Media
Perfect parenting: Brad, Angelina and the N-word
In much the same way I love trashy pop music, Mrs Bigmouth loves trashy magazines - particularly the ones with soft-focus shots of impossibly good-looking celebrities and their impossibly perfect offspring. She particularly enjoys looking for the N-word, which occasionally sneaks into the article and depth-charges the portrayal of perfect parenting.
The N-word is “nanny”.
There was a good one last week (sorry, I forget the magazine) where it talked - after a few pages going on and on about what great parents Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were - about how the couple were having to manage with “just one nanny”.
Just one!
At least the article actually mentioned the nanny (or nannies, in the case of Hollywood royalty. Apparently three nannies per child is normal - one for daytime, one for nighttime and one for the weekends). Most don’t, so you’re left with a few thousand words about how brilliant parenthood is. It’s not tiring, you always look perfect, you can resume your career in a matter of days, and the whole thing is a big happy adventure.
It’d be funny if it weren’t such a fuck-you to real parents who can’t just do a baby dump and bugger off to the gym whenever the little ‘un gets annoying, and who can’t just leave the baby in a separate wing of the mansion when they fancy a nap.
I know that actors are in the business of acting and that magazines - particularly ones aimed at women - are in the business of distorting reality, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of truth for once? “God, early parenthood sucks,” said Famous Lady. “Even with a nanny to help out, I felt like punching Chrysanthemum Space Cakes through a hedge loads of times. But you know what? That stage doesn’t last long, and when it’s over it’s a hoot”.
“I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours / but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour…”
Remember the attempts by Christian Voice to prosecute various people over Jerry Springer: The Opera? And the £90,000 costs awarded against CV’s Stephen Green? It seems Green is asking for some good old-fashioned Christian charity from the very people he tried to prosecute.
The money is due to be paid today, but Stephen Green doesn’t have it.
He has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday inviting them to waive their costs in the interests of goodwill and justice.
Apparently chasing him for legal costs would be “vindictive”. Media Watch Watch says:
Vindictive? Like Green’s relentless self-interested pursuit of the BBC and John Thoday, and his gloating over the dearth of royalties accruing to Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas as a result of his censorship campaign wasn’t vindictive?
While we hesitate to celebrate anyone’s financial ruin, it is hard to feel sympathy for the whingeing hypocrite as he begs Thompson and Thoday to waive their charges. And we seriously doubt it will shut him up.
Chicken Yoghurt is amused, while Richard Bartholomew points out that Green was solely responsible for the “adverse, grotesque costs” and that he targeted two individuals rather than a public body.
Green says:
It is outrageous that a public-spirited individual should be dissuaded from upholding standards of public decency in a public body because of the fear of adverse, grotesque costs orders.
Which is an interesting way of looking at it. As Bartholomew notes, there’s a reason why Green should pay up or face bankruptcy.
without the risk of losing money there would be many more enemies of free speech using the courts – and the very same threat of high costs – to silence ideas they didn’t like.
Is this the future of magazine publishing? Probably not, but it’s still interesting
The Magazineer has put up an interesting post about MagCloud, a print-on-demand service designed specifically for magazines. The content available so far isn’t particularly inspiring, but the idea itself is quite interesting.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - real, live printed magazine - with no giant pile.
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.