Ten recommendations for J-School deans
Just to be nice…
- Stop talking to readers and viewers to find out what’s going on. Talk to former readers and former viewers, or those who’ve never been readers or viewers. Young people are entering a media python strangely different from ours. We need to kill ours rather than let it starve to death (it’s the humane thing to do) and graft ourselves onto the new beast. Attacking the new animal with ours would be suicide.
- The gate keeper function is dead. Don’t even go there.
- Extricate yourselves from any semblance of involvement in mass media. That one-way paradigm died awhile ago.
- Kick the public relations people out the door. Just because Walter Lippmann invited them in doesn’t mean we need to keep them in the same building. It gives people the wrong impression, to say nothing of what it does for “our” students. We are not peas in the same pod; theirs belongs in the business school.
- Have your students look at themselves in the mirror every day and say, “I’m a human being, and that’s okay.”
- Teach the lost art of political argument.
- Notify high schools that the road to riches doesn’t run through your school. You offer degrees, not jobs.
- Every student should blog and participate in the citizens media process. If it teaches them nothing else, it will give them (and you) an appreciation for the reality that technology now allows anybody to be a newspaper or a television station. Our students need to use the technology to fully understand that. To enter the trade of journalism without this understanding would be like engineers entering the labor force without a knowledge of computers.
- Think revival, not nostalgia, to address the problems we face. It isn’t about going back.
- Require students to learn a little about life, even if that means you have to teach it yourselves. You might back off on some of the things they can learn on the job, if you need to find time for history, religion, politics and business.
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Charitable giving for fun and profit
Warning: Sermon ahead. Proceed at your own risk.
As I was surfing the TV landscape last night, I landed for awhile on ABC’s Primetime Live where I watched “Glitz, Glamour Affecting Charitable Giving?” — a thoughtful and provocative report by Brian Ross on the state of charitable giving in the U.S. This is a subject that’s close to my heart, so I found myself adding to the story as it was unfolding. Here’s a portion of the Ross report:
“Americans are giving more and more and more to charity, they’re giving less and less and less to the poorest citizens in this country,” says Trent Stamp, who runs a non-profit Web site called the Charity Navigator, which evaluates and tracks where America’s charitable contributions go.“There’s no doubt that American donors have abandoned the poor in terms of their philanthropic decision-making,” says Stamp. “These are not the right types of charities that are endorsed by celebrities. These are not the types of charities that send you a tote bag when you make a gift.”
Last year, contributions to charities working with the poor decreased to 8 percent of all money given, marking the third consecutive year of decline.
“For the most part, the large donor, the wealthy donor has turned away from these types of charities,” says Stamp. “Nobody wants to be seen at the local homeless shelter, but they would like to be seen at the Symphony Hall.”
Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former New York City social services commissioner, attests to that. She works with many of the city’s smaller charities that deal directly with the poor and the homeless.
“I have donors that will give a $25,000 check to Lincoln Center, and they’ll give us a thousand dollar check,” Barrios-Paoli acknowledges. “You know, the big universities get a lot of the money, the big cultural centers get a lot of the money. And again, I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but the reality is that we have the, we don’t have access to the money, and we really need it.”
“Charity” is one of those words that has evolved in the English language over the years. Whereas it used to be almost exclusively used in the sense of helping the poor, it’s now used to justify any kind of tax-exempt giving. December is the big charity month, because the haves are looking for deductions.
I willingly served on the local boards of various charities during my years as a news manager, and the dirty little secret is that fundraising is one of the most competitive subcultures in the West. I can recall meetings of the Red Cross board (in a location I won’t/can’t mention) where we discussed what to do in the wake of United Way decisions to cut funding to the Red Cross in favor of supporting more popular hot buttons, like women’s shelters. The same is true of the Salvation Army. Here we have two mainline charities that actually assist the poor and the afflicted having their funding cut in the name of marketing. How sad.
In the Judeo-Christian heritage that most Americans claim, God asked one thing of leaders, and that was not to neglect their responsibility to the poor. It was often cited as evidence of righteousness, and as the King went, so went the whole community. Josiah was one of the righteous kings, and while the prophet Jeremiah was lambasting Shallum (Jeremiah 22), the unrighteous heir of Josiah, he makes an important reference to his father:
“He pled the cause of the afflicted and needy; Then it was well (with him). Is not that what it means to know Me?” Declares the LORD.
But Jesus said the poor will always be with us, so the idea that we can somehow “fix” the problem is ridiculous. The problem, therefore, isn’t important, but our response is, and a response where the upper class increasingly gives for the payback instead of the responsibility isn’t a good sign for the future. We’ve lost our sense of noblesse oblige — nobility obligates — the belief that the wealthy and privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate, not build a new wing at the museum.
My suggestion is to put charitable giving to organizations that directly assist the poor on the front page of the tax return, not under itemized deducations, where everything else should go. Not much chance of that though.
I warned you.
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Potshots from the mainstream
I view blogs as a personal form of media — an extension of all that is the writer. Transparency is our credo, not an institutionalized set of standards and rules. This is something a lot of outsiders don’t understand and can’t begin to appreciate. The hazard for the observer, therefore, is that one post does not a writer make, and this can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and mischief.
Witness the case of veteran Chicago Tribune editor and correspondent Charlie Madigan, a.k.a. “Madigan.” Mr. Madigan didn’t like what I wrote about the new dean of the Medill School of Journalism, so he left a snarky comment on the post. I appreciate his position and am thankful for his comment. This, after all, is why I welcome comments from readers in the first place. As I’ve said many times before, when you deal in new ideas, feedback is critical, ‘lest you find yourself surrounded by thoughts of your own brilliance.
The problem is that while each idea ought to be able to stand on its own, some don’t. My site is a combination of essays and daily entries, together forming the whole of my positions in a changing world. I don’t blog for readers; I blog to think out loud — to see if the ideas and wild horses that fly through my head make any sense. In the case of the entry about Medill, for example, you’d really have to read a lot more than just those paragraphs to understand my concerns about the current state of journalism. This is something Mr. Madigan didn’t do. The generalizations, stereotypes and sarcasm he directed at me might be justified, if that was the only thing I’d ever written about the subject.
I care deeply about my trade. Anyone who has visited this site with any frequency knows that. But in the world of cut-and-paste links, and aggregators that skim entries for good quotes, I suppose my iconoclastic perspective can come off as shallow and obnoxious. Fair enough.
As for Mr. Madigan, I wrote a biting, angry, defensive and fairly ugly response last night. Fortunately, I had the sense to sleep on it. Instead, I’ll just offer one clarification. When I speak of “everyday people” in the context of an entry about contemporary journalism, I’m speaking of those for whom the institution of professional journalism has failed…those who are voting their feelings by canceling subscriptions and not watching…those who’ve told Gallup that they don’t trust us anymore (while we still assume that they do)…and those who’ve discovered that their voice matters and can be expressed through personal media. When I speak of “everyday people,” I’m talking about the root of the “seismic challenges” that Mr. Lavine doesn’t appear to understand, which is why I wrote the entry about him in the first place.
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The mainstream’s new spin
I’ve been hearing this more and more lately, and it showed up again today in a statement from John Lavine, the new dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Medill is, of course, the dam controlling the mainstream, so their new guy ought to have deep insight into where things are headed, right?
He doesn’t.
“There are seismic challenges in journalism that put at risk having an informed society. Moving quality journalism to a new, higher level is an important first step of our response, but by itself that will not meet these challenges. We need to develop a more profound understanding of audiences and consumers, of what they value and of how to present journalism and the new digital media to them. We also need to have a far deeper understanding of media brands and marketing communications and how to use them to engage media audiences.
It is the first amendment that protects our society from being ill-informed, not the people who work for our culture’s institutional media corporations. What Mr. Lavine (an “expert on media strategy and management”) ought to be weighing is the threat of his own institution against the everyday people who are working to keep each other informed. The people have spoken. There’s no need for further study.
We’ve got it all wrong on this, folks. Moving “quality journalism (what is that anyway?) to a higher level” isn’t the answer. Getting our hands dirty is. That requires climbing down from our pedestals to the land where everyday people live. We have such a sense of entitlement; it oozes from statements like the above. Who the hell do we think we are anyway?
Deeper understanding? Media brands? Marketing communications? I think not.
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This is why I love the Nashville blogosphere
…and it’s what the rest of you poor folks are missing.
The inimitable Tim Morgan has calculated the mass of Charlie Brown’s head.
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The unbundling continues while others circle the wagons
NBC is the latest to jump on the unbundled media wagon with an announcement that they, too, will be offering programs for iTunes download and viewing on the Video iPods (and other instruments) of the world. NBC Universal is going beyond what ABC is doing, offering programs from “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the original “Dragnet” to “Law & Order” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” CBS is expected to follow suit soon. So now we have all three networks and cable TV in the loop for a la carte distribution of their programming.
Unbundled media IS the future, folks, and I hate to say this, but the future is now. What? You say you’re still waiting for somebody to figure out the revenue model before you leap? Sorry, but you’re too late.
These are the people that Diane Mermigas charges with leadership problems in another biting essay from The Hollywood Reporter.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the blanket notion being floated by some so-called experts that the only way to realize more value from media conglomerates is to dismantle them.Aside from being an overly simplistic, one-size-fits-all view, it smacks of an unproved knee-jerk response to the industry’s complex and challenging digital broadband transition. It fails to address some of the formidable underlying reasons why media stock prices are languishing and full values are not being realized.
Just maybe, it isn’t the mix of media assets, but the way they are being managed.
Just maybe, it is an absence of visionary leadership and enterprising strategies necessary to adapt to the change and make the most of new opportunities.
Here’s the scenario. People aren’t going to the movies as much as they used to. There are a lot of reasons, but one is that people don’t have to sit through 20 minutes of commercial announcements before the show at home. So what are theater owners going to do in the wake of decreased revenue? Yup. Add more commercials.
Ad forecasters at ZenithOptimedia said on Monday that spending on in-theater ads, usually shown before the trailers, rose by 18% this year to $400 million — and likely will go up by about 15% each year through 2008.Driving growth is digital projection that makes it easy to change ads or target ads to different audiences, says Tim Jones, CEO of ZenithOptimedia’s U.S. operations. “That’s directly attributable to the medium becoming more digital. It gives advertisers more options and affordability from a production standpoint.”
The forecast was good news for theater owners depressed by the 6% slide in box office receipts this year. To attract more ads, they’ve spent about $150 million in the last three years to install relatively simple digital projectors just for ads. That’s ahead of the much larger investment just beginning for full digital conversion to movie-quality projectors.
Heatonism #1, I tell my clients, is this: Revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem. Fix the problem. This, of course, doesn’t always go over well, when managers are trying to manipulate the bottom line for the well being of their companies. It’s a sad scenario, but we must not wallow in it, because the reality is there are incredible opportunities available in an unbundled media world. That’s where we need to invest our time and resources.
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Online simply isn’t about reach and frequency
Tom Hespos nails it brilliantly in today’s MediaPost Online Spin, When Will Online Measurement Stop Playing Follow The Leader?
…forcing online media to conform to outdated success metrics predicated on the broadcast model will sell our medium short.If we play broadcast’s game, we will lose. I will not count the notion of reaching as many people as possible with a broadcast message among the Internet’s strengths. But when we conform to reach and frequency metrics, we’re positioning the medium against television and radio in such a way as to fail to play to our own strengths. Interactive, as the name implies, is strong in its ability to interact with people, not broadcast to them.
Instead of making interactive play to broadcast’s strengths, perhaps we should turn the tables a bit. Maybe we should force broadcast to account for the engagements it spawns, conversations it starts and influence it has over word of mouth. What? It can’t measure that? My point exactly…
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Who to believe, advertisers or the networks?
Conflicting reports in the news today lead me back to my belief that research data coming out is only as good as research data going in, and that is often determined by what the researcher is trying to prove.
CBS executive vice president of planning and research David Poltrack told the UBS 33rd Annual Global Media Conference in New York yesterday that ad revenue growth will be in the 5% category next year, and that everything is just fine, thank you very much. He actually made the case that DVRs are good for broadcast networks!
Poltrack noted that cable penetration in U.S. households, on the rise for two decades, is slowing down, and that the phenomenon has combined with the emergence of a significant number of hit shows to help stabilize broadcast-network viewing levels.“Two developments will help the networks in the next two years,” he said. “The addition of DVR homes to the Nielsen sample, and out-of-home viewing.”
Meanwhile — and at the same conference — one of the world’s biggest media buyers predicted that advertisers would continue to pull money away from TV and into broadband video over the next 36 months.
Based on the numbers he is seeing from Carat’s clients, Verklin (David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas) estimated that online now accounts for about 8 percent of their advertising budget, and given the current rate of increase, would grow to 15 percent “in about 36 months.”
“I think it is going to come from television, and I think a lot of it is going to move into online broadband,” he said, predicting that there would be a corresponding shift taking the average media plan from about “two-thirds television” to 50 percent.
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My front yard Mockingbird
A personal note: We moved into new digs last month, and my 2nd floor office overlooks the neighborhood to the west. I love all things outdoors, so it makes for a nice environment in which to write.
One of the neighbors, I discovered, is a Mockingbird who vigorously protects his winter food supply of red berries from the Dogwood tree in our front yard. It’s our state bird here in Tennessee (and Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas), so we all know of this behavior.
Several times a day, hundreds of Starlings descend on the tree to gobble up the berries, but the Mockingbird will have none of that. This single bird will attack the flock with a tenacity that has to be seen to be appreciated. The white markings on his wings and tail make him appear much bigger that he really is, and the combination of appearance and behavior drive the hungry blackbirds away. He moves so fast that it’s difficult to capture on film, but here’s my best effort:
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ABC made a good decision
ABC ended months of speculation today when the network named Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as co-anchors of World News Tonight. (Is it Elizabeth and Bob or Bob and Elizabeth?) They also announced separate — and one hopes updated — versions for Central and West Coast time zones, a very smart move.
I know Bob Woodruff. He worked for me at WRIC-TV in Richmond in 1993 (UPDATE: It might have been 1994.) and was the inspiration for one of my most memorable spontaneous moments. We hired him away from the competition, where he worked as an $18k-a-year reporter, to be our morning anchor. His former station invoked a non-compete, which stated that he couldn’t work for a competitor doing the same job.
“Mr. Heaton,” the attorney asked, “please explain to the court the difference between a reporter and an anchor.”
I replied, “In a courtroom, every judge is an attorney, but not every attorney is a judge. It’s that way with anchors and reporters in a newsroom.” I thought it was brilliant. The judge ruled against Bob, however.
I can tell you this, Bob Woodruff has one of the purest souls on the planet, a truly wonderful human being. He personifies the term “family man,” and is way smarter than most probably think. He gave up a lucrative legal practice to take that $18k-a-year job, because he felt inspired to change professions. As a corporate attorney in San Francisco who spoke Mandarin, he was working in China when Tiananmen Square went down. CBS hired him as a translator, and he got the bug to be a reporter.
I’s a good move for ABC, and I’m very proud of and for Bob.
(And Elizabeth,)
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A deserving Weblog Awards Finalist
I’m delighted and extremely proud that Nashville Is Talking has been named a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards competition. The blog is competing with 14 others — many of them big timers — in the category “Best Media/Journalism Blog.” I think this is a tough category for a blog like NiT to win, but it’s extremely significant to even make the list.
If you’re interested, you can vote here and help send an important message to the world of media and journalism — that a site written and maintained by a local citizens media community is worthy of International recognition in the field of media.
Nashville Is Talking is hosted and operated by my client, WKRN-TV, as an aggregator of the many voices that make up the Nashville blogosphere. I’m especially proud of Brittney Gilbert, the writer of the blog, and the many members of the blogosphere who fill-in for Brittney on weekends. This is truly a product of the local community.
I’m also very proud of Mike Sechrist, General Manager of WKRN-TV for having the courage to leave it alone and let it bubble up from the bottom. This is the real secret to its success, and the payback for the station is significant as a result.
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The path to progress runs through innovation
Rafat Ali over at PaidContent highlights a great paragraph from a free Wall St. Journal interview with new Disney CEO Bob Iger. He’s talking about why ABC did their deal with Apple on video downloads.
“Firstly, we’ll learn more about consumer behavior and using new technology in a new window with different pricing. Secondly, I really wanted to use it as a catalyst to get the company thinking more about breaking with tradition and following the consumer. Interestingly enough, nothing has done more to reignite the company than this deal. It almost has created more value for the company than the deal itself.“
“Following the consumer.” Who knew?
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Casting call for “A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol”
That’s right. Blogger/podcaster Hugh Brackett is turning my little short story into what he calls a “Podioplay” and is currently recruiting a cast.
I’m looking for people to play the various parts. Here’s the download link for the Script of “A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol”. The Podioplay will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license.The details are in the script. I’ll have more information on this project posted soon. Send audition recordings to podplay@illudium.com.
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More bad ad news for broadcasters
Merrill Lynch’s media analyst Lauren Rich Fine tells Joe Mandese that ad spending estimates for 2005 and 2006 are being lowered.
The biggest media hits in Fine’s revised forecast impact the TV business. Broadcast TV ad spending is now projected to decline at nearly twice the rate previously anticipated by Merrill Lynch: 6.1 percent versus an early forecast of 3.8 percent. The main culprit is the major broadcast networks, which are now expected to take a 5.0 percent hit on 2005 advertising sales versus an early prediction of a 1.2 percent increase over 2004. Cable TV also slides in Merrill Lynch’s new forecast, dropping to 8.2 percent growth from an earlier forecast of 10.5 percent.
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Power is shifting to consumers
One of the slides in my PowerPoint presentations quotes a statement by Starcom Media Exec Rashid Tobaccowala in 2003.
“2004 ushers in an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike. How will you engage God?”
Take, for example, the outing of bad business practices by bloggers. We’ve all had bad experiences with companies that treat us like something other than customers, but the best we could do in the past was to complain to our family and friends. We followed the chain-of-command sometimes, and sometimes got relief that way. But it was always on their terms and according to their timetable. Not so anymore.
Shankar Gupta writes in today’s MediaDailyNews of a pissed-off blogger who generated enough viral heat to bring an online retailer of cameras to its knees, because a salesman tried to sell him accessories he didn’t want, and then when he refused, told him the camera he had ordered was out of stock. The sales guy “went ballistic” when informed that the blogger was going to write about it, and in just two days’ time, the camera company was delisted from Yahoo! Shopping and overwhelmed by angry consumers.
Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of buzz-monitoring firm Intelliseek, likened PriceRitePhoto.com’s blogosphere drubbing to the “Dell Hell” saga documented on Buzz Machine, the Web log of media figure Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis wrote about a bad experience he had with computer giant Dell’s customer service, creating an avalanche of negative comments about Dell and bringing to light hundreds of bad consumer experiences with Dell’s support staff.“Moral of the story: this is a new age of accountability,” Blackshaw said. “We’re in a new consumer surveillance society where ostensibly benign and sneaky misdeeds are magnified for broader audiences.”
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Wikipedia gets it (very) wrong
Making the rounds today is an op-ed piece in USAToday by John Seigenthaler in which he justifiably criticizes Wikipedia for publishing a false and defamatory “biography” of him. The bio, which has since been taken down, apparently said that Mr. Seigenthaler was suspected of involvement in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. Such is the mischief that can — and apparently does — slip through the cracks when human beings can hide behind anonymity.
My “biography” was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales’ volunteers “edited” it only by correcting the misspelling of the word “early.” For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his Website’s history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.…And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research - but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.
We live in a litigious culture, something that I personally believe is horribly wrong. Lawyers milk (for their own gain) laws written largely by other lawyers and have established a life for us in which the LAW is God. It’s the fruit of Modernity, and the one force that could really “uninvent” the new media being built on a level playing field for all. In the wake of this event, we’ll hear calls for regulation and lawsuits that’ll make some people feel good while not likely solving anything.
Wikipedia is quite honestly an amazing entity, but the user caveat has always been (and will always be) “consider the source and proceed.” This is an awful example of what can go wrong with such openness, but to treat it as justification for libel and slander suits against Wikipedia would be a mistake. Something needs to be done, and perhaps even new laws need to be written. Craig Newmark says, “We’ll figure it out,” and while I suspect he’s probably right, that’s little comfort to Mr. Seigenthaler.
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