Tag: traditional media

Email: The Once and Future King

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Harvard’s Nieman Foundation had a post today about The Slurve, a daily digest of baseball.  (While I don’t subscribe, I see plenty about it on Twitter and Facebook from intelligent, baseball-oriented friends to know that I probably will at some point.)  Blogger Adrienne LaFrance opines that journalism-by-newsletter may be underrated:

After political reporting and editing stints at The American Conservative and Business Insider, [Michael Brendan Daugherty] decided to quit his job and launch The Slurve, a daily baseball newsletter that began last March on the eve of the 2013 baseball season.

Dougherty saw the opportunity to create a bespoke editorial product for an audience that was inundated with great baseball coverage but had to traverse a huge swath of the web to find it.

Daugherty’s model is subscription, not advertising-based.  He has built an audience and feeds it with great content, and the subscriptions continue.  It’s similar to the model magazines may have used in their heyday, but without the high costs of printing and distribution.

The Slurve is not the first to use such a model.  A few years ago, the National Journal’s Hotiline was required reading when it popped up subscribers’ inboxes right around noon; Ben Domenech’s The Transom treats center-right subscribers to news and analysis each morning.  At some point, LaFrance speculates, specialty email list curators might find seats in traditional media.  She may be right; former Hotline editor Chuck Todd has certainly done so.

In making her point, LaFrance may have hit on something traditional media need more of as they claw their way into the digital age: a direct conduit into the inbox.  Sure, news organizations love to invite viewers to “join the conversation” on Twitter or Facebook.  But doing so is a thin attempt to appear multi-directional: CNN really doesn’t care what you tweeted about Syria, even if it posted your tweet on the air.

News organizations are a one-way conduits of information.  People who know stuff about the world are paid to tell you about it, if you’re interested.  If they are interested in finding your eyeballs online, they would be wise to reach out through your email inbox.

Let’s Make a Deal: MLB Edition

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

If Ryan Braun dominated the sports headlines on Tuesday morning, Alex Rodriguez dominated the sub-headlines.  News of Braun’s plea bargained 65-game suspension for using performance enhancing drugs was followed near-universally with the question, “Now, what about ARod?”

It’s a relevant question: Not only is Rodriguez one of the most famous and hated players in any sport, but like Braun he’s a repeat visitor to the PED circus.  But just because it’s a relevant question doesn’t mean it’s the best one.

Soon after Braun’s suspension news broke, Buster Olney was on the phone with the broadcast team calling Monday night’s ESPN telecast of the Yankees and Rangers.  Olney offered this insight: while Rodriguez is the biggest name on the docket, the player most likely to pursue a deal with MLB is Texas’s Nelson Cruz.  As a free agent after this year, Cruz is best served serving his suspension now and entering the open market as an available yet questionable talent.  If he waits, and the suspension gets handed down over the winter or next spring, Cruz might find it hard to sign if teams are unsure of his availability.

The astute Olney cut through the flash and the clutter to identify the real story – and good for him.  Now, back to the coverage of the royal baby.

 

 

Going multi-screen: #Facebook #adds #hastags

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Cross-posted at ViralRead.

Facebook now allows users to include clickable hashtags in their posts.  The decision seems Twitter-inspired, right?

Sort of, but not completely. Though they are using the tags made popular by Twitter, Facebook’s new feature has just as much to do with an old media dinosaur – namely, live television:

During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook – roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night. The recent “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. And this year’s Oscars buzz reached an all-time high on Facebook with over 66.5 million interactions, including likes, comments, and posts.

Speaking of the Big Game, recall that Super Bowl Sunday was a big night for Twitter this year – half of the commercials mentioned Twitter in one way or another.  Watch almost any live programming and you’ll catch hashtags superimposed on the screen almost as ubiquitously as the logo of the channel you’re watching.  All this takes advantage of multi-screen media consumption – the fact that audiences usually mess around on their phones and tablets while zoning out in front of the warming glow of TV.

And if you’re a show, product, or even a politician in a debate you want to own both of those screens.  Facebook wants to be a gateway to the buzz – and the sweet, sweet marketing dollars that follow it.

(Via AllFacebook.)

Merry Xmas, American Atheists

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The American Atheists annual anti-Christian Christmas billboard has attracted it’s annual outrage.  The Catholic League, as expected, issued a response, focusing on the use of iconic imagery of a crucified Jesus.

This has to be the gift that keeps on giving for both groups.

The Atheists can’t be winning many converts to their non-religious religion; their messages are muddied and non-persuasive.  Christmas and Easter tend to be times of year where people identify more with religion, so it isn’t the time to try to take a crowbar and peel off the less devout.  Further, using Christmas images like Santa Claus while arguing against the celebration of Jesus Christ sends a mixed message.

The Christmas season is replete with Christian imagery, which likely cheeses off the hardcore atheists who would write checks to an outfit like American Atheists.  Making a public statement during Advent is the messaging equivalent of letting off steam.  It’s great timing for media coverage, too.

Getting some press attention and giving donors something to write checks for is probably plenty for the enterprise to be called a success.  But it sure isn’t effective for advancing their organization if the idea is to create more atheists.

In so many ways, Christmas is a season of guilt; you may feel guilty about not keeping up with old friends, or that you don’t do more for the less fortunate.  Have you ever been in a Catholic Church in the weeks before Christmas?  It’s packed to the gills with good folks whose lives got away from them and who are trying to slip some extra pew time in before the close of the fourth quarter.  Maybe American Atheist reasons that people would like to shed that guilt; they are incorrect.

We do it because we want to go to church for 52 weeks, but it’s easy to skip a week – just like we give to homeless shelters and food drives and Toys for Tots now because we know we should have earlier, but didn’t.

Christmas is a time when we’re all a bit closer  to the people we want to be.  You might be a religious person who has disagreements with your church’s stance on something or other throughout the year, but Christmas is rarely one of those points of contention.

That makes it pretty easy for a group like the Catholic League to stand up, draw support, and win some favorable coverage.  Who knew they’d get such a nice Christmas gift from an atheist?

Clown Questions and the Post-Media Era

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

It’s 1951.  Underneath the stands at Old Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio dresses after a game, a gaggle of sportswriters crowding around his locker eager for a nugget of wisdom from Joltin’ Joe.  A cub reporter from the 78 daily newspapers New York City had at the time elbows his way through and asks if he plans will celebrate tonight’s win with a late night rendezvous with Marilyn Monroe.

Joe’s eyebrows raise in a mixture of mockery and disbelief.  “I’m not going to answer that,” he chuckles.  “That’s a clown question, bro.”

As the entire world knows now, that quote didn’t come from the Yankee Clipper but the National Treasure, Bryce Harper.  There were t-shirts for sale by the next morning, there are video mash up jokes, and, of course, tweets-a-plenty.

Mark it down: this is when Washington DC officially accepted baseball.  For all Ryan Zimmerman’s heroics as the franchise’s first home-grown star since the relocation from Montreal and Stephen Strasburg’s at-times otherworldly pitching and always otherworldly hype, nothing feeds this particular home town crowd like a witty retort to the press.  Inside the Beltway Bubble, pundits pondered over whether the quote might find it’s way to the podium at the White House briefing room.

Jokes aside, it’s a valid point.  And one the other Mormon looking to stick around DC might think about. Harper’s disdain for the reporter (if not his word choice) might work for politicians.  Remember the infamous 2008 interview where Katie Couric asked inane inquiries about Sarah Palin’s news consumption habits?  Palin did herself no favors trying to answer what were pretty dumb questions.

When done right, a snarky, off-the-cuff comeback is more powerful than answering a question “the right way.”  That reporter who wanted to know if Harper was going to crack open a cold one might have been put off by Harper’s flippant response, but it didn’t matter.  The rest of the world saw it, and liked it, and unless that reporter is friends with Cole Hamels there isn’t much he can do.  Harper’s message is out.

It’s doubtful that the communications firms in town are prepping an office for Communications Strategist Bryce Harper after his playing days are over – he may be a whale of a ballplayer, but his wisecrack was just a wisecrack.  Maybe there’s a second lesson there though: that if you have to overthink your response to a question, your answer will suffer.

Or as Yogi Berra put it, you can’t think and hit at the same time.

At least AP saved some money by not showing up

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The Associated Press and Reuters joined Mitt Romney in not attending this week’s Republican quasi-Presidential debate.  A story written by the AP covering the AP’s decision quoted an AP official:

The opening stages of an event as important as the presidential selection process should be as accessible as possible to all forms of journalism,” said Michael Oreskes, the AP’s senior managing editor. “These candidates want to lead the country. The country has a right to see them from various angles, not only where the TV cameras are positioned.

Remember, Journalism school students, there’s no reason you can’t quote yourself in a story you write about yourself.  That’s completely fine.

The AP isn’t clear exactly how the rights of the voting public are trampled by Fox News in restricting still photos during the televised event, but not by the AP in refusing to cover the event at all.

The only potential problem is that there will be no embarrassing pictures capturing candidates with their faces scrunched up or with mouths gaping ajar while they pronounce words like “sure” or “capital.” The restriction on pictures would be horrible for the AP if they sold pictures.

Oh, wait, that’s right: they sell pictures.

It is also tough to stomach the spin used by both AP and Reuters in holding up their readers and news consumers like human shields as the aggrieved parties.  In reality it was the news organizations who were slighted by the picture ban.  This isn’t a First Amendment problem; it is similar in that such cases the “public right to know” is used as shorthand for “the news company’s right to publish.”

But luckily for the voters, the AP is pretty much irrelevant as a news gathering organization anyway.  By using their platform for political speech, they become even less so.

Beck vs. O’Keefe

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Glenn Beck was almost immediate in his criticism of James O’Keefe’s latest video adventure, and the media is picking up on it this week:

“The problem with this whole thing is does James O’Keefe have enough credibility to continue to do” undercover video journalism? Beck asked his listeners. That kind of journalism, he said, is “just really not something that you necessarily want to get into.

Beck, of course, is a media trailblazer himself, who rose to national prominence through his revolutionary and original radio program.  He created a similarly original television program and online magazine.

With others from the right falling all over each other with admiration for O’Keefe’s NPR sting, Beck stands out as a rare dissenting voice.

But more than that, O’Keefe’s brand of activist journalism is simply more interesting than Beck’s platitudes from behind a microphone.  For months, critics have been crowing about Beck’s flagging ratings.  O’Keefe is a threat to Beck from a pure business standpoint.

After all, if you were Fox News, what would be more likely to get ratings – Glenn Beck’s chalkboard with notes about the GDP or James O’Keefe sending someone with a hidden camera into a government office?

Olbermann, Maddow, and the new faces of MSNBC

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Keith Olbermann’s final “good night, and good luck” on Friday makes for an interesting media interest story.

Olbermann was a key voice of the left during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, so he surely could have been fired for being “too liberal.”  With the Comcast/NBC merger complete, several corners of the internet were abuzz with gossip that the new parent company had something to do with the iconoclastic Olbermann being showed the door.  Or, he could just be a jerk who has a history of being fired for not getting along with coworkers.  That’s probably the most likely answer.

For years, Keith Olbermann was the face of the new MSNBC’s left-oriented opinion programming; his aggressive style countered the conservative and populist voices of Fox News with something a bit punchier than CNN’s vanilla lineup.

MSNBC hasn’t shied away from that.  They’re keeping the “Lean Forward” campaign, and their evening lineup still boasts Ed Schultz, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow.  Maddow will be the lineup’s new cleanup hitter – and for MSNBC, that seems to be the best motivation for the move.

This is unscientific, but do a Google image search for Olbermann and another for Maddow.  Sure, as a liberal lightning rod, there are plenty of pictures of Olbermann designed to make him look dumb.  But as you scroll through, a pattern becomes obvious: few of his pictures, even official ones, include him smiling.  Much like the “special comments” he delivered on his program, Olbermann frequently looks stern, as if the next words out of his mouth might just be the most important in the history of the universe. (See picture above.)

Maddow, on the other hand, is smiling in most of her search results.  When delivering opinions on her show, Maddow is smug and smart-alecky, but clearly enjoys poking fun at her targets.  It’s not necessarily good-natured humor, but it’s humor.  Much like the gruff Bill O’Reilly, one can picture a calmer, non-political side of Maddow, as if she understands that the topics on her show are important, but not likely to mean the end of the world any time soon.

Public relations 101 for anyone who wants to be on TV is to smile… and keep smiling… and smile some more.  It helps the speaker relate to the viewer.  Even when discussing difficult or contentious topics, smiles go further than furrowed brows.  Maddow seems to know this, and thus is a more effective host – and, by extension, messenger of liberal ideas.

That means that the real winners in Olbermann’s dismissal are the far left activists for whom the erstwhile Countdown host was a beacon in the night of the Bush administration.  While he created a place for overt leftist thought on cable news outside the guise of objectivity, Maddow is now the better caretaker of that tradition.

Whatever the real motivations were, the result of the decision is that Maddow, and not Olbermann, is the signature voice of MSNBC as they move (or lean) forward.  That’s pretty good news for MSNBC, but it’s even better news for left-leaning activists.

And now, the real news about the fake news

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The Onion debuts two cable television programs this month.  The fake newspaper turned fake internet news site presents a unique and specific genre of comedy – the obviously false presented as seriously real.  It’s similar but a bit different from slapstick comedies like Airplane! or Spaceballs.  It’s closer to Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update as delivered by the more deadpan performers, like  Kevin Nealon in the early 1990s.  The 1970s spoof talk show Fernwood 2 Night and the long-forgotten short-lived Nick at Night television review series On the Television may be the best examples, even if short-lived.  Because the audience is in on the joke but the performers are apparently not, it depends as much on performance as it does on clever writing.

Since this type of humor is so specific, it’s unsurprising that the Onion’s television ancestors met with limited success.  What has given the Onion its staying power?

The Onion – which started as a small, regionally distributed newspaper in 1988 – became an early example of the internet’s power of viral distribution.  It may be difficult for a network television show to find the audience it needs to build a niche following; the Onion’s following grew over time as its stories were forwarded by email.  When the Onion’s television shows air this month, they will have already recruited their niche audience online over approximately 15 years.

There’s one final layer to peel back, and that’s the Onion’s business model based on generating large amounts of free, high quality content.  The term “viral growth” is overused, but is applicable to the Onion’s rise through virtual word-of-mouth.  The content brought traffic, and the traffic brought money – both in terms of advertising, book deals, and now television shows.  None of it would have worked without something that was worth sending in an email to a friend.  Funny always came first – and the money followed.  Other small, regionally distributed newspapers who are struggling may want to take note.