Archive: Posts about Media
May 30th, 2008, 14 Comments »
I’m not going to judge you for caring about celebrities. They’re about as meaningless and stupidly aspirational as sports, and I’m a big ice hockey fan.
However, I find the intense interest in celebrity’s children appalling. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw the oddly-named baby of someone famous on the cover of People magazine. And today, I read on TechCrunch that, coincidentally, People.com has bought Celebrity Baby Blog for an undisclosed sum:
Celebrity Baby is FM Publishing’s top parenting blog, and has recently started to pull in more pageviews (and thus advertising impressions) than FM stalwart BoingBoing. Since February its traffic has shot up—to 6.9 million pageviews and 720,000 unique visitors in April, according to comScore. That month, BoingBoing had more unique visitors (2 million), but fewer pageviews (3.7 million).
Why do I find this so heinous? Because I think children have rights to their own privacy, even before they’re mature enough to exercise them. I find it morally corrupt to exploit toddlers in order to serve advertising to the multitudes. It’s reflective of the shallowest, most fickle tastes of our society. If only we could take a fraction of the cognitive surplus we waste on our worst devices and turn it to more admirable pursuits.
I’m not sure how to distribute the blame, but I’m certain that everyone–celebrities, paparazzi, publishers and consumers–is culpable. It’s obviously not climate change or poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, but it still rankles me. If you’re a consumer of celebrity gossip, I urge you to skip the baby pages.
14 Comments »
May 28th, 2008, 30 Comments »
I was just out for a walk, and I listened to a recent episode of This American Life. It was about prom night, and excellent as usual.
At my high school in West Vancouver, we never had anything called ‘prom’. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what prom is. From Wikipedia:
In the United States and Canada a prom, short for promenade, is used to describe a formal dance held at the end of an academic year…
While proms at smaller schools may hold a school prom open to the entire student body, large high schools may hold two proms, a junior prom for those finishing their 11th grade year and a senior prom for those who are finishing their high school years. The name is derived from the late nineteenth century practice of a promenade ball. The end of year tradition stemmed from the graduation ball tradition.
At Sentinel Secondary (holy crap, high school classes are now 80 minutes?) in West Vancouver, we had three or four dances each year, and then a year end event called ‘grad’. Grad involved the graduation ceremony, a dinner, dancing and the usual after-grad mayhem.
If memory serves, by 6:00am on the morning following grad, I ended up in my friend Lincoln’s hot tub. In a classic high school gaffe, Lincoln, myself and another guy, Ryan, all had grad dates that weren’t our girlfriends. I was taking Lincoln’s girlfriend, Ryan was taking mine, and Lincoln was taking a third young woman (their relationship status is entirely fuzzy in my memory).
If you went to high school in Canada, did you have something called ‘prom’? Is this, maybe, a regional preference?
DJs or Live Bands?
On a related note, did you have DJs or live bands at your high school dances? I ask because on the TAL broadcast, they visit a few proms, and they always seem to have DJs. At my high school, we almost always had live bands.
Was this commonplace back in the late eighties? Is it common now, or are all high school dances now DJ-powered?
30 Comments »
May 23rd, 2008, 10 Comments »
The first session at VidFest today was Wired editor Chris Anderson, talking about the power and inevitability of free. The following are my somewhat incomplete notes:
Free allows you to be profligate in your resources. It enables a massive global experiment.
Economics has very little to say about abundance and free. What are the economics of free?
Starts by talking about King Gillette, the guy who invented disposal razors. See his Wired article for all the details.
You give away something to establish a pattern of use and a lifetime of revenue. See also cell phones.
Wired costs $10 a year, less than 10% of what it costs them to produce the magazine. Writing a cheque indicates ‘an expression of true interest’.
The Wired model is ‘third party pays’. In this case, the third party is the advertiser.
How would the world change if electricity was free? You could desalinate water for no cost.
Three inputs that are becoming free in today’s world: processing power, storage and bandwidth.
Thus far, this is pretty much a live presentation of his Wired article.
Technologists need to make technology cheap, easy and ubiquitous. The world will tell us what it’s for.
A terabtye costs about $300 - $350. Anderson’s 9-year-old has twice the storage of Wired magazine. “The market price of storage is zero.”
The marginal cost of reaching an audience member is zero. The old economic model drove us to invent mass media on TV. Hence, “Everybody Loves Raymond”. Nobody loves Raymond. Everybody only likes Raymond.
“The things we share are relatively banal.” We disagree about the things we love–we love the things that mark us as individuals.
Today it costs 0.25 of a cent to stream a video to one person for one hour.
YouTube violates every of traditional television.
3-D printing is a physical example of ‘complexity is free’ moving into the physical world.
“In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.” “Anything that can become digital, will become digital. And everything that is digital, will become free.”
New forms of free that leverage digital economics:
- Freemium: give away 99% to sell 1%. See, for example Flickr’s basic and pro model.
- Labour exchange: consumers create something of value in exchange for free goods and services. For example, Google’s 411 service provides voice recognition training for their software.
- Gift economy: open source and Wikipedia.
Attention and reputation are the new scarcities.
He subsequently applies these ideas of free to games.
He’s a great speaker, very smart and engaging. Having read his article and blog, there wasn’t much new for me in this talk. Judging by the audience’s reaction, though, his ideas are very fresh for a lot of people.
10 Comments »
May 10th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Last September, CBC Radio launched two new technology shows: Search Engine and Spark. I forget how I first heard about them, but I subscribed to both podcasts from their first episode.
Search Engine is a show about the cultural and politics of the web (they need a copyable blurb on their home page and in iTunes). The most recent episode featured stories on the hacker convention Defcon, gaming the CIA’s website and a rapping Hungarian YouTube star.
Here’s the spiel on Spark:
Spark is a weekly audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching. It’s not just technology for gearheads, it’s about the way technology affects our lives, and the world around us.
What’s a Spark story? Wikis in the workplace, Guitar Hero in your living room, or why the new trend in design is the trailer park.
So they cover similar territory, but Spark is less concerned with the Web than Search Engine. Spark has a stickier tag line, because I can remember it: “Tech trends and fresh ideas”.
It’s been educational to watch both shows’ evolution over the past year or so. My impressions:
- They’ve taken somewhat different approaches in story development and presentation. Spark seems much more crowd-sourced, while Search Engine has a more traditional structure. I don’t know how successful it’s been (I’d be curious to hear about their objectives and measures of success) Spark has a wiki for developing show ideas. Additionally, host Nora Young regularly cites comments from the show’s blog. They’re usually insightful enough to merit inclusion (I tend to loathe traditional man-on-the-street commentary).
- Both hosts seem very well-informed, and (while I’m layman in this) are excellent presenters. Search Engine host Jesse Brown has a more informal style–he seems to be palling around with a lot of his guests. This mostly works, and reflects the DIY culture he documents. I do get a bit tired of the geeky indignation Brown seems to have for a lot of his tech stories. I get that every day in the blogosphere (including this site) and at tech conferences, so I don’t want to hear it from the CBC. Because of this, Search Engine sometimes feels more like commentary than reportage.
- I like both shows, but given the choice, I listen to Spark first. Why? Because the topics are fresher (see the tagline) to me. 80% of Spark stories are new to me. I’ve already heard about 80% of Search Engine’s stories. That’s not a criticism of Search Engine–it’s a reflection of the kind of information I consume.
Clearly the CBC made emerging technology and the web a priority last year, and I applaud the results. Keep up the good work.
This is barely related, but I note that these CBC sites have a wacky URL structure. For example, the about page for Spark is http://www.cbc.ca/spark/index.html?copy-about. Maybe it’s a symptom of an older CMS?
6 Comments »
April 22nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
There was an article in last weekend’s Globe and Mail about super-skinny fashion models and their impact on the physical and emotional health of women. I only skimmed the full page piece by Siri Agrell. Though it covered familiar ground, it seemed credible and cogent enough.
The article was accompanied by a large infographic. It combined data from several sources, but featured the results of a study about body size perceptions. I snapped a photo of the page in the paper, so you could see for yourself:
In truth, I was a little surprised by the results-they seemed kind of moderate. On a five-point scale (with one being darned skinny and five being obese), a survey of 500 women identified their current body shape as 3.6. They identified the ideal female body shape at 2.7.
A 23-Year-Old Study
Then I noticed the date of the study: 1985 (I believe it’s erroneously identified as 1995 in the caption). I’m no sociologist, but I wonder how relevant this data is in 2008. That’s basically an entire generation of women.
And surely this generation of young women–thus under the age of 25–have been exposed to more ‘idealized’ images of women than any other. More skinny women in TV, films, magazines, the web (not to mention the mainstreaming of pornography) than ever before.
If we replicated this study in 2008, would women answer the same way? I don’t know, but I’d guess that the ideal body shape needle has moved. What do you think?
This seems like a bit of editorial laziness. It feels like somebody stumbled upon these images, and stuck them next to the story without much scrutiny. At a minimum, they ought to have added a note explaining the inclusion of a 23-year-old study.
On Saturday I sent Ms. Agrell an email inquiring about the inclusion of the old study, and CC’d an editor. I haven’t received a reply, but I’m still optimistic.
2 Comments »
April 14th, 2008, 11 Comments »
I don’t know why I ever listen to or watch the news. I find it extraordinarily frustrating. I turned on the CBC’s Early Edition this morning and the first three local news stories concerned crime (leading off with the eight-day-old Merritt shooting).
At the moment I’ve got CBC TV news on and they led with two crime stories, followed by a story about automated bathrooms, the weather and finishing up with a piece about a piano prodigy. Is this really what amounts to credible news in this country? Has the CBC lost this much perspective?
And this, keep in mind, is the CBC. They’re the best this nation has to offer in TV and news reporting.
Shame on them for fostering the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that’s so prevalent in our mainstream media. It’s exploitative and irresponsible. When our state-subsidized media is this lousy with FUD, who have we got left?
And just to clear something up: don’t believe the hype on crime. Canada is a very safe country. Crime rates have been more or less in decline since 1990, and are currently at a 1978 level. Unless you’re a criminal, your risk of experiencing violent crime is extremely small.
Any time you hear the media fostering fear about slavering rapists and murderers at your door, think critically about the news. Who does your fear serve, except advertisers?
11 Comments »
March 17th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Last month I was contacted by the awesomely-named Shelly Banjo, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She wanted to talk about our ebook (more news about that in the coming weeks, incidentally) and some of the other blogger relations work that Capulet has done. We had a couple of chats, and today we were included in an article about social media marketing for small businesses.
You can only see a preview without a WSJ subscription. I picked up a copy of the dead-tree edition. I’d take a photo, but I’m currently living a camera-free existence. Here’s the section that concerns us:
Others say personalizing a pitch can sometimes win a mention without participation in blog discussions. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo recently co-authored an online book called “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”. To promote the book, they played to the romantic angle of the title by sending personal, hand-written letters asking 10 influential bloggers to review the book.
They enclosed each letter in a sticker-studded, perfume-scented pink envelope. In each letter, they included the address of a Web site set up just for the recipient, where the blogger would find a two-minute video message welcoming him or her to read the book. The idea was a hit: Almost every blogger wrote about the experience.
Mr. Barefoot and Ms. Szabo took another creative approach to promote a new line of printers for Brothre International Corp. (Canada) Ltd., one of their clients. To ask bloggers to review the printers, they created pitches in the form of comic strips customized for each blogger. The duo found pictures of the bloggers online and pasted the images into the strip.
“You want to be creative, but play to your strengths,” says Mr. Barefoot. “If you are a T-shirt vendor, for example, creative personalized T-shirts for each blogger.”
The article also features a slightly-tweaked version of the comic we sent to John and Rebecca. Thanks to Kris, Rebecca and Derek for their permission to use their photos (they’re credited in the article).
7 Comments »
February 6th, 2008, No Comments »
Today this story is getting a lot of attention. It’s titled “‘Euros Accepted’ signs pop up in New York City”. Here’s the lead:
In the latest example that the U.S. dollar just ain’t what it used to be, some shops in New York City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.
This is just lazy journalism. Why?
- Sum total of stores referenced in article: two.
- Sum total of people interviewed in article: two (both shopkeepers).
- Sum total of actual signs referenced in the article: none.
The media loves a big, controversial, easy-to-articulate idea. And they love a trend story. Does two stores make a trend? Absolutely not. Did the journalists bother to interview anybody else–a European tourist, a finance expert, a chamber of commerce rep? Nope.
I appreciate that the media industry is struggling with shrinking staffs and increasing demands, but this shouldn’t have been published by a reputable agency like Reuters.
Plus, the final quote has the distinctive scent of a PR professional:
“I’m happy if I take in 200 euros, because what I do is keep them,” he said. “So when I go back to Paris, I don’t have to go through the nightmare of going to an exchange place.”
That feels like it’s right out of a press release. The fact is that most travelers–especially those going to Europe–don’t exchange money anymore. It’s much easier, and often cheaper, to use the ubiquitous bank machine. Plus, European currency exchanges have never been nightmarish. They’re usually quite efficient, especially now with the marked decline in business.
No Comments »
February 1st, 2008, 4 Comments »
We’re in an era of media amalgamation. This is generally considered a bad thing for freedom of the press and unbiased reporting.
Unfortunately, we’ve also got a Conservative government in power that seeks to curtail those freedoms further. Let’s see what our Prime Minister’s done in the past eighteen months on this front:
What’s Prime Minister Harper’s latest restriction? Quietly muzzling Environment Canada:
The new policy, which went into force in recent weeks and sent a chill through the department research divisions, is designed to control the department’s media message and ensure there are no “surprises” for Environment Minister John Baird and senior management when they open the newspaper or turn on the television, according to documents obtained by Canwest News Service.
You know, aside from their head-in-the-sand environmental policy, I can’t complain much about the Harper government (of course, I’ve been out of the country for the past year).
But these tactics aren’t in the service of the Canadian people. They only serve self-interests. They serve to conceal, to obfuscate and, I assume, to deceive. They show a marked disrespect for the electorate.
Does anybody think these policies are a good idea? I’d love to hear a rational defense from a Conservative supporter (Stephen, maybe?), for example.
4 Comments »
February 1st, 2008, 7 Comments »
This Canadian only recently discovered “This American Life”, a weekly hour-long radio show produced by Chicago Public Radio (and available via podcast). I’d always felt that I got enough American life from the media–who needs more?
Then a few months ago I listened to episode #339, Break-up, and got kind of hooked.
With more than 300 episodes to choose from, I wanted to go back and listen to the cream of the crop. I spent some time perusing a bunch of sources and assembled a list of the web’s favourite episodes of the show. Basically, every time somebody mentioned that they liked an episode, I marked down a vote for it. In all, I gathered a list of 129 episodes which received at least one vote.
A List in 19 Acts
These 19 episodes got at least five votes, though the first four received considerably more than that. I gather they’re considered classics.
Links go to individual episodes, where you can listen via streaming MP3 or buy for 95 American cents. All descriptions are excerpted from the “This American Life” website.
- House on Loon Lake - Our entire show this week is one long story, sort of a real-life Hardy Boys mystery.
- Superpowers - We answer the following questions about superpowers: Can superheroes be real people? (No.) Can real people become superheroes? (Maybe.) And which is better: flight or invisibility? (Depends who you ask.)
- First Day - Stories of the first day on the job, the first day in a relationship, the first day in school.
- Fiasco! - Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns.
- My Experimental Phase - Three stories about people who decide to try out a new life — the kind of life their parents never wanted for them.
- Godless America - At a time when House Majority Leader Tom Delay calls for enacting a “Biblical world view” in government, when Christians are asserting their ideals in the selection of judges, in public school science classes and elsewhere, This American Life spends an hour trying to remember why anyone liked the separation of church and state in the first place.
- Music Lessons - What’s frustrating about music lessons, what’s miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us.
- Notes on Camp - Stories of summer camp. People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don’t understand what’s so amazing about camp.
- Who’s Canadian - Notes and stories about the Canadians among us.
- 20 Acts in 60 Minutes - Instead of the regular “each week we choose a theme, and bring you three or four stories on that theme” business, this week we throw all that away and bring you twenty stories — yes, twenty — in sixty minutes.
- 24 Hours at The Golden Apple - The This American Life producers document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning.
- 81 Words - The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
- Act V - We devote this entire episode to one story: over the course of six months, reporter and TAL contributor Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet.
- Conventions - What happens when people with one common interest gather in monstrous, flourescent-lit halls for the weekend? Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love.
- Recordings for Someone - All the stories in this week’s show center on personal recordings that one person made for just one other person.
- The Middle of Nowhere - Stories from faraway, hard-to-get-to places, where all rules are off, nefarious things happen because no one’s looking, and there’s no one to appeal to.
- Testosterone - tories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.
- Sinatra - Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board.
- Cruelty of Children - Stories about kids being mean to each other.
The list skews slightly toward more recent episodes, but not too badly. Incidentally, if somebody wants to submit this to MetaFilter, I’d appreciate it. It’s not kosher for me to do so, but I know many Mefi readers are also TAL lovers, and I used a couple of MeFi threads as two of my sources.
After the jump, you’ll find the other 109 episodes which received anywhere from one to four votes, in alphabetical order. I didn’t link to their show pages, because that would be a major pain. Just do a quick search on TAL’s website.
Read more…
7 Comments »
