Media
Media
Liveblogging Tom Brokaw at Yale
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 17:07Talking about the future of media.
Annie Le, Dan Malloy, and Connecticut Politics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/20/2009 - 21:30In the latest Journal Inquirer, Chris Powell has written an interesting column entitled No ordinary murder; and paying for politics and Keith Burris has written a great column about Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy’s qualifications for Mayor. (I cannot find the Burris column online, so I cannot provide a link at this point.
In Mr. Powell’s editorial, he wisely asks, “Why is the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le an international sensation?” He asks, “Is it the police particularly or the government generally?... Is it the news media?... Or is the public to blame?” He goes on to explore the relationship between these. News organizations and the government respond to the demands of readers and constituents. There are old adages like “if it bleeds, it leads” and “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” come to mind.
Yet what is it that shapes public opinion and leads the populous to demand one thing or another? I have explored this a little bit in my blog post Outbursts. It is the news organizations and the politicians. We need news organizations and politicians that will help us all strive to be better people, to make better demands of our leaders and news organizations.
This leads nicely into Keith Burris’ column. Mr. Burris seems to believe that Mayor Malloy comes closer to this ideal than many of the politicians we see here in Connecticut. He portrays Mayor Malloy as a man who loves the nuts-and-bolts job of being a strong mayor, as a person who is more of a doer than a listener.
So, how do we elect our leaders? In the second half of his column, Mr. Powell talks about what needs to be done to address campaign financing issues here in our state. He suggests that
A system that was more in tune with democracy and that distributed public campaign funds more according to public sentiment might put fund allocation directly in the public's hands. That is, at the beginning of each election cycle people who have registered to vote could be told by mail that the state was ready to allocate to political candidates and organizations a certain amount of money in their name --- say, $30 per voter -- and given a checklist of the candidates and organizations who had registered for public campaign funds and pledged to obey the rules of public financing.
It is a noble idea, although I’m not sure that it would work on a practical level. I would be concerned about the cost of the mailings and the bureaucracy necessary to make such a program work. In addition, it is the early money that is most important and the system Mr. Powell describes most likely wouldn’t get the money to candidates until later in the campaign.
Another complaint of challengers in the political process is that they have a hard time getting the attention of the local news organizations. While it wouldn’t be as significant a fix as what Mr. Powell suggests, a starting point might be to provide a modification to the Electronic Campaign Reporting Information System (eCris). I would love to be able to subscribe to the SEEC Form 1 filings so that any time a candidate files to run for office, I would get an email notifying me.
With such a system in place, I could imagine a great service that the Journal Inquirer and other papers in our state could provide by posting information about the candidates in their area that have filed the necessary papers as soon as possible.
Can news organizations like the Journal Inquirer and politicians like Mayor Malloy raise the level of discourse in our state so that we can elect more effective leaders and deal more wisely with all the issue that face our state, from a high profile murder case like that of Annie Le to efforts to get the State government to spend its money a little more efficiently? I sure hope so.
Public, Educational and Government Access issues for CableVision CT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/20/2009 - 11:01In a previous blog post, I talked about two meetings happening on Monday. The first is the Sound View Community Media board meeting on Monday at 8:30 AM. The second is the Woodbridge Government Access Television Commission meeting scheduled for 6:00 PM. There are many issues that I hope will get discussed at these meetings and here are some of my thoughts on some of these issues.
Signal Reliability
Back in July, there some reports of the PEG channels going out sporadically. Cablevision was reporting that the signal was okay at the head office in Norwalk, but that perhaps there were problems in Milford. This was to be investigated, but I haven’t heard anything more on this.
In addition, various people reported problems with the PEG channels over weekends which seem to have been related to the video server that Sound View uses in their office in Bridgeport. Apparently, there has not been technical support available to address this issue and if the video server goes down over the weekend, it remains down until Monday. This is also still being investigated. It is not clear if the two different problems are related in any way.
SVCM Policies – Representatives of Elected Officials
Various people have contacted me for follow up on DPUC Docket 08-06-03 which encouraged SVCM to develop of Board policies to help prevent the problem which gave rise to the complaint. My recollection of the discussion from the previous SVCM board meeting was that they claim their policies preclude ex-officio board members representing the elected officials in the region from attending executive sessions.
I believe that they can legitimately make that part of their bylaws, but I also believe that it is a poor decision further alienating SVCM from the communities it is supposed to be serving. It is my hope that SVCM will make every possible effort to avoid going into executive sessions and consider making exceptions to this whenever possible.
I did note that I was the only representative of an elected official at the most recent SVCM board meeting and I believe that both SVCM and the municipalities in the region should make a concerted effort to get more representatives of elected officials to attend their board meetings. I have been in discussions with people from various towns to encourage better attendance of representatives of elected officials.
I should disclose that I’ve had these discussions with people from Milford and that I am actively working to support a candidate that is running against the current mayor. SVCM is particularly difficult for me in that I end up wearing many hats and I have to be careful about properly respecting each role.
SVCM – A Satellite Office
Also in the DPUC ruling on docket 08-06-03, they wrote: “The Department would advise SVCM to carefully consider setting up a satellite Public access studio to address the needs in the Milford/Orange/Woodbridge area.”
I have not heard anything about this and hope to get a chance to discuss this with members of the SVCM board. I do believe that a satellite Public access studio would be of great benefit to public access and should seriously be considered by the SVCM board.
Digital Slamming
Cablevision is moving the public access channel from an analog signal on channel 77 to a digital signal on channel 88. While over the air broadcast signals have all moved to digital, this is not the case for cable signals and many people still watch analog cable channels on old analog televisions. Cablevision had offered to help with people losing signal as their favorite channels went digital, but not everyone is aware of that and the help appears to be temporary. Because of this, the move from analog channel 77 to digital channel 88 may make it harder or more expensive for some people to access the public access channel, with the overall move to digital, this may only be a temporary bump.
Nonetheless, it is an important issue to keep an eye on, since there is a growing problem with cable companies moving PEG channels from a low channel number where people may find the channel via random surfing off to very high numbers, a sort of digital Siberia, where people are much less likely to randomly find the channels.
In addition, I’m told that The League of Women Voters of Litchfield County is studying the issue of diminished access to some channels, including PEG channels and others.
On a broader basis, I’ve been told that the Alliance for Community Media and Dearborn, MI filed a petition with FCC last January, primarily complaining about AT&T's delivery of PEG programs, but also asking for redress on digital slamming by both Comcast & Cablevision.
ACM-NE Video Festival and Workshops
On Saturday, November 7th the Northeast Region of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM-NE) will hold a Video Festival and Workshops at the West Hartford Town Hall. Currently the planned tracks for the workshop are on Advanced Production Skills and Public Policy, Grassroots Organizing and Lobbying.
So, those are the issues that I'm looking at right now. If you live in the Fairfield, Bridgeport, Milford, Stratford, Orange or Woodbridge area, and have other thoughts for these meetings, please let me know immediately.
In addition, no matter where you live, let me know your thoughts on public access television in your area and the issues you are seeing.
Exploring Digital Tuners and Cablevision IO Digital in CT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/19/2009 - 20:24On Monday, I will attend two different meetings dealing with the Public, Educational and Government Access channels in an area served by Cablevision in Connecticut. One of the issues that is likely to be discussed is the movement of PEG channels from an analog cable signal to a digital cable signal.
When I first heard about this, I was surprised. It had not occurred to me that when all of the broadcast channels moved to digital in the United States this year, that so much of the cable broadcasting remains analog and that moving channels from analog to digital would be an issue. However, the concerns about moving analog cable channels to digital channel signals remains as much, if not a bigger issue than we saw with the move from analog to digital broadcast signals.
I don't watch a lot of television, and currently when we watch television, it is on an old analog TV tuned to channel 3 which gets its signal from a cable box. I never paid a lot of attention to what is coming in on the cable prior to the cable box.
However, this is a concern for others. Some people have multiple televisions in there homes. They may have a cable box in the living room, but other rooms are simply getting whatever they can for remaining analog signals off of the cable for televisions in other rooms. As channels move to digital on the cable, they are no longer available to these other televisions, unless upgrades or new equipment is purchased.
It turns out that I have a digital receiver that I can use to receive either broadcast or cable television signals and make them available on PCs. I have a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick. This is a tuner on a USB stick that receives analog, ATSC and Clear QAM channels and allow them to be viewed, or recorded on a PC.
Initially, I had used it to record programs during the Presidential elections. Yet in discussions preparing for meetings on Monday, I figured I should dust off the old TV Tuner stick and try to get a better sense of what is going on with the signal coming in on my cable.
Initially, I had connected the TV Tuner stick to my laptop running Windows Vista. Unfortunately, I've had various problems with Vista since then, and it will no longer recognize the TV Tuner stick, or any memory stick for that matter.
My next thought was to try it on my Linux laptop. Searching on the web, I found a few references to the stick and Linux. As best as I could tell several people had modified the Linux kernel to add a device driver for the stick and it seemed like maybe a third of them were successful. It really looked like too much work for the weekend.
So, on to plan B. I hooked up the TV Tuner stick to Kim's desktop computer. It is running Windows XP and managed to get the software to eventually run on the desktop.
The next problem was finding the PEG channels. I did a scan and found hundreds of digital channels. However, many don't seem to work. They are probably encrypted, and most of the channels that did work ended up with names like 821.916 instead of anything useful. However, it turns out that 821.916 is what the tuner calls the channel. This channel is at a frequency of 171 Mhz. It is a Digital Mpeg2 channel with service ID 916, Original Network ID 0 , Transport Stream Id 48431, PMT PID 38 and PCR PID of 36. It turns out that this is the Government Access channel.
Given that the tuner handles both ATSC and QAM, I don't know if this is ATSC or QAM encoding. The educational channel is 821.915, same Frequency and video standard. The service id is 915, the original network id is 0, the transport stream id is 48431, the PMT PID is 41 and the PCR PDI is 39. The Public Access Channel is 821.912. You can probably guess everything except the PMT PID and the PCR PID which are 87 and 72 respectively.
I also mapped out other channels. CSPAN is 891.2 at 627 MHZ. Transport Stream ID 48154, PMT PID 231 and PCR PID of 121. CT-N is 105.3 Frequency 681 Mhz, Transport Stream ID 48404, PMT PID 167, PCR PID 107. As one other reference, WCBS-HD is 2.1 at 759 Mhz, service Id 702, Transport Stream 600, PMT PID 1065 PCR PID 1056.
If anyone else is using ATSC or QAM tuners in Cablevision Connecticut area and want to compare notes, I can gather more of this information and share it and would be very interested in hearing your experiences.
As a final note, it appears as if you can now buy Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Sticks for about $50 at various places online. It looks like a good way to get add HD television reception, at least for some channels on some PCs.
What does this all mean for Monday? I don't know. I'll explore it and see what comes up at various meetings.
Follow Friday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 11:39@digiday @scottyhendo @shivsingh @StephanieSAM @ckieff @JasonDPG @annemai @KenRobbins @sofadude @LizaPost @DragonSearch @fromedome @mmathias @HartHooton @Alirana @tanyachadha @chrisfield
Every Friday many people in Social Media, especially on Twitter, but also on blogs and other sites, share lists of people that they enjoy following on social media sites. On my blog, Orient Lodge, I regularly participate in this. However, after the Digiday conferences in New York on Thursday, I thought it would be an interesting post for Digiday:Daily. I use TwitterFeed to post the title and lede of my blog post, along with a link to Twitter, and I use the Twitter App on Facebook to pull the Tweet and use it as my status on Facebook. With that, let me discuss some of the people from the Digiday events on Thursday that are well worth following.
@scottyhendo presented “The Future of Cause Marketing: Pledge to End Hunger Case Study”. He mentioned that the head of Tyson said a brand engaging in cause marketing should be like the moon, reflecting the light of the cause, in this case hunger. To illustrate his point, he provided a graph of the number of followers that he, Tyson Foods and the Pledge to End Hunger drive had during the campaign. The campaigns followers skyrocketed while his followers and the Tyson food followers remained on a standard trajectory.
I’ve often wondered how appearing at a conference like Digiday:Mobile or Digiday:Social affects the number of followers a speaker has. @shivsingh provided the keynote for Digiday:Social, “The Social MediaInfluencers: How Brands Become Connectors on the Social Web” which was very well received and I expect he may have picked up quite a few followers as a result.
@StephanieSAM led a panel on making sense of social media data, “Data Here, Data There, Data Everywhere! Making Sense of Social Data“. At one point in the discussion someone brought up a request from a brand about making a viral video. This led to a good discussion on Twitter about how a request to make a viral video is sort of like a request to make a hit TV show. Good content goes viral, but if you set out to make something go viral, it is probably less likely to have good content and go viral.
One person to join in this discussion was @ckieff. I’ve met Chris at many events and he let me know that he is now working on his own at 1 Good Reason. His card describes himself as a ‘Social Marketing Evangalist’. Normally, that would be enough for me to throw the card in the trash. Everyone and their brother on Twitter is a social marketing evangelist. However, Chris really does understand digital marketing strategy, and I encourage people to follow him on Twitter.
After the event, I had a chance to speak to many interesting people. Two that I speak with at many such events are @JasonDPG and @annemai. They are both well worth the follow. I also had a very interesting discussion with @KenRobbins. Ken is the President of Response Mine Interactive, one of the Sammy award winners.
During the conference and the awards ceremony, there were lots of interesting discussions on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting comment came from @sofadude They observed that Weber Shandwick, one of the finalists for Best Twitter Branding, was a PR firm and not an ad shop. They went on to say that if social media is all about the conversation, then perhaps it is best to let public relations and communications firms handle your brand, as well as noting that this may be more cost efficient. Of course, they managed to communicate the idea in 140 characters.
There were several other people that contributed a lot to the discussion on Twitter about the conference and they deserve a shout out as well: @LizaPost @DragonSearch @fromedome @mmathias @HartHooton @Alirana @tanyachadha @chrisfield
So, whether you attend any of the Digiday events on Thursday, these are some of the people that I considered influencers and I hope you follow them. Of course, I hope you follow me on Twitter as well. I’m @ahynes1. Then, join the discussion and share your Follow Friday favorites and if you attended any of the Digiday events, what you thought the highpoints were.
(Cross posted at DigidayDaily.)
