VictorCurrie.com - Home of Producer, Director, and Media Conslutant Victor Currie

Monday

29Jun

I See Dead People

Monday, June 29, 2009 at 9:55AM

It's always interesting to watch how different people react to the deaths of various celebrities.

I have to admit that I loved one person's Facebook post, "Oh my God, a second plane just crashed into Michael Jackson!," because it totally summed up the level of domination his death caused across the media. It seemed especially odd, since it was mostly reported as a surprise despite almost every newsperson I know (including me in the days I still reported) thinking Jackson would go young (if only to satisfy his own psychological need for a Lennon/Presley level of tragic immortality).

Michael Jackson news drove so much traffic to the Internet (roughly 270% or so of normal usage), it actually took down major sites like the LA Times, took AOL's AIM service down for 40 minutes, and got a lot of people starting to think about what would happen to our now net-reliant communication if something crucial really happened. [More on that at the Wall Street Journal.]

Not that anything else important was happening at the time, just stuff like the rushing through of economic and health care legislation that will affect our families long after Jackson's music sounds as dated as Al Jolson's. Or the implosion of another South American government. Or any of the myriad international stories about issues that affect our safety and wallet that we no longer hear about because networks can't afford large-scale foreign bureaus anymore.

Pity poor Fred Travelena, who will barely rate a headline this week in the Parade of Celebrity Deaths. Or Gale Storm.

This was also a weird week since at one time or another I'd met pretty much everyone who died other than Jackson (who I'd seen at various times, backstage at Grammys and on lot at Universal, but never actually met). I met Billy Mays just last month at the Direct Marketing Association convention.

Now I have to see if I can find the negatives of shots I took of Farrah backstage at Battle of the Network Stars in 1978.

While I'm cautiously optimistic that no other celebrities died while I was writing this (I'm a fast typist), I still remember that nearly 30,000 children around the world die from preventable causes each year simply because they don't have access to clean water. And that's something we can actually do something about.

Victor Currie |

It's time to save news

Friday, April 10, 2009 at 3:49AM

Like so many of my media colleagues, I'm saddened by the slow march toward death that newsgathering has been making these last few years.

While it's been quite a while since I've been doing much in the way of traditional journalism, I think my various forays into different media (from developing satellite business television networks programming to new media to directing commercials to producing cheesy network reality TV with dogs) gives me some insight into how we can save some of the traditional journalism outlets.

I don't care whether you're reading the Huffington Post or Drudge, if you get all your "news" from a specific-agenda-driven aggregator, you aren't getting a complete view of the world. There is a reason so many people from traditional journalism backgrounds lament the death of newspapers (beyond the end of their jobs), and that is the ongoing erosion of checks-and-balances in the newsroom that happens when the various editors send the reporters back because they haven't proved their story to the extent that its ready for print. As newspaper staffing dwindles, this quality control drops, the due diligence weakens, and you end up with the New York Times printing fake stories (and they're just one of the few big papers to get caught).

While online journalism has a wonderful implication of immediacy, the fact-checking that gets lost in the rush to be first is worse than even local TV news' need to have something to say when they go "Live at 11!" And of course, we are seeing far too many blog posts accepted as fact and then re-quoted by a more (supposedly) legitimate source and then picked up by national media as if it was real. (None of this is actually new. Back in the early 1970s, my dad and the actor Glenn Ford made up a fake story together and my dad read it on the air as a test to see how long it would take for the National Enquirer to pick it up and report it as fact. It took three weeks.)

So I'm going to propose what many, especially the FCC, consider sacrilege.

Consolidation within individual markets.

It's really simple. Combine the newsgathering operations of broadcast, web, and print so there are enough people working to actually cover the news.

Yes this requires changing the rules about cross-ownership of media within individual markets, but that's been a dead horse for a long time now (as here in LA, where Tribune owns the Times and KTLA-TV).

Is there any reason that a single reporter/producer, working with a cameraperson/editor/tech-person-with-mobile-broadband-device can't handle writing up a story for TV, radio, web, and print? Some may argue that reporters can't cover as many stories, but that's the point. Have a larger number of people reporting across multiple media still allows for a smaller number of people working for the combined media company overall, but there can be more people actually covering the stories. And those reporters would have more time to get the story right, instead of rushing away from covering the policy decision that can affect our taxes to run across town to cover the latest car crash.

Others may argue that a lot of high-quality print reporters would never make it on TV, but I think that is one of the dumbest concepts ever forced upon an unsuspecting public. Who ever came up with the idea that reporters on television needed to do live on-camera recaps of hours-old news? Report broadcast stories the old-fashioned way, with good B-roll, and just have the interview subjects on camera. I really don't care that a hot blond reporter is standing in front of a dark building telling me something happened there six hours earlier - just show the aftermath of the original situation in video - I don't need to have the story told to me live. (Not that I don't think hot blond reporters are good, just that their skills as journalists should be the priority in hiring).

We can still keep the attractive people in the anchor chair. Anchors are for the most part hosts rather than reporters these days (no slight intended to my actual journalist-anchor friends). That's why we hire attractive billboard-friendly people for the job. The main requirement for the job, if we adopted my model and had more skilled journalists in the field, is to be able to smoothly read the prompter to introduce the stories and be able to ad-lib a bit if it breaks (a lot harder than it sounds for those of you who have never had to do it).That is why in Britain, Australia, and other countries, they don't have "anchors," they have "News Readers."

Radio and the web can bring immediacy. TV can bring the daily recap. Print then provides the deeper analysis and fact-checking it could then have the time to handle, plus the more in depth analysis and human interest features. As some cities are cutting back on the number of days the local newspaper goes to press, a two or three day print cycle (most likely to include Thursday and Sunday for the advertising cycle) might make economic sense but the news coverage would still continue across the other media.

It's a change, and people are resistant to change, but overall this kind of consolidation makes economic sense in a new media era (even if it would inevitably lead to less competition between news outlets).

Our course, how much credibility can I have now, since I am writing this in a blog?

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Victor Currie |

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Sunday

22Feb

Reunions in the age of Facebook

Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 4:49AM

Erica and I had a great time last night at a reunion of friends who were Tour Guides at Universal Studios 20 years ago, and it was of course great to see everyone. The strange part was how much Facebook has changed the group dynamic.

In the past, whenever one would go to a reunion of old friends and acquaintances, most of the evening would be spent asking or answering, "So what do you do now?" Instead, through the magic of social networking, we mostly already knew the basics of what people are up to, have seen pictures of their kids, caught up with their careers in the time since. I was already aware of recent accomplishments and life changes for at least three-quarters of the people there.

In other words, the small talk had already been made virtually, and people could dive right into conversation almost as if we hadn't only occasionally seen each other over the decades.

For all the criticisms of social networking as a way for people to avoid face-to-face encounters, I think the opposite can be true. It can be a way to pave the way for great physical gatherings of old friends (this kind of reunion could never have been organized so quickly and easily before Facebook), and keep the conversation going in-between the face-to-face. (Not that the text-addicted 20-somethings don't already know this).

Of course, what it really means is that I'm now going to be even more addicted to this stuff.

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Victor Currie |

Bailout Blues. New cast, but same old story.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 6:23AM

"I don't want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems. Nor does it constitute all of what we're going to have to do to turn our economy around. But today does mark the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs."

So said President Barack Obama in Denver after spending lots of federal dollars to move the presidential entourage from Washington, D.C. to Denver so he could sign the bailout bill with 10 ceremonial pens at a photo op. Hope he sent Al Gore a check for the carbon credits.

"In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed... We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous."

So said President George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, there was a banner for the sailors on board the that said "Mission Accomplished." Despite the rhetoric about it, Bush never said that our mission was accomplished, but that banner that was there for the men and women who were about to be shipped home became a misattributed symbol that dogged him for the rest of his presidency. Fortunately for Obama, he has much better PR people around him than did Bush.

One major difference is that the media likes Obama (pines for with lustful abandon might be more accurate), and of course, they hated Bush with even more passion. Fortunately for Obama, his smooth vocal style gets him through any lack of substance (so far), where Bush's greatest failure overall was his ineptitude as a communicator. No matter how many things Bush did right (and yes he did do a lot right, despite the well-reported fialures), he was never - with the possible exception of his first post-9/11 speech - able to articulate his vision clearly to the American people.

Obama, on the other hand, has Hope. And that might just be enough for the moment as we go through some pretty hopeless times.

But this week's stimulus package, which was much more Reid/Pelosi than Obama, was a serious example of Hope Over Substance. I'm not going to cry like so many other economic conservatives that Obama's team is ignoring their input. What did they expect? His record in both the Illinois and US Senates was farther to the left than Kerry and Kennedy, so of course he's in favor of social welfare programs as a method to solve the crisis. You can't whine because someone acted exactly as his record would predict (though a few Obama voters I've spoken to over the last few days seem surprised because they were so taken with his star power that they forgot to look at his pre-campaign history).

My issue is that there is such a vast amount of legislation tacked onto this thing that should have been thoroughly vetted through the committee process that instead was slammed though. I'm fine with building legitimate infrastructure. I think national wireless high-speed broadband would be a great boon to the growth of small business and telecommuting.

And I think we should throw a ton of money at the arts instead of trying to cut out a paltry $50 million in this bloated mess. The arts stimulates the minds of the thinkers of the future. We are going to need those thinkers, because we are going to be paying for this knee-jerk legislation for a long, long time.

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Victor Currie |