Streaming less, enjoying it more.

Thursday, June 5th, 2003

Children we have it right here, it’s the light in my eyes. It’s perfection and grace, it’s the smile on my face. But it’s mostly me getting up early-ish in the morning and making some coffee and listening to Gaucho (in lovely AAC fidelity) on my rehabilitated Sennheiser headphones.

And where yesterday my eyes were burning—a full-fledged allergy attack, today I’m feeling mo’better, thanks.

I’m up and around and messing with Steely Dan stuff on Gordy’s birthday in anticipation of the fine new album from the fiftyish forefathers of precision rock’n’roll. I believe it’s called Everything Must Go, and for those who can’t wait five days, several tracks are on sale now at the iTunes music store.

Yeah, we use that iTunes quite a bit around here, and like many who hold true that more is more and less is less, we were a bit concerned when Apple release iTunes 4.01, which restricted the cool feature that 4.0 offered—where you could stream songs from your home machine to your work machine—or to perfect strangers across the country. It didn’t take long for developer-enthusiasts to hack together ways to actually save those streaming songs, and thus form the architecture (with Apple’s software) of yet another person-to-person sharing system.

This of course would raise the hackles of copyright fanatics like the RIAA, and would probably engender a lawsuit that could do anything from close Apple’s music store to putting the whole damn company finally out of business.

So Apple closed the loophole, and after taking a deep breath, I downloaded and installed the update that incorporated those changes.

So we stream merrily throughout out house (or if you park out in front), but beyond our subnet, it’s no go. And I can live with that. In fact, I think it’s only prudent, because I want reasonable e-commerce to survive and thrive—especially e-commerce that gives artists a goodly share of the profit. I like the 99 cent per song model. I like the fact you can buy songs a la carte. I like that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) system imposed is not draconian—it allows you to have these songs on all the burnt CDs and all the iPods you want—and it allows you to have the music on up to three computers.

Fair enough for 99 cents. And most importantly: it’s yours. it won’t go away if Apple does.

There’s a report that Apple is holding some sort of event today or tomorrow that is likely to announce a deal with a bunch of indie labels—and again, count me in, that’s great.

Filed 22 years ago

Whoah!

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2003

Okay, in no particular order.

First of all, as one of those geeky people behind the scenes, I’m charmed and pleased that Keanu Reeves has given 50 million pounds (82-ish million dollars) to…no, not charity exactly, but to the effects crew of The Matrix Reloaded! Yes, that’s something like 1.5 million apiece…from an actor who, well yes, was considerably…shall we say augmented?…by this crew’s efforts.

So, wow! It does pay to labor away patiently in the background, carefully arranging row after row of well-behaved pixels. or it pays to work with Keanu. or maybe it pays not to make him look like too much of a goofball when he’s swinging around on a pole, slamming 12,370 Agent Smiths back into each other and various hard surfaces.

I’m beard-free these days, did I mention that? It kinda feels like I have spidey-sense, especially outdoors.

Y’know, when I started this thing eight years ago, it was definitely pre-blog, and I was definitely a proponent of having one ‘article’ on the home page, with previous remarks close at hand. Now, this week I’ve just shoved Tuesday’s entry–a lame effort at best–down. Will I blog-ize this thing? It remains to be seen…I think it come down to convenience and ease-of-use.

Mine, not yours. Sorry…

Filed 22 years ago

Dampened normality.

Monday, May 19th, 2003

Well, when we complained about how dry it’s been, when we bemoaned the low lake levels and felt for the rural Georgia farmers just one scant year ago, we definitely weren’t expecting this deluge (aprés-moi).

But here we sit, soggy and hacking up some sorta moldy allergy cough that won’t quite go away, watching a stream of tiny black ants parade along the wall where the windowsill has leaked water where it wasn’t supposed to.

It’s been rainy.

It’s been very, very rainy. And as is the fashion in this age where everything is talked about and dealt with in extremes, the stories on the news are all about inundated crops and earthen dams failing and sewers clogged across town.

I mean, ye gads, if it isn’t one thing, it’s the extreme other.

And in and around it all, life goes on, comfortably and quietly enough. Sam’s cranking on a journal article and we’re making plans for a midsummer trip to Oaxaca, where she’ll do some work in the mountain highlands and I’ll spend some time alongside, at altitude, scribbling notes, typing in the Powerbook, and maybe shooting some video that’ll resemble some cable documentary on archaeostuff.

Last weekend, we went down to Jekyll Island for the Society for Georgia Archaeology
conference, where, to my surprise, self-styled penurious archaeologists who would never, never
give up their tightly-clutched slide carousels were there slapping up cluttered powerpoint presentations on the big screen using pricy presentation projectors which were paid by, well, someone.

I think a tide has turned, and where I of course vastly prefer the image control and typographic beauty of Apple’s Keynote application, the standard name that has become the nearly generic term (a la ‘Kleenex’ or ‘Xerox’) is, of course, PowerPoint, from the evil Microsoft corporation. So I’ll lowercase it: powerpoint, in hopes of helping that process along. At any rate, when Rank Amateurs Who Aren’t Designers Go Wrong and toss up images cluttered with way too many photos, reduced to tiny squares on the screen, I find myself nostalgic for the old days of nice simple photographs, presented as slides.

So in the interest of making a contribution, I offer here a quick bulletpoint list of things to do and to avoid:

• If you have a nice image, show it off. Make it huge on the screen.
• If the image needs help, crop it tightly to the relevant content. This goes for photos or tables or anything that is reduced in the image. Remove borders and margins on reduced images, but…
• …maintain a border (in TV we call it a ‘safe title area’) of no content around your entire graphic. Stuff should not be positioned at the edges.
• It’s better to go through several large easy to read graphs, images, or lists than to be forced to parse one compound graphic with all kindsa stuff displayed at once.
• The graphic is up there to lead your audience through information–not to serve as notes and structure for you. Put up one thing at a time, instead of displaying a huge and complex outline all at once in tiny type.
• Use downstyle capitalization on all your text–including headlines. Capitalize it like you’d write a sentence.
• Resist the urge to be cute. Humor is OK, but ‘cute’ isn’t.
• Don’t use the standard yellow text color Microsoft suggests. Make it peachier or orangier. trust me on this one.

Okay, I feel better now. Great folks, important content, but ye gads, I beheld some powerpoints that besmote my eyes.

Hope you have a dry(er) week.

Filed 22 years ago

Cool tools for cool times.

Monday, May 12th, 2003

This is one of those sections that if I don’t keep it current, it ends up sounding pathetically, hopelessly outdated—darn quickly, too.

Not long after I started this site, back in May of 1995 (!) I was able to proudly write:

Well, I have high hopes for this section too, But for the moment, suffice to say that I use a Macintosh, in fact a DayStar Genesis MP 800, which is four 200mHz PowerPC604e chips running more-or-less together, and I’ve got something like 200 MB of RAM.

This is way too much power, of course.

Way too much power!? What the hell was I thinking!? Well, okay, it was impressive at the time. Impressively loud, too. And it did a great job of keeping the office warm on winter days. And at the time, it was a pioneering machine in terms of its multiprocessor abilities. And the folks at the dear departed DayStar in Flowery Branch, Georgia built the thing like a Soviet tank…so much so that when someone broke into our house, he just stepped from the window right onto the Genesis—using it like a stepstool…way too heavy to steal.

What’s funny is that the core collection of my cool Mac tools remains the same since those early times. Only the version numbers have changed to protect the innocent.

First and foremost, Adobe After Effects, of which I’ve been an ardent supporter since it was a modest application from a company called CoSA. It is now, in brief, the ultimate desktop compositing program, and responsible for more of the television placed in front of your nose than you could possibly imagine. Back in 1998 or 1997 or so I wrote this about After Effects 3.1. It’s almost up to version 6.0 as we approach the summer of 2003..

Then, of course, there is the legendary Adobe Photoshop, the amazing paint program (okay, an image manipulation program) that put Quantel’s paintbox (priced at $170,000 US in 1984) to shame. In January of 1990 I wrote this about the future of video—and although I didn’t foresee After Effects, I did think Photoshop was just around the corner. And I’m proud to say that I used Photoshop-created images in my graphics and animation just about as early as anyone. Yes, I think there has bees some dilution of the pure Photoshop paradigm (particularly when you consider this as a video tool), but I’m hopeful that the pendulum will swing towards mo’better with Photoshop 8.

To complete the Adobe trifecta, I use Illustrator, not because it’s necessarily better than Macromedia’s Freehand, but it is better integrated and plays better with its Adobe brethern.

For 3d animation, I use Electric Image, even though it’s been bought and sold and bought again and sold again and, well, horribly mismanaged. it remains about the fastest Phong renderer on the planet. That works out fine for me. I bought a copy of Lightwave to work collaboratively with my brother, a true Lightwave master, but

And I use all of these, still on a Mac—but now it’s a dual 800 mHz Quicksilver model with 1.5 GB of RAM and almost 200 GB of storage, when all of the firewire drives are plugged in. Sammy has my hand-me-down 500 mHz G4 (jeez, with only one processor), with 892 MB of RAM and something like 100 gigabytes of online disk storage. And my sister Leslie has taken Sammy’s hand-me-down Blue and White 500mHz G3.

For portability, we’ve got a 500 mHz Titanium powerbook—hardly state of the art, but still fine as a travel partner and a walk-around-the-house reference tool. Data flies into, out of, through and around the place via an Earthlink DSL connection and Apple’s Airport.

Amazingly, this is by no means a state-of-the-art setup—Sammy and I both have, for example, a strange dual hybrid of digital LCD displays (beautiful, crisp, clean) and clunky fading RGB monitors—17 inchers, all. One of each per person.

And thus we await the new Apple processors—the 970s—with bated breath. DDR RAM without any bus speed bottlenecks? Wow.

Six years or so on from being the first to use DV video for actual broadcast television (in 1997), we still use Sony and Panasonic’s DV, DVCAM, and DVCPRO stuff slammed in and out of our machines via Firewire like crazy.

Still kinda feels like way too much power. What the hell am I thinking?

Filed 22 years ago

Old words considered.

Friday, April 26th, 2002

Spring has come and summer, if I were to be honest, has already made more than one cameo appearance. It’s the end of April, the big birthday month, containing not only my birthday, but friends Tom and Steve and Susan and Sammy’s dad and more than one child of some of those selfsame friends. Happiest of birthdays, all. Thanks for your good thoughts and thoughtful gifts.

It was also the month for the big mass-production (heh) of first communions at the Greendale, Wisconsin catholic church attended by my godson, Patrick Michael Mulvey and his family. This was a fine excuse to grab a moderately cheap Delta ticket and zip up to a beautiful springtime weekend which was just a tad cooler by the lake. Nancy and Alan and Kate drove up from Fort Wayne, and we generally made a party of it. Beyond the ceremony itself, which was this modernist affair of kids in suits and..uh..wedding dresses swooping banners and tambourines through the aisles, some sort of croutons instead of wafers, and surprisingly well-performed music, there was we three who went to school together—myself, Nancy, and Deb, all products of an idealistic post-Watergate J-school bulge that continues to surprise me with a large number of, well, employed people who write, talk, preen, and pontificate for a living.

I think I’m long past any aspirations of getting paid for my words—although you never know what I might cobble together in my dotage.

But words are certainly one principal commonality we Ohio University survivors continue to share. For Nancy and I, it’s never been in dispute: Deb’s the most natural, gifted writer…and I’ll tell you that Nancy’s talents are not only in her wisdom and style, but in her energy and enthusiastic output. She started a website hereabouts a year or so ago and challenged herself with weekday updates—at a time when my public words seemed to trickle down to a sad silence. Nancy’s gift to us all has done so much to bridge the miles between Fort Wayne and wherever else her friends have been flung. It truly is like a cup of coffee with her every weekday.

My words, in comparison, have always been so damn meta, words about words, words about the periphery of emotions, words about not quite the point. And that was reinforced when Deb on Friday night brought a thick hanging file full of my words to their dining room table. Thank goodness I had a bottle of Milwaukee’s finest to steady my nerves as Ms. Mulvey led me through an examination of the various letterhead, wire copy, and scraps of found writing surface that I covered with IBM selectric-script.

Oh, man. Page after painful page of uncamouflaged emotional immaturity, trend-flirtation, obsession, self-deprecation, and the always popular low self esteem. There it was, the permanent record I only fuzzily realized might exist somewhere, somehow, in my amazingly confessional letters to Deb over the years—from my unemployment right out of school in Columbus, Ohio, circa 1978, through the early days in Atlanta right up to my marriage (which seems to have been analyzed more in phone calls than letters.)

Let’s be frank: I really did some stupid things, and some of those things I did more than once. I was suprisingly insensitive when a co-worker (many years ago) confessed her attraction to me. I was surprisingly naive just about every other moment of my social existence. And I was surprisingly obsessed with buying a good typewriter when I was making minimum wage. A couple of the pages were painful enough that Deb and I turned away simultaneously with a shared "Ewwww."

I’d like to think, typing to you know, that a powerful message about emotional growth and not repeating old mistakes was reinforced there a couple of weeks ago in Milwaukee—let’s just see, shall we, what kind of choices I end up making now?

Here’s to your wise choices. Put that folder away again, Ms. Deb, at least for a while.

Filed 23 years ago

…so you better get this party started.

Thursday, February 7th, 2002

“I’m coming up,” snarls Pink, “so you better get this party started.” I’m feeling increasingly disconnected from the pop culture mainline, so a line like this just sort of rattles around in my brain, failing to find any referents to cling to. Pink makes it clear right in her song that she cares less, if I don’t like it I can kiss her ass.

Well.

The only reason I mention Ms. Pink is that I spent a half-hour or so of my life—unrecoverable—watching an MTV ‘Diary’ of the pop star. Diary—the show where the slogan is “You think you know me. You don’t know anything.” I learned from this show that this young woman is an earnest artist, who, her drivers’ license will reveal, is named Alecia Moore. She spent quite a while talking about how exciting it was to be working with a producer who is an older woman, a legend in the business, and, sorry, I’ve never heard of her, either! Linda Perry, from 4 Non Blondes. Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell.

So yes, in the empty cobwebbed alcoves of my brain, Pink is indeed M!ssundaztood. Good luck with those spelling (typing?) classes.

Meanwhile, my pop culture quotient is even lower than usual because I can’t chat about Super Bowl spots with my friends—Sammy and I went to see ‘Lord of the Rings’ instead, and were better off for the experience, I think. If nothing else, the movie made me want to visit New Zealand, and it made me wonder whether in the zillions of sword-clangin’ fight scenes, whether director Peter jackson had the sense of humor to get Lucy Lawless into one shot, way in the background, a cameo like R2D2’s in Close Encounters.

It’s a cold, rainy week in Atlanta, and we have lame ratings book television to look forward to, the Olympics, and of course the combo Lincoln’s Birthday/Dad’s Birthday/Valentine’s Day holiday that kinda just confuses me.

Stay warm, stay happy.

Filed 24 years ago

Thousand steps journey, begun (again?)

Saturday, January 19th, 2002

Welcome back to an ancient, battered website, long-neglected, oft-patched, a collection of web-published stuff that dates back to the very dawn of the web (way, way back to 1995!), and is, thanks to some compulsive web-noodling over the weekend, slowly converting over to what folks who do this for a living say is the only true zen cool way to structure a website. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, even though you behold a very basic looking page, beneath the hood it is a sleek, table-free CSS layout extravaganza, loved and endorsed by validation engines everywhere.

It is, in actual fact, simply a cleaner, faster-loading form of web design that keeps all the content in one document (the index.html page you’re reading now) while stashing all the cool design stuff–no, I mean all of it–in a Cascading Style Sheet document. Ah, the web ideal, the “semantic web,” they call it.

So all I have to do, having noodled the stylesheet to within an inch of its life, is to sit down and convert the huge pile of old pages to this new format–and then (ah, the payoff), in theory, never have to convert them again, making design changes as simple as messing with one document.

But of course, once you get started, you have to do the job the whole way, and I haven’t yet. For example, the content on more than half of these links on the left needs to be updated, big-time, and when exactly am I going to get around to that? And after that, well, what about jcbd.com? And what about…oh, jeez. What have my compulsions wrought?

Well, for me, it is something new to understand. Perhaps something worth staying up until three am for…perhaps not. And given my current work-schedule, I suppose…well, no, I think sleep is important. It’s just that there’s that magical moment when you hit save and it shows up out there, for all the world to see and..well, yes, it is three am.

Maybe time to finish things up and add to this page tomorrow, just like one of those newfangled blogs the kids are talking about.

Okay, it is tomorrow–or later today, and it’s lunchtime, and instead of getting in there to enjoy some perfectly fine leftover Savage Pizza, I’m adding a thought or two.

Some credit where it’s due–I was inspired to get going on revamping the internals of this site by looking at Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden, which shows dramatically what can be done when you have all the pretty stuff controlled by a CSS (a Cascading Style Sheet.) Switch out the CSS, and zowie wowie, the appearance of the page looks completely absolutely different–while the content stays steadfastly and resolutely the same. I was also impressed with the cleanth (that’s an old TBS jargon-piece meaning “cleanliness”) of whatdoiknow.org, the journal of mac-based web designer Todd Dominey, who apparently does his work about ten blocks from here. Small planetoid, eh?

Filed 24 years ago

One year (off.)

Saturday, January 19th, 2002

The last entry on this site was January 18…2001, so if you’re reading this page right now, you have either stumbled here by accident or you have a strange masochistic streak that causes you to check in to see a site that hasn’t changed for, well, just exactly twelve months.

What has changed in twelve months? Ha…you have to ask? Well, last time I wrote for this site, Bill Clinton was enjoying his final hours in office. There was some sense that the economy might be weakening…and, oh yeah, I was about to begin a year of work on developing a news graphics automation system with Time Warner that would involve frequent trips to New York City…and on several trips I’d be staying at a very nice Embassy Suites across from the World Trade Center.

Whew.

Since then, well, we’ve all lived…and learned. And have I had the gumption to journal any of this last roller-coaster twelve months? Well, no. If you’re looking for gumption, you’ll have to check out Nancy’s web page, now..hmm..just over a year old. (Maybe I was just abashed by her facility with this medium. Nah, it was something else.)

So. Twelve months later. And I still don’t have anything that profound to say.

I’ve got lots of work. I’m enjoying working with my brother on most of this. And, oh yeah, Sammy still hasn’t finished her dissertation.

So what else is new?

Filed 24 years ago

Professional driver on closed course.

Thursday, January 18th, 2001

So…when did PI spots come back? PI spots, also known as ‘direct response’ spots, are those annoying commercials, often for ‘best of’ albums, which chop together even the most recent hits into an easily purchasable CD. I thought MP3s were supposed to wipe this scourge off the face of the earth! Ah, the promise of the Internet, so much is possible, so much hasn’t quite made it here yet.

So..it’s been three months plus since my last update–forgive me readers, for I have neglected–what do I have to say for myself? I guess I could explain the convoluted Le Mans course that is the meander-path of my life. I guess I could talk about the boom and bust cycles of the internet, and make a case for hunkering down during tough times.

But naah, it’s just that my attention has been elsewhere. Good thing I don’t have a weekly column to write–I mean what kind of mess would I have made of that?

Besides, others have shown up full of that new-new-thing enthusiasm for having a personal website, part journal, part weblog, part confessional.

Now it’s the very last of the twilight of the Clinton era, the true dawn of a new millenium, and I’m sitting here in my comfy chair, up past my bedtime, trying to crank on a document I promised my friends at AOL Time Warner…uh..earlier this evening. I know what I want to say, it’s all swirling around in my head, but no, what did I choose to do? Work on this.

There’s practically an infinity of things I could free-associate about–from the latest spins of Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field (yes, I think the new macs are cool, but don’t I always?) to the problems our Explorer had with its clutch during our subzero Christmas visit to Indianapolis. I could talk about our Airport-networked Powerbook and how it becomes the morning paper at our breakfast table. I could talk about our new old car (with 140,000 miles on it) or the most recent film we’ve seen (set in Vermont, shot in Massachusetts!?) or how we spent our New Year’s Day (allez cuisine!)

But it’s late, and I digress. And this is just the place to do it.

Since my earliest days flailing away in the service of journalism at the Ohio University Post until four in the morning (on a school night!) I’ve had great respect (and have identified with) those who did that for a living on television. ABC’s World News Now has had quite a run now (uneven though it may be) of producing eccentric yet responsible TV shows under the influence of caffeine and a full moon. I proudly display my WNN coffee, tea, or soup mug in my office.

But the program that started it all—the one that truly is my favorite—is the fabled NBC News Overnight, hosted by Linda Ellerbee, Lloyd Dobyns, and later, Bill Schechner. I could go on for quite some time about the details of the show, and hum for you the distinctive waterfowlesque theme song, but fortunately, someone else has already gone to the trouble. This show got me through more late nights of cranking television than it probably is safe to admit. I salute them again.

Filed 25 years ago

Kielbasa and walruses, of course.

Saturday, September 9th, 2000

Just your average Southern pre-autumnal Saturday evening, as the Braves drag out an Expos game into the 11th inning. The sound of Van Wieren and Sutton is as much a background noise this time of year as the ceiling fans. It was a warm day again, although earlier this week we had a couple of days of Pacific Northwest weather, which was a treat. A couple of days in the mist. Aaaah!

Sammy and I enjoyed a quiet evening at home, which began with a homecooked turkey kielbasa and brussels sprouts…um, stir-fry, I think. It was good—I’m the frequent beneficiary of Sam’s experiments in multicultural cookin’.

We watched Iron Chef (allez cuisine!), and punched back and forth between that, a National Geographic Explorer on walruses, and the Braves on Turner South. As I said, kind of the usual, and for us, on a night like this, that’s a good thing.

We’re getting ready for a sojurn north, later this month, to see the fall leaves (and the people we care about who live among them), and we’ve heard reliable reports that it will be sweater weather by the time we get up there—but here again, we have the sun and the warm moist heat.

Just thinking about the weather (or not thinking of anything of consequence), as the evening draws to a close.

Filed 25 years ago

It was 20 years ago today…

Thursday, June 1st, 2000

Well, I know where I was on June 1, 1980…sitting in the comfortable blast of the air conditioning in the remote truck off to the side of a still-under-construction 1050 Techwood Drive. My job: graphics guy–I ran a Vidifont IV character generator, capable of a stunning 8 different colors and two different typefaces. What we were covering: well, in a certain sense, it was ourselves. Our TBS crew was airing the speeches and hoopla that surrounded the first day of CNN, the Cable News Network.

Weeks before, I had written and helped produce a sales tape that purported to explain what this twenty-four hour news channel would be like; it was filled with smoke and mirrors and hope. Twenty years later, the images (seen above) seem incredibly primitive and speculative. How young we all were.

Out there on an Atlanta sunny afternoon, 20 years ago, Ted Turner spoke to a crowd of dignitaries and reporters who included my friend Nancy Nall, down from Columbus, Ohio to cover the event. Ted told the crowd that the channel was signing on now, and not signing off until the end of the world. (That seems to indicate that the world has, in fact, not ended.) He said “to act upon one’s convictions while others wait; to create a positive force in a world where cynics abound; to provide information to people when it wasn’t available before; to offer those who want it a choice…I dedicate the news channel for America, the Cable News Network.”

Then the cameras panned to the “dish farm” of a dozen or so satellite dishes off to the side of the converted country club, someone pushed a button, and we threw control to “the pit” downstairs–and CNN was on the air. Dave Walker and Lois Hart said “Good evening, here’s the news,” and told the world about Jimmy Carter’s visit to Indiana to check on the condition of Vernon Jordan, who had been shot. Yes, the same Jordan who, as a Clinton confidante, procured a job for Monica Lewinsky. The wheel rolls, the world turns, and CNN grinds out the news, ironic or otherwise.

Here’s the Quicktime video of the first moments of CNN on their site.

I went to a commemorative breakfast this morning down at CNN and the Omni Hotel and listened to CNN President Tom Johnson and that other President, Jimmy Carter talk about CNN’s power and force as a global disseminator of information. At the next table, Ted Turner, Gerald Levin, and Steve Case sat with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Some big names there in honor of a news operation that couldn’t buy respect, let alone comprehension a couple of decades ago.

Later in the atrium of CNN Center, I watched the CNNers–many of whom were in their first jobs out of college–reunite with hugs and photos. Many of the familiar on-air faces–anchors like Marcia Ladendorff, Bill Zimmerman, and Don Miller were there, looking like the first crew of MTV VJs–somewhat anachronistic, our of place, but reassuringly familiar. Around them, writers, producers, directors, “video journalists”–these folks laid the foundation for Ted Turner’s success,and who were and are a big reason Turner Broadcasting System became a jewel of the AOL-TimeWarner media empire. I applaud CNN’s “Originals,” the folks who pioneered, who did 24 hour news first.

Filed 25 years ago

In memory yet red, green, blue, and alpha.

Monday, May 22nd, 2000

Boy, I step away from here for a few months to get some work done, and…everything’s changed.

Hello on an early Monday morning, not far from Memorial Day, a day of no real significance to me based on family traditions, although the other day over a beer at George’s around the corner, my father mentioned that he’d of course be back up in Ohio that weekend to visit the cemetaries at Kinsman and Gustavus.

I said "Of course," not really knowing exactly who is buried where. I know his father and mother–my grandparents–are up there somewhere, but like so many things about his life, I’ve let the details bounce off me like so many tired soap bubbles.

We’re going up to see my brother and his family on Memorial Day weekend, now that a visit to see them is no longer as simple as a quick drive down to Inman Park. And although they live in the city where large cars race in a circle for half a thousand miles every Memorial Day weekend, I think we’ll be doing something a lot more benign–like grilling.

Right before that, we’ll be visiting and wishing a happy 80-something to Sammy’s mother, which means a couple of pleasant days up at the ranch house where my wife grew up, out in front of her father’s diversion-slash-masterwork, a garden that probably qualifies as a farm under government regulations.

We just got back from hearing Michelle Shocked (and her Mood Swingers) in concert. A quick search of web pages after we got back reveals an artist’s life of almost unbelievable pain and hardship, followed by the complications of celebrity and the agonies of dealing with the record industry. Seems like all of that got poured out at the Variety Playhouse last night in one form or another. While there, I picked up a couple of copies of the last Atlanta Press. The paper’s own obituary. A few days ago Patrick Best, the editor emailed me and asked for a few last words. They didn’t make it into the pages, although they are here.

Meanwhile, life’s rich drama continues. I’ll spare you the details, this time, but suffice to say there are some sad plot twists in the novel that is the lives of the people I know.

It’s a rainy night, and the humidity is thick in our town, promoting the sort of southern desquidado that wrings words out of the likes of Williams and Welty, Faulkner and Dickey. Me, I just want to get my work done and get some sleep. Of late, my dreams have been overflowing and my work output has been…well, less so.

Gotta go, gotta write. Good night.

Filed 25 years ago

Folding up shop.

Wednesday, May 17th, 2000

My wife, as usual, made the cogent comment: “if a newspaper sells enough advertising, it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is, right?”Right. Exactly. Because after all, the first amendment has always uncomfortably shared a bed with the capitalist ethic in this country. You raise money to publish, or you perish. There are a couple of other newspapers in town, one weekly, one daily that stay fat and happy because of the success of large advertising staffs. Congratulations to them. But do their ad-filled pages mean that the people of Atlanta seek them out for the best that journalism can be?
Before you answer that, sit back a second and consider a few other questions. Is Atlanta a place like Austin, Seattle, or Boston, where weekly papers can thrive with a mix of controversy and commerce? Do we live in a place where we clamor for more sources of information? Or are we complacent enough to passively take whatever is placed in front of our eyes and ears?
When a paper folds, when a bookstore closes, when an eclectically-programmed radio station goes off the air, we all lose.
This week you lose more than a home for the chronicles of the growth of Hollis’s baby and the deterioration of Chris’s liver. You lose a place to hear voices—yours, your neighbors, ours, those of people you disagree with. It’s up to you to fill the gap with something more than Friends reruns and Lottery Coverage You Can Count On.
Read—or write—a book. Talk back to your newspaper. Grab a camera and put your own ideas on videotape.
I’m listening.

Filed 25 years ago

No matter where you go,

Tuesday, March 14th, 2000

I’ve got a long letter in the works right now to the consumer affairs department of Continental Airlines following a massive screwup that started with me booking a ticket on their website—or so I thought. It’s the kind of mess that probably should have me calling in Clark Howard or some other consumer reporter, but at this point I’m trying to deal with it myself.
I mention it to you only because it involves the latest trend when old-line companies want to move fast to develop an on-line internet presence. If they can’t figure out how to do it fast, they outsource—hiring an outside expert company to process the transaction or provide the help or implement the search engine or whatever—all in the name of the hiring company.
We are indeed in an age that you can’t assume you’re dealing with employees of company x when you do business with company x—especially when services are involved. Get cable installed, and likely as not, the installer is not a Media One employee, they’re a subcontractor. Same deal with DSL service from Mindspring. Call and talk to the subscription department of a magazine (and many newspapers), and chances are that person doesn’t have any real connection to that publication—they’re off in Marion, Ohio or someplace else and they’re working from a script—telling you what they’ve been told to say. This is the crux of my problem with outsourcing. The people you’re dealing with often don’t have any expertise outside the narrow window of what they’ve been asked to do—and if you really need help with a transaction, it tends to involve departments and dependencies way outside their scripted, limited
When I booked the ticket on Continental, I was actually booking a ticket from cooltravelassistant.com, which as far as I’ve been able to determine, actually is a operation run by the folks at expedia.com, which used to be part of Microsoft, but they’ve spun it off, and by the way, they’re based here. And every time I talked with someone at that operation, they answered the phone “Continental Airlines”—but when I asked who were they—really—I got different answers each time I asked. And then the Continental people, who said “well, we can’t help you because these folks are not really us at all, so you’ll have to go through them to make the changes.”
But I digress. And rant. And worry.
But yeah, it is a concern when I see new companies cropping up all the time like liveperson.com, which offers to give your site a real human your customers can chat with, live—but those real humans are, like the other service droids, trapped within scripts as well, playing the part of being part of the organization you think you’re doing business with. Yes sir, I am indeed the voice of AT&T!
And when CBSAtlanta..er..WGNX puts together a site that is basically hosted by CBS in New York with some local content, or when some of the pages at 11alive.com are actually from NBC’s corporate sites, the questions of who is responsible for what content—who stands behind what goes out under their logo—become increasingly relevant.
I guess I don’t care who you outsource stuff to—as long as you—the main company, the mothership—are willing to take full responsiblility for the actions of those others. You don’t get away with “well, actually that’s some other company.” You pretend—in certain contexts—they’re your company, you stand up for their mistakes, too.
Phew. Where’s Clark’s number?

Filed 26 years ago

Lost within the JourCon Newstapes.

Monday, March 6th, 2000

A recent Wired brought us the success story of Times Digital, the soon-to-be-independent arm of The New York Times. Under the command of Martin Niesenholtz, they were able to bring the oldest and most venerable of old media—the great gray lady of New York—into our new age. The Times site is everything a newspaper of the future should be—comprehensive, intelligently organized, easy to use, innovative, up-to-date, and, oh, yeah, profitable.So when I think about all the energy that’s been expended down on Marietta Street in the name of creating a presence for the AJC and their sister broadcasting operations, I applaud their efforts and ponder their failure.
I think a big part of what’s behind this digital mess is the underlying fear of all traditional publishers: the new media will gut the old. If we put all our good stuff out on the web, people won’t buy the dead-tree version. If we build it too well, too many people will come.
Interestingly, the Times succeeds at this in spite of erecting a gateway between the world at large and the wealth of its content. They make you register, but it’s perfunctory, non-intrusive: can we have your name and e-mail and zipcode once in exchange for a cookie? Thanks, go on in. Once inside, it’s a unified, sensible, deep site. They’ve got some basic demographic information, and a very desirable audience to sell to advertisers. And they do it by placing ads beside articles you really want to read.
The Cox Interactive folk took a different approach. They created “AccessAtlanta”, an entity that is confusingly an umbrella for the AJC, and WSB TV and Radio (and their other radio stations)—and yet independent of all of them; vaguely commercial and untrustworthy, and despite some apparent depth of content once you start exploring, the place feelslike it’s an inch deep—a creation of the sales department. AccessAtlanta comes off like the online equivalent of those unwanted roto ad inserts that clog the arteries of the Sunday paper.
So they plop this wannabe portal—in between us and the real content providers—the paper and the stations. But once you struggle to the ajc.com page, you’ll find it links to some stuff that’s “really” from the paper and then these entities called ‘News@tlanta’ and ‘Biz@tlanta’ and the ‘X-site’ and then there’s ‘Today’s Paper’ and ‘Today’s Read’ (which isn’tthe same as ‘Today’s Paper’) and—excuse me, I just want to find the damn front page!
All this fast-shuffle seems to do is keep us from getting at the information we want. No, I’m not saying that they’re not offering full-length articles from the paper—the multipart piece on Atlantans driving way, way too fast (there’s breaking news!) was dumped into the site one day at a time, in sync with the printed AJC, more or less. Jim Auchmutey’s multipart history of Peachtree Street got this treatment, too. But there seems to be some of the paper here, and some there, as if a virtual dog knocked it off our coffee table and scattered the sections willy-nilly before we had a change to get to them all. How do we know which stories will be in Biz@tlanta and which will be in the Business section of ‘Today’s Paper’? How much overlap is there? Do we need to read both to get the whole picture? There is no reliable place—that I’ve found, at least—to give us that information.
Wanna search? The ‘Today’s Paper’ part offers something called the Stacks Archive, (a page in dark green and blue) which lets you search the paper from 1985 to present—but you have to pay to read the full-text of an article. If you start from ajc.com though, you have to click on different-looking button labeled “Look it up” and then you’re…uh…kinda at the Stacks Archive, but with different colors and typography, a different gateway to the same search.
Try that search from an AccessAtlanta page, however, and you’re off in a whole different realm—they’re offering you a search of their “Best Atlanta Sites” which contains none of the newspaper content at all. If the AJC wrote an article about one of these places, there’s no link or connection to it. But hey, they’ve got chat rooms!
Then…go to the classifieds. These show up on a page called atlantaclassifieds.com, but appear under the banner of AccessAtlanta, followed by another logo for ajcclasifieds.com and a third, sub-logo that says “a product of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution” and a fourth tiny dude that says “powered by Thomson Interactive Media.”
So who’s on first, again?
You see why I keep getting lost? I’ve got to keep that dog away from the coffee table, or I may never make it out of this site.

Filed 26 years ago

One mugging, courtesy of Fox.

Sunday, February 27th, 2000

Did you hear? Fox 5’s Russ Spencer got mugged the other day. In fact, he flew out to Los Angeles to join a dozen or so other Fox anchors—all of whom were attacked by muggers—as a stunt for the Fox series America’s Most Wanted.
Spencer, fully miked and accompanied by a camera crew, was roughed up by a gun-toting guy in a parking lot. It was, we were told, an important educational experience that we could all learn from. Uh…right. What did he learn from it? "Pay attention to the guy with the gun," Spencer says. What did we learn from it? That there’s no limits to how low Fox will go for ratings. But I guess that isn’t exactly a bulletin, after their most recent audience-grabbing stunt blew up in the Fox-faces.
Oh, you know: that marrying a multimillionaire show. A concept that got so out of hand that right-wing Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch’s own New York Post ran a column from a conservative staffer who said he was worried that the Fox network may not be upholding good conservative values these days in an effort to boost ratings. These days? I’m FedExing him 920 episodes of Married With Children, with a post-it note stuck to the top: "Good conservative values? You’re soaking in it!"
The truth is that Murdoch has never had any compunctions about pandering to sex or exhibiting general salaciousness when it comes to selling newspapers or hustling TV audiences. His English tabloids have had bare-breasted Brit babes just inside the cover for years.
When Fox discovered that a series of specials with names like America’s Deadliest Police Chases ,World’s Most Terrifying Crashes and When Animals Attack! were cheap to produce and pulled huge audiences, well, they went with that flow, and didn’t spend too much time agonizing over moral questions.
So when complaints about the programs’ violent nature hit too close to home, they did what the network seems to do best—they backpedaled, and said they wouldn’t be doing that kind of stuff anymore. And they went to (this amazes me) the very same producers who gave them the car crash stuff and said "we need more sweeps specials from you—but uh…this time make them completely nonviolent."
I guess you have to say the producers of Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire were just doing what they were charged to do—they came up with a compelling concept that would glue people’s faces to the screen—in spite of themselves. Compelling indeed—some 16 million people watched the show—including one out of every four young women. Viewers—we—talked about the show for a big chunk of this month, and ABC made ratings hay by sending Diane Sawyer and friends out to get the story behind the story. One word to sum the whole experience up, Darva? "Oops," she told Diane.
And when the furor over Multimillionaire flared, Fox said they were shocked, shocked and they’ve canceled plans to do anything like that again. I can picture Fox execs on the phone to those same producers: "Alright, no violence, and no poorly-researched instant bridegrooms, but beyond that, the sky’s the limit—get back out there and get us some numbers!"
Air it first, apologize later, and then go back to the drawing board and try something else. The Fox pattern.
But you’ve got to wonder when that same pattern makes its way into the newsrooms of the Fox owned-and-operated stations—like Channel 5. What happened inside Spencer’s head when his news director said "Pack your bags, Russ, you’re going to LA!" Visions of exclusive interviews with Hollywood celebs or campaigning politicians were no doubt shattered when he got the rest of it: "Something violent is going to happen to you, on camera. We can’t tell you any specifics at this point."
At one point (back in the ancient past), journalists were trained to have a loud alarm go off in their heads when they’re presented with an "opportunity" like this. Credibility alert! Psuedo-news warning! Danger, danger!
Maybe Russ has something in his contract that says "you are required to go along with any idiotic thing we come up with for sweeps." We’ll never know for sure. But I’d like to know whether those alarms went off inside his skull, even faintly. You know…the same alarms that were supposed to go off for the Multimillionaire producers. The alarms that should be clanging nonstop inside Rupert Murdoch’s head. And in ours, when we tune in.

Filed 26 years ago