When it comes to humour, however, there is one cultural myth that just won’t die. You hear it all the time from self-appointed social commentators sat astride high horses, dressed as knights who say, “Ni”. They don’t get it. They never had it. They don’t know what it is and, ironically, they don’t want it anyway. That’s right: “Americans don’t do irony.” This isn’t strictly true. Although it is true that we British do use irony a little more often than our special friends in the US. It’s like the kettle to us: it’s always on, whistling slyly in the corner of our daily interactions. To Americans, however, it’s more like a nice teapot, something to be used when the occasion demands it. This is why an ironic comment will sometimes be met with a perplexed smile by an unwary American. . . .
When Americans use irony, they will often immediately qualify it as being so, with a jovial “just kidding”, even if the statement is outrageous and plainly ironic. For instance…
A: “If you don’t come out tonight, I’m going to have you shot… just kidding.”
Of course, being America, this might be true, because they do all own guns and use them on a regular basis (just kidding). Americans can fully appreciate irony. They just don’t feel entirely comfortable using it on each other, in case it causes damage. A bit like how we feel about guns.
It’s not so much about having a different sense of humour as a different approach to life. More demonstrative than we are, Americans are not embarrassed by their emotions. They clap louder, cheer harder and empathise more unconditionally. It’s an openness that always leaves me feeling slightly guilty and apologetic when American personalities appear on British chat shows and find their jokes and stories met with titters, not guffaws, or their achievements met with silent appreciation, rather than claps and yelps. We don’t like them any less, we just aren’t inclined to give that much of ourselves away. Meanwhile, as a Brit on an American chat show, it’s difficult to endure prolonged whooping without intense, red-faced smirking.
In the end, he says, the smashing success of The Office on both sides of the irony divide proves that we’re more alike than not. We’re American: Let’s hug.
Think Progress puts together a brilliant compilation of the humiliating hype of cable news over the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Larry King: “The Number 1 story around the world tonight.”
Scarborough: “For better or worse, would you call Anna Nicole Smith an American icon of the early 21st century?”
Anderson Cooper asks about her Playboy mansion days: “What was she like then?”
MSNBC: Why was she so intriguing to so many people?”
Larry King: “This story will have a lot of legs.” [Cue drums]
Scarborough: “Why the obsession with Anna Nicole Smith?”
Jack Caferty (bless him) to Wolf Blitzer: “Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead?”
Says Think Progress:
NBC’s Nightly News devoted 14 seconds to Iraq compared to 3 minutes and 13 seconds to Anna Nicole. CNN referenced Anna Nicole 522% more frequently than it did Iraq. MSNBC was even worse — 708% more references to Anna Nicole than Iraq.
And big, old MSM says they know how to do journalism and nobody else could do it as well, certainly not us, the unwashed.
Watching the coverage certainly makes me want to wash it off me.
The hiring and then mufflling of bloggers by the Edwards campaign has to make you wonder whether whether campaigns and conversation are incompatible. Or perhaps we just better get used to honesty — in the form of bluntness and transparency and frankness — as a new phenomenon.
When you hire a blogger, you hire someone who lives — thinks and speaks — in public. You hire someone who responds to conversations without the veils of spin and PR and plastic discretion that politicians must learn.
In other words, on our blogs, we all say things that might offend someone. Truth is, in life — in bars, in restaurants, in offices, on the phone — we all do that, only now there is a public and — usually — permanent record. So now when a campaign hires such a person, it has to gird its crotch for the inevitable finding-of-the-offensive that will occur in this, the age of offense. And then, as the Times points out this morning, it has to figure out what to do. Firing people because they once said something that might have offended someone won’t work; there’ll soon be no one left to hire except people who have nothing to say and have never said it. Censoring them post facto won’t work; it violates our ethics in blogs to try to erase your old words; it is a lie of omission. What the Edwards campaign tried to do was hold onto the bloggers but make them choke on crow to satisfy the chronically offended. That trick won’t last for long.
Why don’t we just get used to the idea that people say things that might offend others and that soon we will all — campaign workers and campaigners alike — have such things on the permanent record. Blogs, Facebooks, MySpace pages, YouTube videos — you might say that they will haunt us. But I prefer to think that they will force us to be more open, more honest. Maybe then we’ll have no choice but to have a real conversation.
: My newfound video friends, Mary Matthews and Liza Persky of 39 Second Single, will, indeed, be on Weekend Today tomorrow (not next week as it appeared would be the case).
: UPDATE: This email from Mary: “Just as I predicted when the big news broke yesterday, due to the unfortunate passing of former stripper turned reality TV star turned diet pill pitch person Anna Nicole Smith, the highly anticipated 39 Second Single segment scheduled for tomorrow’s Today Show then changed to next week’s then changed back to tomorrow’s Today Show, has been bumped . . . .” Arrrgh.
: It looks like 20/20 is rerunning its Caught on Tape two-hour special tonight. I appeared on this but the last half of first airing was preempted by the execution of Saddam Hussein. So I was glad I could finally see the whole thing. Except I note that tonight they’ll be looking back at the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Now that’s news.
: Scheduled to be on CNN Sunday at 7:30 p.m. to talk about the YouTube campaign, presidential candidates on small TV.
: And while I’m at it, on Feb. 13, PBS Frontline starts a three-part series about the alleged war in and on news. I’ll be in the third episode on Feb. 27.
Nice example of networked journalism from David Pogue in The Times today: He wanted to puncture the megapixel myth of cameras and set about to test whether people could tell the difference of a few million pixels in a large print. While reporting the story, he blogged it and his readers objected to his methodology. And so he threw out the challenge to beat what he did and one reader/photographer did. And in the end, Pogue was able to quote what consumers said about all this. So by opening up his story, it improved it. And by adding effort and reporting, he improved the conversation. Everbody wins.
At yesterday’s panel here about user-generated content, I quoted Dave Winer’s comment on my blog post about the last such panel I’d attended, at Davos: Here’s a panel with no users generating content. This, I said, was symbolic of the state of the discussion: All the big, old guys still act like closed products, not open networks. I asked whether they could. In the discussion that followed, one of the panelists asked Chris Ahearn of Reuters whether they were ready to open up their source material. He said they did. No, said the fellow panelist: giving people source documents so they can remix and report and find more. Ahearn said he’d ask his editor. I liked that exchange.
Murdoch is being interviewed by Steve Adler, editor of Business Week. Limited live-blogging:
On newspapers: “I think they’re very vulnerable… We have to learn to look at them quite differently.” On the Tribune bid: “I don’t really believe it’s going to happen.” He was willing to go along if he got a joint operating agreement with the Post and Newsday, “which would give us real supremacy here…. So we don’t want the whole thing…. It scares me. The probllem about newspapers as they stand at the moment is that young readership is going down…” Asked whether he’d sell of newspapers, he said no. Asked whether the Post will be a viable business, he says, “if we could pull off this Newsday deal, yes, in five minutes.” He grins. Asked whether he’s still interested in Dow Jones, given the fate of papers, he says, “I must say, I’m cooling on it.” He says that taking the news out of the Journal to go online “has taken the urgency out of it,” and he finds that he puts the Journal aside to read the longer analytical pieces later and just doesn’t get around to it.
On politics: He argues that Fox is fair and balanced. Damnit. He lists the opinion shows: “O’Reilly is thought to be very conservative. I think he’s actually more populist.” And so on. “It’s just that we report both sides, quite a new thing.” He grins. Adler asks: “Clarify your views on Hillary Clinton. I don’t quite understand where you are.” Murdoch: “Nor do I… she’s a very intelligent lady, very calculating. I think that unfortunately, she’s a bit divisive… She’s way to the left on some social issues, which is OK. But I’m not really frightened of her on foreign affairs and defense.” He says she would be “a lot stronger, subtler” than her husband was. “She’s very impressive, I must say.” He says that if you read what she says about the war, she leaves her options open. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes in the war,” he says. Vs. Bush: “I hope she would have run it better.” He says the man he’d love to see get into it would be Newt Gingrich: “He would lift the debate.” He extols the virtues of Bloomberg — “you wouldln’t get an abler chief executive for the country” — but says he’d be to the left of Hillary and that would hurt him in the center of the country.
On Borat: “We laughed like hell at it. We went out to dinner and laughed some more… I don’t think it destroyed our culture or anything.” And it showed that “Americans can laugh at themselves.”
I’m at the over-jammed Media Summit at McGraw Hill in New York and the opening act is the same act you alwasy see at such events: Barry Diller. He’s always entertaining and compelling; that’s what makes him the opening act. Liveblogging….
He extols the virtues of Ask, his search engine, which has 6 percent market share vs. Google’s 47 percent. Diller says it can do double-digit share and that it’s a media model: “It’s not winner take all… By the way, God forbid it should happen…. If there is no other ad network than Google’s, we are all in some trouble.”
The interviewer, a Business Week editor, asks about Viacom’s take-down of video from YouTube. “The issue is availability,” Diller says. Music “stuck its head in the dumb sand for way too long” but that won’t happen in video. He says that Viacom’s video will be available somewhere, perhaps not on YouTube. “Everybody’s going to make everything available…. Perhaps media companies are now saying we’re not going to let you get so strong in distribution” that they will be like HBO was in the distribution on movies. He says Viacom is smart and that they will get paid on advertising, subscription, or micropayment. But what he does not address is promotion and distribution: free marketing.
Asked where he is on the social networking scene, Diller says: “Not.” He argues that Match.com is a form of social network. “A pure social network site, not that they’re not of value… no one has yet proved that it’s the easiest advertising” vehicle. He says that “pure social network sites are an upgrade from the Princess telephone that teenagers used to talk on for hours and hours and hours…. I’m not so sure that the interruption of that life to be sold something is such an easy trip.” He says as promotion “it is fantastic” but it is “not of interest to me.” He says there will be advertising but it’s not clear to him how vibrant that market will be. Talking about the turnaround of Match.com, he says it got into trouble because it added social networking; the problem was that “people handle themselves quite differently when they’re about flirt or about friendship and they don’t want to confuse the two.” It caused a drop 20 percent drop in subscribers.
Now to “user-generated content,” which Diller generally dismisses. “I got banged when I said there are only so many talented people in the world” [at Web 2.0 a year ago; link to my coverage later] and after you’ve seen cat videos “the professional talent pool is finite, it’s not very big: It’s not 100 people but it’s not a million people, I promise you.” He sees no middle ground: professionals who make good content vs. garage attendants who shoots skidding cars. “It will not be the long tail, it will be a very short tail creating very large audiences… which is the way it works.” He argues in favor of a content process that is “journalistically driven.”
“I think the most endangered is print publications and their transition. I sure would like to see more creativity.” He says news organizations are not going away but they “simply have to find a form factor that makes sense.” Well, and a business model and a culture and …
He says he bought college humor because they liked the team and what they built, including Vimeo, “a fantastic video-sharing site.”
But not just buying, he says that “we really want to invent product.” (At Foursquare, he said it is difficult for large organizations to invent and that’s why he buys. I’d say you certainly must do both.) He says he’s going to invent “certainly a couple of million dollars’ capital” in this invention. “So we think it’s the perfect time to begin… We’d buy something if it’s out there and rational but we certainly prefer starting things.” He adds: “We’ll buy anything that walks” but that he thinks most things are overpriced. And “particularly in the program areas” it’s better to do it through your own process, “in your own house.”
Michael Jackson, the head of Diller’s content creation, should be grinning ear-to-ear: a rousing endorsement.
Asked whether the future of TV is the internet, he replies that “the future of everything is digitized.” Everything will be “distributed through this, hopefully, net-neutral pipe.” He says this is the first time that we have a system based on plenty, not scarcity” and we should not ruin it.
He doesn’t call the current state of things a bubble but he does say there is “enormous froth” right now with lots of money fizzing. “Mostly, buying things for more than they’re worth doesn’t work out. [beat] General rule. [laughter].” He adds that “this is a much more practical time” than 2000. He says he doesn’t buy based on forward projections; “that’s dopey.” He asks how much he can stand to lose.
He talks about buying Citysearch — “we didn’t pay very much but it was worth less than nothing” — and pouring $280 million capital into it over almost eight years. “But then it turned and now it’s making money and it’s worth more than the value of our investment.”
Asked whether we will see the emergence of networks on the internet, he lists his companies and says “they’re all networks.” He says we will not see three giants.
“In a time when editorship is passing… no, sorry, editorship will never pass” because it is about giving people good stuff. “The control of it, distribution, is passing to the user from the pinched distributor of old whose job it was to sell scarcity…. The internet is this miracle. You push a button and you self-publish to the world with nobody currently, hopefully, between you and the consumer.”
He argues that we haven’t seen a great retail experience online yet because — as in media — there has not been invention and innovation on the internet side, instead still only replication.
Asked whether TV is a bad business, he says no. But he says it is challenged and there will be “an enormous amount of creative destruction” in the next few years. We are in a “radical revolution,” where there will be destruction and creation.
Andy Plesser of Beet TV made the mistake of handing me a microphone at Always On, but I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Whitaker, former editor of Newsweek and new the overseer of the future at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, and my friend David Weinberger, author of the soon-to-be-released Everything is Miscellaneous. Whitaker, part I:
In what I like to think of as his first blog post — and one that will rise quickly on Digg, Technorati, etc. — Steve Jobs calls for ending DRM. It’s eloquently argumed:
. . . Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. . . .
Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. . . .
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none.
The consumer part of this equation is that if we are given the chance to buy things legally, we often will. It’s about convenience and access.
Companies will no longer be able to make a living by stopping us from doing what we want to do — which, amazingly, is how many do, in the command-and-control universe. You have to find the ways to make money enabling us to do what we want to do. It’s obvious. It’s reality.
I’m delighted to see this small TV getting attention on big TV. For this is a great example of how talent can emerge in our new world. Mary C. Matthews produces the show; Liza Persky is the star. I feel like I discovered them because I happened upon their show one day on Blip. But that’s the beauty of the internet: We can all discover such talent. The world is our casting couch.
What’s brilliant about 39 Second Single is that it creates a show appropriate for the medium — small, fast, intimate — and manages to hook you in two minutes and make you want to keep coming back each week. I showed it to my class at CUNY and they loved it (Mary came to speak to the class and they loved her, too). The only sad thing is that we need to keep rooting for Liza, the star, to continue her rotten luck at dating because we don’t want the fun to end.
So watch their show. Then watch the show about their show. And first, watch this show about the show about their show:
: LATER: Just as I posted this, I got email from Mary with word that Blip is holding a screening of some of the best series TV on the service this Sunday night. Details here.
: UPDATE: Mary emails that the date on Weekend Today just changed to the 17th. That’s TV.
Comscore and Federated Media (which sells some ads on this blog) have teamed up to try to improve measurement in the long tail of social and niche media online. And that’s good.
Except I argue that the panel means of measurement is doomed to miserable failure in the mass of niches. You cannot possible build a panel large and varied enough to get reliable measurement of the audience and traffic of millions — even thousands — of sites, especially when we get the means to tie together lots of those small sites into networks.
What I hope they do is honestly and harshly look at their stats from their panel versus the server stats of the sites — especially the smaller sites, not the much-easier-to-measure big boys like Digg and BoingBoing — and realize that the panel just doesn’t work.
What we need, I’ve long argued, is standard metrics reported from the sites’ servers or from snoopers on pages and verified by a service such as Comscore or Nielsen. Old methods will not work in this new world. The same goes for Nielsen, which is buying the rest of Netratings.
And whilel we’re at it, let’s figure out the new measurements that capture the unique value of this new medium: authority, speed, connectedness… The page view is dead.
I think it’s time for a measurement summit: Bring together the measurement companies, the advertisers and their agencies (buyers), the sites’ reps (sellers), the media sites, and technology companies and let’s hammer out some standards and methods for measurement. This will only work if we have open standards with analytics (like Comscore and Nielsen) building value atop that common data. Otherwise, we end up in a world that will continue to confuse and scare advertisers — and their money — away.
The Knight Foundation just announced an award for news innovation. Bravo. Give them an award for awards. We need to stop whining about change and start innovating — fast.
In the Guardian, Charlie Brooker says he hates Macs:
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
If the newspaper were a blog, that would be the most blatant case of link-whoring I’ve ever seen. Have at ‘im.
My Guardian column was delayed a week because of breaking news but it’s in print now (nonregistration version here).
The revolution will not be televised. It will be YouTubed. The open TV of the people is already turning into a powerful instrument of politics - of communication, message, and image - in the next US presidential election. Witness: Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Edwards; Republican Sam Brownback; and more candidates just announced their runs for the White House not in network-news interviews, nor in big, public events, but instead in their own online videos.
The advantages are many: the candidates may pick their settings - Edwards in front of a house being rebuilt in New Orleans; Clinton in a room that reminds one of the Oval Office. They control their message without pesky reporters’ questions - Edwards brought in the video-bloggers from Rocketboom.com to chat with him; Brownback, a religious conservative, invoked God and prayer often enough for a sermon; Clinton was able to say she wants to get out of Iraq the right way without having to define that way. They are made instantly cybercool - I’m told by the Huffington Post that liberal hopeful, Representative Dennis Kucinich, is carrying around a tiny video camera so he can record messages in the halls of congress; and Democrat Christopher Dodd has links on his homepage to his MySpace, Facebook and Flickr sites, making him come off more like a college kid than a white-haired candidate. But most important, these politicians get to speak eye-to-eye with the voters.
Internet video is a medium of choice - you have to click to watch - and it is an intimate medium. That is how these candidates are trying to use it: to talk straight at voters, one at a time.
Clinton said she was launching a conversation as much as a campaign and wished she could visit all our living rooms, so she is using technology to do the next best thing, holding live video chats last week. Beats kissing babies.
Of course, this can also be the medium of your opposition. When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney joined the race for the Republican nomination, conservative detractors dredged up video from a 1994 debate with Senator Ted Kennedy in which Romney espoused downright liberal stands on abortion and gay rights. They used YouTube as a powerful weapon. So Romney used YouTube to respond. He appeared on a podcast made by the powerful blog Instapundit and the campaign videotaped the exchange and put it up online, a story that was then picked up by major media.
But beware making a fool of yourself. This is also a medium ripe for ridicule. There is a hilarious viral video of John Edwards preparing for a TV appearance and primping like Paris Hilton, set to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”. Every campaign nervously awaits the embarrassing moment that will be captured and broadcast via some voter’s mobile phone; it was just such a moment that lost one senator his election and with it the Republican majority in 2006. Hours after Clinton YouTubed her video announcement, there were parody versions trying to remind us of the scandals of her husband’s administration. I, too, fired up my Mac and made a mashup comparing and contrasting Clinton’s and Brownback’s videos, counting her issues and his references to culture (read: religion), life (read: abortion), and family (read: gay marriage).
And there lies the real power of the YouTube election: candidates won’t be the only ones making use of this revolutionary new medium. Citizens will too. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a survey revealing that much of the electorate is not just watching but is using the internet to influence politics: in the 2006 US election, 60 million Americans - almost half of internet users - were online gathering information and exchanging views, Pew said.
More than a third of voters under the age of 36 say the internet is their main source of political news - twice the score for newspapers.
More significantly, about 14 million Americans use the “read-write web,” in Pew’s words, to “contribute to political discussion and activity”, posting their opinions online, forwarding or posting others’ commentary, even creating and forwarding audio and video. They aren’t just consuming information, they are taking political action. And now that almost half of America is wired with broadband, they increasingly consider watching internet video to be watching TV. So the influence of YouTube will only grow.
We should only wish that this will diminish the negative influence of old TV with its battle and sports narratives of frontrunners and underdogs, with its simplistic soundbites (though there’ll be plenty of that on YouTube, too), and its nasty campaign commercials (though YouTube will have its dirt as well). But, hey, revolutions take time. And we are watching the seeds of one sprout right before our very eyes.
