Merry Media Make Believe!

Merry Media Make Believe! We’re now at that magical time between Thanksgiving and the New Year when the elves in Media’s workshop turn out stories they make believe are important, and good little girls and boys make believe that they are interested in them.

These stories are usually touching or amazing tales, especially touching and amazing to those who have to fill blank newsprint or empty air minutes. That’s because modern Journalism has copied Best Practices from egg farms--- those who don’t produce get to pursue other interests, generally broiling, baking, and frying.

Here’s a sampling of the latest:

IRAN DEFIANT ON NUCLEAR PROGRAM – And how, a little child might ask, is this different from all the other times Iran has been defiant on its nuclear program? To which an adult might answer “Shaddup, Kid! We’re trying to make merry here!”

NEW AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY TO BE ANNOUNCED,  a perennial favorite dating back decades to when the Soviet Union held the New Afghanistan Strategy franchise. Then the Bush Administration took over announcing new strategies, followed by the Obama Administration.  The Afghans themselves stick to a strategy that has worked for a couple of thousand years, which would prove them backward and not innovative if it didn’t keep winning.

SHOPPERS THRONG STORES generally surfaces just before and after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas. Sometimes the shoppers throng for a few bargains or to return another testimonial to Aunt Milly’s lousy taste, but mostly shoppers throng because that’s what they do. And reporters report the annual thronging because that’s what they do. Ain’t Nature wonderful?

CELEBRITY INDISCRETION may always be counted on to provide grist for the mill based on the formula “Celebrity (Name) is reported to (pick one):

n  Have had a disagreement with spouse, lover, publicist, the law or some combination.

n  Have patched over a disagreement with spouse, lover, publicist, the law or some combination.

n  Make a living by doing stupid things so that stupid folk may write about them for the entertainment of the stupid readers.”

HOLIDAY TRAVEL CLOGGED by airport delays, crowded highways, bad weather, and the repeated amazement expressed that those who travel in the busiest travel season of the year, which happens to be in late fall and early winter,  encounter delays and congestion.

TOUCHING HOLIDAY STORY recipe is one part surprise, one part engaging protagonist and one part joy or tragedy; mix well, garnish with photos or video and serve.

But above all, Merry Media Make Believe to you and yours!

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Two Problems Solved!

Second-Oldest Profession Should

Learn The Tricks of The First

Whores and journalists are in the same sort of business – catering to wants for a price – and those calling for government subsidies and other silliness to save professional journalism from the Internet should study how prostitution confronted its own New Age challenges and won.

Prostitutes Do It for money and journalists earn money by telling how others Do It. Both were confronted with the same sort of change – others were giving the product away for free – but prostitutes managed to survive and prosper, while in journalism the only way folks are getting laid is off.

Prostitution once had its market by the -- uh, well – anyway, because of a price and availability advantage. Good Girls were afraid of pregnancy and demanded a lifelong commitment of love and support before delivering the Goods when the mood struck them. Prostitutes got in the mood at the sight of a throbbing wallet and never failed to deliver the Goods at a reasonable price as long as the crane was working.

Journalism also had its market in a firm grip. Ordinary folk couldn’t find for themselves what was happening in the world, so publishers hired reporters to find it for them and then charged advertisers to wiggle their wares before the resulting readers. The readers paid a little, the advertisers paid a lot, the reporters got paid little and the publishers paid themselves a lot.

And Then. . .

For prostitutes, And Then was the double whammy of The Pill and The Sexual Revolution that suddenly made it chic and relatively safe to deliver the Goods often and for free. As in Free Love, bra-burnings, Friends With Benefits.

For journalists, And Then was the rise of the Broadband Internet, which allowed every Joe Citizen to both report and view news worldwide, sharing it at will and sometimes building vast audiences. Advertisers and their money come to vast audiences like flies to manure piles and the biggest piles usually draw the most flies, so journalists watched others build ever-bigger piles and mourned as the flies zipped right past their puny efforts.

So for both prostitutes and journalists, what they once did professionally for money was now being offered by amateurs for free. Same problem, but vastly different reactions.

Prostitutes embraced niche marketing and product differentiation. Since so many of their sisters were delivering Plain Vanilla Goods for free, prostitutes focused on multiple exotic flavors, highly discreet and private special services, and other things that generally fell under the “You Want Me To Do What???” category. Prostitution prospered. Just ask the last half-dozen or so senior elected officials and corporate execs who found the path to “pursuing other opportunities” suddenly beckoning when the records of their expensive and exotic hobbies surfaced.

Journalists, alas, stubbornly tried to charge for what is widely available for free, some even whining that those who do it for free are unfairly benefiting from the traditional journalist’s for-pay efforts. Unwilling to produce a new product that customers might buy, they tried to survive by selling a product that most customers already had for free.

Although unfortunate, the disparity of results between the two professions affords a unique public policy opportunity. Most would agree that prostitution should be eliminated. And most would agree that journalism must be saved. The solution is therefore simple.

We need only make the Leaders of Journalism assume the duties of Madams and have Madams become Leading Journalists – journalism will prosper and prostitution will be eliminated.

Count on it.

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Media Crisis Solved!

Buy Buy Journalism Solution

Traditional news outlets flopping about the beach gasping for revenue saw an idea that would save them this week, but it was presented backwards, so they’ll probably ignore it.

Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, told an audience in Hong Kong that AP is considering selling time exclusives on news stories to online customers – maybe a half-hour, maybe less.

There might be some money in news media selling exclusive first-half-hour rights on some hot online stories. Think Dave Letterman’s Top Ten Employee Dating List, or a revelation that Sarah Palin secretly holds a doctorate in English.

That notion might help traditional media a little bit, but it’s a dim mirror image of one that could generate truly enormous revenue:

Never mind the chump change from selling exclusive rights to publish, the real dough is in selling rights not to publish.

Suppose your newspaper had discovered your United States Senator with more panky in his hanky than his marriage license allows. Someone might pay for the exclusive first-half-hour publication rights, but how much would the senator pay for never-ever-publication rights?

Even without the compost of MBAs and focus groups, the odds-on first-to-flower favorite in that garden has to be the senator.

Or suppose a drug maker’s spectacularly profitable anti-impotence drug is mentioned in a study that says profits are the only thing it dependably inflates. A men’s health website might pay for a half-hour exclusive on that news, but the drug maker would certainly be interested in a permanent keep-it-zipped purchase.

Besides providing a much-needed revenue stream, the sale of non-publication rights could revive the investigative reporting teams many publications ditched when the economy tanked. Instead of looking at investigative reporters as an expensive group of advertiser-irritating prima donnas, cost-conscious publishers could now see them as serious revenue producers.

Implementing this Renaissance of The Fourth Estate would not be without minor problems. Narrow-mind do-gooders might sneer that this was really blackmail, but well-paid media lawyers could surely drape the warm cloak of the First Amendment over this practice as they have so many others. If the Constitution enshrines the right to publish something for a fee, does it not also hold sacred the right not to publish for a fee?

Although there are clear-cut examples as we have discussed, some other stories might result in competing bids between those who want to publish and those don’t. Ethics committee of the various professional journalistic organizations would have to work out rules for a fair and competitive bidding process, paying close attention to the obvious guidelines of transparency and cash or certified checks.

In spite of the obvious benefits to cash flow, don’t look for traditional media to jump on this bandwagon. After all, they were slow to recognize the internet as a threat, and slower still to respond to it, so their record of embracing innovation is spotty at best.

But even if they don’t drink, let the record show we led these horses to water.

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Another SC Sex Scandal

Horsing Around,

Modern Media Style

A South Carolina man was arrested for being in a stable sexual relationship Monday.

Very stable.

In Sugar’s stable, which is where police say Rodell Vereen, 50, of Longs, SC made hay with the 21-year-old mare. Sugar’s owner, Barbara Kenley, confronted Vereen outside and held him at gunpoint for police.

Vereen, who was on probation for an earlier tryst at the same Lazy B Stables, was charged with buggery.

Sugar is being treated for an incident- related infection, her owner says. Vereen awaits a hearing next week.

All of this from the Myrtle Beach Sun News, a 50,000-plus circulation South Carolina daily newspaper. You can read all the details of the story on their website, here.

You can also read comments from readers wondering whether we really needed to know this stuff. As a recovering journalist, I pretty much see the Sun News doing its job, covering its community. It’s a local story.

Or it was a local story until it was covered by The Associated Press, which reminds us it is “The Essential Global News Network.” The AP had some 570-odd words and a photo on one of its websites for hours.

Which, of course, made the story as un-local as it could possibly be. As the AP explains on another web site, more than half of the world’s people might see an AP story on a given day. A quick look on Google found the story picked up by major web sites all across the U.S., and showing up in Europe and India. A video version was on YouTube. Since web stories can live a very long time, this is probably not the limit, and realistic counts beyond “many, many” are unlikely.

So Sugar has become the most famous South Carolina love object since the last time Governor Mark Sanford visited Argentina.

If the Sun News was just doing its job, what about AP?

Not as easy an answer, and full disclosure, a look at my profile will show I worked there a long time. Still, while the Sun News and the AP both have megaphones, the AP’s is very much bigger.

That used to mean a different frame of judgment on what was worth national exposure and what was worth a chuckle in the bar after work. But if the frame for national editorial judgment has changed, then it has changed. Such things aren’t put to a vote.

But if they were, mine would be Neigh!

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Vast Conspiracy Uncovered!

Media Silence Suspicious,

Government is Mum

Look to your left. Look to your right. Unless you see someone reading this over your shoulder, you are about to become privy to information so undisclosed that even the day before the once-in-a-lifetime Moment, few knew.

And if that Moment has already come to pass and you find yourself still able to read this, you are very fortunate indeed, but no thanks to your government. There was no mention of the Moment on the White House web site. And while the Department of Homeland Security said the threat level overall was “elevated” and even “high” for airlines, not one specific word about the Moment was to be found.

Coincidence?

Hardly.

Conspiracy?

The Obama administration makes a big deal of bipartisan cooperation and working with the media. You didn’t know about the Moment until there was nothing you could do about it. Think that’s just more coincidence? Consider:

n The Republican National Committee website is silent on the Moment, its “news” category showing nothing after July 2. Sure, the zipper issue whether on lips or elsewhere has been big, but not one mention?

n The Democratic National Committee is also silent here. When was the last time you remember Democrats being silent on anything?

n You also didn’t hear about it in The New York Times, or on its website. At least on July 7. True, the Times did say something in 1989, but it hasn’t made a mention since, and who among us will remember that slip 20 years later in what is obviously a long-running silence?

n And you didn’t hear about it from Bill O’Reilly, who often covers things the powers that be wish he wouldn’t. Could this have reached even Bill? A search for the Moment’s unpublished number on his website came up zip.

President Obama was in Russia the day before the Moment. Russia and the rest of Europe won’t feel the Moment’s effects until next month, making those places safe at least for now. Another case of undisclosed location?

In all things of government, you must consider only the facts and not jump to conclusions. A senator tapping his foot in a Minneapolis airport men’s room stall could be just recalling his favorite Lawrence Welk show. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announcing her resignation and going fishing could just mean the sled dogs won’t go hungry.

Or there could be other meanings. Clarity seldom visits public discourse. But we are going to make an exception here about the Moment.

The Moment will occur for you when it is 12:34:56 in the afternoon of July 8, 2009, or, as it would be written in all numbers in the American form, 12:34:56 07/08/09. The last time this particular straight time/date sequence happened was in 1909, although as the Times noted in 1989, an early-morning observation on June 6 produce the sequence 1:23:45/6/7/89.

Europe, being perversely European, handles day/month notation differently, putting the day before the month, so their experience of the Moment won’t happen until August 7, when it will be 12:34:56 07/08/09.

There you have it. You are One of Those Who Know, even though the mainstream media didn’t prepare you.

Aren’t you glad?

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New Rules, Same Virus, Same Media

 

The World Health Organization has answered an ancient riddle:

 

Q: When is a pandemic not a pandemic.

 

A: When you call it something else.

 

The World Health Organization said Friday it would revise its rules for declaring a spreading disease a pandemic. The disease-du-jour, of course is H1N1, Swine Flu to its friends, and its rapid geographic spread a few weeks back was the cause of even more rapidly spreading silliness among governments, health organizations and the media.

 

Schools were closed, government offices darkened, dust masks were donned and handshaking, hugging and kissing became antisocial acts as the media went into Energizer Bunny journalism mode. When the W.H.O. raised its threat level to five on a six-point scale, so much dark suit/deep tone manure was spread that the few apparent facts had trouble fighting their way to the surface. Those that made it included:

 

·        The new flu spread rapidly, but no more rapidly than the usual annual flu.

·        The new flu could kill, but far fewer deaths have been connected to it than the routine thousands of deaths from even mild regular flu seasons.

·        Far from being new, the flu strain could have been circulating among pigs for years.

 

On the Monday after it announced it was rethinking things, W.H.O. figures showed almost13,000 confirmed H1N1 cases in 46 countries, with 92 deaths. The same day, a W.H.O. press release on yellow fever mentioned that disease’s estimated toll at 206,000 annual cases and 52,000 deaths.

 

Yellow fever, of course, suffers from bad press relations when compared to Swine Flu, and has been unable to grasp the same amount of worldwide public attention in spite of striking almost 16 times the victims of swine flu and taking 565 times the lives.

 

As far as what the new rules might be or whether Swine Flu might move from Stage 5 to Stage 6 in the Pandemic Pantheon, here’s what I was able to find on the W.H.O. website in the last paragraph of a May 18 report:

 

“Moving from Phase 5 to Phase 6

34. The current process is based purely on geographical spread and not on severity of disease. Several Member States spoke in favour of giving the Director-General greater flexibility in the progression between different phases.”

 

Although this quote is in International CratSpeak, and translation is a notoriously difficult art, it seems the gist is that Member States told the Director-General to lay off the alarm bell and stop scaring folks needlessly.

 

I could find no similar guidance on any of several media organization sites, but if the World Health Organization disease monitor process becomes rational, the media will respond as  they always have to news that contradicts news previously reported.

 

They’ll ignore it.

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