Archive for May, 2007
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Virginia Tech: Cover-up orCYA?
May 22, 2007
The postmortems and spin begins, as predicted here. With 203 additional rounds of live ammunition found (and 32 people dead or dying), Virginia State Police Superintendent William Flaherty told an investigative panel he&;s &;convinced lives were saved because of a rapid response to the classroom building by Virginia Tech and Blacksburg police with tactical and medical expertise who were already investigating an earlier shooting at a campus dormitory.&;
Interesting definition of the word &;rapid&;; this timeline shows at least 2 1/2 hours between the shootings, during which Cho was thoughtfully express-mailing his package to MSNBC.
Posted in NBC-news, virginia-tech | Leave a Comment &;
Rudy Giuliani vs. Paris Hilton: Who&;s a BetterMarilyn?
May 21, 2007
Is Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani finally more popular than Paris Hilton? Some 70 TV segments mentioned Paris this week, according to CNN&;s Reliable Sources, but 141 mentioned Rudolph Giuliani.
More importantly, which one makes a better Marilyn Monroe? (see photos below.) Paris, of course, is convinced it&;s her. “There’s nobody in the world like me,” she told the UK’s Sunday Times last year. “I think every decade has an iconic blonde — like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana — and right now, I’m that icon.”
Certainly bald Rudy can&;t win on the blonde front without a wig. But judging by Paris&; horrendous version of &;Happy Birthday Mr. Hefner&; channeling Marilyn singing to JFK, he may well be a better performer.
Posted in marilyn-monroe, Paris-Hilton, Politics, rudolph-giuliani, Sex and Society | Leave a Comment &;
Paris Hilton NotAppealing
May 18, 2007
I bet the Associated Press wishes it could write that sentence, after the AP&;s noble but failed attempt not to cover the madcap heiress for a whole week.
No, Paris is as appealing as ever.
What she&;s not appealing is her sentence for drunken driving. And what&;s also not appealing are what car accidents caused by drunken driving look like.
Posted in AP, associated-press, drunken-driving, Paris-Hilton | 4 Comments &;
Journalism&;s Problems: Sampling the ConventionalWisdom
May 17, 2007
The Los Angeles Times has been running a long and windy &;dust-up&; on the state of journalism today.
It&;s debated/written by two professors (Robert W. McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee) and reads like it. And it&;s preaching to the choir, newspaper readers, rather than the unchurched, the thousands who&;ve abandoned newspapers lately.
McChesney illustrates some issues well, describing &;the sharp decline over the past two decades in the number of working journalists covering stories at the local level, and the sharp decline in the number of journalists over the same period covering the world for U.S. news media.&;
&;This contributes to a journalism where we are more dependent upon those in power to tell us what is happening, and our journalists have become more inclined to accept what they say at face value.&; Then there&;s &;the commercialization of news and the softening of news standards to include celebrity fluff and trivia. This gives the illusion of controversy while never antagonizing anyone in power.&;
Yup&;every TV channel has a &;trouble shooter&; who takes on dirty restaurants and angry opticians, but never McDonald&;s or Exxon. But someone has to pay to put on the news, and if it&;s not the angry taxpayers as in Britain, it&;s McDonald&;s and Exxon.
Both men have some interesting insights, but like most journalists, they&;re long on asking questions, short on answers.
Posted in death-of-newspapers, Journalism, newspapers | Leave a Comment &;
USA Today ReadsMMMQ
May 16, 2007
Welcome USA Today readers! Commentary on Amanda Beard is below, but stick around for our fresh commentary on media issues du jour.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
Microsoft Presents Its BestFace
May 16, 2007
WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is a hard-core technology event. The attendees are mostly engineers from hardware companies (and a few freelance geeks) building devices around Microsoft products like the Vista operating system, which Bill Gates says has sold 40 million copies. (I&;m still waiting for my promised free Vista upgrade from HP 5 months after I bought my new PC; HP customer service is right down there with Dell.)
I missed most of Gates&; presentation, but I did catch one by one of Microsoft&;s unsettlingly young and poised product managers. He was talking about Rally, which Mary Jo Foley calls &;a set of networking protocols and licenses designed to simplify consumers&;abilities to connect peripherals to Windows Vista and to each other.&;
The presenter was a techie, presenting to a techie audience&;yet he took the time to create and go through a slide explaining arcane Rally terms and acronyms like Windows Connect Now (WCN) and Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS).
In our media training program, we call this &;when in doubt, spell it out.&; Too often, speakers cannot resist the urge to do an &;information dump&; on their audience, who won&;t understand the jargon, acronyms or internal Kool-Aid that company spokespeople have been drinking. And when an audience doesn&;t understand, they won&;t ask for clarification; who wants to lose face?
So kudos to Microsoft for understanding this and enhancing communications with their target audience. But don&;t rest on your laurels: twenty thirty years of media training has almost brought forth a kindler, gentler Bill 2.0.
Posted in bill-gates, Media Training, Microsoft, Microsoft-Rally, Microsoft-Vista, technology-journalism, WinHEC | Leave a Comment &;
Advertisement forMyself
May 14, 2007
The Los Angeles Press Club has announced the 2007 Journalism Awards finalists. My LA Times Magazine West story about Rodney King videographer George Holliday, The Other Beating, was named a finalist in the feature story competition.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
Old White Men Deliver NewsBest
May 14, 2007
The MSM keeps clucking about Katie Couric&;s (and that of CBS News) failure to win the evening news ratings race. In fact, America&;s sweetheart is mired in third place.
Linda Mason, CBS News senior VP of standards and special projects, said on CBS&; Public Eye site that the public &;seems to prefer the news from white guys, and now that Charlie&;s (Gibson&;s) doing so well, from older white guys. I guess they want the reassurance of a Walter Cronkite.&;
In February, I attended a lecture where Anderson Cooper of CNN interviewed Walter Cronkite, who, yes, is still alive and still pretty lucid. While it is reassuring to have someone like Cronkite (who doesn&;t know who Paris Hilton is) deliver the news, it&;s Cronkite&;s experience jumping out of planes in Normandy and Cooper&;s street reporting in New Orleans that give them gravitas and credibility, not their white hair and male chromosome set.
Couric&;s brand of perky doesn&;t play. I&;m not sure who the major networks are fighting over on the national news; I can&;t remember the last time I made &;an appointment&; to watch it. Is it still on at 6:30PM?
Posted in Anderson-Cooper, CBS, CBS-NEWS, CNN, Journalism, Katie-Couric, Television, Walter-Cronkite | Leave a Comment &;
Joe Francis: Everybody WantsYou
May 12, 2007
Hey Joe&;in the words of the immortal Billy Squier, &;everybody wants you.&; Unfortunately, &;everybody&; isn&;t just tipsy college girls hoping for a Girls Gone Wild t-shirt, or even Miss Florida and Miss Nevada. Instead, it&;s prosecutors in Florida and Nevada that want Joe&;after he&;s done with his 35 days of contempt of court in the Sunshine State.
Florida claims there are unresolved criminal complaints from Panama Beach about Girls Gone Wild exploiting underage minors (the same stuff that put Joe in jail on civil contempt charges) while a federal prosecuter wants Joe on tax evasion issues in Nevada. This just in&;the Feds in Nevada get first crack!
When their obligations to various judiciary bodies are over, perhaps Joe and Paris should get back together and claim their rightful crown as America&;s Most Hated Couple.
Posted in Joe Francis, Paris-Hilton, Sex and Society, Television | 2 Comments &;
Lou Dobbs BringsEdge
May 11, 2007
So says Steve Friedman, producer of the The CBS Morning Show, now third in a three-horse morning show race, in an NPR segment. Putting aside the question of how much &;edge&; viewers of the Charmin-soft morning shows can really handle, let&;s hope that Lou Dobbs, who says he&;s in the vanguard of &;opinion anchors&; like Olbermann and O&;Reilly, doesn&;t bring as much edge to CBS as Don Imus and Janet Jackson.
Posted in bill-oreilly, CBS, Imus, Janet-Jackson, keith-olbermann, Lou-dobbs | Leave a Comment &;
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