Tag: online media

Novel concepts from the 30s

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Mashable mentioned an interesting trend yesterday: businesses are building blogs that are focused on their area of expertise, but not necessarily on their products. The idea is simple: by building a media outlet that interests their target demographic, businesses hope to lure more customers.

As the post notes, some journalists would argue that private companies are not credible sources. You can probably find these journalists’ stories on the pages of your favorite newspaper – right next to the ads that fund those pages. Mass media has always relied on sponsorship – entertainment or information nestled around product pitches. Why take offense when the same thing happens on the internet that happened on the DuMont network in the 50s?

From the companies’ perspective, using online media makes perfect sense. There are few better ways to extend your brand – for instance, Whole Foods runs a blog about food and recipes to help establish itself as an expert in groceries. And it’s cheap to do – all the company really needs is the mental discipline to update a blog daily.

With ventures like this cheaper, easier, and more effective than traditional advertising, you can see why advertising revenues are declining. It’s another way the business community will have to adapt to a changing world.

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Does this mean my Mom has to read a liberal blog, too?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

I can’t imagine it actually coming to pass, but rumblings about reviving the inappropriately named “Fairness Doctrine” have sprung up around Capitol Hill. The Fairness Doctrine would be an FCC regulation that would force radio stations to balance their programming – so that station that plays Rush Limbaugh for three hours would have to balance it out with… um… well, whoever it is that liberals and Democrats listen to.

The impetus for the rule change is clear. Senator Debbie Stabenow claims that talk radio “overwhelms people’s opinions – and, unfortunately, incorrectly.” In other words, she’s worried about opinions she disagrees with being more persuasive. It’s completely antithetical to everything our country is founded on, but quelling dissent makes sense.

Beyond principle, though, the problems are in the details. For instance, who determines what “balance” entails? If Sean Hannity is in favor of invading Iran, is he effectively balanced by someone who is against invading Iran because they would rather invade North Korea? And how does a fairness doctrine account for “do-it-yourself” media?

The great thing about free speech is, if you disagree with what someone else is saying, you have every right to answer them and attempt to make a compelling case. Sometimes the other side has the advantage of experience and establishment – just ask any conservative reading the New York Times or watching CNN. (And incidentally – if the fairness doctrine is passed, it opens a can of worms for mainstream media.)

More avenues exist now than ever before to get a message out – which makes the fairness obsolete as well as being, well, unfair.

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Welcome to the online home of Hope and Change

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Hours after his inauguration, Barack Obama has already re-launched Whitehouse.gov. The site features a blog, facts about the executive branch, and other informational links. It also includes an indexed policy agenda and a page for the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. These two items will, in all likelihood, operate hand-in-hand in the new administration: as the President pursues the agenda, look for the Office of Public Liaison to mobilize public support to publicly lobby Congress. This office may also act as a way to run instantaneous focus groups to identify agenda items that will resonate most among the President’s “standing army” of supporters.

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Imagine no possessions

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

As I alluded to previously, YouTube is cracking down on videos that use copyrighted tracks. This has led to some backlash. Rick Hodgin at TGDaily posed the question, “What if intellectual property laws were rolled back – so there were no copyrights, patents, or digital rights management (DRM) software?”

In discussing the upside of this ideal, Hodgin paints the same picture as John Lennon’s “Imagine“: “Imagine all the people / sharing all the world.” The problem is that taking away the financial incentive for creativity will, because of human nature, reduce the number of people who attempt to be creative. And where financial interests are concerned, a no-intellectual-property policy favors those with money. Hodgin illustrates this with a flawed example:

“Suppose you’re into model airplanes and would like to build and sell those craft for a living, but don’t know as much as you should about design? Why not take someone else’s design, copy it and sell it? They have just as much opportunity to sell it as you do.”

In this scenario, the “Big Corporation” is more likely to be the party that takes someone else’s design, copies it, and sells it. An independent engineer may come up with a good design, but may could not finance mass production as easily as Boeing or some Lockheed-Martin.

There are reasons that companies who own the rights to music should want their music to appear – even unlicensed – on YouTube. And there are many creative ways that music is used.

You can’t force someone to give up his or her property for others to use, even if it’s in the owner’s best interest. (Well, sometimes you can, but you shouldn’t be able to.) The good news, though, is that an owner’s best interest is usually a good enough selling point. It’s happening in the music world, where companies like Amazon and eMusic have become extraordinarily successful selling DRM-free music. Even Apple’s iTunes – for years a symbol of limiting the use of downloaded music – has relaxed its DRM policies.

So it’s that financial incentive for creativity which will spur more creativity for distribution – which, in the digital world, will eventually mean more materials available for wider use.

Imagine that. I wonder if you can.

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PelosiRoll’d

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

To celebrate the launch of the Congressional YouTube channels, Nancy Pelosi Rickroll’d Your Nation’s Capital this week. Here’s the video that has Washington talking:

You may not be able to see it by the time this post is up – YouTube has been cracking down on the use of copyrighted music, and it has already been removed once from Pelosi’s official YouTube channel. But it doesn’t matter. The video – which started with a couple of cats frolicking in the Capitol before launching into Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” – has already made a media splash.

Aside from being funny and a good media hook, it shows the Speaker’s office understands the folks who use modern media – Rickrolling is an older prank, but new enough to be relevant (it’s no Dancing Jesus) and wholly unexpected from a federal officeholder. Kudos to Pelosi for running with what was probably the suggestion of a younger staffer.

That said, it’s telling that the Democrats in Congress are harnessing the awesome power of online video to bring us images of kittens and Rick Astley.

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New Year’s Revolution

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

As 2008 ends, the story of the year is obviously Barack Obama’s election – and in tactical political circles, the talk is of the online tactics used by Team Obama. It’s a big theme in the current race for the RNC chair, and various Republican organizations – such as Rebuild The Party – are calling on new party leadership to embrace technology.

In this rush to keep up with the Democrats, The Next Right blogger Dale Franks adds an important perspective about technology in politics. Franks points out that the whistles and bells of online activity are worthless if they do not produce offline results.

As conservatives start putting together their plans for 2009, they should heed Franks’s advice: technology can be a tool to deliver strong messages, but without those messages it’s just a way to make noise.

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Radio Nowhere

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

With Washington DC run by avowed liberals, the New York Times predicts an upswing in conservative talk radio. Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani are expected to join the ranks of Limbaugh and Hannity in stoking America’s unrest with inside-the-beltway politics.

It’s a start, and these voices will have their place. But make no mistake: they represent an old guard and an old medium.

The problem with radio is that, like television, it’s passive. So as millions tune in, it becomes easy for the so-called “main stream media” to dismiss Rush Limbaugh as a single voice delivering soliloquies from the fringe of American politics. They don’t want to see the millions of heads nodding in agreement.

But what if those nodding heads used their voice to speak out? That would be hard to ignore. That’s where a medium like the internet can go beyond where talk radio has gone before.

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