Goodbye News Media: Don't Forget to Write

Traditional news media is about to write its own obituary. In the last few months Time cut 600 employees, US News & World Report, and Christian Science Monitor went online. Hearst, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill, all recorded deficits. CBS posted an 11.8 Billion dollar loss this quarter, CNBC announced a 10% budget cut and NBC Universal is cutting their budget by $500 Million dollars, ABC has a hiring freeze and the list goes on and on and on. I would like to look at the decline of traditional news media, what are we doing with new media, a look at embracing the audience and how this affects democracy.

News organizations are tied to the very life blood of democracy and the economy. Is it possible to have a democracy bailout? Many would say democracy suffers under a declining news media but with new media, new horizons for citizen journalists open everyday and a chance for a new democracy. Robert W. McChesney argues in Rich Media, Poor Democracy a new democracy is not possible without a corporate media explosion and a corresponding implosion of public life (McChesney 3). At this time we are facing a corporate media explosion due to the failed economy and looming depression. If you read any media blogs they are inundated with media “deaths” every day. The grim reaper of the magazine industry has its own blog. It is an entire site dedicated to the demise of the medium titled magazinedeathpool.com. Spend five minutes on the site and it makes you ill but provides a pretty good indication of the state of advertising and what is to come. More death.

The Old Media obituaries have already been written most notable by Marshall McLuhan predicting the electronic age and supplying us with the tetrad in the book posthumanously published by his son; Laws of Media: The New Science . If we look at these four questions he poses with new media in mind, one question of which asks “what is pushed aside or obsolesced by new media?” We can see that it is Television and Print.

NEWSPAPER DECLINE: THE BLAME GAME

In his book Super Media, Charlie Beckett quotes a study by Shakeup Media, for every one percent of broadband growth, newspaper circulation goes down two percent. At this rate, newspaper would be dead by 2090 with no more advances (Beckett 21). Technological advances come every day and it only eats away at that 2090 number. My prediction is newspaper won’t last until 2010. This gives newspapers 2009 to get their act together.

In the wake of an economic collapse, fingers come out and are pointing everywhere. According to an article from the American Journalism Review “Don’t Blame the Journalism” Paul Farhi writes newspaper are not declining because they aren’t adapting to new media and better journalism, but because of the newspaper business. Farhi says 50 million Americans buy one everyday and nearly 117 million read one. Secondly, newspaper readers are more affluent than TV news viewers citing Mediamark Research. Thirdly, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, ratings are lower for local TV newscasts. They took a dive this past year that marks a faster decline than newspapers. Farhi argues if it isn’t readership that is declining or undesirable ones it is advertising that is killing it. Classified ads make up more than 50 percent of newspapers profits. They have declined 25 percent in the first half of 2008 and erased $1.8 billion in revenue according to NAA research. Newspapers desperate last ditch effort to move online in the past few years is now flat lining. Farhi says web revenue is down. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second Quarter of 2008. Farhi who writes for the Washington Post argues the demise of newspapers is inevitable but it’s not the journalists fault and it’s not the readers, it’s the business and the economy (Farhi).

Jeff Javis of Buzzmachine.com has taken a lot of fire these past few months for claiming the decline of journalism is their fault. The journalists are to blame. A former television critic, columnist, creator of Entertainment Weekly, and associate publisher of the New York Daily News and now professor turned blogger, says journalists, including himself, did not see the change coming soon enough, readied their craft and exploit the relationships new media provided with the public. He also blames journalists for not taking back journalism. It was just left to the dogs or as Jarvis says “business people” (Jarvis). “It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours” (Jarvis). In response Adrian Monck, a popular British Media critic and author of Truth or Lies: Can You Trust the Media said in his blog “the crops did not fail because we offended the gods” (Monck). He also claims that if we start blaming the journalist and the journalist start blaming themselves, then the public loses trust which is the very cornerstone of readership and democracy. I agree, but I think the journalists need to recognize their failures as well. The point of a journalist is to listen to the public and the public made a very large battle cry for online news this year, most evidenced by the Obama campaign who capitalized on New Media and when I say capitalize I don’t only mean campaign contributions but I mean bodies, viewership, expanding the electorate. Newspapers have to do the same thing, they have to expand their electorate and according to my prediction it may be too late.

NETWORK DECLINE:

Where do we get our news? Not at the Network. Television news is suffocating under the banner of the networks. The old network model is suffering in an ad deficiency affecting programs across the board. The relationship between the affiliates and the network is strained with low ratings and declining ad sales. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in “A Propaganda Model,” for a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year (Chomsky 268). Ratings are dropping across the board and this is an anomaly year with the election and the Olympics. As Michael Schneider from Variety points out “It’s D-Day for the Broadcast Networks” saying they have been living on borrowed time for the better part of two decades (Schneider). Already hit with the writers strike earlier in the year and now the economy slump, Schneider points out a few possibilities: when desperate times call for desperate measures. One of the big three could drop an hour of primetime. But that would mean giving up prime real estate to the affiliates. In a network first, FOX having two hours of Saturday programming to be sold for infomercials. Schneider also says networks might just dump out of the old network model completely and turn themselves into a cable station (Schneider). Another possibility is selling off TV stations and getting out of the TV news business. He proposes NBC and ABC both got out of radio, why not Local TV? Schneider cites many network execs who think they are a long way off from extinction (Schneider). They claim to have bored through the tough times and they will bear through this. I disagree. I think Schneider points out some good alternatives but it isn’t going to stop the Internet or Youtube or Hula or Netflix or DVR’s. If Networks think they can grin and bear it. I think they have another thing coming. Charlie Beckett credits this fragmentation and loss of audience to an “explosion” of choice (Beckett 25). This could be the same “explosion” Robert McChesney was calling for back in 1999, leading to a more stable democracy.

Joe Trippi vehemently writes in his book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, TV is the cause of the declining democracy. News is not being reported. Political ads are distorted and over his lifetime he has seen, working as a campaign advisors for decades, television’s mind numbing effects. In 2004, he wrote a very compelling argument for democracies salvation. The answer is the Internet. Trippi worked on the Howard Dean presidential campaign of ’04. He passionately describes his experience of politics and technology, “they are about to converge, to crash together and reverse 50 years of political cynicism in one glorious explosion of civic re-engagement (Tripppi xix)” He watched as his grass-roots campaign created what he calls a “dot-com” miracle. Dean was born out of the internet and died under the network. Everyone remembers the clip played over and over and over again of him screaming which states he would take next. Trippi’s argument seems not only for the revolution of the internet but rabid denouncement of television. In the past four years he has been writing a lot about open sourcing and was the senior campaign advisor on John Edward’s campaign. The campaign failed but it’s interesting to note he then became a CBS News Consultant converging both his blog and analysis on-air. He was making an argument against television but now he is finding a wider audience due to television.

JUST SHOOT THE MESSENGER:

I wouldn’t stray too far from Trippi’s views when I look at Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” it provokes me to say, “shoot the messenger.” They describe five filters for news where worthy victims are humanized portrayed prominently and dramatically where unworthy victims will be dehumanized and merit slight detail (Chomsky 282). Everything is done politically ??? and serves domestic power interests. This just adds to the argument of moving away from corporate news sources. The citizens don’t want their news filtered for them. In the most sickening way Chomsky points out our anti-communism filters as a control mechanism of the past (278). “It is the mass media who point into the limelight a Joe McCarthy, Arkady Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling”(278). This article was written in 1988 and it would be sad to say this type of radical filtering is still alive today with the fear mongering exposure of William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Reverend Wright and ACORN.

Nick Davies writes in his book Flat Earth News, there’s no real reporting about reporting, dog doesn’t eat dog (Davies 1). This is a problem with the business in general. There are no watchdogs of the media, only the grassroots kind that have there very beginnings online. Dan Rather, taken down by the blogosphere is the prime example of this. Davies demands in the future media products should be treated like food products which would require them to reveal their contents. He refers to a study done at Cardiff University that shows the most respectable news institutions are recycling unchecked material. I notice this in my own work at CBS News, where we routinely use wire copy that seems to be the all be all when it comes to content. We also use APTN video without even thinking twice. The study found 69 percent of stories were whole or mainly wire copy and only 1 percent admitting the source (52-53). They also found a staggering 70 percent relied on a statement of fact that had not been checked. Davies sites a study done by the Columbia Journalism Review on the Wall Street Journal that found more than half of their news stories “were based solely on press releases. They were reprinted verbatim or in paraphrase” with a WSJ byline (97).

If a majority of all our news is coming from wire or PR services, how healthy do they look right now considering the economy? In an interesting move this last week of November, the News Media Guild, the Associated Press’ largest union, sent out a press release saying more than 500 employees of the AP have signed a petition urging the AP to reverse course in contract talks with the NMG, saying the AP’s bargaining stance threatens quality journalism. First reported in an article in Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp published the letter from the petitioners to NMG. The new contract proposed by the AP has a wage freeze, weakened job security, eliminated overtime and reduction of sick leave for new mothers (Strupp). This is terrible news for journalists. It’s providing evidence of stagnant talks of previous negotiations and proving the AP is, in fact, struggling. If a news organization of this magnitude and located in all 50 states and around the world are making cut backs you can only imaging how this is effecting smaller news organizations. This bad news comes on the heels of a much heated battle between Newspapers and the AP over their high rates forcing some to drop the AP all together. This has opened doors for other news services hoping to jump in the market. CNN recently announced its cheaper wire services to lure newspapers away from the AP. They are also holding a “CNN Newspaper Summit” ( Arango). CNN the Newspaper?? This would mark a major convergence between television and newspapers. It is interesting move on their part to not be investing more on the new media side rather in a dying medium.

With a bigger news hole to fill and a lack of wire services, tighter deadlines and even tighter budgets newspapers may go for it, but who is fact checking CNN. Davies suggests a parallel news organizations that would sample the output of each newspaper and broadcaster, check it for mistakes and then produce a rolling average of their accuracy and make it mandatory to be displayed by them (393). Davies says the most dangerous thing about the internet is news organizations are using it to cut costs but not giving that money back to journalism. (394)

NETWORKED JOURNALISM:

If we do shoot the messenger, pull the plug on Evening News and cancel the Gray Lady, what are the implications of a disappearing conventional media? Charlie Beckett estimates in his book, Super Media: Saving Journalism So it Can Save the World, we have five years –perhaps ten- to save journalism (Beckett 5). “In the short term, news businesses will survive if they make the right decision about staffing and marketing, but in the long term …They have to know what kind of journalism is wanted and needed and how to deliver it” (12). He suggests the only way to do it is by what he is calling “Networked Journalism”. A term used to describe what his “Super Media” will do. The need for networked journalism is a concept of connecting journalists to the public to contribute facts, fact check, link stories, post blogs. The stories are always green and continue on. The Journalist is the facilitator not the gatekeeper (52). A form of this is being done at new news websites such as VoiceofSanDiego.org. It’s a web-based news organization that is rising as a Watchdog in San Diego uncovering many different scandals. At this point they are nonprofit like ProPublica but it’s catching on in other places and the public is interacting with them (Perez-Pena).

Beckett argues it’s impossible to separate the old media from the new media and in fact there is a growing need for the way journalists can filter and package information (Beckett 19). Beckett presents the old media problems such as unresponsive, expensive, deadlines, linear, to new media solutions like interactive, cheap and multi-dimensional (47). There will still be uses for the broadcast and print in the future. It has to be integrated into another model. In Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog he creates a “Model for the 21st Century Newsroom.” In this newsroom all medium come into play. First, an alert is sent out via text or Twitter or Facebook feed, showing ownership of the story and speed of information. Next a draft is written this comes as a blog and can spread the word. Next, is a tangible article or package, this shows editorial decision. Next is reflection and interactivity. This goes back to blogging and live chats. The final stage is customization. This is a subscription or database driving journalism (Bradshaw). This is a great model but it doesn’t explain the profit of it. How do you make money off of this model? There are also editorial problems with this because it doesn’t explain how the original information is received and what would be deemed rumor worthy and who would be at fault for a speed vs. accuracy dilemmas.

NEW MEDIA, NO MONEY:

In regards to making this new media model work, Paul Farhi wrote in the American Journalism Review about “Online Salvation.” Newspapers that think they can make it work online need to think again. Farhi states Nielsen’s Net Ratings show an audience plateau and the ones that are visiting these sites aren’t staying around for long. The average view time of the nytimes.com was 68 seconds per day. Local newspapers are the most at risk for failure. But even if some of these disappear and the newspaper industry continued to lose about 8 percent of its print ad revenue and online revenue continued to grow at 20 percent a year, Fahri points out it would take more than a decade for online revenue to catch up to print. Another problem with online news is the ability to steal it and call it your own, even if you source it, you are still getting the web traffic. This leads advertisers to stray away from online ads on news sites. Rupert Murdoch is making subscribers pay for the journal. It’s also being done in some local newspapers around the country. Eventually somebody has to pay for the journalism. If the ad revenue can’t keep up it will be the people.

Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com says paper is a luxury item, Craigslist, the online classified advertising giant, taking blame for failed profits at Newspapers, chimed into the debate last month. Newmark visited the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times for a meeting with its editors and writers. The LA Times posted the partial transcript online in an article entitled “Paper or Pixels”. Newmark calls himself a “community organizer.” Newmark says he feels that way on a local level and in the future newspapers will be either very local or very national. He mentions this because he recently subscribed to the New York Times, because he thinks people want to have a connection to a national newspaper for big stories they want to read more about (Newmark). A professor of mine posed the question to our class the other day, if the Times decided to make customers pay for their material online would you subscribe. The answer was a resounding yes. Young people would PAY for the Times online. The newspaper of record is still the newspaper of record and its content is not something you can get anywhere else. If I had a choice between being better informed and slightly poorer or less informed and richer. I would choose poorer. Do people out across the country value the Times and its content? Would they pay? Newmark says yes but for the upper middle class and above. He also thinks we will turn to the sponsorship model that we saw in the 50’s and 60’s. We will also see the public service model and philanthropy model (Newmark). The public service model much like the VoiceofSandiego.org mentioned earlier, or one of my personal favorites devoted to polls and projections FiveThirtyEight.com who recently looked at the retention percentage of political Web sites. TheAtlantic, Drudge, Huffington are all over 100 percent (Silver).

DEMOCRACY DOUBTS:

What does it all mean? Robert W. McChesney writes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy people are more intoned to media then ever before. They are not jumping ship to go to another medium they are just consuming more media. But, he argues, media have become a significant antideomocratic force in the US and it’s due in-part to the corporate media explosion. McChesney argues, “behind the lustrous glow of new technologies and electronic jargon, the media system has become increasingly concentrated and conglomerated into a relative handful of corporate hands” (McChesney 3). He says we must restructure the media and reconnect with citizens (3). He proposes a media system that promotes democratic rule which means creating a nonprofit and non-commercial component. This is opposite of Schneider’s model but similar to Beckett.

McChesney wants to reenlist the public in the debate over media issues. I find this problem in our own society to be the most daunting. The only ones talking about the decline of the media are the people in the media. McChesney explains in his book the need to organize politically to enact structural media reform. He argues the only way to do it is by an “emergence of a broad-based democratic left that makes media reform one of the core elements of its platform.” (11) I challenge this notion of a “left.” This term today is very vague. He speaks about media radicalism and the downfall of neo-liberalism. I don’t think you have to be a contender for the left to challenge the media. I think websites even like FiveThirtyEight are challenging the media. They are providing a product that others aren’t. I beg the question: is Obama left enough? Will he have the platform that changes the corporate media today? He has already established his new media presence and has created the White House Daily Briefing Channel on Youtube. He wants to move his conferences online and speak to the public with feedback. I argue he is already contributing to McChesney’s media reform. In The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. David Croteau and William Hoynes’ call to action is to exercise choice, and to engage in civic activities. There are many forms of content on many different mediums and with that an opportunity to branch out from the corporations. The authors conclude media overshadows other important social institutions integral to our democracy. The decline of church groups, labor unions, consumer organizations has lead to a more consumerist society. They advise the revitalization of civic life will not occur from the restructuring of media but through a renewal of civic culture (Croteau 258).

The project I want to do is chart the decline of the news media in this economic crisis. Will this be the year conventional media died? I would like to create a website that follows the daily battles of TV News, just like mediadeathpool. There seems to be a lot of literature about print but not as much on the broadcast decline. One thing I have noticed in my own research is there is exhausting amount of research on the media in general and journalists are not afraid to write about journalism. The more books I looked at closer to this date the longer their works cited pages were, citing lectures, websites, blogs, packages, print articles, books, soon we will be quoting Twitter comments in our works cited pages. The information is overwhelming and infinite and I find it hard to weed through it all. It only adds to the argument that journalist or “community organizers” or “networkers” are essential in this movement. By the time I have finished writing this sentence media will have changed and 10 new blogs will have been created. It’s impossible to keep up.

I also would like to look at online social networking sites and if they are causing a decline in audience to news and journalism. My generation spends a great deal of time on these sites rather than watching news or picking up a paper or reading the times online and some of my research suggests network journalist will use these sites to research stories gather comments and network with other journalists on information. If people had to pay for facebook and Myspace would they still use them? They have built up such a user base, I argue they would. Can these be turned into news sites? If they are used as news sites is there a way to monitize the content. Adage.com says "That's perhaps summed up best by Ted McConnell, Procter & Gamble's interactive guru: "What in heaven's name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?" (adage.com).

A lot of research out there is lacking the business perspective. This utopian belief that we can start up some Networked Journalism and all move online and have this perfect news media, non profit journalism is just that: utopian. The news media has to make money just like everybody else. I think where this comes down to is free. We as a society feel so entitled to everything for free. Yes it is a “free” press but that doesn’t make it FOR free. If advertising is failing we have to turn to subscription based programming/print and online content. Yes, media conglomerate corporations will fail that base everything on big time advertising but smaller media companies that employ real journalists will succeed. Isn’t that what we want, a poor media, rich democracy?

Works Cited:

Arango, Tim. ""CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers"" New York Times. 30 Nov. 2008.New York Times.Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/01cnn.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business>.

Beckett, Charlie. SUPERMEDIA SuperMedia : Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2008.

Bradshaw, Paul. ""A Model for the 21st Century Newsroom"" Weblog post. Online Journalism Blog. 17 Sept. 2007. Nov. 2008 <http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/09/17/a-model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-pt1-the-news-diamond/>.

Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. "" The Propaganda Model"" Manufaturing Consent. Pantheon Books, 1988.

Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. The Business of Media : Corporate Media and the Public Interest. New York: Pine Forge P, 2005.

Davies, Nick. Flat Earth News : An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

Farhi, Paul. ""Don't Blame Journalism"" Nov. 2008. American Journalism Review. Nov. 2008 <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4623>.

Farhi, Paul. ""Online Salvation"" Jan. 2008. American Journalism Review. Nov. 2008 <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4427>.

Jarvis, Jeff. ""It Is Our Fault"" Weblog post. BuzzMachine. 8 Oct. 2008. Nov. 2008 <http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/10/08/it-is-our-fault/>.

McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy : Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York: New P, The, 2000.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media : The New Science. New York: University of Toronto P, 1992.

Monck, Adrian. ""The Decline of Newspapers - Nothing to Do with Journalism"" Weblog post. Can You Trust The Media? 17 Feb. 2008. Nov. 2008 <http://adrianmonck.com/2008/02/the-decline-of-newspapers-nothing-to-do-with-journalism/>.

Newmark, Craig. ""Paper or Pixels?"" Interview. Los Angeles Times. 25 Nov. 2008. Los Angeles Times. Nov. 2008 <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-newmark-ps25-2008nov25,0,1635100.story?page=1>.

Perez-Pena, Richard. ""Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs." New York Times. 17 Nov. 2008.New York Times.Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/media/18voice.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp>.

Schneider, Michael. ""Needed: Network bailout?"" 23 Nov. 2008. Variety. Nov. 2008 <http://www.variety.com/vr1117996347.html>.

Silver, Nate. ""Friday eCommerce Interlude"" FiveThirtyEight. 21 Nov. 2008. FiveThirtyEight. Nov. 2008 <http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/friday-ecommerce-interlude.html>.

Strupp, Joe. ""Guild Claims 500 AP Staffers Signed Petition Against Contract Proposal"" Editor & Publisher. 25 Nov. 2008.Nielsen Business Media.Nov. 2008 <http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003915997>.

Trippi, Joe. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. New York: ReganBooks, 2004.

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Can TiVo Survive?

TiVo is the world’s first digital video recorder (DVR). It revolutionized the way we watch television by allowing a viewer to pause live television. Virtually replacing the VCR, the new technology was inviting to consumers because it puts the power in the palm of their hands. Users can digitally record their favorite shows, store them on a hard drive inside the device and watch them whenever they please. It allows the users to fast-forward through commercials, customize their content, and manage their entertainment by ones own specifications. TiVo first came on the scene at a Consumers Electronics Show in January of 1999. Originally intended by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsey of Silicon Graphics and Time Warner’s Full Service Network as a home networking device, the two changed direction when they began first public trials of the product in the San Francisco Bay Area. They had developed the idea to record digitized video on a hard disk. It was wildly successful forcing Ramsey to announce they would be shipping them to homes in March of that year, way ahead of schedule. Although TiVo was originally incorporated on August 4, 1997 as “Teleworld, INC,” after launching the DVR in March, the company renamed itself and made it’s Initial Public offering in September of 1999.

STRENGTHS:
TiVo has many strengths in the marketplace. It was the first one on the scene allowing it to cement it’s name as the leading provider of digitally recorded television. It has even created its own language. The word “tivo” becoming a verb used in many parts of speech. People would talk about how they had to “Tivo” something or they hadn’t “tivoed” this show yet or to not ruin the out come of a game because they were “tivoing” it. By doing so it further established it’s brand, much the same way we say “do you have a Kleenex” instead of tissue or I’m going to make a “XEROX” instead of a copy or “just google it” instead of “look it up.” The language around the device was designed that way. I suspect TiVo did not want it’s users to even know it was a DVR. It didn’t even market itself that way. A “digital video recorder” was too confusing a concept for a viewer. They wanted to establish themselves in the marketplace as something easy and fun and anybody could do it, not loaded with technological jargon.

TiVo built it’s empire of being very user friendly and fun. It seems like its idea was to make television viewing like being at an amusement park. It’s corny but it works. In the beginning when the system is starting up it plays this animated TiVo character, which is a television with two legs and an two antennae, running around in what looks like a Mouse Trap game until it finally lands on your screen in the top corner. It has a soundtrack. You can’t fast forward through it, so you are forced to watch it. The little guy is so cute and friendly you can’t take your eyes away from the screen. It’s like the Pillsbury Dough Boy for DVRs. This is all part of managing the brand and connecting the consumer with the product. Even the TiVo sounds are iconic. When Tivo switched over to the DirecTV version there were sound issues causing a firestorm on online chat boards and Tivo support was flooded with calls of how to get the sounds back. My friends and I, when we are watching a show and I want to fast forward, I don’t even say fast forward, I say “Buboop.” It in itself created its own subculture of television viewing. It became such a household name providing a bit of notoriety when people were spending endless amounts of time watching shows they Tivoed or even laughably admitting they had to “catch up” on their TiVo on the weekends. “Sex and the City” even had an episode where Miranda was having a relationship with her TiVo. This type of branding and technology made TiVo what it is today: an icon. An icon in technology.

Because it was first in the marketplace to develop this type of software it also holds the keys to many patented features, one of which, is the “trick play” allowing a user to pause live tv and even go back 30 minutes in time. It will also record 2 or 3 shows at a time. TiVo also created the Season Pass Manager, allowing you to create programs you want to record all the time when they are on. You can select first run or repeats for even the quality you want to record them at. TiVo created the Wish List, which allows you to record all shows according to search criteria. You can type in Brad Pitt and it records all movies with Brad Pitt.

TiVo also prides itself as being the DVR that can go anywhere. TiVoToGo allows you to move recorded material to your home PC, laptop or mobile device. They have also partnered with Yahoo TV to allow you to record shows anywhere on the go. One of TiVos recent strength building moves was the partnership with NetFlix. This allows you to watch over 12,000 movies and TV episodes streamed to your box. You can also rent or buy movies with Amazon’s Video on Demand feature through your broadband-connected DVR. They have also partnered with Jaman, which has thousands of international and independent titles in it’s library and have also joined forces with Walt Disney Studios and CinemaNow for the latest rentals. TiVo has patented the Swivel Search which let’s its users look for programs to record by the process of association, a director directed this movie with this actor who produce this film who has another film coming out. It’s really neat. You can also look up movie times in your area by the director, actor, opening night, top box office and see what is playing around you. You can check show times and purchase tickets. If you are staying in, they recently partnered with Dominos to deliver pizza to your door.
TiVo has always been on the forefront of creating a way to manage your home entertainment. The system links to your music library on your PC or Mac and you can play out songs, download free music video and access Rhapsody. They also link to radio stations and podcasts. This has been a big weakness with other DVR systems, accessing and streaming music. TiVo has lead in all the DVR markets on this technology. In the same way they have lead with linking your photos and videos to your television. It will even let you link with online pictures on Photobucket and Picasa to view other peoples Web Albums. In a recent addition they have teamed up with One True Media Service to allow the user to create their own home movie. You can edit them and add music and then share the private channel code with family and friends and they can download the home movie to their DVR.

TiVo has a new video feature that allows you to view content provided by over 75 partners that are not on cable or satellite including the New York Times, CNET, The Onion and Vogue. The downloads are free and only available to TiVo users. TiVo has also partnered with YouTube to provide the best of the web video to your DVR. You can search the YouTube Channel or just look up todays favorites. TiVo Desktop software allows for hundreds of extra titles from internet feeds and even video podcasts. They are the only DVR that has Broadband connectability. The system is THX certified and also has an imbedded Kid-safe TV chip with TiVo KidZONE. Tivo also made a deal with Nero, a german based digital media company to enhance user experience on a PC. For those users who watch TV on their PC they now can pause and record live TV on it.
TiVo Suggestions is one of there biggest strengths because the device takes notes on what you record, don’t record, thumbs up or thumbs down and gives you suggestions based on that. TiVo is the only DVR that does this. Their remote is also unique in how it was designed and is user friendly for rating videos. TiVo is also quickly becoming an icon in audience research. TiVo has the ability to compile audience research like no other DVR system. They can essentially predict the future by telling the mass media about the past. Viewing patterns of the audience are essential to any advertiser. This is a huge strength for TiVo considering they are working with and develping StopWatch Ratings Services. A new rating system developed in 2007 based on DVR viewing. They have increased their sample size to 100,000 homes in the last year and are proving ratings that are 25 times more accurate. They have the ability to look at second by second viewing, enabling a rating for each specific commercial. It shows how fast a viewer fast-forwards through a commercial and viewing behavior. All of this is a great strength but also leaves a great deal of opportunity for the company. TiVo has established itself so far as the best overall software for manipulating video and managing content. Many have tried to emulate the TiVo formula but lack the software engineers. But competitors are hot on their tails.

WEAKNESSES:
Tivo is not a source. TiVo has to connect to two things in order to receive information and a picture. It either has to connect to a phone line or to an internet signal to receive information. It has to either connect to an antennae, cable box or satellite receiver in order to receive a picture. This has been a great weakness since it’s inception. It has forced TiVo to rely on other companies in order to provide their product. One such tumultuous relationship over time has been DirecTV, the leading satellite provider in the country, which may eventually lead to TiVo’s downfall of being a leader in DVR’s if it doesn’t nurture it’s current relationship. TiVo originally could connect with any incoming source but in 2000 it united with DirecTV to create DirecTiVo. It allowed subscribers to access all of DirecTV’s satellite channels and record them on a TiVo model integrated into a receiver. It was a great partnership until DirecTV cut ties with TiVo after News Corporation took a controlling share of the Satellite provider and switched their operating system to NDS, which by the way News Corp own a majority of. However, the partnership did not disintegrate completely, they still used each others customer support system and just last year they announced they would be distributing a new HD DIRECTV DVR with TiVo service, which comes out at the end of 2009. Many TiVo users are breathing a sigh of relief because the original HD units did not work very well. A weakness that comes from this is a loss of many customers. People that were linked to TiVo through DirecTV lost their relationship to TiVo because they didn’t switch satellite providers they just switched DVR’s. Theses weaknesses were caused by there relationship with DirecTV, a relationship they now know they need in order to continue doing business. Many have complained TiVo’s software integrated with other cable or satellite systems do not work as well. For instance, the original Comcast + TiVo relationship didn’t work as well but they are currently working to provide better integration and arrival in new markets.

Other customers who stayed with DirecTV were allowed to keep their DirecTivo’s but when they upgraded they upgraded to a DirecTV DVR with no relation to TiVo. In the process the customers got a taste of the competition and it proved fruitful for DirecTV resulting in many upgrades of their platform. Upgrades people liked over the old TiVo model. TiVo was slow to make these adjustments and is still lagging behind in some improvements. For instance, when a viewer is watching a show or game and they don’t want to know the ending. In the TiVo model when you switch from the main page to the guide it shows you the channel you are currently watching. The problem with this is, if for instance you were TiVoing Tiger Woods at the Masters Golf tournament and you are watching the recorded version and he is on the 12th hole. If at that moment you would like to see what else is on TV and you switch to the guide you may catch Tiger holding the trophy in real time. It’s a flaw in the system. In other DVR models the guide takes you to a different page. There is no video behind the guide.

Another weakness is TiVo does not have as many channel options. In the DirecTV model you can choose a news feed or a sports feed or a specific event feed. This allows the user to watch 8 channels at a time. In television, networks often have a “switch pool” at sporting events. It’s what you would watch say on USA when you are watching the US Open for Tennis. They are watching and commentating on one central “more important” match but switching every so often between courts to show you other matches that are going on. In the sports feed it allows you to pick your content. So you can actually watch the other courts and monitor all the courts if you want at time. Or on gameday if you wanted to watch 8 different college football games at a time. They do this with news also. You can watch CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, FOX-Biz, ABC, CBS all at the same time. With your remote you channel up and down for the sound you want to listen to.

People have also complained that TiVo is slower. There is a longer lag time between gaining information. They have said the new system out next year will fix that. Also when you are fast forwarding through shows there is only three speeds as opposed to four, although a particular strength for a while was TiVo’s ability to jump through programs which now other DVRs have added.

A weakness with the original models was the price. They were very expensive to begin with but have since come down. There are other DVR’s out there that are more competitive in price that you aren’t charged for. For instance, if you are using TiVo service but you have and HD satellite you will be charged for the HD satellite and then you will be charged for Tivo and their HD service. Another problem is hardware. Many of these receivers that are also DVR’s are just one box. With a TiVo you have to buy and maintain one more piece of hardware, if you aren’t integrating into say a DirecTiVo. DirecTV, Comcast, Dish Network or Time Warner/Cox Cable will give you free hardware that runs their software. These are all problems TiVo has with not being a source. Tivo also has to live on a phone line or an internet connection, these other devices do not.

OPPORTUNITIES:
TiVo has many opportunities to improve itself which it is doing on a day to day basis as I mentioned earlier TiVo has great software engineers, marketers, developers which makes them a force to be reckoned with. TiVo’s partnership with NetFlix to download movies directly to your TiVo box will help grown their movie library and they can compete with video on demand services. When you click on the NetFlix icon on the Now Playing screen it brings you to a list of movies from there you pick a title and stream the movie to your TiVo box. In time I suspect you will be able to buy these movies and store them somewhere on a separate hard drive. You can also access your Amazon account for Video on Demand and buy movies. You can connect your Amazon account to access Paypal to pay for the movie. I’m sure in the future you will just be billed directly to your TiVo account if they can work out some agreement where they take a share of the profits. TiVo is trying to compete with VOD (video on Demand) offered by DishNetwork and DirecTV and other cable companies. The obstacles remain which titles or database you are pulling from. NetFlix does not have all the licensing agreements with all the studio and therefore cannot provide all the movies but in time they are building their library and this looks to be promising relationship. When downloading movies there are always bandwidth issues and you do have to have an internet connection. It also means more hardware that you will have to probably buy from TiVo. They may make more money off of hardware then movies. TiVo has also made a great deal of money off of rebates, people that buy hardware and do not cash in on their rebates.

Other opportunities for TiVo in the future could be completely pulling away from a satellite or cable provider and pull video and information directly from the internet much like we see with such programs as Pandora or Hulu where you are only connected to the internet and listening to radio. They have the YouTube channels and NetFlix but it’s not everything that is on Television.

TiVo also has great opportunities in mobile technologies. They have recently partnered with RIM (research in motion). This originally was a partnership to bring access to your TiVo device to your mobile phone in terms of programming a show to record or looking up program information, or transferring recordings to your phone, but they are now researching and developing a way to bring that content directly to your device. I believe this is the future of television it will all be on the internet much like what TiVo is doing with Nero. If you have an internet connection you will be able to watch LIVE TV from anywhere including your mobile phone and even record on your mobile phone. The storage space has just not been developed. The screen is small and not as inviting but in time they will make bigger screens that fold out and hopefully TiVo will be working on software to integrate into these screens.

I believe they should work to put a player on the iPhone immediately. There is not a TiVo application and you can’t watch LIVE TV. You can stream from YouTube on the iPhone but if there was an application to move video you recorded on your TiVo to your iPhone that would be a step in the right direction. AppleTV looks to be a big commetitor in this department and may get there before they do on the mobile device.

TiVo’s biggest Strength as well as opportunity is research and development. Like NetFlix, they hold an incredible amount of information on the television viewing public. They know what shows you watch, when you watch, how long you watch, and by establishing their own internal rating system with the thumbs up and thumbs down remote they are gaining invaluable information of what you like and what you don’t like. Other DVRs are not doing this. TiVo picks programs for you based on what you program it for you to like. It’s learning. With every click forward or backward, it’s learning. TiVo has the opportunity to be the Nielsens of the future. They can sell all this information to advertisers for a lot of money. Also, if they work with Netflix and combine databases the possibilities are endless. They may get out of the DVR business altogether and do audience research.

Tivo has already started playing around with advertising on the screen and in between ads. Comcast does some of this on its guide page but TiVo has a new version where there is an ad that pops up when you are fast forwarding. A display ad or banner. There is a great opportunity to develop software that does this sort of subliminal advertising. This may also be why DirecTV has kept their relationship open with TiVo. The advertising possibilities as well as the software engineering that is not being done any place else. Investors are holding on with these prospects.

THREATS:
DirecTV is nipping at their heels. As soon as they figure out technology and figure out advertising they may leave them. They are also Beta testing new software for music and photosharing on the DVR which TiVo was known for and also a reason DirecTV has kept them close. Dish Network Corp was creeping up on them but then TiVo sued their manufacturer EchoStar Holding Company for patent infringement. They were awarded $104 Million dollars. Dish Network has still developed the technology they just have to tweek it a bit and they will be back in business. Dish and Direct tried to merge at one point but were not allowed by the FEC due to monopoly concern but future talks of mergers are still possible with other companies, which is a treat to TiVo. The biggest former competitor for TiVo was ReplayTV but because they quit producing DVRs they have little share in the market. They developed a software that skips commercials but they were then sued by advertisers and it bankrupted their company. TiVo has to be very careful not to disrupt the television industry too much otherwise it will come to the same fate.

News Corp NDS has developed a DVR that has Peer to Peer content and the ability to share content around the home. This is the direction I think the market is going, where you can game as well as record and share all your files. TiVo has yet to develop these gaming technologies but DirecTV is Beta Testing some software. This is a huge threat to TiVo. TiVo’s numbers are also dropping as of October 2008, TiVo had 3.45 million subscribers compared to 4.36 Million in January of 2006. This means there is more competition and people are using other DVRs. TiVo has also been lowering their prices and offering more deals on the HD receivers. According to Businessweek.com they also had a higher churn rate that was worrying analysts.

COX is extremely competitive and offers there machine for free. They are also steadily catching up in Hi-def channels which was originally a concern with cable. The cable companies can compete with satellite DVRs when they have as many channel and you can watch 3 or 4 at a time which you cannot do with TiVo. Apple TV is also putting a lot of pressure on their content, you can rent HD movies, buy HD TV shows, listen to iTune and watch podcasts or show off your photos, this is much like TiVo except it doesn’t record LIVE TV. But the more and more they add to Apple TV the more and more of a threat it becomes. It’s also user friendly and Mac users naturally gravitate toward it where TiVo wasn’t as Mac friendly at first.

CONCLUSION:
Today Tivo has rebounded closing at $6.67 up from $4.43 about two weeks ago. The stock hasn’t performed this well since the beginning of November. It could be that we are going into Christmas and TiVo’s 3rd quarter reports were better than expected. This year, TiVo has recorded profitability for the third quarter of 2008. There service and technology revenues were $51.7 million, compared with $58.3 million for the same period last year. If you look at their adjusted EBITADA it was $95.3 million which included the $87.8 million of money that came from the EchoStar battle, this figure is down about $22 Million dollars from last year. According to their annual report they had a net income of $100.6 million but excluding the EchoStar case they would have posted a net loss of 0.9 million. There is another hearing in January of 2009 to determine more damages beyond those rewarded in October. Overall it looks like a very healthy balance sheet with current assets more than double what they were last year. Their Cash Flow at the end of the period was $189 Million. It’s interesting to note also that their research and development is $16.5 Million out of their budget. Tom Rogers, the

President and CEO of TiVo said this in a press release:
"This was another solid quarter for TiVo, our fifth straight of Adjusted EBITDA profitability and we are well on our way to delivering our first Adjusted EBITDA positive year. Our strong balance sheet, consisting of over $200 million in cash and short term investments and no debt, along with our continued solid financial performance and the progress we have made on our strategic content and distribution relationships, positions us well for the future. “

TiVo has a strong hold in the market and doesn’t look like it is going anywhere soon. It is also important to note that during these tough financial times people are more likely to stay in rather than going out. Home entertainment hasn’t seen a huge leap this last quarter but maybe in 2009 heading into deep dark depression people will be spending less of fancy dinners and movies and travel and more on Video on Demand. Only time will tell.

Also, in this rough economic time more and more traditional media outlets are feeling the weight. They are losing advertising revenue streams and profitability is down. The New Media and new technologies are pulling ahead and TiVo might just be leading the way to the eventual collapse of the medium (television), the machine that helped put it on the map. Charlie Warner spoke in our class the other day about “Disruptive technologies” referencing Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, I believe TiVo is one of those disruptive technologies. The idea was not to ruin the marketplace for advertising on television or to put cable or satellite or local television out of business but that is where it is heading. TiVo is a perfect example of listening to the audience which is why conventional media needs to have their ears perked up.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
www.tivo.com
www.directv.com
www.comcast.com
www.cox.com
http://www.gizmolovers.com/2008/09/03/tivo-and-directv-reunited-and-it-feels-so-good/
http://www.pvrwire.com/
www.apple.com
http://investor.tivo.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-07-81563
http://www.zibb.com/article/4451990/TiVo+Reports+Record+Profitability+for+the+Third+Quarter+Ended+October
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D94MKM0G0.htm

What am I missing here?

I just finished writing my Graduate Lit Review, 4 days ago, and now I feel a bit nostalgic. In preparing for a paper of such massive proportions I spent much of my day online reading or with my head in some books over at NYU's Bobst Library.

Today, I have plenty to write. I DON'T miss writing. I have a case study due on Monday on TIVO and I'm working on a package on "Cadillac Records," the new film on the birth of rock n'roll opening tomorrow. I am also working on a piece about Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting" for my understanding class. But I miss the Lit Review. It's disgusting, I know.

A good friend of my dad's came into town not to long ago, we were talking about grad school and what's easy and what's not. The friend said, "I could do research all day long, it's just sitting down to write it that kills me."

At the time I disagreed. I said "Oh no no no, I love doing the writing, I just don't want to do the research."

What was I thinking?? I completely agree. I hate putting my thoughts together, that is what writing is. It's putting a bunch of thoughts together on a page, so it all makes sense. I have found through writing this Lit Review, well...I don't think I'm very good at it but I like the research.

I assume this is the point of all this research, to put it all together. If you can't put it all together then what was the point?

For example I was up in the lab yesterday teaching myself how to do Final Cut Pro. I am a professional after one session with ...myself. I was researching on some tech site how to do everything. It had a little web tutorial and after I watched the tutorial, I went back to FCP and practiced. There you go. Research in motion..no not the Blackberry. The actual act of carrying out research. I was using my research to successfully accomplish something. Did I miss it?

In graduate research you have to accomplish something otherwise you are wasting their time, your time and your (parents) money. I struggle with this everyday. I can't write about anything because I don't know what I want to research? What do I want to write about? If I were to enter into a thesis tract what would I dissertare?

I am currently caught up in this idea that journalists of the future will be "Community Organizers" (see Buzzmachine.com) Although Jeff Jarvis blames the fall of newspapers on journalists, I still think he has some valid points about re-thinking how we journalize. Journalists of the future won't be doing all the researching and the writing, they will be helping people organize, helping the public set up blogs, mediating chat rooms, scanning comments for news, facilitating twitter comments, linking, bridging and collaborating with other journalists.

In a lit review the writer is looking for holes in the current literature on a given topic. The author argues a need for more research on an idea for a study. I didn't do that in my lit review. I didn't challenge the Jarvis' of the world and I didn't come up with any new ideas. All I did was talk about the decline of traditional media and the convergence of new media.

It's been done.

I'm writing this blog post because I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated with my lack of critical thinking. I did the research. I did the writing but I didn't do the thinking.

Yes, I miss the lit review but its not because of the research. Its not because I can or cannot write or because I can't organize my thought. It's because I have no thoughts. I miss the lit review because of the critical thinking.

Media Projects

http://www.ifc.com/on-ifc/mediaproject

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/media/18voice.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&feature=channel

Intellectual Autobiography for Graduate Class

I remember my first camera. My grandfather gave it to me along with it a life of inspiration. It was this beat up old thing that he dragged from Shanghai to Sydney. It had a crankshaft that had to be manually dialed and was best loaded in the dark. I loved that camera. My first print off of it was an empty Coke bottle with a cowboy hat tilted on the top of it. I shot it in black and white in front of some garbage cans on my back doorstep. I don’t know how, at that age, I was able to capture classic Coca-Cola and capitalism at its best but am amazed at my own observations. I continued to shoot a lot through middle school and high school. I applied to a highly competitive photography program at a technical school my senior year and was accepted. I learned black and white and E6 processing, portrait photography, hand-painting and digital restoration. It was a busy year but there was something that happened in that class I will never forget.

It was a darkroom day for me in school, which means I would spend all day making prints. I started early and made a decision not to listen to any form of music or radio. I actually work best in complete silence. A few hours had elapsed and my professor came in and shouted the twin towers had been hit. I wasn’t sure what she meant by this. It sounded important. I left the dark room and went down the hall where the rest of my class had convened. I watched as the second tower fell. I knew at this point it was New York and 2 planes had flown into the World Trade Center. I didn’t know where it was in relation to anything. I didn’t know who was to blame or where the attack came from. According to the TV it was one of the darkest hours of American history and I had been in a dark room.

I spent the next weeks engulfed in news. I watched the towers fall over and over again. I enrolled at a journalism program at the University of Oklahoma and received an internship at The Oklahoma Daily. I wanted to do photojournalism. I wanted to tell a story with my images. I started at the photo desk testing the waters in print journalism, unsure of my abilities. I spent quiet a bit of time in the newsroom. I became eager in my photography and wanted to add a writing aspect to it. We had such a strong staff and excellent set of writers and copy editors it was difficult to really grasp what could be done differently. In a newsroom the only way to get your voice heard was to have a louder voice then everyone or a more creative one. The podium was the paper. Day in and day out writers proved their place.

The great thing about a student publication is white space. It had to be filled and an editor needed inches and not just ideas. One night I was sitting out with my managing editor discussing my next step. I had been throwing around the idea of a food column for sometime now. I knew a lot about food having grown up as a chef’s daughter, raised in a cooking school. The Managing Editor suggested I go and speak with the Entertainment Editor and “pitch” this idea of mine. I asked him what I should call it and he said “well how ‘bout Lindy’s Leftovers.” And it stuck. The food column became a relative success. The Editor of the paper really liked it and suggested I expand on it. I did expand and eventually became the Entertainment Editor a few years later. I wrote for multiple sections of the paper and took photos at football games to court appearances. I had a very good run at the paper and it molded a lot about what I feel journalism is and should be today. I met many interesting people and most of my closest friends today are people from that paper.

One Semester I decided to study abroad in Spain. A few weeks before I was to leave there was a terrorist attack on the train system in Madrid. The trip was cancelled. I quickly found a trip to Costa Rica in its place. I finished my minor and traversed most of Central America on that trip. I fell in love with the culture and the people. When I came back I enrolled in a class called International Relations in Latin America taught by Charles Kenney. This class forever changed the way I look at US intervention. We read Talons of the Eagle by Peter H. Smith. Since the Monroe doctrine, the US has intervened in almost every country in Latin America. They have intervened almost 3 dozen times (Smith). I look at those events and I wonder if they were covered by the broadcast media. Crisis in Latin America doesn’t make the evening news today. Did it then? What have we missed along the way? And what else isn’t being covered. I found out more on my next trip.

I enrolled in a study abroad program in London focusing on British media studies. This trip positively changed my life. I spent the summer focused on the disintegration of American media. Our class had a meeting with Tom Fenton author of Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News and the Danger to Us All where he talked about tracking stories about Al Queda for more than a decade and not reporting it because network news execs didn’t think it was news worthy (1). He believed Americans had been suffering from a “news gap” and 9/11 was the result. Fenton said journalist could be held just as accountable as any government agency (3). He believes we need more and better news. “Our lives depend on it,” he said.

We also traveled to Paris and met with Jim Bittermann, Senior European Correspondent for CNN News. We gathered in his apartment on one of his days off and discussed a myriad of topics but mostly the downsizing of foreign correspondents and News bureaus abroad. The numbers were frightening. CNN used to have close to 300 corespondents in Europe and now they are lucky to have Jim and a few others. Bittermann shared experiences with us of covering two papal transitions, the gulf wars, NATO Air strikes on Kosovo, and the death of Princess Diana among many many other things.

I spent some time at the British Broadcasting Center (BBC) in London where we went over story structure and video synthesis. The BBC doesn’t put a time limit on a story some pieces can be 15 minutes long. In America news packages range from one to three minutes and have very fast cuts they usually don’t stay with one image for very long. They take the time to tell the story and let the video do the talking. Our group also spent some time at Associated Press Television (APTN). They are largely becoming more and more responsible for all the worlds’ video. This puts a fierce monopoly on the market and has caused some strain in the industry. This trip really made me think about the decline of the American news media and its effect on society.

One of the other students in London and former Daily writer introduced me to television. He had decided he was going to do an entertainment show on public television in Oklahoma. He asked me to be his co-host and producer. At the time I was manage editing and writing at a local magazine (another former daily writer asked me to come on board). I had a lot on my plate but agreed. I fell in love. I spent the next year in front and behind the camera producing local news and entertainment pieces. Shortly there after, I applied for on camera job down in Texas as a small town reporter. I wanted to apply everything I had learned in Europe for my tiny broadcast. It turned out it wasn’t everything I had hoped for. This was a good thing though because it pushed me to move to New York and apply at CBS News.

I wanted to see how an American network functioned and be “embedded” with what many in fly-over country would call the “liberal” media. My time at CBS has been my second education. I worked very hard as a broadcast associate to get on the foreign desk. I felt I had something to offer and was very interested in international news. Coincidentally my job was to monitor feeds from APTN and cut video of important international events. I became a filter for our own video we put in pieces and delivered to affiliates. For example, I would work with the network desk to get video out of Pakistan when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. I was instrumental in our own accusation of the video of Saddam Hussein’s death sentence being executed in Baghdad. I’ve seen countless hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, weddings, funerals, elections and roadside bombings.

At one point we were covering several roadside bombings a day. It became so familiar it almost went unnoticed in the news. I decided to take a class at NYU, Iraq: Anatomy of a Conflict. It was taught be Michael Soussan who was a whistleblower at the UN for the Oil for Food Program. This class was really unbelievable. We had such a diverse group of students who really were set out on understanding why we were occupying Iraq. I took away a lot from that class and one in particular was an interest in graduate school. I thought about studying politics or international studies but I find that my mind always goes back to media.

My father, son of my camera weilding grandfather, who is also a great inspiration in my life gave me a book once by Hugh Hewitt In, But not of, he said “recognize that the choices and habits of your school years will become those of your life”(Hewitt 43). I feel like I generated positive habits in my undergraduate years and plan to accomplish more in my graduate years. I would like to study corporate responsibility to inform the public on issues that effect their security and compensation. My time abroad and in the newsroom has made me more aware of the treats our society faces due to a lack of information. I’m hoping to research these ideas and develop a project to visually show these Fenton “News Gaps”.

Bibliography:

Hewitt, Hugh. In, but Not Of : A Guide to Christian Ambition. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Limited, 2003.

Fenton, Tom. Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. New York: ReganBooks, 2005.

Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle : Dynamics of U. S. -Latin American Relations. New York: Oxford UP, Incorporated, 1999.

Q moves into the neighborhood

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Let us in! Let us in!

Summer is coming to a close and Washington Square Park is not coming to an open. Phase 1 of the reconstruction process will not be done until Spring of 2009.

Thanks...New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Thanks for ruining my summer. This park is a fixture for the community and the village just doesn't feel the same with out it.

Where else am I going to listen to folk music from a ten member band one of which is playing a salt shaker? Where else am I going to see a warrior sword fighter slashing at the air? How am I going to be in over 20 student films as background at the fountain. Where esle am I going to longboard if I had a longboard.

Listen NYCDPR.... I see your trees of green... red roses too. I see them bloom for ME and for you. So let me in!

I feel like a caged animal out here, behind bars stuck in this gotham city... and you and your new light fixtures and grassy meadows taunting me with every blade. Let us out let us out! And in to the park!

I smell construction.

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Behind bars

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The view from the outside

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Checkmate!

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The arc of the park

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West 3rd and MacDougal

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elephant in the (bath)room...

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Every breed recognized by AKC

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Today I ...

-Ran race for the cure with Daisy where we walked and talked about standing up for something...if not for ourselves.
-Had brunch with Tara where she very scarily explained to me why the government MUST bail out these companies.
-Spoke to my good friend in Houston via extended texting due to reception loss and power outages about the war zone that has now become Another new Orleans. Houston we have a problem.
-Read about Innovation in my new favorite grad school book(there are only 7) "the art of looking sideways".
-Oklahoma please google: Elmer McCurdy.

DNC Day 2

I'm tired. It's day 2 and I can't feel my brain. I'm so glad I got a PHD in perfection...otherwise how would I cope? I have a lot to say but will post again next year.

DNC Day 2

I'm tired. It's day 2 and I can't feel my brain. I'm so glad I got a PHD in perfection...otherwise how would I cope? I have a lot to say but will post again next year.

This isn't what I signed up for

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Here's the Oklahoma delegation way up here

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Wire are you?

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DNC Line up media LINE UP

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Decapitation doesn't phase newyorkers

I thought the perfect day to take a greyhound bus would be the day after that guy got decapitated in Canada.

Aparently I'm wrong. I've now waited for my bus to DC for 2 hours. About half the time I waited for my iphone ...but the people waiting on that line were way cooler then these losers.

Boltbus doesn't have a phone service. So I emailed them instead.

"hey I'm here. Where are you?"

Good morning iPhone I love you.

I've been doing a lot of red carpets lately and it's only fair I post at least one photo of my misery. Carpets are fun but bloodsuckingly loud and often obnoxious.

I also wanted to show off my new shiny iPhone ap. Cellspin. My coworker says it's stealing all by valuble information but I say who cares? It's awesome.

On the carpet...

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shakin' that tree boss

Journalist Takes Redundancy to Illogical Extreme.

Posted on Gawker: http://gawker.com/364706/journo-takes-redundancy-to-illogical-extreme
Gawker thinks she is possibly covering for 5 of her colleagues on a smoke break.
But my favorite comment on the board was:
"That's how the Times gets multiple sources."

Anatomy of the Finger....point

This war is about Oil and it’s the media's fault. Section 1.

That could be the title of the class I am now enrolled in courtesy my fellow students.

It is your average run of the mill NYU course. Except, these are not your average run of the mill NYU students. We had a few state department employees, a few people from the UN, some investors (you can probably guess why they are there), a couple marines, a DOD backgrounds inspector, a refugee humanitarian and that is just to name a few.

The real title is "Iraq: Anatomy of a conflict." Section 1.

Tonight was class one. It was our job as a student body to come up with a boilerplate as to what we wanted to discuss this semester. A boilerplate it was. A heated emotional and utterly confused boilerplate.. You can imagine the cross firing slodgefest that erupted.

Within two hours the media had been attacked seven times, Bush four, The UN three, Congress three and Saddam a disappointing two.

Oil was mentioned five times, Electricity eight times, Iraq’s admiring neighbors four times and WMD’s zero.

Our instructor, whether he wanted to or not, mediated a two-hour random and often times directionless spattering of Iraq debate. He proved his point at the end.

“What drives our assumptions about Iraq? What fuels the fire? What do we really know?”

Nothing.

At least, I said nothing. I have nothing to say. The only thing I can remember about the Gulf War is sitting on my couch in front of our then projection screen TV. It is the one with the three primary colored bulbs disguised inside a table. There was a large map on the screen and a voice over. It was a map of Iraq and the voice of Tom Brokaw. Something had happened. I didn’t know what but I didn’t really care. I interrupted Tom to exclaim something to my dad. But my dad did care. It was met with a loud authoritative shushing.

I’ll never forget that shush. It was serious. It was ominous. It meant something. So much so that it has stuck with me to this day.

This conflict has struck a chord with the American people. Even in my small survey class of 15. I see confusion and a whole lot of finger- pointing but no clarity.

Iraq won’t be solved this semester and probably not next semester. But the least we can do is graduate to a level of understanding. Understanding a conflict that could define our generation.

In the meantime Let’s all just shhhhhh and listen. We may learn something.

No Country For Any Shorts

One of the joys of living in the West Village is the various art houses, cinemas, jazz clubs and comedy clubs within a stones throw.

I was heading home on Friday and I stopped in at our local IFC center on our block. I was checking the listings to find anything good for the weekend. I noticed opening tonight was the Academy Award Animated and Live Action Shorts for 2008. It was starting in five minutes. I bought one ticket and headed in.

I have never actually seen Shorts listed at theaters, although I am a big fan. My question is who actually ever sees these things besides the Academy?? This was the first year the Academy paired with Target and Magnolia productions issued a somewhat wide release of these films.

I sat through the entire thing with my eyes glued to the screen. I was amazed. They were all truly unbelievable and all… foreign. Not one of the 10 nominated shorts this year is from America. There is even a live action short about a Tonto women that is Canadian! They were quirky, funny, ingenious and uniquely un-American.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Animated:
“My Love” A Russian short by Aleksandr Petrov. It’s a hand-drawn pastel animation depicting 19th century Russia. It was wildly imaginative and told a beautiful story of a Boy that is love torn. The picture moved as is you were watching a painting come to life. By color and hard strokes you literally felt every emotion that the hormonal boy passed through. It was a journey that made me actually sway in my seat at times. This is the winner if my vote counted.

“Madame Tutli Putli,” This was a stop motion animated film from Canada. It was about a hellish night one middle-aged woman spent on a train. It was sarcastic, quirky and over the top. The characters were all a bit disturbing but that could be attributed to my genuine fear of moving dolls. I didn’t exactly understand the storyline at the end but I could relate to the overall drudgery of travel, which was uniquely represented. No Disney story here.

“Even Pigeons Go to Heaven” An animated short from France about a priest that tries to talk a dying man into buying a machine that will take him to heaven. The digital animation was unbelievable. It was very fun to watch and you couldn’t help but fall in love with the old man who has his own interpretation of heaven.

And my honorable mentions go to “I Met the Walrus”, a Canadian animated illustration about a brief interview with John Lennon on Peace. It was a neat short on a topic that still feels politically fueled today. And last and probably least was “Peter and the Wolf.” The stop animation was great. I thought it was a bit long in spots.

I wasn’t over the top excited about all the Live Actions shorts so much so that I am only going to mention two here.

The one worth the almost 42 minutes to tell the story is the Danish (not so) short, “At Night” about three young women dealing with cancer. Bring the tissues. It is a tearjerker. A heavy topic covered very eloquently by Christian E. Christiansen and Louise Vesth. I think this one may be favored at the awards due to its compelling nature.

If it was left up to me I would pick the loveable Belgian “Tanghi Argentini.” It was short and sweet. It did exactly what I want a short to do. Make me laugh. I loved it. It was about internet dating. It was very well written and it speaks volumes that I would probably youtube this right now. Right now. Unless of course you are finding someone to tango with right now.