Category Archives: Media & Culture

Song of @fezmonger

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Going for a bike ride and leaving the phone behind.
Keep the ratings up and don’t forget to roll
the credits when you’re through.

It is days like this that I wish
I had a café lifestyle
and not the sit in front of a computer
life I have today.

The train is running extra slow today.
Not a surprise considering
the rain tends to jack it up.
Gonna be a looong ride home.

This train is moving
a bit slower than I would like.
At this rate we won’t reach basecamp by tea time

And it begins again. I hope the train shows up soon
my cloud cover is breaking up
and it looks to be a hot day ahead

Sitting on the train platform in a warm LA night.
At least the smoke has cleared out…
I’ll be back here tomorrow

The damn couch keeps calling my name.
I’m trying to get something… hell anything, done today
but a nap sounds so very nice

The lines above were compiled from random tweets by Jason Rogers. No words were added or deleted. I did break lines as spirit moved. I hope someone with music in their soul can make this sing.

Obits on TV

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We’ve been fiddling around with the Internet for about 15 years and tried lots of different ideas. Streaming audio of debate from the state legislature; oral arguments from the state supreme court; online database of accident reports format he state highway patrol; and –as the say– the list goes on. One idea could never get off the ground was Obits Online. This was back in the late ’90’s as I recall.

Funeral homes would log in to our online database and post funeral announcements. The public could search by name, date, city, etc etc. We pitched the funeral home associations in Missouri and Iowa (maybe some other states, I don’t recall).

The idea never got off the ground because most funeral homes were still trying to figure out their fax machines and were convinced the people in their communities were not using computers and were unlikely to do so any time soon.

I bring up this stillborn digital baby after spotting this story (AdAge.com) about a TV station in Michigan that’s running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region’s four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week.

obt-screenshot“For $100, the station will run the deceased’s name and photo on-air and publish a full-length obituary on ObitMichigan.com. Full-screen graphics listing names of people who have passed away are broadcast during the local station’s morning and noon shows Monday through Friday, as well as on weekend morning shows. Viewers are pushed to the website for more information about the deceased as well as funeral-services information.

The station’s owner, Meredith Corp., expects to roll the concept out to its other stations and says it is also in licensing discussions with other station groups.

At $100 an obituary, it’s not clear that WNEM or Meredith has really tapped a massive vein of cash. Revenue from obituaries “is a teeny subset” of overall newspaper-classified revenue, said Mort Goldstrom, VP-advertising at the Newspaper Association of America. Fees charged by papers can range from as high as $1,000 for a major metro to a few hundred dollars for a midmarket paper. And many small community and weekly newspapers still run obituaries for free.

WNEM started running obituaries in August at no charge, to get people familiar with the service and to work out any software bugs. Since launching as a paid service in early September, executives said, the station has over 700 obituaries in its system.

The new obituaries are also prompting a change in the way people go about their daily routine, he said. “The biggest issue that we have is the elderly people that don’t have the ability to pay for internet access or don’t have a computer. Now they see it flash on TV and those that don’t have a computer can call the funeral home and ask for information,” Mr. Luczak said.”

Having the TV station to promote and leverage the idea is an important component. I hope they make some money and provide a useful service.

Pomplamoose

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I haven’t listened to a song on the radio for a long, long time. Six months? Longer. It’s all iTunes and Pandora these days. I discovered a link to the song above on @fezmonger ‘s Twitter feed. He found by way of @planetnelson.

I really like the video. The girl is almost too cute to look at. The guy seems ecstatic in his joy. I do wonder if the song was really recorded in the bedroom, as it appears. If so, Big Label Music is cold-in-the-ground dead.

PS: Yes, I am aware of how much video I’ve been posting of late. Not sure why. Coincidence, if you believe in such a silly thing.

“Taking a break from the news”

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The following anecdote won’t mean much to anyone who has never worked at a small town radio station covering local news stories. And I don’t share this to embarrass or disparage anyone still doing so. It’s just a sign of the times.

One of our network reporters called an affiliate in a small town, asking for a feed of a story about a bank robbery and the capture (and tasing) of the stickup guy. Our reporter was informed the station news person was on vacation and since they couldn’t find anyone to do the news in his absence, “they’re taking a break from the news this week.” Our reporter’s reaction?

“The bridge is too far away for me to walk to it and jump.  Our bluffs are not high enough to guarantee a fatal descent if I were hurl myself off one of them and I do not want to spend years as a paraplegic watching for more of these signs.   My Norelco razor will not cut through any arteries and the only scissors I am allowed to have are the school scissors my children left behind when they grew up.

My only recourse is to continue working in this industry until it reduces me to complete incoherence, upon which time I can be placed in a padded room where I shall be safe from the apocalypse.”

Philosopher and poet-journo Bob Priddy:

“Radio began to lose its soul when stations became “properties,” when communities became “markets,” and when staff became “human resources.”

Do you need a “website?

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My pals at the local yoga center have been asking for my advice on re-doing their website. Since my advice is free, I don’t have to worry too much about it being good advice. But if I were doing this and didn’t have to answer to a committee (or Vishnu) I think I might go in this direction. (Nothing original here, BTW. Regular readers know who my influences are)

Don’t make people come to you (or your website). Take your information to where they are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

I like posterous for feeding these social nodes. And it gives you a nice, clean, low-maintenance “place” to park your domain.

“All spokes and no hub”

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Steve Rubel suggests the next big media company won’t have a website:

“Conceivably the next great media company will be all spokes and no hub. It will exist as a constellation of connected apps and widgets that live inside other sites and offer a full experience plus access to your social graph and robust community features. Each of these may interconnect too so that a media company’s community on Facebook can talk to the same on Twitter.

Facebook might be the first venue where this starts. It could become a mini news reader for millions who don’t care about RSS or Twitter. Over time this may obviate the need to create large news sites. It’s easier to create a rich interactive experience there than start a new news site and hope that people come to you. They won’t have time to find or visit.”

Bomb shelters or spaceships

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If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast)

In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes?

Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials?

What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online?

Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task.

Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do.

But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order)

What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary.

As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones.

Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out.