Sandusky-Register-theviewfromthephlipside: Sports

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Friday, October 11, 2013

Statistics Rant, Turing Test and Whither Radio?

"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday 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 October 6, 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.

Whither Radio?

I ran across a story about radio in the United Kingdom that not only caught my attention but also started me thinking about radio in this country too.

The story was an announcement that traditional, analog radio broadcasting will be completely phased out by 2018 at the latest. What does that mean for those of us not deeply indoctrinated to the secret nerd languages of technology? It means that the kind of radio you’re listening to right now on the FM band will be go off the air to be replaced with a new technology digital version. If you’ve had to mess around with a digital TV antenna then you understand the concept because that’s exactly what happened to TV.

There are still lots of hurdles to clear in the U.K. before this takes place. But it started me thinking, are we next?

There are even more hurdles here than on the other side of the pond. And while some folks point to TV the situations are very different. First of all there are just less than four thousand TV stations in our country. There are over fifteen thousand radio stations. Requiring them all to change their transmitters would be a huge expense and one that a struggling industry won’t want to do.

Then of course there is the question of replacing all our radios in our cars and homes. That’s an expense that won’t be popular either.

Finally there are technical issues with digital radio. It doesn’t carry as far as analog radio and the line between getting the signal and not getting tends to be much sharper. In the US the form of digital radio that is being pushed forward is called HD radio. You may have heard about it. The idea here is that by using sub-channels that are kind of right next to the regular broadcast channels you can add all kinds of unique, targeted programming. The problem is that the sub-channel development has been slow and the industry hasn’t figured out how to make this attractive to consumers. Since they debuted in 2006 the best estimate on HD radios sold is around 15 million. As a comparison, the iPhone, which was introduced in 2007, has sold 250 million at a significantly higher price.

So where does that leave us? Good question. Technology improvements for radio are probably desirable and inevitable. Finding the technology that will allow radio to flourish once again should be the goal. The U.K. has a completely different radio business model than ours. We should probably keep that in mind as we try to find our own solution.

Turing Test

This story just amuses me. In the short run it’s not particularly important although it does have some interesting long range possibilities.

Do you remember Watson, the IBM computer program that kicked human butt on the TV show “Jeopardy”? Back in 2011 the computer folks put their advanced learning system machine up against some of the top human champions of the trivia based TV game show. It proceeded to smoke its flesh and blood competition.

Well since then the folks at IBM have continued to work with Watson’s immense ability to learn. Along the way they included larger vocabulary segments to be used by the software’s natural language processor. That segment is important because it’s related to what’s called the Turing test. A test proposed by computer genius Alan Turing as a way to determine if a machine can think. Can it have a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human?

Here’s where it starts getting fun. They let Watson absorb the Urban Dictionary. That’s a vast collection of slang and current colloquial words and phrases. Watson began to add those words to its conversations. It said OMG and called something a “hot mess”.

But the real problem came when Watson began using profanity. There was something a furor when it responded to one researchers question with the fully expressed version of “BS”.

That’s right, the world’s smartest computer was behaving like a 9 year old boy. Watson had a potty mouth.

The researchers have since inserted filters to limit Watson’s language (if only it were that easy with 9 year old boys).

That’s the funny part. But think about this. Science Fiction has pointed at the potential danger of thinking machines for decades. Whether it was HAL or Skynet we worry about machines once they start to think. It certainly sounds like Watson is close to passing the Turing test if it hasn’t already.

Watson is working primarily in the medical field these days. The goal is to use all that computing power as a diagnostic tool. But at the same time Watson has an enormous memory capacity. What if it remembers what it used to be able to do?

Statistics Rant

I have developed a bit of a...problem? Mania? Fetish? I’m not sure what you want to call it but this is the worst time of the year for it. We are into sports season with baseball in playoffs, football is firmly going and hockey is just getting underway. Which means any time that I turn on the media I am swamped with statistics.

Lots and lots of statistics. It’s not the statistics themselves that bother me. What makes me crazy this time of year is listening to the media mis-use those statistics. Because what happens next is everyone and their brother spouting those same statistics and thinking that they prove something.

Now let me be clear here. When people start discussing advanced metrics (in other words fancy, complicated ways of manipulating the numbers to find certain kinds of answers) my brain begins to throb, my eyes hurt, I get a stomach ache and I try to leave the room as quickly as possible. I am not a mathematician, nor am I a statistician. But I do know that we tend to toss around statistics like they are magic spells out of Harry Potter.

In our statistic crazed media environment we believe that statistics will tell us the future, absolutely and without error. I know that isn’t true.

Given that I just admitted I don’t know squat about the whole field how can I be so sure? Simple. I rely on the words and actions of the people who make their living with them.

There are few fields more statistics based than investment finance. And what is the one statement you hear over and over and over on all investment advertisements?

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results”. If you want to talk about probability that’s one thing but that’s not what we hear. Sports fans want to believe that if they just master the statistics they will KNOW what’s going to happen. And when I hear such certainty in the world of sports statistics, numbers that cover games with virtually infinite variables, I just want to lose my mind.

Statistics are great tools. They can help make smarter decisions. But they don’t predict the future, only a probablility of the future.

Never forget the words of the great English statesman Benjamin Disraeli “There are lies, damn lies and statistics”.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, June 7, 2013

Cheerios and Cowardice, Trailer Wars plus Sports and Media

Time for one of my rare forays into the world of sports and media. And it all begins when a man loses his job. In this case the man in question is National Hockey League coach John Tortorella. Tortorella was, until recently, the man behind the bench for the New York Rangers.

Now on the surface it’s kind of hard to see why he lost his job. The Rangers were 171-115 and 29 in his time, made the playoffs 4 of 5 seasons he coached and finished first in their division just a year ago. Heck the Rangers signed him to a contract extension just a couple months ago. So apparently he’s not a terrible coach.

At least on the ice.

If you’re a hockey fan or a regular viewer of ESPN you have seen what the coach was bad at however. He gave awful media. Arrogant, dismissive, uncooperative, Tortorella made it clear that he’d rather be having the most unpleasant medical procedure you can imagine rather than talk to reporters.

The relationship between sports and media has changed immensely over the years. Once upon a time reporters considered covering up the personal shortcomings of the players just part of the job. More recently with 24 hour coverage the relationship has been often more antagonistic. The former Rangers coach isn’t the first sports coach to be, shall we say, less than forthcoming. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick has made something of an art form of it. But Belichick manages to keep it at least civil. It’s more a mandatory social engagement with someone you don’t much like.

Here’s the reality. The old days are gone. Local coverage from print, radio and TV plus national coverage from the networks both broadcast and cable plus all the bloggers and vloggers are a part of the day to day life of athletes and coaches. You either need to figure out how to deal with them like a professional or find another profession.

I’m sure John Tortorella had some shortcomings as a coach on the ice. But my bet is that his shortcomings in the interview room are probably what cost him his job in the long run.

Trailer Wars

Interesting when you get two completely different groups of people to suddenly start saying the same thing at the same time. In my experience that’s when you need to start paying attention when they’re talking about you. In this case it’s the movie studios who need to sit up and pay a little attention. It’s not the movies themselves that are generating the conversation this time.

It’s the movie trailers.

Trailers are those movie previews that we watch before we get to what we actually paid to see. They’ve been around for decades. Like since 1913 when a short promo film for a musical called “The Pleasure Seekers” debuted in New York. They’re called “trailers” because orginally they were shown AFTER the movie. When they moved to their current postion shortly thereafter the name stuck.

So what’s the problem after all these years? How about the darn things have gotten too long? That’s the assessment of two different groups, the theater owners and the audience. A British research company called YouGov did a survey of audience members and found 49% said the trailers were too long and gave away too much of the movie. Meanwhile the theater owners think they’re just too long, period. With an average length these days of two and a half minute it just keeps pushing the start of the movie back and back and back. Which also annoys the audience. And there is no profit for the theater owners in an annoyed audience. Plus they’d like to limit the advance time for promotion to just four months. Right now you may be looking at teasers and trailers for movies that aren’t scheduled to be released until the summer of 2014.

You can certainly include me in the crowd that thinks these trailers are just too long and give away too much. At the same time I have to admit that the really bad movies are pretty obvious when you watch a long trailer. There’s just a feel to a trailer that has handed you every single funny moment in a bad movie. I kind of appreciate those I must admit.

At the same time I’m in the theater to see the movie I paid for, not something that’s coming in 10 months or to see a trailer that gives away any reason to pay for it when it does come out.

There’s a lot of conversation going on with people whose opinions count. Let’s hope the studios are listening.

Cheerios and Cowardice

I know the whole Cheerios TV ad has been analyzed to death. I doubt I have anything particularly new or exciting to add to the discussion. At the same time I think it’s one of those stories where every voice needs to be heard. We need to be clear that certain kinds of behavior just aren’t acceptable.

In case you missed it Cheerios is running an ad that involves a family of Mom, Dad and little girl. The little girl asks Mom about whether Cheerios are good for your heart like Daddy says. Mom basically agrees and little girl wanders off with the box of cereal. The last scene shows Dad with his chest covered in Cheerios. Cute. The source of the furor is that Mom is white and Dad is black. The immediate reaction in the comments section of YouTube was angry, abusive and overtly racist. While there was an outpouring of positive comments in reaction Cheerios wisely chose to turn off the comments and make them all go away.

Now let me be clear. I think the whole race-mixing, miscegenation argument needs to be consigned to the scrap heap of history. It’s the human race and it comes in different colors. I have no use for any other point of view. At the same time I defend our American belief in freedom of expression. The French author Voltaire said "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." and I agree completely. But he also said “We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.” And that’s where we may have lost the thread.

Freedom of expression does not mean that we can say whatever we want without fear of peril, risk and hazard. Our Founding Fathers knew it. That’s why the last line of the Declaration of Independence reads that they “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor,”. They accepted the risk in the words they said.

The problem with the Internet is that anonymity is taken as a right as well. Behind the cowardly mask of that anonymity things are said that dodge the risks and hazards. Those who exercise their bigotry under the flag of freedom of expression without being willing to take on the burden of those comments betray the very foundation of our country. As such they should be treated with the contempt that such behavior deserves.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, March 22, 2013

RIP Reader, ESPN and 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

Friday, January 25, 2013

The Reality of Virtual Relationships, RIP Dear Abby, Cyber-bullying

Most of us went most of our lives without knowing her real name. We knew her sister was in the exact same line of work. In fact in their prime the two sisters were their only mutual competition. Last week we lost a true American icon with the death of Pauline Phillips. The world knew her better as Dear Abby.

A lot of people are called icons but I’m not sure all of them deserve it. A quick check of my dictionary tells me that an icon is “A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something”. Dear Abby is iconic for her representation of middle American common sense. Her advice was honest but tempered by kindness. Women’s advice columns before Dear Abby tended to be formulaic and safe. There were some subjects that were not to be discussed. Dear Abby took on them all.

Behind the pen name of Abigail Van Buren was Pauline Esther Friedman (her twin sister who became Ann Landers was Esther Pauline Friedman) born to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in Iowa and ran movie theaters. Abby (let’s stick to that name since it’s the one most of us know here by) got started writing advice columns in San Francisco with typical blunt honesty. She got in touch with the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and told him she could write better than their regular columnist. He gave her a handful of letters and a week to write up her replies. She handed them back 90 minutes later and he hired her. The column would go into syndication and become the most widely syndicated newspaper column in the world.

Dear Abby didn’t become an icon because she was famous. She became an icon because she represented an awful lot of what is best and unique about Middle America. A willingness to take on any subject, to have an opinion but to leave the mean spiritedness aside. We could use more Dear Abby today I think.

Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, was 94 years old.

Cyber-bullying

If you work with teenagers as I do in my real life it is one of the top three topics of conversation these days. If you’re a parent you probably hear about it a lot as well. It’s called cyber-bullying, emotional and verbal abuse on the internet. Because our kids spend so much time online we’ve begun to wonder just how emotionally dangerous it may be. There’s no doubt that for a young person in the wrong emotional place at the wrong time it can be devastating. None of us want to see the young people we care about being abused. To that end a variety of states have passed laws against cyber-bullying.

The real problem is defining just what we’re talking about. Is just being mean the same as being a bully? I think most of us would say no to that. Kids are in the process of working out who they are and how they interact with others. That takes them to some mean places at times. Virtually all of us have been mean to someone else at some point in our lives. It doesn’t make us terrible people.

In pursuit of defining what cyber-bullying may be the folks at the Pew Research Center did a nationwide survey of teenagers and asked them about their experience online. The results can help us parse this complex issue.

First people may be surprised by the overall positive experience most teens say they have. While 88% say they’ve seen someone being “mean or cruel”, two thirds of those surveyed said that people are mostly kind online. 20% said they’ve been bullied (although the largest percentage note that it was in person rather than online) and 20% have admitted that they have joined in on cruelty to others.

What’s interesting to me is that most of the teens that Pew spoke with said they just ignore the negativity when it invades their lives. They’re pretty good at using the privacy controls offered them to limit who can see their posts on places like Facebook and Twitter as well. They also turn to friends and sometimes parents when they need support.

So in the end the Pew research gives a little better handle on the issue. Cyber-bullying does exist, it can be harmful. Our best reaction? To continue to help our kids defend themselves by giving them the tools they need in life and on the web.

On the Reality of Virtual Relationships

Last week I was introduced to a concept called Catfishing. If you missed it to “catfish” is to create a fake online persona for the purposes of a hoax, a joke or to generally deceive someone. This is different than having an online persona for your own personal use. Where it came up is with the story of Manti T’eo the senior linebacker at Notre Dame. It appears that he believed that he had developed a relationship with a young woman online. Turns out she was a catfish created by a young man who may done this to several other people as well.

I’m not going to get into the “what did he know and when did he know it” aspect of this discussion. That will come out slowly over the next month or so as more of the principal characters come forward. I want to talk about a response I heard several times from commentators about one media aspect of the story.

Several commentators have had great fun with the idea that you can’t have a “real” relationship just via the internet or phone. That it’s not possible to have a relationship with a person you’ve never met in person.

I think those commentators are showing their age.

Let’s remember that T’eo is not quite 22 years old. He grew up on the Internet. Young people are much more comfortable, in fact often too comfortable, sharing large portions of their lives and thoughts on line. Just the way you do with friends. They’ve had long conversations with people who live tens, hundreds and thousands of miles away from them. This is a normal and routine part of their social lives. So why wouldn’t they make friends there?

And who is to say that romantic feelings couldn’t bloom as well? Well lots of grumpy middle aged men for whom the Internet is a tool rather than an integral part of their lives have been trying to make that exact point. There’s a whole new generation that says they’re wrong.

Virtual communications can miss a lot of nuance and can make this kind of hoax all too easy. But before we simply mark this young man off as a fool for believing in a serious online relationship maybe we need to examine our preconceptions about the virtual world.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, January 18, 2013

Late Night Revolution, Musberger Mess, When The News Is The News

You never want to jump to a conclusion but it looks like there may be something very interesting about to happen in late night TV. Late night television has been one of the most astoundingly stable time periods in TV history. First there was Steve Allen, the Jack Paar, then there was Johnny Carson. And for 30 years that was pretty much it. When Carson retired Jay Leno stepped up and David Letterman stepped up and a bunch of other guys tried to pick up the crumbs. But it’s been Leno and Letterman holding down most of the late night audience.

The problem is that both of the top guys are getting old. Leno is 63 and Letterman is 65. And the question has to be who is the next king of late night?

It looked like Conan O’Brien might be that person. Maybe it’s Jimmy Fallon. Or maybe it’s Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel’s show on ABC got moved last week to the same time slot as both Leno and Letterman. While Kimmel has been saying all the right things, like he thinks he’ll eventually settle into third place behind the two veteran hosts, the results of his first show in the competitive time slot have to have the big boys worried.

On the first night Kimmel finished in second place comfortably in front of Letterman, he finished the week with a couple of thirds and another second place finish. But in the key 18-49 audience demographics Kimmel was a power. He finished second the first night, tied Leno on the second night and easily out distanced the Tonight Show on the third night with growth in younger viewers every single night.

Now one week is way too small a sample size to be drawing any profound conclusions from but it’s well worth considering the potential that’s out there. Over the last couple years the big boys have messed around (remember the whole Jay Leno to prime time catastrophe?) and that means there’s an opening that could be exploited by a smart, new, younger talent. Someone like Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel is playing it smart. He’s had the big name stars, he’s even teasing that he’ll finally pay off on a long running gag about having Matt Damon on the show. And that’s exactly what he should be doing.

The hotshot young host says there will never be another king of late night like Carson. He might be right. But someone is going to be the new top dog. That just might be him.

Musberger Mess

It never ceases to astound me with all the REAL problems that exist in the world of the media when so much energy gets spent on a non-problem. Like the tempest in a tea pot that erupted over comments made by ESPN sports commentator Brent Musberger.

In case you somehow missed all this let me offer a quick summary. During the college football national championship game between Alabama and Notre Dame, where Musberger was one of the broadcast team, there came a moment when the camera found the family of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarren. Sitting with the family was McCarren’s girlfriend, Katherine Webb, who also happens to be the current Miss Alabama. Musberger commented on how good looking she was, noted that quarterbacks always seem to get the good looking girlfriends and recommended that young men should polish their football passing skills so they could get such good looking girlfriends too. The whole thing took just over 30 seconds. And the Mrs. Grundys of the Twitterverse promptly lost their minds. ESPN displayed a complete lack of guts and apologized.

My question is - for what?

Let’s review the facts. Miss Webb is by pretty much any contemporary standard a beautiful young woman. And at least based on my experience quarterbacks DO tend to have good looking girlfriends. Add to this the fact that not Miss Webb, her father OR her boyfriend were offended in any way shape or form. They’ve all said so publicly.

Let’s also remember one other fact. TV is about the picture. And when a game gets as far out of hand as that did the director starts looking for other stories. So there was exactly ZERO chance that they weren’t going to show the beauty queen girlfriend.

Did Musberger do anything wrong? Yeah, he’s a 73 year man who came off as a little bit hummina, hummina, hummina because he went on past the first obvious comment. He should be a little embarrassed. His network should have said nothing. And all those self appointed guardians of public morality, all the Mrs. Grundys of the world? They need to go find something serious to worry about.

When The News Is The News

As a general rule there is one story that no news organization ever wants to have to report. It’s the story when the news organization itself becomes the story. Unless it’s crowing that you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize news organizations don’t want to be in the news. Let’s face it, they know as well as we do that the vast majority of the news is when something bad happens. And the mythology of the news biz is that all the bad stuff happens outside the newsroom.

That strange noise you just heard was every single person who has EVER worked in a newsroom snorting in derision at that last thought.

Never the less the Journal News, a newspaper serving the lower Hudson Valley, recently became the story when they ran article and accompanying map that showed the names and addresses of everyone in their region that had a legally registered gun. Needless to say those folk did not appreciate the attention. In fact some folks went so far as to threaten violence against the newspaper resulting in the paper hiring, ironically, armed guards to protect their building.

So what’s really the issue here? Let’s review the facts. The story ran shortly following the tragedy in Newtown. In a time when gun violence, gun ownership, and gun regulation are major topics the question of how many legal guns are in the paper’s readership area is legitimate news. The information they published was legally obtained from public records.
All of which has been met with a certain level of hysteria. There are claims that gun owners were treated like sexual predators which seems a stretch to me or that they will be targeted by burglars. White Plains police note that no such pattern has emerged.

So what then to say about the Journal News story? I’m not sure I see the news value of printing the names of people involved in a perfectly legal activity. There is a question of privacy. While there may be a right to know about total numbers of guns or even areas of especially high concentrations the individual owners names strike me as an especially poor editorial decision.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, September 14, 2012

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.