RIP Reader, ESPN and Crowdsourced Creation

 "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 2013 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of March 18, 2013



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. 

Crowdsourced Creation                                                                                                        

One of the coolest things that the Internet allows us to do is called crowdsourcing.  If you’re not familiar with the term it is a way of getting services provided or tasks accomplished by calling on a large group of people.  The idea is an old one really.  It’s called “Many hands make light work”.  Crowdsourcing has been used by all kinds of groups to do all kinds of things.

Here are just a few examples - movies have been made, translations done, the Department of Defense has done some research using crowdsourcing, satellite photo review searching for lost people, creating texts that are accessible to the visually impaired, creating maps, creating an encyclopedia, environmental monitoring.  Heck you can even fund a new album for your band by crowdsourcing the finances!

But of all those projects (and several of them are really cool) I think THE coolest one was the project that crowdsourced the design of a sports car.  A company called Local Motors wanted to see if they could use the Internet community to design a race car more efficiently and less expensively than the old school way.  What they got took only 18 months and three million dollars to develop the Rally Fighter, an eight cylinder, 430 horsepower racing machine.  Cost?  $99,900.  There is one other small catch.  You have to build the car yourself.  Included in the price is a six day stay at the factory, all the instructions you can use (including wikis and videos) plus the assistance of the Local Motors expert staff.  Pretty amazing really.

The old school way requires a large design team and layers of corporate bureaucracy.  Sometimes that creates great cars.  Most of the time it just generates pretty good ones.  And Local Motors isn’t done.  They have a design process underway for a military vehicle for the folks at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm (and ironically the origin of the World Wide Web) plus they have community challenges out there for the creation of a new pizza delivery vehicle for Domino’s (which explains part of their current ad campaign) and the best design for a driving shoe as requested by Nike.

Imagine hopping into your crowdsource designed car, opening your crowdsource created map to plan your trip while you listen to a crowdsource financed album from your favorite band.

The mind boggles.

The March of Time                                                                                                       

If there is one entity in the TV world that stands pretty much unchallenged right now it’s the network that has adopted the title of “World Wide Leader in Sports”, ESPN.  Yes there are other sports networks out there, most of them focused on specific sport, a few of them trying to be more all encompassing but the reality is that second place in this particular race is so distant that first place can barely be glimpsed.

Now I’m a big sports fan and I watch more than my share of ESPN.  At the same time I’ve recently become more and more annoyed with the sports network.  Maybe it’s just because it’s my least favorite sports month of the year.  March.  When most of the sporting media world in the U.S. seem to forget that there’s anything other than basketball going on right now.  Between the avalanche known as March Madness and ESPN’s over emphasis on the NBA trying to find any other sports on the “World Leader” can be problematic.

And yes I said over emphasis on the NBA.  Now I know that this will bring on the howls of the hoops fandom world.  They would have you believe that pro hoops is on the verge of becoming the second most popular team sport in America behind only the NFL.  Everybody loves the NBA.  What would you add in?  Football is off season, Baseball is only spring training and it’s not like the NHL is a major sport.  But there’s a problem with that argument.

It’s the assumption that the NBA is more popular than it really is.  Take a look at the attendance statistics for the 2011-12 seasons.  Baseball and football are way out in first and second place.  It’s baseball for overall attendance and football for per game attendance.  But when you take a look at the hockey versus basketball numbers it’s very interesting.  Because the NHL actually draws a little better.  

So why the imbalance in coverage on ESPN?  That’s easy.  They have a basketball contract but no hockey contract.  That may be the opening some new competition needs.  And both NBCSports and the deep pockets of Rupert Murdoch and FoxSport Network are coming.  FoxSports is quite upfront that they are gunning for ESPN.

Maybe we’ll end up with just another “World Wide Leader in Sports We Have Contracts With” but at the moment I think I’d take that happily.

Next On Tonight

It has become something of a tradition here on The View From the Phlipside to note the passing of folks that I believe deserve a final salute but who may not get it.  Today we’ll alter that just a bit by offering a salute to a lesser known but sorely to be missed computer application.  Farewell to Google Reader.

Google Reader is (for a few weeks more) an RSS aggregator.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It’s an old online application but a potentially useful one.  Think of it as a simple subscription system that allows you to sign up to follow your favorite web sites.  An aggregator is the application that handles all those subscriptions.  

Now there are three groups of people on the subject of Google pulling the plug on Reader July 1.  People like me for whom Reader is a part of our daily lives.  We are not happy.  There are people who think, for various reasons, that Reader needs to die.  And then there’s everybody else.  Who mostly don’t care.

Here’s the reality - RSS has been around for a long time but not a lot of people use it.  And the number has been falling especially the last couple years.  So there is a reasonable argument for Google’s decision.

What’s really stood out for me has been some of the arguments made by the “Reader should die” camp.  This is includes Dave Winer who is actually one of the guys who helped create RSS.  What jumped out at me was this quote “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.”

And that’s the rub isn’t it?  We’ve become accustomed to getting cool stuff and services on the Internet for free.  The problem is that free is a tough business model to make work.

But here’s the challenge I’d offer in return.  When cable took on “free TV” (which wasn’t really free of course but a different topic for a different day) conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done.  So why is pay TV virtually universal these days?  Because they offered something over the air TV couldn’t.

Just dumping free services doesn’t guarantee that we’ll move to fee based services unless there’s an improvement in our experience.  In the end you can take away our Reader but you can’t make us pay.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Chris Berman, The Future of Radio and Winning Advertising

 "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 September 10, 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. 


Chris Berman                                                                                                          

ESPN decided to make a big announcement last week.  You may not have noticed but the last year or two have been a little rough at the World’s Leader in Sports.  They’ve had some high profile folks leave, there have been complaints about how female staffers are treated, just a few small details like that.  So what do you do when folks are talking about everything other than your product?  You make a big announcement.

And true to the sports world model that they cover ESPN went with the announcement of a big contract extensions for one of their stars.  Oh let’s be honest, it’s a contract extension for thier equivalent of the starting quarterback, the home run king power hitter, fill in your favorite sports figure here, Chris Berman.

Like him or hate him, and there are plenty of people in both camps, Berman is The Man at ESPN.  And why not?  He’s outlasted pretty much any other contender to the throne.  Berman was hired just a month after ESPN launched and has been the mainstay, voice and face of the network pretty much ever since.

As I read the coverage of the story I thought to myself “That’s not Chris Berman’s only claim to fame.  He’s also responsible for the mess that sports journalism is in right now”.  That’s right I believe Chris Berman is responsible for everything that’s wrong in sports media today.

Once upon a time sports coverage was about, here’s a novel thought, SPORTS!  The games themselves and the people who played them.  Unfortunately today the games appear to exist only to give an entire industry of talking heads something to rant and rave about.  It would be one thing if we were getting some intelligent conversation out of it.  Instead we get Jim Rome and the cadre of wannabe’s following in his footsteps who are making a living out of being the person we all hate at the games.  The loud mouth know it all who won’t just shut the bleep up.

Once upon a time you only noticed the sportscaster when they did a really good job describing the action.  Today too often we can’t get them to get out of the way so we can even see the action.  The transitional step between the days of Vin Scully and Jim Rome?  I’m afraid that would be Chris Berman.

Hey Chris for this new contract how about making it be about the game again?

The Future of Radio                                                                                                

I had a very interesting conversation the other day with a friend of mine who is still toiling in the media mines of Radio.  It backed up something I’d come across from “Professional Music Geek” and blogger Alan Cross.

Cross points out that radio is slowly killing itself.  Not through programming choices or the slow erosion of aging technology or even by being stuck in an old business model.  Radio is killing itself because it’s leaving nowhere for the next generation of radio stars to be born.  When my buddy and I were talking we had both noted that it was hard to encourage young broadcasting students about careers in radio because neither of us see much room to build a career in radio.

Let me use my own career as a model.  I started at a day time only Country station in southwestern PA.  I did the local news for the first half of the day.  Then I got the chance to try my hand at my own program.  I next moved up to Erie PA as a copywriter and production director.  I made a lot of mistakes there but had the room to learn and grow.  Another station put me back on the air, then I was hired here in Jamestown as a swing shift announcer.  That’s the bottom of the barrel.  No regular shift, you work when you’re needed.  I got lucky, a full time slot on a certain radio station opened up and it was full speed ahead from there.

The problem is that most of the jobs I did on my way to full time in a drive time slot don’t exist any more.  Small market stations have largely eliminated local news, sales people write their own copy and with more automation there are fewer slots to learn and grow in.  It’s not even a safe haven to be the “established star” (certain folks here in Jamestown being the exception to the rule) because lots of those people are being cut for budget reasons.

So where will the next generation of radio stars learn their craft?  A lot of folks think it’s easy to be a radio DJ.  That’s basically true.  It is very, very, very HARD to be a good one.  Like anything it takes practice, dedication and a clear understanding of the ins and outs of creating a great product.

The industry as a whole appears to be happy turning out cookie cutter mediocre radio.  Doing great radio requires taking a chance.  Sometimes it’s taking a chance on a young, untested announcer who just might grow up to be something special.  Not many places to learn how to do great radio any more.

Fake Reality

Any time I hear someone deciding to try something that’s worked before I hear Doc Brown’s words to Marty McFly as he talks about going back to the future.  Relying on the past is not always the best decision but if you choose your spots it just might work.

For example if you’re a nationally advertised product right now you know you’re up against a couple different problems.  First of all most media consumers just don’t like commercials as a general rule.  Second we now live in a era where you can avoid them if you want.  Between people recording programs and watching them later (called time shifting) and fast forwarding through the commercials to the newest technology which allows you to do basically the same thing with live broadcasts the advertiser has to find some way of making sure their message gets heard.

So a tip of the lid to the folks at Aleve, the over counter pain killer.  They’ve taken a cue from broadcasting history to make sure their message is heard on the syndicated program Jeopardy.   Now in the old days a company would simply sponsor the entire program.  There’s a reason why soap operas are called that.  Laundry soap companies paid the freight for the program.  Pretty much no one does that any more.  But Aleve has a new variant.

They provide the cash for the second and third place contestants, insuring their name gets mentioned.  They buy a ton of ads on each show all week and they buy the very last slot just before the Final Jeopardy answer is revealed.  They then mimic the Final Jeopardy screen and insert a product related question and answer.  In the end you are going to find it very hard to avoid the product.  And that is the function of advertising.

This is an example of a company taking a look at the reality of the market in which they have to compete.  No whining about how hard it is or unfair.  They find a model that offers them the best results they can get and they commit to it.

In the past or in the future that’s almost always a winning formula.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.