journalism / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on The Agars, Buzzfeed and our garage
07
Aug 17

The Agars, Buzzfeed and our garage

John Agar Sr., wanted to do something with his son, John Jr. John the younger has cerebral palsy and, while they were looking for a thing to do, they found the 5K. Dad would push son 3.1 miles through the course. They got lapped by a power walker. So they resolved to train harder. And these guys are something special. I could tell you, but John’s sister Annie is about to show you:

They race all over these days, the Agars inspire and delight and even challenge Michael Phelps to races. Phelps, who was last seen in a simulated race against a shark, hasn’t taken them on yet.

This is an interesting idea. Buzzfeed is going to do a Twitter broadcast. I’m trying to work this out in my mind. Poynter tells us about it:

BuzzFeed News is launching a morning show on Twitter later this year, and it’s hiring a team to get it off the ground.

The next broadcast from the company that brought you exploding watermelons and a live goat ambush is a weekday newscast aimed at “an audience that wakes up hungry for the latest in ‘fire Tweets,'” according to a May 1 press release from Twitter (which also announced streaming shows with The Verge and Cheddar).

The winner here is Twitter. I’m not sure it is the right idea for Buzzfeed — curating the ideas of the many seems like a return to an older distribution model in a different envelope — but maybe at a place like Buzzfeed it doesn’t have to be the right idea just now. Maybe you just have to have the idea, because that’s going to lead to The Idea. I don’t know what The Idea there is going to be, but they have plenty of sharp people on board and it’ll develop over time, or strike as an epiphany.

Wouldn’t you like to have The Idea first? It isn’t hub-and-spoke. It isn’t TMZ and it won’t be a gatekeeper style. It won’t be the old Buzzfeed kitten and listicle model, either. And again, you can’t curate everything coming out of the firehose. A small portion of the success of the social media monsters can be attributed to the implications there. Even if you tried, it would be a Kardashian tweet here, a sports blooper there and today’s best pet or kid video. And then you’ve got a host basically reading tweets to us as a show. And the hashtags. (Don’t read hashtags allowed.) Or, slightly better, you get a panel laughing and reacting or maybe even contextualizing the content. A super smart version of that might be viable. You might create the Twitter broadcast version of some of the better network or cable shows — but cooler, for a social media program. But then there’s gravitas, name recognition, the boring logistics of “Can you get that person on?” And then, if they are good, can you get them regularly? Are they in demand for network appearances? And which show would you choose if both sets of producers called?

All of these traditional — or newly traditional routines, if you will — will present the same issues here. But I think, for them, it has to drive you back to Buzzfeed. Why would a site who made their name as a part of the evolutionary media disruption go exclusively to social media, another ripple from their point of view? There’s something to be said for presence and branding, of course, but that’s not the big goal out of this. Maybe it is an offshoot of a new growth pattern, a new revenue stream for the company that seemingly fell well short of their projections last year. Maybe they’re starting their own gif-driven social media platform.

Or what if this is successful? What if the website, which grew on those lists and rewrites and became an earnest newsroom and, to some, an influential juggernaut, ultimately spins off their video programs.

I have a notebook sitting in a closet where I doodled out the mass media fragmentation models. It basically went from four big blobs to a bunch of lines and dots. And it seemed, back in 2006 or so when I was writing in that book, that all of those dots and smaller blobs and indistinct triangles and other shapes would naturally one day coalesce again. I thought of it as a natural reaction to funnels at the time. Maybe it is a corporate response to market forces and the silo-ification that is bound to happen. It has happened before.

This I wondered about while straightening up in the garage this evening. But the boxes in the garage didn’t give me the answers. I’m down to watch and see. I did not have The Idea.

Today, that is.

Update: My friend and Knight Fellow Andre Natta chimes in, because he’s smart and I asked him too. He made three keen points. One of them I wanted to include:

Because, is there really a better use than managing accuracy during a breaking news event (or managing the hot take hose)?

That would be a great feature. Who do we trust for that? We don’t trust traditional media for it 98 percent of the time. We should trust them more. Is Buzzfeed going to bring me the Ryan Seacrest-Cronkite of this generation to tell me the Kansas City Star is on the ground and has bonafides and is offering legitimate Twitter coverage the next time there’s a big problem in the ‘burbs?

If that’s the case maybe who is really missing out here are the news networks. Buzzfeed won’t build this out for breaking news. That’s an important model, but it isn’t sustainable for them. What’s more, CNN and the like struggle with a variety of on-air management issues in slower news periods.

As for Andre’s thought on the “hot take hose” … Here’s something that may very well be impacted by such a Buzzfeed move. Watch the “trending topics” and “who to follow” boxes. Already, if you click a trending topic that “who to follow” box updates with relevant or topical accounts. Now throw in a video box on the right side, with some slick production under the Buzzfeed brand and the topics amplify. It is a traditional media idea, agenda setting theory. Walter Lippman’s original idea, that the media are what connects events to audience, and all of the scholarship that followed, which basically says “Media can tell you what to think about” works here. If Twitter is a water cooler. There’s about to be a new, very dynamic co-worker hanging out there.

Friday / photo — Comments Off on Meditations on time
04
Aug 17

Meditations on time

I saw this sign while walking about downtown today:

I wonder how long you have to stare at that until you came up with that idea. And when exactly is Kanye time, anyway? It is always time for some things, and common sense tells us that it is never time for other things. But does this artisanally-crafted sign imply that you can park at all of the times that aren’t Kanye time? And when is Kanye time?

Also, this sign, because nothing brings people back into your store after a series of health and sanitation woes like a celebrity ingredientologist!

They’re driving their audience to a website where your ingredients are musical. You can create some interesting stuff from the samples. I plugged in my usual order. It makes better sense as a food than it does as a song, which you can listen to here, but the site itself is really quite impressive.

And, finally, I was in the car, the stereo was blaring, the sun was finally suggesting it would, once again, sink softly below the western horizon, when I figured out something I’ve been pondering for a lifetime. It was the sort of thing that you don’t even know you’re considering it, until the consideration is resolved with the peskiness of a realization. I now know what the best part of the week — in your standard westernized context, anyway — is. The best moment of the week is 7:45 p.m., on a Friday.

What’s better than that? You’ve left the week behind, you have the weekend ahead, there’s a reason the sun is right there and the stereo is blaring. It is 7:45, and that’s … well maybe not legendary, but certainly memorable.

markers / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off on There’s a lot of odd stuff in this post, so, the usual
03
Aug 17

There’s a lot of odd stuff in this post, so, the usual

Do you know the significance of this building? It has some important history.

You’ll learn about this building on the most recent addition to the historic markers site. If you just can’t get enough of the historical markers you can see them all right here.

Today I helped put stickers on cameras for a few minutes. All of that Sunday school training paid off. Except for on the few stickers that were a millimeter or two off-center here or there. (But don’t tell.) Four stickers per camera. One on the body, one on the lens, another on the power adaptor — it does a slow focus pull in video mode — and another on the external microphone.

This is the funniest cruel thing — is it the funniest, cruel thing or the cruelest, funny thing? — that I’ll watch. The premise is the expert explains the topic over hot peppers. Some people get through it just fine, this lady tells an interesting story and she’s really hurting. And I’m sympathetic to her plight. But I learned some neat things:

We watched this last night. Just an incredible hour of television, which took place in 2005 and I just discovered. It is amazing, in a way, that this made it to network television. And it was the fourth highest rated episode of the last season of West Wing. And of course, this would never happen in real life, ever. But it is a fun watch:


The West Wing S 7 Ep 07 – The Debate

Or maybe you just have to be a certain kind of viewer to appreciate that. But I enjoyed that, didn’t want it to end. I dreaded it ending, and how often do you say that about a single episode of television? I realized why Alan Alda is there and put away, for an hour, my Unifying Theory of Alda, because this was more important, than that. Which is saying something for a fictitious debate in a non-existent presidential campaign in a world that we don’t live in — with issues similar to ours.

But, then, I spent a lot of my master’s degree working on debates and writing and researching campaign material, so maybe you have to be an especially specific kind of viewer. I’m going to have to stop it during the opening credits right now, or I’ll end up watching the thing again …

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on There is no such thing as too many cameras
02
Aug 17

There is no such thing as too many cameras

We’re still working on those cameras. It turns out that preparing 150 of these things takes some time. Tomorrow they’ll be barcoded. At some point they’ll get put into The System. We’ve put them together in a room that is ordinarily an 18-computer classroom. And the finished cameras fill up all of the tabletop space in the room. Here’s a small sample:

One hundred and fifty cameras. We found that you could get into and out of one box in about eight minutes. You could get six or seven ready, then, per hour. That’s if your fingers were behaving at the time which, for me, is something easier said than done.

Saw these Black-eyed Susans at lunchtime today:

At which point we could discuss the passage of time and the second half of summer and the early hours of August and what comes next. But it is a beautiful day and the flowers are still showing off. There will be time for all of that later, it is inevitable. Enjoy the sunshine, he says to himself, knowing one day it might take.

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Say cheese
01
Aug 17

Say cheese

Today I helped a few people build out some cameras. One of our classrooms had 75 brown boxes. And in each brown shipping box we found two Canon boxes. And in each of those colorful Canon boxes there were three other boxes. Those boxes contained a camera body, a lens and a microphone. And a lot of packaging.

I didn’t think to take a photo of all of the bubble wrap and cardboard and the many piles of literature. There were two manuals, a registration, a warranty and some other stuff too. This was just one pile:

It took all day and then some, unpacking, removing the tape, wrestling with, and sometimes failing to avoid cardboard cuts. Then you had to deal with each part’s individual wrapping. Then put the lens on the body, the microphone in the hot shoe, and then thread the neck strap through the body. Do all of that 150 times. It took all day. They look nice, though:

Students are going to have a lot of cool new gear this year.
Tomorrow

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