Media
Should NME become a freesheet?
An interesting suggestion from No Rock’n'Roll Fun as NME unveils the seventy-third redesign this year:
Maybe the logical thing to do would be to abandon charging - perhaps except for subscribers, who could pay to ensure their supply - and try to build the readership that way. It might make more long-term sense than another relaunch every six months.
The full post takes an in-depth look at the NME’s latest new look. The verdict isn’t exactly a massive thumbs-up.
Keystone cops prevent perfectly legal photography
Security goons, store-clerks and police officers detained Flickr user “i didn’t mean to go to Stoke” for taking photos in the outdoor, pedestrianized area of Middlesbrough, UK
Meanwhile in London, the PCSO (aka Keystone Cops or “not cops at all”) try to stop someone filming (video link).
There are places you can’t legally photograph or film without permission - privately owned property, such as shopping malls, airports and train stations - but shooting in the street is perfectly legal.
(Thanks to David for the links)
Flat Earth News
As one of the cover quotes puts it, if even half of what Nick Davies writes in his expose of the news industry is true then things are truly terrifying. The stuff on Iraq, the neutering of the Sunday Times Insight team and the problems of “churnalism” have been covered elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here, but one of the things that really jumped out for me was the way in which newspaper regulation in the UK is stacked in favour of newspapers who play fast and loose with the truth, trampling people in the process.
The (newspaper-controlled) Press Complaints Commission dismisses the overwhelming majority of complaints without even investigating them, which means the only redress is via the courts. However, you can’t get legal aid for libel and newspapers’ deep pockets and expensive lawyers mean that you’ve got bugger-all chance of someone taking your case on a no-win no-fee basis. What that means in practice is that newspapers can falsely accuse you of anything, ruin your life and get away scot-free. Flat Earth News contains some horrifying examples of that.
Put it this way: this week’s apology to the McCanns by the Express and the Star was unusual not because of the scale of the apology, but because the McCanns hired Carter Ruck, the famous and famously expensive legal firm, to represent them. Most victims of newspaper falsehoods don’t have that option.
Even better than the real thing
This is brilliant: Fake Steve Jobs takes on Wired reporter Leander Kahney and wins spectacularly.
Leander, you are a hopeless pussy. This kind of attitude is why you’re a hack at Wired and not running your own multi-billion-dollar company.
It’s not just that the interview is funny, although it is: it’s that in these days of media management, an interview with the fake Steve Jobs is a million times more interesting and entertaining than an interview with the real SJ would be. Same applies to celebs, whether it’s Craig Brown’s fake diaries in Private Eye or the (hit and miss) celeb diaries in the Guardian on Saturdays.
The whole point of an interview is to get the truth, and these days celebs and CEOs alike are smart enough (or trained enough) to provide anything but. It’s quite frustrating sometimes: you know what the answer is, the interviewee knows what the answer is, but there’s absolutely no way in hell they’re going to say anything on the record and there’s no way they’ll give you anything with a bit of personality. So why bother?
Maybe the answer is for every celeb and CEO to hire a fake version of themselves to take care of media stuff. You could have a Fake Richard Branson, a Fake Mohammed Al Fayed, a Fake Britney, a Fake Rupert Murdoch and so on. You still won’t get the truth, but it’d make newspapers a lot funnier.
iPod porn and news that isn’t news
An interesting article (Salon.com, via Fark) on a rash of iPod-porn stories that appeared on US TV. Now, iPod/iPhone porn does exist - the porn industry isn’t exactly slow to embrace new technology - but what’s interesting is the content of the news reports.
Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.
But something here was amiss. In addition to panning the iPod, Raskin used her time on TV to push “safer” holiday tech gifts, including products made by Panasonic, Namco and Techno Source. These weren’t unbiased reviews. The local stations that featured Raskin were fully aware that the three companies had hired her to pimp their products during news appearances
Sounds like a pretty lucrative line of work. Maybe I should ask for cash to plug stuff on radio.
Robin Raskin, the iPorn-wary tech journalist, told me that between 2002 and 2006, she appeared in almost three dozen TV marketing opportunities — roughly eight a year, each of which was sponsored by three to five companies and was built around a holiday or news event.
It’s more fuel for the Flat Earth News argument that cost-cutting in media means that an increasing amount of “news” isn’t anything of the sort.
The Friday Project goes bust
The Friday Project, blog-book publisher extraordinaire, has gone bust. As Bobbie Johnson writes:
According to my sources, The Friday Project has always operated a fairly predatory approach to the web; offering most of their writers fairly desultory rewards for their work, especially compared to the deals offered some other bloggers). Still, any penny pinching didn’t appear to help the bottom line much… the company’s accounts look rough, with losses of £705,713 last year.
What next? Well, the Telegraph says Harper Collins - a book publishing arm of Darth Murdoch’s NewsCorp Death Star - is buying the company. But what becomes of the bloggers and their books? Not clear - directors Scott Pack and Clare Christian both say they can’t comment on the situation.
The Telegraph story says it’s been in administration for a month, so sorry if this is old news. I hadn’t spotted it before.
Panasodding camcorders
If you’re thinking about getting a cheap camcorder and you’re using Leopard, beware: I’m having huge problems with my El Cheapo Panasonic camera. It uses Mini DVD, which means I can’t play the discs in my Macs (they’re all slot-loading drives), so I need to connect it via USB.
Unfortunately Leopard doesn’t like Panasonic’s files (they’re .VRO format, I think) and Panasonic’s Mac software doesn’t like Leopard. So while I can connect the camera to my Mac, I can’t do anything with the video unless I convert it in MPEG Streamclip and shell out real cash money for Apple’s QuickTime MPEG plugin. Damn, blast and arse.
PopJustice on Heidi Montag: good point, well made
Reality TV star Heidi Montag was a bit upset when those nasty internet people slagged off her video:
“I just started sobbing uncontrollably. I cried myself to sleep that first night after my video came out. I just couldn’t understand [how people] I didn’t even know felt the need to be so cruel and hurtful toward me. I am just a 21-year-old from a small town in Colorado trying to follow her dreams.”
PopJustice is absolutely right:
Do you know what, there’s no easy way to say this, but this woman just doesn’t have what it takes to be a popstar… If she bursts into tears when people tell her they don’t like her new video, how’s she going to react when, say, a gossip blogger Photoshops spunk onto her face two hours after a family member dies? Someone, just lock her in a room with a bucket and Britney’s press cuttings from the last twelve months, and don’t let her out until she’s thinking about a job in an office.
Gratuitous Bebo mention in teen suicide story
A teenage girl commits suicide for no apparent reason. The Daily Mail reports:
Chelsea, a keen dancer, had her own page on the social networking website Bebo.
Her death comes in the wake of a series of 14 recent suicides involving young people in Bridgend, South Wales, and fears that they may have been linked by websites such as Bebo and Facebook.
However, there is no suggestion that Chelsea’s death has any connection to these.
So why mention it?
Oh no! Mr. E has lost his blanket!
Squander Two recommended that I check out the BBC programme In The Night Garden, which is aimed at young babies. And he’s right, it’s brilliant - but something about it has been nagging me for a while, and I’ve only just realised what it is.
The main theme tune sounds like Eels. Not “a bit like Eels”; I mean “every time I hear it I’m expecting E to start singing about death and cancer and stuff”.
You can hear the theme here (link goes to a YouTube parody, which is basically the theme with some added drums) and a very similar Eels track here (Windows Media format).