I’ve met Gerard Braud, when I sat in a workshop he conducted some years back. He’s a reporter’s reporter, who knows the ins and outs of working ina newsroom.
Gerard has been nominated for a CNN iReport award, and I highly recommend him. If you feel inclined, watch this video of his short, succing iReport on Hurricane Isaac. Then, please take a few seconds to cast a vote for him.
Hurricane Isaac iReport - Gerard Braud
Whenever I bring up this topic it turns unpopular, for obvious reasons.
It is unpopular to say this, not just as a communicator, but as a parent. Adults have gotten so used to using television as a baby sitter –and as a back seat pacifier in the SUV — that it offends them to hear the contra view. So here are two recent reports that makes you realize that there are better ways to engage our kids.
I had brought this topic up (“TV plus children equals brain damage“) in 2005 on this blog, and it still gets a lot of hits. Now I know why. It’s an evergreen topic, simply because there will always be dissenters who think a screen could do no harm.
There has to be a downside of where we are headed. Think about this one fact: The Kaiser Family report found that young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by one hour and 17 minutes daily –up from 6:21 to 7:38. That is almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day! TIME magazine did a cover story on this in 2006. A lot has changed since then, obviously.
If you are too busy multitasking to read the report, here’s the podcast!
This is hilarious.
But it is also a sad comment on the formula into which most news has slipped.
For years most of us communicators have been saying that it’s time to break out of the structure of news –how stories are told.
But how could you blame the reporter who has joined an organizations that requires him to do it their way, which conforms with the industry standard, which is really a formula invented about half a century ago? Bucking the trend and attempting to frame a story opposed to the inverted pyramid or the sound-byte sandwich is a good way to be back on the street.
And so we have the evening news full of this.
Yes, we get a few variations of this:
So what do we do?
Something has to give. I don’t see these conversations happening in my local TV stations, and few (like Tak Hikich) asking for a different formula.
So until then, we’ll see a lot of the walkie-talkies and statutory shots, I guess.
“We’ve got the Internet here at Signal, and it’s been a miracle that we’ve been able to stay on air … “Don’t ask me how we’ve managed to do that.”
“Because this is just a dirge. I’m ready to shut it off. And I’m sure there’s plenty other about to do the same.
“Good attitude Mr. Anonymous. With a mindset like that nothing will ever happen.”
“We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.”
“It puts into the public domain every bit of information collected by public bodies that is not personal or sensitive, from alcohol-attributable mortality to years of life lost through TB. Happily, not all the data sets deal with death.”
“News Corp. needs Google more than Google needs News Corp.”
“Yet, honest Abe and HAL9000, both had one thing in common. They conveniently applied a Heuristic theory as they were, in fact, the only one calling the shots.”
Q: What might Tehran and Southwest Airlines have in common?
(No, it’s not another ‘peanuts’ joke.)
A: An intolerance with passengers text-chatting online.
Dan York, a tech strategist, author and blogger discovered to his dismay that while Southwest had begun a WiFi Zone on board some of its flights, (and is big on, and well known for using Twitter,) it cut out Skype chat.
But blocking speech at 30,000 feet is the least of our worries in a world that is increasingly intolerant of dissenting voices. It took on a new dimension in Iran this week, in the aftermath of the highly contested elections. The Associated Press reports that the government has stepped up its Internet filtering and Iranians are unable to send text messages from their phones. The Guardian had this to say:
“Mobile phone text messages were jammed, and news and social networking websites – including the Guardian, the BBC and Facebook – as well as pro-Mousavi websites were blocked or difficult to access.”
But can a government really ‘block’ people’s voices in this age of leaky media. While Twitter is being blocked in Iran, some tweets that get through publish the addresses of proxy servers that can be accessed undetected.
Someone uploaded –to Flickr! — this screen capture (left) of tweets found using the hash tag #iranelection.
And then the opposition candidate MirHossein Mousavi has been tweeting, as we know.
Despite all this other forms of technology –including jamming –are being used to circumvent the government clampdown.
Even Arab satellite TV news station Al-Arabiya was shut down.
I don’t think we will see an end to governments trying to curb dissent using intimidation and technology, but these events are unwittingly providing those who favor democratic processes good examples of how best to adapt to the next clampdown, the next autocrat, the next crisis.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: “You have handled this ordeal with a lot of political skill—so far.”
Yeah right!
Watching Rod Blagojevich self destruct on the public airways made me wonder if the former governor of Illinois was master of the cottage industry -selling sound bites to the hungry media.
If you switched between channels on Tuesday it was wall-to-wall Blagojevich. From Larry King to NBC’s Nightline, to CNBC. He even managed to say the same things to the hosts, who alternated between inquisitor, cheerleader and mesmerized host.
So here’s my question. Does the media sometimes lose its journalistic compass and get sucked in by the bad guy (the old case of OJ comes to mind, doesn’t it?) or is this an instance of masterly media handling by Blagojevic?
Speaking of the cottage industry, check who else other than the TV hosts is making hay while the ex-governor heads to Crowbar Hotel.
When I wrote about Photosynth in June 2007, I wondered what it might do for crowd-sourcing mega events, even political ones.
That day has come.
Microsoft (which now owns Photosynth) has teamed up with CNN to enable all those snapping up the moment in history, to share those images, and more importantly knit them together as one composite.
It’s not just the collaborative potential of this technology that’s mind-boggling. It gives new meaning to what we often refer to as the Big Picture, letting you look at a something in fine detail from multiple angles and distances, and in a thousand of different ways. You can zoom, tilt, look at a person or an object from its side, and often get a close-up view.
From a surveillance angle, this could be a great deterrent to anyone planning mischief. After all, any moment during the inauguration will easily be captured not by the surveillance cameras — there are some 5,000 in the area –but by the hoi polloi.
Take a look at this image of the Capitol (Sorry, but you’ll need to download a small application on your computer first to use Photosynth) and you’ll see what I mean. You could move in so close to the dome, and the windows below, you could spot the surveillance camera looking down at you!
I attended an amazing session yesterday titled “A day in the life of a TV reporter” that may have seemed like it was about news, but was really about PR. Specifically about pitching your story to a TV news team,
Gerard Braud who ran the session is a been-there-done-that kind of guy. It was not the usual how to, with five golden rules, etc. It was an exercise in every sense of the word –one of the most fast paced sessions I’ve ever attended– to put us in the hot seat of the news team.
I guess you never realize the “if it bleeds it leads” imperative in a newsroom until you work in one. Attendees were divided into four news stations, KSUK, KRUD, KNTS and KRAP (no shortage of acronym fun!) given the same stories, and asked to produce three news bulletins -an A.M. newscast, an afternoon, and the big enchilada, the evening news. But it wasn’t just that. We were assigned to roles of egocentric, tired, underpaid, ambitious and reclusive individuals who put it all together. But if they were caricatures, Braud assured us he had worked with precisely these types.
That was the whole point of this. To see how stories, pitched to a news organization made up of dysfunctional (read: human) individuals dealing with the pressures of advertising, sweeps, budget constraints and deadlines ever make it.
The day’s story line-up included murder, corruption, a weather related car wreck, a local government story and a technology piece among others. As we set off to report and package the stories for the bulletin, a story of a blogger (posing as a child to lure a pedophile) was dropped by most teams, never mind the social media hook. (Please don’t tell Shel Holtz that!) The zoo story about a giraffe giving birth, survived. But you knew that, didn’t you? Even though it meant sending a cameraman in two different directions, it was in keeping with the silly convention of a cute story wrapping up a bulletin stacked with very depressing stories..
Just when we began to get the hang of things, Braud threw a curve at all four teams. I won’t spoil it for any other group who might attend this session some day, but just say this. Hard exposive stories are the sexiest -with the exception of the giraffe.
There were some great lessons. Pitching lessons, empathy lessons, and sensitivity to the news cycle. “We tend to treat them news people as special, don’t we?” remarked Braud. “We put them on a pedestal, but don’t recognize they are human, just like us.”
These three words may not mean much today, so save it for later in your brain.
What it means is that a content provider –even your company– could produce media content that is smart enough to know what platform is being used to access that content, and then configuring the story/video/slides etc on the fly to make the experience relevant. It is not simply about resizing the content to fit the screen, but editing the story for your device.
Think about it. If you’re reading a story on Myanmar on your iPhone or via ‘smart goggles‘ you have less tolerance for detail, and may want more images and a high level description that loads fast.
When you access the same story on your laptop, you may have time and screen real estate for larger graphics, more context, maps, and other detail.
And should you be browsing on your 60-inch High def TV, you may appreciate longer length video pieces because your battery life or your broadband signal isn’t something to worry about.
The New York Times is looking into this, as Mike Zimbalist explains, here.
