Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Apr 15
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Ouch. File this one under the "We feel your pain, freres." The staff at Le Monde went on strike rather than accept cutbacks of more than 25%; the paper didn’t come out today, which says to me that these folks were serious. Now, I know that workers in France are accustomed to much greater levels [...] [...more]
Ouch.
File this one under the "We feel your pain, freres."
The staff at Le Monde went on strike rather than accept cutbacks of more than 25%; the paper didn’t come out today, which says to me that these folks were serious. Now, I know that workers in France are accustomed to much greater levels of job security than workers here in the U.S., which may be responsible for the outraged reaction. Even so, something in me appreciates that the journalists there are at least motivated enough to make the effort to protest the cuts.
Here’s a snip from Reuters:
Le Monde’s losses reached 20m euros ($31.64m) in 2007 after a loss of
14.3m euros in 2006. It has accumulated 150m euros in debt and chief
executive Eric Fottorino says drastic restructuring is needed.
The paper’s journalists, considered among the aristocracy of the French
daily press, say they do not dispute the need to take measures to
respond to the problems confronting newspapers everywhere but they say
the drastic cuts threaten the paper.
They say management has failed to address chronic problems such as the
newspaper’s archaic distribution system, which can leave readers
outside Paris struggling to find the daily many hours after it has
appeared in Paris. Le Monde’s main rivals, the conservative Le Figaro
and the leftwing Liberation have both struggled with similar problems
and Liberation went through a brutal restructuring of its own last year.
So many papers in the U.S. have already gone through these kinds of devastating staff cutbacks; the conventional wisdom these days in the shellshocked newsrooms is that every newspaper reporter and editor now sucking oxygen is nothing more than a dead man walking. Friends still working (albeit part-time) in newsrooms talk about seeing the "thousand-yard stare" in their colleagues’ eyes; that people are doing there jobs and struggling through the days more out of a sense of duty than of hope. That resignation has set in, and many journalists are just going through the motions, really.
Meanwhile, today the effects of the internet were also felt right here in L.A. – New Line Cinema, which only a few years ago was riding high on the mountains of cash being brought in by the Lord of the Rings franchise, has had 450 jobs cut. The mini-major studio hit a losing skid after the LOTR franchise, and its efforts to jump-start a new cash cow failed dramatically, as The Golden Compass tanked. BTW – that may have been my least-favorite movie of the last year – it felt so freaking awful, that I was enraged when leaving the Arclight. Out of fear & greed, the New Line dingbats had removed everything that made the stories interesting or compelling and released a christawful pseudo-spectacular that had lots of big sweeping shots of CGI creatures running across dramatic landscapes, but no real story that made people care about what was flickering on the screen.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. The crisis hitting newspapers and the crisis hitting the movies is the same one. The roots lie deep in Corporate America’s takeover of the media in the last 30 years, and the way that focus groups, test marketing and escalating budgets have combined to take all the life, all the humanity out of most of the media.
Has nobody there read the Cluetrain Manifesto? Fewer and fewer of us will stand to be treated like thin-sliced demographic profiles; Corporate insistence on clinging to their charts, graphs, spreadsheets and analyses are at the heart of why people keep turning off, in search of authenticity…
Apr 15
Posted: under Uncategorized.
I was wondering what Sony would try to do to compete with the great little Canon HD “crash-cam” that blew everyone’s minds last year. They already loosed a swarm of cameras around Christmas, hoping to scarf up some market share then – which may not have been a bad strategy, seeing as how the economy [...] [...more]
I was wondering what Sony would try to do to compete with the great little Canon HD “crash-cam” that blew everyone’s minds last year. They already loosed a swarm of cameras around Christmas, hoping to scarf up some market share then – which may not have been a bad strategy, seeing as how the economy has soured so dramatically in the last few months.
Anyway – at NAB in Vegas, they came correct with some nice prosumer cameras that look promising to the aspiring DIY documentarian. Best of all, they don’t capture in that hinky proprietary Canon codec that has caused me so damn many problems in the post on my long-delayed short film.
Here’s a shot of the PMW-EX3, which, unlike so many other Sony HD cams, has interchangeable lenses. This dissipates the advantage that Canon had in this market space, as its H1 used to be the camera of choice, since you could swap out wide-angles for big zooms, rather than screwing in some half-assed adaptor to get good in-car video of your subject driving and talking…
Apr 07
Posted: under journalism, Politix, Web/Tech.
Where has Hillary really been, and under what circumstance? Check out this use of the Google map-customization features… In the wake of the "Platoon coming into a hot LZ" story that Hillary floated last week – and that rose up to bite her in the ass, and make her a reliable butt of jokes for [...] [...more]
Where has Hillary really been, and under what circumstance? Check out this use of the Google map-customization features…
In the wake of the "Platoon coming into a hot LZ" story that Hillary floated last week – and that rose up to bite her in the ass, and make her a reliable butt of jokes for a few news cycles – comes this bit of multimedia storytelling.
It kinda threw me for a loop, at first – I was trying to see what message it was that the map was trying to tell me. And then, I realized that this was a more sophisticated use of the web than the traditional use of infographics, that normally serve to cram complex information at you in as short a time as possible.
No, this is use of multimedia that is far more demanding – it demands that you have the time, patience and attention to really browse through all the data collected here, and that you arrive at a conclusion on your own (should you so wish).
And also, should you also not wish. Because if you were only interested in a few segments of the story (such as, what the hell was Hillary doing in Dakar? GIving away a trophy to some dust-caked winner of the Paris-to-Dakar rally?) – well then, you can just skim & browse over the map and pick out the bits of information that you are interested in and that are relevant to you. A more trenchant hypothetical would be if you’re a foreign minister of one of these countries, and you want to see how long it’s been since the Clintons swung by on an official visit.
Anyway – brilliant use of non-linear storytelling techniques, and the possibilities offered by the web. This is an infographic that works on a lot of levels, from the most sophisticated, to the most casual interest. And yeah, it kinda sucks you in after a bit – you want to keep mousing over all the points and trying to imagine from the sparse description what the hell was going on during that visit back in the ’90s.
Apr 02
Posted: under Uncategorized.
CBS stations start to jettison longtime staffers as audiences dissolve There are many newspaper editors, reporters and publishers either feeling schadenfreude or shaking their heads in sad sympathy at this news… While local news stations remained profitable, ratings for evening and late newscasts dropped in 2007 for the second year in a row, according to [...] [...more]
CBS stations start to jettison longtime staffers as audiences dissolve
There are many newspaper editors, reporters and publishers either feeling schadenfreude or shaking their heads in sad sympathy at this news…
While local news stations
remained profitable, ratings for evening and late newscasts dropped in
2007 for the second year in a row, according to the 2008 State of the
News Media report. Morning news shows held firm.
Still, half of the nation’s news directors reported increasing their
budgets last year, according to the study. Why? Because newsrooms are
the economic engine of a local TV station, contributing roughly 42
percent of station’s revenue, according to a national survey of news
directors.
“But they’re fighting a continued fragmentation of the market,”
Papper said. “Just as newspapers have found out, there are a lot more
places to go to get news.”
Here in LA, two of the familiar faces are getting purged, along with reporters that I used to know, back when we were all stuck covering the O.J. Simpson circus. Ann Martin and Jennifer 
Sabih used to hang out in the parking lot behind the Hall of Justice, passing the endless hours while Judge Ito had shut off the video feed, trying in vain to come up with some other topic of conversation than that damn trial. Meanwhile, the perpetually puzzled foreign news reporters would be chainsmoking and sneaking sips of whatever christawful rotgut they had hidden in the increasingly battered plastic Carl’s Jr. cup.
Apparently, “The Tiffany Network” is following the wrongheaded lead of way too many newspapers, slashing the already skeleton news staff to preserve their 20% profit margins. I’m not a fan of local TV news broadcasts (the “bleed = lead” strategy is one of the philosophies that has really contributed to the U.S.’s downward spiral these last 20 years), but an even smaller staff means an even weaker product, fewer viewers, and more cuts inevitably to come.
It’s been a rough few days at many of the Eye’s local news affils. Last
week stations in Miami, Denver, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Sacramento,
Pittsburgh, Dallas and Philadelphia all sustained layoffs, with about
15 jobs shed in each market. Boston was the worst hit, with about 20
cuts. There could be more to come, as several employees are
contemplating buyout packages.
I’ve been telling my students/trainees these last few months that TV has been looking down its nose at newspapers for quite a while now, secure in their position as the most desireable destination for the advertising dollar. No longer. When the internet wave really starts to hit TV news, it is going to be even uglier than it was in newspapers, since, as the Variety story points out, some of these TV talking heads pull in massive salaries that can translate into some serious bottom-line savings.
Viz:
CBS News has been underperforming since not long after Katie Couric was hired 18 months ago at a salary of $15 million a year.
she has been trailing both NBC and ABC evening
newcasts in the ratings by a wide margin. CBS Corp.’s share price has
been down 19 percent so far this year.
