Category Archives: Media & Culture

“There is no online department. It has ceased to exist.”

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Jeff Jarvis points to examples of how some newspapers are trying to survive in the online world:

DelawareOnline is reorganizing the paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. A few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”

News organizations that are unable or unwilling to grasp this and make the transition will die.

WSJ: “How to get attention in a New-Media World”

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Wall Street JournalThat’s the headline on a story in today’s Wall Street Journal. I won’t bother posting any of the many nuggets in this piece. You can read them yourself. And if you spend anytime online, you know a lot of this already.

Here’s what I want to know: How can any intelligent, semi-educated, reasonably well informed, man or woman entrusted with running a business (or some division or department of that business) not have at least heard about the things referenced in this story (blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc etc)?

We talk to people every day that insist (and I belive them) they’ve never even heard the terms. I don’t expect the average Joe (or Joanne) to be as into this “new media” (someday we won’t need the quotation marks) as I am… and I know that not everyone has access to the Internet. But if you own a TV set, a radio, read a newspaper or a magazine… how could you not have seen or heard one or two of the countless stories about “new media” during the last couple of years?

* I just read the local sports scores in The Daily Bugle
* I only watch Wheel of Fortune and QVC on TV
* I haven’t seen anything in People Magazine about all this stuff
* Cousin Bob on Country 108.7 would tell me if any of this stuff was important

What do you know? I answered my own question.

Let me stress that I’m not saying your business should be using any of the new media tools (you should)… but I remain mystified that there are people who have not a glimmer that something is happening.

NAB Radio Show down with New Media

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Scott reports there are at least eight sessions on “New Media” at the NAB Radio Show going on this week in Dallas:

1) Pod Squad – Getting the Drop on Podcasting
2) Text Messaging – Where U @?
3) How to Make Your Radio Station Website the Newspaper of the Future
4) Promotions with New Technologies
5) Harnessing the Power of Blogging
6) Radio’s Future in Focus: What Millennials REALLY Think
7) It Ain’t Just Radio: Where Else Can You Find New and Bigger Revenues?
8) Email marketing

Let’s hope Scott fires up that Blackberry and files some dispatches from a few of these sessions. We’ll post them here if we get ’em. They’ve got some people who know their stuff on the blogging and podcasting panels. (Scottie: Make Roger buy the tapes for those two sessions.)

Early adopters and the masses (Hugh MacLeod)

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“I’m astonished at how long it takes an idea to filter from the early adopters to the masses. What sort of person just read the Da Vinci Code or just discovered the iPod? I was standing in a nice store in a nice suburb and heard one 25 year old explain to a 30 year old what gmail was… it’s so easy to assume that everyone already gets it.”

— Part of the answer to one of ten questions Hugh Macleod posed to Seth Godin

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Ben Brogdon)

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A few days ago I posted on getting an email from Ben Brogdon who used to work in radio down in my neck of the woods (Northeast Arkansa/Southeast Missouri). As I always do, I Googled Ben and got a hit on the Broadway musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It ran from 1978 until 1982 (later made into a movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, Charles Durning et al) and Ben played in the Rio Grand Band, part of the original Broadway cast. I pinged Ben to see if he was “that Ben Brogdon”:

“Yassir, tha’s me. We had a western swing band in Nashville for the fun of it, and a friend of ours who produced Asleep at the Wheel (and some of Bob Wills later stuff, and Willie Nelson’s early stuff, and who also played with Buddy Holly when he was killed) hooked us up to the powers-that-were, and we went to New Yawk on a trial basis and just stayed a while. It was a great experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I honestly didn’t like living there very much. I will have to say, though, there sure was a lot of great music to hear, and some incredible restaurants. The play, by the way, was a lot better than the movie. I still sorta keep in touch with one of the authors of the play, Larry L. King. He lives in D.C., and still writes some. Great guy with a great mind.

In case you’re interested, I’ve worked with some kinda big name acts, but most of them were country. (Stonewall Jackson, Dottie West, Donna Fargo, Barbara Mandrell, and others). I did work a club in Nashville where we backed a lot of different people doing showcases, or even just settin’ in, and got to play with Tony Orlando, Lou Rawls and others. All in all, I’d say I’ve played bass for about 150 name or near name acts. And the number of great instrumentalists I’ve been fortunate to pick with still amazes me. I don’t know if you’ve heard of some of them, but Lenny Breau and Danny Gatton, as well as Roy Clark, Chet Atkins and some others are some who I’ve gotten to pick for. Now, please, I’m not name dropping, but I’ve been in the bidness a long time and have been very lucky.

If you saw The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas in New York at the 46th street theater in ’78 or ’79, I was probably playing bass. I left and went back to Nashville after about two years. You’ll also see me on a blues website, I think, and I’m on a lot of steel guitar things.”

Talk about your brushes with near greatness! Ben has agreed to let me interview him and we’re working on the details but it sounds like he’s got some great stories to tell. Stay tuned.

Hollie Farris and the Senath Light (Ben Brogdon)

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I recently received an email from Ben Brogdon, a long-time radio guy (KLCN, Blytheville, AR) who stumbled across one of my websites:

“I Googled my old hometown radio station, KLCN, Blytheville, AR, and found a link to your Early Days At KBOA site. I sat and read every word of it, looked at every picture, and finally went to bed at 6am.”

Ben is a musician at Dollywood and played in a jazz band in college with Wendell Crow (Sheryl’s daddy). We bounced emails back and forth for a few days before he brought up “the Senath Light.” This is (was) a well-known paranormal phenomenon (that I never witnessed).

“Actually, I never saw the light. Oh, we’d drive up from Jonesboro when I was living there playing in bands, working at radio stations, and attending class on occasion, and we’d sit patiently, not making a sound, those who smoked wanting a cigarette REALLY bad, and wait, but it never came out while I was there.

Others told me they had seen it, though. One of my jazz mates at school, Hollie Farris, a trumpet player who has the distinction of being the only white musician James Brown has ever had, and who QUIT a gig with Steve Winwood to go back with JB after he got out of prison, DID stand under that tree in the middle of the road and supposedly got KNOCKED CLEAN OUT COLD by the light hitting him in the head, which most assuredly changed his life and his thinking process from that moment on.

I also worked with a piano player from Caruthersville who could talk to spirits, and was told that he had actually TALKED to the light, which surprised me, since we all knew if you made a sound, it would disappear. BUT, having him sit in my house and tell me it was inhabited by spirits, which I had suspected, and then say once when we were watching a storm that it would kill 35 people, and it DID kill 34, I somehow believe he may have talked to the light.”

Why do I blog? So I can “meet” people that played with Holly Farris, the only white musician to play with James Brown.

Phone Whores

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In case you are not familiar with a term that I just made up, a phone whore is a woman who goes to the airport with no magazines, laptops, books, puzzles or other means to entertain her. All she has is a phone, and she’s going to use it, no matter how many people are annoyed.

The phone whore is motivated by the desire to talk with people. The phone asshole (male variety) is motivated by the need to have everyone on the flight know he’s negotiating important business deals and that he has staff members that must receive his wisdom.

— Scott Adams

 

Tips on linking

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  • Traditionally, links are underlined as well, but that approach is often unnecessary and falling out of favor to reduce visual clutter.
  • Links lack affordance, which means their visual properties don’t suggest how they are used and are understood only through experience.
  • Link text should indicate the result of clicking on the link.
  • Use different colors for visited and unvisited links.
  • Don’t use color for text that isn’t a link because users may assume that it is a link.
  • Always show either an underline (for any link text) or a button frame (for command link text only) on hover to reinforce visually that the text is a link.
  • Don’t underlined text that isn’t a link because users will assume that it is a link.
  • Use background colors that contrast with the link colors.
  • Use link text that is the most relevant part of the text and are large enough to be easy to click.
  • Don’t provide an infotip [in HTML, a title element] that is merely a restatement of the link text.
  • If a link requires further explanation, provide the explanation in either a separate text control or an infotip, but not both.
  • Place optional supplemental graphics that indicates the target of a link to the right of the text and use an infotip to explain its meaning.
  • Link to specific content rather than general content.
  • Use a link only if the linked material is relevant, helpful, and not redundant.
  • Link only on the first occurrence of the link text.
  • Don’t add “Click here” to the link text. It isn’t necessary because a link implies clicking. Also, “Click here” and “here” alone are poor link text because they convey no information about the link when read by a screen reader.
  • Start the link with an imperative verb and clearly describe the action that the link performs.
  • Don’t use ending punctuation except for question marks.

Gnomedex: Day Two

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Heading out for Day Two of the annual geek-fest. Roger is on his way back to JC. Wish you could have been with us last night when he got his first explanation of Second Life (“They’re not talking about real islands, are they?”). If you’re remotely interested in following Gnomedex, there is no shortage of blog posts and this guy has a nice flickr set. And here’s a good piece on John Edwards’ keynote, which was mostly Q&A. I was skeptical about having a pol speaking but I kind of enjoyed the session.

Your online presence

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A thoughtful and well-linked post by Jim Mathies, wondering how a potential employer might reflect on his (Jim’s) online persona. I’ve posted on this topic a few times and thought about it again last week following an interview with a young man who was interested in a job with our company.

The job in question is web-related so I asked if he had anything online that I could look at. “Not really,” he responded. He read a little surprise on my face and added, “I have a My Space page.”

When I pressed him for a look, he reluctantly pulled up his page, which launched to the sound of music that could best be described as “urban.” And there was a nice photo of the young man striking a bit of a “gangsta” pose. (Like I’d know)

He seemed a little uncomfortable so I attempted to reassure him that I’d rather see his My Space page than some dry, lifeless resume.

But, as Jim’s post (and the NYT article that prompted it) reminds us, a lot of who we are it “out there,” just a Google or Technorati search away. I have no doubt I have written something that would keep a prospective employer from hiring me. But I wouldn’t want to work for a company that would not hire me based on something they read here. Younger bloggers might not have that luxury.

So, do you let the world know who you really are by letting it all hang out on your blog? Or, do you craft a sanitized, lifeless, carefully worded resume? Most pros would argue for the resume and they’d probably be right. Unless I was doing the interview.