Tynan's Anger

Days like these are the worst days to be on the Internet. There are glaring problems with the coverage of Kanye West that I would willingly ignore if I thought they'd ever go away. So allow me to address how this story, like dozens before it, has progressed.

1. Something shocking happens, usually on television. Either we get word of an unexpected death, an exposed nipple, a rapper saying the President doesn't care about black people, or the same rapper saying that someone else should have won an award.
2. The unexpected nature of the moment leads to hysterical coverage by talking heads. This happens regardless of whether or not the hype is manufactured.
3. The Internet responds in appropriately hysterical fashion, leading the story to dominate Google trends.
4. It ends up dominating Google Trends so heavily that even the media outlets with the highest standards feel the need to cover it, whether or not their readership actually cares. This is why the death of Anna Nicole Smith made the front page of the New York Times in 2007, and why The Daily Show, which is allowed to be more honest, is considered to be the most trustworthy news source.
   
5. Everyone ends up pissed off and morose over what is essentially a non-issue, and nothing gets changed.

I'm 23 years old. Is that old enough to make me the only one who still cares about music to remember MTV's long history of manipulating hype? At 23, should I be cynical enough to either dismiss this issue entirely, or cash in on it?

I don't want either case to be true, but unless something is done, this is how the media in the 21st century is going to work.



Controversial MTV VMA moments throughout the years

Labels: google trends, internet hype, kanye west, msm, mtv, new media, rants, video music awards

Image via Wikipedia

So Tony Kushner a world-class playwright, wants the chance to develop a play like any workshop theater playwright can. He wants to do it at a major regional theater, in order to build up for the Broadway debut it deserves. The Guthrie mishandles its press release to critics. Some critics are already so pissed at the Guthrie that they will take it inevitably out on Kushner and everyone working on the show (they won't ever claim to if they do). Why are they doing that? Because the critics' jobs may be on the line if they don't cover it at the Guthrie.

This is how things work in 2009. Even in theater, the one medium where you can't hide behind a computer screen.

Kushner to critics: Please don't review my new play; Critics to Guthrie: Thanks for mishandling this [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]

Labels: Drama, guthrie theater, new media, Playwright, public relations, theater criticism, Tony Kushner

Image via WikipediaYou Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

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Warning: the Jets' utter craptitude has soured my Hannukah, in a way that not even a Flip Mino camcorder the complete series of the Wire can fix. I will save my sports ranting for another day. Today I am taking it out on the media industry.

• This was not a merry season for new media in my mind. I'm not even talking about the god awful media economy that's hitting the online sector as well as print. I'm talking about those highly sought after journalistic "standards" that are supposedly to be found at sites like Slate, Salon, and Huffington Post. First we get the reports that a publication no less dominant of the new media industry than the HuffPo is fast becoming a breeding ground for plagiarism. I've seen too many front page Digg stories that link to HuffPo as opposed to the source article to fully buy the general "it helps your traffic too" argument. But now we get reports that HuffPo is outright stealing concert previews from multiple Chicago publications without permission for syndication. We're talking entire articles, people.
  
  This is the stuff that got Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke fired, but it's being done without repercussions on the internet by someone as respected as Ariana Huffington. Gawker, who has had this happen to them by HuffPo multiple times before, is predictably going apeshit. And they're right. This is not aggregation. This is theft of content, search traffic, and advertsing revenue, and it's doing it to an excellent publication like the Chicago Reader whose owner just filed for Chapter 11. And you still claim to be saving journalism? If I sound pissed, the Reader is even more so. The fact that HuffPo hasn't really responded only makes the case more damning. I've already found the Full Feed unmanageable with all the articles that are less-than-subtly pilfered from actual reporting publications. That overload is hurting HuffPo's own readers in addition to the media industry. And all this occurs even as the HuffPo's own builing staff continues to produce outstandingly, top of the line quality writing that doesn't need supplemental content theft. That's what makes the case so frustrating.
• If media theft isn't enough to get your blood boiling, how about media crypto-fascism? Ron Rosenbaum, the guy who wrote a book heralding the German dissenters of Nazism, is becoming exceedingly intolerant after supposedly "exposing" Jeff Jarvis as a fraud. I was already burnt out from Rosenbaum after reading his exceedingly navel-gazing, obnoxious article on Bernie Madoff that carelessly called the Godfather Part II anti-Semitic. Then I stumble upon his "review" of The Reader, which he calls the worst movie of the year, backed by this wonderful nugget of open-mindedness:

  And yet the reverent reviews this film has got from people who should know better. Are they out of their mind? Or does the reverence for a “serious” film with “serious” actors and “serious” pretentions outweigh, overwhelm their “serious” powers of judgement? I’m totally baffled. I’d like to call this movie the Emporer’s New Clothes of “serious” Oscar contenders, but maybe with its sleazy exploitiv use of nudity to keep our attention from wandering in the first thifd, it should be called The Emporer’s New Nudity.

  First off, I have not seen The Reader, and knowing my tastes, I would probably agree with Rosenbaum's assessment. But how dare he speak for other critics and call them crazy simply for disagreeing with him. I thought you learned in like freshman year of college that civil discourse in the intellectual world allows for a diversity of opinions. A Kate Winslet movie is certainly less touchy of an issue than the banality of evil, yet Rosenbaum won't allow anyone who disagrees with him to chime in on that either? As someone who studied fascism, I would hope Rosenbaum would appreciate dissent. Turns out he only appreciates it when he's the dissenter.
• Ok, now to the Hanukkah portion of the evening: Loews 42nd street E-Walk has introduced a Kosher vending machine, the first of it's kind to run 24/6 (god I love saying that), because it turns off on Shabbos. Go on, quote The Big Lebowski now; there's no point in trying to resist.
• On to journalism I actually like. Two of my favorite yearly features came out this week. The first is Regret The Error's list of the most egregious mistakes and most surreal corrections in the media world. Amid disastrous 2Pac reporting and misspelling of your own paper's name came this glorious correction from Slate:

  In the June 20 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals.

  This is one case where what was left out of the correction actually makes it a better read. I don't want to know what other rappers have contemplated cannibalism before. I want the answer to remain ambiguous.
  
• The other, which I have blogged about before, is the AV Club's list of worst band names of 2008. Overally, this wasn't the best (worst?) year for ridiculously awful band names, but this is only feature every year where you get an entire slew of band names like Fecalized Rectal Sperm Spewage ("one man porn groove nightmare") and Diarrhea Till You Die
  all in one place. Still, there's nothing quite as transcendent as last year's show listing: Pink Reason + Psychedelic Horseshit, Expensive Shit: Beerland, 10pm.
• Finally, if you're too depressed by the media industry's decline, here's the death of print set to the tune of "I Am a Very Model of A Modern Major General" from Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore (via FishbowlNY).
  This is a cheery comparison. I mean, things worked out for the British Empire, right?
  

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Labels: Arianna Huffington, chicago reader, huffington post, jews, Kate Winslet, kosher, Lil Wayne, Nazism, new media, plagiarism, ron rosenbaum, you got yr. link bomb, your medium is dy-ing

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
-Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People"

The Internet, as we've heard thousands of times, is the ultimate form of democracy. It puts the common man on the same ground as the elites, and destroys the gatekeepers and roadblocks to having your voice heard. On the Internet, the opinion of Roger Ebert matters as much as the ordinary film fan with a blog. Sure, internet comments can be awful, but if we like democracy, we have to take the good with the bad.

Labels: athenian democracy, Democracy, fascism, internet comments, new media, politics, Reductio Ad Hitlerum

Image via WikipediaHOW TO SAVE THEATER CRITICISM

Lately there’s been a lot of rambling about the death of theater criticism. Michael Riedel has felt demeaned as an old stodgy covering theater, a far cry from the classic depiction of the theater critic. The Playgoer has wondered whether mainstream theater is now immune to critics in the same way that movies have gotten. On a guest post on The Critical Condition, Variety’s Sam Thielman saw the role of theater criticism deteriorating and scattering across the medium’s spectrum.

Over the next few days, I will give my take on the role of theater criticism and the critic in contemporary and future American theater. In Part One, I explored the differences in the theatergoing experience between the critic and uncommitted audience member. In Part Two, I explored the relevance of theater in a digital age. In Part Three, I conclude my discussion by outlining the role of a theater critic in the current economic and cultural climate.

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PART THREE—What is to be done

If we are to save theater criticism—and I believe it is truly worth saving—we’re going to need to equip it with some tools for its own survival. Here’s my modest proposal for ways to ensure that theater criticism stays current and vital through the digital era.

Embrace the digital era
Forget the Algonquin; print media is no longer sustainable under any respectable business model. Print is not going to be dead in 2 to 3 years; it’s dying as we speak. There are some elderly theater patrons who still want print. Let them have their print for as long as humanly possible, but in the choice between going digital only and shutting down an entire publication, the former is better from both a business and human standpoint. Don’t think theater criticism can survive in print just because of the old theater attendees. If you want to obtain that under-30 crowd that every person in theater so desperately craves, digital is the only choice.

Ditch thumbs up/thumbs down, A-F grade, 1-4 stars, and all that
Some would say with the rise of sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, providing a numerical score is more essential. But theater doesn’t have an infrastructure like that yet on the web, and there’s no need to create one. Even the binary system of see it/don’t see has become obsolete in an era where the financial disparity between the critic and patron’s decision to attend theater has never been higher. Instead, provide a summary of what segment of your audience you think would like this production, and which one wouldn’t. No sacrificing of editorial standards is involved in saying that.

Cover any and every professional production
What is the benefit of online media if not creating an infinite platform for expressing one’s belief? Why should a theater section cater to the limits of print column space in their online coverage? I don’t care if it’s a 50-word summary of a show that no one would or should be seeing—every work of theater needs to be addressed by some publication or another. If a theater section is serious about being the voice of the theatrical critical community, it will leave no stone unturned. In the age of volunteer writing, this shouldn’t be such a financial risk, either.

Go national
I was shocked to open my New York Times Arts section a few months ago to find a front page review by Charles Isherwood of—gasp!—a Chicago production. It shouldn’t have to take winning a Pulitzer and Tony to have your work reviewed by the leading theater authorities if you dare to open outside of New York City. Now that no one has to struggle to find reviews from any publications from any location, the long-standing need to create a national theater discussion can be easily addressed. Call it the Terry Teachout model of criticism—if a regional theater is willing to have a major critic or publication review its work, why hold back due to geography?

Interact more with the artists
This is a dangerous proposition for any neutral critic—as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs said about the artist/critic dynamic in Almost Famous, “These people are not your friends.” A detached, professional relationship is necessary, but in order to build a bridge between practitioner and critic, everyone must at least be courteous to each other. The responsibility is on the critic’s end as much as the artist himself. If you’re building a discussion about theater, it’s hard to maintain the current system where critic and artist are at each other’s throats.

Pander to the theater geek
In catering to a mainstream audience, most theater editors will beat the Brecht out of all their budding critics. But a market that hasn’t been tapped in the online press is the theater geek; one who can quote Carol Churchill plays and Rodgers and Hammerstein on a moment’s notice, and know every last detail of what’s been on Broadway for the last 15 years or so. I’m not saying every publication has to do this—this is just a huge side of the theatrical community that is currently lacking a real online voice, even as the film and music geek have found online outlets multiple times over.

Talk about theater in larger terms
It’s not enough just to focus on the theatrical community any more. It’s gotten too small, even on Broadway, for someone just to think in terms of what’s beneficial to theater. More talk has to involve how a particular play benefits society. The problem is that through theater critic lenses, it’s often impossible to think outside that prism. Well, get with it, boys and girls, because even today’s theater crowd cares about a lot more than just theater, as strange as that may sound.

Labels: Broadway theatre, critic/artist relations, how to save theater criticism, new media, regional theater, terry teachout

Image via WikipediaHOW TO SAVE THEATER CRITICISM

Lately there’s been a lot of rambling about the death of theater criticism. Michael Riedel has felt demeaned as an old stodgy covering theater, a far cry from the classic depiction of the theater critic. The Playgoer has wondered whether mainstream theater is now immune to critics in the same way that movies have gotten. On a guest post on The Critical Condition, Variety’s Sam Thielman saw the role of theater criticism deteriorating and scattering across the medium’s spectrum.

Over the next few days, I will give my take on the role of theater criticism and the critic in contemporary and future American theater. In Part One, I explored the differences in the theatergoing experience between the critic and uncommitted audience member. In Part Two, I explore the relevance of theater in a digital age. In Part Three, I will conclude my discussion by outlining the role of a theater critic in the current economic and cultural climate.

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PART TWO: Would Kenneth Tynan Twitter? Theater as the ultimate digital diversion.

Most sane people don’t go into theater criticism for a paycheck. Arts criticism in general is becoming an even less profitable way of making money, and theater criticism as a non-academic profession is at this point almost as extinct as the panda (though the image of an attempted mating between a caged Mary McCarthy and Walter Kerr is significantly less adorable). When in doubt, current critics like to point to the death of theater in general. But theater isn’t dead—it’s still got a national appeal even as it has become centralized in a few major areas, and there are communities—yes they’re fragmented, Prof—around the country.

The main reason people go into theater criticism, however, is their desire to be at something like a modern-day Algonquin Roundtable. The theater critic carries a history of status and image that the middle-aged sweater-wearing film critic or the drug-fueled rock critic lacks. There are paintings in New York subway stations of theater critics surrounded by the likes of Eugene O’Neill and George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx and Edna Ferber. It may seem completely irrational to go into a field for a 70-year-old image, but theater critics do so all the same.

These are the same critics who find absolutely no respite in the digital age. With multiple critics being old, that is to be expected. But there seems to be a larger theme of the Algonquin image crumbling under the image of new media. Would Kenneth Tynan Twitter? Would Bernard Shaw post his rants on his blog without editing them beforehand? The idea of the print journalist critic losing his voice in the digital age hits especially hard with theater criticism, since theater can never really be tapped digitally.

Rather than a problem, however, I say that theater’s distinctly analog qualities are precisely what can make theater vital in the digital age, and make theater criticism just as vital. Theater is defined by performers performing in front of a live audience, as in an audience who is actually in the same room. Live performance cannot be replicated by a computer. Both dance and music, other methods of live performance, can be translated to digital media (though they differ from their live counterparts, the core of the medium stays the same). Theater, however, is the part of live dance and music that doesn’t translate digitally. Theater is absolutely untouchable—have you ever tried watching a taped performance of a show? It’s almost unbearable, even though you’re still seeing all the actions that would take place in person.

What this means to me is that, rather than being outdated by technology, theater can regain its importance in society simply because it is the only medium where in-person human interaction is built into its DNA. If art exists as a means of pleasure to take us away from our daily lives, theaters artistic power is amplified in a culture where all other human interaction is digital. With other forms of digitalized art, the value of entertainment and diversion gets cheapened and makes the audience lazy. Why go to the movies when I can wait until its on-demand? Why go to the record store when there’s a record store on my computer? There’s no way to encounter theater without it essentially turning into a night out. The need to go out at night won’t diminish, which means theater could increasingly prove to be a sociological necessity.

That theater can’t exist in the digital realm also places an increased premium on theater criticism. With digital access to any other form of art, people can make judgments for themselves without putting on pants. You don’t need to go through the effort to deem whether a work of art is worthy of your time, and increasingly, you don’t need to decide whether to spend money on that art, legally or otherwise. But with theater, there’s no way of knowing what goes on without actually being there. If someone is looking for an assessment of a play, they cannot download the play and judge for themselves. The need for an independent party to relay their experience, whether on the blogosphere or in a major paper, is at a higher demand for theater than for any other form of art. That’s the closest link to the Algonquin era that we’re going to get.

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Labels: digital vs. analog, how to save theater criticism, kenneth tynan, Mary McCarthy, new media, reproducable art, theater criticism

Image via WikipediaOne thing I've constantly struggled with in my entry into the media word is the issue of what tone I should take. The debate over tone goes back way beyond the Internet; even in the 1950s, the tone of a paper like The Village Voice was enormously different from that of the New York Times. The difference with the Internet, however, is the web's ability to centralize and level the playing field of all different kinds of tones in the media. I'm not just talking about the differences in tones between publications; I'm also talking about the tone an individual writer takes.

In my case, I have stated multiple times that my goal in life is to be head theater critic of the New York Times. That goal is admittedly preposterous; there may not even be such a position (or a New York Times) by the time I can merit the position. Nonetheless, much of my theater writing on the web sounds very New York Times-like (see: As We Speak, Stoppard and Remnick talking points on Chekhov, The Strangerer). At the same time, I can be crude, snarky, and immature, and embrace the stereotypes of blogs. I took my last blog off Google because I didn't think I regulated my tone enough. I have a personal LiveJournal that I intentionally do not publicize.

In the past, a writer's portfolio would exist in disparate, individuated sources. I'm speaking literally, as in these articles were on distinct pieces of paper in vastly different publications. But now, there's nothing distinguishing the experience of reading Sports Illustrated from reading Kissing Suzy Kolber; they are both read over the same medium, on the same screen (and if you use an RSS reader, the same website). If you're on the internet and into all the talk of personal branding, you know that a good online content producer promotes everything he does on the web on the same centralized platform. But if you're a writer who writes intelligent theater commentary for one source and poop jokes on another, how can you avoid those two worlds coming into conflict?

What centralized online media does on an individual level—or at least what it will eventually have to make us do—is admit the complexities and contradictions that make up an individual content producer. Most people aren't defined by their work, let alone only one facet of their work. By putting oneself and one's work nakedly online, individuals are forcing the world to take all sides of their identity together, rather than just make a judgment based on one source. We take different tones at every stage, setting, and context of our lives. Putting it out in the open on the web is a risky move, but probably one that will be the most rewarding.

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Labels: humanity, media, new media, new york times, the writer, tone, village voice

So here are the two best analyses of social media I've seen today:

The good news: Our command of these social media laws has nothing to do with our knowledge of technology. It has everything to do with the creation of authentic relationships.

The bad news: Most of us probably suck at creating authentic relationships.

Don’t F*** With The Natural Laws Of Social Media -CorporateDollar.Org

And from the Gary V, like only he can:

Labels: good journalism, new media, no bullshit, Social media

Let's hope she's resurrected with one of the many new media jobs she will be offered.

In case you haven't been following the story, Alana Taylor has been at the center of a prime recent controversy that has exposed the generational divide between purveyors of old and new media. Alana is a junior at NYU journalism school and blogger on the social media blog Mashable. She posted on PBS's MediaShift blog about how much old media was still left in her supposed New Media class, and how she was shocked to be the only blogger in the class. When I first read the post, I find it to be prescient and entirely benign. She didn't swear at her professor, nor did she even mention the professor by name. Nonetheless, a relatively massive controversy ensued. She was banned from blogging on the class by her professor, and received tons of hate mail (probably by the same people who lambaste the internet for allowing more hateful rhetoric). She also received a heroine's welcome among some newer media types, and was offered multiple media jobs in a time when few are being offered to anyone.

Some will inevitably see this as social climbing, but as a member of Taylor's generation, I'm pretty sure Taylor didn't write the post to start controversy. She probably simply meant to be informative, as the post was to eyes tuned into this discussion. Instead, the controversy was started by the old media types who hate this sort of thing. Now, she's a hero of the blogosphere, and her point has been proven. As print media journalists look to be collecting welfare checks sooner or later, Taylor already has them beat in the job search.

I was surprised, however, to find that the forum posts on Mediabistro were almost unilaterally against Taylor. I figured on an internet forum there would be at some supporting her, but the forums on Mediabistro are counterintuitiely dominated by old media types. The paranoid in me was wondering whether this was a Lee Siegel situation; I didn't post that after seeing that the posters all had multiple posts under their belts (It would have just validated the old media types, anyway.) Here's what I did end up saying:

I personally am shocked by the uniformity of the response on this discussion board, and this uniformity seems completely out of character for a website dedicated seriously thinking about the media. I am a member Taylor's generation (and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's posted so far who is), and from my perspective, what she has done is completely innocuous to the NYU teacher and a fair assessment of where j-school stands.

I was seriously considering J-School after graduation, but everyone who I spoke to said don't go. Most of the responses I got not only mentioned the lack of career doors that J-School would open, but also made the point that going to J-school may actually hurt me in the media job hunt, as publications would see me as a privileged kid looking to pay for media connections.

As someone who's just entered the media profession, one of my greatest strengths is my savviness with new media (I'm on at least 10 social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Digg), and that in part is what landed me my first job. At the same time, there are some older editors who actively hate any and all new media, and would not hire me at all even though they probably need someone like me to stay solvent over the next two years.

The single biggest generational gap between my generation and the ones before me is what we consider private information. Blogging on the details of a class seems completely innocent to people under the age of 25, as would posting a picture of a social gathering on Facebook or publicly blogging about personal relationships (even if in vague terms). To those over 40, however, blogging about the details of the class is an incredibly invasive and outrageous act, which explains most of the subsequent controversy. I am as baffled as to why there is a controversy as I'm sure older j-school professors would be baffled as to why I don't understand.

At the same time, I think Taylor was right to point out just how overhyped our generation's supposed investment in media can be. The vast majority of my friends are not on twitter, and a significant number haven't updated their Facebook profiles in months or years (and I'm probably more likely to have friends who twitter, considering that I flock to people interested in the media). I agree that people need to know how to write, and I've worked hard to keep up my grammar and clarity in an age of instant publishing. But there is a difference between good blogging and good newspaper and magazine writing, and the differences between them become especially pronounced over the generational divide. That there still exists an institution where people pay upwards of $40,000 a year to become educated on media practices that are at least 20 years out of date is particularly pathetic, especially considering that most of the old fogeys who rigidly adhere to those practices will be out of a job soon.

Of course, I started that post with a minor grammar mistake (I forgot commas, boo hoo), so some posters will dismiss me outright. Hopefully enough people will get the point.

Mashable has an excellent (if biased) summary of the brou-ha-ha.

Labels: alana taylor, journalism school, msm, new media, nyu, privacy, wtf

There's been a long history in the annals of the new vs. mainstream media battles of monthly magazines already being out of date by the time they hit newsstands. I'm not sure if this is the same case with the error just made by the New York Times, or if its just a standard error meant for the corrections section. In an otherwise excellent article on the role of orchestrations in Broadway musicals, Susan Elliott says, "Michael Holland is revamping Mr. Schwartz’s original “Godspell” score for its run at the Ethel Barrymore (set to open Oct. 23)." The only problem: Godspell has been cancelled. My guess is that the article was written well before the Variety report on Wednesday, and that it's a fact checking error. But by today's standards, making an error based on a three day old article heavily buzzed in the theater press looks a lot worse than it did 10 years ago.

Labels: godspell, new media, new york times, theater press, variety

There's a brouhaha at the Seattle Pacific University student newspaper over a request to take an article from 1998 off their website. 33-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Shakespear Feyissa, now a lawyer, is pressuring the school and the paper, The Falcon, to remove an article which discussed a dropped sexual assault charge against him and his indefinite suspension from the school. At the time, Feyissa wanted his story to be heard. Years later, it became one of the top results on Google for his name.

I agree with the school paper on the matter of preserving its archives. You can't force the paper to take the article off the web, as they have the rights to everything they publish. There's no way I would have agreed to this when I was an editor at my college newspaper. But is adding robots.txt censorship? Does taking something off Google, but not the web, violate freedom of speech? I don't think it does, but I may change my tone on that in a few years. It raises some legal questions about how important Google is to accessing information in today's world, and whether a governing body (in this case, a school administration) is prohibited from forcing the press to take something off Google without taking it off the web.

Of course, now the point is moot. Because of the coverage of the controversy, the article is nowhere to be found on the Google results for "Shakespear Feyissa," But the stories on the controversy are all over the place. Not exactly the best SEO strategy if you're trying to remove a rape allegation from Google.

(via Romenesko)

Labels: censorship, google, new media, rape allegations, shakespear feyissa

Courtesy of thePuck at the Social Media Philosophy Project:

Labels: new media, online video, philosophy

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

Here I was defending new media when I am introduced to a site that puts the final patch of dirt over my dream job's grave.

Conversely, this may be good as a training tool: it forces you to cut down on your logorrhea. Doomed, or improved?

Blipp is Twitter for Micro-Reviews [TechCrunch]

Labels: critics, new media, your medium is dy-ing

When a new medium emerges and we don't know how to deal with it, it's helpful to compare it to the older media it is updating or replacing. Blog comments are as controversial of a new medium as we've seen since the emergence of the Internet. The above On The Media NPR segment addressed the obscenity, racism and hatefulness that can be found on Internet comments and Internet forums. But what purpose do comments serve, when compared with other media of the past?

Only a truly naive person could argue that the Internet has made us more hateful. It's certainly made it easier to be hateful, and convenience has a long history of advancing hate speech. But hate goes to a much deeper part of the human psyche than a place that can be touched by 10-15 years of technology. Furthermore, hateful responses to published material is not a new phenomenon. It's best to think of Internet comments are as unregulated, uncensored letters to the editor.

Letters to the editor have been a part of the American media since there's been an American media; you could argue that the Federalist Papers were letters to the editor. But anyone who's worked on a paper can tell you that there are dozens of crazed, hateful screeds written all the time that don't get published. For every letter The New York Times has ever published, there are at least 20 letters that are not put in print, and most of them don't have a chance of making it to paper because of their offensiveness. If blog posts are published materials just like newspaper articles, they can inspire the same heated, infuriated responses that have always existed. The Internet doesn't encourage this kind of speech any more than angry letters to the editor do.

What the Internet has done is make it much easier to write a letter to the editor, and made it exponentially easier to have that letter made public. Most blogs, and even most print publications that allow online comments, don't try to restrict what commenters say. Anyone can post whatever they want, and as long as they can prove they're not a spam bot, it will be published. Let's compare that to what a person who wished to comment on an newspaper or magazine article would have to do before. The New York Times lists the following guidelines to letters to the editor:

Letters to the editor should only be sent to The Times, and not to other publications. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters.
Letters for publication should be no longer than 150 words, must refer to an article that has appeared within the last seven days, and must include the writer's address and phone numbers. No attachments, please.
We regret we cannot return or acknowledge unpublished letters. Writers of those letters selected for publication will be notified within a week. Letters may be shortened for space requirements.

Today, the Times also has tips to getting your letter published, the emails of the editors, and phone numbers to call. Up until a few years ago, that wouldn't be there. The only way to know where to send a letter would be one sentence in the masthead of a paper. Then you had to follow those guidelines, use your own paper and ink, lick the stamp, pay postage and go outside to stick the letter in a mailbox. All those steps have now been eliminated. The Internet has democratized the stupid, hateful speech writing process, just like it has democratized everything else in the media. Democracy, as I think we can all attest, doesn't make people smarter.

What's particularly frustrating is that newspaper journalists get up in arms over Internet comments. They're stressing over the same kind of response that they throw in the trash in the newsroom. Journalists are already supposed to have thick skin, but with the Internet, they just need to add extra layer or two.

The purpose of comments differ depending on the type of publication. If you're a small blog like this one, comments are the best way to create discussion and gain attention to your site. If you're the website of a major paper, I'd advocate treating online comments like letters to the editor and heavily regulate it. It's true that people will complain that you are stifling free speech. Just like everyone who hasn't gotten their letter published in a paper thinks their opinion is being stifled.

Labels: internet comments, msm, new media, npr

George Hunka had an excellent post up today on the staging of Beckett's television and fiction work to the stage at the Lincoln Center. Hunka rightly notes than in an era with as strong media saturation with distinctly non-theatrical media, integrating things like film and prose into theater is inevitable. This is especially true when that production happens to have a lot of money.

I commented that Beckett one-acts are perfectly suited for viral video. But that got me thinking about what happens to the theater and its audience if plays go to YouTube and the web. On the one hand, some of the core distinctions of the theatrical medium—an organic creation, live audience, using a theatrical space—get lost. At the same time, audience interaction in general does not get lost. It may actually even get bigger.

The web has created unprecedented possibilities for media access, whether or not the business side of the media world has caught up yet. YouTube has already been used as a promotional tool to get people to see shows. But what's stopping a taped, live, organic performance from streaming on the web? What if a free broadcast of a staged production gets orders of magnitude more viewers than a $50 per viewer live staging. What if a web broadcast gets audience comments that, in effect, serve the same purpose as audience feedback slips in the program?

These kind of innovations would no doubt be maddening to theater traditionalists, but they may be essential to moving theater into the Web 2.0 (soon to be 3.0) era. Audiences aren't going away, they're just going to nontradional places. Trying to redefine the theatrical audience is certainly a tricky proposition that could easily fail, but it's time someone at least had the guts to try.

Labels: george hunka, innovation, new media, samuel beckett, theater on the web

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