When we talked about public broadcasting television, we discussed how television programming used to be local, but now it’s all programmed nationally. Obviously, making the program more local would give more voices a chance to be heard and a larger audience to reach. However, I feel that it is important to point out some of the things that can go wrong if localizing is done in the wrong spirit.
Over the summer, I interned at South Jersey magazine (as well as Suburban Family, run by the same company). South Jersey is so local it doesn’t even cover all of the counties in South Jersey, and only expands to cover happenings at the shore over the summer for it’s “shore issue.” Suburban Family was a magazine even more hyper-local than the first, but was filled with things of absolutely no importance to the outside world whatsoever. Page after page of star students, start coaches, star teams, teachers, parents, etc. A woman who works at the magazine told me the magazine started off covering stories, but they soon realized that what the audience wanted to read were announcements congratulating their children or neighbors on their smallest accomplishments, so they started filling the magazine with only that sort of thing. I cannot describe how painful it is to find three star fifth-grade sports players worth mentioning (or the names of any at all). But more than that, it amazed me that the preferences of the readership shifted the magazine so far from the original vision, and not exactly in a better direction.
Mainly, I feel the problem with hyper-localizing can be that in some instances, it takes away any motivation most of the population had for looking at the world beyond their own, small lives.
Too much, it turns out, but that was expected. However, I think the following animation sheds some more illumination on just how expensive running a 30 ad on television can be.
It really makes me think about the ways corporations use the media to control the market. For example, because advertising costs are so high, it makes it impossible for smaller companies to run ads on big television stations. So, the same big products get shown again and again, while products from smaller companies never get the same exposure. Essentially, companies pay for the exclusivity as much as the opportunity to simply get their message out there. This is not to say that seeing an ad more times would make a person more likely to purchase the product, but it is true that people love familiarity, and when you hear a name over and over again it begins to appear more trust-worthy. If a cap was put on the amount of commercials a company could air and the cost of commercials, it would be interesting to see if consumer patterns would also change.
The internet needs to stay free so art like this can continue to exist! Seriously though, I think remixing media takes an extreme amount of talent, especially when it’s as funny as this.
And with one of the most powerful arguments I’ve seen for gay rights:
These are the stories that need to be told in the media, as opposed to “experts” arguing over who is and is not allowed to have children. This young man delivered an eloquent case; I’m sure his parents are extremely proud. I almost cried while watching this.
… they may be thinking of something like Wayne’s World. Or, they could be thinking of Let’s Paint TV, a show that started out on Los Angeles public access television from 2002-2008, until the Los Angeles public access studios were shut down. Host John Kilduff claimed he wanted the show to encourage people from all walks of life to try their hand at something creatively, but, as you’ll see in the clip below, many viewers used the lack of call screening as a way to call up and curse or make derogatory comments on television.
Here’s Kilduff trying to paint, exercise and blend drinks:
Now, serious kudos to this guy for even trying, and he has managed to gain a large following through his YouTube channel, but unless this is some form of performance art, it says something very sad about the state of public access television in the United States.
From a comedic stand-point, it’s golden, but when you compare the quality of this with the quality of anything that has ever aired on the BBC, the difference is immense. Not that this channel was the BBC’s equivalent in America, but that’s just the problem. Nothing is. The BBC manages to pull its audience in with programming that is at once entertaining and informative. As we saw in the cross-examination of Tony Blair, the BBC is not afraid to put major politicians on the spot and demand answers to tough questions.
As for PBS, not only have ratings been dropping consistently for at least a decade, but the focus seems to be a bit off. In a 2001 plan to reverse the decline in audience and membership, PBS planned to “cultivate ‘social capitalists’—individuals who vote, volunteer, and attend cultural events—as viewers and members of local stations.”
Just how were they planning to go about this?
“In the programming plan, PBS cites as examples American High and Senior Year, two reality-based series on teenagers; Life in Bold, a show debuting this fall about “social capitalists in action”; and Public Square, a concept that will “redefine and reinvent” public affairs programming. An Americanized Mystery! and American Family, a drama about a Latino family by Gregory Nava, are among PBS’s newest initiatives in fiction/performance programming. ”
Wedged right in the middle of that quote is a concept that will “redefine and reinvent” public affairs programming, and yet, 11 years later, who has ever heard of it? To be fair, this was 2001, the internet was slowly changing reality as the world knew it and it was hard to redefine something more than it was about to be redefined online. Maybe it is a great show after all, but my point is that even if it did reach some percentage of the audience it was meant to, PBS viewership continued to decline. To me, it feels like where the BBC has succeeded in becoming a beloved part of the media culture of England, PBS has failed to capture that spot in the hearts of Americans. When a comedic genius, the American equivalent of Ricky Gervais, let’s say, wants to start a show and have it do successfully, they do not go to PBS. PBS has become the stomping ground of television aimed at pre-schoolers, and while it desperately wants to expand its audience of “social capitalists,” it cannot escape the fact that it buckles to corporate donors too often to be comparable to most European public access.
PBS might be better off putting out programming that is edgy and truthful, asks the hard questions, and makes people take notice in the hopes that this might gain funding from the public and other organizations in line with the type of programming that public access should be putting out. It will be very shaky in the beginning, but the running the risk of putting out programming like that, programming that actually is inventive and would redefine American media, might have a very big payoff in the end.
Congress has declared pizza a vegetable. Is this more or less damaging to society than an act that would severely impact internet culture as we know it? I’m going to say less, but still, really Congress?
As Gothamist reporter Jamie Feldmar reports:
“A spending bill pushed through this week with a little help from frozen food manufacturers, the salt industry, potato growers and conservatives who don’t think the government should be telling kids what to eat declares the following: two tablespoons of tomato paste shall count as a vegetable, and the USDA can’t limit the number of starchy vegetables a kid crams down his gullet every day. In other words: more mushy pies and French freedom fries for all!”
The bigger picture is this is a blatant example of how companies can impact which bills pass and which don’t.
“We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutrition to call this a national disgrace.”
To the average citizen, I would hope that this situation sounds as ridiculous as it clearly is, but the average citizen may just be happy Domino’s will still cater their eighth grader’s cafeteria.
If you go on twitter, don’t be surprised if you see something like this.
Twitter actually censored itself to protest the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In light of their role in the targeting of Wikileaks activists, this strikes me as a particularly strong message. A small, but effective show of protest.
Wikileaks lost a battle to the Justice Department recently, when the DoJ demanded that Twitter give up the account information of three activists linked to Wikileaks, without a warrant.
One of the activists, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, was targeted for her role in the release of the Collateral Murder video:
According to this Pacific Free Press article, “American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Aden Fine denounced the ruling. ‘Internet users don’t automatically give up their rights to privacy and free speech when they use services like Twitter,’ Fine said.
‘The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.'”
Twitter at least informed the three that were targeted that the department was requesting their account information, but the ruling is deeply concerning. Because a few companies run the internet (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), it is up to them whether or not they keep the information of their users private, and it certainly seems as though companies are more likely to cooperate with the government, without a warrant and under the Patriot Act, rather than to protect the identities of their users.
The main problem, it seems, is that the technology and the politics are developing in wildly different directions. The internet is a haven for those who want to get out information quickly and effectively, and would be nothing for the government to fear if it was not so keen on hiding videos like the one above, which does not endanger national security. The only thing this video endangers is the public image of our country.
In this piece posted on LezGetReal, Linda C. LaVictoire writes:
“Screeching about privacy rights on social media is pretty pathetic for someone who has not regard for anyone else’s privacy or rights.”
She might have a point, if Jónsdóttir had been releasing information on private individuals, but given the context of the situation, this argument does not hold up.
In an era where a good chunk of a person’s life and information ends up online, it can be argued that getting account information from Twitter is akin to going into somebody’s home without a warrant in search for information. If the people in the Justice Department feel what they are doing is right, there should be more transparency in the way things are being conducted. If they feel the need to hide it, it’s a good sign that privacy rights, for the moment, are not well protected.
When William Jacobson visited class the other day, I expected something slightly… different. And, I suppose, political. While discussing his blog, Legal Insurrection, with a classmate (God help me, I’m awful with names), my peer noted that on before Obama had been elected, Jacobson had stated on his blog that Obama would never be elected because he didn’t have what it took to take down a terrorist. How wrong he was, we sneered to ourselves.
“Somebody should ask him if he would admit now that he was wrong,” classmate suggested.
“Yeah, I wonder if he’d admit it,” I agreed, and thought to myself, “I am definitely not going to bring that up during class but if you really want to, go for it.”
And then the class totally did not go in that direction and was, as Professor Cohen had said it would be, about blogging. The biggest thing I took away from Jacobson’s visit was somebody with even minimal knowledge of blogging can, in fact, start one and become quite successful at it.
I also hadn’t realized the following points that were brought up during the discussion:
-The amount of posts it takes to keep up a readership: I guess I had assumed that once a readership was faithful, it would not leave. However, Jacobson said he has to blog about four times a day to keep up his readership, because if he misses a day it might take a while to get the readership back. I suppose this makes sense. Even if I were very faithful to a blog, I may become frustrated if the regular update wasn’t met.
-Bigger blogs linking to your blog can increase your traffic: This seems like common sense, but I suppose I simply had not thought of it. I suppose the problem then is to get noticed by the bigger blogs, but it is always possible to email the creator of the blog with your own to see if the material interests them.
-A blog can be your side job and not necessarily your main job: Again, this seems obvious, but in class we so often talk about people whose lives seem centered around their blog or indy media outlet, that I simply hadn’t thought of making money off of a blog as something to do part-time, or on your lunch break.
I found the class visit to be very informative also on the topic of advertising, and the way things like Google ads work, and some of the other ways to get ads to run on your site. There really is nothing more valuable than learning from somebody who is experienced in doing what you’re studying, and sometimes it is more helpful when that person went into it hardly knowing what blogging was. This way, all of the troubles are highlighted and the matter is presented in a simple, effective manner.
Of all the “Occupy” protests, Oakland keeps popping up with video footage that makes it look like some distopian movie (or at least like a different country).
The Washington Post recently defended their choice to publish a picture of a cop petting a kitten instead of a picture of the demonstration after it turned violent. Carol McKay, the Post’s photo editor, claimed that photos of the confrontation had not arrived at the time when the article was printed, even though news of the violent protest had arrived and was included in the article. McKay said she chose the kitten photo in particular because it showed a “moment” in time, and not just a cop walking around trash cans or other debris left behind after the protest.
However, choosing to use this “moment” as the main photograph for the story, combined with the title of the article, “Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide,” sends the message that the protesters are a negative force in this country while the police are ultimately positive, kitten-loving keepers of the peace. There is no way to call this choice of photo unbiased or fair.
This is not to say that the Washington Post doesn’t have plenty of photos showing the violence between protesters and police that occurred- they do, but it was irresponsible for them to choose this particular photo to accompany the article, especially being such a widely read newspaper.
The “Occupy” protests have also shown the dark side of media and the police more than anything in the United States in recent memory. There was the video of the man in Nashville being arrested, even though he stated at least three times that he was a member of the media.
Now there is this video, again from Occupy Oakland:
You can hear the man asking if it is okay for him to be video taping the long line of policemen. It is obvious that he is not partaking in any sort of violent or outrageous activity, he is merely video taping when, without warning, he is shot with a rubber bullet. The lack of build-up to the cameraman being shot is wildly unsettling. He no doubt thought that what he was doing was a safe activity, and repeatedly asked for permission to be doing so. This man was not causing trouble, he was documenting what was happening at the protest, which is the job of a journalist. With the definition of who is and who is not a journalist changing, and citizen journalism on the rise, the actions of the policeman that shot the journalist are cause for concern.
Right now, in media classes, journalism students like myself are being taught to document, that it is good to be able to upload history from a video camera, or your smartphone, to the internet. The power of Youtube has ramifications; this is not debatable. The sad thing is, this sort of police behavior has been going on for decades and does not appear as though it is going to stop, but the police forces should be trained to deal with citizens who want to document their history, to share what is going on in their own world with the internet, because not only will that not stop, but it will continue to grow as new technology continues to emerge and become more affordable for the general public.
Indydia 