Media
Media
Perspectives
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/28/2007 - 10:37Yesterday, Montana Maven pointed me to Jay Rosen’s recent entry on Huffington Post. Jay, together with Arianna Huffington, is searching for ways to get more people to “Participate in Politics by Covering the Campaign”. It is a great idea, which I wish them luck in, but that also raises a few concerns.
Back in January, I wrote a New Year’s resolution post for Gather.com. It was part of my preparation for Journalism that Matters conversation in Memphis. My resolution was to “to help people find their voice”. In Memphis, I refined it further to become, “to help the voiceless find their voice”.
I hope that Jay and Arianna’s efforts will help people find their voice in the political discourse. However, I worry that it might be the same rich white ivy school educated young men that I run into on the blogs and the conferences across our country. I worry that the discourse might end up being not substantially different from the nasty, horse race, Coke or Pepsi type coverage that we see in the traditional mainstream media.
“Right up her ass”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/25/2007 - 09:31It is hard to imagine that I graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, MA, thirty years ago this June. Mount Greylock is a great school in a great town, but I rarely reflect back on my experiences there.
One experience, however, has come to mind twice this week for different reasons. It is one of the most memorable experiences I had, one which taught me so much more than many other hours in the classroom.
The year was 1972. America was mired down in an unpopular war abroad. Many people considered the man sitting in the White House a crook. In many ways, it was a year not much different than today.
Back then, there was a draft, and people found different ways to avoid the draft. I had a bunch of longhaired teachers, whom everyone said had become teachers to avoid the draft. Williamstown was a fairly liberal town, so they got away with things they might not have in other towns.
Miranda is now in eighth grade and is reading Lord of the Flies for school. I remember the day that my eighth grade teacher passed out copies of Lord of the Flies to our class. He said he had an important lesson for us and asked us to turn to page 123. I don’t remember the page exactly, but it seemed like a strange place to get introduced to the book we would be reading. About a third of the way down, there was a phrase that had been crossed out by a black magic marker.
“This is called censorship”, the teacher explained. He spoke about how people had complained about the language in the book and gotten the school to cross out the phrase. Visions of teachers, in the teachers lounge, crossing the phrase out in book after book and muttering about the idiocy of the school administration came to mind.
Act Different
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/20/2007 - 09:38On March 5, ParkRidge47 posted the video Vote Different on YouTube. The next day, xxxgrimREAPERx posted it as 1984and since then, people have been around the URL in emails and IM messages. Then, on Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the video and it crossed over into the traditional mainstream media.
Everyone has to share their comments about how important this video is. It will become, people argue, the iconic video indicating the transition from a broadcast era of politics to a new era of politics. Instead of being a half million dollar advertisement, it is something that anyone could produce. It represents a fundamentally new style of politics.
Well, whenever such grandiose claims come along, someone always needs to present a different view point. Let me take a crack at that. First, using Apple advertisements to communicate a political message online isn’t anything new. Back in 2003, a bunch of grassroots volunteers created the I Switched to Dean online video campaign. People shared the URL, bought the DVD. YouTube wasn’t around at the time, and it didn’t cross over into the traditional mainstream the way Vote Different has, so they haven’t become the icon that people are predicting Vote Different will be.
As to being something that anyone could make, well, I think that might be an overstatement as well. I spend time talking at various conferences encouraging people to start making their own videos. Many people have cellphones that can shoot video. Others have digital cameras that can shoot good video, and others have gotten digital video cameras that can shoot great videos. Yet when I speak at conferences, very few people know how to shoot a video with their cameras and then get it online. Those who do rarely have any idea about how to do more than the most rudimentary video editing, and those who can edit, rarely are well versed in framing a political message. I know very few people that could have pulled off a video like Vote Different.
Will the video encourage others to learn how to shoot video with the devices they already have, learn how to upload, learn how to edit, and learn how to frame a message? I hope so. If that happens, then the video could end up being incredibly important.
Gannett buys Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/08/2007 - 09:42The other day, Genghis Conn, from Connecticut Local Politics wrote about The Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate being sold to Gannett. He worried about how the papers would fare and I spoke about my optimism for the papers. He asked me why and I gave a brief comment there. Let me take a few moments to expand on those comments.
F2C Day 2, Part 2: The media – the backchannel
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/07/2007 - 10:43On of the things that is particularly valuable about Freedom to Connect, and some similar conferences is the backchannel. This is typically a text based chat tool that gets projected onto the screen behind the speakers that people access from their laptops in the audience, or in my case yesterday, from my home computer as I watched the stream. It reflects Gillmor’s observation about the audience often knowing more about the subject than the speakers do.
During the “Peer Production News Panel” there were a couple interesting discussions that I got involved with, which I will post here, in a format edited for readability.
As often happens when you get people discussion the role of the internet in journalism, the question of economic models comes up, and people point out Craig’s List as taking away the advertising revenue of newspapers.
