Newsweek, the Price of Immediacy, Tracking You

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of October 22, 2012



My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside. 

 Newsweek Goes Digital                                                                                        

It really feels like I ought to be doing one of my RIP commentaries.  The ones I do when someone or something has passed away or closed up shop.  The passing of an icon, something like that.  But it’s not really that.  At least not yet.

Last week Tina Brown, a publishing icon in her own right and editor of Newsweek magazine, announced that effective later this year the news magazine would completely cease the printed version and go all in on a digital version.  It is the end of an era even though it’s not the end of the line.

This news is really no small thing.  Newsweek has been around for just shy of 80 years.  It never rose to the top of the pile constantly trailing “Time”.  At the same time it was the second largest weekly news magazine in the United States.  I remember getting a copy every week during my high school Current Affairs class to study.  It even got mentioned in a popular Paul Simon song.  Newsweek has probably felt the shift in paradigm of the print media as painfully as anyone.  How else do you explain the sale of the magazine by owner The Washington Post Company to 92 year old audio innovator Sidney Harmon in 2010 for a dollar.  You heard me right, one dollar.   Harman took on the magazine’s debts in the deal as well.

I’ve always felt that magazines were probably better positioned to make the move to digital better than newspapers.  The daily paper has to concern itself with the news plus the minutiae  of day to day life.  Magazines have the opportunity to range more widely, delve a little deeper and explore issues from more angles.  Consequently the opportunity that the new Newsweek, to be called Newsweek Global, has is to use all the tools of the new media world as it presents its case for continued existence.
Of course the problem is that magazines are pretty much by their nature long form and the digital world has been a bit more short form in its nature.  There are plenty of things that go well beyond Twitter’s 140 character limit.  Newsweek might be able to offer a winning package as Newsweek Global.  The highest hurdle may not be making the new digital world work but whether it can make enough money fast enough to deal with the legacy debt burden it brings with it.

This may not be RIP for Newsweek but it certainly feels like the patient is in need of some serious care.

The Price of Immediacy                                                                                             

One of the great innovations of the world wide web has also turned out to be one of the great pitfalls as well.  It’s immediacy, the fact that what you post to the world wide web is in fact world wide in just a split second.  Because there is so little processing time that immediacy has been a great assist to things like people’s revolutions like the Arab Spring.  The fact that it is spread so widely and quickly means that it’s virtually impossible for governments or censors to have much impact.  By the time you realize you have a problem it’s long past the time when you can do anything about it.

Of course that immediacy also causes problems when people post ideas and thoughts before they’ve had a chance to really consider what they are saying.  The list of athletes and celebrities who have gotten themselves into trouble by posting whatever pops into their heads in a kind of stream of consciousness foolishness.  I suppose it was only a matter of time before we took the step from foolish trouble to real trouble.

That happened last week.  The financial markets wait with bated breath for the earnings reports from all the big companies.  If earnings are better or worse than expected it can cause big changes in the value of a variety of stocks and other financial instruments.  So the that information is very carefully handled.  Now take the case of Google.  Information of all kinds is taken VERY seriously at Google.  Paranoid would not be over stating Google’s approach to their corporate information.

So imagine their unhappiness when someone at financial publisher R.R. Donnelly released quarterly earning report before the report was finalized.  Given that the news in the report was not particularly good it set Google’s stock into a tail spin.  A 22 Billion dollar tail spin.  Google had planned to release the report AFTER the market had closed to try and ease the damage.  But that’s when immediacy jumped into the equation.

In theater we say that timing is everything.  In the age of immediacy timing is even more vital than that.  And the only way to make sure you’re handling the timing right in such an environment is to slow down and take a little more care along the way.

Tracking You

It’s not something most of us think about.  But our computers are tracking where we go, what we watch and what we do online.  Everything.  Let me tell you a slightly embarrassing personal story as an example.

A couple months ago I was looking for a particular style of let’s just say undergarment.  I couldn’t find it at our local stores so I went online.  I spent a grand total of about 15 minutes researching the subject.  Ever since then I spend most of my time when I’m on Facebook looking at ads that feature men’s behinds.  Seriously.  Sometimes two at a time.  It’s not my idea of a good time.

Now how does that happen?  Simple.  My computer tracks where I’ve been and some websites, like Facebook, make use of that information.  Those sites even sell that information to other websites.  It’s called tracking and a lot of folks don’t the concept.  So there has been an ongoing push to give users (that’s you and me) control over who tracks us.  It’s called the Do Not Track movement.

Well don’t get too comfortable just yet that you will be able to decide who gets your info.  The National Association of Advertisers is raising a huge stink about Microsoft actually making Do Not Track the default setting on the newest Explorer browser.  They claim that Microsoft should side with the advertising community who wants that data rather than the overwhelming number of users who want Do Not Track.  As much as I like to pick on the folks up in Redmond  Washington I have to give them credit this time for choosing what their users want.

So what’s the bottom line?  For me there is a little bit of a balancing act here.  I understand the need for advertising to help pay for what is out there on the World Wide Web.  At the same time where I go and what I do is the center of the privacy discussion.  I want the final decision to be mine.  I don’t believe that the advertisers have any “right” to that information.  They need to do a better job of selling why we should allow them to track us.  And they need to let us determine just how much tracking we are comfortable with in our browsing.

I’d be happy if they could just forget those 15 minutes of my life.

Call that the View From the Phlipside