Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Thank you for your patience

In a bit of a hiatus right now due to an abundance of personal matters to attend to, and a rediscovery of The West Wing reruns on Bravo. Hoping my holiday break from work allows for a bit more reflection and commentary here.

UPDATE: I’d like to make it clear that “an abundance of personal matters” is just end-of-the-year tasks, trying to get back in shape, and spending more time wrapped around the Mrs. Nothing worrisome there.

The end of reality (TV)

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?

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…

GOP: Please re-watch Star Wars

I realize I am a few days late in commenting on this, but I just realized something.

You know all those unnamed sources who are spreading rumors about Sarah Palin not knowing that Africa is a continent, or which countries are in NAFTA, etc. I realize they’re thinking that besmirching her reputation will somehow help cauterize the gaping, profusely bleeding wounds the GOP has been nursing since Tuesday. And that any populist movement that’s formed behind her will be dispelled thanks to these comments.

In fact, it’s more like that scene in the middle of Star Wars: A New Hope when Obi-Wan Kenobi fights Darth Vader. Specifically, what Obi-Wan says at 0:57 in this clip:

I’m no fan of the governor, but come on, guys: Think.

(I’m surprised this didn’t occur to me earlier, what with all the holograms CNN was sporting all Election Night.)

UPDATE: So apparently the Africa thing was a hoax by this guy. Which uh…still makes it like Star Warsin that this dude is Darth Vader telling Princess Leia he won’t blow up her home planet if she tells him where the rebel base is. Or something.

This week in work, vol. 2

A roundup of what I’ve been writing about over at the TOC blog, for those of you who break my heart by not reading regularly, or leaving it out of your RSS feeds:

* Lots of people didn’t like this week’s episode of Mad Men. I did.

* Sadly, I didn’t like the Ben Folds show at the Congress, but I’m sure I would have if it had been anywhere but there. Someone bulldoze this place now.

* Local band Brighton, MA has a new disc out. I think it’s the perfect CD to calm your economically-frazzled nerves.

* Speaking of economic end times, I’ve been a “Weird Al” fan for as long as I’ve been listening to music. His new song is part of the reason why.

How do you watch live events?

With the debates and the Playoffs on this week, I was wondering about the level of personal engagement people have with others during major live events.

For instance, I purposely stayed home during the Sox final clincher game against the Twins because I wanted to be able to swear at the TV and act up without the judgment of those around me. I was at work during the game yesterday, but am considering leaving early to hole up in a bar to watch the 2nd playoff game against the Tampa Bay Rays. If Sunday’s game is another do-or-die, I’ll probably stay home again, but the farther along we get in the Playoffs, the more I’ll want to be around other people.

But…I did use Twitter during those games to enhance the shared misery and joy.

For the debates, I almost never want to be out. It’s fine for me to make sardonic comments, but hey you, buddy? I’m watching the future of our country over here, keep it down, uh?

But again…Twitter has actually enhanced my enjoyment of the debates. Some of my friends are their own mini-Truth Squad, others drop Dorothy Parker-level bon mots at every opportunity, and still others just offer a sense of the communal. (Though I know at least one casual Twitter-using friend of mine has reported being overwhelmed by the level of Tweets coming into his phone.)

There are definitely some times when I want to be “alone” and able to control my immediate environment, but lately I’m more and more drawn to using Twitter to still get analysis, camaraderie and information about a live event.

How about you, avid/casual Twitter users? Who else is using Twitter during live events? And are there ever events when you wouldn’t want to use it?

Still the best thing I've ever done in any workplace ever. *

This has been a stressful week at work, due largely to a big online project I’m working on in conjunction with next week’s issue. Look for it on the site on Wednesday.

This package has a lot of video components to it, so I needed to grab a piece of code we used when I created the Indiana Jones vs. Megatron video over the summer. I ended up re-watching that clip, and decided to post the embedded version here. Enjoy.

http://tony.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/tony-pub01-live/current/toccenter1/tocCenter01/client/embedded/embedded.swf

Sometimes I think I have everyone fooled.

* Er, when I used to work on a crisis hotline that helped runaway kids get home to their parents? That was probably better in terms of making the world a better place. But this probably wins in the “Best Use of Video – Wanting Not To Laugh But Being Unable To Stop Yourself” category.

A.J. Pierzynski: Futurist

From this New York Times article:

Pierzynski said that when people asked him about a possible Chicago-Chicago finale, he advised caution.

“I’m like, ‘You don’t really want that to happen because the city would just probably explode,'” Pierzynski said. “And no one would be able to go to work. No one would be able to do anything because there would be fights every day at work, and just because it’s so passionate and the fans are so amazing.”

Smart and punchy, that’s our A.J.!

I have a copy of When Chicago Ruled Baseball on my shelf, so I took a quick look at the index to see if past performance might be indicative of future events. There isn’t anything in there about fights or other workplace incidents, but I don’t think for a minute that A.J. is wrong. If your workplace is anything like mine, the election is already putting a drag on productivity. If both teams – or, frankly, even just the Cubs – get into the playoffs and/or the World Series, I think Chicago’s going to see its own economic slowdown.