{"id":573890089,"date":"2017-08-07T22:49:13","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T03:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573890089"},"modified":"2017-08-09T11:36:49","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T16:36:49","slug":"what-do-the-agars-buzzfeed-and-our-garage-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2017\/08\/07\/what-do-the-agars-buzzfeed-and-our-garage-have-in-common\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agars, Buzzfeed and our garage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s sister Annie is about to show you: <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Ironman Boulder 70.3<br \/>RISE UP <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/TeamAgar?src=hash\">#TeamAgar<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/agar_john\">@agar_john<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/UnderArmour\">@UnderArmour<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MichaelPhelps\">@MichaelPhelps<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JustinVerlander\">@JustinVerlander<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/IRONMANtri\">@IRONMANtri<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 2017 Annie Agar production <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/iNrY48hdV2\">pic.twitter.com\/iNrY48hdV2<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Annie Agar (@AnnieAgar) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AnnieAgar\/status\/894394460808687617\">August 7, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t taken them on yet. <\/p>\n<p><strong>This is an interesting idea<\/strong>. Buzzfeed is going to do a Twitter broadcast. I&#8217;m trying to work this out in my mind. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poynter.org\/2017\/buzzfeeds-latest-streaming-gambit-a-new-morning-show-brought-to-you-by-wendys-update2\/469672\/\" target=\"_blank\">Poynter tells us about it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>BuzzFeed News is launching a morning show on Twitter later this year, and it&#8217;s hiring a team to get it off the ground.<\/p>\n<p>The next broadcast from the company that brought you exploding watermelons and a live goat ambush is a weekday newscast aimed at &#8220;an audience that wakes up hungry for the latest in &#8216;fire Tweets,'&#8221; according to a May 1 press release from Twitter (which also announced streaming shows with The Verge and Cheddar).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The winner here is Twitter. I&#8217;m not sure it is the right idea for Buzzfeed &#8212; curating the ideas of the many seems like a return to an older distribution model in a different envelope &#8212; but maybe at a place like Buzzfeed it doesn&#8217;t have to be the right idea just now. Maybe you just have to have the idea, because that&#8217;s going to lead to The Idea. I don&#8217;t know what The Idea there is going to be, but they have plenty of sharp people on board and it&#8217;ll develop over time, or strike as an epiphany. <\/p>\n<p>Wouldn&#8217;t you like to have The Idea first? It isn&#8217;t hub-and-spoke. It isn&#8217;t TMZ and it won&#8217;t be a gatekeeper style. It won&#8217;t be the old Buzzfeed kitten and listicle model, either.  And again, you can&#8217;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&#8217;s best pet or kid video. And then you&#8217;ve got a host basically reading tweets to us as a show. And the hashtags. (Don&#8217;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 &#8212; but cooler, for a social media program. But then there&#8217;s gravitas, name recognition, the boring logistics of &#8220;Can you get that person on?&#8221; 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?<\/p>\n<p>All of these traditional &#8212; or newly traditional routines, if you will &#8212;  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&#8217;s something to be said for presence and branding, of course, but that&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/26ebf992-00c4-11e6-99cb-83242733f755\" target=\"_blank\">fell well short of their projections last year<\/a>. Maybe they&#8217;re starting their own gif-driven social media platform. <\/p>\n<p>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, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2015\/04\/the-eternal-return-of-buzzfeed\/390270\/\" target=\"_blank\">an influential juggernaut<\/a>, ultimately spins off their video programs.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>This I wondered about while straightening up in the garage this evening. But the boxes in the garage didn&#8217;t give me the answers. I&#8217;m down to watch and see. I did not have The Idea.<\/p>\n<p>Today, that is.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: My friend and Knight Fellow <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/acnatta\" target=\"_blank\">Andre Natta<\/a> chimes in, because he&#8217;s smart and I asked him too. He made three keen points. One of them I wanted to include:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Because, is there really a better use than managing accuracy during a breaking news event (or managing the hot take hose)?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That would be a great feature. Who do we trust for that? We don&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/KCStar\" target=\"_blank\">Kansas City Star<\/a> is on the ground and has bonafides and is offering legitimate Twitter coverage the next time there&#8217;s a big problem in the &#8216;burbs?<\/p>\n<p>If that&#8217;s the case maybe who is really missing out here are the news networks. Buzzfeed won&#8217;t build this out for breaking news. That&#8217;s an important model, but it isn&#8217;t sustainable for them. What&#8217;s more, CNN and the like struggle with a variety of on-air management issues in slower news periods.<\/p>\n<p>As for Andre&#8217;s thought on the &#8220;hot take hose&#8221; &#8230; Here&#8217;s something that may very well be impacted by such a Buzzfeed move. Watch the &#8220;trending topics&#8221; and &#8220;who to follow&#8221; boxes. Already, if you click a trending topic that &#8220;who to follow&#8221; 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&#8217;s original idea, that the media are what connects events to audience, and all of the scholarship that followed, which basically says &#8220;Media can tell you what to think <em>about<\/em>&#8221; works here. If Twitter is a water cooler. There&#8217;s about to be a new, very dynamic co-worker hanging out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573890089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-monday","category-twitter","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573890089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573890089"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573890089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573890095,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573890089\/revisions\/573890095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573890089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573890089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573890089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}