Monthly Archives: March 2009

Picking up on my earlier thread of Blog Posts You Don’t Want to Read, this post is going to explain everything about the news industry, why it sucks, and why TV news could be the tool of Satan.

It has to do with the Gatekeeper Paradox I talked about in my last post. The big secret of the media is the same as the big secret of the music industry: The Media is perfectly willing to abdicate its editorial responsibility and just give you what you want. If the ratings go up during disaster coverage, they’ll feed you more disaster coverage. Do you click on every tech story you see with Apple in the headline? Because we can write lots more of those! If the ratings show that you like watching the news read by blonde white women and white men with salt-and-pepper gray hair, then imagine how high the network’s ratings can go if EVERY anchor matched those descriptions!

Fox News consumers like blondes, celebrity news, and human interest stories. So the web site ingeniously added a “Features and Faces” module, which at any given moment looks much like the image above and with the same ratio of blondes. Weird, I know.

Think CNN is any better? Peruse their latest “news” headlines, shown above.

You see where I’m going with this. The news judgment and taste of the average American is simply not good enough to trust a company’s news direction with. And yet almost every news organization is guilty of it.

It’s killing the media, it’s killing our brain cells, and I think it may one day end up helping to kill any chance of American bipartisanship and rational government. The reason being that the Internet and the cable news channels are giving us opportunities to tribe it up like never before. We are choosing our news sources based on what we agree with. Conservatives never need be exposed to a liberal idea without Hannity or O’Reilly ripping it apart like a delicate strawman. Liberals have their own information enclaves. The only recent good news is that we’re at least united against a common enemy: the Wall Street jocks who were clearly tribing it up a bit too much with the broad-shouldered clowns on CNBC’s Fast Money.

And we’re rewarding these news organizations for feeding us reinforcing ideas. Do you REALLY think everyone at Fox News is a conservative? The writers, producers, executives, assignment editors? Of course not, but they give their audience the news and the personalities their audience expects and wants.

Which brings us to the real villain: Analytics. Ratings, clicks, unique visitors, etc. As an editor, it’s super easy to collect data on what your audience wants, and to craft your content around what will be popular. And if the audience responds appropriately with higher ratings/clicks, it’s easy to get sucked into a feedback loop. I should point out that audience segmenting and pandering is great for companies’ bottom lines, so editors will probably always be pushed in this direction. It lets news orgs build rabidly loyal followings, increase user engagement (and enragement!), and thereby sell more ads.

But maybe that shouldn’t be the job of the news editor/reporter/producer.

So here’s my theory/solution: Just like editorial departments are walled off from their advertising departments, the media and the public might be well served by editorial departments that are walled off from analytics as well. Let the editors and reporters report the news according to their own news judgment and let the audience-development guys worry about making sure people are watching/reading. Let’s get a little more ivory tower back in the media and a little less man-on-the-street.

Consumers: It’s easy to spot when a news organization is pandering to you (hint: stories about kittens or dogs are a dead giveaway). Don’t encourage that kind of activity by supporting it with your clicks/eyeballs. Find news outlets that work independently, and if you find yourself nodding along with the news too much, go find a news source that pisses you off a little more often. It’s good for you.

Someone help me out with this: What is it about plane travel that messes with our brains? I flew from NY to Austin to NY to Austin to NY in the past 10 days, and it feels like those 10 days lasted years and years. Lunch in Austin yesterday feels like it was a week ago. Lunch in NY on Friday feels like a month ago. Lunch in Austin last monday feels like a whole lifetime ago. Why is that?

It’s as if my subconscious knows that great distances were traveled too quickly, and compensates for it by screwing with my perception of the elapsed time. Or maybe the change in weather, accents, and manners is so great between Texas and New York that my brain has to add a buffer so I don’t go into shock. :-)

It’s strange, because the actual process of traveling is so much like a day at the office, except I sit in a chair in one place and I stand up from the same chair in another place a few hours later. Only I’m exhausted, dehydrated, and have a distorted perception of time after sitting on a plane. Why does my brain and body treat that whole sitting-in-a-chair process like it’s a big deal? Maybe those of you who travel for a living (I’m looking at you, Jon) can tell me whether you ever get used to that post-flight feeling. Do you still get it if you fly first class?

This post was brought to you by jetlag. I’ll write a recap of my Austin adventures when my brain starts working again.

Super quick post (I’m at work):

If you’re one of the Mormons who are upset over the upcoming depiction of sacred temple ceremonies in Big Love, please remember that while you have commited to keep the temple ceremonies to yourself, HBO hasn’t. It isn’t bound by any law to respect our religious convictions, only by good taste. And, being a media company, HBO is not required to have good taste, and will probably be more successful as a media company if it doesn’t. (And will be even MORE successful if you drive up ratings with loud protesting and a boycott).

If our missionaries are doing their jobs, the public will be curious about what we do in our temples. That’s a good thing, even if we’d rather they turn to us for explanations instead of HBO or the web.

It’s fine for us to be offended by it, and hopefully HBO treats the scene with respect instead of sensationalizing things. But while we’re offended, let’s appreciate that we live in a country with both freedom of religion and freedom of expression. We are free to worship how we want, HBO is free to depict it how they want, and I’m free to blog about it. And now you’re free to comment!

I just want to extend a heartfelt congratulations to the marketing genius that invented the term “price point.” Every day I hear marketers and PR people talk about “price points,” and sometimes journalists fall into the trap of using the psuedo business term, too. “The new line of digital cameras will come in at a price point of $299″; “We’re still trying to figure out the right price point before we launch the iPhone app”; “Our main competitive advantage is a lower price point than competing USB toothbrushes.”

Why it bugs me: Price point = Price. I’m betting back in the 1900s some 21-year-old PR intern probably figured out that he’d score a job offer if he sounded more professional than the other interns in his program, so he started making up professionalisms for already adequate words. I bet it totally worked.

Webster defines “pricepoint” (one word) as: “the standard price set by the manufacturer for a product.” In other words, the MSRP. In still other words, the price. The other online dictionaries give similarly valid-seeming-until-you-think-about-them definitions.

But wait! The term’s provenance gets even more absurd when you go to Wikipedia, where someone wrote a whole article on an alternate definition of “price point”–the article involves microeconomics and a very homemade graph. My first thought was “Wow, PR guys and marketers have been wrongly using the term this whole time.” Only I followed up that thought with a Google search, and didn’t see any other instances of it being used this way. Then I looked at the comments for the Wikipedia page and saw this gem:

“This article desperately needs at least one reference. Otherwise, there’s nothing on which to even criticize it and it reads like speculation. Also, the term “price point” in more common use doesn’t really have this same meaning, near as I can figure.”

So this non-word has been concocted on two separate occasions! Congratulations to both of the concocters on a job well done.

If you haven’t seen this week’s episode, don’t read this post. Actually, nevermind. I’m not really giving anything away that you wouldn’t have been able to guess.

The episode set up what I hope is NOT the big crisis of the next few episodes: the love square of Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet. Because honestly, who cares anymore? They’ve all been with each other, usually for only an episode or three, and then something comes between them and they go back to smoldering. We’ve never had a chance to invest ourselves in the success/failure of any of those relationships because they’re all so short and flip-floppy. Does Kate love Jack? Sawyer? Charlie? 5 years in, we still don’t know, and I’m bored with the writers telling me I should care when there are so many more interesting things going on.