Donna has been cutting my hair since 1984.
Blane Mays.
My brother is now in Northern Sumatra and heads to Aceh on Wednesday. He reports:
“The death toll is greatly underestimated by CNN and other news organizations because hundred of thousands of bodies are under rubble. The figure is closer to 300,000 dead. Please pray for me and the other workers who are trying to bring comfort and hope to the survivors.”
“Please pray for these first teams who will be helping remove bodies that are badly decomposed; that our community development foundation will be able to quickly install clean water units; that the cease fire will hold between Acehnese rebels and the govt. Also, our teams will not be taken hostage or caught in crossfire.”
Roger that.
Clear Channel’s Internet plan
“Radio analysts say Clear Channel, along with other broadcast radio stations, is being pushed online and toward new technologies by a fragmentation of its own market and by growing competition from satellite radio. Mix the power of Internet radio with those new delivery tools, and terrestrial radio begins to look increasingly fragile, unless it’s online too, some observers worry.” — CNET
New news network?
“As the network anchors drummed their manicured fingers, waiting for correspondents to parachute into position, the sketchy wire reports were supplanted by real-life, as-it-was-happening stories by bloggers who penned moving first-person accounts. This is as real-time as news can get. Weblogs, which started out as online diaries, have morphed into reporters’ notebooks. The information is raw — and perhaps unpolished when compared with news from more established outlets — but it is nonetheless news.”
— Article at Business 2.0
Blog explosion.
Jeff Jarvis summarizes some amazing stats on the growth of blogs, from the latest Pew Internet and American Life study:
* 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.
* 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers.
The same study reports only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term blog means. That 62% is in daily contact with me.
Concrete TV
“Concrete Ron describes himself as “perhaps the greatest video editor of all time”, and anyone who’s ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn’t argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of “raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort” in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup.”
Reading List: 2004
Stab in the Dark, Lawrence Block (December)
Distraction, Bruce Sterling (October)
Florence of Arabia: A Novel, Christopher Buckley (October)
The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (September)
Rain Fall, Barry Eisler (September)
We the Media, Dan Gillmor (August)
R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton (August)
Skinny Dip, Carl Hiaasen (August)
The Stone Monkey, Jeffery Deaver (July)
Live Bait, P. J. Tracy (July)
Hidden Prey, John Sandford (June)
Note: This post has been predated so that it would appear in 2004. 8/16/05
Local News
The news director at the station in my home town called this morning to ask about my brother. Lots of folks in Kennett know he is in Indonesia and have been asking about him. I told him what little I knew. Just a little human interest story. Very local. A big city station or a “nothing but the hits” station wouldn’t consider this remotely newsworthy. I’m really glad to know they’ve started doing this kind of local news again (maybe they never stopped).
At about the same time, I received a pointer (from XM Ben) to an interesting article on the state of radio in 2004 (Radio in 2004: An Overview, by Lawrence Stoler):
“One of radio’s strong points that can not necessarily be achieved to the fullest extent on satellite radio is localism. In other words, being out and active in the community. Being at the scene of an important event at a moment’s notice and providing necessary information to the residents of where a station is licensed to broadcast. The industry has to resume this practice of being community active. Radio has to go back to providing information after 8:30 AM during the week or in the evening after #7 and on weekends too. Not every area of the country has a 24 hour all news station within hearable range.”
I honestly don’t see how radio stations (or TV stations, for that matter) will survive without a strong, serious commitment to local news.
Edward Wasserman: “The Next Rebirth of the Media”
Edward Wasserman titled his piece “The Next Rebirth of the Media” but I came away wondering about the future relavence of networks as we know them. Wasserman is a professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA.
“TV will migrate to the Net, and if networks can reach a national audience online, why bother with costly affiliation contracts? By cutting out the needless re-transmitters they keep the entire advertising dollar. But what becomes of broadcast affiliates once theyre no longer affiliates indeed, once theyre no longer broadcasters either, since their audiences wont be getting them over-the-air either? When you click on to your online news and entertainment options, why will you choose your local ex-ABC affiliate? You wont, unless it has something unique to offer namely, the very content that has been most sorely neglected in the current era of non-regulation: local programming.”
Four our five years ago I described the Web as a meteor, far out in space, headed toward earth. We don’t know how big it is… when it’s going to get here… or whether it will miss our little planet or smash ut so bits. But we better start building spaceships. Just in case. Don’t know how to build a spaceship? Better start learning. The meteor is big…and it’s close.
Blane Mays update.
Blane reports he and the family were out of town (Bandar Lampung) when the earthquake/tsunami hit and didn’t realize it had happened until they returned. That seems pretty amazing. His organization is sending disaster relief teams to assess needs but foreigners are not currently allowed into the province of Aceh due to the civil war going on there. He thinks the disaster will open some doors. Bottom line for the Mays family: Blane, Tonya and kids safe and sound.