You have to be of a certain age to know what this is. To know that the Indian in full headdress at the top and this pattern came on when programming was off-air. Those hours when most everyone should be sleeping.
Adjusting the vertical and horizontal buttons to make the picture perfect. The "ant fights" of the static dead time.
Media. The old days.
This was the front page from February 10, 2009 for the Santa Fe New Mexican. I liked the headline and took a digital shot for my study of the economic crisis and media. Newspapers are dying and there is not a reason for me to buy this daily paper except to get the inside special edition Pasatiempo published on Friday. And I do like the ads for that special issue.
The newspaper business is dying fast with death throes and rattles and I'm bored even trying to report the dire bad news of the news. I knew when I could easily do desk top publishing way back when in the early 90s that the gatekeeper mode was breaking and anyone could publish to anyone at a much reduced cost. Whenever we pick up a newspaper here in Santa Fe we lament that it is already news we've seen online. But over the weekend we had three papers delivered to our driveway and we'd not subscribed at all. How do you get rid of papers you don't want, besides using them to start pinyon fires?
Naomi had commented on my post earlier about NYU professor Jay Rosen's article, Flying Seminar In The Future of News, which I had read. Go read it. It is a great March 2009 wrap up of links for mindcasting on the crashing of the newspaper industry and imagining a new news system.
The latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.
It is all about the disclaimers and trustworthiness of those who are in authority which now is very disruptive and no one is catching something important in this brou-ha-ha. Not wanting to add to the din of the story or echo of the simple idea of it all, the deeper story was backburnered until something important needed to be said.
There is a much bigger newsworthy story to this. If you are interested.
Don't you love those Drudge headlines!! I had to summarize some interesting reading. But first, good leadership makes hard decisions. Perhaps if our leaders dating back to Clinton's financial leaders had make tough decisions, perhaps we could have changed things but change is hard and there will always be people that don't do the right thing.
The Legitimate Story: The Future is Scary! Our president warns that the future could be catastrophic. Headlines blare his message: Pass it now or we may never recover. An email from President Barack Obama to supporters by name was sent individually to the 13 million supporters built by the Obama campaign and now controlled by the DNC. "I need your help to spread the word and build support..." the president's messaging said. Today his words: The situation we face could not be more serious. We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression. Economists from across the spectrum have warned that if we don't act immediately ...our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse. It is the war of the words...Media Matters and the spin of Republican talking points in the media coverage of the stimulus message war demonstrates the war of the semiotic framing and I watched the media graphics of the political play of the fight in this crisis.
The Politics of Journalism:Why didn't these stories get covered way back? They were considered fringe. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who has studied the national press since he received his PhD in 1986 has a must-read piece which has become his most-linked to post, ever. Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. He writes about the sphere of consensus -- a most interesting model of how news is covered by journalists and something I studied under the dean of my Media Studies graduate program at the New School, NYC, in her class on political communication. He explains why the internet is closer to real public opinion rather than the mainstream media and why the news media is a political institution.
Fringe or Taboo Stories: Austinite Bruce Sterling writes that 2009 is the Year of Panic (we are all deluded). Would this be out of the legitimate sphere? He writes:
"As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?" Sterling lists these seven areas: climate change, intellectual property, national currencies, insurance and building codes, the elderly, the Westphalian system and science.
Agreed-upon controversy is a legitimate story... the he said, she said, good guy, bad guy way of legitimately covering the news."
Newspapers are Walking Dead... With a journalism undergrad degree, I'm sad about all of the death and dying notices that are coming out in tital proportions in 2009. I've put together a short summary of this whirlwind of last gasp indicators...
We've had a long dance with printed news (see Ben Franklin's first magazine, published 1741, at right). It's almost over for newspapers. People forget that the U.S. Postal service subsidized media keeping the cost of sending news through the mail cheap and affordable.
Signs of Print Death Rattles...
The NYTimes received $250 million from Carlos Slim and started putting ads on the front page. Two weeks later the Boston Globe put ads on its front page. Layoffs continue -- the WSJ, LATimes, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald and on and on- across the board all newspapers are cutting back. The Chicago Tribune has a new design for news stand editions and it is compact --looks like a Parade insert. The Albuquerque Journal is stopping delivery and rack sales in more than 30 communities in New Mexico. Discussion is continuing about making newspapers non-profit, and France has given everyone over 18 a free newspaper subscription as a way of subsidizing the newspaper business. The Washington Post is ending its stand-alone book section. Even Bloomberg is cutting jobs and that is one media outlet I thought was well set for surviving these shifts.
Neighborsgo.com is a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News that uses a social network for community journalism and will cover 47 neighborhoods and is an example of how things are shifting from old to new.
Watching these mediascape changes:
If you are interested in more on media disruptions, go to Newspaper Death Watch. For media in general, I follow I want Media - Media News & Resources and Media Memo. It isn't just newspapers that are suffering. ABC, Time Warner, Disney, Clear Channel and other media companies are also suffering with the changes in the mediascape and the cut in advertising dollars in the recession. Hollywood will release fewer movies and put less marketing money put behind each release.
Jon Stewart's media joke: What's black and white and completely over? Newspapers.
Rupert Murdoch is admitting he spent twice as much as he should have for the WSJ. What I don't figure is why there isn't a date and timestamp on its online front page. I picked up a WSJ hard copy Wednesday and had read most everything digitally the morning before. Print is so old news, at least with the dailies.
Digital print:
The NYTimes is thinking about going back to online subscription. Kindle readers pay for a pushed version of the NYTimes, but it isn't updated. The new Kindle2.0 comes out Monday (expects a $1.2 billion business this year) and I'm ready to go to intangible digital books but since Santa Fe doesn't have good AT&T reception, I can't do iphone so it will be a long time before I'll be reading books on that tiny iPhone screen. Amazon expects books on iPhone to be the next area up for growth. My New Yorker subscription is also offering full content online to subscribers but I've not checked it out to see if it is different, but it will be pushed to me via email before the print editions come out which is a feature I would like, especially since news is old by the time I get it in the mail in New Mexico.
Digital Media... The shift to intangible media continues
Twitter, Dig, memeorandum, bloglines.... the way to get information online has pushed news elsewhere. CNN.com set a record for Obama's inaugural Live Stream. Craigslist has doomed classified ads in print. Facebook is 5 years old. Facebook's revenue is estimated at $260 - $300 million and Google's revenue is estimated at $962 million (link). DVD sales are down (no one likes Blue-Ray) and CD sales continue a decade-long spiral (Sony execs call it the "phyiscal music market").
What a day this is if you pay attention to business news. Media love a crisis, telling the story, explaining the news, hooking readers with controversy, using a good-guy, bad-guy narrative. The "fluid" and oblique Fed issues a statement as to what some are calling a "Zero Interest Rate Era". Obama meets with CEOs, the House prepares to pass the economic stimulus bill and Davos kicks off today with the theme Shaping the Post-Crisis World (post-crisis???? did some assume the global financial crisis would be over?).
The media is yet to call this a Depression, just as powers that be and the media were reluctant to call this a Recession as it became named the Global Financial/Economic Crisis. Reading Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter's letter, The Year of Investing Dangerously, he dances around the names for this further-sinking time with these terms: the Second Great Depression; the Great Retrenchment; the Great Reckoning. Paul Krugman forst came out with the D-word: Depression 2.0.
Several media outlets are covering Davos. Here are the ones I'm following: Financial Times Davos 2009; Dispatches from Davos, a Forbes blog; Time's Davos 2009 Blog; and Tracking Davos - a HuffPo Big News page. Arianna Huffington is participating in several panels at Davos involving new media, politics and bottom-up technology and media fusion potential.
Interesting reads on Private Equity: The Ultimate Bubble? by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair (a "shadow banking system" in a fluid situation and God himself couldn't turn a profit at most companies now") and a Bloomberg exclusive on the gravest crisis in the 40-year history of leveraged buy-outs.
The World Economic Forum is buzzing. The crisis is building.
(update I: Wonder how we got here? A good explanation for this perfect storm came out today.) update II: Still, the media is covering Davos for a multitude of reasons (and I wanted to add the link to the story in the photo), several outlined
by the Time blog article on Davos, including that "for the global tv
networks, it is the equivalent of College Football Gameday on ESPN --
Davos offers a backdrop that adds variety and excitement to the
proceedings. Plus, the presence of lots of prominent talking heads in one place
turns the perpetual challenge of booking enough guests to fill all that
airtime into an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel."
update III: I'm also following Twitter Davos
Six in ten Americans watched the inauguration live. Only 20% didn't pay any attention at all. I recorded the speech, ran off to a commitment and when I returned my husband had printed out the text and provided his comments in the margin. 46% of Americans rated Obama's Inaguration speech excellent.
My favorite snippet: let's dust ourselves off and get to work. (Such a reference to kids, such a call to business.)
So - links: The speech transcript, the live video and text; and my favorite review of the rhetoric was from presidential speechwriting pros, Experts Critique the speech, with opinions from: William Safire and William Gavin, speechwriters to Nixon; Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter to President Bill Clinton and others.
Numerous dailies increased their single-copy press runs, some by as many as 800% for inauguration day coverage which is a new trend to print-as-commemorative editions I noticed with our local paper in Santa Fe. The Wall Street Journal pushed into new unprecedented big headlines, too, for their commemoration paper.
Hanging onto the words... important to note this since this is a president who rose to office on words. (update: My own opinion: a soaring day, sunny with strong rhetoric. He was short on logos, strong on ethos and pathos. Logos is what is needed now).
update II: Letterman's Greatest Moments in Presidential Speeches.
The entire front page of today's Santa Fe New Mexican is covered in photos. The only text is photo cutlines.
That's something different for a daily newspaper. I can't remember seeing an entire print newspaper devote a front page to nothing but photos from only one story.
Visual literacy. Where is the text? Where is the written narration? Is this a move for a commemorative edition? Is this a sign of a blue state? Or a paper for an state that ranks low on education?
The visuals accompanying The Great Financial Crisis (a new moniker I've spotted for this is Depression 2.0 used by Paul Krugman) are rather dreary and dull for the most part. Charts heading down? How exciting is that? Certainly not like Anderson Cooper swimming with sharks. Of Time's top 10 magazine covers for 2008, only Conde Nast's Portfolio had a cover on the economic news.
A very niched blog, Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog started on October 3, 2008 to capture a very specific way that we saw this unfolding. Prior to this, for sale signs in yards topped with the add-on FORECLOSURE seemed to accompany articles in online newsoutlets about this time.
Other niche sites like economic blogs are gaining clout through this story.
note: This is part of my continuing study of The Great Financial Crisis as it unfolds in the media (Part I, Part II, Part III via flickr).
Google News, gaining ground, lists sites most often linked to as sources for top stories. In a study of most-cited news sources on Google News, Newsknife found that Bloomberg, a financial news service, was listed as one of the top sources for 2008 for news stories, ranking on a world-wide basis with Reuters, AP, CNN, Voice of America and FOX News. Newsknife also saw istockAnalyst.com for the first time in May 2008. Another niche site getting play on Google: 24/7 Wall st.
While some call it the most undercovered media story of the year and Columbia Journalism Review asks how the media missed the story, 77% of Americans think the U.S. media are making the economic situation worse by highlighting negative news and, as a result, lowering consumer confidence and investment activity.
I love the culture to be found in magazine covers -- it is a mirror to ourselves in U.S. society. And of course, I think the New Yorker and New York Magazine covers capture sophisticated culture, not pop culture, the best. For our culture of fear and the political year that had moment-after-moment of surprises, twists and turns, my favorite is the New Yorker cover at left. The War on Terror remains in our subconscious, a never ending nightmare.
The culture of hope, as in Obamahope, is Time's #1 magazine cover for the year (below, right).
Mart Pasetsky's 2008 cover awards give a glimpse of some of the year's best. I leave you with this, the year the internet surpassed everything but tv for national and international news.
Magazines should stay tangible for the cultural mirror they illustrate and this makes them most medialistically relevant.
Our wrappers, our visual literacy, ourselves, our statements.
