Rebellion makes gains

clipped from www.psychologytoday.com Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and even the sciences "you need a rebellious spirit and the type of mind that can see new things

TV and the arts

The Web can be the new TV promise!

clipped from www.artsjournal.com Today I want to make an argument about the rise of arts culture. In the 1950s, at the dawn of TV, the medium's pioneers believed that television would be the great democratizer - exposing culture to the masses. The best of the world's culture could be brought into the living rooms of America. The early shows were full of high-art culture - symphony orchestras, plays, high-minded debates.

Thinking outside the box

From Today's NYT:
"When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’,” said Andrew S. Grove, Intel co-founder. In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

"This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path...

"To innovate you have to bring together people with a variety of skills.

"When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."

This is why we need to think differently about television. This is why old media is threatened.

sticking to breaking rules

clipped from www.nytimes.com In doing different road movies, I also came to realize that a good screenplay grants you more freedom to improvise than a weak one. It’s like jazz: the better the melody, the easier it is to wander away from it, because it will also be easier to return to it later.

I don't really want my MTV

clipped from blog.fastcompany.com The older and more established the network gets, the more mainstream and commercial, the more out of tune and irrelevant. MTV has relinquished its title as our youth culture's spokesperson. But unlike the modern wonders of Web 2.0 -- YouTube and MySpace -- MTV has a more emblematic personality -- a greater connection with its dwindling audience. Just like radio survived the giant threat of TV through innovation, for MTV the Web is the ideal podium to regain its pop culture cool and its influence in the media landscape. But does the user-generation need a spokesperson when they can speak for themselves or do they want myMTV?

Why creativity is ROI

clipped from www.dispatch.com "Millionaires think long-term. The middle class thinks short-term," wrote Keith Cameron Smith in The Top 10 Distinctions between Millionaires and the Middle Class, released on the Internet in August. "Millionaires talk about ideas. The middle class talks about things and other people."

open TV as cultural change

From the New Yorker

clipped from www.newyorker.com Not just television, but also private radio stations and newspapers have flourished in Pakistan over the past few years. The result is an unprecedented openness. . . . Young people are speaking and dressing differently. Views both critical and supportive of the government are voiced with breathtaking frankness in an atmosphere remarkably lacking in censorship. Public space, the common area for culture and expression that had been so circumscribed in my childhood, has now been vastly expanded

why old dogs need to learn

clipped from www.hollywoodreporter.com Consolidation in the old media world destroys value," said Laura Martin, founder and CEO of Media Metrics LLC. "They are buying stuff (and audiences) because they don't know what else to do." She argued that online and digital deals with a monetization rather than a traffic focus are key, citing Google as a firm that has made smart acquisition decisions, while signaling that media giants are often otherwise inclined. Martin also said that the young technology entrepreneurs that make a difference in today's world want cool and hip work environments. "That's not the big media companies," she said.

CSPAN Copyright policy

clipped from www.c-span.org C-SPAN holds the exclusive copyright in the video of all the public affairs programming it produces. Although C-SPAN is the only news media organization that regularly televises the legislative proceedings of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, it does not hold a copyright in that video coverage. That government-produced video is in the public domain which means that it belongs to the American people and may be used without restrictions of any kind. As part of its mission to make the activities of the federal government more broadly available, C-SPAN has established a copyright policy that allows the public to use C-SPAN's video coverage of federal government events for their own purposes. Those who want to use C-SPAN copyrighted video will be able to do so without concern about further copyright restrictions as long as they adhere to the following policy:

Share and share alike

Very interesting to note that the paid model will not work in the future according to this research. This seems to again, go against current wisdom. This also will perhaps allow greater production by the public. Perhaps the model will be ad $ going to popular AND niche-rich productions.

clipped from playlistmag.com The iTunes Store’s salad days as an outlet for paid video downloads are short, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The company claims that paid video downloads will peak this year, to be replaced by advertising-based systems instead.

Networks explain why Prime Time TV viewing is off

This is from today's USA Today. Old media is scrambling for why viewing is off, other excuses included the fact that daylight savings occurred earlier and therefore people were outside longer (?). It might be also that alt media on the web is replacing the commercial ladened shows are getting usurped by dvrs and downloads.

clipped from www.usatoday.com We can't really examine things in the same mind-set that we did a year ago," ABC research chief Larry Hyams says. Trouble is, advertisers so far are refusing to pay for all those procrastinating viewers, arguing that many skip commercials. So Nielsen is testing ways to measure audiences for commercials, not just programs. Still other observers worry the shortfall may mark a tipping point as networks lose share to the Internet, cable and other media. "When you put it all together, it snowballs," says Starcom Media's Sam Armando. Yet hope springs eternal as the finale-filled May sweeps begins: "In another month we can have turned the corner."

From Andy Kessler's Blog in the NYTimes

clipped from kessler.blogs.nytimes.com Don’t get me wrong. The Internet will soon deliver all our video clips — sitcoms, sports, the whole shebang. But whoever creates and controls this content is who will make the big returns from it. Google is tops at search. It’s not yet obvious it will be tops in video. The game of lifting video clips made by others is almost over. If Google wants to stay in the game, it will need to ramp up its spending on video big time.

From David Denby in the New Yorker

clipped from www.newyorker.com Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.

neuromarketing

Whaddyaknow! Marketers are using neuroscience to sell. I think storytelling (myth, fable, fantasy) and the connecting of neurons are as powerful as the science.

about story from KQED

From the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative:

"The restorying process can be used as an agent for personal change and the transformation of a negative experience into a positive one. As a therapeutic application, storytelling is a technique that encourages people to analyze events and relationships clearly and put them into perspective. This process grants permission for a negative or stressful situation to be developed into a positive or resurrective narrative. The concept is simple: you can't change what happened, but you can change where you stand in relation to that story. That is, you don't need to stand in the victim's place. If you retell the story, you become the author. Through that reauthoring process, the story gets rewritten according to your version of it."

New Yorker Article on State of Cinema

Great piece in the NYer regarding cinema by David Denby, one of my favorite film critics. I do dislike 99 percent of Hollywood productions BUT I LOVE THE BIG SCREEN. It is different than the tiny web screen. I watch most of my media now in little, tiny 320x240 screens on my computer. I am as enthralled and bored as I am with big pictures. There is real psychology to where and how you watch. But if you become engaged in a story, no matter how big of a screen you are watching, that shows the real power.

Interviewing Problems and Solutions

In this month's GQ, correspondent Chris Heath gives us a delightful insight on what to do when an interview goes bad. He didn't intend for this to happen, but in his interview with De Niro he had to show us behind the scenes to explain the dearth of material.

The article really goes to show how important the relationship is between the interviewee and the interviewer. Sometimes even the best can be foiled by reluctant interviewees. Heath has guts though and presses on!

Link

Sarnoff Quote from 1950

“When Television has fulfilled its destiny, humanity’s sense of physical limitation will be swept away, and boundaries of sight and hearing will be the limits of the earth itself. With this may come a new horizon, a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom and greatest of all, perhaps a finer and broader understanding between all the people in the world.”

David Sarnoff
Chairman of the Board
RCA
1950

A.O. Scott in the NYTimes 11/22/06

"In narrative art, nothing is more artificial than an ending — life, after all, does go on — and Mr. Altman’s endings often serve two purposes. They bring the artifice to a dazzling pitch of virtuosity while exposing it as a glorious sham. They revel in plenitude, in throngs and spectacles, but there is a throb of emptiness, of incompletion, in the midst of the frenzy."

Aging Thoughts

From AOL Headline about lack of programming for the 40 plus age set:

"One statistic he's sure to cite: The survey found 51 percent of the postwar generation describe themselves as "open to new ideas." Meanwhile, only 12 percent of young adults think the older folks feel that way.

Why does that matter? Jones said the average media buyer or planner is under 30. Many are undoubtedly hired for their know-how in appealing to a specific generation, and it isn't the baby boomers.

"There is this huge perception versus reality situation in the marketplace," he said.

Jones is pushing the idea of a "middlescence," about 40-to-59-year-olds who don't feel young anymore but don't feel old, and have plenty of discretionary income."


I still wonder why the under 40 set is bought at $300 a minute while the older set is bought at $100. Age is so "long tail" there is more money to spend and more money to spend for a longer time.

In the world of television I would be concentrating much more on the 40 plus demographic especially as the under 40 flocks to the internet. That is not to say that the over 40 is not capable, perhaps the over 40 just doesn't spend its time investing in mindless entertainment.

This study shows what it the ongoing paradigm in TV advertising: statistics and perception really don't add up.