Author Archives: Steve Mays

Baseball promos riff on blogging

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Picture_1Baseball’s playoff advertising push gets under way today, when the first spots of a $65 million campaign — the league’s largest ever — are broadcast. The spots will showcase blogging and feature Fox and TBS personalities like Jeff Foxworthy and Frank Caliendo. Separately they appear at a desk, tapping away on an Apple laptop, blogging about baseball and October memories.

In one of the spots, the scene is a desk placed at home plate, where Caliendo — an accomplished impersonator whose riffs on President Bush are hits on YouTube — sits, blogging in the voice of the president. “There’s Only One October.” (Mr. Caliendo, in his President Bush voice, closes by saying, “I’m pretty sure there’s only one.”) [Story at NYT.com]

I can’t find these on YouTube yet. If you spot them somewhere, please ping me.

Reporting from the road

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Our company has three reporters in Denver (for three different networks) covering the state delegations for their respective networks. Where they were once strictly radio reporters, today they’re also posting stories to websites; blogging and Twittering.

LaptopI could be wrong, but I seem to recall one convention when we actually shipped a couple of cart machines so the reporter could produce his/her reports that where then phoned back to the network for broadcast to affiliate stations over the satellite network. We still distribute by satellite but a lot of our affiliates get a lot of our reports on the web.

I was reminded of these Dark Days by a photo O. Kay Henderson took of her equipment set-up (annotated) in her hotel room in Denver. Blackberry, wireless data cards, laptops, minidisks… it all fits in a couple of carry-on’s.

“web think”

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I don’t think I’ve come across the term “web think” before I saw it on a post by Terry Heaton. It describes a way of looking at information and media and, frankly, the world.

“Those who influence my thinking do not come from a media background, but are pioneers in “web think” and the running of web businesses. This puts me in almost constant conflict with the world I’m actually trying to serve and help and fuels the rolling of eyes I often witness in conference rooms or sense over the phone.”

My theory is “web think” is like learning a second language. You’re really “there” when you start thinking (dreaming?) in the new language. You internalize it.

Coffee Zone Radio

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Coffee Zone proprietor Tasir Yanis has an amazing mix of songs on his iPod. That’s what we listen to here at the Zone. Maybe it’s just the ambience of a coffee shop but the former radio program director in me often thinks Taisir’s mix would make a great radio format. Except for all the commercials you’d have to jam in between the songs.

CoffeezoneradioOr we could just download this little app for our iPhones. If I understand this correctly, it enables you to tap into your entire music collection on your home PC via your iPhone – and the music collections of your friends, too – and stream all of the above to your phone, wherever you go. [YouTube demo]

I found this on Mark Ramsey’s Hear 2.0 who describes it as being able to “create our own radio stations from our own content and share them with friends who are mobile.”

So I could listen to Coffee Zone Radio wherever I am? Or Planet Nelson Radio? Or Scott Brandon’s Friday Funk?

Okay, the iPhone is starting to look more and more like something I’m going to have to have. But I really want the thing to stream video, too. I’m getting close.

“Looking past the death of newspapers”

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Amy Gahran points to (and comments on) an essay by news industry consultant Vin Crosbie (Transforming American Newspapers.) that includes some dooms-day predictions:

“More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies… will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily.”

Ms. Gahran sees a somewhat brighter future:

“I think that people who want news will still get it through other means, possibly less directly, probably more collaboratively. It may not look like what journalists think news “should” look like. It may include a strongly automated, algorithmic component layered with human insight. It may look more like bullet points than stories. It’ll probably be strongly focused on mobile and social delivery channels. It may not even call itself journalism. But will it offer people the benefits they currently seek from news orgs? I think it could — maybe even better, in some cases.”

Faux Graffiti

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On the way to dinner on our final evening in Seattle, we discovered a team of artists finishing up what I would describe as a graffiti piece. They’d been spraying away all day and looked a little pooped. We chatted with what appeared to be the boss artist and learned he was a graphic artist and this was a paid gig.

We also learned they don’t use any old paint from the hardware store. It’s special spray paint created for this kind of art. Costs about nine bucks a can and comes from Germany. There were a lot of cans strewn about but the company apparently gives it to them for promotional purposes.

I mean no disrespect in using the word faux to describe their work. I’ve always liked the raw, bold look of graffiti art but suspect the owners of the building would like for passers-by to assume some talented street urchins and done this in the wee hours with back-packs full of Krylon.

UPDATE: Received email from one of the artists, asking me to pull the images from flickr. At least the ones that showed the artists faces. While this piece was commissioned by the owner of the building, sometimes these guys get creative without being asked. I was happy to yank the images. It never occurred to me that a tagger (?) might do a legit job by day while still answering the call of the wild. The artist offered to send me a photo of the finished wall. I’ll post it if and when.

UPDATE: Here are some more photos by one of the artists who did the wall we saw in Seattle. Sneke, Myth, Hews and Kel 1st who is one of the original NYC subway writers from the late 70’s – mid 80’s.