BuzzMachine

40 over 40. Add Graver to the list.

The Times of London gets a video showing Atta et al having a good laugh before they recorded their murderous wills.

At the Picnic in Amsterdam — which, sadly, I couldn’t attend because of various duties — Matt Locke, head of innovation at BBC Future Media and Technology, sings sweetly to this pew in the choir about the real structure of media. The Guardian’s Mark Sweney blogs it:

The good news is that the BBC turned out to be the most commonly referenced big brand [in blogs].

The bad news is that just 0.3% of the millions of blog posts analysed referred to the BBC.

What does this all mean? It means that what the BBC does, creating programmes, is just a tiny ‘atom’ in the new media world and how on earth can you grow that 0.3%?

The likes of YouTube and blogs equal cheap forms of production of content.

You can’t ‘own’ all the relationships audiences have in the web world so the best plan is to ‘atomise’ content, disintegrate, to ‘explode’ into places where they are.

Amen, brother. I said sometime ago that media is not about owning content or distribution. It is about relationships. And Locke is quite right: relationships are also not something to be owned. Sweney continues:

Here we go, he has four rules/lessons/options for large media companies, this ought to be interesting. Hmmm, I seem to have come out of it with 5 - perhaps one is an example.

1. The BBC is not making programmes it is making ‘atoms’, tiny elements going everywhere in the digital landscape. The controversial Creative Archive is an attempt to “unlock” elements, “atomise the archive”.

2. Decentralising production. BBC Backstage project. Not to get too techy but this seems to be where clever people are allowed to create applications. One chappy created a system that tailored the BBC news output into “moods” - good or bad - by scanning for key words such as ‘festival’. 90 have been built in the last year and some might get commissioned.

3. Host successful sites and communities and don’t try and re-invent the wheel by doing a “me too” MySpace or YouTube. They are already out there so provide content and engage with them. . . .

4. Be an aggregator. Like the MTV guy said yesterday TV channels can be aggregators. Example: Radio 1 site pulling in content that refers to the radio brand from the likes of Flickr and YouTube. . . .

5. Don’t panic. Linear TV is not disappearing. Broadcasters just need to take different strategies and roles in different media. Example: Creating a virtual festival complete with streaming video footage within Second Life of an event held in the real world.

I had coffee this week with Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of global news and world service, just to compare notes. I come away from encounters with the BBC impressed that even with its gargantuan size and leaden history, culture, and structure, it is still able to innovate and explode assumptions. Contrast this with the talk among American newspaper companies in a post I’ll put up shortly. You won’t hear them talking in such blunt terms about the fundamental change in media.

At the VON conference, I told about recording a CBS Evening News free-speech segment and Steve Garfield lamented that CBS was inviting selected people to record these pieces rather than asking for submissions from the public. I suggested he didn’t need to wait until CBS called. Start your own site: Say it Katie. And that’s just what he did. Go to Blip.TV, submit your video, and tag it SayItToKatie. Jonny Goldstein has the first one up, a video about such videos. I suggest you now make videos about any topic in the news, especially topics that are getting bad or insufficient coverage. Maybe we can convince CBS to start airing the stuff we make. ABCNews.com did.

: Speaking of the ABCNews.com segment, Fred Graver — who knows whereof he produces — scolded me and Steve Safran for chiding ABC for overproducing the segment: “I call it “produced.” Steve, did you WANT to look at Jeff’s talking head for a whole three minutes? Didn’t you appreciate the eyecandy?”

Leo Laporte wants to change the name of “podcasts” to “netcasts” because “pod” makes people think they need an iPod. I’m afraid that once names stick, they stick. How many times have we heard people wish for different names than “blog,” “blogosphere,” “RSS,” “HTML,” and all that. When you think about it, “elevator” is a silly and rather haughty word; “lift” is much better. But here we elevate. We blog. We podcast.

Here’s a good example of how TV is changing.

I got an email from the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric asking me to tape one of those “free speech” segments they’ve been airing. I wrote a script and went back and forth on it a bit. I mentioned Dan Rather. That made someone nervous. Then they said it was OK. And so I included him in my final script — after another clearance. And I recorded it. I’m not sure, given the Rather reference, whether it will ever air. I’ll let you know.

From a media perspective, what hit me was the experience of taping the segment. I’ve done many things like this before, but this time, I counted how many people were involved in getting me on tape: seven producers, camera people, sound people, teleprompter people — plus God know how many more producers and editors who took it then.

At home, I took the exact same script and with some photos to illustrate my points and produced the segment alone, in my den, on two programs: iMovie and VideoCue, a Mac competitor to Visual Communicator, which gives you a teleprompter and the ability to drag-and-drop graphics, lower thirds, photos, audio, or video onto your script so the’re all recorded along with you (no need for editing). I’ve used these tools before and had to brush up on them anyway for my CUNY class. They make it incredibly easy to make TV. Will my segments look at good as CBS’? Well, that depends on your definition of good but probably not. Still, the thoughts and the talking head spewing them were exactly the same.

So compare: probably a dozen people involved in my little 1:30 at CBS; one person at Buzzmachine World Headquarters. Networks will collapse from their bloat.

Then this week, ABCNews.com emailed asking me to do a 1:30 commentary about changing TV for them. They wanted me to come into the studio. No, I said, let’s not just talk about changing TV, let’s change it. I wanted to record the segment at Buzzmachine HQ. The producer was nervous and didn’t think he bosses would buy it, but they did. I recorded my script and FTPed the video to them. They then proceeded to produce the bejesus out of it with dancing graphics and flying Jarvises, to distract from my bad accoustics (and haircut), no doubt. Here’s the final product.

And then last Friday, Amanda Congdon and crew came through Jersey to my HQ to tape a vlog for Amanda’s across-the-country video tour. She came to the door with here three friends bearing cameras trailing behind, Boswelling her every move. Then they set up in the den with lights, a decent mic, an HD camera set to focus on Amanda and me on the couch in front of the books that make me look smart, and with two of them roaming with two more video cameras and a third shooting stills. It was a three-camera shoot! Cable networks and sitcoms don’t use three-camera shoots anymore. On top of that, it was in HDTV. Amanda’s friend Mario said the whole set up cost something like $2 grand. Compare this, again, with the big networks. And compare the quality of their work, instead of mine, with the big guys. They shot 45 minutes of my blather on three tapes — poor Chuck Olsen had to edit it — and at the end, they brought in my kids, Jake and Julia, for their moment in the video spotlight. (My wife, for no earthly reason, doesn’t like cameras and Chuck edited out the family cat). It was a hoot. The first segment is here; I’m so long-winded, I get a second one here.

In the second segment, Amanda and I got into a tussle over TV. I said she — and Rocketboom and Ze Frank and Chuck Olsen and countless new colleagues — were making the new television. She said she didn’t want her stuff called TV; she said it’s something new, it’s a video blog. I argued, in turn, that the definition of TV is up for grabs and that she should grab it: Don’t let the big, old guys define and own TV. New tools, technology, and talent are opening TV up to a million new creators who are reinventing TV itself. And it’s about time.

I was asked to write a piece for a publication that goes to editorial-page editors and columnists about their future. I want to share my thoughts with you first to hear what you say….

In this age of open media, when every voice and viewpoint can be heard, when news is analyzed and overanalyzed, and when we certainly are not suffering a shortage of opinion, do we need editorialists?

No.

I leave it to you to argue whether we ever did. But there can be no question that, as the rest of media and journalism go through wrenching change and – I hope – radical reexamination, so should the editorialists reconsider their roles.

The irony is that the editorialists have long been guilty of the sins most often attributed to bloggers: They rarely report and mostly just leach off the work of other journalists. And they work anonymously. Worse, they attempt to speak as the voices of institutions, issuing opinions as if from the mountaintop. But today, we do not trust institutions. We are impatient with lectures. We demand to speak eye-to-eye as humans. We require conversation. The form of the editorial is as outmoded as its medium. News organizations should no longer define themselves by the ink on their paper. And publishers may no longer assume the prerogative of telling us what to think just because they buy that ink by the barrel. Now we all have our barrels of bits.

And as newspapers face economic torture, it is time to ask whether they can afford editorialists when spare resources should go toward supporting their true value: local reporting.

So should we fire all the editorial writers? Not necessarily. But they should realize that eliminating their jobs is a real and rationale option. And they should keep that fear in mind to force them to reinvent themselves. Rather than one cold voice of the institution, shouldn’t they try to gather many new voices and viewpoints? Instead of one opinion from one high, wouldn’t it be more useful to an informed society to share the best arguments around issues so we, the people, can make better decisions?

I know what you’re thinking: Wikitorial. When the Los Angeles Times took the well-intentioned but ill-informed step of letting the public edit its editorial. The problem was that they took a medium made for collaboration, the wiki, and used it for a subject about which there can be no collaboration today: Iraq. When I saw this, I suggested on my blog that the Times should have taken a proposition, Oxford-debate style, and put up two wikis: one pro, one con; let the best arguments win. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales saw that and tried to get the Times to split the wikitorial in two – to fork it, in our argot. But it was too late; anarchy reigned. Wikis and open collaboration now had cooties. But one misstep should not stop you from moving forward.

So fork the editorial page (before you have to stick a fork in it): Embrace new voices and viewpoints. Listen before lecturing. Break free of the limits of paper and use the internet to create a limitless platform for experts to inform the discussion. Become moderators and enablers of the debate that is already going on in the community. In short: Join the conversation.

As a starting point, I’ll point to Comment is Free – commentisfree.co.uk – at The Guardian (where I write and consult). The paper’s columnists are now, for the first time, speaking in the midst of the conversation, and those who choose to engage are creating a new relationship with readers. CiF also enabled The Guardian to bring in a much wider array of opinion and knowledge with hundreds of new writers (most contributing for free). And CiF has discovered new voices from amidst the interaction and made them CiF writers. I would also argue that columnists and editorial writers should blog – under their own names – in recognition that smart opinions are not delivered fully formed; they are enriched by the conversation. And by finding and linking to other bloggers and speakers in the community, you may well find that they are the opinion writers whose opinions matter.

FoxNews takes the Bill Clinton interview down from YouTube. Fools. They would be getting a whole new audience. They’d be even more part of the conversation. At the otherwise numbing panel I went to this morning, that interview was raised by a young person — in the audience, not on the panel — as an example of real conversation on TV, not packaged and faked balance. She saw it on YouTube. Now she can’t. Foolish, foolish Fox.

I’m at a PBS panel at Reuters on news and the tabloid culture. It starts on a snotty note: a commercial for PBS from its head and sniffing about popular culture, which I find rather disingenuous from an institution that has to exploit Yanni to get money. When people look down on popular culture — aka tabloid culture — they are looking down on the public they supposedly want to serve.

Carl Bernstein argues that “journalism is part of popular culture and we cannot get away from that.” He goes on to say that “I don’t believe that the reporting on the war is as bad as some people, particularly people on the left, say. . . . During Watergate, it took a long time for people to believe in our stories.” The country is turning on the war because they do not believe it’s working and he says they come to that belief because journalists have been dogging coverage of the war.” Yet he turns around to argue that we operate with an “idiot culture” that was once a subculture “but now it is more menacing because it is starting to drown out the process by which people previously have been able to absorb serious information.”

Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair says the problem is that what we in media do is boring. “The form has died.” He also says the economic basis of news is falling apart and that one cannot name a news industry and organization that is not in turmoil.

Poor Janice Min, editor of US Weekly, is being held up as the devil: Ms. Tabloid. She, in turn, holds up TV news as the devil. “I would just rather go online and read the news.”

Todd Gitlin blamed everything on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, until he was cut off.

Brooke Gladstone of On the Media tells a whining Bernstein that the relationship with media is fundamentally changing. “You can’t use media as a conduit anymore… you have to use it as a conversation.”

Wolff says to Bernstein and Gladstone that “this is all about condescension…. people are reading our news and saying it is full of shit.”

Gitlin launches off on a lecture on Watergate. Wolff jokes that we should get off this Watergate thing. Gitlin explodes and tells Wolff he’s rude. “Gitlin part of the fucking problem with media” is shouting, he shouts. Wolff: “Part of the problem is is a lack of a sense of humor.” Gitlin, red-faced, proves the point, accusing Wolff of “a lack of grace.”

Bernstein asks the room who voted for Bush. Not a single person raises a hand. “This tells us something about we who are producing this,” he says.

A student from NYU says that between Frontline and US is Jon Stewart. I wish some journalism students — someone under 50 — were on this panel (and there are plenty here from NYU and CUNY). That’s the perspective we’re not hearing. Indeed, we heard some sniffing about having the follow the demographic advertisers want: namely, young people. After saying, with admiration, that Stewart should be nominated by his school for a “fake Pulitzer,” Gitlin — looking at media the old, mass way — says that Jon Stewart’s number are “very low” and that “he is not the voice of a generation.”

I do my predictable rant arguing that this is about respect for the people and about listening. When we dismiss popular culture we dismiss the population. We do see Fanning of PBS and Gladstone of NPR making good use of new media to present news but I argue that is less than half the battle (and the head of PBS says that PBS — particularly Frontline — is looking to use new media to open up to new talent and new reporting): It’s about listening to the people.

Michael Rosenblum, a pioneer in bringing the power of shooting video to the people, is working on an exciting project to create local nodes of video reporters to produce for the web and TV and mobile phones, with backing from Verizon. (I hope it will not be seen just via Verizon.) And Michael is also looking for an executive producer. Terry Heaton has details.

Mel Gibson compared the war in Iraq to the human sacrifice by Mayans in his new movie. Well, if you want to talk about human sacrifice in the name of religiosity, look no farther than the suicide bombers sent to murder by their elders.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is appearing on Jon Stewart’s show Tuesday night. Even Stewart seems amazed. Is it because Stewart is a worldwide media kingmaker? Is it because Musharraf plans to announce where bin Laden has been hiding. Is it because even sympathetic dictators have a sense of humor? No, it’s because he’s plugging a book.