Metaphors: Bill Clinton, Julius Caesar and Mothra

Janet Coats’ Changes at TBD show Godzilla just keeps winning

Apologies for blockquoting 50 percent of the original post, but there were so many media metaphors I couldn’t help it. — Nick

Bill Clinton

I don’t envy the folks at TBD.com, especially those in leadership positions.

I’ve been in that awkward position of trying to balance my journalistic obligation to truth-telling with my fiduciary responsibilities as a company manager. Even when you hew strictly to the facts in those situations, the nuance comes out as a painful parsing. You feel like Bill Clinton, clinging to the definition of “is’’ as your last line of defense.

Julius Caesar

Take it from those of us who’ve been on the front line of that culture war: Old media won. While TBD the Product may survive for a while, TBD the Culture is as dead as Julius Caesar.

Mating Godzilla and Mothra

A decade ago, when I was about the business of trying to integrate print and television newsrooms, I kept saying that the effort was a lot like trying to get Godzilla and Mothra to mate. These two beasts just weren’t destined to come together and form a common culture. The best you could hope for was cooperation.

An immune system

I think we can claim some very limited success at shifting the culture in those hybrid print/television/online newsrooms in Sarasota and Tampa. But the truth is that every time we started to push the organization around the next turn, those powerful legacy media cultures fought back. Triggered like an immune system, the impulse to timidity would kick in. And usually, we’d actually lose a little ground in the process.

Fragile shoots

So the green shoots get stepped on and ground out. And the leadership keeps clinging to models that creak and groan and show every sign of giving out.

iPhone vs Android the way normals see it

Android’s conscientious users are the same people who choose to run Linux on their desktops, said Dan Benjamin in a discussion with John Gruber on the latest episode of The Talk Show.

Now, this is nothing more than total annecdotal evidence that doesn’t prove anything, but this I found it interesting: A discussion on a normal, non-techy friend’s Facebook wall asking “iPhone or Droid. Which way does this current BlackBerry girl go?” (I’ve removed names and some off-topic responses.)

  • DROID
  • I am currently a bb girl too, but when I’m not I’ll be a driod!
  • Droid.
  • iPhone, baby!
  • Love my iPhone, but my ATT service is terrible when I go to IA…so how’s Verizon in your neck of the woods?
  • Droid all the way.
  • Apple blocks Porn in their App store, that should be enough to tell you to stay away.
  • Ummm not that I’d download porn from a App Market, but it’s the point that they block it as if they think they known what people should and shouldn’t have access to.
  • Droid. It is what i upgraded too and I HEART IT! HEART IT!
  • Love my iphone.
  • Droid.
  • Good poll…I was pondering the same thing this week. I’ve been begging for an iphone, but now I think I will wait until this summer to make the switch. I heard there will be a new version of the iphone for Verizon out then and hopefully the bugs will be worked out of the system.
  • Work with people that have both. Even the ones with the iphone wish they had a Droid. I got one too. Love it! Beats the hell out of the blackberry I had.

So 12 answers, only of which are three pro-iPhone. It’s a glimps into the way normals think about Android (which they don’t think of as “Android” but, rather, as Verizon’s “Droid” branding of Android). Also interesting was the comment a non-geek made away from keyboard about being unable to figure out his s0n’s “iTouch,” the term for an iPod Touch that instantly labels the user as a non-geek, while at the same time having no trouble navigating and using his own “Droid” phone.

Why you should use Twitter’s built-in retweet feature

Yesterday, Shoq offered two reasons you shouldn’t use Twitter’s built-in or “native” retweet feature. Me, I much prefer the new-style native retweet function, and I tell you why later. But, first, I think Shoq and others are wrong for preferring the old-style retweet.

First, Shoq argues that if everyone uses native retweets, we’ll all miss important things.

Repetitive tweets tell you a story mattered to a lot of your followers. You might ignore the first few retweets you see, but when the 3rd, 4th or 5th come in, you’re going to notice, and may well be glad that you did.

This is true if all people are sharing is the original tweet and not engaging in any sort of conversation or adding their own thoughts. If a story is important, people will be adding their thoughts and sharing other links to important parts of the story.

Now, this might seem to reinforce Shoq’s second reason against using native retweets:

Users can’t add their own comments to the built-in retweets

This is true. You can’t add a comment to the original tweet with the new-style retweet. But with only 140 characters it’s hard to do that with the old-style retweet without completely mangling the original tweet anyway. If I want to reshare a link and add my own comment, rather than butchering the original poster’s words I prefer write my own post and credit with a “via @username” at the end.

Native retweets give my followers control over seeing what they’re retweeting since I can turn off native retweets on an per-user bases. I can’t do that with old-style retweets. Native retweets keep 15 instances of the same post out of my timeline. Native retweets shares original tweets without the need to mangle “to,” “your” and “for” into “2,” “yr” and “4.”

Twitter’s native retweets are certainly imperfect, but I find the hard-core stances against native retweeting hard to understand.

Filling the X-Files void

As a teenager, I was introduced to, and loved watching, The X-Files. Sunday appointment viewing and when it jumped to the big screen, it was one of only two movies I made a point to see opening day.

Then David Duchovny quit and the Agent Mulder disappeared and Robert Patrick joined and became the new Agent Scully and the old Agent Scully turned into the new Agent Mulder and it sucked and then The X-Files went away for good.

Then I was introduced to Fringe. It hit the same sweet spot that The X-files had.

But now that Fringe is getting closer to death, I need a replacement.

So what’s it take for a show to hit that same geeky place in my heart? I think these are the elements:

  • Suspenseful science fiction
  • Set on present day planet Earth
  • Normal people investigating some grand unknown (black oil of The X-files or the other dimension of Fringe)
  • But not too much focus on “mythology” over “monster of the week” episodes
  • Focus on a few key relationships (Mulder and Scully. Peter and Olivia. Dr. Bishop and Peter.)
  • Great dialog with deadpan humor

A couple weeks ago I put the question to fellow Fringe and X-file lover Jordan Running on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/bergus/status/18820933749837824

He came up with a couple:

http://twitter.com/#!/swirlee/status/18825547899469824

I also asked on Aardvark and got a few suggestions:

  • The Lost Room
  • Lost
  • Carnivale
  • Surface
  • Primeval
  • The Adventures of Sarah Jane
  • The Middleman

And here’s my thought: Torchwood. Let’s see if it hits my necessary elements:

  • Suspenseful science fiction ✔
  • Set on present day planet Earth ✔
  • Normal people investigating some grand unknown ✔ except Captain Jack Harkness
  • But not too much focus on “mythology” over “monster of the week” episodes ✔
  • Focus on a few key relationships ✔ only a few more characters
  • Great dialog with deadpan humor ✔

Am I missing some important elements? Are there other heirs to The X-Files throne?

UPDATE:

Another suggestion

http://twitter.com/#!/stephdavidson/status/20972747546959872

Another flap about which I don’t care

These three tweets from Jay Rosen sum up the whole Keith Olbermann thing and why I don’t really care about it.

(Also, I really wanted to test out the new Blackbird Pie plugin.)

Metaphor: hamster wheel

The eternal squeaking wheel
Dean Starkman’s The Hamster Wheel, in the Columbia Journalism Review

Without getting into whether newspapers are worse or better than before—let’s concede they’re fabulous; that’s why everyone loves them so much—we should pause for a second and think about the implications of the do-more-with-less meme that is sweeping the news business. I call it the Hamster Wheel.

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics (Bloomberg!). It is “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” (Kokomo Tribune, 7/5/10). It is “Ben Marter’s Home-Cooked Weekend,” (Politico, 6/28/10): “Saturday morning, he took some of the leftover broccoli, onions, and mushrooms, added jalapenos, and made omeletes for a zingy breakfast.” Ben Marter is communications director for a congresswoman. It’s live-blogging the opening ceremonies, matching stories that don’t matter, and fifty-five seconds of video of a movie theater screen being built: “Wallingford cinema adding 3 screens (video),” (New Haven Register, 6/1/10). But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

Metaphors: TBD.com special

A supermarket for news
Robert Allbritton, quoted in Paul Farhi’s TBD.com making its move into the crowded market of local news, from The Washington Post

Right now, [getting local news on the Web] is like trying to buy groceries in the old country. First you went to the fishmonger, then to the baker, then the grocer and so on. And it worked until someone said, “Why don’t we create a supermarket and put it all together in one place?”

News judo
David Rothman’s TBD’s hyperlocal judo is smart and ethical: How should rivals at the Washington Post and elsewhere respond to all the linking ahead?

In judo, you can use a big guy’s weight against him, and the same applies in busi­ness, especially the news kind.

Reading the Washing ton Post story on the TBD local news startup — which will compete against the Post, AOL’s Patch local net work and the Washington Examiner — I couldn’t help but think “judo.”

…

Besides, in the end, the Post story today will have been just a sideshow despite its current benefits to TBD. The real judo will happen by way of a principle espoused by Jeff Jarvis, the media guru of BuzzMachine fame—in essence, Do what you do best and link to the rest. TBD’s own news staff is tiny, with just a dozen or so actual reporters and a small band of editors. So, to try to compensate, TBD will be regularly linking not just to the Post but also to the Examiner and Patch, which has drawn more than a few dollops of money from America Online.

Tom Sawyer as newsboy
Mark Potts’ Why TBD is Important

As it develops, I think TBD is going to prove a model for other local efforts around the country. It understands something very fundamental, something that once upon a time, a group of us referred to it as the Tom Sawyer strategy: when you’re working with limited resources, use them to the maximum–and turn to the rest of the Web for help with filling in the blanks.

A Coal-mine canary for news
Jack Mirkinson’s TBD.com: A First Day Look, from the Huffington Post

Why is so much attention being paid to a local news site? Well, TBD is something of a canary in the coal mine. The news industry is desperately searching around for new journalistic and business models, and local news has been seized upon as a potential savior. Local, so the thinking goes, is where the money’s at — where you can offer people something they can’t get anywhere else. This explains the rise in so-called “hyperlocal” coverage, which hones in with intensive zeal on the day-to-day happenings in neighborhoods and regions.

Metaphors: a farting dog and a wandering prophet

A farting killer dog
Adrian Monck’s Can apps save news journalism?

[W]here does the rise of the app leave the news business, the flatulent Rottweiler in the dog shelter of online content? Can apps give it a caring home at last?

Moses wandering the wilderness
David Cohn’s Generations in the Desert – Thoughts from Aspen

I’ve said before that professional journalists, in one interpretation, can be thought of as a diaspora. Their “home land” in newspapers has been compromised. If there is a promised-land for media, considering generational theory, it might be that this transition we are in will last much longer. I joked that unless I live to be as old as Moses (120) I won’t live to see the dawning of this new digital age. I am doomed to be part of that cusp generation that must wander in the desert with the elders who remember something long passed and can’t settle into something new. Meanwhile acting as a steward and trying to head north to a new land with a younger generation to take over for me.

via Steve Buttry