So this is 2014?
Nice.
So far, at least.
Let's get started this year with some thought about why we do what we do and what we are going to do this.
This blog will continue to be "home base" for my radio show "The View From the Phlipside" (now airing M-F at 8 AM and 5 PM on WRFA-LP, Jamestown, NY). I haven't noted in a while that what you see is the relatively rough scripts that I write each week. I spend a little time cleaning them up but I just don't have the time and energy to turn them into proper essays. When I record them I count on my ability to shape them as I go along. This results in some convoluted sentence structure in the scripts and some missing punctuation and grammar points. They are what they are and they are written to be spoken aloud.
I will continue to offer some reviews of movies and books. My focus will be more on older materials. The reason for this is that there is plenty of contemporary reviews of new media. The hope of these reviews has always been that I can point people to things that they may not know or may know but aren't sure if they would like. For all the media that is created new in this age there is still a massive backlog of things too good to simply fall away. Because I don't get to see as many new movies in the theater as I'd like I'll still watch and review newer stuff too. But the focus will be on older materials.
There is something new that I hope to explore this year. That's the highest quality material available on the web. This will NOT be a review of dog/cat videos and the like. I believe that there is some real quality material out there that doesn't get the attention it deserves. I want to be part of fixing that. If I'm wrong then the Internet is really nothing more than a children's toy and we need to face that if true.
Over the next couple weeks I hope to take some time to fiddle with the site, re-arrange things, maybe remodel the place a bit. For the moment I am unemployed and so I have the time to go a little deeper. I also hope to do some writing that looks a little deeper that I can spread across at least the next couple months along with the usual suspects (Great movie, by the way, "The Usual Suspects". It's the movie that made me say "Kevin Spacey? Gotta keep my eyes open for this guy"). These posts will appear (assuming I find something worth including) as "The Best of the Web". I'm kind of looking forward to exploring all this. If you have a suggestion feel free to pass it along via the comments.
Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Friday, November 1, 2013
Mea Culpa, NaNoWriMo13, and War of the Worlds
Program scripts from week of October 28, 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.
NaNoWriMo13
Much to my surprise I note that I have not talked about National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, in almost three years. With November knocking on the door, that is the month in question, I thought this would be a great time to mention it again.
If the name rings no bells for you let me review. NaNoWriMo is an annual opportunity to live the dream. The dream of writing your own novel. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. The core idea is to worry less (in fact, not at all) about the quality of your writing. The goal is to get you to create a habit of writing, to try something you’ve never tried before. Or even better to help you finish what you have tried and failed at before. Last year 341,375 people started the challenge, 178,211 completed the challenge. The great thing is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are online forums where you can compare notes, ask for help, look for or offer encouragement and find a shoulder to cry on when you hit one of the tough spots. Many regions of the country even have write-ins, opportunities for folks taking the challenge to get together, hang out and write. It is one of the more amazing events I’ve ever done.
And yes, I’ve done it. In 2009, at my daughter’s urging, I gave it a shot. My certificate from the Office of Letters and Light proclaiming that I had achieved the 50,000 word target in the month hangs proudly near my desk. The goal had been to do it again the following year but my stroke intervened. I’ve never managed to get it together again since then.
However, once again at the urging of my daughter, no let’s be honest, at the outright command of my daughter, now a Masters of Fine Arts Candidate in Creative Writing at Carlow University, I am trying it again this year.
It’s really NOT about whether or not you are the next Ernest Hemingway, Anne Rice or Dan Brown. It’s about pushing yourself to try something new. It’s about finding a new way to express your creativity. NaNoWriMo says of itself that it is about “...Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline...”.
So what about you? Are you up for a challenge? Have you ever thought that you might have an idea for a book in you? There is still time to get ready. Who knows you may start November as an auto mechanic, a store clerk, a middle school English teacher or a talking head on the radio. But you could end it as a novelist.
(It's not too late to start! Check out NaNoWriMo.org)
October 30th, 1938 the radio series “The Mercury Theater on the Air” offered up a dramatization of H.G. Wells novel “The War of the Worlds”. The production was the work of a then up and coming star Orson Welles. He had made his mark already as a stage director and his career in films was still in front of him. This was the event that made him a star.
That Halloween broadcast, with its use of fictional news reports “breaking into” the programming, was a sensation. It’s hard for some to remember what radio was like in those days. Where we watch TV or the Internet for amusement these days radio held the stage then. But there was no way to know what exactly you were listening to as you scanned up or down the dial. Since “Mercury Theater” ran commercial free there were no breaks in the action which probably added to the confusion between fact and fancy.
Beyond the fascinating work in the original broadcast (I own a copy of it and have listened to it multiple times) it was the stories of panic associated with it that first drew my attention. For any art form to create that kind of reaction was thrilling to me. Today we know that much of the legend around the panic is exactly that, legend. While many people did call the radio stations, the police and the newspapers, very few barricaded themselves into the house or ran panic stricken into the streets. Psychologists have noted that the world was in a stressful place that week, with fear of the war in Europe spreading to our country.
For me the radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” remains a touchstone for all that media can be when it puts some effort into it. “Mercury Theater on the Air” was a relatively small player in the media world at the time. It was Welle’s attention to detail, careful planning of when certain events appeared in the broadcast and his commitment to making it as realistic as possible that took just another radio drama on an October evening to the status of legend.
I still believe the media can be that good. Take the time this week and spend an hour with a classic. 75 years ago we were shown just how incredible imagination can be.
This week I need to offer a confession. A mea culpa to try and make up for contributing to some stupidity earlier in my career. It would be easy to make excuses but in the end what I can try to do it is make a change.
Do you remember the story from 1994 about the woman who spilled coffee on herself then sued the fast food restaurant that sold it to her and was awarded 2.9 million dollars? Most of us do because it was a big story back then. People were outraged and media folk like me had a field day with it. There was much mocking of a person dumb enough to put hot coffee between their legs while driving and much outrage over the “ridiculous” amount of money this foolish person received. It made us feel all smug and righteous and clever.
There’s only one problem. Most of what I just told you isn’t true.
Stella Liebeck, the 79 year old woman at the center of this story, wasn’t driving the car. She was a passenger and the car was parked at the time. The coffee was between her knees because the car didn’t have a flat place to put it while she put in her cream and sugar. When the top popped off the coffee splashed on her causing the burns. The injuries put her in the hospital for 8 days, required skin grafts and two years of treatment. She tried to settle out of court for medical costs, was refused and went to court. The initial judgement from the jury (which actually reduced their award because they noted that Mrs. Liebeck did bear some responsibility for the event) was 2.8 million. The judge reduced that to just over 600 thousand and the final settlement was reportedly below 500 thousand dollars.
That’s a different story, isn’t it?
What happened was that the story got edited down and edited down for space till the version most of us saw had only the minimal details. Sadly the rest was filled in by people trying to fluff out the story. In an age when more journalism seems to be aimed at reducing the footprint of the stories we see it strikes me as a cautionary tale.
Too often I see folks passing along stories that can quickly be shown to be incomplete or outright fabrications. Our laziness in this regard allows falsehood to masquerade in the clothing of truth. That’s something none of us should support.
Stella Liebeck deserved for the true story to be told. It’s taken me 20 years but now I’ve done it.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Friday, October 11, 2013
Statistics Rant, Turing Test and Whither Radio?
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.
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?
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, August 30, 2013
Gender Questions, The New FM Challenge and The Cost of Friendship
Program scripts from week of August 26, 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.
The Cost of Friendship
The other day Mrs. Phlipside was grumbling that she might have to unfriend someone on Facebook. Seemed the person in question was spending a lot of time exercising their potty mouth on their feed and it was getting my lady down. I know that I’ve downgraded several folks and dropped a couple more because they’ve had a negative effect on my enjoyment of Facebook. Just like real life, sometimes you grow away from certain friends. It’s not that big a deal.
At least I didn’t think so. Turns out I might be wrong. And that may mean all of us need to take a much closer look at who shows up on our Friends list. How would you feel about some of those friends if you discovered they were keeping you from getting a loan or taking out a mortgage?
Turns out that some lending institutions are now reviewing the social media of folks who are applying for loans. The idea is that if you have friends who discuss their debt problems you may be a greater debt risk. At it’s simplest it’s a “birds of a feather flock together” concept.
One U.S. company called Movenbank is working on a system where your interest rate might be related to your levels of friends or followers on sites like Twitter, LinkeIn and Facebook. Other lenders are already using things like your payment record at Amazon, Ebay and Paypal right along side your credit score from the major credit ratings companies.
How you feeling about all your Facebook friends now?
Here’s the reality. I have several friends or family members who have had financial problems, even gone through bankruptcy. Being a decent human being I don’t walk away from them just because they’ve had financial problems. And their financial problems don’t have ANY impact on how I pay my bills. So I find this concept pretty idiotic. And even for someone who likes social media I find the idea that my online “influence” is somehow an indicator of my creditworthiness as quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve heard this year.
Tell me its a minor consideration way down the list and maybe I’d shrug it off. But if you still aren’t sure you want to make the loan by the time you’re looking at how many Facebook friends they have let me make it easy for you.
Just say no. Facebook should be for jokes, silly videos and cat photos.
It started with MP3 players. Two completely different ones at very different points on the cost spectrum. Interesting but not compelling. Then I came across an article talking about how it’s the next addition to cellphones from the folks at Sprint. Then when MY new cellphone arrived (NOT from Sprint) it had it too! So I guess I need to take note.
What’s this new addition? Climbing back out of the scrap heap of history it’s...an FM tuner chip.
A little research shows that it’s not a brand new thing. The difference is that with the addition of a large wireless provider making a commitment to making it a standard part of their product line suddenly local radio has a toe in the new media door.
I’ve heard plenty of people poo-poo this saying that there are plenty of apps that allow you to access all kinds of radio from all over the country, even all over the world. Trust me when I say that I’ve listened to some great radio stations from Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, New York and more. But on a morning when the snow is falling steadily and I’m trying to figure out how that’s going to affect my drive into work or home at the end of the day I want LOCAL radio.
Here’s the chance for local radio to get on the playing field of the technology that the majority of adult consumers are now carrying. The question is what are they going to do about it?
The new environment has a lot more competition than before and competition that doesn’t play by the same rules. But they are in the game. I spend a lot of time talking about the challenge in a paradigm shift. Radio is getting what they’ve been asking for, the core of the business, access. If they think they can just keep cranking out the same bland corporate tripe against this competition it will all have been for nought.
They can either open the door in front of them or they can just curl up next to the Dodo bird.
He. She. Him. Her.
Seems like pretty simple concepts to most of us I’d wager. But in the past week the modern complexity around those concepts has leapt to the forefront of discussion in the media.
If you have been following the news you have heard the story of Army Private Bradley Manning. He was convicted of illegally publishing secret military communications. That’s the easy part of the story. Manning has announced that he believes he is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body and has asked that he be referred to from now on as “Chelsea”.
You may or may not have any sympathy for this part of the story but trust me it creates an enormous issue for the media covering the story. How do you refer to Private Manning? Which personal pronoun do you use? The New York Times has chosen to try and sidestep the issue by simply saying “Private Manning”. The problem is that this is in variance with their stated policy to refer to people in the news by their preferred gender. National Public Radio has made an even more unfortunate choice by announcing that until such time as gender reassignment surgery is completed they will continue to refer to “Bradley” and “he”. That decision simply makes them sound judgmental and insensitive.
For activists in this area the answer is simple. Just do it. People should be referred to by the label and personal pronoun of their choice. That sounds simple until you realize some people are making up their own. The media has a legitimate concern about clarity. We need to understand who and what is being talked about. Suddenly talking about Chelsea instead of Bradley is going to lose some folks in the shuffle.
This discussion is brand new for a lot of people. It’s also a subject that will be a struggle to comprehend for many people. I’ve had a couple of these discussions over the last few years with people who were willing to walk me through some new concepts and I STILL don’t think I’ve got it down.
The best thing for the media to do right now is lead the way. Take us through the concepts. Help us understand what is trying to be said and why. Shine a light and help us to understand what we see there.
In the end I believe that will bring us most successfully through the changes coming in those very simple concepts.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Satire Danger, April Foolishness and RIP Roger Ebert
Program scripts from week of April 8, 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.
R.I.P. Roger Ebert
It’s only been a couple weeks since I noted that when I do the memoriam programs I try to stick to folks that I don’t think will get massive coverage in the mainstream media. I will now promptly break that rule. But I need to offer up my own eulogy for the late Roger Ebert.
Prior to discovering the show “Sneak Previews” I was just a guy who liked to go to the movies. I don’t remember exactly when I started watching but my bet is that it wasn’t long after the show began airing on PBS in 1975. My dad loved the movies too so I’m sure we picked up on this show very quickly. What we didn’t know at the time was that we were watching TV movie criticism changing forever.
Think about it, movie reviews on TV prior to this were Gene Shalit on “The Today Show” doing something short and maybe with an interview with someone from the production. It was the newspaper review read on air. What Siskel and Ebert did was different. This was a pass fail grading system, thumb up or thumb down. Plus you got two guys who really knew the movies talking about WHY they liked or didn’t like them. Plus they took a few good humored shots at each other. Remember this is 1975, this is radical stuff.
And don’t forget the network that was willing to take a shot at this madness was PBS. It would be seven years before someone on the commercial media side would sit and and say “Hey, we can make some money on these guys”.
For me personally it was epiphany time, that moment when the light comes on and suddenly things that were hidden become obvious. I was studying acting so I was already looking at the movies from that point of view. It was Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel (two guys who you would NOT have chosen as great TV stars) that inspired me to spend more time thinking a little more deeply about all the aspects of what I saw on that screen. From those moments watching the two Chicago newspaper critics speak from their personal passion for the movies grew my own passion.
Maybe I would have come to know and respect the work of Howard Hawks, maybe I would have come to appreciate the difference between a movie that’s great fun and one that’s great.
Maybe. But thankfully Roger Ebert was there to show me the way.
Roger Ebert was 70 years old.
April Foolishness
I actually held off on this story for a week because the ending could have gone two different ways. You should always be careful when reacting to April Fools Day pranks done by radio stations. I’ve played a couple of them myself over the years. The idea is to play the joke just as close to the edge as you can while still never slipping over that edge.
So on the whole I would actually have given very high marks to the morning team of Val St John and Scott Fish at Gator Country 101.9 in southwestern Florida. The duo went on air last week on Monday and announced that their listeners should be aware that a substance called “di-hydrogen monoxide” had been found coming out of faucets all over the listening area. I’m sure all the chemistry teachers in the audience got quite the chuckle (chemistry teachers have been trotting out this particular joke for years) but a great many people in the rest of the audience panicked. And flooded the local water authority with upset phone calls.
In case you did as poorly in chemistry as I did “di-hydrogen monoxide” is also called H2O or water. That’s right the DJs announced that water was coming out of the water faucet.
This is where the story starts getting really stupid. The water authority began making noises that the duo could face felony charges for making a false report. The radio station yanked them off the air before their airshift was over, suspended them indefinitely and began making repeated apologies on the air.
All because two air personalities had said that water was coming out of the water faucets on April Fools Day.
I’m really not sure who should be more embarrassed here. The candidates are the water authority for over reacting to what was without a doubt a major annoyance, the radio station for over reacting to radio personalities being, well, radio personalities or the listeners of Gator Country for well, let’s be nice about this, being astoundingly gullible.
But I’m pretty sure I know who feels the most embarrassed. A station poll asked listeners when St. John and Fish should be returned to the air. At one point 78% said “Never”. I’m happy to report they were back on the job Wednesday morning.
All for saying water was coming out of the water faucet.
Amazing.
Satire Danger
One of the great advantages of the World Wide Web is that it allows everyone to take a shot at being what they’ve always wanted to be. Whether that’s writer or movie maker, journalist or model It’s the great democratization of the media. In many ways that’s a really good thing.
But not always.
The problem is that a lot of those roles are a lot harder to pull off than people realize. Doing it well is a whole ‘nother question.
Plus you get people who don’t really understand the medium or genre they’re trying to create. I think that may have been part of the problem for a disgruntled high school senior recently.
Suzie Lee Weiss is a very bright young woman from my hometown of Pittsburgh PA. She really wanted to go to an Ivy League school, applied to a bunch as was turned down by every single one. Now she had the basic qualifications but those selection processes get really competitive and she came up short. Not surprisingly she was a little miffed. Out of that unhappiness came an open letter to those schools published in the “Wall Street Journal” that was, shall we say, fairly scathing.
There was an immediate backlash calling her spoiled and suffering from entitlement issues. To which she responded that it had been a satire. I’ve read the original piece and I think I see the problem.
You see if you’re a well known satirist like say Jonathan Swift people know not to take you seriously. How else do you think he got away with “A Modest Proposal” where he suggested the solution to Ireland’s problems was to use their children for food. Most performers will agree with the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean who said that dying was easy but comedy was hard. Trying to be funny or ironic or satirical is very difficult. It’s even harder when you don’t set it up right.
I think that’s where the young lady came up short. Without the right set up she wrote something that a lot of people took seriously (either in favor or against).
In the end the answer is just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Friday, February 1, 2013
Rant on Phones, Corman at Sundance, Radio and Social Media
Program scripts from week of January 28, 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.
Radio and Social Media
I need to offer a tip of the hat to my friend and former co-worker Julia Ciesla-Hanley for tipping me to this story. She linked to the blog post by Social Media Strategist Lori Lewis on her Facebook page. It made fascinating reading for someone with a background in radio who is now exploring the world of Internet communications.
Fascinating in a sort of traffic accident/train wreck kind of way.
Along with print radio has taken the greatest beating from our new digital age. Streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify, Slacker Radio and last.fm have taken the core of the music radio industry (the music) and stripped away all those things that so many listeners find annoying (commercials, repetitive playlists and yes, bad disc jockeys). What’s left is a station that theoretically plays only songs you like (well maybe) and nothing else. And that’s pretty attractive.
What’s really astounding is how resistant to fighting back radio can be. Here’s where the blog post from Lori Lewis comes in. She notes the big news in the industry over the last couple weeks has been the return of a big time Country station to the New York City market. When she checked out their website she saw the listed both a Facebook page and Twitter feed. Since she’s a social media specialist she checked them out. And discovered that neither one of them existed. In fact the Twitter handle they publicized turned not to have been claimed yet. So Lewis grabbed it. This a major move from one of the biggest broadcast companies in the nation, Cumulus. And no one bothered to actually create the social media presence that they were promoting.
How many different kinds of stupid do you have to be to pull that off? For my brothers and sisters still toiling in the radio industry salt mines here’s the fundamentals. At bare minimum you MUST have a web page where you stream your station, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. It is vital if you’re going to survive the next decade.
Otherwise an entire industry is going to end up asking if you want fries with that.
Corman at Sundance
This is one of those stories that you end up scratching your head wondering how it could possibly be true. For the first time ever independent film making icon Roger Corman appeared at the Sundance Film Festival which ended this past weekend.
Sundance is one of the largest independent film festivals in the United States. It’s probably done more for raising the profile of indie film makers than any other event. And somehow Roger Corman, one of the most prolific and beloved indie filmmakers of the last half century has never made an appearance. Mind boggling.
If you’re not a film fan the name Roger Corman may not mean anything to you. When you find out that he has almost 400 movies to his name you may wonder why you’ve never heard of him. That’s easy. Corman has made a career out of making films on tiny budgets. With all the sacrifices that might be inevitable along the way. It’s easy to dismiss him as low budget schlock till you remember that he has mentored directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Jonathan Demme among others. He helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro and more.
If you really want to see where he made his reputation take a look at the adaptations of a variety of Edgar Allen Poe stories in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. 8 films, 7 of them starring Vincent Price. Also appearing in some of the titles were Ray Milland, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. All of them are low budget classics.
In 1970 Corman funded his own independent movie studio New World Pictures and brought such cult classics to the screen as “Death Race 2000”, “Rock and Roll High School”, “Children of the Corn” and “Piranha”. Roger Corman is what every indie film maker wants to be even if they’ve never heard of him.
At 86 now Corman is still working and creating low budget movies. The film that premiered at Sundance “Virtually Heroes” was made for less than a half a million dollars.
It was about time that the premiere indie film festival and the premiere indie filmmaker finally were introduced.
Rant on Phones
A bit of a rant today, so you have been warned.
The first great modern mass communication media was the telephone. The phone is the single most commonly used appliance in the developed world. It’s been around since 1876 and is, in one form or another, an indispensable part of most of our lives.
But think about this. The phone is actually a service more than a device. You can have the device in your house and it doesn’t do a thing till you pay to get it hooked up. Then you pay a monthly charge to have that service in your home. Let’s go over this one more time. It is an option YOU choose to have and YOU pay to have it. I would assume that virtually everyone would say that we do so for OUR purposes. So that we can make calls and receive calls from the people of our choice.
Which is why tele-marketers really tick me off. Where do they get off running their business through my service? Yes, I know that the incoming call doesn’t cost me a penny. That’s beside the point. I didn’t pay for the installation and monthly service charge so that someone else can make money by annoying me. Tele-marketers are the epitome of marketing. They are trying to convince you that you need something that you have no desire for intrinsically.
No doubt someone is now wagging thier finger at the radio to remind me that this is a public utility. So is the electrical service. How would you feel about a business coming in and saying “Oh we’re going to tap into your electric to run our business. Thanks so much”. If they are on my phone then they keep me from using it. What gives them the right?
In the world of the Internet we have a word for folks who do this sort of thing. They’re called spammers. Spammers rank down there with trolls in the hierarchy of web society. Yet somehow the person who spams my phone is supposedly different.
I shouldn’t have to put up with people denying me the ability to use a service I pay for. I shouldn’t have to come up with elaborate ways to get them off the phone.
It’s my phone, dang it.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Friday, November 23, 2012
Facebook Creeper, Google Books, Turning Out the Lights
Program scripts from week of November 19, 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.
Turning Out the Lights
There’s an old saying that what goes around comes around. Also that there’s nothing new under the sun. A lot of folks in the digital media world want to believe otherwise. And yet reality just keeps jumping up and biting them in the butt. For all the nearly religious chanting that it’s a whole new world with new rules blah, blah blah in the end some things never change. For example in the end if you want to play in the big leagues of the media there’s a simple gold standard for success. You either make money or you don’t. If you’re not competing in that arena then you’re a really talented amateur. Now really talented amateurs can do a lot of really cool things. But you’re not playing in the big leagues.
Of course the down side of playing with the big boys is that they’re relatively unforgiving. They don’t try to be nice, they don’t cut you any slack and they’re not going to give you a break. A year ago YouTube decided it wanted to play with the big boys. They knew they needed to move away from just being the host of endless Gangnam Style and laughing baby videos. The big leagues required original high quality content so they created “channels”. These were folks that received at least some financial support from YouTube to create that kind of must see video content. A year later and YouTube has taken a long look at those channels.
Well that makes one of us.
As it turns out most of us have paid zero attention to the majority of the channels. So in the very near future most of those channels will face some cold hard reality. YouTube will be pulling the plug on 60% of the channels. The reason is simple economics. YouTube dropped as much as five million dollars per channel and over half of them didn’t turn enough of a profit. The channels that showed some potential will continue to have the support of the video media giant. The others will be left to their own devices AND expected to continue to work on paying back the original investment.
It’s a brave new world out there on the digital frontier. Some people have managed to forget just how tough the frontier has always been.
Google Books
You may not have noticed but the folks at Google have been working on digitizing the world. All forms of data, all forms of information and everything in print. This includes books. And that has created a little bit of problem. You see there are folks out there who actually kind of own the publishing rights to some of those books. Turns out they’re not really happy with having their property offered up for free by Google. So in that great American tradition they’re settling it in court.
The good news is that it seems like they have actually come to an agreement. At the center of the disagreement is Google’s Library Project, which they describe as “An enhanced card catalog of the world’s books”. What they were doing was scanning books from public libraries, making the books searchable and offering snippets of them online. That resulted in groups representing both the publishers and the authors bringing suit. This settlement covers the publishers only. Google maintains this is all covered under the concept of “Fair Use”. The courts have yet to rule on that issue.
Now the deal would seem to be a win-win-win for Google, the publishers and readers like you and me. Google is one step closer to moving forward with the project. The publishers get the right to exclude a title from the project if they so choose. And the rest of us get a better way of finding books online. Financial terms, if any, have not been disclosed.
I will note that the publishers did get one thing they may not want. They get a free digital copy of every book in their list. I’ve looked at a fair number of those Google scanned books and a lot of them are a mess. Seems like maybe some of the scans put more emphasis on quantity rather than quality.
Given that these legal shenanigans date back to 2005 getting some kind of settlement done is a good thing. Even the publishers acknowledge that there will be a growing influence of e-books in the years to come and having a digital card catalog works to their advantage.
Getting it done right is just as important.
Facebook Creeper
I have to admit I was a little cranky when I heard about this next item. A little cranky and a little creeped out. You see I just discovered that someone has created a page about my relationship with the Lady in My Life. For those of you new to the world of the Phlipside that’s my long standing nickname for my wife. We’ve been together for over 30 years. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t upset to discover that someone has been collecting photos of the two of us, scanning our personal social media postings and amassing them all on a web page. A web page I knew nothing about and for which they did hot have the permission of me or my wife. That’s pretty creepy.
Now the bad news. You probably have one too. If you’re on Facebook and are listed as being in a relationship then Facebook has probably created a page about you and your significant other. Did a chill just run up and down your spine? Check it out at www dot facebook dot com front slash us.
The pages are called Friendship Pages and they’re actually not new. The social media giant introduced them two years ago with a certain amount of fanfare but they promptly slipped off of most people’s radar pretty quickly. Let’s face it Facebook is constantly changing things, adding features and generally running amok.
What I find creepy, that is creepy beyond the fact that Facebook is doing this at all, is that it happens without my permission or knowledge and the fact that there’s basically nothing I can do about it. You can not make the page go away. You can not opt out. The best you can do is crank up your privacy levels nice and high to limit what the creeper page can post about you. That, of course, is the best defense against any online creeper out there.
My question is simple. Why do I need to protect myself against Facebook? In what possible alternate universe did the brain trust at Facebook decide that turning itself into the world’s biggest creeper was a good idea? Unfortunately this is symptomatic of the overall attitude within the Kingdom of Zuckerberg. An attitude that they know better than we do how to run our lives online and control our information.
Now they’ve decided they know what I want said about the most significant relationship in my life. And that makes Facebook a creeper.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Friday, September 14, 2012
Chris Berman, The Future of Radio and Winning Advertising
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.
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