Archive for May, 2006

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Beyond Broadcast (and Harvard)

Friday, May 12th, 2006

It’s lunch time at the Beyond Broadcast conference here at the home of the elites, Harvard University. The set-up here is, as I suppose you’d expect, the best. For conference presenters, the issues are always an easy way to connect the old laptop to the projector for PowerPoint slides and audio (something often overlooked or terribly inadequate). These guys have it down to a science. Everybody on the panel has their own audio cable and serial connector for the projector, which run through a router that’s control from the table. Nice.

The weather’s bloody awful here. Gloomy, rainy and cold. Brrr. The usual suspects are here, but there are a lot of new faces for me, and that’s always fun. A lot of people have said very nice things, including offering condolences about Allie. She was going to come to this conference with me, because she just wanted to walk around the Harvard campus. I’ll have to do that for her.

This is the 3rd conference on public broadcasting and new media that I’ve attended in the past year. They have a long way to go to fully embrace the personal media revolution, but there are some people doing some really cool things. Bill Buzenburg of Minnesota Public Radio showed some marvelous examples of how a broadcaster can involve the audience in their work. They’ve created an interesting Wiki that I’m going to try and duplicate somewhere.

I still find, however, that this institution — perhaps even more than its commercial counterpart — approaches this new media thing with caution and skepticism. Their mission involves that loaded phrase “serving the public interest,” and we all know the minefield that can be. I told one fellow that I thought commercial broadcasting had a better chance of “getting there” sooner than public broadcasting, because profit is a considerable motivator. And this public interest thing can be such a barrier when you presume you know what it means, because “public” interest often proves to be only the interest of the purveyor.

As you’d expect, issues of the “digital divide” and lack of minority voices was raised. As I told the group, we all have a responsibility here, including the groups apparently under-represented. I say apparently, because as was pointed out by an audience member, most of the Web isn’t American and doesn’t speak English. Political correctness may work here, but not in Japan, Korea, China and the rest of the world.

Who knew?

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Insight into WRKN’s strategy

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

As mentioned in my last post, I’ll be talking about WKRN-TV (my client) at Harvard this weekend. I want to share a couple of slides from the talk, and in so doing, reveal a couple of the behind-the-scenes strategies of the station. Understand that we got to this position by thinking strategically and experimenting over the past year.

First up, the back-end of WKRN’s internet technology. The station runs 16 websites, many of them part of the local blogosphere. Everything created by the station for the web is an independent, “discrete” item written in XML for aggregation anywhere. Stories, videos, calendar events, lottery drawings, you name it. They’re all discrete items. If your content management system can’t do this, I encourage you to talk to Harry Hayes at Sausage Software in Seattle about how to do it.

The station’s main Website (wkrn.com) is essentially a highly sophisticated RSS aggregator, taking discrete items from anywhere and displaying them in a useable manner. You can argue about the UI and the way the site is organized, but those are items we’re working on. The point is that this is the future.

Why? Because the same technology that runs the customizable start pages of Web 2.0 applications are in use here. That forces the station to create unbundled items — including video — as part of the daily web workflow. Since each is monetized, we don’t care WHERE they are consumed (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).

The next slide shows the growth in visitors over the past 12 months for two of the stations websites, Nashville is Talking and Nashville Weather Channel. Nashville is Talking is an aggregator of nearly 400 bloggers from the Nashville area, and the weather site is produced by the stations weather department.

The trendlines here are obvious, and for an industry looking for real growth, they sound a soothing and pleasant refrain. Bear in mind, too, that when you’re in the business of creating discrete items, they can be used anywhere. The contents of the weather site are re-used on the station’s main Website.

I believe every station will need to own its own platform like this, although that won’t stop the WorldNows of the TV station web space from trying to get in on the act. Frankly, they should’ve listened to me years ago.

I brag.

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Beyond Broadcast

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

I leave tomorrow for the Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture conference at Harvard where I’ll hook up with lots of old friends and some new ones. The conference looks interesting, and I’m on the first panel of the day — What the Broadcasters are doing — with David Liroff, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of WGBH-TV in Boston (I’ve heard him speak — very bright guy and in touch with tomorrow), and Bill Buzenberg, Senior Vice President of News, American Public Media/ Minnesota Public Radio. Chris Lydon of NPR’s “Open Source” is the moderator. Chris and I were on a panel at the Integrated Media Association conference in Seattle earlier this year. His take on the future? All blogs, all the time. Cool.

I will be talking about WKRN-TV and especially Nashville is Talking.

Next weekend, I’ll be in Orlando for two presentations to public broadcasting general managers and marketers. I’ll be on a panel with the inimitable Bob X. Cringley, and I’m really looking forward to that.

I’m keeping busy, and that’s a good thing.

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The problem with “half full”

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

Writing for Media Magazine, Peter Lauria correctly concludes that television will be around for a long, long time, and he also makes an excellent case that we really don’t have a workable definition anymore for what “television” means. This is an excellent article that fairly summarizes — from a positive perspective — what many observers (myself included) have been saying about the business decaying in the wake of disruptive innovations. It’s nice balance, in other words.

Clearly, television was a bit slow on the uptake in harnessing the power of new distribution technologies, but the medium wasn’t caught nearly as off-guard as its counterparts in the music business. Music labels are suing people, seeking to shut down Web sites, and withholding products — activities that antagonize and ultimately drive consumers away. When viewed through that lens, television’s tentative embrace of new media and alternative distribution platforms looks positively progressive.

Television, both conceptually and physically, isn’t leaving the scene. At worst, it is in a state of arrested development, and arrested development can continue for a long time. Consider, for example, that despite overnight mail delivery, UPS, FedEx, and e-mail, Western Union only this year announced it would send its last telegram.

If the practice of sending telegrams made it until 2006, how long do you suppose it will take until television as we know it ends its broadcast day? The answer, quite simply, may be never. So stay tuned, the revolution will indeed be televised — ideally, in as many forms and on as many screens as possible.

His conclusions are backed by “half full” viewing of various statistics (88 percent of households don’t have a DVR, and 95 percent have not downloaded a TV show…only one clip on youTube has passed the six million views mark, etc.), and while the article admits that things are changing for “television,” it makes the case that TV is still the best bang for the mass marketing buck.

This is all well-and-good, and I appreciate the context offered by Mr. Lauria’s observations. But here’s the problem with the half-full approach. The investment community doesn’t give a crap about bangs for bucks, cultural phenomena or the amount of money still being made by the industry. These are mostly public companies, and bottom line GROWTH is what determines value. Fragmentation and advertiser concerns profoundly impact the growth potential of any media company, and that, my friends, is where the real problem exists. When the viewing universe for any program shrinks, that impacts ad rates, which impacts revenue. The only way these companies can produce growth, then, is by cutting expenses, and in the creative world, that is suicide.

Moreover, I think it’s important to acknowledge that the industry isn’t the bloody networks. While the nets are doing some creative and cool things, the reality is that the affiliate groups that ARE the industry are getting creamed. Broadcast company presidents and CEOs look at all of these network innovations and rightly ask, “What’s in it for me?” The answer is usually “nothing.”

I approach all these statistics from a warning perspective, because television is and was my life. I love the business and hate what’s happening to it, but there ARE things broadcasters can do to build growth businesses online. That’s where I want attention focused at the local level, because that’s where the real opportunities lie.

The multiple-platforms-for-content-distribution approach is, at best, a necessary evil for local television. Sales can sell it, and that’s important. The multiple platform approach insists that the “mass” is reachable through combining all of the various methods of viewing “television,” be it cellphone, PDA, iPod, DVR, VOD, or whatever. Moreover, the thinking goes, measuring all these “viewers” will reveal audience growth, which will lead to revenue growth, and so on. That’s a concept that TV salespeople can grasp.

The problem, of course, is the underlying assumption that one-way is THE way, and that is lunacy, especially for broadcast companies whose business is based at the affiliate level. The mass media model is what’s under attack by a personal media model (still being defined) that’s energized, in part, by a revolt against the hype and selling associated with the mass media model. We’ve only seen the leading edge of this, and as it accelerates, those who’ve bet the ranch of the multiple platform model alone will be in deep trouble.

Finally, one of the “Heatonisms” that I teach broadcasters is that they’re no longer JUST a television station. A local media company can do and be anything they wish online and use its existing mass marketing muscle to promote new business innovations. In the end, this is what will save these companies.

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Advertisers prefer a sterile environment for their ads

Monday, May 8th, 2006

George Simpson is one of my favorite writer/observers, and he scores a good read today with How The Real World Works. He tells the story of a client who pulled its advertising from a site that featured content the advertiser didn’t like. Name-calling and cries of “free speech” followed.

New-world editorial, please shake hands with old-world media economics 101. This is a battle that has been fought on every front of traditional media for decades. It will be no different for new media.
It’s a great read for anybody new in the publishing game that thinks advertisers should ante up just to get near their readers, regardless of their content. It doesn’t work that way.

And this was one of the key factors in Walter Lippmann’s creation of “professional” journalism. He and other publishers wanted to create a sterile environment in which to sell advertising, because they saw that the multiples for advertising were far greater than the multiples for subscriptions. And so it goes…

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The revolt against interruptions

Monday, May 8th, 2006

A Sunday New York Times article poses the important question — “Somebody Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?” The story cites the usual statistics about DVRs and commercial skipping and offers a wonderful quote from Duke University law professor James Boyle:

…broadcasters offer a program knowing that only a fraction of the audience watches the commercials. Advertisers, he added, buy nothing more than “an option on a probability,” and the viewer is no more obligated to watch every commercial than a driver is obligated to read every billboard.
This analogy gives me an opportunity to share, once again, some important differences between television advertising and that which is possible via the web. It’s important, because you’ll never really “get” the opportunities that exist online unless you can look beyond the basic premise of broadcast advertising.

Over at Lost Remote, Steve Safran rightly notes in the comments to this story that professor Boyle’s analogy isn’t applicable, because TV advertising is more like toll booths along a highway than billboards. This observation is spot on, and it’s also descriptive of the difference between print advertising and broadcast advertising.

In broadcasting, there is only the signal. Advertising, therefore, must interrupt the signal. That’s why we’ve always called them “commercial interruptions.” Display advertising is entirely different, because you can surround the “signal” with advertising to pay for the content without disturbing it. Display advertising, like those billboards, is accepted by consumers, because it’s non-intrusive.

What happens when you “interrupt” a page with an advertisement? You get pop-ups and an enormous consumer backlash. A whole industry has grown around helping people avoid such, and yet we hear no complaints about it from the ad world or web publishers. Is blocking pop-ups really any different than skipping ads with a TiVo? The energy behind both efforts is identical.

Television must come up with a way to provide what amounts to display advertising along with its content. Most online video players do this, offering a clickable display ad next to the video content. In order for this to happen, however, everything about how things work over-the-air will have to change, including network/affiliate rules.

As I’ve written before, time is the new currency. The longer the commercial breaks become, the more people hit the remote or the fast-forward button. The interruption has gone beyond just an interruption, because a full one-third of prime-time viewing is now sales and marketing. That’s not an interruption; that’s a blatant disregard of precious leisure time. It’s like inviting people to call and say hello but routing them through an endless litany of options before human contact (hello, business and industry, are you listening?).

The technological innovations that are now chewing the foundation of broadcasting are — in many ways — necessities born out of the very real need of consumers to help manage their lives. It would be terribly smart of the broadcasting industry to embrace those needs and work with the disruption rather than against it.

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Of downloads and snake oil

Friday, May 5th, 2006

I’m puzzled by the story today that ABC is conducting a test with five four affiliates to give them a piece of the digital download pie. Nothing about this makes sense.

The stations provide prominent banners on their local sites to drive traffic to ABC.com, where users can download the digital programs. What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s see, how about users don’t need local affiliates to get to the downloads in the first place. Secondly, the affiliates get to place an ad between the link and the download. Right. I’m going to stand for that, just for the privilege of going through my local affiliate to get to the goodies. For the privilege of driving traffic to ABC, the affiliates get to “share revenue,” although nobody’s saying what the split will be.

ABC wants to see if local sites increase traffic, and the affiliates are apparently eager to prove that their sites have value to the network. What are these people smoking?

I’m sorry, but the only winner here is ABC. The affiliates talk it up and increase the demand, but the only way this works for them is if THEY can provide the downloads and control the revenue. Sorry, but that just won’t happen.

This idea is actually being spun as an “olive branch” to the affiliates, who are angry over the network’s unilateral decision to sell downloads of the programming that gives the affiliates value. An olive branch? More like snake oil. Moreover, the time wasted here could be better spent attacking the actual problem instead of hoping that network sales will save the day for affiliates.

Sheesh.

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The lives we unknowingly touch

Friday, May 5th, 2006

I’m a bit pensive this morning, so here I go again.

I got a phone call Wednesday from Hawaii. It was from my old boss at KGMB-TV, Dick Grimm. He was offering condolences and sharing insight he’d gained when his wife passed away two years ago. I’d not heard from him since leaving that job over 15 years ago, and it was as if no time whatsoever had passed. Life’s like that. Time is an illusion, and linear time is a created dimension. All that’s real is the here and now, but I digress.

Dick is now president of the Hawaii Foodbank, an organization that I (apparently) energized and invigorated by creating a food drive to feed the poor in that state in 1989. They’ve just completed their 17th annual food drive — still with the help of KGMB — having gathered 750,000 pounds of food and a half million dollars in cash. Dick said he uses my name every time he tells the story of the Hawaii Foodbank. I was a bit taken aback, because I’d long ago forgotten that effort by our news team and station.

But it really blessed me and got me to thinking about the lives we unknowingly touch — for good or bad — as we travel this life. We read about it from the philosophers and the theologians and can find examples throughout the history books, but rarely do we ever stop and consider the seemingly insignificant lives we encounter and the seemingly insignificant moments of our own existence. We are not alone, friends, and no life is meaningless, for if one were truly meaningless, all would be meaningless.

We are spiritual beings on a human journey, not the other way around, and in a very tangible way, the web is making that more apparent. We don’t “come into being” at human birth, and we don’t “cease to be” when we die. It is only our human journey that begins and ends. And our connections with each other, therefore, exist in two realms. One is physical, but the other is free of the physical.

The non-physical connection was made abundantly clear to me on April 25th, when my beloved Allie’s human journey ended. A handful of people have grasped the significance of what I’m saying and have written about it over the past week. One is Jackie Danicki. Read and ponder what she wrote, because it’s important.

I don’t think people have actually grasped the extent to which social media is changing, and will continue to change, humanity.

The most basic way that social media has changed the way that I (and many people I know) interact is that we are growing used to being able to meet individuals� minds before we meet them physically.

…Individuals are the basic unit not just of any business, but of this world, and those who think the blogosphere is some kind of blessed embrace of collectivism or Marxism are wrong for precisely this reason: It is the ease with which individuals can connect with one another across this network which brings about the spectacular effects that it does. There is no top-down imposition on these individuals. There is no governing body deciding what each individual�s �needs� and �abilities� are, or how frivolous or worthy those might be. These are millions of individuals deciding for themselves what is in it for them, and getting from it what they want. Sometimes that�s a recipe or a video of someone singing a stupid song, and sometimes it�s comfort after the death of a child or loved one.

If you think that�s not going to continue to have hugely positive implications for us and this planet, think again.

I would add that we’re not just meeting people in the cognitive realm; we’re also meeting at core — through our hearts — and I agree that this has profound ramifications for the future of the planet.

Just as Paul Lurie wrote that the structure of the web — with its highly associative, endlessly referential and contingent environment, and its process for finding information — will ultimately tilt the culture war to the left (great long tail article), Ms. Danicki is suggesting that the web’s highly social character will also tilt the culture to, I imagine, one that’s more connected and therefore tolerant. This is a good thing, I think.

And so as I sit here today thinking about my life and the life I had with Allie, I’m struck with this whole “connected” thing and how an event 17 years ago in Hawaii created a ripple effect that continues today. It’s not about gun belt notches, brownie buttons or “well done, thou good and faithful servant.” These things are simply reminders that we were here. And in the end, it’s not what we’ve gained through all the other lives we’ve encountered, but what we gave to the process of life.

When I was at the hospital waiting for the doctor to give us the bad news, I was frantically trying to purchase a coke for Alicia’s mother from the machine in the waiting room. I only had a dollar and the price was $1.25. I was frustrated, crying and in obvious distress, and a middle-aged Hispanic woman who was also in the waiting room got up from her chair and put a quarter in my hand. She spoke no English, but the look in her eyes said she understood.

No life is meaningless, and we are all connected.

Allie touched thousands of people in her too-short life. I know, because I’ve heard from many of them. She’s now touched many more in her death, and I know that makes her smile. You were here, myAllie. You were really here.

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“Innertube” leaves local affiliates in a rip tide

Friday, May 5th, 2006

So CBS has launched a broadband channel (innertube). This should surprise no one, since Viacom owns CBS and Viacom channels MTV (overdrive) and Comedy Central (motherload) have similar broadband channels. It’s a smart move by CBS, but once again, what about the affiliates? MTV and Comedy Central are CABLE channels and not bound by affiliate arrangements, but not so with the tiffany network (what the heck is a network anymore anyway?).

This is just further evidence that local affiliates are facing downstream irrelevance, and at the risk of sounding repetitive, let me summarize a few statements I’ve been making about local affiliates for several years.

  • The only thing of real value you have is your local franchises. Now is the time to invest in creating more, and since the barriers to entry are significantly lower online, DO IT THERE!
  • It’s also time to move those franchise to the Web in a way that intersects with what’s really taking place here. Unbundling yourself is the only way you’ll really be positioned to compete in the years to come. The days of “driving” traffic to portal websites are on the wane.
  • Always think local and regional. Knowledgeable and extremely flexible outside players can’t compete here, unless you let them. Give it all you’ve got in meeting the information and entertainment needs of your LOCAL audience, and for crying out loud, stop thinking you’re just a TV station.
  • Streamline all of your internal processes. For news, that means incorporating the tools of the personal media revolution. Yes, I’m talking VJs. This is no longer an option, folks. Local television no longer requires the Hollywood tactics of days gone by. Individual, multi-skilled video journalists will simply be better equipped to compete downstream, and now is the time to start developing systems and work flow for tomorrow.
  • Retool your engineering and production departments. Your online technology is where growth is, and I’m amazed at how few stations are equipped — from a personnel standpoint — to deal with this. You need at least one hot programmer, a Flash artist, and a crackerjack web designer/developer. It’s past time to up your onboard geek quotient.
We are in the midst of an unstoppable business disruption for local television, and the only way to find downstream profitability is to embrace the disruption itself. There IS a future, and it’s looking more and more like it may not involve a network affiliation.

Denial isn’t (just) a river in Egypt.

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A new coat of paint — brilliant! (or not)

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

Gregory Wilson has penned a nice little commentary (Saying Mass) for Media Daily News that talks about how branding is more important than ever and how marketers need to view the various TV screen sizes now available to consumers as different opportunities instead of simply calling everything “video.” These types of commentaries are everywhere today, as the mass marketing world attempts to rebuild itself for a very uncertain future, and each carries the basic assumption that, well, we just CAN’T throw the mass marketing baby out with the bath water.

Read Mr. Wilson’s words:

But the fact is, a brand is the trust people have in the product. And trust is built through emotional connections.

The best way to create (emphasis mine) an emotional connection? Sight, sound, and motion.

This is the business of marketers — to “create” emotional connections. But here’s the problem: Nobody asked consumers if they wanted these emotional connections, and that’s a huge part of what’s happening in our culture today. People are tired of being sold. We’re drowning in hyperbole as these smart salesmen “create” emotional connections, and what they don’t realize is that we KNOW what they’re doing.
It is the context in which a message is consumed that determines how that message is absorbed.
Absorbed? We are we, sponges? Can you see the manipulation hidden in this statement? Hello? We’re tired of being manipulated.
One of our screens goes on the wall. One goes on the desk. And one goes in our pocket. This allows each to offer something uniquely different.

The large screen allows us to connect viscerally. Size does that. The small screen, rationally. (Online search is, for the most part, a left-brain function.) And the mobile screen–well, that allows us to use its mobility and connect tactically.

With one, we (emphasis mine) can move the heart. With another, the head. As for the mobile screen–well, that moves with our customers so that we (emphasis mine) can be there at the point of attack (I mean, purchase).

Viscerally. Rationally. Tactically.

Heart. Head. Help.

Give. It. Up.

Maybe we don’t want to be “moved,” and who wants to be attacked? Geez.

I was with a group of broadcasters a few weeks ago and said, “This is a revolution — the Personal Media Revolution (thank you, J.D. Lasica). Who do you think they’re revolting against? You.”

With all due respect to Mr. Wilson and others in mass marketing, I know your world is collapsing. I also know that branding and other forms of mass marketing aren’t going away completely, but the notion that you can manage your way out of the current conundrum by being smarter and slicker than you already are is preposterous. It may buy you time with clients who want assurances that you know what you’re doing, but in the end, you’re only shooting holes in a boat that’s already sinking.

There IS life beyond mass marketing, and the really wise agency people — like Edelman and Denuo — understand this and are working to shift their clients into the new, customer-in-charge paradigm. What “moves” people here? Honesty, transparency, respect, and other human traits that engender trust without manipulation.

It’s a million miles from putting a new coat of paint on a tired, old building.

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The killer app isn’t “monkey see, monkey do”

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

“What should we do?” is a common question in my travels and meetings with broadcasters. “Do something,” is the best response I can give, and it’s not what people want to hear. Of course regular readers here will understand that, because I’ve written about our addiction to formulas and the safety we find therein. And “doing something” means stepping off the cliff and perhaps, OMG, experimenting.

Most broadcasters would rather wait and see what comes down the pike and then try to reproduce it. Such is the way of an industry that has, for years, specialized in copycat. A game show works, and suddenly everybody has game shows. A reality show works, and suddenly everybody has reality shows. A sexy ratings grabber works for local news in Cleveland and suddenly everybody is doing it. This is the sad and predictable method by which much of mass media works. (Movie sequels, “sellable” authors, etc.)

So now comes this new medium, and nobody knows what to do. We build websites. We define for ourselves what works and look for more of that around the web. Our instincts, training and experience require that we look at everything through our mass marketing glasses. Meanwhile, we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Let’s look for just a minute at the amazing success of youTube. The site exploded on the public scene when somebody uploaded a clip of the “Lazy Sunday” skit from Saturday Night Live last fall, and it was viewed by over two million people in a couple of weeks. The Washington Post reports that the site now has six million daily users and presents over 35,000 videos a day. YouTube is essentially a user-generated video site, but those numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we’re about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It’s the numbers. It’s like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, “There! There’s the audience we’ve been losing.”

Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It’s the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it’s youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat’s ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that’s a problem. The same users who made youTube “successful” could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

And while everybody’s looking at the youTube “model” (what is it anyway?), they’re not out there exploring and experimenting on their own. Yet this is exactly what needs to be done — especially at the local level.

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USAToday’s branded reader

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

USAToday has launched a branded reader/start page for users to customize and create their own “news” experience. It’s nicely done and something I’ve been advising local media companies to do for a long time. The point is that information is unbundled now, and there’s more value in providing aggregation tools for users than simply providing content.

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Pajiba and Television Without Pity

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

Two sites that I think everybody should have in their RSS readers are the TV program summary site Television Without Pity and the raucous film review site, Pajiba. TWP deals with television and Pajiba deals with films, but both feature witty and biting commentary written by what are essentially fans of the mediums.

If you missed the latest episode of Big Love, for example, TWP will have a recap and a later summary. The writers and readers grade each program, but what I really love about TWP is the hilarious conversational writing. There’s nothing formal here, just people telling it like it is. Here’s a portion of the recap of Sunday’s West Wing:

Do you remember last week, how Sam Seaborn came back, and Josh nearly went postal, and Josh and Donna went off on a romantic vacation? And you remember how we’ve been waiting to hear more about C.J. and Danny? And how we all want to know whether Toby’s going to prison, or whether he’s going to be pardoned, or what? Well, none of any of that gets resolved or addressed in the slightest degree this week. Instead, we get an episode devoted almost entirely to Arnie Vinick’s post-election blues, Santos’s difficulty in selecting a cabinet, and Helen freaking out over the changes in her life…

…I can’t believe they wasted one of our last three episodes on this.

Pajiba reviews movies and has a policy of not writing about films in advance. The site mocks the hype machine that is Hollywood and, again, does so with prose that’s clever, funny and takes no prisoners. The latest from Pajiba is an entry called “The 10 Worst Blockbusters of All Time” (Batman and Robin is number one):
In 2003, the average movie registered 41 percent of its total box-office take in its first weekend, and that portion is certainly higher now. The major studios understand that the formula for success has absolutely nothing to do with quality; it’s about creating enough hype and hiding your film from critics long enough to sneak a $50 million opening past the American public before they realize they’ve been hoodwinked into spending three hours’ wages for two hours of Hulk.
Both of these sites work outside the machine that is Hollywood, and as such are a part of the anti-institution rising tide that the internet makes possible. They’re written in the voice of the viewer and the moviegoer, so they resonate with the people who really matter in the whole entertainment world.

So here’s my gift to you today: the URLs of these two wonderful RSS feeds. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

RSS: Television Without Pity
RSS: Pajiba

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New life beckons us all

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

It’s been a long time since I watched any early morning television, but there I was today at 6:30 scanning the dial (now there’s an ancient saying). About one-third of the channels on my basic cable presented paid programming of one form or the other. This was always the case during the middle of the night, but I was surprised to find it at 6:30 in the morning. Now in decline, TV is clinging to its basic core competency, so this shouldn’t surprise anybody. Television is about selling — mass market selling — and infomercials don’t pretend to be anything other than that.

I was also surprised to find Dr. Gene Scott. He’s been dead for over a year, but his work lives on. It’s the long tail of televangelism, I guess.

Sitting there and flipping, I was taken by the vast and insatiable appetite for content demanded by even a 100-channel universe and the impossibility of such a system to meet the needs of people when and where they arise. Most channels just rotate programming now in the hopes that their schedule will match that of viewers at some point during the day. Yet news departments everywhere are wont to repeat even one story. Imagine that.

There is nothing “worth” watching at that hour of the morning, not to me anyway. All that’s there are reminders of a day gone by, a tired, old formula gasping for breath while the bottom line demands ever more. Contrast this picture with the rising sun of the internet, and you understand why I’ve been shouting the clarion call for so many years. Life is everywhere and the energy of growth and opportunity hums a melody of possibility. So different. So very different.

I was also taken by the great uncertainty that hangs over our advertising industry, which for so long has fed off the nipple of this dying system. Buying and selling will continue in the marketplace of the internet, but business won’t necessarily go to the guy with the biggest sign. As Doc Searls writes, “There is no market for (unwanted) messages.” I don’t think there ever was one.

And since I’m so reflective this morning, let me point to the biggest downstream uncertainty of all — what happens to the economy of a country that sells for a living? The copyright industry is our biggest export, for example, and marketing — not content — is where the money is made and spent there.

Notice in Dave Silry’s latest snapshot of the blogosphere that we bloggers are a global group and that English isn’t even the dominant language here. Will we let that get in the way of getting to know each other across-the-miles? I hope not, and here technology can help us. You’ve got to be blind to not notice the bubbling and gurgling that’s taking place at the bottom layers of global culture. We are all much closer together than you think, and the question is what will we do with it?

I need to stop getting up so early.

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