When Betaworks’ John Borthwick mentioned on the latest Gillmor Gang an analysis of the speculation surrounding Obama’s Bin Laden takeout announcement before the late night speech last Sunday, I had to look it up.
Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream.
Crazy how important Twitter has become in the news system, isn’t it?
It is becoming important for everything, not just news, though some voices are still absent. Funny, I will rail all day against curmudgeons who diss Twitter, but I’ll make a confession: I am glad I don’t see David Simon pimping each episode of his show in my stream. But maybe he would not use Twitter in that way; I’d like to think so.
What does my pleasure in Simon’s abstinence say about Twitter? Maybe that even people like me, a four-year user of the service, still find it vaguely trivial on the whole, increasingly promotional, self-centered. Yeah, it’s pretty much a mirror of the culture, and I suppose that is its value.
As a huge fan of several HBO original series, which are eminently rewatchable, I like having access to the complete archives of favorite shows. Comcast’s OnDemand chooses for me—only letting me at selected episodes of selected series, while HBO Go allows me to dip into whichever season of The Wire I might be in the mood for.
I’ve so fully embraced the whole streaming thing that I rarely watch DVDs anymore, and recently switched to the streaming-only plan on Netflix. I’ll choose to watch something that can be seen instantly and without the physical encumbrance of a DVD. In fact, I’ve developed an active avoidance of DVDs. I can’t quite account for this odd behavior when it means I miss watching things I know I would like, but DVDs have become almost distasteful to me.
There’s one thing I miss: listening to audio commentary tracks, and the studios will have to do something about that. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to provide a commentary version of selected online videos, and while they’re at it, I’ll take an MP3 of the audio for my commute, please. (I might even pay, a little.) With well-loved movies and shows, I already know what’s on the screen. I can see it in my head. And so often the commentary doesn’t necessarily map to the action anyway.
iTunes helped kill innovation in podcasting
In the early days of podcasting we saw some experimentation with amateur commentaries to videos, and I think Battlestar Gallactica even produced an official audio commentary podcast. But podcasting has settled into a rut just generally. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in recent years. I blame iTunes’ dominance as a podcatcher, which meant iTunes became podcasting’s Billboard top 100 ranking and a main discovery method, which led to elevating the MSM podcasts, and possibly caused amateur efforts to ape old media style and production conventions.
With the rapid convergence of TV and the web there are opportunities to get creative—with show formats, not just technology. Alternate sound tracks wouldn’t just have to be recorded, either; they could be live. I’ve always thought, for example, that sports fans (guys mostly) might like to hear opinionated, partisan play-by-play sprinkled with obscenities. You know, the way guys talk when they’re watching games together. Especially when they are angry at a coach. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Also, there are a ton of podcasts about TV shows. They could mix it up a little, break from their predictable formats and offer commentary tracks, maybe just on occasion, like for season finales.
This cracks me up: the German press is having it out with the government’s press office because a spokesperson announced Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the U.S. on Twitter before it was announced to the press in a traditional news conference.
It’s a little hard to tell from the translation but some members of the media seem pretty pissy about it. The communications guy holding the press conference isn’t having any of it. I wonder if there’s video. I’d like to hear the tone and see the body language in that exchange.
I heard about it in a retweet of Jay Rosen by Dave Winer so I’m hoping they will talk about it on today’s Rebooting the News podcast.
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
It all came full circle in little neural connections this morning when seeing Dave’s twitter handle fired off a reminder of the podcast, and the circle was cemented by the irony that that other reformation began in Germany.
Your market may vary, and maybe they’ll dream up some specials by the time Keith Olbermann shows up on air. But upgrading to a higher tier of channels for an extra $16.95 a month isn’t a priority for me, much as I like and admire Keith, so I hope the show is online or they don’t try to prevent fans from putting it online.
Later: Ha! Just realized I wrote “called Comcast” in my headline when I really chatted. Reminds me of my kids saying “Let me show you a song.”
Neat idea: Whitehouse.gov is hosting an “enhanced video” of the live State of the Union speech tonight. Charts and things, I gather.
I may try watching it that way, if only to distract me from watching the VP and speaker. Congress can re-seat itself, that’s fine, but what I really wish they would change is the camera angle or the presence of those two players immediately behind the president. I can never help but watch them deciding when to applaud, and when to really show approbation by standing up to applaud. Drives me nuts.
Is it a trend to work through politics in fiction? Take Andy Borowitz, whose fake essays amplify news events in the same way SNL skits reduce the real to the ridiculous. Willie Geist’s new book, American Freak Show, takes off on “what ifs.”
Then we have Nicolle Wallace processing some of her frustrations through fiction. (I started Eighteen Acres yesterday. She’s quite a smooth writer, and the story sounds like it will be interesting. I have a problem with her cliches, i.e. “She loved him to the very fibre of her being.”)
If you include non-print writing you might even throw David Simon’s The Wire and Treme into the category of working out political angst in fiction.
I think short print fiction could make a comeback and serve as useful propaganda at the same time. It might even help magazine finances to embrace it again, if they were bold enough to try something that conventional market wisdom says is passe. Think Dickens—whose novels were serialized in magazines—and the crowds at the New York harbor panting to learn from British passengers what became of Little Nell.
Plus, we may even need a bigger helping of fiction to make sense of the craziness out there. Why couldn’t Huffington Post host Sarah Palin fan fiction? Why couldn’t The Nation publish a short story today that “what ifs” the proceedings of an inevitable committee hearing to investigate the president’s birth—because a few of those extreme right-wingers could get committee chair appointments.
It’s already stranger than fiction out there, so why not?
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.
What a story: AIG is dragging its feet on medical insurance payments for injured Iraq war contractors.
I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)
Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:
First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.
It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”
Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”
Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.
You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.
Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)
I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I even tried to sell a t-shirt from the classifieds in the back of the book in the late 70s (Linda for First Lady; got a cease-and-desist).
While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.
But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.
Would I pay? Maybe. A little.
*How often do you print? Me: I’ll go a month without turning on the printer at home, maybe twice a week at work, usually to pass something around for review and copyediting.
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.
When Barack Obama sent a thank-you text message to supporters—on his way to the victory speech—saying he couldn’t have done it without us, I thought that was nice to address us first. I replied “You’re welcome, buddy. Keep us involved.”
Wired Obama supporters have been thinking a lot about how the power of his online communities might be harnessed to do some good beyond getting him elected.
What would you think about bringing public hearings into the online world? It wouldn’t have to be exactly like Capitol Hill hearings. Hearings have taken to the road for a long time, but they tend to keep to the same formal rules.
A different kind of supplementary input might be put in place so that testimony could be given via one of the live video services, in shorter chunks, and by a different class of witnesses—more ordinary citizens, more front-line experts, fewer heads of agencies and heads of interest groups. (The higher you climb on the title ladder, the less you learn about what’s happening and the more you learn about what the establishment wants you to think is happening.) It would be less formal than hearings held in Washington, but more official than a town hall.
Live commentary on the testimony could be mined not just for reaction to the testimony but also for ideas. It could shape the direction of the hearings in real time.
I don’t believe anybody thinks Joe citizen should vote to decide things like how to fix the economy. But swarms do one thing very well: they ferret out the important, consequential bits of an issue, situation or conversation. When this happens in real time, we’re saying “Yes, more of that, please. Now.” We’re like players in a game of hide the thimble, telling the hunter if she’s hot or cold, closer or further away from the prize, or the essence of a thing.
If our representatives in government take the trouble to listen, and if they are canny about it, they’ll use that power to navigate the issue terrain.
Later: Brian Solis pens a good roundup of Obama’s use of social media during the campaign and and floats ideas for using it for governing. The stat that popped out at me:
YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000, with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for 110 million views.
While the ratio of Obama-to-McCain subscribers was about 2:1, the video posting ratio was more like 5:1. So, it’s not just that the McCain campaign was stuck in the 20th century in terms of thinking of the electorate as an audience; McCain supporters thought of themselves as the audience.
Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream. 
With the rapid convergence of TV and the web there are opportunities to get creative—with show formats, not just technology. Alternate sound tracks wouldn’t just have to be recorded, either; they could be live. I’ve always thought, for example, that sports fans (guys mostly) might like to hear opinionated, partisan play-by-play sprinkled with obscenities. You know, the way guys talk when they’re watching games together. Especially when they are angry at a coach. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
—but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”