Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee do Promo for Washington Post iPad App

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

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Articles You Need To Be Reading on the Future of Media Industry

  • Mark Cuban – How Google TV could hand Netflix the entire streaming universe
    Mark Cuban made him self incredibly wealthy founding Broadcast.com, and he’s now best known as owner of the Dallas Mavericks.  He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the media industry.
  • Mark Cuban – What Google TV and Apple TV should do
    More on the future of television alternatives from Mark Cuban.
  • TPM – Seven percent of all Talking Points Memo traffic coming from mobile devices
    We’re used to talking about media as being print, audio, video etc.  But what if the media issue wasn’t what the content looked like but what the delivery device looked like.  I know we’ve long heard that “the medium is the message,” but we’ve still been talking about content in one form or another.  But as I’ve been writing about for some time, the big new medium is the world of mobile devices. Talking Points Memo, one of the big online-only news and commentary sites, reports now that the proportion of the site’s traffic that comes from mobile devices is now up to seven percent.  That’s not a big number, but it’s twice what it was a year ago.  We’re going to be talking about mobile media a lot in the months to come.
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Rocky Horror Glee Reaction #2

Debbie Deese Linder is a former student of mine from my West Virginia days.  She is in her 40s, is a lesbian in a committed relationship, and has been a hard core Rocky fan since the mid 1980s.  Here’s her reaction to the Rocky Horror Glee Show:

From the early ’80s and into the mid 90’s, the Capri Theater in Charlotte (now demolished) midnight-screened Rocky Horror every weekend.  While in high school, I was not only a regular attendee (250+ times between ’84-’86), but became a member of the group of amateur ‘actors’ who would dress up in home-made costumes and act out the action on the stage, as well as leading the crowd in doing the Time Warp, breaking in the ‘virgins’ [first time attendees] and other assorted duties of the ‘floor show.’  Many of the folks who were part of this group are still within the circle of my closest friends, and there is a Facebook group comprised of over 180 of our old gang. [Editor’s Note: Debbie reports dressing up  as “Riff Raff mostly, though I did Eddie a time or two. Somewhere in my mom’s storage building is a sportcoat with a hump sewn in, as well as a ray gun that was made by a friend in shop class.”]

Anyhow.

Overall, I thought the handling of Rocky Horror was expectedly tamed for television — that stage/screen show is too sexually loaded (even now) to perform on network TV unedited. However, I’m disappointed as hell for the writers feeling comfortable using the term “tranny” in character Mike Chang’s refusal of the part of FrankNFurter, but not using the word ‘transsexual’ in the context of Frank’s opening number. Let’s just say that there had better be a good explanation. A very good one, lest they alienate a large segment of the show’s audience, who see ‘tranny’ as a soft-core slur against the transgendered.

The other thing I am disappointed with is the casting of a woman in the roll of Frank. It defeats the dynamic of the whole plot and would have called for more ‘rewrites’ than Sue Sylvester could have ever dreamed of. To her credit, Amber Riley gave an amazing performance of Frank’s introductory song, but that’s not the point. If one envisions the whole thing being played out, a female ‘Frank’ is vanilla, and cannot possibly push all of the boundaries that ‘Frank’ does in building himself a sexual plaything that Charles Atlas would be proud of.

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Rocky Horror Glee Reaction #1

I posted my reaction to preview materials of the Rocky Horror Glee Show last week, and nothing I saw during the episode changed my opinion.  But I’m an old guy who used to go to Rocky Horror Picture Show when it was new.  I’m also not a fan of Glee.  I have nothing against it; just not my type of show.  So here is the first of two guest blog posts on the subject. Samantha Bates is a journalism student at University of Nebraska at Kearney.  She’s a Gleek who has enjoyed Rocky Horror Picture Show:

Shortly after watching the Rocky Horror Glee Show I went to Twitter to see what the trending topics were saying. One tweet pretty much summed up a lot of what I’m feeling:

“#Glee was good but now every single tween on the planet is gonna claim to be a true rocky horror ‘fan’ #watchtheoriginalthentalk.”

I think a lot of people feel the same way.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m some holier-than-thou Rocky Horror fan because considering the age of the show I’m relatively new to the scene. I was introduced to the movie by a friend a few years ago and have since memorized the songs and seen the movie countless times, but I’ve never seen the play, though I know the play, going back to its inception in 1973, is an even larger event than the movie.

Last year I went to see the film at the local movie theater during Halloween weekend and was amazed at the spectacle. We brought our own toast, toilet paper and other various items to participate, but what I was most surprised about was the amount of people that showed up in full Rocky Horror garb, including a student that I’ve seen around campus, as a stunning replica of Frank N. Furter. I had no idea that Rocky Horror was the phenomenon that it is.

As a Rocky Horror fan first, I have to say that I really did enjoy the Glee episode. I thought the musical numbers were highly entertaining and the characters well-interpreted. I’ll probably even buy the album on iTunes. That’s not to say that I thought the show was flawless−far from it.

I felt like the episode spent half of its time concentrating on addressing the risqué material. In the very beginning, glee club director Will Schuester says, “I’ll have to make some edits here and there.” That did nothing to prepare me for some of the pointless changes that I was in for.  The show tried to be too politically correct, and yet still be edgy. Obviously, the R-rating of the film called for some censorship but some of the changes just didn’t make sense.

The seemingly “subtle” lyric changes were fairly ludicrous. Opting for “Sensational, Transylvania” instead of “Transsexual, Transylvania” in “Sweet Transvestite” was a small change but made the fans who actually knew the lyrics scratch their heads and say, “Why’d they do that?” However, that was nothing compared to “Touch a Touch a Touch a Touch Me.” The line “I felt there’s no use getting into heavy petting” was changed to “heavy sweating.” What? Explain how that makes it less risqué.

Sue Sylvester made a comment during the show about how Will shouldn’t be exposing kids to this type of material, and it got me thinking. The show thought that maybe the material was too racy so they censored it, but they knew that thousands upon thousands of pre-teen or teenage “Gleeks” would be IMDB-ing Rocky Horror Picture Show and renting the movie to see what it’s all about, thus exposing kids to this material. Did Glee do this episode in hopes that thousands of kids would experience a new world that included “Transsexual Transylvania?” Maybe, maybe not. [Editor’s Note: They could also likely borrow it from their parent’s DVD collection….]

And now for the casting. Characters like Brad, Janet, and Mr. Scott were easy to agree with, but I don’t know why Kurt, the one gay male character, couldn’t have played Frank N. Furter. Maybe it was just too obvious of a choice, but I don’t go for that excuse. Kurt said that he didn’t want to dress up in a transgender corset with fish nets and high heels, but why not? That seems exactly like something he would do on a normal day, much less for a school play; not that Mercedes (Amber Riley) didn’t do an amazing job in the Frank N. Furter role, because her rendition was fantastic, but it lacked the flamboyancy that Kurt (Chris Colfer) could have brought to the role. On the other hand, I can’t think of another character that would have done a better job in the role of Riff Raff than Kurt. I guess I can’t have it both ways.

The last of my queries was about the ending. Throughout the entire episode we go back and forth with how far they can push the envelope but then they end up performing “for themselves” in front of no one. Glee isn’t the most realistic show but this made me put things in perspective. If this had been a real public high school, would they have been able to perform this show either? That makes me wonder about the intended audience. I believe that with the ending as it is, Glee put their Rocky Horror Glee Show out there for us to be the audience. They were telling us to decide. They gave us their version of the show and we can either take it or leave it. Personally, I’ll take it. With all its flaws, it’s still the Glee I love and the Rocky Horror I adore.

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NPR, Fox, & Juan Williams

UPDATE 2: Full segment from Fox for Juan Williams comments.

UPDATE: Jon Stewart weighs in on the Juan Williams dust-up.

Here’s a round up of stories covering the endless debate over NPR firing news commentator Juan Williams and the role Fox News has had in criticizing the network.  (And in giving Williams a new $2 million contract….)

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Rocky Horror Glee Show – Everything from the margin moves to the center

The ever-popular Fox show choir series Glee is doing a Rocky Horror themed Halloween episode next week.  As a long time Rocky fan, I’m both pleased and dismayed.  Pleased, because I think Rocky is good, campy fun and could fit in well with the Glee format.  Dismayed because in order for this R-rated story to make it onto broadcast television is going to require some serious changes.  I’ve listened to several clips of the episode and notice several things:

  • The Riff Raff in the Glee Rocky seems to be based more on the movie “Rocky Horror Picture Show” rather than the vastly superior stylings of the Roxy Cast stage version “The Rocky Horror Show.” Yes, I know everyone knows the movie version better than the stage version, but this is supposed to be a play.
  • The fact that that this is a story of of a gay male transvestite building a boyfriend for himself seems to have been eliminated.  Consider: The part of Frank ‘n’ Furter (played by Tim Curry on both the stage and screen) is being sung by Amber Riley.  She does a great job with “Sweet Transvestite” but…   It’s supposed to be sung by the gay male transvestite Dr. Frank ‘n’ Furter.  There is a lyric that is supposed to be “I’m just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.”  The Glee version is from “Sensational, Transylvania.”  Now obviously the story is going to need editing for broadcast, but this goes to the center of the plot.  It has been changed from a gay story to a straight story.  Sort of like taking “Brokeback Mountain” and making it about a cowboy and a cowgirl. (Or Disney giving Little Shop of Horrors a happy ending….)
  • Finally, this is a perfect example of Truth 3 – Everything from the margin moves to the center. Rocky Horror started out as a camp musical in the 70s that found enormous success in the counter-cultural community.  Today it has been sanitized from a celebration of cross-dressing gay culture into a mass market story of straights playing with gay themes.

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

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John Hockenberry Interview from C-SPAN

This interview with journalist John Hockenberry is one of my favorites from C-SPAN’s old Booknotes series.  It’s now available through the C-SPAN video archives.  A great story about living with disability, and a great series of stories from an interesting journalist.  It’s also worth watching to see how C-CPAN’s Brian Lamb conducts an interview.

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Twitter for Reporting

As a followup to the Omaha 10/10/10 conference on the future of digital media, my depth reporting class talked a bit about using Twitter as a reporting tool.  My first exposure to the idea came from a 2008 On The Media story that focused on how St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata was using Twitter as a reporter. Ojeda-Zapata has done some great reporting using Twitter, and he’s also got a couple of fun technology/geek blogs as well.

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