More “who’s a journalist?”

April 27th, 2010

This crushing segment from Bill Dwyre’s excellent LA Times piece upon seeing the documentary of Pat Tillman’s death at the hands of fellow soldiers on a hill in Afghanistan six years ago. The film follows the pursuit of truth by Tillman’s mother, Dannie.

Dannie Tillman did what a nation full of high-paid, overblown journalists should have done. She went after the real story while the beautiful people on TV and the nerds with notepads broadcast and wrote morality plays. She got in the military’s face, in the government’s face. She didn’t let up. She was doing journalism while journalists were doing what we mostly do now — chase Web hits and take short cuts to higher profits.

A housewife got the real story, or as much of it as anybody probably will. Professionals trained to do so gathered moss and wrote slop.

So again, journalism is practiced by many who are outside the velvet rope of the institution. Dwyre indicts himself in the piece, and it’s a most worthwhile read.

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments » |

This grave consequences of the Gawker raid

April 27th, 2010

By now everybody knows about the Friday night raid at Jason Chen’s house as part of a police investigation into the alleged “theft” of a prototype iPhone that ended up in the hands of Chen’s employer, Gawker Media, Inc. I tweeted my initial reaction, which was “where’s the hue and cry from the press?” The truth is there isn’t any hue and cry and there won’t be, because “the press” wants Gawker — and every other disruptor of its party — shut down permanently.

The issue, which the DA in the case is now pausing to consider, is whether Gawker is practicing journalism and, therefore, falls under the California shield law (it does, even if it’s just a blog). If so, police did not have the authority to raid Chen’s home (including kicking in the damned door), because it was his office and, therefore, protected from such searches and seizures.

Some in the tech press are arguing that the police may be after Gawker for criminal charges in possessing a stolen item — and that that would justify the warrant — but that’s a specious argument, because even if it was the case, law enforcement would still need to obtain a subpoena first, because Chen was functioning as a journalist. The law is crystal clear on this, and if it were not, police would use the excuse of breaking the law to raid any organization’s files in pursuit of a source.

This case could set in motion a landmark ruling, which could ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court, and it has dreadful consequences for the very group that should be rallying to support Chen — the traditional press. Chen is, in fact, a journalist and the shield law must, in fact, support him. However, if that’s the case, all of those pedestal-dwelling professionals who think they and they alone actually practice journalism are going to get screwed, because the courts will be redefining what it means to “be” a journalist. In California, the shield law also protects bloggers, and frankly, I can’t wait to see what happens. The state will lose and Gawker will win.

Locally, we had a case a few months ago of a school board changing its media policy (they don’t allow “bloggers”) to evict a local blogger, because they didn’t like what he was writing about them. This is a damnable offense by a local government entity and one that “the press” wouldn’t tolerate if it was one of them. “First they came for the bloggers, but I wasn’t a blogger, so I said nothing…”

The state of California must do what’s right here and stand up for a free press. Let Apple appeal, and let’s have a real donnybrook over the whole thing. And here’s my warning to the silent traditional press: either get involved in the new world or risk total irrelevancy downstream.

UPDATE: Simon Owens asked editors what they thought. No hue & cry.

Posted in Blogging, Journalism, Legal | 2 Comments » |

Poor PowerPoint

April 27th, 2010

The Army’s dissing it and so is Seth Godin.

Look, here’s the simple truth about a PowerPoint presentation. It’s a story-telling tool. If you have no “story” — no beginning, middle and end — PowerPoint will make you look like an idiot, no matter how you use it. If, however, you do have a story, any tool of the software you use — yes, even bullets — will be just fine.

The software isn’t the problem; it’s the story-telling.

Posted in Just Plain Fun Stuff | 3 Comments » |

The Trouble With Twitter

April 26th, 2010

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

The Trouble With Twitter

In this piece, I’m taking a step back from observing local media to examine an issue about Twitter that I think my friends and colleagues who use it faithfully need to stop and think about. There’s no doubt in my mind that Twitter is a two-headed beast, a low-tech and highly efficient notification system, and a unique method of conversation. It’s when the two seem to combine that I have difficulty. I tweet, but not like some of the people I follow, because my work occupies most of my attention. I follow a select group (and for different reasons), and some of them are really prolific. The problem occurs when I try to understand the nature of those tweets and the conversation about which they are a part. I suspect technology will ultimately help me, but until then, it’s my trouble with Twitter.

Posted in Essays, Twitter | No Comments » |

Slowing down the revolution

April 23rd, 2010

My disdain for the third branch of our government — the Judicial System — is well-documented here. My issue is the matter of so-called “case law,” which is something you won’t find in the Constitution. Lawyers have given unto themselves the ability to actually make law, which the founding fathers gave to the Legislative Branch. Here’s how it works:

• The Legislature makes law.
• Somebody challenges it in the courts.
• The law loses, and since one judge or court ruled against it, lawyers bring that case up in other cases, which in effect, renders the law useless. In this way, the courts have created for themselves — thanks to self-serving lawyers — power that they, in reality, don’t have.

We’re walking ourselves into a real pickle here with case law that’s being created in the face of a cultural revolution. The status quo — represented by those same lawyers — needs to stop the revolution, but the truth is that the best they’ll ever do is slow it down.

In New Jersey, for example, a state appeals court has ruled against a blogger in a defamation case involving a company that provides software to the porn industry by deciding that no shield law can apply to her, because she’s not a journalist. I am absolutely sick and disgusted of hearing this crap, and it’s the kind of thing that our Legislative Branch MUST deal with. A press card from a traditional media does not make you a journalist; it’s the act that matters.

Another legal matter today that I find particularly annoying is the removal by YouTube of all the wonderful adaptations of the scene in the movie Downfall where Adolf Hitler realizes all is lost and drones on — in German — for several minutes. Hundreds of people have created their own versions of the scene by substituting the English subtitles to represent all kinds of hilarious thought streams. YouTube has been removing the parodies in the wake of legal notice from the copyright owner, Constantin Films. Never mind that the writer and director think the parodies are wonderful, Constantin Films has the “right” to demand they be removed.

The question to me is why?

The answer is because they can, and again, this is madness gone to seed in the name of the law. The only people who can fix it are our representatives in Congress, and the battle will be a donnybrook, pitting the status quo against the revolution (one, I might add, that is already so far along that I don’t even think the lawyers can stop it).

Posted in Legal, personal media | No Comments » |

Media and the public (dis)trust

April 23rd, 2010

Everywhere I turn, I see conferences on saving journalism. There’s talk (again) of a government subsidy to save “newspaper journalism,” whatever that is, and the USC’s “Public Policy & Funding The News” project has published an entire list of ideas that have been brought forward to “save news.” The investigative reporters of the world are the most vocal, insisting that a lone wolf reporter simply cannot do what someone who works for a large, institutional press organization (with lots of lawyers and libel insurance) can do. “The sky is falling” rhetoric is at an all time high, and the decibel level of the blame game is louder than it’s ever been.

Those of you who’ve followed my work know where I stand on all this, but I want to elaborate on something that I first said many years ago. For journalism to function, it must do so with the public’s trust, and we’ve been losing that for decades. So the question to these groups is what exactly is it that are you trying to save (other than your jobs)?

Here’s the latest from Gallup, a company that’s been asking the same question since the early 70s.

Take a hard look at that and then go look in the mirror. The notion that we go out the door in the morning to do our jobs carrying the public’s trust on our shoulder is false. It’s bogus. Look at that graph. More people distrust us than trust us, and it’s been that way for a few years. The decline started long ago.

The old definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over only expecting different results. We want to do what we’ve always done, only we want people to love us. The pity party over the decline of the institutional press is pathetic, when we should be staring at that graph and being honest enough to ask ourselves why.

For example, an honest look at history would stop and examine Spiro Agnew’s famous rant against the bias of the television press in 1969. Most people I know dismiss Agnew as a nutcase or a Nixon pawn, but that kind of hubris is exactly our problem in the above graph today. Agnew was a spokesman for Nixon’s “silent majority,” another concept we dismissed as just marketing. Read carefully Agnew’s words in that 1969 speech in Des Moines:

“A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast can raise doubts in a million minds about the veracity of a public official, or the wisdom of a government policy,” he said. “One Federal Communications Commissioner considers the power of the networks to equal that of local, state, and federal governments combined. Certainly, it represents a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history.”

That power has gone to our heads, and that, too, is reflected in Gallup’s graph, and if we want to do something about it, we’ve got to give up the notion that continuing to do the same things is the solution. Maybe, just maybe, there is truth in Agnew’s words, and the public is responding.

Here’s more from that speech:

“The purpose of my remarks tonight is to focus your attention on this little group of men who…wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.

“How is this network news determined? A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen “anchormen,” commentators, and executive producers, settle upon the 20 minutes or so of film and commentary that is to reach the public…Their powers of choice are broad. They decide what 40 to 50 million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and the world.

“The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?

“The views of this fraternity do not represent the views of America.”

Those four paragraphs closely resemble a remarkable recent essay by NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen, one of the great minds actually asking the right questions today. If you’ve never read “Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press,” I strongly recommend you do so.

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.

For all of our work — broadcast or print — we continue to underestimate the people who make up our audience. They see through our efforts to be “objective” and they’re, frankly, tired of it. The good old days of absolute institutional power are gone, and journalism will certainly be just fine without it.

I recently wrote about a Dallas sportscaster’s rant against his station for showing the video clip of Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones — with likely a few beers in him — saying some embarrassing things. The sportscaster said this was exactly what’s wrong with “the news” these days, and then he crossed a major line with me:

Our business now too many times is a fat kid in a T-shirt in his mother’s basement eating Cheetos and writing his blogs.

Blaming bloggers is the passionate raison d’être of the press these days, because we seem incapable of viewing blogs as a reaction to the above graph rather than a cause. Go back and look. When was the first blog? Late 90s, perhaps? I started blogging in 2002, and I was considered radical at the time. So which came first, the public distrust or blogs? Blogging and the personal media revolution — Jay Rosen’s “Audience Atomization Overcome — are a reaction to the mistrust of the press and certainly not the cause or even a cause.

Again, we simply must get off our collective pedestal, if we are to make a difference in the trade of journalism.

Rather than trying to save something that is lost (the insanity of “saving” the press), we ought to be discussing — with a blank page — how we can provide a news and information service that the public will trust. Here’s a tip: they will be a part of it.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Journalism | No Comments » |

Facebook has bigger issues than it thinks

April 23rd, 2010

Here’s a comment I just posted on Fred Wilson’s blog:

As a consultant working with Media Companies (who are discovering the value of Facebook), let me add that Facebook has SERIOUS issues that must be overcome before the business community fully embraces it. At the top is the absurd notion that the name and email address of the person who starts a fan page remains with the page in perpetuity. You cannot imagine the problems this creates. How does one, for example, “purchase” the assets of a page started by someone else? What happens if a business is sold? What happens if the employee who started the page moves on? The problem here, for me, is that it is impossible for someone representing a smallish sort of business to get to anybody with any clout who can address these issues, and it remains my biggest gripe with Zuck’s company. If he seriously wishes to be the identity center of the Web, he’s got to get off his pedestal long enough to deal with matters such as the above. There. I feel better.

I’m serious when I say that Facebook is way too far ahead of itself to accomplish what it really wishes to accomplish, and that is to be, as Dave Winer has so brilliantly stated (here and here), “the identity system of the Web.” Old wisdom says to not build a tower without first considering its foundation, and this, I believe, is Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest problem.

Posted in Disruptions, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment » |

Of volcanos, earthquakes and Life

April 18th, 2010

Somewhere deep in the human psyche is the ability to care, and whether it’s for oneself, one’s work or others, this spark has driven people to achieve and achieve greatly. A big part of the process is determining what went wrong when things go wrong, and some people are better at this than others. God bless the fault-finders.

Engineers are great fault-finders, for example. We’d have never made it to the moon without them, but their fault-finding is deeply ingrained in scientific study of things we know or learn through experimentation. I say “things we know,” for what drives experimentation is a curiosity about things we know. What happens when I do this to that? Why did that happen?

My friend Jeff Jarvis barely escaped from a European business trip this week by catching one of the last flights out of Germany. He’s laid it all out in a wonderful blog entry, in which he uses the term “zen” to describe the events of his escape from the dust cloud of Eyjafjallajökull. The circumstances that led to his catching that flight are remarkable, and when we humans encounter the remarkable, we’re often left grasping for meaning. “Zen” was Jeff’s way of describing the remarkable. After all, when volcanic dust is the enemy, who you gonna call?

In the same human psyche that produces achievement lives the “idea” of God, regardless of how that is represented. Despite all of our scientific efforts, most of us still conclude that Life is bigger than we are. The problem comes in our response to that, and this is where I find confusion in abundance. Human beings want to understand everything about this “thing” that we don’t understand, and that’s a doorway for the corrupting influence of religion.

My definition of religion is very broad and includes any organized form of that higher power concept. In my view, for example, environmentalism is every bit a religion as any other philosophy, the key being the open or closely-held worship of a power greater than oneself. By worship, I don’t mean standing in a crowd waving hands either; it’s much more about how you live your life, and if some greater good grabs your being, then chances are you’re participating in a religion. The key, of course, is that it must be organized.

Science is a form of religion, although its members would certainly disagree. I think, however, it takes considerable faith to believe that squirrels “evolved” wings to get from branch to branch in trees. The evidence is theory, and that’s religion in my book.

Many social movements are religions, or they function as religions do. If it provides meaning for the unexplainable, then I think it’s fair to say that the zeal associated with that is religious in nature. You are free to disagree.

In following up his adventure, Jeff engaged in a wonderful conversation via Twitter (still ongoing via #ashtag) with anybody who was interested, and he included this Tweet:

The article in reference is a piece by Dr. Andrew Hooper of Delft University published in the TimesOnline. The headline reads: “Why the Icelandic volcano eruption could herald more disruption.”

The fault-finders mind says, “There must be a cause,” and the expert of the TimesOnline offers up global warming. Here’s Dr. Hooper:

At the end of the last ice age, the rate of eruption in Iceland was some 30 times higher than historic rates. This is because the reduction in the ice load reduced the pressure in the mantle, leading to decompression melting there. Since the late 19th Century the ice caps in Iceland have been shrinking yet further, due to changing climate. This will lead to additional magma generation, so we should expect more frequent and/or more voluminous eruptions in the future.

Gosh, that sounds just so darned plausible, right? The statement assumes much, including that we humans are the ultimate architect of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Of course, blaming the consequences of disasters on human selfishness isn’t reserved for the environmentalists; it’s been around for a long, long time. It’s that evil in human beings that the religions of the Bible have used for centuries to control members and, by extension, culture.

Disasters, it seems, make for strange bedfellows.

The New Testament refers to natural disasters as signs of the apocalypse, and this has spawned subcultures galore. There are lots of warnings out there today coming from the right, who blame everyone but themselves for the earthquake in Haiti. According to the USGS, we’ve had quakes of greater than 6.0 on the Richter scale in Spain, China and New Guinea in just the last week alone. Oh my! The USGS reports we’re within normal range for a year, but that doesn’t stop those who use natural disasters to profit themselves or their cause from saying otherwise.

Still, I look at all of this after 63 years on the planet and sense that something just isn’t right. I’m no prophet, but I certainly believe — as religions of both the left and right are preaching — that we’re somehow paying for our deeds, and I have a certain thought stream that doesn’t bode well for the future. I just think there’s a darkness on the horizon that most of us refuse to see.

Is our planet trying to tell us something? To warn us? Something inside me resonates with that thought. Of course, maybe we’ll all have some great awakening and realize that we’ve just got to treat each other better and, in so doing, treat our precious planet better, too. Hallelujah, we’ll all will live happily ever after!

Religion provided an internal cultural governor for us that is long gone now, a check on our behavior. If you truly believe you’ll go to hell for cursing, for example, then you won’t curse. You know the drill. It makes for good citizens, but Sunday morning gettogethers don’t produce any better human beings than an environmental rally in Seattle, and I wish we could all see that. The Bible says God’s judgement (I prefer the consequences of our behavior before a Life that provides all) begins at His own house, but that is not a message that brings the worshippers in. Now I’m preaching, and I didn’t want to do that.

Let me close by saying that those who know me know I’ve fought big demons in my life, although I’m nobody unique in that regard. Where I have found peace — and this became real after Allie’s death — is with a profound understanding that I am a spiritual being on a human journey, not the other way around. What that means is that my behavior today doesn’t contribute whatsoever to my being more spiritual tomorrow. I can’t be more spiritual than I am; it’s impossible, because I am fully spiritual to begin with. The challenge is to become more human, and I find that easier than pursuing the other.

We are like amphibians, C.S. Lewis wrote, capable of living in two worlds. In the one, I am perfect. In the other, I can only pursue the goal of getting better. I have replaced the internal governor of religion with one that is less susceptible to mischief and manipulation, because my future isn’t determined by my behavior today. If I believe in heaven, then I should live as if I’m in heaven today, because the abstract nature of heaven and hell are alive and well in the streets that we walk each day. Heaven and hell aren’t so much places you “go” to, therefore, as where you exist in the here and now.

Is Life tapping us on the shoulder with events like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes? Possibly. Why? Because all of Life does what it is supposed to do except humankind. We alone can say “no,” and that’s why we find ourselves in such a jam on so many levels today. Look around. Are we causing the polar ice cap to melt? Did we cause the collapse of our financial institutions? Do we continue to prop up what Umair Haque calls our “zombie economy?” Is the gap between the haves and have-nots widening, and which side of that do you think Life wants to defend? What’s happened to self respect in the age of anything goes? Why is sexual addiction suddenly so rampant? There are so many “disorders” today that one wonders what represents “order.”

The questions aren’t as important as our response. What will we do about it? I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with that human capacity to care. Can we shift it just a bit from ourselves to others?

Finally, is Life capable of guiding you around these things if you’re sensitive? Is Jeff’s zen moment an affirmation that he’s “listening?” I think absolutely, but here’s the catch. Time and chance occur to everyone, or as we said in the 60s, “shit happens.” Life isn’t fair, because It doesn’t have to be fair. Life is hard, but it’s hard for everybody. There are no truly “privileged” people, because we all are.

Posted in Philosophy, Twitter | No Comments » |

Broadcast affiliates are hosed (again)

April 17th, 2010

The Wall St. Journal headline says it all:

ABC Sees Success in iPad App

ABC is the only network (so far) offering ad-supported free television viewing via the iPad.

The network said that in the 10 days since the iPad’s debut, its TV-show watching app has been downloaded 205,000 times, giving the Walt Disney Co. unit a presence on nearly half the 450,000 devices that Apple says it has sold. Moreover, users have watched at least part of 650,000 television episodes using the app, generating “several million” ad impressions, according to an ABC spokesman, although the precise number is still being calculated.

Disney-ABC television President Anne Sweeney says the network is pleased with the initial results.

Well, of course she’s bloody well pleased. It’s called cutting out the middle man person, in this case local broadcasters. I’ve been predicting this for years, because our hyperconnected world is able to route around blocks, which is good news for some and not so good news for others. Here, ABC is able to leapfrog broadcasters in delivering programs directly to consumers in their markets.

The affiliates will challenge this by asking for a cut of the revenue, but we know what ABC will tell them. It’s just a matter of time, folks. What will affiliates do without network programming or with fragments of an audience? That’s the kind of question that drives media execs to Ambien (or worse).

Posted in Broadcasting, Disruptions | No Comments » |

Stop blaming the bloggers

April 17th, 2010

Here in Dallas, we worship the Cowboys. Well, at least most folks do. Anything associated with the Cowboys is big news, and everybody has an opinion. One of the most opinionated is Dale Hansen, venerable sports guy with WFAA-TV. Hansen has reached the pinnacle of sports broadcasters. His godlike status (hey, the guy’s good) enables him to take on sacred cows, even his own employer.

So it wasn’t surprising that he did just that over the widely circulated story of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones blabbing on about Bill Parcels and Tim Tebow in a grainy video shot unawares in a bar as Jones gabbed with fans. In legal parlance, this is “shop talk,” and you’re not supposed to be punished for shop talk.

In this day and age of “anybody’s a reporter,” however, people such as Jones have to be more careful.

Anyway, Hansen railed against WFAA-TV for showing the video. According to Ed Bark, here’s what went down:

“Yet another example of the decline of journalism as we once knew it,” Hansen told viewers. “Our business now too many times is a fat kid in a t-shirt in his mother’s basement eating Cheetos and writing his blogs. And we make it news. Jerry Jones in a bar being Jerry Jones is not news to me. And the fact that some creep slides up to Jones, records the conversation without Jones knowing, then tries to sell that recording and that becomes news is an embarrassment to us all.”

A couple of things. One, I think WFAA’s news director made the right call. How can you NOT show this video, when it’s the most talked about thing in the market? Not showing the video would send a message to their viewers all right, but not the message Hansen thinks it would send. Two, notice how Hansen assigns blame for the whole thing to bloggers.

“Our business now too many times is a fat kid in a t-shirt in his mother’s basement eating Cheetos and writing his blogs.”

Mr. Hansen, with all due respect, that’s horseshit stereotyping, and it’s wrong on so many fronts. It’s ignorant, deliberate demagoguery, and just plain incorrect.

I organized a blogger meet-up in San Francisco many years ago that was largely a success. We made t-shirts for everybody to mark the occasion, but the TV station made mostly XL and XXLs, believing, as Hansen does, that “bloggers” were fat people with nothing better to do. Of the 200 plus people in attendance, maybe a handful were overweight, and it really gripes me that an industry icon like Dale Hansen would drag this notion out of the mud pit and use it like this.

Rather than look in the mirror, far too many traditional media types prefer to blame the blogosphere for their woes, when the fact is that the decline in trust in the press in this country began long before the first blog was ever made. Bloggers, in part, Mr. Hansen, are a RESPONSE to the decline in trust in the press, Ed Bark’s blog being a good example.

So get off your pedestal, Mr. Hansen, because you’re suffering from oxygen deprivation. Jerry Jones? He’s a fat cat silk stocking that apparently drinks too much. He makes a nice stadium, though, and he certainly doesn’t need your defense.

How about sounding off on paying $75 just to park there. Never mind. That’s a different rant.

Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment » |