BARBS

Here are a few things I am wondering about after the news events of this week:

1. If (when?) most (all?) journalists are soon to be come independent “backpack” practitioners — you’ve got all the tools, you’re on your own, good luck! — who will rescue those who, either through youth, inexperience, stupidity, or sheer bad luck, find themselves under arrest and in big trouble? What if, say, they not only don’t work for an actual organization with actual resources and support systems; but also don’t happen to work for a guy who happens to know the former President of the United States? What then? Say what you will about (mostly) corporate-owned “old media” companies (I know I certainly do); they do have systems in place for preventing what happened to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, and when it does happen, they have a bunch of back channels for protecting their people and getting them home safely (yes, I know there are exceptions; see, e.g., Daniel Pearl).

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Brian Stelter has written two excellent pieces for today’s New York Times, and whether he intended them to be read as a pair I don’t know, but together they paint quite a picture of the state of foreign news coverage.

The first article described the real-time criticism on Twitter of CNN’s (and other cablers’) relative lack of live news coverage of the weekend’s protests in Iran. “The channels largely took the weekend off as Tehran exploded in protests after Iran’s presidential election,” reads Stelter’s lede graf, and that led “untold thousands” to use the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations.

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Here’s how Bernard Lunn, COO at ReadWriteWeb, answers his own question in an interesting blog post:

Yes, they would have.

We don’t need to protect journalism with public money or grants. The greater social good will be delivered by thousands of people on the ground reporting what is happening. That massive flow will be analyzed and edited (”curated”) by a small number of experts who are motivated and trained to uncover the truth.

It won’t be perfect. But the current system isn’t perfect either. It is fair to say, though, that scumbags won’t rest any easier. They will still be exposed.

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That’s the title of an interesting article that popped into my Google Reader today, one that tackles a topic I’ve been talking about a lot lately, but haven’t articulated quite as well as Steve Rosenbaum does. Curation, he says, is the new role of media professionals:

The old model was “one to many”  (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.

[snip]

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.

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A long post today, and I’m afraid I have to start off with a few disappointments:

Saw the film “Waltz With Bashir” yesterday. Borrrrrrrrrring. Got in a good 30-minute snooze, in fact. The animation is pretty awesome, though.

Watched the debut of “Sober House” on Thursday night. Also borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. As has been previously noted, I am a “Celebrity Rehab” addict, so I had high hopes for this latest spinoff from Dr. Drew. But it was thin gruel. I mean, come on people, an entire show spent agonizing over whether Steven, who showed up to the sober house high on heroin with needles and drug residue in his pants pockets, should be kicked out? Answer: YES. Let’s move on.

In fact, let’s move on to Miami Beach, where Maureen Dowd managed to get the New York Times to send her on a junket to the new Canyon Ranch. I am trying to decide whether I have ever in my life read a more absurd piece of “journalism,” not to mention one that was given lots of space and ink. The apparent rationale for Dowd’s visit with her friend “Alessandra,” (gee, I wonder which Alessandra that could be…) was to dig down and explore whether “spa guilt” is running rampant at a time “when America has undergone a transformation into a place where vain fripperies and vulgar extravagances are met with a gimlet eye.”

To help answer this question, Alessandra puts herself through a $500 “body ritual” that she reports made her feel “like a fat Mafioso being serviced by Thai hookers.” Dowd herself enjoyed the “gorgeous shimmering mosaic designs, gentle lighting, sumptuous rooms, a sybaritic spa,” and the “delicious (if suspiciously salty-tasting) food, and raspberry-vodka-and-hibiscus-tea martinis.” She goes to a lecture called “Let Me See Your Tongue,” and confesses that, during meditation class, she finds herself reflecting on how she and Alessandra can go AWOL from the spa and take in some of Miami’s “sparkle.”

The answer, as it turns out, is that Dowd calls “the only person I knew in Miami” — who just so happens to be Police Chief John Timoney (who, you may recall, is not exactly a big fan of civil liberties and has a son who was busted for trying to buy 400 pounds of pot).

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Drumroll please: here’s the first video I have shot, edited, narrated, and posted all by my little old-media self; it’s about my wonderful lobby attendant William Miller. I’d like to thank The Academy, as well as Michael Rosenblum and his wife Lisa, who taught me how to do this during CUNY J-School’s January Academy.

This is freakin’ hilarious! Hat tip to Brian Williams for blogging about this Onion News Network spoof of Apple’s latest innovation: a new laptop with no keyboard!

From James Poniewozic’s “Mediapocalypse Now” article, and I think he’s right on:

Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they’ll need to see their new-media “problems” as part of the solution. Internet users don’t hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer–and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.

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Good discussion of this topic over at BuzzMachine.com. Jarvis makes what I think is a perfectly concise and concisely perfect argument for what is often called “convergence” in journalism education:

Media is no longer broken into separate means of presentation and delivery; they are all mixed in together online (as I tell journalism students, while hacks in my era had to decide among media once for a career, now they must make that decision each time they go to gather and tell a story).

Right. So let’s teach students how to do each and all means of presentation and delivery, as well as how to judge which media are best for gathering and telling any given story. Let’s not only not make students choose a media “major,” let’s explain why they’re better off if they don’t copy the hacks of Jarvis’s (and my) era.

Michael Rosenblum has a provocative blog entry today:

What the web did was to take away the barriers to entry. To make the ‘gold’  of the NY Times or NBC’s FCC license as common as lead. Now, anyone, any time, and for no cost, could get into 2 billion homes. For free. So where does value suddenly reside? In the content.

Thus, he says, it makes no sense that, when the inevitable budget cuts come in the media, the first to be cut are those who actually create the content. Read the entire entry here.