AR&D Reinventing Local Media

I think we're going camerablind, and I don't know what to make of it.

Let me explain.

I took the family out for one of my little town's “concerts on the common” Monday night. (Picture New England town, postcard, bandstand, ice cream, Norman Rockwell… the works.) The local cable channel was, impressively, doing a three-camera shoot. Because they're cable access, they have limited resources, so one of the cameras was fixed, about 25 yards from the center of the stage, on the lawn.

Everyone sits at these concerts. It's a picnic kind of atmosphere, save for the kids running around. But I'll tell you, it seemed like whenever someone stood to chat with a friend, they stood right in front of that camera. Two guys stood there for a good few minutes, probably five feet away. As a TV guy, I wanted to yell something – but what? “Down in front – of the camera?” The cable access guys simply switched between their other two cams until the guys were done with their chat.

Parents pushed their kids on bikes, occasionally hitting a training wheel on one of the tripod sticks. One person stood in front of the camera and just, well, sort of examined it, as though it were a museum exhibit.

Here's another example:

The family went to DisneyWorld earlier this month. Of course, the place is lousy with cameras. But what do you do when you see someone taking a picture of their kids or friend? You stop, right? Let them have their picture. It's one of those “everyone in society does this, so we can all have our pictures” things. Same with the camcorders. Unwritten rule: when you have your camcorder rolling, I duck.

Not any more.

People just walk through the picture now. And I don't mean they walk through because you're 20 feet away and they can't tell you're trying to squeeze in the whole of Epcot into a shot of your wife. They'll walk through a standard three-foot shoot. Even if it means turning sideways. No apologies. Nothing.

I accidentally walked into a family shot. Truly – it was accidental. I was coming out of a door they were standing in front of and WHAM a flash goes off. (I had a brief taste of what it must be like to be a celebrity.) The group laughed. I was so embarrassed that I offered to retake the shot with all of them in it. Isn't that what you do?

The ubiquity of cameras can lead to great moments – like capturing news when no professional organizations are there. But it also has its downside. We're becoming camerablind. I don't think there's an intentional shift to rudeness here. We're just saturated by cameras. They're on the traffic lights, in the airports, in the stores, in the casinos – you're on camera all day long. What's one more?

I just want to take a moment to share the news of the passing of a great journalist and professor, Jim Thistle. Jim was the director of the Boston University College of Communications Broadcast Journalism Program, and I was a student of his in the early '90s. Jim conferred upon me my Masters of Broadcast Journalism, and occasionally invited me back to talk to the students. Jim worked in TV news for 30 years, serving as news director at the CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates here in Boston. Whenever there was a story about news in the news, the stations went to him for comment.

Not only was Jim a mentor – he was a mentor to those who are now others' mentors.

Even though his DNA was in TV news, Jim knew that the Web would change everything. We talked in 1992 about the changes that were coming. I remember he brought in speakers who, even before we had the World Wide Web as we knew it, spoke about how this nebulous thing known as “digital convergence” would change our jobs. Jim embraced the concept, and as the years went by held panels on the topic and eagerly taught students about the Web.

Getting an internship in Boston is easy – all you need to say is “Jim Thistle sent me.”  That's how I landed at this startup in 1992 called “New England Cable News,” where I launched my career.

There are all sorts of debates today about the value of a journalism degree, and you can even count me in the debate. But there is no debate about the value one teacher can have in your life. Thanks, Jim.

“Optimists are nostalgic about the future,” or so the quote goes, widely attributed to the Chicago Tribune. It's a good quote for the times we're in – heck, even the week we're in. The publisher of the LA Times and the editor of the Chicago Tribune both quit, no doubt due to the Sam Zell takeover. Ad bucks are down and there's no dispute they're going lower. It costs a fortune to travel anywhere this summer.

And soon, you won't even be able to buy an American-owned Bud.

Plenty to be pessimistic about.

But I'm nostalgic about the future. I can remember, vividly, saying to a friend in 1984 “This is 'the future.' We have cool cars, we have computers, we have ATMs that give us money whenever we want, we can call across the seas, we've been to the moon, we can fly – all the things than man has dreamed of.” I swear. Ask Jen Harris. OK, she may not remember it. But I had the epiphany. It was in a Toyota Camry. And I can admit this because I was wrong. 1984 wasn't 'the future'. It was almost 25 years ago.

I am nostalgic about the great things yet to come, because I can see walls coming down. I started to preach convergence media in 2000. Nearly all the practices you see in newsrooms now weren't allowed under the rule “TV first, Web second.” The decade isn't even out, and the mindshift has at least changed, even if the practices haven't everwhere. I am nostalgic for the time when that will come. And it will.

 I am nostalgic for the future because I don't think journalism is going downhill. I think the way we investigate news and disseminate information will get better. What is holding us back is one attempt after another to hold on to ways that haven't changed since the 19th (even 18th) century. But if we take the efforts that go into making the same homogenized local TV newscasts and we put those into creating great acts of local journalism… we're back in the news business. Otherwise, we're just trying to hang on to a model from the 1960s.

I am nostalgic for the future because, since the inception of Facebook, I have reconnected with a number of old friends. Is there a better kind of friend? Place-based technologies like those for the iPhone will make this kind of rekindling even easier – “Your friend from high school is three blocks away – want to meet at the Starbucks on 56th and 5th? Here's a coupon for a free latte!”

We get hit with all kinds of setbacks in life, and this has been one downer of a year economically. Just look at any media company's stock. We can decide that this is it; to paraphrase T.S. Eliot: This is the way the media world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Or we can be nostalgic for the future because we know the reinvention is here and with a change in our course there are great, unknown and wonderful things ahead. 

ADDENDUM: Yes, they lined up like the Apple nuts that they (OK, we) are. And AT&T had glitches activating all the phones, once again frustrating the most loyal consumers:

A spokesman for AT&T Inc., the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., said there was a global problem with Apple's iTunes software that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

 ”Hey, thanks for waiting seven hours for this. Now go home, and finish the work for us. There's no way we could have anticipated this much demand. We're only AT&T after all…”

There is a price to pay for being early adopters: the glitches get worked out on you.

(Original article below…)

The true test of fanaticism will come on Friday when Apple releases the second iteration of its iPhone: will people line up like crazy, just as they did when the first iPhone was released last year?

The iPhone 3G seems to offer some significant improvements over its predecessor (battery life, however, doesn't seem to be one of them – According to Walt Mossberg:

…the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone has a sealed battery that can’t be replaced with a spare.

Which always makes me nuts. I'm using a Motorola Q right now, and the life on the “extended” battery is short enough. To have to find an outlet by the end of the day every day when I travel is an outright pain.

The big difference is the speed – on the 3G network, accessing the Web is much faster – Mossberg's test found it to be more than five times faster.

Still – the phone's the same size (no “Nano” versions here) comes with the same screen and the same not-so-hot camera (and no video camera – a puzzler) as the original iPhone.

So – will they line up? Will the eager beaver Apple Addicts toss aside their first gen iPhones on which they spent $599 last year to get the upgrade?

If they do, I won't believe for a moment the economy is in trouble.