DECEMBER 16, 2008

I love books, but due to some work and general life craziness, I’ve been unable to read much for the past few weeks. Luckily, things have slowed down enough that I was able to finally sit down and finish a book I started a month or two ago - Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, a novel about an aging liberal patriarch, a veteran of the culture wars of the 60s, and his relationship with the younger generation, comprised of his daughter, his nephew and his daughter’s two friends.

I’m ashamed to say I picked up the book because of its inclusion in several critics’ Best of 2006 awards. I don’t read a lot of fiction and not many of my friends do either, so when it comes to figuring out what I should read next, I generally have to rely on the Pulitzer committee or the New York Times’ Review of Books. I figured The Emperor’s Children was a safe purchase because of its critical acclaim.

Was I ever wrong. Undercurrents isn’t a book review site, but suffice it to say that the critics’ perception of this book didn’t match my own. I thought the dialogue was hackneyed and impossibly witty, that many of the central premises of the book were outlandish,  and the characters unbelievable. The constant refrain running through my head as I read was “People like this do not exist, and if they do, they do not deserve to have a book written about them.”

After finishing the book, I blamed my own upbringing for my lack of appreciation - I’m a hayseed from Richmond, Virginia and a current resident of staid and practical Washington, not the child of Manhattan literary eminences -  but upon reading reviews at Amazon and Metacritic, I quickly discovered that my opinion about The Emperor’s Children wasn’t unique. At Amazon, the most commonly-used tags for the book are “waste of time and money”, “avoid”, and “awful”, the most common rating for the book is one star, and the average rating is a mere two and a half. At Metacritic, the aggregate rating from professional critics is 85 (denoting “universal acclaim”) while the rating from readers is 69. Whichever way you slice it, reader reactions to this book were a far cry from those of elite reviewers of literature.

Reading these reviews, my insecurity over not “getting” The Emperor’s Children quickly melted into triumphalism - I was right, and the professionals were wrong. I mean, it’s not surprising the book was reviewed so well - it’s basically about the same New York literary-journalism class that reviewed the book, and paints it in a very appealing light. But it’s nice to know that that small clique isn’t capable of driving public opinion about books like they once did.

This particular book aside, it’s incredible how much power social media has had in debunking the ideas of “professionals”.  As print media continues to die, the blogosphere has eroded the opinion-setting power of all kinds of pundits, from art and literature critics in New York, to political talking heads in Washington - and one can only hope that the unwashed masses on the internet continue to prove that the emperor has no clothes.

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NOVEMBER 12, 2008

The last time I really picked up a newspaper was in August 2007. That was when I used several bundles of newspapers to wrap my colleague Neal’s cubicle in what stands to be the greatest TMG birthday prank on record. I obviously don’t read the paper. And, based on the latest numbers on newspaper circulation, I’m not alone. I don’t consider myself an uninformed person- I just get my news from television and the internet- the two biggest competitors to newspapers.

However, last Wednesday was different, and not just for me. People all across the country raced to get the daily paper, especially those sporting front page headlines about Barack Obama’s victory.

So does this mean that print is back? Of course not. Joe Strupp over at Editor & Publisher agrees:

…a lot more people will have a lot more newspapers to look back through some day and remember when. Remember not only when voters first elected a black president, but also when the daily paper was still around.

People weren’t buying the paper last week as a source of news- they were grabbing copies as a memento, a keepsake, a piece of history. You can’t frame a website or video story. In this way, papers have seemingly been reduced to the same category as concert ticket stubs or the program from a baseball game. In my opinion, newspapers will continue to serve a purpose, but more as an artifact of time than a physical representation of our current times.

I bought into the frenzy, too: I stopped by the local 7/11 and bought four copies of The Washington Post. I’m going to send the copies to my parents and siblings. History was made on November 4th and I want to hold onto a little piece of it. So for the first time in a long time, I’m thankful for the newspaper.

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OCTOBER 30, 2008

Back in April, my colleague Mike wrote a post entitled “The Long Goodbye To Newsprint Begins” in which he detailed the final changeover from print to online format for Madison, Wisconsin’s The Capital Times:

The Capital Times may be among the first to step so emphatically into journalism’s future, but every entity of the Old Media – not just newspapers, but TV, magazines and even newsletters and academic journals – has had to face the fact that the digital age has transformed the rules of mass communications.

And while it’s true that every aspect of traditional media is facing a paradigm shift, it seems that print media is taking the worst beating, at least for the moment.

• Condé Nast, an international publisher with numerous publications (many of them household names like Wired, Vogue, Glamour and GQ) announced major cuts across the board, with each title having to reduce staff and budget costs by 5% over a matter of weeks.

• The Orange County Register is laying off 110 employees by the end of the week.

• The Los Angeles Times is cutting 75 newsroom jobs, which is about 10% of its staff.

• Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., is also cutting 10% of its community newspaper staff, on top of 1,000 jobs it let go in August. (Because of Gannett’s size, this will be a very substantial number of jobs.)

• And next year, the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to go to an online-only daily edition. (CSM will retain a weekly print edition.)

No doubt the economy plays a role here (particularly when the only printing press seeing an increase in demand seems to be the one at the Treasury Department) but it’s also indicative of the rapid convergence of social and traditional media. As we increasingly exchange information electronically, print newspapers - and to a lesser extent magazines and books - become a seeming anachronism. When content I can find in a print edtion of a newspaper is also available online, I will opt for the electronic version every time.

As exciting as the changes are in the way we consume and distribute information, the loss of jobs is unfortunate and has a tremendous impact on the people in the industry.  The question now is whether the decline of print media continues to accelerate, or holds firm. My guess is that 2009 will bring a number of similar announcements to the one made by the Christian Science Monitor.

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SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Some interesting news flashed across my Google Reader screen this morning: SpinSpotter, a Firefox add-on that uses a series of algorithms to detect “spin” in news stories, has gone live.

According to the BusinessWeek article, SpinSpotter’s basic features include functionality to detect and flag violations of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.  In addition to that, the program will rely heavily on input from its users, who can flag specific instances of bias and spin that may not be detectable by the program. Those individual flags will be incorporated back into the program itself, so it has the capability to adapt to new kinds of spin.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to check out the program for myself, but reading the interview with company officials, a few red flags pop out at me. First, there’s an assumption that media bias is a two-sided affair - that if there’s bias, it’s against Republicans or Democrats - when in reality, American political opinion is much more multifaceted than the old left-right continuum would suggest.

My other issue, though, is a little more substantive. I believe strongly in the power of an adversarial press - where people, reporters, and companies with different opinions can contribute their points of view. Certainly there must be ground rules, and if a journalist is merely repeating the talking points of a political party then he or she deserves to be ignored. But part of the marketplace of ideas is a vibrant press, filled with different points of view, that allows readers to decide what’s relevant and what’s not.

An adversarial press relies on diversity of outlets - something that has been in short supply over the past 50 years, when most cities have only one daily paper and three television stations to supply the news. But the internet and social media have changed that by allowing the kind of diversity of opinion in the press that existed before the big media conglomerates. To gut that diversity by using an automated spin remover seems to me to be missing the point of social media entirely - that it’s supposed to be about individual opinions.

Beyond that, there’s very little evidence to suggest that Americans are interested in bias-free news. For instance, a Rasmussen poll shows that 87% of Fox News viewers plan to vote for John McCain in the upcoming elections, while Barack Obama holds smaller majorities of CNN and MSNBC viewers. It’s clear that in this case, we’re selecting the media outlets that we think best fit our views. It’s no different in newspaper-land: conservatives here in DC read the Times, everyone else reads the Post. 

While SpinSpotter’s efforts are certainly noble, ultimately I think it’s a lost cause. Even if we were interested in reading non-biased news, the nature of bias is so complicated that it seems impossible to truly remove it.

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SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

The battle of electrons vs. dead trees continues to wage on.

First, there was the e-book reader, of which perhaps the Amazon Kindle is the most famous variety.  While some reports indicate that the Kindle is doing quite well, I have to say that in the past two years I’ve spent riding public transit here in D.C., I’ve seen only one of them. It’s my guess, even as a 30-year-old guy whose information consumption habits skew heavily toward online, that people just like the ease, convenience, cost and even feel of a good old-fashioned book.

But despite the challenges of getting e-book technology to be adopted en masse, The New York Times reported this week that Plastic Logic, an international company whose website brands the organization as a “World Leader in Plastic Electronics”,  revealed the technology for a new, electronic newspaper reader.

According to the Times:

The electronic newspaper, a large portable screen that is constantly updated with the latest news, has been a prop in science fiction for ages. It also figures in the dreams of newspaper publishers struggling with rising production and delivery costs, lower circulation and decreased ad revenue from their paper product.

While the dream device remains on the drawing board, Plastic Logic will introduce publicly on Monday its version of an electronic newspaper reader: a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look — but not the feel — of a printed newspaper.

The device, which is unnamed, uses the same technology as the Sony eReader and Amazon.com’s Kindle, a highly legible black-and-white display developed by the E Ink Corporation. While both of those devices are intended primarily as book readers, Plastic Logic’s device, which will be shown at an emerging technology trade show in San Diego, has a screen more than twice as large. The size of a piece of copier paper, it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

Personally, I think a device of this nature has the potential to take off for exactly the reasons that the Kindle, at least initially, hasn’t. When I’m on the go, the last thing I want to do is read a big, bulky newspaper (usually with inserts falling out) while I stand packed into a crowded train. Something sleek, easy to read, and durable would be a big advantage over my current attempts to read news on my Treo. I already read most of my news electronically - something I don’t do or even want to do with full-length books - so for me, this is actually an upgrade on my existing options. If I were able to personalize my device by drawing from multiple news sources and subscribing to feeds, all the better.

What about you? Do you have an e-book reader? If not, would you want an e-newspaper reader?

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SEPTEMBER 3, 2008

Because someone in my office gave birth to a healthy baby boy early yesterday morning, and another one of my colleagues is about to become a new mom later this month, and also in honor of “Labor” Day, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about the crazy Hollywood obsession with getting the very first pictures of newly famous newborns with their famous parents.

People and OK! magazines are usually the first to release full-page spreads of sleeping babies cradled by their proud parents… and thousands of people flock to the newsstands to take a look at the tiny people.  The pictures (and the rights to the pictures) are purchased with very hefty price tags.  This raises a question of ethics.

USA Today featured a story called “The High Cost of Celeb-Baby Fever” in August that focuses on the topic of ethics in the sale and release of baby photos.  The article makes mention of the recent record-breaking $14 million deal between Hello!, a magazine based in Britain that purchased international rights to a 19-page “family album” of pictures of the Jolie-Pitt twins– Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon.  Before this deal, the most that was reportedly paid for celebrity baby pictures was $6 million, to Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony after the birth of their twins.

Now the ethical questions: will this crazy sum of money (seriously, I can’t picture $14 million bucks in my head) become “the norm” in the world of Hollywood now?  Will other celebrities expect money like this for their pictures?  Also, is it even right to sell your baby’s pictures to the media and essentially objectify them at such a young and vulnerable age? 

Then comes the mental health of the child later upon learning that pictures of them were sold for all of the world to see.  Will the kids resent their parents later? 

Also, where is the money going?  Does the fact that some or all of the money received for pictures may go to charity change things at all?
Everyone has a different opinion about this issue.  I personally think that if the pictures are not sold to the media in the beginning, the paparazzi will go crazy trying to pry their way into the lives of celebrities just to get the first one.  Also, the financial aspect is really not anyone’s business.  If a mother–who spent hours and hours giving birth to a child– decides to take and sell some pictures, that’s her choice.  She clearly is making the best choice she can make for her child and her family.  I also think that charitable donations are an honorable cause and it’s wonderful that a few pictures could benefit the multitude of groups receiving aid because of a few pictures. 

In the end, what does it matter?  We are so saturated with images, celebrity news, drama, and gossip that the pictures will be old news before we know it. 

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JUNE 3, 2008

While you were out grilling this past Memorial Day, The Washington Post published media critic Howard Kurtz’s regular column. Kurtz, who offers occasionally insightful views on news coverage and politics, wrote about the recent round of buyouts at the Post. The company’s newspaper division, like so many others in the country, has fallen on hard times, and offered a buyout to employees over 50 years old in order to trim payroll. Most of the column is a justified paean to the lost expertise of his soon-to-be former colleagues, and a lament of the changing and diminishing capabilities of the Post’s staff, now nearly 25% smaller than it was eight years ago.

Even as a 23 year-old working in the social media world, I recognize the breadth and depth of this loss, and understand that the Post and other papers are less able to embark on serious investigative journalism than they once were. But I also happen to believe that this lost capability has been more than compensated for by the kind of work coming out of the blogosphere.

Kurtz can’t just leave it at that - he has to take a few potshots at the media and mentalities that are slowly replacing the traditional press. Here’s Kurtz on the difference between blogs and newspapers:

There isn’t a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won’t support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game.

Kurtz, however respected he may be in the world of newspapers, has little idea of the “economics of the Web”. The point of a blog is not to offer wide-ranging coverage on every conceivable topic - it’s to offer in-depth coverage, coverage beyond the depth possible in traditional media, of a few specific topics. So if I want to read about DC sports, I don’t have to read the Post - I can read one of the excellent Caps blogs, like Japers’ Rink, or Nats320, a Nationals blog. If I want to see public officials held accountable, I can read Raising Kaine, a blog on Virginia politics, or Glenn Greenwald, who writes on constitutional issues, or Daily Kos, a community devoted to all things progressive.

And guess what? Each of these outlets provides remarkably more in-depth coverage on these topics than the Post can possibly provide - there are no such thing as column inches on the internet. They continually scoop the traditional press on all sorts of serious stories, like Sen. George Allen’s infamous “macaca” moment, the controversy over the FISA bill currently before Congress, and other stories the newspapers initially deem unworthy of newsprint. And Kurtz is kidding himself if he thinks that newspapers are the only medium that can possibly cover stories requiring high-level access; when the newspapers die — and die they will — the news has to go somewhere. Already we’re seeing corporate and political opinions change when it comes to blogs - we counsel our corporate clients regularly to include bloggers on their media lists, and both major political party conventions will have exclusive blogger programs this year.

At the end of the column, I learned that Kurtz’s concern about the future of news is not based in reality, but in mere petulance:

The ticking time bomb here is the wholesale abandonment of newspapers by younger people who grew up with a point-and-click mentality. When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, “I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?”

“What are you going to do about it?” I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can’t force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of XBox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.

Never mind that Kurtz’s apparently serious response to the “smug” graduate student resembles a joke my coworkers and I mutter to each other over cubicle walls (no, you’re a joke), the ridiculous, false-on-its-face conclusion that the death of traditional media is coming at the hands of spurious entertainment like video games and movies is frankly insulting.

No, Howard, what we’ve asked papers like the Post to do is provide us with exactly the news we want, exactly when we want it, and without the kind of fluff and ephemera that is endemic to today’s newspapers. Due to the economics of the newspaper business, papers like yours have found that impossible, so we’ve turned to the world of blogs to gain multiple, in-depth perspectives on what’s important to us. You’re catching up, albeit slowly - the Post’s Going Out Gurus blog is a regular stop of mine for events in Washington - but don’t insult or blame us for the newspaper industry’s inability to put out a compelling product.

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APRIL 29, 2008

The Capital Times is a small newspaper with limited reach outside of its home in Madison, WI.  But what it did Saturday caught the attention of every newsroom in the country:  It ceased publishing its daily print edition and set up shop online.  After having papers roll off its presses every day for some 90 years, the newspaper decided to follow its readers to the Web.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, told The New York Times. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”  

The Capital Times’ move comes as newspaper circulation continues to decline nationwide.  New figures out Monday showed newspaper circulation fell another 3.6% in the six months ending in March.

The Capital Times may be among the first to step so emphatically into journalism’s future, but every entity of the Old Media – not just newspapers, but TV, magazines and even newsletters and academic journals – has had to face the fact that the digital age has transformed the rules of mass communications.  Even the publisher of The New York Times mused aloud a year ago that he didn’t know whether the Times would still be printed in five years (although he later clarified that he fully expected print to endue for a long time). 

What is confronting the Old Media is a power shift of historic proportions.  Now everyone with a computer and an Internet connection is a competitor to The New York Times and The Capital Times and every other traditional media outpost.  Social networking sites like Facebook and millions of individual blogs and web sites mean you can be your own media company for the cost of a computer and Internet hookup – you don’t need to spend millions of dollars on a 700-ton printing press and buy ink by the barrel.  Now there are no significant barriers to entry. 

At TMG Strategies, we realize that there are more voices coming from more places now than ever before in history, and to successfully communicate your message today you must listen to them and engage with them.  Change is occurring at breakneck speed, and the shift in power from institutions to individuals and small groups is just beginning.

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OCTOBER 2, 2007

Here at McGinn MS&L we find it important to keep track of the first time important things occur in our society.  These changes tell us a lot about things that may be surprising or even overdue, and are a great indication of where we stand.

Some recent firsts that are significantly important are:

Ø      On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first successful "test-tube" baby was born in Great Britain.

Ø      For the first time at least since World War II, there were more failed marriages than lasting ones at the 25-year mark: Slightly more than half of the men and women who got married in the late 1970s were separated or divorced — or widowed — before they reached their 25th anniversary.

Ø      The 2008 edition of “ America’s Best Black Colleges” marks the first time U.S. News & World Report has released a stand-alone ranking of historically black colleges and universities.

Ø      John Edwards appeared in the first MySpace/ MTV candidate forum. The Democratic presidential hopeful was the first in a string of candidate dialogs planned by those two stalwarts of modern culture.

Ø      The number of violent crimes increased by a larger amount than expected last year, extending the first significant rise in murders and robberies in a dozen years.  Robberies surged by 7.2% and murders rose 1.8%.

Ø      The number of people living past 100 in England and Wales reached almost 9,000 last year for the first time ever.  The number of Centenarians had increased ninety-fold since 1911 when there were only 100 total in the country.

What does this all mean?  Well, advances in technology have made things like the "test-tube baby" and the record number of Centenarians possible.  It also is the main factor behind the MySpace/ MTV political influence which signals a huge shift in society and the things that we emphasize as a nation.  Technology is changing everything about our world and we are taking notice.  It’s great to see that we are taking advantage of our ability to communicate to mass audiences and political leaders are taking the time to speak to these audiences– young and old.

The rise in the number of murders and robberies could be because of a larger issue, such as Hurricane Katrina or the terrorist attacks on September 11th.  We are starting to realize that we should stop and enjoy life, and how important is really is to remember that everyone is an individual with their appreciation for the world around them.  This could be the reason for the record number of failed marriages as people begin to explore what they find most important in life.  We are encouraging individuality and uniqueness, as well as embracing positive changes such as the first edition of U.S. News and World Report releasing a ranking specifically for the nations Black Colleges and Universities.

As new firsts emerge and these changes continue to become an integral part of the way we live, it’s important to just stop and take in these shifts before years go by and we never even realize they occurred.

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MAY 22, 2007

I’ve always thought that someday the 3 (4?) major broadcast networks would consolidate their newsgathering operations into one global brand.  I think that because they all do the same thing - and none of them have the resources anymore to do it as well as they’d like. 

Now, I see Mark Cuban is calling for convergence of both print and television.  He argues that some of the print brands (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, etc..) are the most trusted names in news:

Riddle me this Batman: Rupert Murdoch has figured out that Print and TV can be combined to be a vertical news organization and is willing to pay 5 billion dollars to do it. Why has no one else realized the value of combining big news brands and organizations ?

Why isn’t a CBS News merging their news department with a NY Times and rebranding itself as the 6pm NY Times News ? Or with Time Magazine News ? Or NBC News and ???

With newsroom cuts a daily occurrence, why wait until you’ve been bled to death?

Of course, this does bring up the questions of putting the reporting of news in fewer hands, but with the Internet/blogs/podcasts and millions of amateur journalists at the ready, is this really true?  We’ll see.

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