Category Archives: Media

Chicago newspapers, television and radio plus movies and TV

Beware the bubble of your own understanding

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davidcarr

David Carr died this week. He was a media reporter for the New York Times, a former alt-weekly editor, a man in recovery from addiction, a father, a husband, a defender of the good, a champion of the great.

Rather than idolize him, I tried to idolize his work and his approach: be open to the new, skeptical of the conventional wisdom and crucifying of the fatuous. He brought down the barbarians in the Tower with a single (meticulously reported) article. Few of us will be as good as he, but I hope it’s enough that we try.

I’m as guilty as anyone for occasionally thinking the world as it exists through my eyes is as it is for everyone. So after an evening watching colleagues in the media memorialize and celebrate Carr in specific, loving memories on Twitter, I wondered how many people I knew, knew him.

I asked some friends on Facebook:

Non-media people: How does David Carr’s death resonate for you, if at all? He was a giant in this field and an idol of many but I’m trying to get outside the bubble to truly understand it. I have thoughts on this but would rather hear from you.

(Granted, this is still a biased sample but far more helpful than asking the same question on Twitter which overindexes for media types.)

Here were some of the responses.

“Lived in DC and read the Washington City Paper when he was writing for them. Still, I had to be reminded who he was.”

“His name was familiar enough that I would have guessed he was a columnist or editor for the Times, but I didn’t know him for anything specific.”

“I vaguely remember an interview with Fresh Air. I think it was him, and if so all I took away was he’d had a drug problem. I used to be more up on these factoids.”

A few folks who are active in media even chimed in:

“I guess I am a media person, but have no idea who he is/was”

“I had heard of him, but hadn’t really followed his work or identified it as his work” 

“Chiming in from the goofball community – never heard of him” 

“Had to Google him. And I consider myself to be pretty savvy when it comes to media & media personalities” 

“Maybe I don’t count as a non-media person, but Night of the Gun was a rad memoir. I didn’t connect his NYT personality with the writer of that memoir until I saw a documentary on the NYT a while ago.”

Thirteen people responded. Six of them in media, seven who aren’t. All said they either didn’t know him, sort of knew some of his work but didn’t know him or had no idea.

I somewhat expected this response but it was really surprising to hear this from people within media (though they’re all outside New York).

This isn’t to minimize Carr’s impact though I debated publishing this because it might come off as such. To be clear, he shaped or changed many accepted narratives. His work was crucial to understanding media in the 21st century.

But as we as a society become more fragmented in our media choices and assume the world at-large mirrors the conversation in our social feeds, it’s worth fact-checking that from time to time, even anecdotally.

To return to the Tribune example, he saved the paper from an awful fate. In many ways, they’re still rebuilding from the damage Zell and Michaels wrought both within the Tower and with its constituencies. If you believe in the need for a vigorous watchdog press, thousands of people in the Chicago area were helped by his work without even knowing it. For this reason alone, many more people outside media circles ought to know David Carr’s name.

Carr’s writing offered a reminder that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the points in-between are often the key. Checking assumptions is crucial. You have to go out and look for truth because it is usually hidden by those who’d rather you didn’t find it. These values were never more apparent than when he turned his own considerable reportorial skills on himself, fact-checking his memories from when he was in the thrall of addiction.

Even those close to you see the world very differently. It’s important to ask them how from time to time. I’ll try to remember that.

Photo by Eddie Cordel via Creative Commons

And now, back to the news

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Next week, I’m starting a new job as editorial director of Touchvision, an independent video news startup. It’s based in Chicago, but national in its reach and point of view. Our work can be viewed on mobile, tablet, desktop or television – anywhere there’s a screen. I’ll oversee the creation of our news product, make sure it has a compelling, relevant, distinct voice and get it in front of the right audience. Like most jobs of its type, it’s both creation and distribution. It’s a fantastic opportunity and I’ll be there with a couple of old friends, which is always a plus.

Not having started there yet, it’s a bit premature to talk in detail about what Touchvision does and where it’s headed other than to say we create straight-ahead video news as well as features. But this video about a young woman who’s a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet gives a sense of the possibilities.* It tells a beautiful story with strong emotion at its core and reveals something about the world.

I really liked working at Cramer-Krasselt. It’s full of smart people who do great work and they tolerate a lot less BS than other places – especially agencies. I learned a great deal about how big international brands launch new ventures and conduct their business. When I turned in my notice, colleagues told me they appreciated what I do and will miss having me there. Everything you could ask for from a job.

And there’s no denying we’re in a difficult period for the larger media world and, more specifically, the business of journalism.

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t eager to be a part of it again. As much as I wanted/needed the experience of working in an agency environment, this is one of the most exciting times ever for news. It’s what I know best and what I love. And when I’ve had the most fun.

I’m incredibly excited. Can’t wait to get started. The thought of being in a newsroom again makes me a little dizzy.

That’s probably a good sign.

* It probably goes without saying but just in case it doesn’t: I didn’t have any involvement in the creation of the Joffrey piece. But I really dig it all the same.

Image by Theo Curmudgeon. Used and adapted via Creative Commons license.

Banners are broken. So is social media. Let’s fix it.

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A colleague and I just wrote a piece for Digiday called “How to fix social media and banner ads.” It’s pegged to the twentieth anniversary of the first banner ad and a reflection of brands’ insistence on shoving their products into conversations where they don’t belong, a topic I’ve written about before. Our central thesis is pretty well summed up here:

…Banner ads have lost most of their usefulness in an environment that trades impressions for engagement. At the end of his piece, McCambley says banner ads need “to get back to asking customers: How can I help you?”

Marketers seem to be repeating these same banner mistakes with social media. What began as an opportunity for one-to-one conversation with people is now driven by like-based metrics that only satisfy the needs of a brand’s messaging strategy. What users really want and need runs second to the scaled-based approach that killed the value of the banner.

Read the full piece at Digiday.

If the above resonates with you, check out Social Media Strategery, a blog maintained by my former boss, Steve Radick. His thinking has been a huge influence on me over the past year. As a starting point, read his post on the dangers of becoming what you measure in social media.

My top 10 favorite moments at Chicagoist on its 10th anniversary

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Chicagoist – a site I succinctly describe to the uninitiated as “a news and culture blog about Chicago” – chicago-istlaunched about ten-and-a-half years ago under editors Margaret Lyons and Rachelle Bowden with the backend marketing and infrastructure support of the Gothamist network (which at the time was just two sites). The site’s just getting around to celebrating this milestone tonight and I’ve been in full throwback mode all day. (I’ve been tweeting reflections and stories on Twitter under #Chicagoist10).

It may seem unremarkable now but at the time there were few sites trying to talk about the news the way the average twenty/thirtysomething person talked about the news. In Chicago, there was Chicagoist, Gapers Block (the older brother competition who always made us try to work harder), Eric Zorn’s blog and a handful of others mostly focused on specific topics. Chicagoist and Gapers were the only two group blogs I recall that tried to cover the whole city. (Red Eye, Chicago magazine, Time Out Chicago and the dailies were still very focused on their print products.) We didn’t always succeed in our efforts to cover all of Chicago, in part because Chicagoist had a downtown/North Side bias running through it for its first couple of years. This angered native Chicagoans (and oddly some transplants, too) but it also meant the site had a voice, the voice of someone moving into the city for the first time and discovering it. And as the site grew older that voice become more authoritative and it grew into its aspirations without losing the barroom skepticism that ran through it in the early days.

I started there as a music and movies writer, a few months after the site launched. This was my first audition post. (It is nothing special.) I left as a co-editor in 2007 to go work at Time Out Chicago. Chicagoist was an incredible training ground for writers who wanted to develop. Many of us wrote for free. We weren’t really editing each other early on. SEO and social-driven audiences were non-existent. So the site was often a mix of in-jokes, minor happenstances and hobby horses. I can’t count the number of times favorite movie quotes of mine became headlines. But it was also a chance to figure out who you were as a writer. And get better at it. Or to create a newsroom environment even though we all worked remotely. We even managed to throw the occasional event or five. It was legit to say that blog had a community around it. I still read the comments in those days.

It was also a time when there were few alternate sources of news and viewpoints on the same. Again, unfathomable if you’ve grown up in a media ecosystem, post-2010. When the dailies or other media sources did something dumb, sexist or short-sighted, we wrote about it. I know how trite this sounds now, but it was what made me proud to write for them. Scroll down to the “Special thanks to” section here and you can see all the folks who made the site what it’s been.

I owe most of my current career to getting my start there. So do many others. It’s also where I met my wife. So in some ways, I owe it everything.

Here are ten of my most memorable moments – nine good ones and one when I got a little over my skis.

10. The Dave Matthews poop bus stories
All the Chicagoist writers had their way with this legendary story of a DMB tour bus dropping its toilet after-products into the Chicago River. I took particular glee in it. We retired the topic here but it still gets referenced whenever fecal matter is involved.

9. Interviews and festival coverage
We started doing coverage of summer music festivals in 2005 when Lollapalooza returned. The first year we were still small so I just ran around Lolla with a digital camera, a notebook and a tape recorder. Other local sites would follow the wall-to-wall model as the music festival scene took off with Intonation and Pitchfork. But Chicagoist still does it best years later even as social media has changed the way live events get covered.

Chicagoist is also where I learned to interview people whether they were bands, filmmakers, authors, a friend of mine who was a ballerina and a burlesque dancer. Most importantly, I interviewed the guys behind Filmspotting (nee Cinecast), a show I guest-co-hosted a couple of times, which remains a highlight of my life in media.

Speaking of interviews…

8. WBEZ’s decision to drop jazz
It’s ironic how hard I went after WBEZ here since I’ve ended up appearing on its airwaves many times since as a panelist, which would not be possible without this switch. After I did this post, its VP of comms asked me if he could respond so we ran this Q&A.

7. The Get Well Roger project
When Roger Ebert first became ill, the staff crowdsourced a simple photo project: People uploading and tagging photos of themselves giving the thumbs-up.

6. That time I kinda fucked up
I hated Tucker Max. Still do. I count as a career highlight the time I was editor of Playboy.com and told his publicist we would never cover him as long as I was editor (which didn’t last long but still). But I didn’t do my homework on this one and the whole reason for it – Tucker Max supposedly operating a site under a pseudonym – was taken down hard in the comments (deservedly so) by people with more awareness of him than I had at the time. The rest of the post is sort of useless (though still true) without it. But he was in an ascendant period here and it felt important to talk about that. The world would eventually tire of his shenanigans.

5. Ctrl-Alt-Rock 1 and 2
We threw two local band showcases thanks in large part to the booking prowess of Jim “Tankboy” Kopeny. Ctrl-Alt-Rock was the name coined by our sports writer Benjy Lipsman. The first packed the house at Schuba’s. The second was at Double Door and was one of the last things I did with the site before leaving for Time Out Chicago. The second is my favorite because I convinced Jim we should book the Reptoids and a little band of U of C students no one had heard of called The Passerines.

4. The Double Door is closing hearing in which nothing happened 
Everyone freaked out because the Double Door might close. An online petition was launched. I went to to the hearing. The response to the loss of a great rock club forced the two sides to come to an agreement. I wrote this post because I sat in a courtroom for hours and wanted to make it worth something.

3. Guilting Pitchfork/Intonation into letting people bring in their own water
It is always ridiculously hot during Chicago’s festival season. The fest that would become Pitchfork Fest had a stupid policy of not allowing people to bring their own water. But their reaction to questions about it was what really irked me so I wrote this. Two days later the fest reversed its decision and allowed people to bring in their own water, a rule most summer festivals here now follow.

2. Questioning NBC 5’s ethics
I don’t know why this bothered me so much. Maybe because our site had a more stringent ethics policy for food reporting than a major television affiliate.

1. The Richard Marx letters
It’s pretty much standard for Richard Marx to go after someone in Chicago media when they do something he doesn’t like. My errors were minor to non-existent depending on your read of this. This was the first time I heard from a legitimately famous person I wrote about and it was a little weird. Justin Kaufmann and I later immortalized those emails in this live Schadenfreude sketch:

This Sun-Times headline is more false than controversial

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suntimescoverThere’s a debate to be had about whether this Sun-Times cover is overly incendiary or whether its tone is or is not befitting the front page of a newspaper. But you could go back and forth on that and neither side would be right or wrong. Meanwhile, the New York Post would be all “How you doin‘?”

What’s not really debatable is how factually incorrect this cover is.

The issue comes down to the phrase “Here’s the reason….” It’s essentially saying “This guy did it.” Does current evidence seem to point to him as the culprit? Yep. But he hasn’t been convicted. A newspaper should probably keep its powder dry until that happens.

But even still, it’s false. Let’s say for the sake of argument you as the editor are comfortable saying he did it because of the Facebook post he left and his lawyer essentially admitting he did.

He isn’t the reason the fire happened. A person isn’t a reason. Those are two different things. We don’t yet know what the reason was that he (for argument’s sake) did it. So the word use is poor. Maybe the reason was mental illness. Maybe he was drunk and high on drugs and didn’t have all of his faculties about him. Maybe he was absolutely in his right mind when it happened but had a grudge against someone.* We don’t know yet. The reasoning behind it is still unknown. None of this is revealed by printing his photo.

And not to further split hairs, but the reason the flights were canceled is because the FAA doesn’t have a backup system in place for when the Aurora flight control tower is disabled. Capacity became an issue. The fire was a huge contributing factor, for sure. But it wasn’t the reason. At best it was one of two.

So nevermind the language’s potential consequences or whether he should be treated with kid gloves in copy. The headline, as written, is incorrect. And that’s why it shouldn’t have been printed.

I get why it’s on the cover and even why it was framed around the flight cancellations. It’s a huge story that reminds me of the air traffic controller subplot of “Breaking Bad.” The drama of it is cinematic in scope but affects the way many people lived their lives over the past few days. Contrast this with the current Joliet murder trial that’s grisly and twisted but ultimately doesn’t affect the average person. This story plays well on the front page and has relevance.

But at some point, the front page of a newspaper has to not sound like the boozed-up guy on a barstool at O’Hare who missed his flight to Cleveland.

* Many news outlets have reported that this man was recently told he would be transferred to Hawaii. In the minds of many, this became cause and effect. But this seems like one of those fascinating details that, at first, seems to provide a reason but later turns out to be a McGuffin. Would the move to Hawaii mean he would be separated from family? Did it come with a demotion in title and salary? Does he hate coconuts? There’s so much more to this story but the flash of it seems irresistible.

Five Things I Learned About Side Projects From A Podcast About Barbecue

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Earlier this week, I was a guest on Car Con Carne, the world’s only barbecue podcast recorded in a car (the show posts early next week). It’s hosted by my friends Mike Bratton, a professional voiceover artist, and James VanOsdol, former Q101 DJ, author, and radio host/reporter at WGN Radio 720 and Rivet Newsradio. I mention their CVs because this is a side project for them. They’re running a Kickstarter so they can fund it on the most basic level and squeeze in tapings around their paying gigs.

bmgmpMeanwhile, I’d recently started a small Tumblr-driven news blog about my neighborhood. BMGMP covers news about Beverly, Mount Greenwood and Morgan Park. Though I’ve made some media appearances recently and pay attention to news and politics in Chicago, it’s been a while since I’ve followed a beat in this way, even on a micro level. Following RSS feeds, tracking sources and seeing how stories develop over time felt a lot like riding the proverbial bike.

Both experiences have taught me a few things about launching side projects:

1. Play to your strengths

I worked in digital media and publishing for eight years before moving into content marketing, which has a similar skillset. Covering news is still a passion of mine. Plus, I live in the neighborhood I’m covering and things I see, hear and experience all end up as fodder for the site.

Mike and James are both professionals in the field of audio-delivered news and information. James hosted his own podcast on The Steve Dahl Network. They know how to produce an interesting show, book guests and digitally publish their work. And not for nothing, they’re both fans of barbecue in a city that’s seen a number of quality BBQ spots open recently.

A couple months ago, I was trying to get a design newsletter off the ground with a friend. The idea we had was great and there was probably a good business idea in it, too. But neither of us knew design well enough to create the editorial part of it which…was the whole thing, really.

All of this is just another way of saying “write what you know.” It’s a lot easier to make a side project a reality if you’re just remixing your current skills and knowledge.

2. Use available resources

Mike and James record their podcast in James’s Mazda RX3 instead of a studio. Rather than hinder their process, it makes what they’ve created better. It gives them a marketing hook (“the world’s only barbecue podcast…recorded in a car”), a healthy dose of verisimilitude (on more than one occasion the show discusses something weird that’s happening outside the car) and the ability to record from outside of any barbecue joint they like. Mike also has gear from his voiceover work that makes recording a podcast much easier for them than it would be the average person.

I’m not a fan of Tumblr as a publishing platform. But it works for now. It was simple to set up, even for the customization I wanted (no comments, small tweaks to the template), and costs nothing but time. I do about 30-45 minutes of work on it when I wake up in the morning. I’ve purposely made it a digital-only news source so it doesn’t require me to do any shoe-leather reporting other than what I’d already be doing. I’ve made sure Google can see it and I push traffic to it via Twitter. It’s the minimum viable product I wanted to fill a news gap in my neighborhood.

3. Start small

One of the reasons I started on Tumblr and not WordPress was to give myself growth goals: if I can keep up the site for a month, I’ll buy a domain for it and move it to WordPress. If I can keep it up for three months, I’ll consider adding features or creating a social presence for it. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on it in the beginning only to discover I couldn’t maintain it. I haven’t let that many people in the neighborhood know it exists while I experiment with the format and content.

Car Con Carne records every two weeks. They’re starting with friends and colleagues as guests and visiting local BBQ joints. If the Kickstarter really takes off, they’ll make changes to the show and maybe even record in BBQ meccas like Memphis.

4. Don’t wait for perfection

I won’t speak for what Mike and James might change about their project but there are a ton of small things I don’t like about BMGMP that I don’t yet have the time to fix: the way photos embed, how permalinks show up and not having built a complete list of sources, to name a few. I haven’t even decided whether the name is something that works. Some of this is the direct result of starting small. But the best way to learn and improve is by doing. If I didn’t start, it would never get better. And speaking of…

5. If it’s worth it, you’ll find the time (a.k.a. It’s never the right time to start something new)

Like anyone else, Mike, James and I all have job and family responsibilities that keep us busy. In the two weeks I’ve been doing BMGMP I’ve missed a couple of morning runs. Eventually, I’ll re-adjust a find a new routine that allows time for all of it. (Easing up on my self-imposed publishing deadline of 7am would probably help.)

I created this side project as much for myself as anyone else. I’m not doing it because I think it will make money or get noticed or disrupt something or any of the other external reasons people start side projects. I’m doing it because it’s both fun and useful for me. If that’s true then it will probably feel that way for someone else, too. And all the reasons that get in the way of not doing it will cease being real obstacles and just be excuses.

What I would have said on In The Loop last night

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Yesterday I was supposed to appear on In The Loop, WYCC-TV’s news and public affairs show. Unfortunately, as I was pulling out of my driveway to make my way to the morning taping I got a flat tire. So I missed it. (You can watch last night’s show as it aired here.)

I’ll hopefully appear on a future show, but it seemed a waste of research and talking points to not write about some of the topics they discussed.

8782370251_2584e8fecc_mAlderman Fioretti enters the mayor’s race
The narrative around Fioretti’s run for mayor is he doesn’t have name recognition or a strong constituency. The first concern can be overcome pretty easily and I don’t believe the second is much of anything. Even without entering the race, Fioretti polled 25% of the electorate to the mayor’s 43%. Moreover, while Karen Lewis has volunteers at the ready, the current mayor has to rent his GOTV effort. As for Fioretti, he’s been making the rounds, particularly in black churches and is a leader in Chicago’s progressive movement, mostly because the ward remap has given him nothing to lose.

Still, the problem with the narrative is it misses the real story: Chicago is having a moment for progressive politics. Too often, Chicago has favored a strongman view of the mayor’s office and we frequently seek a person to rally behind, rather than ideas or principles. (Witness the scramble during the last mayoral election for a consensus black candidate that obscured the actual concerns of Chicago’s neighborhoods of color.)

If we consider the race through this lens, this mayor’s race is seen less as a race between individuals and more as a contest of ideas. Crime is down overall, but in some neighborhoods it’s up. We’ve starved some neighborhoods of economic resources in an effort to make the Loop the economic heart of the city. Twenty of the 49 public schools closed last year were on the South Side. These are the big issues of the campaign – or should be – and it’s why there’s room for progressive candidates this year.

Finally, as Ben Joravsky reminded us this week, Chicago uses a runoff system for its mayoral election. Unless the mayor gets 51% of the vote, there will be a runoff in April. Plenty of time for any candidate to introduce himself or herself to voters.

Cardinal George’s recent column on gay marriage
The Cardinal is in ill health and regardless of his personal views, I hope for his recovery and comfort.

Anyone who reads the news can tell you we are still litigating many of these issues so to say there’s a uniform state law that governs all activity from economics to sexuality – which is what the Cardinal invokes when he says “sharia law” – is simply untrue. It’s a good line and one designed to provoke – in the same way that it was when the Cardinal compared LGBT advocates to the Ku Klux Klan (for which he later apologized).

But what we have seen is an increasing movement toward equality.

I’m not Catholic but I went to a Catholic high school and I attend a Catholic church. One of the things I’ve always found great comfort in is the church’s stance on issues of social justice and helping those who’ve been set apart from society, often because of laws.

I would hope the Cardinal comes to understand that people who have been denied equal access to marriage or certain forms of health care is an issue of social justice and that while the church may not change its stance on those issues, there is an opportunity for healing between the larger church and those who feel apart from it. Especially those whose marriage does not exist for the purpose of bearing children – older couples who can no longer bear or support children, adoptive parents, etc. – but still fulfills the greatest commandment of love.

The Obama presidential library
I’m glad the statehouse bill to set aside $100 million in public funds got stuck in a drawer somewhere. We sought to raise 250 million in private and corporate donations for the Olympics and raised 73 million the month before our bid was not accepted. The NATO Chicago committee raised $33 million in private donations. (Some of this has been returned back to Chicago’s communities.)

Say whatever you like about the mayor but the man knows how to fundraise. That goes all the way back to his days as director of Clinton’s finance committee in 1992. Chicago will already need to commit public funds to support the everyday operation of the library, so funding its construction with private and corporate money seems the better way to set financial priorities for our state.

The Obama Library is also symbolic and brings prestige to the city. We hear the pejorative of “Chicago-style politics” and it would help beat that back a bit and have a reminder that Chicago gave the country a president.

More people are moving to Chicago
As Greg Hinz said in Crain’s it’s too early to tell if this is a one-time thing or a pattern. But Chicago is definitely seen as a high-tech city despite whatever financial problems are plaguing the state.

What will encourage more people to move here is connecting our public schools into this burgeoning sector. Job training, mentoring programs and getting kids and parents to understand that there are career paths for them in the neighborhoods. Blue 1647 in Englewood is a great example of taking the 1871 model and applying it elsewhere.

If we do want to see downtown as the heart of the city and a place of aspiration we have to make it something that’s attainable for kids who live in our neighborhoods, not just people from outside the city.

People like to say that we don’t make things anymore and it’s just not true. But what we used to make with cotton and steel we now make with 1s and 0s.

Nick Wallenda’s walk across the Chicago River
Sure, why not? Seems like a great way to distract people from the Trump sign.

Image: Chicago Public Radio via Creative Commons

U2 and iTunes: Being big isn’t always the best

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U2 has always wanted scale. But it’s always been in a fight for itself about how to reach millions of people and what it wants to say to them once it has their attention.

Lyrically, their scope has always been big. If your second album has a song about the Polish solidarity movement, you’ve distinguished yourselves from the “I wanna hold your hand” school.

In the book U2 by U2, Bono says of The Unforgettable Fire, the band’s fourth album, “all we had to do was to keep doing what we were doing and we would become the biggest band since Led Zeppelin.” And though Bono said the were “reapplying for the job of the best band in the world” in 2000, they’ve often substituted “big” for “best.”

At some point though, trying to go big isn’t always the best.

Say whatever you like about the album itself, but U2 forcing its album on iTunes users evokes desperation. It seems to say “If you had the choice, we know you wouldn’t take it. So we’re not giving you the choice.”

Mike Fourcher at Vouchification says push distribution is the future and he’s not wrong, per se. But it’s only the future if a brand is OK with being ignored. He puts a fine point on it here:

This, in digital form, is basically the power newspapers used to have when they landed on everyone’s doorstep. You didn’t have to read the ads, but they were there, and you could see them.

“You didn’t have to read the ads, but they were there” is the operative phrase.

U2 via iTunes is what happens when a brand is less interested in engaged users and more interested in empty impressions. “They own it but haven’t listened to it” is such a long way away from how U2 started and what they used to mean. U2 was a band that with Zoo TV offered a pointed commentary on the role media plays in shaping image. Now they’ve let the mechanisms subsume them. The conversation in their art is beside the point.

Or, to put it another way, they’ve put all their money on being big, not the best.

If you can’t beat them, write a media criticism piece about them

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With all the big news stories this summer — racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza — a site like Vox seemed destined for success. Those stories cry out for explanation, context, perspective. Vox does its best to offer that, and it has seen some promising traffic numbers. But industry sources say the site has yet to demonstrate a novel or innovative approach, much less show that it can be an essential destination for news consumers.

In Vox not living up the hype, explained

And then Dylan Byers of Politico proceeds to contradict his entire thesis. Vox’s traffic is at 9 million readers, its editorial forms are new and experimental and its coverage of Ferguson has been must-read and indispensable on a fast-moving story. Byers also soft-pedals how other media organizations hustled to create their own explainer verticals before Vox even launched. If Vox doesn’t seem to have changed the media landscape in the last four months, it’s because its effects were felt in the three months prior.

I have my own issues with Vox – more than a few embedded-tweets-as-articles diminish its value as an analytical, completist source – but Politico doesn’t make any of its criticisms stick. So much so that if Ezra Klein wanted to respond with the schoolyard taunt of “I’m rubber, you’re glue…” then he’d be justified.

In Slate, Dave Weigel provides further evidence that this is more about Politico trying to undercut a potential long-term competitor.

Content streams: The Internet is terrible edition

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This week, the guy who invented the pop-up ad apologized for making the Internet terrible. Here’s a roundup of people and companies who might be the next offenders or the next innovators.

Digiday: ‘Brands aren’t people. And if they were, they’d hate ads too.’
What’s the thesis? Brands should look for ways to be niche publishers, not broadcast advertisers. Talk to a smaller, more relevant and engaged group who will take your content, share it and integrate it into their relevant conversations on their platforms of choice for you.
Why should I care? This is a variation on the larger pushback we’re seeing on brands using social (mostly Facebook) for scale and substituting impressions for engagement. And the re-examination of earned media’s value vs. paid media.
Anything else? The YouTube Hero, Hub, Hygiene strategy he mentions sounds odd, but it’s how YouTube content creators formed a loyal subscriber base without big budgets.
Who else is talking about this? See last month’s Newcastle item.
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? At this rate, I’m assuming you’ll see people falling all over themselves to name their SXSW talk “Facebook Is Dead.” Oh and then there’s this:

Quartz: Messaging apps are reprising the web’s business model, circa 1999
What’s the thesis? “The internet giants of the present era are rushing to…become the Google of mobile.” The old web portal model (Yahoo will find everything for you) has become a mobile brand model (YOUR FAVORITE INTERNET BRAND HERE will provide you with every conceivable mobile service – email, messaging, gaming, travel reservations, etc.).
Why should I care? Theoretically, the more data brands have on consumer activities, the more customizable and effective they can be at marketing to them.
Anything else? “What is your brand’s Yo! strategy?” went from a joke to an actual thing people are talking about in two months. And apparently, ICQ use is increasing again. <digression>I really miss the early aughts, you guys. Even if half the music was terrible.</digression>
Who else is talking about this: I remain skeptical about broad use of new mobile apps as smartphone adoption plateaus. This Nielsen study says time spent using apps is on the rise, but people aren’t trying new apps. Emarketer backs this up with its own data. (Though this data might be affected as trusted brands like Facebook and others expand offerings in the space.)
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? Mobile data is probably the most personal of all (think about the content of the last email or photo you sent someone). With the Snapchat security breach still fresh in mind, upstart brands ability to compete will rest on their ability to prove they can keep user data secure.

Rolling Stone: The Presidency and the Press: A former Obama spokesman on the history of the toxic relationship
What’s the thesis? “To communicate with everybody in this country at the same time and get them all wrapped around one issue – it’s very much an idea whose time has passed.”
Why should I care? This piece isn’t really about content marketing per se, but the above quote and the details about how the Obama administration often goes around traditional media outlets (and matches their reach) to get its unfiltered message directly to the American people offers plenty of lessons for brands.
Anything else? I never thought about how media cost-cutting led directly to more coverage of smaller stories but it’s pretty obvious in retrospect. Less money for more complex reporting means you spend time on gaffes and nonsense.
Who else is talking about this? The Boston Herald did a story on social media portals’ effects on the 2016 election. iCitizen is an app that helps voters track issues that are important to them. What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? The election is more than two years away and that’s forever in both politics and technology so anybody who thinks they have it figured out in advance of 2015 is probably full of it.