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Tuesday, January 8, 2002
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 Tuesday, January 8, 2002
started 1/8/2002; 1:01:39 AM - last post 1/9/2002; 1:14:55 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, January 8, 2002 
1/8/2002; 5:01:39 AM (reads: 5660, responses: 3)
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Chug this, Fido 
| | Davezilla: Every time I see a dog owner bring their mutt into a restaurant, I wish I was packing a piece |
I disagree, but that's just my opinion as a journalist
| | A journalist proclaiming that opinion is the same as journalism because his opinions provide "insight" (insightful according to him, at least) seems a bit arrogant and narcissistic. Definitely no room for that in my definition of journalism. It's called opinion, plain and simple. |
Dysblogorrhea
| | I'm sitting in this press room trying to get shit done while Glenn is shooting pictures of Rael crawling around under the table and Cory is explaining what really happened behind what Saltire just wrote about. |
Lost
| | Yesterday at Steve Jobs' keynote I kindly turned off my cell phone, and never saw it again. I only noticed its absence later in the day in the press room. I was hoping it would show up this morning, but no. |
| | Now calls to it either reach busy circuits or voice mail. |
| | Lemme tell ya, it is no fun to do a trade show with no cell phone. Yesterday I told about five people they could call me on the thing. Arg. |
Making the (Power)Point
| | When the going gets tough, and bad desk clerks make it tougher, tough customers get even. That's the story behind the leveling of Doubletree Club Houston by customers who filed their complaint in the form of a very public PowerPoint presentation, rendered in HTML. |
Improperganda
| | All three are expressions of journalism at work. Their subject is propaganda travelling as journalism. There's more news-faced propaganda than ever, and that fact matters more than how serious Journalism is. More and more of the stuff we calljounalism is literally bad news. |
| | It used to be obvious that there is a shitload of difference between news and entertainment stories. Today that difference barely matters to the content barons at the entertainment companies that now run most of the commercial broadcast news business. |
| | I heard tonight (Monday as I write this, for Tuesday's blog) from my hosts (at the house where I'm staying in Palo Alto) that CNN is running an ad for newscaster Paula Zahn that sells her as "sexy." I just checked around and found a Drudge Report that says this: |
| | It's out with the news, in with the sex at CNN this weekend after the network launched an ad campaign for 23-year news veteran Paula Zahn -- declaring her 'sexy'! |
| | The 20-second promo, which ran on the all-news channel this weekend, features an announcer asking: What other morning show has a host who is brilliant, super smart -- and sexy? |
| | The word "sexy" then appears in red letters on the screen followed by a face shot of host Paula Zahn. |
| | "It is a sad day when we talk about journalists being sexy," countered FOX NEWS all-star Rita Cosby in a radio interview Sunday night. |
| | This from a network so eager to entertain at all costs that it dispatched the narcissist Geraldo Rivera to Afghanistan as a "war correspondent," with predictable results. |
| | "You trust your mother," Mother Jones' tagline used to say, "but you cut the cards." |
| | But this Mom is a mutant. Or worse, she's a pod. A replicant. A trivia pump in make-up. A crap cartel. (And a big thanks to RageBoy for that last link.) |
| | Two things are going to happen in the next year: 1) In the absence of another serious terrorist attack (or something that looks vaguely like one, such as the Anthrax scare, which had the net death count of a traffic accident), the War on Terrorism won't be renewed by the networks, no matter how hard George W and his salesflacks sell it; and 2) The audience is going to get bored with the show anyway, because they care more about stories than storytellers — no matter how cute they are. |
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smerdyakov - Re: Tuesday, January 8, 2002
1/8/2002; 10:36:58 AM (reads: 418, responses: 2)
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"It used to be obvious that there is a shitload of difference between news and entertainment stories." When? What examples can you give?
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 8, 2002
1/8/2002; 1:34:09 PM (reads: 592, responses: 1)
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There has always been a "church and state" distinction between journalism and the advertising that pays for it. And there has been hand-wringing about the blurring of distinctions between news and entertainment:
Interviewed on the completion of his 50th year in TV, Hewitt expressed his concern about blurring: "For the old news giants, the motto was, 'News is news and entertainment is entertainment, and never the twain shall meet.' Well, the twain have met. And it's not good." He also deplored the lowering of standards on prime-time news shows: "You end up doing these consumer-oriented 'news you can use' stories, and celebrity interviews."
That was Sixty Minutes' Don Hewitt, four years ago, when the modus operandi of his own show had already made his remarks ironic.
Since then commerical TV news has become plainly more compelled by the need to both cut costs and obtain ratings in ways its bosses best know how: by entertaining people. That requires two obvious strategies: 1) create and employ attractive stars; and 2) tell stories.
And if that's not a good enough answer, let's ask another question.
When there were three TV networks in the U.S., and all three had large news operations with permanent bureaus and seasoned correspondents all over the world, would any of them have promoted one of their correspondents as "sexy?"
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jt - Re: Tuesday, January 8, 2002
1/9/2002; 5:14:55 PM (reads: 637, responses: 0)
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Doc,
Saw an interesting round-table, month or two back, on the conflicts of having the profit-motive in Journalism. I think a lot of this reflects that basic problem. As the news media has been bought up by bigger and bigger conglomerates, a lot of that independence has been lost.
Not to say that the profit-motive should have NOTHING to do with news coverage, as that's one mechanism of steering the kind of news coverage we get.
But when it gets closer and closer to being the PRIMARY concern.. well, the results speak for themselves, IMV.
jt
SiliCow Valley
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