Monday Morning Media Quarterback

When MSG Communications media-trains executives, a key point we make is that just like their own industries, journalism, media and publishing is all about doing more with less.  If a newspaper had three reporters covering consumer electronics and gaming, for example, now there might be just one.

On a media tour with a client to Newsweek, we were having an engaged discussion with a key editor.  Suddenly, someone burst in.  “Time to blog!” they sang out brightly.  The editor’s look of incredulity, scorn and resignation was priceless.

The same pressure exists at Time.  Time Editor Rick Stengel wrote in a recent memo to staff:

Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com. TIME.com is a daily responsibility; Time magazine is a weekly responsibility.  

We are now both a 24/7 news organization online and the indispensable weekly magazine that we have always been, and always will be. We don’t own our readers or their time - we have to earn their attention and loyalty every week, every day and every hour in a media landscape that is only getting more competitive. Let’s go to work.

Like the editor at Newsweek, the Time staff doesn’t get paid extra for their new 24/7 workload.  If they’re lucky, they get to keep their jobs as long as there’s a Time in print–which Chairman Ann Moore claims will be as long as we live. 

Sorry BabyBoomers, you’re too old for Playboy.  It’s not an indignity limted just to women born in ‘64 and before; the tyranny of youth applies to guys as well.

Actor Kevin Bacon was summarily dumped from a scheduled Playboy  interview because an editor decided he was “too old.” Miffed that he couldn’t join his acting idols Lee Majors and Telly Savalas in its hallowed pages, (he apparently read Playboy for the articles), Bacon wrote this song.

Oh, Playboy will gladly take your money, even if you’re out of its desired demographic.  But then you’ll end up writing letters like this:

Having passed midcentury a few years ago, I believe my tastes may not reflect the average reader’s.  I find WWE diva Ashley Massaro’s lip rings extremely unappealing.  She looks like a vampire.

Ronald Solomon, State College, Pennsylvania

Good thing Playboy’s editorial policies don’t apply to the frolics of its founder.

The San Francisco Chronicle is making one of the biggest newsroom cuts yet; 25%, writes a Chronicle reporter(!)  Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others will be laid off.

“Analysts predicted the reductions at The Chronicle could have repercussions for readers. While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists. “

Then there’s the news website in Pasadena, that has unrepentently (and to great publicity) outsourced its city council coverage to India to reporters paid $7500 a year.

While I have sympathy for those cutback or outsourced, I’m not going to cry crocodile tears.  As my Dad told me more than 30 years ago, you’ll never see pro-labor sentiment in a newspaper because they’re an employer.  As the last person I know who owns three American cars, (a Ford, a Lincoln and a Jeep) where were these people and their publications in terms of supporting U.S. industries?

Still, it’s tough times, and for a communications person, the whirling scythe dumps more competitors into the pool.

On May 17  I attended the Time Warner annual meeting in Burbank.   CEO Richard Parsons gave a presentation, told us “we toil on your behalf” and said after years of “going sideways, we finally got some movement in the stock.”  He pointed to the board of directors, “I work for them, they work for you.”

He went over numbers and showed graphics like InStyle with Haile Berry, Bugs Bunny and CNN with Anderson Cooper, adding ”I’d like to salute publicly our journalists who put themselves in harm’s way.”

Befitting the Warner Brothers location, he showed a pair of film clips.  The latest Harry Potter looked vivid and great, while the new Hairspray left me wondering if John Travolta (in drag as the mom) has a speech impediment.  Parsons noted the studio won 10 Oscars in 2007, but I don’t see Travolta finally getting his for this.  Nonetheless, Parsons urged the audience to see the films “early and often.”

“Can old media exist in a digital world?” is the challenge for content creators, according to Parsons, and is something a writer like myself  struggles with every day.  “We’re in the content creation business; ink on paper, television, video.  Our challenge is to move our company into digital, whether you own it, rent it, watch it on an iPOD.”

Parsons is unflappable, as befits a man who says he’s a big fan of Happy Feet.  He also has a good sense of humor, staying calm while noted corporate gadfly John Chevvedden talked about Parson’s high ($22 million) compensation.  When another stockholder admonished Parsons for selling Google years ago, he said, “We could have done better, but no one has ever gone broke taking a profit.”

What’s Time Warner all about?  Parsons put it this way:

1. Make money for our shareholders.

2. Do some good in the world.

3. Have some fun doing it. 

From a media training point of view, couldn’t have said it better myself.

Welcome USA Today readers! 

Amanda Beard will be appearing nude in a Playboy near you. 

 

Who is Amanda Beard?  She is an 7-time medal winning swimmer and Olympic athlete.

Obviously, Ms. Beard feels the exposure (insert your own joke here) will help her career and bank account. But the nay-sayers are out;  posing sexily is seen as bad for women’s sports.  Does Amanda have  an obligation to promote women’s sports, or is it OK just to promote her (naked) self? 

Sports Illustrated writer Aditi Kinkhabwala takes up the issue here.  Money quote “Sexy pictures don’t make people more likely to read about women’s sports, they don’t make anyone more likely to attend a women’s sporting event, and they sure don’t drive any season-ticket sales.”

But Kinkhabwala’s point is compromised by her platform; when I read her story online the ad next to it was for one of Sport Illustrated’s many Swimsuit edition products.   Also unaddressed was why Beard needs to put her obligations to some amorphous larger group (women, women’s swimming, women’s sports) ahead of her own personal interest.

In a rare reversal, management at IDG (publishers of PC World) have kicked the CEO/publisher upstairs and brought back editor Harry McCracken.  He had resigned over editorial independence issues when a story, “Ten Things We Hate About Apple,” was killed by the CEO for fear of offending same.

As IDG finally realized, at the end of the day, a magazine is a lot like a person; ultimately, all you’ve got is your reputation. 

Tech journalists would generally rather write about cool products and score them for themselves than attack powerful companies.  Computer magazines, like automobile magazines, are generally uncritical “enthusiast” publications.  Journalists for both love to write stories with leads like “The new ________ is the best _______ yet.”

However, sometimes push comes to shove, and Harry McCracken, editor in chief of PC World, resigned last week after the magazine’s chief exec (or publisher) killed a story about Apple Computer.  The story, perhaps not wisely for McCracken’s tenure, was called “Ten Things We Hate About Apple.” 

That kind of story is only OK with the publisher (read ‘chief ad salesman’) if all “ten things we hate” are on the order of “1. Apple is so darned innovative that’s it’s hard to keep up with all their insanely great products.”

With more and more readers migrating to the Web, and thus not actually buying magazines,  advertising, both print and web, becomes increasingly important.  Indeed, the PC World publisher, Colin Crawford, claims 35% of IDG’s income comes from digital sources.  So what’s been called the  ‘Chinese wall’ between the editorial and advertising sides is becoming increasingly porous.  As McCracken seems to have discovered, editorial independence is falling by the wayside, and the ‘new Golden Rule’ is in place: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

Reggie, the lovable alligator dumped in a Long Beach lake by his loser owners when he got too big, is back! 

 

This week also brought us a grizzly bear attack and aftermath. It follows the death threat against little Knut the Polar Bear and the pet food panic.  Last spring, a coyote in Manhattan was a huge story, even as Californians used to real Wileys said WTF.  There’s West’s incredible cover piece on Cheeta, 75-year old survivor of Hollywood’s golden era.  Lucky and Flo. And .

Alligators, bears, monkeys and coyotes don’t buy papers.  But people who care about them apparently do.  Is reading about animals a respite from the depressing doings of humans?  Do animal stories pull  like Hollywood tales?  Do they bring the call of the wild to sedentary urban people?  Or are animals part of the reader’s idealized family, as in this 1939 (!) shot of Cheeta with Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Hara as Jane.

 

Or has what was once the summer silly season  become a year-round media game of trivial pursuit?

Joe Francis is a man America loves to hate.  He’s tall, rich, arrogant and arguably handsome.  He’s seen as a pornographer and exploiter of underage girls, and worst of all, he’s an intimate friend of Paris Hilton (link NSFW).  And his company’s unconscionable use of the ‘approval’ sales process (once you’ve ordered, they keep sending you new DVDs and charging your credit card) put the FTC on the case.

Now the guys who brought down Al Capone are after him.  It’s no wonder he tried to get a little in his lonely cell. 

 

But Francis may be a canary in a coal mine illuminating government attacks on ‘pornographers’–and a victim of his own success.  When you really need friends, it’s too late to make them, and Francis mistook the hangers on, leerers and entourage for friends. He didn’t buy respectability like this First Amendment defender.

Francis may also be targeted by what Andrew Sullivan calls the Christianists in power.  Judge Smoak, who said,“It does not take a very brave man to go out and corner a girl in the middle of spring break who had four drinks,” is a Bush appointee and a long-time resident of Panama City, Florida, which has been after Francis for years.

Think about Turkey much?  Me neither.  But I learned today that more than 250,000 Turks marched against religious fundamentalism to defend the idea of a secular state.  “We don’t want to become Iran,” said one interviewee. Where did I learn this?  In the newspaper delivered to my door this morning, the much-maligned LA Times. 

Yes, such information is certainly available on the Internet.  But you’d have to search it out.  More importantly, you’d have to know you wanted to know.  A good newspaper serves up familiar and unfamiliar items to you like a smorgasbord.  All too often, the blogosphere offers only comfort food for your pre-concieved notions, whether you carry your tray left or right in the cafeteria.