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TV
Sunday, October 04, 2009
You know you should listen to Leo, right?
Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.
So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.
Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The right climate for Dickens
A new BBC take on Little Dorrit started on PBS in the U.S. tonight.
It’s nice. No surprise there, as it’s been adapted by Andrew Davies (newest Bleak House, Middlemarch, 1995 Pride and Prejudice).
Good time for it, too, with its threads of ruinous debt and government bureaucracy, all packaged up to satisfy a need to find amusement in despair.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
288-hour news cycle
Further on persistence of interest: 12 days later people are still passing around links to the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer encounter.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Aging white suburban woman reflexively lapses into language patterns of the Baltimore underclass
I love The Wire, the HBO series, and I love watching great series on DVD, but I’m compulsive and once I get started, I can’t stop. Also it gets me talking like Bodie.
This is a problem near the end of winter in Chicago, permapiles of black snow dotting the parking lots and the hope of spring not quite evident. Start watching a depressing (though wonderful) collection of stories and you can get caught up. It gets embedded in your brain, in your whole way of thinking.
It’s easy for me to slip into the world, since I operated on the periphery of one a lot like it 30 years ago as one of those dreaded community organizers in St. Louis, a city very like Baltimore: old, a little southern, beaten-down. I was a community involvement coordinator for the St. Louis Public Schools working in the voluntary desegregation program, part of a consent decree that preceded court-ordered busing in 1980. The Magnet School District office was located in an old elementary school at Pendleton and Enright, something like the cast-off digs of the major case squad on the show.
I had to do an intervention on myself on Sunday after a 12-hour streak. I made myself get up, and I ran through some of the things I should be doing around the house. Talking to myself, I said, “OK, I need to take the clothes out of the washer. Then I gotta dry that shit up.”
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The ‘oh god’ echo
Count on the blogosphere to remark on interesting errors. Here’s the blog reaction to the MSBNC host or producer whose mic was open as Bobby Jindal was strolling into the shot for the Republican response to the president’s address to Congress last night. It is output from a Google blog search feed.
Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Twitter search is a great tool for gauging persistence of interest
I do occasional maintenance on this widget because it has a couple hundred installs, so I should. Its value decreases when it doesn’t include enough timely searches.
(Click on “Search this” to refresh the widget and try another search.)
The rotating content leans heavily to Twitter Search because I think it’s such a fascinating way to get something of a handle on the pulse of opinion. To update it I add searches, and I also check the current searches to see if the results still show recent activity. (See the archive of currently rotating searches as well as retired searches. Note to Expression Engine heads: that archive page shows open entries for the active searches and closed entries for the retired ones—so easy.)
I’m getting to it now; thank you for your patience, just had to set it up. I’ve been surprised that interest in certain search terms has not waned as much as I would have expected. For example, “auto industry” and “iphone+storm” are not in the news as much as they were a few weeks ago when I added them, but they persist in racking up a lot of current results.
A slightly different sort of custom tool that tracks persistence of interest could be useful for research conducted by media outlets, and maybe other types of businesses, but I’m more tuned in to media and think of it first. Examples:
- Mainstream media, like monthly print magazines, having longer lead times, to see what people are still interested in.
- Even for more instant media, like TV or blogs, it could be handy for planning more-produced, better-researched features. If there’s no longevity to public interest in a given topic, it might not be worth the investment.
Of course this assumes there is a spot of value in the idea of enduring interest, and not just in the latest thing. Sometimes I despair of our “newest is all there is” way of looking at news and everything else.
If you wanted to go all radical, you might even say that sustained public interest in a topic maps to its importance and consequence. Nah…
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Winding up a story
I’ve never watched Pushing Daisies, but I hear there are plans to finish up the story in a series of comic books, should the TV series get canceled.
I’ve been thinking for a long time that TV shows should do this when there’s still an audience, but maybe not a big enough audience to justify Hollywood production. I don’t know if comic books would be my medium of choice, but I think I’d consume more of some stories in just about any form.
It’s especially cruel to fans, don’t you think, to lop off a series in mid-story like both of David Milch’s HBO series—Deadwood and John From Cincinnati. Give me a podcast or an animated movie, a novelization, shoot, a blog. Just tell me what you had in mind to wind the thing up. You know? And, OK, because I pay for HBO, I think I feel a little more used when I don’t get my conclusion.
