AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Cory Bergman at Lost Remote references a story from Multichannel News outlining the Weather Channel’s plan to provide local web video forecasts for the top 25 markets beginning May 1st.

Everybody wins in the deal, but there is one huge loser: local television. That’s because the deal offers — to newspapers, radio stations and bloggers — the key franchise of any local TV News operation. It’s another chapter in the continuing saga of local broadcast media companies sitting on their asses while outside providers come in and snip away at market share.

It’s also terribly smart strategy on the part of the Weather Channel, because the forecasts will come with advertising. It’s a brilliant unbundled move, because others distribute the content. That includes, I’m assuming, local bloggers.

To counter this, stations need to create weather widgets that can display content — and even video — in the sidebars of blogs. Widgets are the killer app for local media companies in dealing with the personal media revolution in their neighborhoods, but I suspect most won’t offer them and the majority of those who do will clumsily present them as if they’re doing bloggers a favor.

As Gordon Borrell notes, “The deer now have guns.” What do you do when the deer have guns? You get into the ammunition business. Widgets are our ammunition.

Nothing epitomizes the depth of salacious pandering that “news” has become like NBC Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” sweeps’ stunts. Using the skills of volunteers working for a Portland, Oregon group called Perverted Justice, who pose as naive and innocent teenagers in online chatrooms, the network newsmagazine lures unsuspecting men to a house wired with cameras and proclaims them “internet pedophiles” without due process. And now comes the news that for a May sweeps airing of these entrapments that was shot in Ohio, NBC actually paid Perverted Justice “low six figures” and that its members were deputized to make convictions easier to obtain. The end — nice ratings, not capturing evil men — justifies the means. NBC’s cameras have become extensions of the state, and where do we draw the line?

The premise itself is unjustifiably beyond the scope of our legal system but is rationalized by news execs and viewers, because it deals with protecting our young people from sexual predators. This is viewed, in consulting language, as a highly attractive “position” in marketing a station or network to the (stupid) public. In so doing, however, the practice raises the fear level in our communities and lowers the trust level between human beings everywhere. After all, if every stranger might be a predator, it’s better just to not acknowledge anybody you don’t know. Tell me this is good for our culture. Tell me you want to live your life in an isolation booth.

This idea was birthed in local news, which I wrote long ago is the metaphorical Lizard on America’s Shoulder, relentlessly shrieking in our ear that everything is life-threatening and that we must always be afraid. Hidden in this message is the notion that we can somehow “manage” our way to success and happiness if we’re better informed, an idea that many learn too late is only a myth.

Sexual predators are the lepers of the 21st century, an indefensible group of (mostly white) men who sadly live in a fantasy world in which they actually believe young girls want to have sex with them. This is the sick fantasy that compels them to get in the car and drive to meet a potential partner that they’ve found on the internet. In their minds, it isn’t rape or even predatory behavior, and we’re repelled by this line of thinking.

But this problem is much bigger than the act of driving to a teenager’s home. We don’t talk about how this fantasy is formed in the minds of some men, nor do we talk about how it is furthered by our increasingly sex-based culture. We leave that to self-serving special interest groups who make money yelling at the symptoms instead of attacking the bigger matters of loneliness, powerlessness, rejection and fear. We don’t dare admit that what we call “normal” is also an illusion, and worse, that it only exists among the haves.

Nor do we wish to examine the issue of fatherlessness — real, forced or imagined — in our culture and the impact this devastating reality has on young girls who aren’t sufficiently knowledgeable as they learn to seek attention from the opposite sex.

If you were to ask any Hollywood costume designer to present the look of a streetwalker for a film, they could find all of the clothes they needed on the bodies of young girls in any mall in the U.S. And what is the role of streetwalker apparel if not for advertising? Yet the vast majority of these girls would be astonished at the suggestion they were advertising, and that’s not their fault. Our culture flaunts the “come hither” look for young women, and this, like it or not, feeds the fantasy of the sexual predator.

We hear a lot about sexual predators in the news — and a lot from Law and Order, SVU — but we hear FROM very few. Let’s do a reality show from inside a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting instead of lectures from those who study it from arm’s length. Let’s get all the ugly insight, straight from the horse’s mouth, and in an environment more conducive to honesty than being probed by a self-serving reporter with another “gotcha” notch on his gun belt.

It’s not likely to happen, though, because such a show would be a turn-off, not a titillating turn-on. However, if we really want to protect young women from this scourge, we’re going to have to peer into this darkness for causes instead of throwing everything we have at symptoms.

This whole matter is complex and messy, and it’s not made one little bit better by NBC’s entrapment of these men for the sake of ratings. I think it’s actually made worse, because it drives the behavior further into the shadows and far from the sunlight of the healing it so desperately needs.

Shame on you, NBC.

Slowly, it seems, media companies are stirring in their slumber chambers. Here are a couple of gems from today’s PaidContent:

Staci Kramer interviewed Anne Sweeney, Co-Chair, Disney Media Networks/President, Disney-ABC Television Group, shortly after ABC’s new online program distribution announcement. She sounds like somebody who really gets it, despite the comments yesterday of underlings.

Do you think you’re going to end up with multiple business models? Sweeney: “I can tell you that we’re open to it and we’re intent on finding that out but we’re putting the consumer first and the idea right next to them and then we’re figuring it out — because I really don’t want to get in a world where we’re retrofitting new technologies into old business models.”