Newspapers eating the broadcaster’s lunch?
Posted on September 13, 2008
Filed Under digital media, journalism, media convergence | Leave a Comment
Geek alert! I’m at the Online News Association Conference in DC, so this post is all about shoptalk.
I’m at the “Sharing the Research panel” at ONA and just heard something surprising from the panelists. Interesting topic at hand: culture clash between TV and newspapers, all about online media.
According to the study the researchers are presenting on media convergence, “newspapers are eating the broadcaster’s lunch” in the run for the web. Well we have heard the, let’s say, “shrinkage” taking place in the newspaper industry, and how much of this is at least anecdotally tied to the emergence of the new media. However, the researchers base this assertion on the fact newspaper organizations in general may have ventured into the web earlier and with more creativity than broadcast companies did. They point out that TV stations tend to farm out their web stuff to a limited number of companies that produce on-size-fits-all environments, and are usually not fast at innovating.
Presented this way, it makes sense. However, with video becoming central to web experiences anyway, one would think that broadcasters should have a leg up soon if they are smart about it.
See more here and feel free to post your thoughts below or in the Wall (right-hand column).
Old town lost, in digital pictures
Posted on September 8, 2008
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It is now more than 24 hours after Hurricane Ike rammed into my hometown of Gibara, Cuba, and I have yet to make phone contact with my folks over there. Neither have my relatives from other parts of the island or from the US. But I have already seen images of the destruction, as some pictures are already making the rounds on the web since early Monday. Quite an accomplishment for that particular piece of digital stucco, since there is no power or phone connection in the area, and the roads are said to be a mess.
So here I am, trying to reconnect with familiar places by looking through a fog of rubble. And wondering if this is IT, the moment in which Cuba finally becomes one of those places like war-torn Afghanistan, or Beirut, where every picture or frame of video seems to contain a certain amount of rubble. You know, one of those places that wherever you look you find a roofless building, or a house with holes where the windows should be.
That is not an unlikely situation given the one-two punch of Ike and Gustav in less than two weeks, covering absolutely all of Cuba’s territory. Add decades of precarious maintenance and shaky infrastructure–all the ingredients for a tipping point.
Gibara used to be a prosperous old town (established in 1817). An international sea harbor, it was a town where commerce, the arts, and the bohemian spirit in general, flourished. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for Gibara reads as if it were still the early twentieth century, when Gibara was “a port of call for the American Munson [shipping] Line.” It may be the case that the page is just screaming for an update or not. It could as well be intentional. As a beloved teacher at the University of Havana told me once, people from Gibara live as if pretending that time had not passed.
Well, I don’t have the heart to be the one who sets the record straight in Wikipedia. They still have the poetry readings, the art galleries and the “Festival de Cine Pobre” (Low Budget Movie Festival), a sort of Third-world Sundance that takes place there every year. But the old charm may be hard to rescue this time. It may not be possible to restore all those ancient buildings with accuracy, when so many basic needs of daily live will hardly be met in the next few years. And I know for a fact that this is a loss that will be mourned there and around the world just as if somebody had perished in the storm.
Shine the floor, Teresa!
Posted on September 6, 2008
Filed Under networked society, postmodern condition | Leave a Comment
Just have the weirdest flashback from the late seventies (ok, I wasn’t even a teenager there, but never mind). Back from a short vacation and in need of dragging myself back to the gym, I resumed my swimming program. At the pool I met this guy from India who was doing a similar routine. We started talking afterwards (he is a History and Law professor) and somehow the conversation veered towards what it was like growing up in the age of the Non-Aligned movement–ok, I know, not your typical poolside conversation but certainly something we had in common…
So, it turns out that while we in Cuba were being brought up on Soviet apple sauce and shown socialist-block cartoons (a.k.a “muñequitos rusos”), in India they were also watching movies from the USSR and, surprise surprise, Cuba. I guess that may have been cheap TV programming, as it was shared also with cultural and ideological purposes. It is also one of the building blocks of the current global networked society, I’d say.
Then, my friend started to tell me that he remembers this Cuban film about a woman who struggles to reaffirm her identity and takes a stand against her husband’s macho attitude. Of course I knew immediately that he was talking about “Retrato de Teresa,” directed by Pastor Vega. But the truly odd thing was when he said that he specially remembered a song… and then I could see it coming! I could barely believe it but his vivid memory was of a tune that became very popular at that time, and it even turn into an expression to talk about either good housekeeping or machismo: “sácale brillo al piso, Teresa,” (shine the floor, Teresa!). Obviously my friend could only remember the subtitles, not the melody. Just as well. That was odd and amusing.
Talking with Luis Fonsi
Posted on August 28, 2008
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We had Puerto Rican singer and songwriter Luis Fonsi the other day in Yahoo! as he was launching his new production. For me, it was fun to do the convergent media experience from the web side. I mean, I had done this in the past at CNN en Espanol with TV being the main vehicle, and Internet as and-on. Now we actually did not required even a studio or a control room. Obviously, not a very complicated production but we did have people watching through Yahoo! Live and chatting in the same environment. People were able to ask their own questions and request some tunes from Fonsi. Here’s a clip (in Spanish).
Nobody Cares About Your Blog
Posted on August 8, 2008
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A colleague from the digital media camp, Jim Breiner, tells me in an email that he cares about my blog. Jim had just commented on a post. Beyond how interesting he may find my notes on what I call digital stucco, Jim was making a reference–wink wink–to a phrase I’ve been using regularly in the past few years as a shorcut to summarize my feelings about user generated content.
Now is a good time as any to expand on the idea right here. First, about the origins of the “nobody cares about your blog” phrase: it comes from design-marketplace site cafepress.com and it was skillfully printed upon request on notebooks, T-shirts, even thongs. I saved the thumbnail of the mouse pad, and I’m glad I did because the original design seems to have gone away even though there are still plenty of variations on the theme.
If you were to place all the types of content available online in a continuum of relevance, blogs in general will fall towards the negative side of the axis. Granted, there’s always Perez Hilton, but I mean in general. That is to say that the allure of a never-ending supply of free user-generated content may make your business’ mouth watery, but watch out. It will be hard to cluster large audiences around any particular area. And advertisers don’t want to sponsor the whole internet, not even your whole network.
So, to make the point I say ”nobody cares about your blog”–or mine for that matter, with a few dear exceptions like Jim and other loyal readers. It is a fact of life in the new media age because we are now competing not for space or time, but attention for our very own digital stucco.
Obama, Britney and Paris are all just doing their jobs
Posted on August 3, 2008
Filed Under politics, postmodern condition | Leave a Comment
An ad from the McCain campaign mixing Obama with Britney and Paris (Hilton, of course) called the presumptive democratic nominee “the biggest celebrity in the world.” I’d say this is quite an exaggeration, isn’t it? As far as celebrity stock goes, Obama may not fetch as much interest as many others do. But he is quite high up there in the pantheon, though.
Even the spammers have taken notice. I have received more Viagra and Rolex offers with “Obama” in the subject line than with the name of any other celebrity–and that’s only for the ones not caught by the filter. Note in all fairness: McCain also showed up this week in the highly creative work of a spammer who claimed that Rapper 50 Cent will be in the GOP ticket.
Playing the role is just of the political job in this age of simulation, where any media event is more important than a reality it may relate to. Take the State of the Union Address, for instance. Even as the media gets advance copies the President’s speech and its content hardly surprises the audience, the ritual of the ceremony is what matters after all. It is the same situation for the campaigning politicians acting their roles publicly, just as the Parises and the Britneys. That’s the way it is and–funny thing–we all play along. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The 80s are calling… or maybe the end is near
Posted on July 27, 2008
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Last minute invitation to a 70s/80s-themed party. Ok, the time period is broad enough but with such short notice the only solution at hand was to go searching online for some clues. A quick survey of the landscape helped me decide for the Grease look. To my surprise, there was no need for me to go to far to pull it off. It was a near as my closet: black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, no belt… and quite a combination of contemporary hair products to try to emulate the period stuff. Close enough.
At the party, I was surprised to see that the dominant look was the hippy style–a little off-period actually but probably more of a favorite with the crowd because of the potential good match with certain herbal accessories. After that, and the multiple women trying to get by just on leggings and shoulder pads, the Grease look was big. It seems as if all procrastinators did the same web search and then headed straight for their closets.
This may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagine a big crowd converging on the same sites, which in turn start to accumulate generous amounts of good search engine karma. Add the new relationships that those contents may establish in cyberspace with, say, Flickr photos of parties such as the one I just described, tagged with the same search terms. At some point in time, it will all become part of ”our” idea of the 80s and the 70s. In other words, representation overpowering reality, as Baudrillard would put it.
It reminds me of all the oracles heralding the end of the world by 2012 these days in the History Channel. The series of programs puts all these predictions together in a single narrative that weaves eerie coincidences on the topic from seemingly disconnected sources–the Maya calendar, Merlin… all the way to the WebBot Project.
The WebBot Project counts on an army of web crawlers (programs) that are, as the coordinators of the project claim, scanning the collective mind of the virtual world. But they are also ready to admit that at this point the program may be regurgitating the same idea. And of course, the idea itself is by now snowballing with all the chatter about the subject in the media… and by the insensitive bloggers that cannot resist the temptation to comment about it.
Listening to cockpit conversations
Posted on July 21, 2008
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Meet The Aviatrix. She flies, she blogs, and she has inadvertently done away with an old notion involving bad news and journalism. See, we use to take it for a fact of editorial judgment that thousands of airplanes taking off and landing are not “news” and only those that crash are. But not anymore, that is if you follow Cockpit Conversation and the comments of its loyal readership.
Aviatrix writes her blog anonymously for reasons of her professional live. We know she is female, pilots commercial planes and she is based somewhere in Canada. Week after week she chronicles her workdays in bits that read more like adventures, peppered with personal observations and juicy details about the inner workings of the commercial aviation system–from her quarrels with ground crews to her interactions with other pilots.
Truly addictive material for those of us who, say… regard the airline industry with a mix of awe and horror. May she continue to have safe blogging and, as the late Prof. Bob Stevenson used to say, equal number of take-offs and landings.
Political Jibjab alert
Posted on July 16, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, networked society, politics | 2 Comments
What!? The JibJab brothers are at it again, joining the political season with a new animated parody. And I had to find out about it nowhere other than the “old” media. Good old CNN, keeping me cool. The viral clip is said to be bouncing around inboxes all over the net. Not in mine, though. I don’t like what that says about my social networks. Shame on you my peeps!
So I thought I’d take the lead. But why just send you the standard clip, when we have the opportunity to work with some digital stucco here. Let my political dog do the talking… I mean, the singing:
iPhone nightmare
Posted on July 11, 2008
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Today was definitely not a good day to be facing an iPhone crisis. Any poor soul in need of attention from of Apple’s traditionally substandard customer service today had the added burden of a fierce competition. iPhone enthusiasts lined up in stores around the world, even camped overnight in front of stores–as if they were waiting for a Star War movie release or the latest Harry Potter book–trying to be among the first ones to lay hands on the device’s new 3g version.
An then, there I find myself with a dead iPhone of the old generation in my hands, unable to talk to the tech support rep or get an appointment for service at the Apple store. Sad to say it, this is not the first crash of this iPhone. We were able to survive a previous crisis with a lot of downloadings and synch-ups and one really messed up laptop as collateral damage. But this time it was for real. This is one dead iPhone with do-not-resuscitate clause and all. Really bad timing.
But if misery loves company, there seem to be plenty of it to go around today. Apparently many of the iPhone fans who lined the store fronts for hours are now suffering the early adopter’s curse. A global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers prevented the iPhones from being activated in stores as planned and left many of the new devices unusable, except for emergency calls.
Even that is more than what my closest iPhone can do right now so I can take this as mere coincidence… or a sign.
