Diary of a Digital Detox – What did a media professional learn from his experience?https://t.co/mUE8xMq28M
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 22, 2019
I have my classroom media literacy students do an electronic media cleanse as their first homework each semester. And they just need to make it for a day.
A couple of stories today about both iPhones and Androids:
Apple bringing back larger-screen MacBook Pro, creating iPhone Pro models w fancy cameras, refreshing iPads.https://t.co/2vp2ybaWMJ
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 22, 2019
Google debuts new Android logo, kills off fun dessert-based software revision names, goes to boring numbers. (OK, going from ‘Oreo’ to ’10’ is probably a good idea, but it isn’t any fun…)https://t.co/1RfZRD1UGPpic.twitter.com/qXMCCLRzqC
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 22, 2019
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 22, 2019
Smart speakers are the creepiest. Do you really trust giant corporations to be listening to every word, every sound… coming out of where you live? Not me.
When a Facebook “joke” looks like an actual threat: 'Storm Area 51' event pushes Rural Nevada county to declare emergency https://t.co/eboBQNGcZa
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 22, 2019
So there was a joke group set up on Facebook to have a giant crowd of folks storm the gates at secretive Air Force base Area 51. But what if some people actually show up?
And finally, your Distracted Boyfriend meme of the day:
Going to try to get back to blogging on a more regular basis this fall. On days I don’t have essay posts, I’m going to share some of the media issue Twitter posts that might have scrolled by your feed. Let me know if you find these interesting/useful.
-REH
NEW: Six months ago I had a thought: What could we learn abt the 2020 candidates thru their rally playlists? Abt audience and intended message? So we got them from nine Dems (and Trump). And this interactive was born. Let's dig in. (w/ your sound ON🔊🔊) https://t.co/VJwy1Xasy1
A great look at what can be done with multimedia reporting. Doing online what you can do best online. Really cool story.
If I may: I looked at this a bit with my MFA thesis. My project was a media history essay + archive connecting related materials from disparate Internet archives & other sources; I think it demonstrated one way to not just present history but to teach it. https://t.co/XtmGKndHpO
How are historians supposed to cope with the digital world? Here’s one example from artist Gordon McAlpin whose masters project looked at the history of the transition from silent to sound movies.
CBS and Viacom may finally be getting back together again after a lengthy on-again, off-again relationship.
Although they are currently two separate corporations with separate stocks, the ownership and management of the two companies heavily overlap. CBS owns the CBS broadcast network, half of the CW broadcast network, a number of television production companies, approximately thirty broadcast television stations, and the Simon & Schuster publishing group. Viacom owns the movie studio Paramount and numerous cable channels, including Comedy Central, BET, and the various MTV and Nickelodeon channels.
Viacom had begun in the 1960s as a small film production unit within CBS. Later, in 1971, the federal government became concerned that the broadcast networks were becoming too powerful, so it forced them to sell their content production units. (Can you imagine that today?) As an independent company, Viacom grew into a major producer of cable television programming; its products included MTV and Nickelodeon.
In 1987, theater owner Sumner Redstone bought Viacom. Under Redstone’s leadership, the company became a dominant media corporation in the 1990s. Finally, Viacom bought CBS in 1999, the television network that had given birth to it decades before.
But then, in 2005, Viacom and CBS split back into two separate corporations with separate stocks being traded. So they are no longer a single Big Media company, right? Well, sort of. In recent years, Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari have been battling over control of the company. Sumner is now in his 90s and in failing health, so Shari has been more firmly in control. But the story over the possible remerger of the two companies has been as much a family soap opera as a business narrative.
Since 2018, however, the companies have been dancing back and forth, considering becoming one company once again. The issues surrounding this deal seem to be largely one of how much one company would be willing to pay for the other, and who would be the management after the merger. In 2018, CBS had revenue of $15 billion from cable networks, local media, publishing, and the various CBS broadcast properties. Viacom had revenue of $13.8 billion including Paramount Pictures and a wide range of cable networks, most prominently the MTV family of youth-oriented channels.
Complicating matters were the problems of CBS’s former chairman Les Moonves, who was forced out of the company by multiple charges of sexual harassment. Moonves was fired in September of 2018, following a pair of articles by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker alleging that that Moonves had sexually harassed at least a dozen separate women.
So, with all that background, what’s going to happen with this likely merger?
One of the major objectives of the merger is to get the two companies into a better position to compete in the cord-cutting, streaming world of the Fox-enhanced Disney behemoth, Comcast, AT&T/WarnerMedia and Netflix.
Sheri Redstone, daughter of Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone, will become chair of the combined company and become one of the most powerful women in the media industry. Reuniting the two companies has been a goal for Ms. Redstone for at least three years.
The ViacomCBS merger, with an estimated value $11 billion, is pretty small compared to AT&T’s $80 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia and Disney’s $71.3 billion purchase of most of the entertainment business of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.
“The new ViacomCBS looks much like the old one, where Sumner Redstone served as chairman of a company that essentially had two parts: Tom Freston ran cable operations while Leslie Moonves supervised CBS assets. The new version of the company will install Redstone’s daughter Shari as chairman, but leaves some questions about whether the combination will be able to maximize its efforts with the assignments given to Bakish and Ianniello.”
If I really wanted to go nuts on this blog post, I could make a pretty compelling analogy with the relationship between director/choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer/actress Gwen Verdon as portrayed in the recent FX mini series that I finally got around to watching this week. But I will leave that as an exercise for the reader…
Avengers – Endgame now has biggest global box office, displacing Avatar Avengers – Endgame has now passed James Cameron’s Avatar for the title of world box office champion, with a current total of $2.79 billion, compared to Avatar’s $2. 789. That figure does not, of course, account for changed ticket prices since Avatar came out a decade ago. Endgame still has a ways to go to top Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the all-time domestic gross list. (A:E at $854 million, SW:TFA at $936 million). Adjusted for inflation, the top three domestic are Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, and The Sound of Music.
Want something more to think about RE: live v. animation
The short Piper won best animated film Oscar. Style looks a lot like Lion King.(And yes, I know, everything in Piper was animated.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTjHEyEAlsc
Cats musical movie now has trailer
I strongly suspect some of the people involved with this movie were on hallucinogens while they were working on it. But it still seems oddly compelling.
Is GateHouse poised to own 1 in 6 of America’s newspapers?
Looks like it. GateHouse is reportedly in talks to purchase Gannett, which would combine the nation’s two largest newspaper chains. Then new company would control 254 dailies and hundreds of weeklies. (Nieman Lab)
Are newspapers still newspapers when they go all-digital?
Chicago Defender, iconic African American newspaper has gone all-digital
As of July 11th, the 114-year-ld black newspaper is no longer being printed in physical form. The paper’s legacy includes “driving the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago from the South and bolstering the black electorate as a key constituency in national politics.” (Chicago Sun Times)
How can the Washington Post get rid of cookies and still be able to study their readers?
By moving their tracking in-house instead of making use of third-party cookies and tracking data (think Facebook and Google), The Post and publications that license their technology can deal better with both effective targeting and maintaining reader privacy. (Although not mentioned in this article, I would guess that this new tech is one of the big outcomes of having the paper owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.) (Digiday)
Why is Starbucks going to stop selling newspapers in September?
Because customers just “borrow” them off the rack without paying for them. In short, everybody steals the newspapers, so there’s no money to be made from selling them. Hmmm… think I’ve heard something like this before. (NY Post)
I don’t generally name my cars, and I don’t really set out to name my motorcycles, but it seems like over the past decade most of the motorcycles I’ve owned have somehow let me know what they wanted to be called. This year all my motorcycling is being done on a Suzuki DR650, AKA Putt Putt. This is the final installment of the story of Putt Putt’s and my trip to the canyon country of Utah.
With our visit to Zion National Park complete, it was time for my traveling companion Howard and me to turn our bikes back east. There were still parks to visit, but the road would now be inevitably leading us back home.
We spent the night at a rustic, remote motel outside of Hatch, Utah, that was just one of several family run accommodations that turned out to be great choices. The Riverside Ranch RV Park Motel & Campground was old school, but neat and clean. And there was a porch outside that let a person sit, sip bourbon, and enjoy the sunset.
There was also a restaurant across the parking lot with the enticing sign of “Restaurant” above. I suppose there was a name for it on the menu… But the food was an interesting twist on New Mexican food. And it was dark enough after the late sunset to be able to see the Milky Way spread across the sky.
Simple pleasures are the order of the day at The Riverside Ranch, etc.
Breakfast offerings were pretty slim at The Riverside, so the next morning we rode on to Bryce Canyon Pines for eggs and homemade corned beef hash. Much better than cold cereal and toast. It occurred to me that while making a go of it in the restaurant trade is always tough, it must be a particular challenge in such a remote place that depends so much on seasonal visitors.
As much as I loved our visit to Zion, I liked our time at Bryce Canyon National Park much more. While still a busy park, it was much less crowded than the better known Zion. While shuttle busses were an option, we were still allowed to ride the bikes out to the many overlooks and trails.
What a spectacular collection of canyons, amphitheaters, fins and hoodoos. What’s a hoodoo? Think of giant sandstone columns topped with a harder-rock cap that keeps the top from eroding away. Some of the most dramatic and most iconically Utahan landscapes of the trip. (A ruder person than me could make a crude analogy of what these valleys looked like, but I shall take the high rode here and not mention it. Those of you of the proper (or improper) frame of mind can figure it out for yourselves…)
An overlook full of hoodoos.
One of the endless views from Bryce.
There was debate over what these chirping bugs were. One parking lot attendant suggested they were pine beetles, but there were also a lot of cicadas visible. Any entomologist readers with an ID for us?
After leaving Bryce, we had a lot of miles to go across riding backroads, including the amazing Utah Highway 12.
We found time for a brief stop at the Capitol Reef National Park visitors center, but there will need to be a return visit there, along with the missed Cedar Breaks National Monument.
Utah Highway 12 descends off the mesa.
Our final stop for the day was at Colorado National Monument, just shy of our Grand Junction, Colorado destination. From there, it was back to our hotel. In the morning, I would head east across the Rockies home to Kearney, Nebraska, and Howard would head southeast back to Texas.
We had five great days of riding in Utah, but we still have unfinished business in the state. We skipped Arches National Park because of the crowds, we missed going into the Needles Unit of Canyonlands National Park, and we had to skip completely Cedar Breaks National Monument.
And there were a lot of interesting dirt roads that got bypassed because I had street tires on Putt Putt.
The most important reason for this not being a bucket list trip, however, is because this isn’t something I’m checking off. It will be something that stays with me for a long time to come. I still think about a backpacking trip I took with my older brother more than 35 years ago. It’s still with me. And I hope that I haven’t left these beautiful areas behind forever. I want to come back to see the mainland of Alaska, and Canada’s Northwest Territories, and…. It’s not a check box, it’s an introduction.
Mountain high, valley low, this has been a great trip, but it has only lengthened my list of places to go, not checked any off my list.
I’ve written on a variety of occasions how much local news matters – news from a local newspaper, television station, radio station; the importance of broadcasters having a local physical presence along with local ownership if at all possible.
We get lots of talk (criticism) of “the media” where people really mean the big national news outlets. But oftentimes the news we really need comes from the hardworking, low-paid local reporters, photographers and editors who work round the clock.
That was certainly the case this week in my home of Kearney, Nebraska, where we go nine inches of rain overnight (NINE INCHES!) Monday and early Tuesday. The flooding closed the main Interstate 80 interchange into town as well as hitting hard a major hotel district, commercial area, and residential areas.
At a time like this, locals and visitors alike needed to know how far the water was going to rise, where could they get food and shelter, and when could they expect for this disaster to be over.
Here’s just a sampling of some of the great news coverage we got from local media:
The City of Kearney closed Yanney Park Tuesday because of flooding. The lake in the park has overflowed, as can be seen from Yanney Tower. Photo by Erika Pritchard, Kearney Hub
Good story with a great photo taken from the park’s observation tower.
Water nearly covered some of the vehicles in the parking lot at Kearney’s Holiday Inn Tuesday. The photo was taken by a drone hovering over the Nebraska Public Power District’s substation in south Kearney, which was de-energized during Tuesday’s flooding.
This story, by my friend Mike Konz, gets had the lasting business impact this flood may have on Kearney.
(I particularly liked this story because it gets out into the local region and talks with people from our immigrant community.)
And finally, Kearney is fortunate to have a regionally owned radio station that has local talk shows and news along with their nationally syndicated programming.
I don’t generally name my cars, and I don’t really set out to name my motorcycles, but it seems like over the past decade most of the motorcycles I’ve owned have somehow let me know what they wanted to be called. This year all my motorcycling is being done on a Suzuki DR650, AKA Putt Putt. This is part two of the story of Putt Putt’s and my trip to the canyon country of Utah.
With the end of our visit to Natural Bridges, it was time for Howard and me to head west. With Glen Canyon / Lake Powell in the way, and the ferry across Lake Powell no longer running because the lake level is so low, we had no choice but to either head north to take the bridge on the upstream end of the lake or head south to the Glen Canyon Dam end of things. Since our return trip would bring us across the northern bridge, our wheels turned south to Page, Arizona where we would be spending the night.
But for Howard and me the direct route is never the best, so we headed out to take the Moki Dugway – A section of Utah 261 that turns into three miles of mostly gravel switchbacks dropping down dramatically off the edge of Cedar Mesa and ending up near the Valley of the Gods.
The view down from Cedar Mesa. Three miles of gravel switchbacks will get you there.
You can see a little of the Moki Dugway in the top center of this photo.
Once we arrived in Page, we encountered the strangeness that is Arizona time. Most of Arizona (save the Navajo reservation) does not go on Daylight Savings Time in the summer, so its time is different from everyone else on Mountain Time. We decided to just keep living on Utah time, which meant our 6 a.m. Utah-time alarm actually had to be set for 5 a.m. Arizona time. It wasn’t that tough to deal with, but it still doesn’t feel right seeing that time you ringing alarm…
Our hoped for target for the day was Zion National Park. Unlike the parks from earlier in the trip, Zion is a popular, crowded park where there is never enough parking and many of the roads are open only to the park’s free shuttle service. Howard and I were concerned we might not be able to find parking at the park, even with our early start.
We needn’t have worried. As Handel foretold in his oratorio The Messiah, “Oh thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, there is plenty of motorcycle-specific parking.” Or something like that…
Despite our worries, there was plenty of unpublicized motorcycle specific parking at the park. (It’s attached to the oversized-RV lot, if you’re looking for it.)
We were soon in line for the shuttle to the far end of Zion where we were to go on the Riverside Walk. For us there was about a 45-minute wait.
In line for the Zion shuttle bus.
But the wait was worth it. The views along the paved Riverview Trail were spectacular. As Howard wrote in a post on Instagram, “I can’t imagine a person seeing it for the first time 400 years ago. How could you explain it to someone who’s not only never seen it, but never seen anything like it?”
At the end of the trail comes the legendary Narrows – a route into the depths of the park accomplished by wading up the river.
The jumping off point of the Narrows was a popular place on this warm afternoon, but we had neither the time nor the right equipment to follow it.
Despite all of the people and accompanying noise and fuss, it was still possible to have a moment of peace in this incredible park. Just listen for a moment to burbling of the Virgin River I recorded on our way back.
I don’t generally name my cars, and I don’t really set out to name my motorcycles, but it seems like over the past decade most of the motorcycles I’ve owned have somehow let me know what they wanted to be called. This year all my motorcycling is being done on a Suzuki DR650, AKA Putt Putt. This is the story of Putt Putt’s and my trip to the canyon country of Utah.
Ralph and Howard at the Needles Overlook
When I was an undergrad, my older brother gave me a copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. In it, Abbey tells the story of his three years as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument (it wasn’t yet a national park) in the 1950s. In it Abbey talks about his time at a park so remote that days could pass without a visitor. He also laments the fact that the park was changing during the years he worked there, becoming more civilized, accessible, and crowded.
My wife and I live in northern Arizona back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and traveling through the canyon country of southern Utah was always a favorite. I’ve been back to Arches on several occasions since then, and I’ve always loved going there, but on this year’s trip to Utah on Putt Putt, I decided I wanted to head into some of the more remote parks, to experience, as much as possible some of Abbey’s country.
The first day of our ride goes through one of my favorite areas of the state – Utah Highway 128 that runs along the Colorado River through canyons leading up to the popular tourist town of Moab. The road is often bumpy and the unwary rider can come upon unexpected patches of gravel. It is narrow, winding, and has almost no shoulder in places. In short, it’s the perfect entrance to canyon country.
A view of the La Sal mountains in the distance from Utah 121. That’s the Colorado River off to the right.
As we rode our motorcycles past the entrance to Arches National Park, we could see the cars lining up to enter into the popular spot. And as much as a part of me wanted to join them, this trip was about trying to go where the crowds were not. So instead we kept heading north and then west out of Moab to get to the Island in the Sky unit of Canyonlands. Despite only being about 30 or 40 miles from Arches, Canyonlands had only sparse crowds, with about half a dozen or so cars in the parking lot of the visitors center. There were people present everywhere we went there, but they were never loud and overwhelming.
Looking over the Green River from the Island in the Sky unit of Canyonlands National Park.
John Wesley Powell wsa a one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first successful expedition down the entire length of the Green and Colorado rivers through the canyon country of Utah and Arizona. He’s one of my heroes. The most exciting thing about him was his Western river explorations, but his most important accomplishment was his work on Western water policy.
Lunch was at the Peace Tree Juice Cafe in Moab. Although the temperature was a 102 degrees, the humidity was a fairly comfortable 10 percent. A cool meal of pita and hummus along with plenty of ice water was just perfect.
Our final destination of the day was the Needles Overlook just north of Monticello.
This Bureau of Land Management spot is about 30 miles off the main road and truly is remote. By the time Howard and I got there, were were the sixth and seventh persons to sign into the guest registry for the day. And what a view of the Needles section of Canyonlands.
The Needles Overlook.
I’m not going to give exact directions on how to get to the overlook. It’s not hard to find, but well worth the effort. There’s also a campground not too far from the overlook that makes it easy to see the overlook at sunrise or sunset.
We finished are ride through the eastern part of Utah with a morning visit the following day to Natural Bridges National Monument. Like Canyonlands, this is a remote park with relatively few visitors. It’s a also great place to see three natural bridges which can be seen from overlooks or from more ambitious hikes. What struck me about the bridges is how well they camouflage themselves because the layers of rock on the bridges match the layers in the surrounding canyon.
Can you see the natural bridge in this photo?
Coming up next – Putt Putt travels to some busy parks.