Past resolutions…
Tuesday, July 13th, 1999
Ah, I remember it all as if it were a flashback…
For those of us for whom Nick at Nite and TV Land are indeed repositories of TV memories (as opposed to watching something your parents watched just because it’s like, you know, retro), the past is so crisp I gotta wear shades.
Have I mentioned we don’t have cable? That of course makes it all the more special when I’m traveling and I have an extended chunk of time (usually late in the evening) to plop on a motel room bed and watch these fine, fine channels way into the wee hours.
I especially enjoy TV Land’s interstitial graphics (no, don’t go diving for dictionaries-interstitial means that stuff between programs). Based on road signs and found roadside 60s art, it’s reminiscent of stuff I did a decade ago-but much nicer, and with a budget. And like the programs they surround, they’re so crisp and clean!
That’s also exactly what’s so odd about itand I promise to put my TV-techno-hat on only momentarily to explain. Watching these reruns (and others like the restored original Star Trek on the Sci-Fi Channel), we’re seeing the past much, much clearer than it ever was. These resurrected programs have been re-transferred from their original film to (digital) videotape using equipment that’s simply generations beyond anything they had even at the networks in the 1960s.
So when I Dream of Jeannie first aired on NBC (during that time that shows made the transition to "living color") viewers were actually seeing a shakier, blurrier, smearier version of the image, even more so after it made the trip from a "film chain projector" in New York to your local station and out into the air to land in your enormous RCA Victor color TV. Similarly, the audio came off of film in glorious tinny mono, with fidelity not unlike an AM radio station.
Now when we tune in, say, Dragnet 1968 on TV Land, we see in excruciating detail the cheesiness of the sets, of the makeup, of the bad rear projection, of the obvious stunt doubles in the cars-it’s like getting a new prescription for your glasses. On Lost in Space, you can see the seams in the fake sky just above the cardboard horizon and the wires holding up the Jupiter 2. And since colorful shows sold color TVs, these oldies sure are ultra-colorful. the riot of vivid hues hitting the walls of the 1960s USS Enterprise. (The cinematographer on that show, Gerald Finnerman, went on to win Emmys and Oscars, and really, the show’s lighting is quite beautiful-and completely unrealistic.)
Similarly, these revitalized shows have taken the audio into the digital realm with simulated stereo, and did sneaky digital things to clean up and expand the quality of the sound, just to bring it up to our standards and expectations of present-day (and not even high-definition) television.
All in all, it’s (appropriately) kind of an acid trip experience (especially in a motel room at 2 am): a purified, digitized Petticoat Junction can be almost terrifying in its clarity-and an example of a rememberance of things as they weren’tquite.
Behind the brands
Tuesday, July 6th, 1999
Brand loyalty doesn’t start from sheer nothingness. Often there is some reason why you choose a particular gas station, bank, grocery store, clothing store, soft drink, network newscast, or weekly newspaper. You tried it once and you liked it. You felt as if you got value for your dollar, or at least, a quality product. You draw the simple a-to-b conclusion if I go back to that brand, I will have the same satisfactory experience.
Fox gave me The Simpsons, they must know what they’re doing when they give me Family Guy or Futurama. When I see John Pruitt’s face on the screen (a brand in itself), I trust him to bring me the news. That Gap t-shirt looked so cool, if I go back I will find more cool stuff. I like Coca-Cola, so if I buy new Coke…oh, wait. Hmm.
Behind the surface level of a brand image, past shiny logos and warm, fuzzy commercials lies an increasingly ugly truth: consolidation, mergers, outsourcing (a clever way to say we sell it, but we don’t make it) and handshake deals make it more and more likely that no matter what brand you buy, the product or service you’re actually getting could come from darn near anywhere, or anyone-including people you don’t want to do business with.
At the gas station, fill up with Texaco or Shell-it doesn’t make a difference-literally. They’ve merged their gas refining operations. They make basically the same stuff for both pumps. Does your car run better when it comes out of a pump with an Exxon logo? They may have bought it from Chevron. In a Wall Street Journal article last week, these examples were cited as new challenges for marketers-how do they keep you caring about what kind of gas you put in your car? Well, my answer (not theirs) is if Chevron or any of the others offer real value-cheaper price, faster service, heck, even a free car wash, free coffee, and a smile-I’m there. If not, the mystic allure of ‘Techron’ isn’t going to make a bit of difference.
Hate America Online? Don’t choose CompuServe as an alternative. Although marketed as a completely different company, it’s now owned lock, stock, and server by AOL.
Have a problem with Delta or another airline? Choose your alternatives carefully-with codesharing, you may well be taking a trip with-and handing money to-the folks you want to shun.
So what’s the point of loyalty? Folks traditionally define loyalty as something that is earned, in the same category as respect. It’s also a deal, a two-way street. I’ll be loyal to you-whether you’re a person, a product, a company, or a local TV channel-and you’ll keep giving me whatever it is I want the way I want it.
And blind loyalty-a one-way street-is what most marketers are counting on. They hope you’re not paying too much attention-that you’re too busy to investigate and make a smart choice every time.
TV: Just wacky
Sunday, June 27th, 1999
Stand back-and squint. A little more. There. See? From here, the ebb and flow of trends in our mass media culture look like gentle waves, sine curves arcing one way only to fall back the next. From the most significant to the most mundane, that’s the way it flows.
And some weeks I’m stationed, ever-vigilant at the "significant" desk, but this week it sure feels like I’m in the domain of the mundane.
Take helicopters, please. Seems as if one ratings book WXIA does some research that tells them that people could care less about cameras in the sky. Then, Bruce Erion nabs some great footage of a fire rescue and suddenly the pendulum swings back, and 11 Alive is the station with something called "the air advantage" (guarantee: our newscast has more air than those others.) In six months or so, if no major airborne breaking news hits, news and promotion management will again shuffle the helicopter card to the back of the deck.. What have you done for us lately, chopper guy?
Same thing happens at WSB. One sweeps they go all out promoting consumer dude Clark Howard. People get sick of it, and Clark’s promos evaporate in the summer sun. Then, they get some research that says maybe the other stations do .5 percent of a better job at consumer reporting. Oh, okay-yank Clark away from the radio mic and let’s plaster his face all over the television again.
Take Fox’s lineup. We could stick Futurama over here, and move That 70s Show to there, andno, let’s just move them back and start all over.
Take UPN. One season they decide to be the station for hip comedies. That goes nowhere. Then they go for hip urban comedies. Nope. Then they remembered that really drama was what they were all about. Uh-uh. And this fall: back to hip comedies.
And with any of the real in-for-the-long run programs-as in late night, for example, the waxing and waning of the host’s energy is just about a given. Lately, we’ve been lucky. Ted Koppel was at the top of his game covering Kosovo (I got more of a sense of the feeling of that troubled region from watching three Nightlines than about all the coverage put together. And Ted’s buddy Dave over on CBS actually seems to be enjoying having a show these days, lucky for us.
Maybe I can put all this valuable raw data (strewn over the "mundane" desk, elbow-deep in scribbled notes and smudged post-its) into a spreadsheet and try to correlate the coefficient of Dave’s mood swings divided by the delta pi of Monica’s hair, factored by the inverse square root of the frequencies Dan Rather’s been hearing these days. Add in the total number of news consultants, and put the whole mess over the exponential growth of function-alike cable channels, and multiply by the number of monitors on the new Headline News set, and, wait, I almost have it.there.
My carefully calculated conclusion: TV is just wacky.
Silicon emperors
Tuesday, June 22nd, 1999
We went over to my brother and sister-in-law’s Sunday night for dinner and a chance (for us cable-free types) to see "Pirates of Silicon Valley" on TNT, one of those made-for-television movies "based on fact" that purports to reveal the real behind-the-scenes machinations of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and other pioneer computer-robber-barons as they built empires.
I felt a certain sense of self-interest since these were empires built, in part, with my money. Yep, I bought one of those Apple 2e things back in the early 80s.a couple of grand there. I was the first on my block with a Macintosh-paying $2200 or so for a cute little beige computer (from a small store in Gainesville) with less memory than our microwave has now. I am what computer marketers gleefully label an "early adopter," willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest. And so, during my last trip to Northern California, I paid a brief pilgrimage to Cupertino, California, home of Apple. Drove by the gleaming building at 1 Infinite Loop, and said "well, there’s some of my computer dollars at work."
And I’ve certainly kept up with the melodrama that has been the lives of these geeky millionaires, who sold what has come to be known as vaporware to anyone who would fork the cash over. They’d then work weeks of all-nighters to create what they promised as accomplished fact. They stole ideas, erected rhetorical "reality distortion fields" around themselves at computer shows,, pushed employees to and over the brink, and apparently, those were their good qualities.
This territory has already been covered in a much more non-fictional forum on PBS, where pseudonymous Robert X. Cringely’s multipart "Triumph of the Nerds" chronicled the rises and falls, vividly told by the principals themselves. So why do we need a fabricated, abstracted version of history? I suppose it’s only through the exaggerated mirror of the fabled docudrama form that we get the sense of just how manipulative Steve Jobs was-and why (according to the TNT filmmakers) his dysfunctional personal relationships, children out of wedlock, and anger over being adopted came together to create the guy who could sell America computers as appliances (now available in five perky colors!) It’s only through a marginal fiction that we can plumb the true dweebiness (and poor personal hygiene habits) of the richest man in the world, that Bill Gates guy. And of course, it’s hard to get millionaires to sit down for PBS cameras and talk about dropping acid, racing bulldozers at midnight, and infringing on each other’s trade secrets.
Then, of course, there’s the sidebar sport of docudrama-watching: rating how well the person they cast succeeded in rendering the actual person. How long did it take watching a bearded, grubby Noah Wyle pinballing around until you stopped thinking "ER doc"? Anthony Michael Hall-who was a Saturday Night Live castmember while these guys were changing the world-was easier to buy immediately as Gates. But my favorite had to be the guy who played Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s current president) totally over the top-to great effect. Close your eyes and zero in on his voice-yes, it’s Futurama’s Bender the robot, John DiMaggio.
Smarta way to live
Tuesday, June 15th, 1999
Sometimes, things can turn on a paradigm.
I was thinking about this on my way down to the airport this morning on MARTA-the train cars had celebratory logos saying "20 years of bus and train service in Atlanta." And the scary thing is: I measure my tenure here by the arrival of those trains-we both hit town about the same time. When MARTA’s train stations opened, my friends and I rode the shiny new cars to the opposite ends of the East Line just because we could, and we bought in to the optimistic PR statements that said that rapid rail would revolutionize the city, would provide for a downtown that is living and vital, would clean up tartar between gums and teeth.
Well, downtown’s tartar is still there, and although it’s a fine way of getting to the airport, the number of places I can travel to reasonably on the s’MARTA is fewer than the places I can’t. Atlanta remains a place where people travel one-per-car along clogged freewaysand there are plenty of folks outside 285 that look at their car (or SUV) as urban protection-a shield against interaction with outsiders.
So I’m on the train, quite enjoyably passing south along old rail lines, and I’m thinking: how have other cities been able to bring mass transit to the fore? Is it simply a challenge for public relations and advertising (and if so, I can tell you right now that ‘It’s Smarta’ ain’t going to get people to park Jeep Cherokees.)
No, in towns like Portland, Oregon the very idea of mass transit has been made as fashionable as the $2.49 corn and cilantro fritter at the Whole Foods Market. It’s fashionable there, and not only because the local mass transit authority does a good job. It’s fasionable because news anchors and people who write for weekly newspapers and other "media voices" talk about it in a positive, uplifting context-and as far as I can tell, they mean it. It fits their lives like a well-worn backpack. The words feel good tumbling out of their mouths. And this may well include way-overpaid TV folk who still climb into their Yuppie Scummobiles after the newscast is over-but their talk perpetuates the germ of an not-so-abstract idea. You can ride free downtown. People take the rail or buses to events because it’s part of the group experience (same thing in London, Paris, hell, even Boston.) It’s a great place to read and watch some of the world go by.
Why can’t we say that here?
Well, to some extent the fault lies, sure, with the MARTA authorities, for their general marketing cluelessness and their unwillingness to try programs like the free-ride-in-center-city thing.
But they could have the best programs and a decent advertising campaign and the problem still would remain. So how do we turn this perception around? No, I’m not proposing mass hypnosis or mass hypocrisy, just something closer to visualizing whirled peas. Picture yourself enjoing a ride on MARTA, on the bus or on the train. Then do it. Then talk about it. Then enjoy the feeling of being a bit more connected to the city and its people.
As I did this morning.
Spots in the dark.
Tuesday, June 8th, 1999
Well, Sunday afternoon-warm, sunny, full of green trees and blooming flowers-seemed made for a wander outside to enjoy (enjoy?) the transformation of Virginia Avenue last weekend into that Summerfest thing. You know, that gathering where the object is to get as many vehicles with out-county plates to cram into an intown neighborhood, sprawling over medians and, well, mostly in front of our house. The idea is that people stroll blissfully down Virginia, which has been transformed into this corridor of art, music, and free spirit. Well, with success comes creeping commercialism in all its ugly forms-and for every worthy enterprise like artists stalls and places to get walkabout food from restaurants like Harvest and Dish, we had to run the gauntlet of countless natural gas services and cell phone providers determined to sign us up, or at the very least, to force us to shake hands with some bespectacled guy in a rotund blue costume (hey, he ain’t the real gas guy!)
As my friend Tom said after visiting the World of Coca-Cola, "What that place needs is a logo-free zone."
And in search of an advertising-free experience, my wife and I squeezed past the enormous fake climbing mountain, escaped the hubbub of Virginia Highland, and headed for the cool darkness of the moviehouse.
I guess we should have known better.
First, there were the slides, the lowest form of advertising life known on this planet. (I always say to my brother-if our work dries up, we can always make those slides in the theatres. Scrambled movie titles-how hard could it be?) For some reason, at this particular showing the slides would proceed at their usual mind-numbing pace for a while, and then speed up unpredictably, whizzing by in a blur as if the projectionist had collapsed on the remote control for a minute or so. Then, the stately march through the carousel. Then, warp speed. Go figure. Maybe this is something that market-research experts have determined will get our attention. Um…I guess it did.
But those were just a prelude to the torture to come.
Torture, as in twelve minutes of commercials before we even got to the trailers, which, after all, are nothing but commercials for movies. Twelve minutes! We were forced to watched really grainy video-to-tape transfers-an ad for talking chimps on TBS, an ad for Moviefone (Why? We’re here, we figured out the showtimes already!), a chiropractor (spend too much time in those moviehouse seats?), and, targeting our demographic perfectly, a Coke spot with NASCAR guys (auto racing and Shakespeare-great together!)
Has the cost of replacement projector bulbs gone up so much that it’s come to this: our seven buck visits to the movies must be augmented by some easy-money ad revenue? The phrase ‘captive audience’ comes to mind, of course, but do media buyers really think that just because we can’t zap these annoyances into submission, we’ll be moved to increase our yearly chiropractic budget?
We need those fine web-based movie listings services to add just one more line of data to their movie listings: how many minutes we can skip and still slide into safely our seats by the opening titles.
Ally McRerun.
Friday, May 28th, 1999
Content is our most important product. We must conserve our sparse national resource-entertainment. That’s why I wholly support Fox and producer David Kelley’s decision to chop up hour episodes of Ally McBeal, add a few shots left on the nonlinear editing floor, mix, and serve-a recycled half-hour of television. Makes perfect sense, right? People don’t tune in Ally for great narrative structure. They won’t mind some regurgitation. And think of the money Fox saves-which I’m sure they’ll reinvest-in our interest-in even more World’s Greatest Car Crashes V, right?
This concept-that the Makers of Television™ need not waste their time with new stuff when we’re just fine with the old is hardly new or without precedent, but this is the first time to my memory that a top-rated primetime show has blatantly said "let’s serve up some leftovers" while the main airing still attracts big audiences. Of course just last week, the much-hyped finale of Home Improvement-ostensibly 90 minutes of entertainment-was in fact a half-hour of flashbacks (that would be recycling), an actual half-hour program, and then a "behind the scenes" filler half-hour of outtakes and the "stars reminiscing," and, oh yeah, the face of that guy who hides behind the backyard fence. Oh, thanks so much.
I was much more charmed by the Mad About You finale, which you didn’t see because Buffy was on against it. Somehow, the idea that Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt’s baby would grow up to be Janeane Garafolo had a certain rightness to it. Her "looking back" documentary on the turbulent lives of her parents was a great way to tie together loose ends
The finale I’m really waiting for however, is the penultimate Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I might as well confess here that this program has been consistently my favorite hour of television over its seven year run. This past year’s episodes, taken together, form a calculated dramatic march to the finale, with major threads playing out and resolving, all leading to one entitled "What You Leave Behind" that airs the weekend of June 5th. The stories have been great, the drama has been first-rate, the computer-generated spacecraft have been blowing up in spectacular fashion, and, well, I really like the work these folks do. Simple as that. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not surprised-WGNX airs DS9 at 11:36 pm on Saturday nights-and then at 11 am on Sunday morning, one last time. However, I’m sure that, like most of Star Trek, DS9 will air in reruns well into our geezerdom.
It’s funny-unlike the more generally popular Next Generation series, Deep Space Nine and Voyager have more narrowly-defined audiences, and there are plenty of Star Trek fans who will tell you that neither show is the "real" thing. Yet plenty of Internet bandwidth is consumed with critical dissections of each episode, and, by syndicated standards, the shows do well, and Paramount/Viacom markets the franchise in the great George Lucas tradition.
Maybe they should sweep up the digital outtakes, string them together, and offer Star Trek: The Leftovers . Hey, it could air right after Ally McRerun.
Apeeling satire.
Monday, May 17th, 1999
It’s the third (more or less) week of the May sweeps, and I’ve been celebrating by not watching television just as much as I possibly can. It’s probably quite an indictment of my tastes in entertainment, but somehow I’ve been able to pass up the enticements offered by NBC ("Atomic Train"? "Atomic Train"!?) and CBS (LeeLee Sobieski plays the young Helen Hunt in "Joan of Arc"), and I saw all the revealing stuff from ABC’s "Cleopatra" back in April on Entertainment Tonight.
So-that freed me to go wander the bookstore, and I returned not with great literature, but great satire-and I’ve been laughing myself to sleep every night for most of a week now.
I hold in my hand "The Onion presents Our Dumb Century-100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source."
The concept is simplicity itself. The 8 1/2 by 11 book presents us with reproductions of the front page of The Onion-one or two a year-from the past hundred years of this newspaper’s existence. We’re taken from the Puritanical, early-industrial America of the 1900s on a long march through the decades-touching somehow, on everything newsworthy, trendy, or pop-cultural along the way.
This is a particularly neat trick because The Onion has really only been around a decade or so. It’s a heretofore little-known humor publication, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Their conceit-a restrained, generic American newspaper simply reporting the news and trends of the day-makes for an amazingly effective way to satirize, spoof, and generally cause spontaneous humor combustion.
This book is so damn funny-and observant-on so many levels. It is lighthearted on one page, savage on the next; a bit juvenile one moment, and then it wheels about and out-intellectualizes the Harvard Lampoon moments after that.
A scan of the headlines for January 1, 1900-one page out of 160 or so-might give you some sense of the bounty to be had: "A New Century Dawns!/McKinley Ushers In Bold New Coal Age/ Nation’s Skies Filled With Beautiful, Black Smoke/Death-by-Corset Rates Stabilize At One In Six/Ladies Breathe Slightly Less Painful Sigh Of Relief." On the same page: "Vatican Condemns ‘Rhythm Method’", and a summary of "To-Day’s Extinctions," and a proud corner-box exclaims "Fewer Printing-Press-Men Killed Every Day."
No, I guess it doesn’t give you the idea, here, because a big part of the book’s payoff is in the presentation. "Our Dumb Century" is a beautifully-crafted design parody, too, expertly reproducing the cluttered, smudgy, old metal-typeface look of a century past, and bringing us up all the way to the USA Today-like front page of the 90s, complete with weather map, pointless graphs, and last night’s lotto numbers. Context and content had me LOL, ROTFL, and all those other Internet acronyms.
I remember thinking at the bookstore cash register "Boy, this better be 15 bucks worth of laughs." (It hadn’t been a good day up till that point.) Well. "Our Dumb Century" is so dense, so packed, so much fun that it’s a bargain at twice that price. Read this book, visit their website (www.theonion.com) regularly-support and cultivate this source of fine American satire. I have a feeling we’ll need all we can get.
Playing with ®-dudes.
Tuesday, May 11th, 1999
A friend with a small video production firm in New Mexico got a call from a large floor-wax company last month. Seems that his small website-which was basically his initials plus ".com"-carried a domain name that the large firm was interested in. They’re negotiating now for a transfer of that name, which should be worth, if not a fortune, at least a comfortable chunk of change for my friend. He sees it as found money-a reward for having that particular set of initials and the ego to have a eponymous place of your own online. If that makes you say "gee, I should go register some domain names I think might pay off down the road," you’re not alone, and you may well be late to the party. It’s a new form of speculation, as compelling, and, ultimately, as futile as playing the lottery.
Intellectual property-part of the intangible wealth to be exchanged, grown, and speculated on in the world of the Internet-is something you really can’t hold in your hand. It’s not a good. It’s not made by union laborers at a rusty car plant in Detroit. It’s just an idea-not necessarily a good idea, but one that is in the right place at the right time. Poof! It’s worth something.
It’s inevitable that the growth in the trade of intellectual property coincides with the sprawl of the Internet-the perfect medium for distributing products one cannot hold in one’s hand. What is amazing is how something like a domain name-which hardly carries enough weight to even be called an idea-is valuable. Why? It’s a brand.
The people who subscribe to industry journals like Brandweek (yes, there is such a thing) call names-for-things brands, of inherent worth in themselves, not just on the internet, but at the mall, in a car dealership, in a too hip commercial with swing dancers. They go on about "protecting the brand"-making sure that names similar to theirs aren’t being used by others to confuse the buying public, and "extending the brand"-taking a great name for jeans, like Levi’s-and putting it on perfume. Or floor cleaner.
These brands-words in fancy type, really-are what America manufactures these days, and the factories aren’t topped with smokestacks, but satellite dishes.
One of the biggest of these New Factories is here in town at CNN Center, but the zen brandmasters there aren’t working for the news channel, they’re down the hall at World Championship Wrestling, where the names of wrestlers, once novelties, have become stunningly profitable commodities in their own right. I should have become hip to this back about a decade when I noticed that the names "Obi-Wan Kenobi®" and "Jean-Luc Picard®" (do hyphenates make better brands?) started showing up with that little ® thingy next to them, and when the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle began to be very serious in protecting the use of the names Sherlock Holmes® and Dr. John Watson®.
Perhaps now in addition to getting a Social Security number for your just-newborn, you should lock up their name-as-domain (as an investment), and get them one of those ®-dudes to play with in the crib.
Left hand of incredulity.
Monday, May 3rd, 1999
Oh, I tried to watch a few minutes of NBC’s mega-event Noah’s Ark, where, apparently, biblical events transpired in medieval times in a land where British accents prevail. But I found myself holding up my patented Left Hand of Incredulity at the glowing Sony. Just what the? Whatthe? (My all time favorite comic strip balloon: "What the?"-because no one actually talks that way-except me.)
So up flew my patented Right Hand of Remote Control Manipulation, and I was quickly out of my misery. I mean, do we care? They could have staged Noah’s Ark with the cast and costumes of Gilligan’s Island, and it still would have been hyped as the mega-event of May. Jon Voight!?
We had friends over Sunday night, television-watching friends-friends who even have cable-and I asked them who they choose for local television news these days. "We can’t stand any of it," they said. "We watch some CNN, and that’s it." Talked to another friend on the phone the next day. "Local news? It all sucks."
Well, yes, and it’s reached the point where this is the universal wisdom: who do they think they’re fooling with their breathless teasing and promoting? Who watches the news for the news anymore?
I’ll admit, for me, the best antidote to television is indeed the Internet. In my office, I had Fox 5 News at 10 on and a web browser fired up, both close at hand. Amanda Davis was doing what anchors do these days-promoting: "In a moment we’ll have details on a breaking story, a tornado that devastated the midwest." Well, where? What? Just tell us now!
As an Audi commercial ran, I typed www.cnn.com and wham, there were the details before the first thirty second spot was over. Oh. It happened in Oklahoma (is that the midwest? Not where I come from.) And then when Fox 5 News returned, we got a folksy Doug Richards feature on Vidalia Onion beauty queens before, eventually, Russ and Amanda told us what happened to some unfortunate Oklahomans.
And I don’t mean to single out the folks on Briarcliff Road-you can play this same game watching CNN itself. With a computer at hand, you can find out about what’s happening way before a conventional newscast tells you-because they’re compelled to promote it first. They have to keep you through that break, keep you up until eleven.
What I like about getting most of my news from the Internet is the ability to go wandering for other parts of the story. CNN interactive linked the tornado story to the Daily Oklahoman’s website, where I could read someone else’s local perspective. And I could, of course, just as easily hit www.bbc.co.uk and see if a devastating storm gets any attention overseas.
If I were a news consultant weasel, I’d tell my stations that eventually, we’ve got to swing the pendulum back. We must simply tell people the news, the whole story, and give them not a clue what might be coming next. The stories would catch them totally unawares–It would be, like, news to them, each and every time.
I am comfortably numb.
Tuesday, April 27th, 1999
Can you feel it? The May sweeps—they started Thursday—are in the air, full of hyperbole, special investigations, exclusive television events, and…well, as much as the traditional nets (and their local affiliates) clamor and hype for your attention, the results at the end of May will no doubt be continuing in the trend we’ve witnessed—fewer people watching, more people drifting off to cable and satellite alternatives, more people bored by it all.
Or maybe not bored. Maybe desensitized, comfortably numb.
So why do they, the programmers, the fillers of time, bother?
Well, they’re looking at spreadsheets. They’re watching the ebb and flow of advertising revenue, of course. And as advertisers sneak off cableward in search of their audience, broadcast stations are forced to cut what they charge for advertising, and so the ebb continues.
Sign after sign points to the decline of many aspects of traditional broadcast television. News has been dumbed down and over-promoted to the point of being staggeringly repetitious and content-free. Where once Dan Rather was confidently predicting that CBS Evening News would expand to an hour, now its continued existence has been put into question.
Whole genres of entertainment are being talked about as hopelessly passé—sitcoms, for example. The idea that anyone wants to watch the antic adventures of just one more dysfunctional family is, well, laughable. "Creative" people in LA are trying to come up with the next Friends and Seinfeld just as the nonstop reruns of those two shows have us crying uncle. Oh yeah, please give us more of that same.
Sports producers are trying to hold onto dwindling audiences with gimmicky high-tech devices—virtual first-down lines, glowing pucks, and the like—as well as (again) a promotional spin that puts every ball game in the pantheon of great American battles.
Even the traditional success stories like the staggeringly expensive ER are not immune from the decline. We (as a collective people) just don’t want to sit down and make an appointment for televised anything., it seems. We aren’t much of a collective people at all these days, I find myself thinking.
And then, something happens like the Cotton Mill Fire, or the school shootings in Colorado, like the Oklahoma City bombing before it—that seems to punch through the static in a way that intangible bomb-dropping in Kosovo hasn’t.
For that, we can turn to the media, to somewhere on television, talk radio, even the newspaper, and we find that there still is, amazingly, a communal moment or two of grief, disbelief, outrage, or triumph that can be wrenched out of us.
And wrenched is the operative word, because like the kids playing Doom, I feel desensitized sometimes. There’s just so…much of it. We’re way beyond the intimacy of television, where a story about a single killing could grab us. It has to be carnage. Then we re-connect.
Reading some mail
Tuesday, April 20th, 1999
Live from a midnight flight to Las Vegas, it’s time to catch up on some old business. I’m on my way to briefly visit this week’s National Association of Broadcasters convention. It’s a gargantuan show, straining at the seams of the Las Vegas infrastructure, and if the thought of that many TV people in one place doesn’t scare you, perhaps it should. In order just to enter the convention, you have to run the gauntlet through an enormous parking lot filled with the latest in microwave and satellite trucks, jammed nose to nose with gleaming helicopters and colossal sports remote trucks, all as overlogoed as the Coke museum.
Yes, I’m descending into a fake town crammed to the gills with people whose mission is to create the continuing illusion of television, available whenever you click the remote. They’re shopping—looking for the latest digital doohickey or camera or wireless microphone or super doppler mega 2000 radar thingie, and me, I’m just browsing, meeting, and, oh yeah, recoiling in horror at the whole idea.
But I digress.
I got an email from someone at the Journal Constitution who read last week’s about the live television coverage of the Cotton Mill fire rescue, and they wondered, um, how I thought the AJC did covering the story.
Well, we don’t get the paper at home for the simple reason that I can’t bear the thought of throwing away that much ad-covered newsprint every day just to get to the actual news content. (Instead, I shamelessly and regularly scavenge for news sections at restaurants, coffee shops, airports.) I’d probably pay a premium to order the AJC Lite, where just the news sections are home-delivered, sparing me and my recycling bin the shame of wasted ink. (Would they sell it that way? I think not.)
But I digress again.
The rescue. Actually, I did get a look at the local section on Tuesday (yep, discarded out on Concourse A) , and I was pleased to note, alongside attempts where the AJC tried to be television (with huge color photos) they had some space to be a newspaper and indeed gave us some interesting background on the AFD unit that was trained for high-altitude rope work, the Mill, both historically and as a trendy development project, and on the effects of the fire on Cabbagetown in general.
The other email that gave me pause (perhaps it’s in this issue’s letters section) asked if Media Rare is just some lame local-only column because I haven’t talked about the shameful boosterism in print and on-air Kosovo coverage. Yep, true: when the US goes to war, some headline-writers and broadcast news producers get a jingoistic tingling and before you know it, it becomes we, the home team, against them, the evil empire-du-jour. But what seems to make this conflict a little different is that NATO’s deadly handiwork is under day-to-day scrutiny: we hear about bombs that went astray almost the moment they do. Yes, it can be argued that all bombing is misguided, misplaced, and deadly to the innocent, but it’s not journalism’s job to argue that case—it is, instead, to bring us reports of what all the parties are doing. Our outrage, pride, fear, anger, and horror should then be strictly grown locally, and voiced globally.
Real. Life. Drama.
Monday, April 12th, 1999
My wife walked into my office Monday afternoon and issued a terse bulletin: "The cotton mill in Cabbagetown is on fire—it’s completely ablaze. There’s a guy on a crane."
Sure enough, most of local television was on the story (although Channel 46…er, CBS Atlanta, seemed not to be paying attention.) I snapped the TV on to WXIA, and there were vivid live pictures high over a would-be huge trendy loft-complex-to-be going up like the second burning of Atlanta. We both watched transfixed as a crane operator clung for dear life as choppers were mustered for a rescue.
We witnessed most of this drama through the lens of Bruce Erion’s 11Alive Skycam, for the simple reason that when it comes to stories involving aircraft and air rescue, Erion tracks and reports the story better than anyone else. A former Vietnam chopper pilot, Erion understands the problems rescuers faced intimately, and he’s able to communicate to us Earth-bound folk in a remarkably clear, jargon-free manner. Everyone else in the air over Atlanta (with the exception of Keith Kalland, who, after all, isn’t piloting and talking) have the crippled communication skills of, well, pilots.
If WXIA had left good enough alone and stuck with their early team—Bruce talking with weatherguy Royal Norman back at the studio—they would have won the afternoon. But no, they brought in insipid reporters on the ground who didn’t seem to be tracking the information Erion and Norman had before it was their turn. We saw Bill Liss and Kevin Rowson saying absolutely nothing of interest, poorly. We saw Jennifer Leslie trying the patented consultanty "the crowd’s prayers were with the crane operator" crap.
And WXIA’s last shred of credibility disappeared when Wes Sarginson and Brenda Wood where connected live to a hoaxer—one of those Howard Stern fan-weasels—who claimed to be in charge of the mill. I tried to warn them, screaming "Hoax! Hoax!" at the TV, but, did they listen?
Meanwhile, over at WSB, the quality of ground reporting was better if only because anchor Richard Belcher and reporter Sally Sears seem to have some inkling of the history of this town. Sears reported that her vantage point in Oakland Cemetery was "roughly on the line between where the Union soldiers and where the Confederate soldiers are buried," and for a moment, this "Breaking News" event was happening someplace other than Genericville.
By my count, Fox 5’s Sharon Crowley wins the award for saying "as you can see here" the most times in succession during a live shot— sometimes four to five times in one sentence while trying to gather her thoughts. Fox 5 folk in general trotted out the phrase "raging inferno" most during the live coverage. On the other hand, they deserve big credit for having enough perspective to put together a lengthy historical piece on the mill and Cabbagetown in general. Real background information, cool!
Later Monday evening, both 20/20 and Dateline did sum-up pieces that used extensive amounts of their Atlanta affiliate’s video—with scant acknowledgement. And in a promo faux pas, nanoseconds after Dateline showed us the climatic moment, WXIA told us to "stay tuned for an amazing rescue you’ll have to see to believe…"
Uh…no thanks, we just did. In fact, by midnight, if you had a television on, you shared the experience with a whole bunch of your neighbors. It was a reminder to me that there are some kinds of "Breaking News" that can hold you riveted to your screen, connected with your fellow viewers, compelled to find out what happens next.
Pictures from my headphones
Monday, April 5th, 1999
It’s springtime in Atlanta, and the airwaves are filled with the smells of ballpark franks, Skip Caray’s aftershave, and, of course, all those turtles.
I’m walking down Highland Avenue, dodging smokers in the sunshine, NPR’s WABE in my ear in between innings of the Braves opener. Bruce Dortin reports: "Georgia has 134 miles of turtles. That is, 134 miles of coastline." Ah, we need radio of this caliber to make news operations like WSB radio’s actually seem sophisticated.
I thumbwheel my walkperson back to Newstalk 750, WSB, where you get traffic reports from a guy who has earned his psuedo-military rank under decidedly mysterious circumstances, and where reporters bellowing "depend on it" just make me nervous.
But it’s also where listening to Braves Baseball is about as close to the best of what commercial radio can be these days. Pictures actually form in one’s mind, and unlike most morning radio shows’ image-conjuring, they’re not the kind you slap your temples to eject from your skull. There are just those four familiar voices, and the aural aroma of the game. Pete’s encyclopedic perspective and Don and Joe’s insights are just gravy—I listen for Skip Caray’s distinctive cadence, laden with just how he’s feeling right now. He is, by turns, a 12-year-old kid in love with the ballpark life and a curmudgeonly old man who really doesn’t want to say it’s the Ikon Office Systems scoreboard, even if that’s what’s on the damn card.
Later the same evening, I stash the radio and force myself to stay up to watch The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn—just for…just for…just what is the point?
There, at 12:37 in the morning, when there really aren’t all that many people awake, we have Craig, the new boy. He’s wearing a Conan O’Brien pompadour, he’s sitting in a fine-veneer set that seems cobbled together from the old Greg Kinnear Later digs and where Charlie Rose sat for CBS News Nightwatch, circa 1988.
There’s a two-shot—it’s the Letterman shot, precisely. Craig waves goodbye a la Dave. Vaguely creepy music plays. I’m baffled. The overnight ratings say the timeslot’s audience hasn’t increased, but he has attracted—you guessed it younger viewers, who, I must conclude, lack the time-depth to detect the recycling of sets, hair, and ideas.
The lengths that CBS will go through to buy some young demographics seem, well, ruthlessly capitalistic. No sooner does CBS CEO Mel Karmazin again express his FCC-prohibited deep desire and longing to acquire NBC, then rumors pop up in Monday’s San Jose Mercury News that AOL would like to absorb that tasty morsel CBS.
CBS owns a heavy majority in about a zillion—okay, about 160 radio and TV stations (including Z-93, WAOK, and V-103 right here). They’ve got TNN and CMT (sewing up the country cable acronyms.) and now, in no April Fool’s joke, they shelled out something like $2.5 billion in stock last week to buy King World Productions, the syndicators of Oprah, Wheel, and Jeopardy. (How valuable will this pricy grab be after Ms. Winfrey leaves?)
And why should you care?
Visualize the classic eyeball logo. The announcer speaks: "This…is AOL."
Well, it makes me shudder.
Italic Anxiety
Monday, March 29th, 1999
When the lotto jackpot creeps up above $70 million the concept that people are buying lottery tickets suddenly drops into the brains of assignment editors and out of their mouths as if it were actual news, deserving of Dedicated Determined Team Coverage You Can Count On. Get those crews out there! Bring us those familiar pictures of hands, cash registers, money and tickets. Unleash those anchors, enabling happy talk on the order of “gee, I guess I should get my tickets. Time for sports. Bill, d’jou get your tickets yet?”
When Bill Gates cranks out another book of public relations tripe about e-mail, the Internet, and how corporations can be rejuvenated by installing Windows-based machines by the hundreds, who at Time magazine stands up and says “we should put this brilliant man on the cover”…? Did we hang onto every word of Henry Ford decades ago when his basic message was “the world will become a utopia if you buy enough of these basic black cars?” Well, hmm, maybe so.
And just when exactly did Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw discover that they were more than pretty-boy anchors—why, they’re authors, qualified to pontificate in print on the meaning of the century, or of the generation past? If they had so much extra time for authoring, why didn’t they instead snag a camera crew and go out and find some actual news?
Yes, these are just rhetorical questions. And no, don’t get me started. Uh-oh. Too late for that.
Did they hire Tom Skerritt to shill for Aleve because the guy looks like he’s in perpetual headache agony? I’m standing in front of the mirror, scrunching up like crazy, and no, I can’t make my face do that.
Is there some sort of gender thing going on when they counterprogram Ice Dancing Championships with Die Hard 2, or the Final Four with Something to Talk About?
Is Craig Kilborn going to tank as the new host of the Late Late Show because he refers to himself as “frat-guy fun” and “charming” in interviews?
If they pick Joel Siegel of Good Morning America to replace the late Gene Siskel, will we tune in one day to find Ebert’s hands around Siegel’s throat?
If the Supreme Court outlaws camera crews riding along with cops (as they kick the doors in of America’s shirtless and blurry-faced), will the Langley-Barbour series Cops be able to survive with only eleven years worth of reruns to syndicate? (or gee, will the Supremes require them to erase those tapes?) Maybe they’ll just require the producers to blur out the entire program.
When a station tells you that something is “New at 11,” what exactly do they mean? Are they operating from the NBC Zen Theory of Reruns that says (and I quote), “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you?”
Do the producers of Jeopardy! wail on Alex Trebek during commercial breaks when he’s spent too much time doing funny voices, helping out Canadian contestants, or pointing out the failings of hapless guests? (Seems to me as if right after he does that, we come back from break, and he’s much more subdued.)
And will I get my runaway italics corraled before next week?
Message reaches…audience?
Friday, March 19th, 1999
There was a brief flurry—it may well now have subsided a bit—where every Internet company, no matter what its actual business, wanted to become a portal—that place from where (they hoped) your web browser would start on its exploration of the great .com unknown. It would, they hoped, be a friendly place, customized with the news, stocks, weather, sports scores and other junk that you wanted to see—and of course serve as the search engine—even if what it was doing was linking to another portal’s search engine, so as you typed "golf clubs" in, a piece of software somewhere would make a note the person sitting at your machine, someone who lived at zip code 30324 (you told them this to get the weather) liked golf, so maybe we should be showing him or her golf ads.
It’s always fairly creepy when a banner ad pops up on my web browser showing clear evidence of an attempt to target me based on where I’m surfing—and yet that’s the Holy Grail of advertising. Message reaches audience. The folks who sponsor NASCAR know that if you’re a Dale Earnhardt fan, chances are you want to shop at a certain kind of place, and they can conclude you’d be in the market for, say, Texaco gas and motor oil.
It’d be creepier if "hyper-appropriate" ads showed up on the television show I’m watching, since there’s absolutely no feedback mechanism about what channel we’re tuned to (another reason I like over-the-air broadcast television) —although of course media buyers, the people who buy commercial time on behalf of advertisers—are trying to make similar guesses. If you’re watching "Felicity," you may want to look at this spring’s fashions from Old Navy, for example. Watching Dan Rather? You may have bladder control problems. A recent issue of Electronic Media dove a little more deeply into that paranoid place—where the execs at the older, stodgier TV networks were complaining that since media buyers were, for the most part, folks in their mid-twenties, their personal favorites are the only shows that get advertising money. An endless parade of "Dawson’s Creek"-clones, they say, will be the result. (Not likely. Scary, but not likely.)
This ability to effectively target advertising is one of the reasons big corporations are investing heavily into these all-in-one news/portal/city guide things on the web, and why we’ll be seeing more and more "local" sites that purport to give us the "ultimate" guide to Atlanta. Cox Interactive (yes, more or less the same folks who bring us the AJC and WSB) have quite a head start in this and a handful of other markets, and I give them credit—their Access Atlanta site has a healthy dose of "here" on its zillions of pages. Contrast that with atlanta.sidewalk.com, Microsoft’s extension of a service that’s seen some success in Seattle and San Francisco and some other places out west. I don’t recognize our town in its pages. It feels like a soulless, generic template generated by a server in Redmond, Washington, operating on instructions like "insert the words ‘kudzu’ and ‘grits’ every 18.5 words."
For better and worse, Atlanta’s way more subtle, complex, and inconsistent than that.
