BuzzMachine

Tomorrow and Thursday, the world will be able to listen to Howard Stern for free again. And it’s going to be a good two days with a radio sitcom by Sam Simon of The Simpsons and a Gary Dell’Abate roast.

It’s a brilliant marketing move to push not only Stern on Sirius but also a new offering: an internet-only subscription to 75 of the channels online, no radio or antenna required. Note that subscribers with radios also get the internet feed included. But if you want to listen in an office or in Munich, like a letter-writer on this morning’s Stern show, you can.

More than a year ago, I argued in an open letter to Mel Karmazin (cheeky bastard, I am) that he should be doing just this: Don’t be trapped by your distribution, don’t think of yourself just as a satelllite company, be the radio company of the future.

There’s still one more thing I want: Howard as a paid podcast. As part of my subscription, I want to be able to catch up on Howard on my terms, without having to go to the hassle of recording or buying the new radio that can record. I missed the amazing show when Artie Lange talked about his heroin use and kicked myself. Thanks to a fellow Stern fan — a media exec in a suit; there are more of us in this club than you dare to imagine — I got to listen because he recorded it so he can listen to the whole show in his car. Now that Stern is being repeated around the clock, I actually find myself timing my commute so I hear different parts of the show in the morning and evening. I’d rather listen to it all on my iPod.

Once Stern et al are available however, wherever, and whenever I want them, then Sirius will truly be the radio company of the future.

Next: video.

Give The Times some credit today for trying to put forth a path in Iraq in a major editorial. Whether it is a plan, I’m not sure. And I wish it were signed so the discussion could continue, person-to-person, idea-for-idea. But still, it is an effort to have the right discussion, which is how to get the Iraqi people out of this mess.

And it sure beats the White House’s pronouncement that it will no longer say “stay the course.” Because, of course, you can’t stay the course if you can’t find the course to stay. They’re not saying what they’re going to do or not do. They’re saying what they’re not going to say.

Since when did Jon Stewart start writing for Tony Snow?

PaidContent.org gets a long-awaited and needed redesign. I like it much better than the cluttered old look. One complaint: It requires a lot of clicking — to get more of each post and to get earlier posts (which, because PaidContent is so blessedly copious in its coverage, means posts older than a hour or two). I wish I could get a show-me-everything-ya-got-today view (which is what the RSS feed gives me). I wouldn’t say that for all sites, but I would say it for PaidContent because everything they write is indispensible.

In a speech to the Royal Television Society (one wonders what could ever be royal about television), Peter Fincham, the controller — that is, chief programmer and boss — of BBC One, responded to a column I wrote about exploding TV for Media Guardian.

I suspect that Fincham and I disagree only by a matter of degree — though that may be like missing by five degrees when building a bridge from either end, meant to meet in the middle. He believes in the value of linear TV channels and seems to think that the internet is a nice complement. I believe that television has the opportunity to grow in untold new ways — in programming, distribution, choice, interaction — and that the old channels are becoming the complement to the new. Some of Fincham’s points and my responses, in turn:

YouTube’s great. Google’s great. It’s all great. But if the conclusion you draw – and some people love drawing it - is that television is over, I think you might just be wrong.

The one simply doesn’t follow from the other. I read an article in the media section of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, by Jeff Jarvis. Not sure who Jeff Jarvis is, but he sounds like a man who keeps his nose to the ground.

The headline – so unremarkable as to hardly grab the eye - was ‘Television is dead’. This is what Jeff said: ‘All the old definitions of TV are in shambles. Television need not be broadcast. It needn’t be produced by studios and networks. It no longer depends on big numbers and blockbusters. It doesn’t have to fit 30 and 60 minute moulds. It isn’t scheduled. It isn’t mass. The limits of television – of distribution, of tools, of economics, of scarcity – are gone.’

What I’m saying is that rather than being ‘over,’ television has the opportunity to expand as never before. I just wrote an expansion of that Guardian column and some posts here for the magazine published by aforementioned Royal Television Society; I ended it this way: “All the limits that used to define television are gone. TV can now become whatever we want it to be.” I don’t look at the old, linear channels as the definition of TV; I look at them as the limitation on TV. Fincham continues:

Anyone here still got a job? Elsewhere in the article, Jeff says ‘My teen son and his friends are getting hooked on new series not via TV but through the web and iTunes.’

Ah, Jeff’s teen son and his friends – I feel we know them well. They have a great life – more media choice than ever before, gadgets we never dreamt of, chatrooms, websites, iPods. The only downside is having Jeff standing in the corner of the room trying to work out what they’re up to.

This sort of breathless over-enthusiasm for the overnight destruction of television is reminiscent in some ways of the dotcom boom of the late Nineties, when all conventional businesses were apparently heading for the scrapheap.

It also reminds me of the late Sixties – yes, I can just remember them – when a bloke I met in a youth hostel assured me that Western civilization was on its last knees and the future lay in self-sufficient collectives living in Wales.

Well, some companies are headed for the scrapheap. And I’d say this reminds me more of the advent of cars. Trains and horses are still around, but so what?

The trouble is, it’s missing the point. Conventional television – old media, linear, whatever you want to call it – and new media don’t exist in opposition to each other. In fact, they’re perfect partners.

We agree. Only I don’t think they are separate entities in partnership. I think the two merge and meld in wonderful ways, if only you’ll let them.

Jeff Jarvis assumes that where technology leads, our tastes will follow. He thinks that to embrace the new, it’s necessary to reject all that’s familiar. I think he’s wrong.

Any anthropologist will tell you that our ancestors, although they lived in caves, had exactly the same brains and bodies that we have. Evolution just doesn’t move that fast.

Actually, yes, we agree: I believe is that our tastes do not change rapidly. What is changing is our opportunity to express those tastes apart from the tastes of network programmers who tried to tell us what we should like.

Fincham goes on to praise a literary show the BBC had just carried and he asks:

Does Jeff Jarvis’ new world of television mean there’s no room for adaptations of Jane Eyre? And if so, is that something we’ve gained? Or something we’ve lost?

People like programmes. Seems like a pretty obvious thing to say, but in our noisy and novelty-driven world it can’t be said often enough.

They also like, in my view, an intelligently-balanced linear schedule. Yes, of course video on demand will enable us to create our own schedules and time-shift programmes at will. But we won’t want to do that all the time, will we?

I do so dislike it when executives say that “people like” what they make. We, those people, like lots of things. Sure, that includes programs. But it also includes much more. Do we like the programmers’ linear TV schedules? Not much. That’s why God invented the remote control, VCR, PVR, and cable/satellite box: to give us choice and control over our consumption of media. Now we also have the power to create media. And Fincham says about that:

User-generated content is a wonderful thing, but it won’t simply replace the professional stuff. There’s such a thing as a user-generated garden shed – you buy it from Homebase and put it together yourself.

Or there’s the other sort, which I must admit I prefer – you get somebody else to do it for you. The two markets don’t cancel each other out – they co-exist.

I did not say that they would cancel each other out, nor did I say — headline aside — that old TV would die. I argued that TV can be reinvented, reborn, reinvigorated, if only you’ll let it. I’ll also argue that TV has not been such a passive experience since the invention of the remote control 50 years ago. You program. We click. We began programming our own networks even then.

Fincham does acknowledge that distinctions will disappear:

When we’ve lost the distinction between terrestrial and digital, it will be replaced by a new distinction – between channels that originate, and channels that don’t.

And between channels that have range, and channels that are niche. . . .

When I was growing up – this isn’t an exact analogy, but it’s got some similarities – department stores were sorry places. The world seemed to be passing them by. You could have been forgiven for thinking they were in terminal decline. No, they weren’t.

They just needed refurbishing, refreshing, they needed to be made modern. Now look at them. Try getting into Selfridges on a Saturday morning – you’re trampled to death in the crush.

The equivalent of Selfridges on a Saturday morning, you might say, is a mainstream channel on a Saturday evening. Seventy per cent of the population have access to up to 400 channels, but for the last two Saturdays more than 15 million people have come to two of them as BBC ONE and ITV1 take position and fire arrows at each other.

Well, perhaps that’s another difference between over there and over here. I haven’t been to Macy’s for years. I buy my clothes and books and gadgets online. I’ll take Amazon over Bloomingdale’s. And I do believe we will value the producers of programming — which includes the BBC — over the networks that simply carry it.

Fincham concludes:

I’m a big advocate for linear viewing, for proper programmes, for television in the sense that we understand and have always understood it.

Riding both horses in tandem – that’s where the future lies.

But real television, 30 minute, 60 minute, 90 minute television in all its recognisable genres and forms, with challenging content and full production values, with the best talent and the most varied ideas – that sort of television is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.

If you’re as lucky as I am, to be running the BBC’s flagship television channel during this time of enormous upheaval, you’re not working in a backwater.

Quite the opposite. You’re on the frontier. There’s much, much more still to explore, and it’s a very exciting time to be exploring it.

“Proper” programs? “Real” television? Who’s to say what proper television is? With all respect, it’s not you, not anymore. Just because you run a channel does not mean that you run television anymore. We do. That’s just the point.

We out here do, indeed, like your proper programs and the good news is that, if you’re clever, we have so many more ways to find them now and you have so many more ways to find us. You also have the opportunity to broaden your definition of what makes TV — whether that comes in 3- or 30-minute increments — with new ideas and new talent. You have the historic chance to make TV more than a one-way, linear channel. So, yes, we agree: there is much, much more still to explore. So explore.

: See also Raymond Snoddy’s reaction to the speech in The Independent.

The Times reports today on networks backing out of shows even when they look promising. I think we are witnessing the tipping point for Hollywood and the blockbuster economy of entertainment. They’re going to have to figure out how to make entertainment for less and make money with smaller audiences. Networks and movie studios are not built for that. Says The Times:

The quick cancellation of “Smith” elucidates how television, like the movie industry, has become a business where there is little room for the modest success. Network executives might talk endlessly about how, in an era where the attention of audiences is ever more scattered, new shows need time to find themselves. But those same executives are often quick to pull the plug on an expensive production that does not immediately perform to expectations.

Combined with NBC’s announcement last week of plans to cut back on expensive programming, the experience of “Smith” demonstrates how the recent trend in television — costly serializations with large casts and complex plots — changes the basic rules of engagement for networks.

See also the post above about the BBC and linear TV.

The problem with old guys on newspapers trying to attract young people is that they pander and insult the people they so desperately want to attract. They create lite products because they think the young have no attention span when, far more likely, the young have no patience for the overlong blatherings of the old.

See this story about a Dutch paper attracting a young audience willing to pay for it with depth, not shallowness:

Instead of the traditional news values of “who, what, where and when”, NRC Next claims to concentrate on background, analysis and opinion. It assumes that readers have already learned the main points of the news from other channels.

It took the old dogs long enough to learn that new trick.

See also this story on the millenials (aka te young) in the Star-Ledger:

They rarely read books for fun and most likely aren’t reading this newspaper. They are the most diverse — and perhaps the smartest — generation in U.S. history. And Richard Sweeney thinks the nation’s colleges and universities need to start making changes to teach them better. . . .

Sweeney, a father of six (including two Millennials), began noticing a change in the learning patterns of students while conducting his annual campus focus groups on how students use [the New Jersey Institute of Technology's] library.

“About seven years ago, I started noticing some differences in the focus groups,” said Sweeney of Metuchen. “I began to see distinct differences.”

As the Generation X students graduated and left campus, they were replaced by the Millennials. The new students seemed to be studying more in groups in the library. They huddled around their laptops teaching each other. They watched videotaped lectures of other professors when they couldn’t understand their teacher’s lessons. . . .

Many spent thousands of hours of childhood playing video games. As a result, they learn best by doing, with interactive graphics, collaboration and the ability to advance through trial and error. . . .

“They want more choices, not less,” Sweeney said. “They want to do it their way.” . . .

Most confirmed Sweeney’s theories that Millennial students are not reading books for fun, watching television news or reading newspapers. Nearly all said they get their news from Yahoo, Google or other sites.

Only one of the seven students had read a newspaper in the last week — and that was the Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization.

Here is Sweeney’s article and here is a PowerPoint on the millennials.

The real lesson in this is simple: Respect. Sweeney is trying to teach this lesson to academics but also to journalists.

A wise editor who was my partner in the launch of Entertainment Weekly, Joan Feeney, taught me that the worst place to begin the development of a new media product is with the demographic, for this inevitably leads to pandering. What do they want? Let’s give it to them. But a product that starts with a need and the passion to fill it is quite different. If you want to serve young people today, start with respecting them enough to give them something worthy of their time.

My Guardian column this week brings together a few posts furthering the notion that the internet obsoletes the institutional voice of the editorial writer (translated into British newspaperspeak: leader writer). Column here; nonregistration version here.

: The column is up at Comment is Free and generating interesting comments there.

At last, This American Life has thrown off the limitations of being sold on Audible. It’s now a free podcast.

The Mail on Sunday carries leaks from an “impartiality summit” at the BBC that purports to reveal various biases:

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism. . . .

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC’s ‘diversity tsar’, wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

I don’t get the “dominated by homosexuals” part.

: UPDATE: Don’t miss the response of the BBC on their editors’ blog. As pointed out in the comments, the “secret” meeting was webcast.

Brooke Gladstone does a very good story on the three Iraqi citizens-turned-journalists now in journalism schools in New York. One of them, of course, is Zeyad, and he read the post I quote below. Listen here.

After losing another friend to the war back home, my friend and colleague Zeyad, the Iraqi blogger now in New York at CUNY, writes with devastating directness on his blog: “I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle.”

I do not pretend for a second that anyone should care what I think or write about Iraq. But I when I wrote about politics and news more than media, I wrote about the Iraq war in terms not unlike Zeyad’s in 2003. Lately, I have been dancing around the necessity of writing my own, less eloquent post on the Iraq war and me. I should. So here it is.

I had separated intent of the war from its execution. In 2003, I believed the intent was proper. I followed a path that Tom Friedman has since abandoned if not recanted: that this war was not and should not have been about WMDs but was instead about bringing freedom, democracy, and opportunity to a part of the world whose primary export is becoming anger. Not unlike Peter Beinart, I saw a liberal justification to the war: antitotalitarianism, freeing people from tyranny, supporting freedom and choice, as well as coming to rescue the people we had abandoned in the first Iraq war and its aftermath. I saw a humanitarian cause.

But the execution, I saw too late after our “victory,” was hopeless and shameful. And, of course, it has only gotten worse as it has gotten more stubborn.

How do I think it should end? How should we fix this? I do not know and I am afraid I don’t see anyone today who does. I will still say — as I did in the Guardian’s Comment is Free some months ago and as the paper’s Mideast editor said more intelligently than I — that we on the left have a responsibility not to abandon the people of Iraq and to have a plan, not just for leaving but for finding some path to peace. That the White House is now apparently considering recruiting Syria, occupier of Lebanon, and Iran, who too recently was at war with Iraq, to get them out of the mess they made is either painfully ironic or just pathetic. But I won’t presume to understand the politics of the region sufficiently to prescribe a path myself. I just wish our leaders on any side would and could.

So which do I regret? The war or its execution? I fear it doesn’t matter anymore. Wishing and what-iffing that things had been done differently does no good for the people who have lost their lives there. I wish that the people of Iraq were both free and living in peace. I wish that there were a thriving example of democracy in the Arab Middle East. I wish the hate-mongers had been put in their place, on the fringe of civilization. Of course, I wish that all these lives had not been lost. So I regret much, and especially regret what we have brought Iraq to and that we still do not know where to go.

I can predict that at least one of you will seize on this opportunity to nya-nya me about my early views on the war in Iraq. Fine, if that’s your sport. But right now, what I wish most is that there can be a substantive and constructive effort to find a way to end this hell.

So no more friends are lost.

Just piling up the bad news for newspapers this week:

* Newspaper circulation continues to clog: “Industry sources who have seen the numbers tell E&P they anticipate that for the six months ending September 2006, top-line daily circulation will fall roughly 2.5% while Sunday will drop approximately 3%.”

* Newspaper advertising is declining: “Earnings from three big newspaper companies — Tribune Co., New York Times Co. and Belo Corp. — provided more dramatic evidence that print-advertising revenues have gone into decline after a long period of low growth. All three posted lower newspaper-advertising revenue in the third quarter compared with the year-earlier period, echoing results from most of the companies in the industry that have reported earnings in recent days. . . . Results in recent days have reinforced gloomy predictions coming from some analysts. Last week, Merrill Lynch cut its newspaper-ad revenue forecast for this year to flat from 1.2% growth and revised its 2007 forecast to a drop of 1.5%.”

* Those who thought they were saved from conglomerates and profit margins when they were bought by local owners were fooling themselves. Those papers are laying off: “The new owners of three former Knight Ridder newspapers announced layoffs, expected layoffs and abrupt changes in management yesterday as they painted a bleak outlook for the newspaper industry. . . ‘Newspaper publishers and owners across the country are saying that this has been the worst 90-day stretch that they have ever seen in the business,’ Mr. Tierney wrote. ‘They also universally believe that this reduced revenue picture will be a permanent part of the future of newspapers.’ ”

* There’s upheaval all over: NBC News cuts back. The Chicago Sun-Times appears to be for sale. The Toronto Star ousted its editor and publisher. Liberation’s future in France is in question.

That’s just one week.