Category Archives: Media

Chicago newspapers, television and radio plus movies and TV

I think I’m out and then….

Internet, Media,

I thought I was done talking about Chuffpo here until Whet, who is the Web Editor at the Reader, noticed that ChuffPo has been running blurbs and writeups from the Reader, TOC, Centerstage, Decider and others. Whet explains it all in posts here and here:

I’ve known this for a while, and perhaps it’s hurbis on my part, but I find everything ChuffPo does, from the top down, to be substandard so I have a hard time getting worked up about anything it does. The original content it features is from writers who either do better work elsewhere or do crap work altogether, the attribution they use is so disguised it might as well not exist (if even Roger Ebert’s confused then what should we expect from other readers), and it has no original voice or outlook of its own. Since the site’s had minimal impact locally, I figure whoever’s reading it doesn’t know any better, is attracted by nothing by the name and the site will eventually wither away.

I don’t know anyone in Chicago who says “Yeah, I really like ChuffPo. It’s an interesting read.” Everyone who ever mentions it is doing so with ire raised (whether its about its aggregation strategy, its practice of not paying its writers*, its habit of not posting critical comments, etc.). The last time I heard anyone mention anything about a post** from any of its writers was during the whole Steve Dolinsky*** kerfuffle and again – ire raised.

All this explains why I haven’t been as worked up about it as Whet. It’s been lousy from Day One, and continues to be lousy. It doesn’t seem to be doing direct harm to TOC and since any given day hands me a solid list of things that do (or potentially might), my focus ends up there. Is it wrong they’re running whole writeups from other, better publications? Yes. Would I join in a call for them to change their attribution/linking/aggregation strategies? Yes. Is it its worst crime? Arguably, no.

But perhaps it’s worth taking a stand against this due to the theory of the slippery slope. If a site like Chuffpo – which uses other publications’ content to acquire millions of dollars in financing that could be spent on more responsible media sites – can get away with something like this, what’s to stop any other site from doing the same. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being an aggregator of content, but Whet makes a compelling argument that ChuffPo’s way is the wrong way to do it (a.k.a. flat-out stealing), especially if they’re making money off it.

So perhaps tomorrow I’ll ask for some of that money back.

* A practice I defend, in part, here.
** Technically, the last time I heard anyone mention anything about a ChuffPo post was when Mike Doyle wrote about the CTA’s plan to eject the homeless from its cars. But that was originally a post Doyle wrote for his own site Chicago Carless, which proves its writers save their best work for other places (or cross-post it).
*** Who’s no longer writing for them, it seems.

The end of reality (TV)

Media, ,

From “Reality craze is over for broadcast TV” in Media Life magazine:

“These shows are like scripted shows. After a while there’s some fatigue,” says Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director at Horizon.

“Rather than sit through another season of an unscripted show, people want to see what else is on. And there’s more competition than ever before. Cable is just littered with these shows.”

Do broadcast executives really think we believe that reality shows are unscripted? (If they aren’t, some people are really bad at playing themselves and I say this as an avid watcher of Gene Simmons Family Jewels).

Motrin gets it, why doesn’t Ad Age?

Internet, Media, , ,

Last week in TOC, we hosted a roundtable with professional food critics, bloggers and chefs (full transcript is here). It’s a follow-up, of sorts, to our critics’ roundtable back in January and it’s the second story our senior food and drink writer, David Tamarkin, has written on the topic (in the first, he profiled the foodie site LTHForum.com and in the second, he talked to local professional critics about how online critics affect their jobs*. I realize I’m biased, but I’ve been impressed with the overall tone of TOC‘s coverage of online critics (which includes this article I wrote). It isn’t fear-based and doesn’t seem like it’s trying to unring the bell of online amateur criticism.

Would that everyone else in the publishing industry could get hip to that.

This Ad Age article on how an online blog/Twitter-driven campaign caused Motrin to pull an ad shows that not everyone has put his or her finger to the wind. (The ad is here. I don’t have a uterus, but even I’m irritated with that ad.)

This graf stood out to me:
“The ultimate demise of the campaign demonstrates either how quickly social media can galvanize a groundswell of opinion or how much power over online discourse they can give a few vocal tastemakers with outsize weight.”

First of all, these people were – for lack of a better phrase – experts in their respective fields with audiences to match. Just because they’re online, doesn’t make them any less so (I’d argue it makes them moreso but whatever). Plus, the bitter snarl hovering over the phrase “a few vocal tastemakers with outsize weight” wouldn’t be there if we were talking about, say, academics or traditional publishing outlets. Or is it only OK to have a few vocal tastemakers so long as they serve a business model?

If I was a company, I’d want to know what people are saying about my product – good or bad. Which is worse for a company like Motrin: To know there’s a wave of displeasure about an ad, so you can pull it and show you’re responsive to the views of your customer base or to trundle along in ignorance and contempt of that same audience. Eventually the latter will wear down your market share (incidentally, that’s how online critics serve your biz model). As anyone knows, for everyone one or two people that let you know about their feelings about your product, there are several who share their views but haven’t let you know.

So this isn’t about the few, this is about the many. Everyone has the potential to be a vocal tastemaker now, which the Ad Age article does point out:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this,” said Mr. Armano, who also blogs for AdAge.com. “Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

The ones who add little value to the conversation will get lost in the din.

* In a comment on this story, a woman quoted in a WSJ article that David references mentions that Yelp now labels reviews of a restaurant where Yelp holds events as “Yelp Event at ___.” I always thought it was an ethical lapse for Yelp to allow for published reviews about a venue when A) they were involved in a business relationship with that venue and B) the reviewer’s experience during these events is hardly representative of the venue. Now if only they could get Yelp employees to stop publishing reviews of businesses they work with…

More on ChuffPo

Internet, Media,

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I have in deciding what to blog about here and what to blog about at TOC. My TOC blog post on Huffington Post Chicago – or as I’ve been calling it ChuffPo – could have gone either way. But the gist of that post ended up directed not so much at ChuffPo, but at the whole of the arts and entertainment press and their blogger brethren. In our quest for page views or cover lines, we’re missing some things, or letting publicists dictate our coverage. So we – the experts – are missing the city that exists all around us, and running the risk of someone else acquiring the mantle of the most informed.

Which brings me back to a few lingering thoughts on ChuffPo…

Granted, it’s only a few days in, but I’m not really sure what the site has to offer. As I allude to in the TOC post, most of the content on the site consists of links to stories you’d see in many other places. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing that distinguishes that content. Even Gapers Block‘s Merge section, which offers a quick to-the-point glance at big headlines of the day, still manages to do so with a certain style and voice.

Yes, it has some celebrity bloggers you might not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of them have had much to say (really, John Cusack, that’s all you got in you?). And the true Chicago voices in the mix have…well, if I want to read or hear what they have to say, I can go elsewhere, as most of them have columns, features or work in other places.

Speaking of HuffPo contributors, Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter raised an issue last week (2nd to last item) about the site’s lack of monetary compensation that’s been on my mind as of late, ever since a Gawker post on the same subject: If people are going to write for you – and you’re making money off them – you ought to be paying them. Rhodes has a point, to an extent, particularly about the lunacy of helping a competing business for free. But magazines – and newspapers – utilize unpaid talent (we call ’em interns) all the time. In fact, they depend on them. And those who excel in this grindhouse boot camp are often placed at the front of the line when there are jobs to be had at those same publications.

Disclosure time: I used to blog at Chicagoist, and while there was some monetary incentive for going above and beyond, I gave it away for free during most of my 2 1/4 year stint there (not to mention the work I did for our Ctrl-Alt-Rock events that were for the promotion of the site/brand). But all that free labor directly led to paid freelancing work, and is largely responsible for me having a job at TOC. So it’d be ridiculous of me to suggest that free labor in this environment is unethical (a Gawker blog commenting on fair labor practices would seem problematic as well, but nevermind). And since most of the critics in a TOC roundtable back in January said they’d still be doing what they do even if they had to do it for free, who am I to criticize?

It’s fine for these folks to look for more exposure (and some of the print scribes probably see it as I saw Chicagoist – as a door to more work down the line). But the whole thing has a very arm’s length feel to it right now, a sort of best-of compendium that has yet to present a real view of the city. And frankly I worry that its east coast pedigree will give it the bona fides that it hasn’t earned (especially since according to Ferdy, it can dish it out but has trouble taking it).

Yet.

Consider the following:

“With all its unfair built-in advantages, Huffington Post Chicago could actually help push one or even both of Chicago’s daily newspapers — both struggling mightily for different reasons — right to the brink of extinction. And if that happened, HPC would ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. If the Chicago Tribune disappeared, so would half of the actual news the Huffington Post now highlights.” – Will Bunch; Philly.com

To be fair, ChuffPo is blogging about stories from all over. And since sites like ChuffPo actually funnel traffic to newspaper sites, I’m not really sure how Bunch’s point follows. Besides, a site like ChuffPo ought to be filling in the blanks – particularly with content like this nightmarish account of one person’s stay at Swedish Covenant Hospital – not trying to do what a daily does. That’s now how it will become a source of real power.

Maybe Bunch just wanted to get quoted on Romenesko, and that’s why he said something so ludicrous. In fact, in the next paragraph he turns around and says that dailies and ChuffPo need each other. So there you go.

And that’s what I mean about the view from a distance. If Bunch knew anything about Chicago, he’d know the Tribune isn’t in any immediate danger of disappearing (even if some of its great talentis). The Sun-Times is doing a fine job of killing itself, with no help needed from ChuffPo or anyone else.

The problems of innovation

Internet, Media, ,


From a piece by the Trib’s Mo Ryan on the new J.J. Abrams show Fringe:

At a Monday Q&A session on the show at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, J.J. Abrams, one of the show’s co-creators, recalled watching an “Alias” episode late in that ABC show’s run.

“I watched a few minutes, and I was so confused,” Abrams said. “[I]t was impenetrable. I was like, ‘I know I should understand this. I read the [script] — who the [expletive] is that guy?’”

Glad I wasn’t the only one.

Abrams seems to me like one of those creative guys who gets easily bored. The last three shows he’s done that I liked started to go off the rails in their third seasons: Felicity, Alias and Lost. (By all accounts, Lost regained its footing in its 4th, but I’d stopped watching by then.)

This is because Abrams usually gets involved with a new project. Those projects were Alias, Lost, and Mission Impossible III, respectively. No one would argue that those weren’t all worthy projects. Alias and Lost walked a new path for network television shows (though to be fair Alias had much of the brush cleared by Buffy) and I still think Mission Impossible III is one of the smarter action movies of the past five years.

So what’s to be learned here? Three things:

People who are true innovators need to be challenged in order to keep coming up with interesting new ideas. If the opportunities to do that aren’t available in the organization, they will go someplace else to find them.

Also, innovation requires evolving maintenance. It’s not enough to create new ways of doing things. You also need the right people in place to maintain the tone and structure. In organizations, this means one or two wunderkinds aren’t enough: you need a group of people who understand the underlying goals of a project and how to make new additions serve them. You want to add social networking features to your site? Fine, good. But why? And what purpose will they ultimately serve. Not every site needs to be a new Facebook. But if those new features are used to highlight excellent content that might otherwise get ignored, that’s innovation that serves your site.

Similarly, on creative projects, there can’t be a brain trust. This is often difficult with auteur works like Abrams’s but again Lost has shown that having the right lieutenants in place makes the battle that much easier. In the workplace, maintain a knowledge base through Wikis and share evolving information throughout the group often. The idea of redundant systems isn’t just for servers. When an expert develops an expert process, note it. That way when your expert leaves for a new project, the rest of your team won’t be trying to find its footing for the next 3-6 months. And much like a television show, it’s important to have regular “story meetings” that involve everyone to discuss that year’s overall themes, arcs and possible new plot developments (Oh and do these in person so people can see each other. Even video conferencing is better than conference calls facilitated by speakerphones.)

Oh I almost forgot: Don’t add the half-sister of your leader to your crew, especially if she is related to the lead antagonist. Eventually, she’s just going to end up as an evil zombie who you’ll need to put into a coma. You might think that’s just applicable to Alias, but really that’s just a solid rule across the board.

Sold Train

Media, Music

After 38 years as the conductor of “Soul Train,” Don Cornelius has sold the show to MadVision Entertainment. The company plans on creating new episodes, and it also sounds like they’ll be releasing old episodes on DVD and what have you.

First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to pitch my idea for “The Afro-Sheen Music Minute,” a new “Soul Train” feature wherein ?uestlove of The Roots would review the week’s hot new tracks with Charlie Sheen. Go ahead and try to come up with a more compelling concept, I dare you. Plus, you’ve also got a built-in sponsorship opportunity.* You’re welcome, MadVision. Send me a Facebook message and we can do some business.

Also, wedding season is upon us. So it’s time to start building up your repertoire of dance moves now. Here is your homework:

* Apparently, they don’t make Afro Sheen anymore. Maybe Dark and Lovely will be interested.

Too long for Twitter, and not quite postworthy but…

Media, Uncategorized, ,

…whatever happened to the casual relationship America used to have with Scott Baio? He was sort of like Leap Year. Every few years you’d hear about some hot woman he was having sex with, then respond with something akin to “Wow, how does that guy do it?” then make a Joanie Loves Chachi reference and be done with him until the next time.

I miss those days.

Well, at least he didn’t just issue a press release this time

Media

Amen for newspapers and the Internet. On Thursday night after the governor revealed his plan, the local TV news shows – including the normally excellent Chicago Tonight – were reporting the governor’s back-door deal of free rides for seniors as a sure thing (and feeding into Blago’s self-creafted image as some Capra-esque pol while they did it). But the next day, online critics, and local print outlets are pointing out that the gov’s plan is both poor government and not the economic incentive he thinks it is. A commenter on a TOC post I wrote last week noted that a Chicago senior citizen would have to spend $70,000 on taxable goods in order to offset the $176 lost revenue from their free CTA pass (using the gov’s own numbers based on a twice-a-week ridership)

Now television news* has joined with the party, rightly pointing out that even the $19 million isn’t enough, as rates might have to be raised to cover the free rides. I know “the media” gets a lot of flak for being the tail that wags the dog, but television news is the worst offender.

Most seniors are not hurting because of transit costs – and not near as much as those who live near the poverty line – so this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and the creation of a problem for which there is now no solution, since legislators are now faced with a pass-it-or-perish situation. So in that way, you could argue that the bill is a sure thing since it does give pols some political cover. Then again, downstate legislators (and know-nothing suburban reps like Christine Radogno) have gone out of their way to avoid some pretty obvious solutions in the past, and that’s why the transit crisis is – to quote Frank Stallone – far from over.

* Hey Trib, if you’re going to create a video-only site that’s largely dependent on your own branded content, just go whole hog with it so people can find clips for local news events. And also, let’s get working on an embed code, huh?