Tynan's Anger

Mark Cuban has this to say in terms of the news cycle for a celebrity controversy:

Of course, the constant chase of headlines can create misery for those people being chased, but it has lead to a rule of thumb that offers a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone under media scrutiny. The life of a story in this media world is 3 weeks. Not 2 weeks and 6 days, and not 3 weeks and 1 day. 3 Weeks. For anyone who is getting attention they would not like, if you can just deal with it, and not generate any new news or stories about yourself, than all the attention will go away in 3 weeks.

In 3 weeks, unless you do something new, even the media gets bored with the story. They run out of ridiculous headlines. They cant get even the smallest blogs to reference them. The juice runs dry and by then someone else has is the story. More importantly, if you can stay out of the news for a while, your 3 week run will have been completely forgotten.

Its also important to recognize that the 3 weeks rule does not apply to good news. If you cure the common cold, save a person from drowning, feed the poor, or do something nice that does get a headline, it will not be carried forward for 3 weeks. You will get 1 day in the news, and then 10 blogs will write about it, and then after 3 days, it will be forgotten by all by those involved in the story and your friends and relatives.

Really? Tell that to Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Tom Brady, Michael Vick, Bill Belichick or Brett Favre. True, they kept fueling the news themselves, but the issues would just not die for months. In a 24-hour news cycle, the media gets ridiculously desperate to fill its time. Anyone who's come close to completing Will Leitch's Clockwork Leather experiment knows this. The Daily Show spoofs this phenomenon constantly. The longevity is not so much of this issue; it's the intensity it is covered when it happens.

Labels: controversy, mark cuban, media circus, new media, sports

Mark Cuban's been attracting a lot of controversy in the blogosphere for his recent explanation for why he doesn't allow bloggers into the Dallas Mavericks locker room. The main thrust of his argument is that if he were to be fair to all bloggers, he'd have to let in the working in their mother's basement bloggers as well as the more mainstream ones. He is also fiercely critical of newspapers starting blogs of their own, saying it's killing their brand. Of course there have been dozens of rants on bloggers by prominent media members in the past. The main reason his argument has been so divisive, in my mind, is that it's an anti-blog column in the form of a blog post, and it's by one of the more prominent thinkers of new media in America, for better or for worse. Kim Voyner at Cinematical (full disclosure: I use to work for AOL) has an excellent if ambivalent response.

Cuban is something of a mystery to me, both as a sports fan, a movie fan, and a thinker about new media in general. At times, he can be one of the most brilliant prognosticators on media around; he saw the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube coming before anyone else did. At other times, he can be a five year old, as his reaction to Will Leitch's interview with him was straight out of grade school. In my mind, new media is increasingly gaining a more prominent role in our society, and that eventually, everyone's going to have to deal with it. At the same time, old media is still more dominant than it gets credit for, and there are legitimately a ton of exceedingly idiotic bloggers out there. The main problem is that the whole idea of community, reader-created media has never really existed to the current extent, and no one, no matter how smart, really knows how to deal with it. I'm reserving judgment on whether Cuban's argument here is right or wrong until 10 years from now, though my instinct is bloggers will have to be reckoned with at least in some capacity.

Labels: blogs, mark cuban, new media