

But Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University, says people may not always be enamored with each other's amateur videos.

"In the early days, when anyone could make a phonograph record, you could go to Coney Island famously and record your record -- you know everyone did it. And over time, people said, 'You know, I'd really rather listen to talented people doing this.'"

[...]