"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 December 3, 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. Technology for Christmas I have to admit that the Great American Activity this time of year is something that I absolutely can not abide. I’m just going to put it out there and I’ll deal with whatever backlash is headed my way.
I hate Christmas shopping.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy shopping. In fact my wife and I trade the traditional gender stereotypes when it comes to shopping. She likes to go in, get what she wants and get out which is the traditional “male” shopping style. I enjoy window shopping, comparing prices and features and just generally making a project out of it. Except at Christmas. You see I hate crowds. You are all lovely people I am sure. But when we all get together in a bunch our less desirable personality traits begin to emerge. Plus there’s the added problem that when that many people all show up at the mall then you end up parking somewhere near Rochester. Which means I end up having no idea where I parked the car. Which just adds to the overall level of frustration.
So I think what is being tried at the Mall of the Americas in Minneapolis is a really cool idea. The super mall has a parking lot with over twelve thousand spaces. Now they have a text based system that will not only remind you of where the car is parked but also can answer any question you may have about what’s going on at the mall, all done in real time. You start by texting your location before you leave your car (all the instructions are posted throughout the parking lot.) Then later in your shopping adventure (and if you’ve never been to the Mall of the Americas let me assure you that shopping there is an adventure. That place is enormous) you will get a text message with the location of your car. All provided by actual live customer service reps right there at the mall itself.
Mall of the Americas says it has average over a thousand lost customers every year for a while which is why they added the text service. Our malls are smaller but I’d bet at Christmas time most of us would consider such a service to be a real gift.
It might even make me a tiny bit less grouchy this time of year.
Mail Privacy Privacy is an issue that I’ve talked about many times before on this program. Privacy covering our personal information, privacy concerning who we are and what we do while we’re online. The reality is that none of this is particularly easy or clear cut.
For example - we all know that what we post on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media is pretty much public. There are some ways to control that but the reality is once you put it out there, it’s out there. Now I would imagine that most of us think that our messages on Facebook are somewhat more private (as compared to posts to our timeline). And most of us probably presume that our e-mails provide us an even higher level of privacy.
Of course if you follow the news you know that may or may not be true. E-mails between the former director of the CIA General David Petraeus and his biographer have had massive personal and professional repercussions for Petraeus and the U.S. Intelligence community.
But that required authorization from a court to violate the privacy, right? Well, it may not be as hard to pull off as we think. For example did you know that if the government wants copies of your e-mails from the last couple months they need to get a court order. But if they want to see your e-mails that are older than 180 days they don’t need any such thing. 180 days. So we’re in the first week in December, that would mean anything from this summer and before is pretty much fair game.
The issue here is that once again the law is trailing real life. You see we used to store our e-mails on our personal computers. Now more of us (for example if you use Gmail) keep our e-mail in the Internet “cloud”. The current law offers limited protection for files stored for more than 180 days on an online server. There is proposed legislation to change this but at the moment it doesn’t have a great deal of support.
It’s easy to sit back and think that our personal e-mail is part of our private life. It’s easy to think that we are protected by our Constitutional rights. Turns out it’s never that simple.
RIP Mr Food
There’s a very special place in the American mythos for the self made man. We love successful people but our mythology is really built around the person who starts with nothing and makes something out of himself. It speaks to potential, the American Dream that with a little luck and hard work any of us could be a success.
Two weeks ago we lost one of those great American success stories. Art Ginsburg passed away back in November. You probably don’t know that name. If you do recognize it’s only because of his obituaries. But you’ve almost surely seen him on TV and maybe even own some of his books. Art Ginsburg was better known to the world as Mr. Food.
Ginsburg was born in 1931 in Troy New York. His father was a butcher and that’s what Art grew up to be as well. The story probably would have ended there except that through a little bit of luck he ended up in the catering business. His success there led to a local TV station in Schenectady asking him on to do those little drop in bits that are a staple of morning television today. That grew into a syndicated program that at its peak had 168 affiliates.
Sure there was Julia Child and Graham Kerr but Mr. Food was different. He had no interest in showing off his arcane knowledge of exotic foods. Ginsburg was quoted as saying that “...chefs cook for other chefs, I cook for America”. That meant that he had no problem using canned soups or cake mixes along the way. The idea was to create good food that didn’t require stuff you couldn’t find in the average American home and to do it quickly and easily.
Along the way Art Ginsburg and his Mr. Food persona became a comfortable and friendly presence. Maybe you’d start with his stuff and go on to the fancy cooking but you could stay right there with him. Ginsburg wrote 52 cookbooks that sold over 8 million copies. He used to record over 200 episodes every year of his show. He remembered that cooking was about the food we serve our families not a culinary competition.
Along the way he became the great American success story. And yes, I’ve got to say it, Oooh, it’s so good.
Art Ginsberg, Mr. Food, was 82 years old.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
"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 
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 
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
