Club MediaNote: September 2006

Bon Bon: This Onion Makes You Laugh, Not Cry

The Onion, America's Finest News Source.

In Mass Comm 101 this week we heard about the Penny Press Era, the New York Sun and its "Great Moon Hoax." These were a series of articles printed in 1835 that claimed that the moon was inhabited and was home to such creatures as moon buffalo and giant moon beavers. After it became painfully obvious that the paper had been making up some whoppers, the readers of the Sun largely remained loyal and the paper continued to enjoy the largest circulation of any newspaper in America up to that time. So maybe we like a good, funny story now and then and it really doesn't matter if it's true or not. (Please don't quote me on the previous sentence if you are a journalism student.)

Enter The Onion, "America's Finest News Source" according to its motto. This satirical paper, which has long delighted readers through its website, is now popping up in paper form in newsracks all over Los Angeles (and other cities too, if other cities even exist). This paper Onion forces a couple of trenchant, Club MediaNote-worthy questions: If there is an audience for comedic versions of the news on television (and there is), will the same idea translate into print? And second, will The Onion be a successful competitor to other alternative weekly newspapers? (The Onion is satirical for the first eight pages and more like a typical alternative weekly from Page 9 to the back cover.)

I can't tell you if The Onion will elbow aside the L.A. Weekly and other, presumably non-fiction, competitors. But I can tell you that, unburdened with having to report those pesky yet tedious facts, The Onion is a pretty good read.

***Back to a regular (presumably fact-driven) medianote on Monday.

Bon Bon: Technorati

[NOTE: On medianoteless days, I post a Bon Bon, which is a fun media-related thing. Today's Bon Bon, the first of the semester, follows.]

Technorati is a useful and fun search tool, or at least it has become one for me. Technorati is a frequently-updated search engine that looks only at blogs. I was reminded of it a few days ago when I wanted to see if there was any blogger buzz about the "Video Games Live" concert I attended with a large group of MC101s (and their guests) at the Hollywood Bowl. I like the handy bar chart that shows how many times a topic or person has been mentioned in searched blogs over the last couple of months.

Take a look at Technorati and start by searching for your own name. You never know when some blogger may be posting something about you.

One of the goofier stops on the MC101 downtown History Walk is this wedding chapel in the Bridal District. This MC101 student hooked up with an elderly (and apparently delusional) guy.

***I'm back from our field trips to the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Central Library. OK turnout on the first Times tour, great turnout on the second. Our walk through Downtown's historic core was interesting as always, although we weren't able to get into the Biltmore because some sort of big thing was going on there (someone said it was an American Idol taping. The library field trip went well and I'm pretty sure everyone made it home.

Tough Times at the Times

The eagle, symbol of the Los Angeles Times.

Some years ago when your blogger was a poor but pure graduate student he was an intern (after four tries!) on the View section of the mighty Los Angeles Times. It was a smartly-written feature section under the direction of Art Berman, who 20 years before had been part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watts Riots. Under Mr. Berman were two associate editors and a dozen or so full-time feature writers.

What struck me about the Times in those days was how they threw money into the editorial product. Those well-paid feature writers, for example, were responsible for only one article per week, which in the newspaper world was a very leisurely pace. They paid their freelancers (I was one of them for awhile) pretty good, too.

I remember having the freedom to really focus on doing my best A+ work. Quality, not quantity was prized (a revolutionary concept in the newspaper world).

It looks like that Times is gone. Mr. Berman died some years back and the Times was sold to the Tribune Company in 2000. One million daily circulation--which had been a source of considerable pride to the old Times-Mirror Company--is now a distant memory. And a lot of reporters and other employees had their contracts bought out, took retirement, or got laid off.

The editor and publisher of the Times have recently decided that the cuts have gone far enough, and have defied orders from the parent company to cut an additional $10 million from the paper's operating budget. The emerging fight has been covered by National Public Radio, which ran a story on Sept. 19 and a followup on Sept. 22.

YouTube Gets a Little More Mainstream

Last night, a large delegation of Mass Comm 101 students (and your humble blogger) took in the Video Games Live concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Amidst all the gamer energy, some of the MC101s found their way to the Bowl Museum where they learned a bit about the facility's star-studded history.

Warner Music has signed an agreement with YouTube, the wildly-successful website where anyone can post their homemade videos so that everyone can view them. It allows music and videos in the Warner library to be used on YouTube, free of charge. This marks the first time that a major American record company has embraced what some believe is the future of entertainment.

The deal is a recognition by Warner that the bright line between content producers and content consumers has faded. Computer-savvy young people, for example, have grown accustomed to shooting their own video, finding some music to serve as the soundtrack, and posting the result on video-sharing sites like YouTube. A Warner Music executive quoted in a Sept. 19 Los Angeles Times article about the agreement said that fans from across the world are now free to create their own videos that reinterpret music from Green Day and other groups.

According to several of my students, making and posting a video about your car--complete with heart-racing soundtrack--is fairly popular.

Spinach and Spin

I guess it really isn't easy being green.

Over the last week or so millions of Americans have entertained the odd thought that spinach might be out to kill them. Well, not the spinach exactly, but the E. coli infection that has been found in spinach recently. E. coli is pretty serious stuff: at best it will make you sick, and in some cases it could kill you.

Among other things, this creates a giant image problem for the spinach industry. Public Relations professionals--a mass media-related profession covered in Mass Comm 101--often provide advice on damage control, how a person or product whose image has been damaged can recover.

Good news, spinach fans: at least half of the MC101s who commented felt that spinach consumption will recover, although maybe not right away. One student said the spinach industry should bankroll a big-budget Popeye movie.

But Will they Sell Downloadable Raisinettes?

If I owned a movie theater, I'd be thinking real hard about playing up the parts of the moviegoing experience that cannot be easily replicated at home.

Because digitized movies make for enormous files, the film industry has been able to stand back and watch how the Internet has challenged the music industry. But now, as more and more people are signing up for cheap, fast broadband, it's time to roll out the next distribution channel for movies, the thing that comes after DVDs.

Enter "10 Items or Less," a modest-enough little film starring Morgan Freeman. It will open in theaters in December and two weeks later will be available for digital download. This perhaps represents the beginning of big changes for movie studios and, even moreso, for movie theaters.

Will the broadband surfing masses (more than 40 million U.S. homes are currently equipped with it) flock to paid movie downloads? Will these high-quality downloadable files have their encryption cracked and their content pirated? And will digital downloads prove beneficial to lower-budget character-driven films or will the digital world also be dominated by big-budget blockbusters?

***THE BOWL'S GOT GAME Here's an update on our Thursday night field trip to the Hollywood Bowl. There will be some pre-concert activities that gamers might be interested in ...

PRE-SHOW FESTIVAL

5:30pm - 8:00pm & Intermission

At the Museum Patio:

Classic Arcade Game Competitions
Compete for thousands of dollars in prizes!

Pre-Release Game Demos
Check out the latest, including Guitar Hero 2!

Costume Contest
Finalists to appear on stage!

Prize Giveaways
Enter to win!

On the Box Office Terrace:

Industry Meet & Greet
Meet your favorite game designers, composers, etc. See current list.

For more information, please visit www.videogameslive.com.

TV Networks Pinning Hopes on Telenovelas

Will Ugly Betty mark the beginning of the telenovelaization of American television?

Today's medianote comes from a recent National Public Radio story about English-language telenovelas that are hitting the American airwaves this month. The story does a good job of pointing out that Hollywood is perfectly willing to adapt everything from story lines to production techniques from Latin America, India and elsewhere.

Most of the conversation centered around Ugly Betty, which will debut on ABC on Sept. 28. Several students felt that the series may briefly become popular because of its novelty, but that ultimately telenovelas will not become as huge a TV trend as reality shows.

***HAPPY HUNDREDTH This is my 100th posting to Club Medianote. Doing this blog has been interesting and fun. I'm ready for more.

We Split Over the Digital Divide

Does Internet access depend (at least somewhat) on your race, ethnicity, or social class? Apparently, the answer is still yes, according to a report recently released by the National Center for Education Statistics. Some of the other major points mentioned in a Sept. 5 Associated Press article entitled "Digital Divide Still Separates Students" include:

•There is no longer an online gender gap among American children; girls are as likely to be online as boys,

•Public school students are more likely to use computers and the Internet than private school students,

•Household income and parents' educational attainment are both positively correlated with Internet access in the home; two-parent households are more likely to have Internet access at home than one-parent households.

The big question for the MC101s was "Does it matter?" Is it really true that children with Internet access in the home have a significant advantage in life?

***SOLD OUT I sold the last of the Hollywood Bowl tickets for our Sept. 21 field trip today. You can buy tickets near our section directly from the Bowl for $7 or you can simply set your sights on another Mass Comm 101 field trip. Remember, all of the field trips are optional and extra credit.

Was It OK to Fictionalize "Path to 9/11"?

Has ABC injected itself into this fall's political campaign? And will viewers take ABC's "Path to 9/11" as a completely factual account?

ABC television has created a two-night television movie that seeks to recreate the events that led up to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The major facts are, well, factual and the movie portrays real politicians and other government officials who had something to do with the web of decisions that led to that fateful day.

But it's a movie and like just about every movie I can think of there is some dramatization and fictionalization. And now some of those who were put into imagined conversations are claiming that they have been unfairly defamed and that this movie dangerously mixes fictionalized entertainment with the public's perception of a real event--a huge and defining event--in American history.

We listened to a National Public Radio story about the controversy before talking about the ABC movie. What I'd like to know--and I hope there is a scholar who researches this--is how much average Americans will take this movie to be the actual truth about the events leading up to Sept. 11, 2001. (One student said ABC should at least run a disclaimer to remind viewers that while the movie has some truth in it, it is nevertheless a fictionalized account.)

Are iPods the Lecture Halls of the Future?

Is it a good idea to give iPods to students? Will it enhance, or devalue, higher education?

Today's medianote was about a plan at South Kent College in Dover, England to give iPods to students and make lectures available in MP3 format for download. My questions to the two MC101 classes that met on Friday essentially boiled down to: Is this a good idea? What other than recorded lectures could be put on an iPod that would enrich the college experience?

There were some good, insightful comments in the class. One student pointed out that there will be students who would use their academic iPods constructively, while others would use them only for entertainment. Another student wondered if students would have to pay for their iPods (or other MP3 players) if they became a generally-used educational tool. And yet another student wondered if this would widen the digital divide, since there are some students who can't just go out and pay $300 for an iPod. You would have some who could afford to listen to recordings of recent lectures, and others who might be shut out. One other idea that I thought was interesting: A student asked, might there be some way that iPods could replace textbooks?