The second edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World is now available at the very student-friendly price of $45. (Yes, the new edition sells for less than used copies often do of the first edition.) It features a newly strengthened media literacy focus, greater depth on a number of topics, extensive coverage of "long-tail" media, and new chapters on media effects and global media. For more information, visit the CQ Press website.
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Monday - March 30, 2009
Truth 4 - Nothing's new. Everything That Happens In The Past Will Happen Again Dept. - Britney Didn't Invent the Naughty Pun In Pop Culture Britney Spears has a new song and video out called If You Seek Amy that has been generating a fuss. See, if you speak it out loud, it's like you are spelling out F U .... well, you get the picture. Terrible how pop culture is degrading our language these days. Why can't kids read Shakespeare instead? Because if they did, they would discover that the Bard used a similar trick in his play Twelfth Night to spell out the even more offensive "C Word." Check out the link above to a fascinating article from Slate. Things your English teacher never taught you.
Chasing the Long Tail Part II - Katrina Leskanich If you lived through the 80s, you have to remember the Katrina and the Waves summer anthem Walking on Sunshine. You've heard it in a million movies and TV shows, and unless you have really serious issues you can't help but smiling every time it comes on. KATW had several other modest hits in the US and the UK.
But now Katrina Leskanich, lead singer of the band (bet you couldn't figure that out), is 50-years-old. And fresh-faced stars of the 80s really aren't going to get a lot of attention from the music industry 25 years later. Yesterday afternoon I was working in my office and listening to a recent episode of Coverville, my favorite podcast. An absolutely wonderful cover of the old Tracy Ullman cover They Don't Know came on. Turns out it was on a new solo album by Katrina Leskanich. I took a look at the album using a link to Amazon, where I discovered the album was available either as a download or a burn-to-order CD. I then went over to iTunes where, with a little trouble, I found and bought the album. I highly recommend it!
As I was listening to it for the second time this evening, it occurred to me that this was a perfect example of long tail media in the 21st Century. We start with an artist who had a pretty good short head career, recording hit records for major labels. But now Katrina is much more a long-tail niche artist, distributing her music through digital downloads. And I discovered the album not through radio airplay or advertising, but rather through another long-tail medium - a podcast.
Along with They Don't Know, the album has a number of standout cuts, including a new version of Walking on Sunshine and a cover of the Martha and the Muffins hit Echo Beach. Just for fun, here are videos of Walking on Sunshine from KATW,They Don't Know by Tracy Ullman, and Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins.
Another Love Letter to the Kindle Slate's Jacob Weisberg tells why he is in love with Amazon's eBook reader and why he can't stop boring people by telling folks how great it is. He's using it as an overall reading device, getting books, magazines and newspapers on it.
As of late, I've rediscovered the public library as a great source of current, and not-so-current books. They don't cost me money and they don't take up space on my packed book shelves. I wonder if getting a system up and running that will let libraries circulate books in Kindle format will ever come about. Weisberg has a number of interesting long-tail points to make about lowering the cost of distribution of print media.
Making a Long-Tail Living at the Apple App Store If you want to make a living writing code for Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple or Sony, you probably will have a job at a software company that can market and sell your product. But the Apple App Store, that sells programs for the iPhone and iPod Touch, will sell and distribute your program for a 40 percent cut of the price. And some software developers are finding they can make a better income selling these little programs through Apple than they could at a mundane job. In short, long-tail tools are letting folks reach consumers directly with all sorts of products, from movies to music to books to little computer programs.
Does Watchmen's Box Office Problems Mean The End of the R-Rated Blockbuster? Or does it just mean that dark, violent movies with complicated storylines that can't possibly have a mass appeal should have smaller budgets? (Don't get me wrong. I really liked Watchmen, but I'm also a comic geek.) Interesting analysis from the blog Io9, though they don't deal with the issue of Watchmen having limited appeal because of its storyline.
Why Are Textbooks and Video Games Alike? Because I've spent way too much money on both over the years? Perhaps, but not the answer I'm looking for. Textbooks and video games both are relatively expensive (except for Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, which sells for less than $50 new....) and both have a thriving market for used copies. And.... the publishers do their best to give customers a reason to either hold on to their copies or at least buy new copies. A great article from the WP'sMike Musgrove and what video game publishers are doing to get rid of the secondary market.
Off Topic Dept. - iPhone and iPod Touch Report Diabetes News This is, of course, a media/mass comm blog, but every once in awhile I go off topic. Today is such a day. Well, sort of. Many of you may be aware that Apple announced version 3.0 of the iPhone/iPod Touch softwarelast week with all sorts of cool new things like copy-and-paste, improved search, stereo Bluetooth, and landscape viewing. But the part that really caught my attention was the fact that the iPhone/Touch can now talk to medical devices via either a USB connection or Bluetooth.
And this means?
For one, it means that the iPhone can talk with a diabetic's glucose meter to track blood sugar levels, make dinner suggestions, and even help with insulin dosing. As an insulin-dependent diabetic, I find this really exciting. The idea may have gotten its start from an open letter to Steve Jobs written by diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich. Is this new capability an answer to this plea? Perhaps. In any event, anything that can make managing blood sugar levels easier and more convenient is a good thing.
Newspapers Closing - But Are They Really Doomed? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped publication Tuesday, but unlike the Rocky Mountain News, it is maintaining a web presence for the time being. Is this the beginning of the end for newspapers? Maybe, though as USA Today points out, the big problem facing major papers is the debt load they carry, not the basic profitability of their business. Newspapers are still churning out an average profit of 10 percent, which isn't bad unless you compare it to the incredible 30 percent profits they used to be producing. Here's a round-up of stories about the P-I.
NYT's Nichols Kristof - The Daily Me
Take a good look at this one - it deals with the consequences of going online for news and commentary that matches your own point of view.
Jon Stewart v. CNBC's Jim Cramer Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm trying to pretend that I'm on spring break, even though I'm in the office before 8 a.m. today.... I've got several things to write about this week, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer going web-only, but for today we'll stick with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart sticking it to CNBC.
You may recall that back in October of 2004, Stewart appeared as a guest on CNN's political debate show Crossfire. Stewart's scathing critique of the show led to Crossfire being cancelled in January of 2005. In that appearance, Stewart proved he could not only be funny, but also that he could be one of the sharpest media critics in the business.
Last week, Stewart did it again by inviting CNBC's financial advice show host Jim Cramer onto The Daily Show and holding him accountable for many of his questionable calls. The fascinating part of this is that Stewart will say what journalists won't because he is a comedian and doesn't have to follow journalism's rules.
Here's the unedited interview from The Daily Show's website:
Posts For My Students Dept. - Decency and Broadcast Television Here are several posts/reposts I've promised my students:
Charlotte Ross on NYPD Blue In 2003, actress Charlotte Ross showed off her naked backside in a scene of the series NYPD Blues. As a result, the FCC is trying to fine ABC affiliates a total of $1.4 for this brief bit of non-sexual nudity. The FCC argument was because the show aired at 10 p.m. in Eastern and Western time, it was legal there, but not legal in the Central and Mountain time zones because there it aired at 9 p.m. What is interesting is that the Deseret News attacked the FCC, not because the paper liked the nudity, they didn't, but because they didn't like the FCC meddling in the affairs of a local broadcaster 5 years after the broadcast took place. The lesson? As it was in the era of Speaker Tip O'Neill, "All politics is local."
Use of Fleeting Expletives
November 4th brought more than just election day - it was also the day that U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the case of FCC v. Fox Television Stations. Fox is in trouble for celebrities such as Cher and Bono using "fleeting expletives" such as the "f-word" or the "s-word. You can read the full scoop on this and see the video that goes with it using the link above.
Janet Jackson v. Saving Private Ryan
An entry from back in 2004 about how Janet Jackson's Super Bowl flash led to broadcasters being afraid to air the WWII movie Saving Private Ryan on Veteran's Day.
Columbia Journalism School Prof -- "F#&@ The New Media" Ari Goldman, a professor at the prestigious Columbia Journalism School, told New York Magazine that new media is irrelevant to journalism. In fact, he went so far as to say, "F*$% new media," comparing new media training with "playing with toys."
If J-Schools were only teaching technology, he might have a point (though I don't really think so). But if you talk about what you can do to better report and tell stories with these new tools, Goldman is completely wrong. Think Progress compares his comment to saying "writing books is an experiment in playing with printing presses."
My big complaint? Disparaging changing media as irrelevant with the Cheney Word is hardly a solid intellectual debate! (Thanks to Niels for the link!)
Amazon's Kindle Amazon's Kindle continues to fascinate. Here are a couple of items on it:
Amazon to sell Kindle eBooks for Apple's iPhone and Touch
Amazon has announced that there is now a Kindle app for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that will let consumers download Kindle formatted eBooks to the popular phone/media player. It will even synchronize where you are in the book between the Apple device and the Kindle. Sounds to me like Amazon is on the right track on how to make the Kindle format a standard.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos talks about the Kindle with Charlie Rose
Brittany Seawell, a student in my mass comm class, sent me the following note. Interesting stuff!
I was watching The Charlie Rose Show on PBS during my lunch hour the other day and I saw Charlie interview Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder. You probably already know about several of the things mentioned in the show, but I was very interested in his ideas that 1: the Kindle should be cheap enough that everyone can own one (he did release Kindle 2 at the same price as the original Kindle, even after making technological improvements) and 2: every book in the world should be available on Kindle (could this be the answer to my issues with Interlibrary Loan?). I thought you might want to put these things in your blog, along with the other projects Bezos is working on (including launching tourists into space and bringing color to the Kindle).
Kevin Sites Top Five Tips on Being a SoJo Kevin Sites has been on campus here at UNK this week talking about his documentary A World In Conflict and his work as a solo journalist (SoJo). You should know Kevin for his year-long backpack journalism project Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, where he visited 20 active conflict zones in the world over a one year period. He went out on his own, but was supported with a three-person team of producers back in the United States. We'll have more about his visit to campus later this week, but for the moment I want to pass on what he had to say to my blogging class this morning. Here are Kevin Sites' Top Five Tips on Being a Solo Journalist:
Learn from the blogs, but don't become one.
Look at what is being published on blogs and see what the creative folks out there are doing, but don't get seduced into endlessly talking about yourself. Instead, talk about what other people are doing. "You don't always have to sell your own views through your blog," Sites said. "I'm not interested in your opinion. If you're the president, I'm interested in your opinion." The one exception is if you have opinions about local issues where you truly are the expert.
Crosstrain like a triathelete. Report in three dimensions. Video is the medium of motion, Photos are the medium of the face. Text is the medium of information.
Buy your own tools and avoid being one. Build the simplest web site you can. Buy a camera. Buy a video camera. Their cheap. Learn to use simple tools like Apple's iMovie.
Geeks rule the world. Sites points out that many of the richest people in the world right now are geeks. Having a blog while he was reporting from Fallujah changed Sites' life. It gave him a second chance to report a story he felt he got wrong on television.
Share your passions and you will get paid. Traditional barriers to publishing your work are coming down. You won't get paid right away, but you will once you start having an audience. When you are young is your time to experiment. This is your chance to hone your skills.
Questions Worth Asking (Maybe) - All Comic/Animation Edition
Why Do I Hate Disney's Little Mermaid? Let me count the ways! The link is to the original Hans Christian Andersen story. Note that it is quite different from the Disney vesion. (And to all of you out there - I do like the music from the movie. I just don't like the tacked on Disney happy ending.)
What Would Garfield Look Like Without Garfield In It?
Imagine the comic strip Garfield, but without the fat cat in it. That's what Dan Walsh did when he created Garfield Minus Garfield. Each day he posts his version of the popular comic strip to his web site. It's the same as the regular version, except that Garfiled the cat has been removed. Makes for sort of an existential drama (I'm told) about Jon Arbuckle. In an amazing development, Garfield creator Jim Davis has no objection to Garfield Minus Garfield being up on the web, or even being published in a book. Kind of cool to see an legacy media artist who gets that reusing of his material does not detract from the value of what he has created.
Paul Harvey Remembered Legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey died Saturday, Feb. 28. There was no one else like him on radio. As the Deseret News put it, "He had a sense for what was important to the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers of America. He knew where they kept their hearts and he knew how to touch them. He was an informed and educated populist." I have been a long-time fan of Paul Harvey - partly because he really knew how to tell a story, and partly because you never knew just exactly what he was going to say. He was certainly an old-line conservative, but he was never a talking point spokesman for the right.
Several years ago, I had Leigh Limerick Rosenecker as a student. Where does she fit in here? She is the daughter of Doug Limerick, a long-time radio journalist and an occasional replacement for Paul Harvey when he was sick or on vacation. I first heard that Harvey had died when Leigh posted her dad's radio obit for Paul Harvey in a Facebook message to me. It's a great piece of work. Take a listen to it now.... After listening to it, I asked Leigh if she had anything to say about Paul Harvey. This is what she wrote:
Here are my thoughts - a little different from most, I guess.
I learned of Paul Harvey’s death a few hours later than most. Returning home to Morgantown after a Saturday evening of shopping and gluttony in Pittsburgh, I was road-weary. Still, I gave in to my nightly compulsion to check CNN.com one last time before hitting the sack.
As I read about Harvey’s passing, I sucked in deep and hard before calling to my husband. He stood in the doorway and instantly spoke what I was already thinking.
“Do you think your dad knows?”
On and off since about 1996, my father has been privileged and honored to fill in for Harvey when needed and asked. This occasional duty was the highest and happiest point of his 40-something year career in radio, something he probably never dreamed possible as a lanky 16 year old deejay in 1961.
For my dad, every day he was able to sub for Harvey was a little brighter and lighter, a chance to seek out the strange, the quirky, the heartwarming stuff no one ever mentioned but Harvey. Putting together 15 minutes of News and Comment ain’t easy, and dad would stress about it a little. Still, my old man loved his assignment as much as he loves roadside tourist traps and soul music, county fair midways and western North Carolina barbeque: like all these things, Harvey’s newscasts where the ultimate in nostalgia, symbols of happier times…yet somehow still relevant.
In his usual gig as a top-of-the-hour anchor, neither my father nor his colleagues ever get to report the fun stories. I suspect all the doom and gloom showcased in less than five minutes of the morning’s headlines can have some nasty effects on the person delivering endless bad news. My dad’s a pretty pessimistic fellow, and it’s no wonder.
I am grateful my father – Doug Limerick, Eternal Curmudgeon - was so often allowed the opportunity to step outside his zone. Paul Harvey was the absolute only person in radio who could grant that wish.
I believe Mr. Harvey’s positive and optimistic energy was to thank for his longevity, both chronological and professional. It’s unfortunate that he was one of a kind in that regard and now an unfillable hole remains. What legacy will an endless stream of angry Limbaugh knockoffs leave?
A Double Dog Dare Competition I have long maintained that there is nothing interesting for students to say about campus parking issues. No matter how good or bad it is, they always complain about it. Because of this, I routinely forbid my commentary students from writing about parking issues. But this semester gave my blogging and commentary students a "double dog dare" to write something worth reading on their blogs about parking issues. They're allowed to take any approach they want. Here are the students who took on the competition:
I've got a nice prize for the top ranked blog entry.
But you'll have to be quick. The survey closes at 11:45 p.m. on Wednesday. Link Me
Monday - March 2, 2009
Everything From the Margin Moves to the Center Dept. - Random House Buys 10 Speed Press Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher, has acquired Ten Speed Press, an independent alternative publisher of titles like What Color Is Your Parachute? and The Moosewood Cookbook . Remember, of course, that Random House is owned by German publishing giant Bertelsmann. My first book on bicycle maintenance, Anybody's Bike Book, was published by Ten Speed. This acquisition brings to mind when News Corp., through its HarperCollins division, bought out literary publisher Ecco Press. Daniel Halpern, founder of the press, told the Washington Post, "People will say, 'There goes another independent press, isn't it too bad. The short answer is, 'Yes, it's too bad.' But that's the reality. Let's not be sentimental about this stuff. This is not a time when the small press can survive." (Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the link!) Link Me
Things I Learned Reading Romenesko on Friday You all read Romenesko on a regular basis, right? Jim Romenesko writes a long-running press blog for the Poynter Institute that is probably the most read news media criticism site on the Web. A must read. (He also writes the Starbucks Gossip blog and Obscure Store and Reading Room.) Here's what I was paying attention to when I read it Friday morning.
Pentagon OKs Photos Of Coffins Coming Home
For the first time since 1991, news organizations will be allowed to photograph the coffins of our war dead coming home, as long as the families of the fallen agree.
Google News To Start Running Ads
So why is this so controversial? The content comes from newspapers, broadcasters, and other news organizations who pay to have the news produced. Google brings it all together on a single site, but doesn't pay news organizations for the content they provide. So it's not too surprising that these struggling news organizations don't like to see Google profiting from their work.
Handicapping the Pulitzer Prizes
Who will the likely nominees be for this year's Pulitzer Prizes. Editor & Publisher gives their picks.
How Much Money Was The Oscar Broadcast Worth?
26 minutes of ad time sold for a total of $72 million on ABC. The show also had the highest ratings of any entertainment program in two years. The most watched Oscar broadcast ever? 1998 with 55 million viewers when Titanic won best picture. Surprise, surprise - you have a popular movie up for best picture and lots of people watch.
How Do You Develop a Good Column Idea?
An entry from my other occasional blog for my commentary and blogging class. A look at Kathleen Parker's column on the dead chimp cartoon.
For all the talk of getting a scoop or uncovering news first, the best predictor of what will be in the news tomorrow is what's in the news today. Especially when we can jump in on a trend.
Great, you're back. As you noticed, journalists rather uncritically wrote about there being 50,000 sexual predators online with absolutely no credible source for the numbers. (And actually, journalists just love anything that there is 50,000 of!)
The latest prey of the journalistic pack are teens who are "sexting." Until recently, my only use of the term sext was to refer to a brief noon-time monastic prayer service. But that's not the use that's being made of the term today. Instead, it refers to either sexually explicit text messages or photos teens send to each other using their cell phones. You can't go anywhere in the news media these days without coming across a sext story. I just Googled the term "sexting" and came up with 305 hits in Google News, and 435,000 hits in the general Google search. (I wrote this previous sentence this morning. Tonight the total number of web hits is up to 462,000.) The stories are all over the place. A few examples:
A column from Cal State - Chico's Orion, Dated 2/25 Students writing on the topic. No surprise. Also no real-life examples other than a group of six teens charged with distributing child pornography in Greenville, Penn. (And a possible confession from the column's author.)
CBS News story, Dated 1/15
The Pennsylvania Six are here again, as is the National Campaign study. (Though here it is called the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.) It's linked to a story about protecting children online from predators. There is also mention of a Texas eighth grader who spent a night in juvenile detention over a nude photo on his phone.
ABC News Story, 12/13/08
We've got the National Campaign study listed here, along with students who say "they" haven't don't it, but they know "someone" who has. There are also a few unnamed examples.
The sexting scare is also being used to help promote the sales of parental monitoring software. And the company promoting the software brings up the old 50,000 sexual predators story. The press release also brings up the National Campaign study.
So, after looking at just this sample, what do we know?
A limited number of students may be facing child pornography charges.
A lot of journalists are talking about a limited number of examples.
An unknown number of young people are likely sending nude or semi-nude photos of themselves to other students.
And CosmoGirl magazine sponsored a survey of sexting behavior among teens and 20-somethings who volunteered to participate in online surveys. Yes, this is the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy study that gets mentioned in an lot of the Internet postings about the sexting crisis. The study itself is not based on a random sample of teens - just young people who volunteered to be surveyed.
My point here is not to argue that there isn't a problem of teens misbehaving in serious ways with their cell phones. I'm sure they are and that we need to find a way to get them to behave better. No, my point is that a single study of limited validity is capable of setting off a media storm of coverage of an issue. Raw meat was thrown out to the wolves, and the wolves responded.
Support Our Reporters Reporters, photojournalists, camerapersons, translators, and aides are risking their health, liberty, and even their lives to bring us the news we need from Iraq and other hot spots around the world. Show your support for these hard-working and courageous journalists by displaying the Support Our Reporters yellow ribbon on your blog or web site.
, where I discovered the album was available either as a download or a burn-to-order CD. I then went over to
and why he can't stop boring people by telling folks how great it is. He's using it as an overall reading device, getting books, magazines and newspapers on it. 
In 2003, actress Charlotte Ross 
iPhone and iPod Touch that will let consumers download 
and 
. Remember, of course, that Random House is owned by German publishing giant Bertelsmann. My first book on bicycle maintenance, Anybody's Bike Book, was published by Ten Speed. This acquisition brings to mind when News Corp., through its HarperCollins division, bought out literary publisher 