One of my favorite series this summer is Current TV’s “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.” Hosted by Morgan Spurlock (Director/writer/star of “Supersize Me”), the series counts down the top documentaries of the last 25 years. Documentarians like Michael Moore and Penelope Spheeris, as well as an expert panel of film industry pros and critics, discuss the impact of the films and tell the stories of how they were made. At this writing they haven’t revealed the top ten yet. I suggest you all watch the series and the final ten next week. There’s a lot we can learn to apply to our own content.

First of all: Passion. All of the documentarians exuded passion for their subjects. No matter whether the subject was Heavy Metal, the rise of extreme skateboarding, or the truth about the Vietnam War, every filmaker believed passionately that their story was one that had to be told.

Second: Go where the story takes you. Errol Morris never thought he’d get a 20 hour interview with Robert MacNamara, which became the center of “The Fog of War.” Andrew Jarecki started to make a film about children’s entertainers in New York and ended up making “Capturing the Friedmans.” Go where the story takes you, and don’t be afraid to tell the truth.

Third: Make it happen. Every project had its own troubles, ranging from a lack of funds, lack of historical footage, inexperience of the filmakers. They didn’t let the roadblocks stop them. The documentarians figured out a way to incorporate the roadblocks in the story or they worked around them. The passion they had for their subjects wouldn’t allow them to give up.

So find a story that fires your passion. Go where that story takes you. Make it happen. In the words of M.B. Ray:

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand — and melting like a snow flake.”

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL. This article was originally posted at MyProgramIdea.blogspot.com.

What Is News And What Is Not: When Local Reporters Go GaGa for “Media Events”

by Dave Zornow

Nyack, Nov 19, 2010 — A religious hurricane forecast to hit Nyack, NY last weekend changed course at the last minute, allowing a high school production of The Laramie Project to take the stage with no worries about religious fundamentalists disrupting the play.

But to end the story there would be to miss “a teachable moment” about the averted storm – and why some forecasters predicted it.

The Laramie Project is a play about community reaction to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student in Laramie, Wyoming. The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas has been picketing productions of the play throughout the country to spread its belief that every tragedy in the world is related to homosexuality.

For students of the media, religious fundamentalists — and students of all ages — here’s a study guide which looks at some of the myths and assumptions about the protest that didn’t happen.

1. As reported on their Website, The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas was hell-bent on coming to  this suburban NYC community to protest a high school production of The Laramie Project and spread their message of intolerance towards homosexuals, Roman Catholics, Islam, Jews, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians other Baptists and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

Actually, it was never entirely clear that they were coming at all. To wit:

• On October 21, the WBC announced they planned to picket at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY but never showed up.
• Last weekend, school administrators at Richard Montgomery High School in Bethesda, MD prepared for a Westboro Baptist Church rally that never occurred.
• On Nov 13, about 120 counter protesters at Cal State Fullerton were ready for a scheduled WBC rally that never materialized.
• On Nov 10, 2009, WBC members picketed at Baylor University. Four congregants demonstrated for 20 minutes and were mostly ignored by the students.

A local parents’ group that supports theater productions made a conscious decision not to counter protest and ignore WBC members if they appeared. It was only after local media owned by AOL and Gannett publicized their presence that it because widely known. The story was also subsequently picked up by WCBS-TV.

“No event or condition is inherently news,” says Scott Bonn, author and associate professor of sociology at Drew University. “It only becomes news because someone has the power and ability to say so and, generally, that person has both a political and profit-driven agenda, not the least of which is to entice an audience and sell advertising.”

Bonn, who previously worked at MTV as a sales and marketing executive, says news making is inherently amoral and it will cover and promote anything that serves its self-interest. “The news media often become passive co-conspirators in spreading public panics such as the bird flu and the threat from Iraq that was alleged by the G.W. Bush administration,” Bonn adds.

2. 21st Century mass media lets religious fundamentalists spread their message in ways never before possible.

Mass media has a long history of spreading religious intolerance. Father Charles Coughlin used radio in the 1930’s to reach millions of radio listeners with anti-Semitic message broadcasts. Although sophisticated in their use of media, sociologists say the Westboro Baptist Church has little in common with previous, more polished hate mongers. “Coughlin, in a totally different era, was successful and credentialed,” says Gerald Marwell, a professor of sociology at New York University.

By comparison, Marwell says Fred Phelps, the leader of the WBC is neither. “Coughlin had his own broadcasts and millions of followers.“ Marwell says that with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, anti-semitism was a very important issue. Because the country is moving away from the positions advocated by the Westboro Baptist Church, Marwell adds that Phelps is a just a side-show, “Only the media pay him any attention. The best response to Phelps is laughter and dismissal.”

3. The Westboro Baptist Church is only doing this for the money.

Not true, says Baylor University’s Christopher Bader, an associate professor of sociology who has studied the Westboro Baptist Church extensively. “First, their motivations are primarily religious. They believe very strongly and unanimously in a God that is both “hands on” with the world and extremely judgmental of it,” he says. Although Bader describes the group as ambulance chasers, it’s because they are always looking for situations that will get the most attention. “It is not by accident that they engage in outrageous antics. They see themselves as God’s elect who must warn others.”

“The Phelps’ seem to be driven by a desire for attention. They will take negative attention over inattention,” says Deana Pollard-Sacks, a law professor at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. ”The public did not seem interested in the Phelps’ anti-gay rhetoric, so the Phelps’ resorted to extreme personal attacks against fallen soldiers and their surviving family members to garner media attention for themselves.” Pollard-Sacks says that the Westboro Baptist Church has been unable to attract public support for their anti-gay agenda. “The only reason they are getting any attention is because the media are giving it to them,” she says.

Bader says Westboro’s annual travel budget, estimated to be about $200,000, comes from multiple sources. He says that many church members hold regular jobs working as nurses, working in law offices and working as computer programmers and developers. “They also make significant money from winning lawsuits,” Bader notes. “Since they defend themselves, but can charge for their time, when they win a lawsuit in jurisdictions where the ‘loser’ has to pay legal expenses, they make a lot of money.”

4. Nothing good comes out of hate.

In this rare case, that isn’t quite true. Students involved in Nyack’s production of The Laramie Project say the publicity has sparked interest from peers who previously were not interested in either the arts or in talking about tolerance. According to one participant, kids are googling the play and the WBC and are forming their own opinions.

5. If it’s in the paper, it’s news.

The 20/20 hindsight of the run up to the Iraq War shows that reporting by a NY Times reporter tipped the scales for mass media in accepting the credibility of the Bush Administrations’ WMD myth. The public generally believes that news sources are motivated to report the news; but anyone who has ever worked in a news room knows that the definition of news is truly in the eye of the beholder. Journalists, more often than not, are motivated by the fear of “getting beat” on a story regardless of whether or not a story idea meets any vague criteria for being “news.”

Objectively speaking, is it news that six people in a bus with Kansas plates come to a town without any local support and hold up attention getting signs purely to attract the attention of the local press? Shouldn’t local reporters have some a built in “Media Manipulation” alarm for these kinds of incidents? Maybe — but more often than not — they don’t.

Sources:

• Church protest planned, church group fails to appear. The Spectator (Hamilton College) 10/21/2010
• Westboro Baptist Church is no-show at announced protest at Richard Montgomery High School. Montgomery (MD) Gazette, 11/13/2010
• Westboro counter-protest a success, The Daily Titan (Cal State Fulterton) 11/15/2010.
• Controversial church largely ignored, The Lariat (Baylor University) 11/17/2009.
• Wikipedia: Westboro Baptist Church, Father Charles Coughlin

Lost amid the fuzzy retelling and rewriting of recent history in George W. Bush’s new memoir, “Decision Points,” is the most salient fact: the Bush administration knowingly committed war crimes in Iraq. Let’s not forget that the Bush administration violated the Nuremberg Charter and the U.N. Charter when it launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. Also, the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners, particularly at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, the water boarding of detainees, the killing of civilians, and the destruction of property during the occupation of Iraq violated the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The sacred documents violated by the Bush administration are international treaties that the U.S. co-authored after the atrocities of WWII.

However, rejecting such claims, the Bush administration has steadfastly maintained that the invasion was justified on the basis of the Bush doctrine of preemptive self-defense. However, the Bush doctrine went far beyond any reasonable interpretation of preemptive self-defense which would require that an actual attack was certain or imminent. The Bush doctrine was based on a much broader position that the U.S. was entitled to use force to eliminate any possible future threat to its national security, whether or not a threat was objective or imminent. According to the Bush doctrine, the invasion of Iraq constituted self-defense ostensibly because the Bush administration said so.

The Bush administration has always sought to preserve self-defense protection for invading Iraq under the U.N. Charter by falsely claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that it was linked to al Qaeda and involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Of course we now know that none of those accusations were true. However, even if Iraq had possessed WMD as claimed, without an actual attack or an immediate threat to use them against the U.S., there would still have been no justification for invading Iraq under the U.N. Charter.

Watching G.W. Bush in his interviews the last few days it is painfully obvious that he lives in a delusional world in which he is capable of convincing himself of anything despite glaring evidence to the contrary. For example, he now claims that he was absolutely certain that Iraq had WMD before he launched the war in 2003. That is simply a lie. There is overwhelming evidence that Bush knew with virtual certainty that the information he used was flawed, including a 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee Report which concluded that the Bush administration knew the intelligence was bad but used it anyway. Moreover, Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, had persistently said that there were no signs of WMD prior to the invasion and even CIA reports (now declassified) offered skepticism about the validity of the evidence of WMD. In particular, the CIA warned President Bush at least three times that U.S. intelligence services did not believe the claim that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium yellowcake for a nuclear bomb, yet Bush made that now infamous claim in his 2002 state of the union address.

It was refreshing to hear that G.W. Bush finally accepts the fact that Iraq did not possess WMD as he had claimed. However, when asked by Matt Lauer last week whether he would still have launched a war on Iraq if he knew then what he knows now, instead of answering the question, he stated that invading Iraq was still the right thing to do. His rationale is that he kept the U.S. safe from further terrorist attacks after 9/11 by invading Iraq. Apparently, in his delusional thinking, he protected the U.S. from the WMD that Iraq did not possess! Although his reasoning is self-serving and illogical, it no doubt allows him to sleep at night. Because if he did not live in his delusional world, he would have to accept the facts that he lied to the U.S. and the world about the Iraqi threat and that he committed war crimes when he launched an unprovoked and illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.

Scott Bonn, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book titled Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq from Rutgers University Press. He can be reached at sbonn@drew.edu.

“Here’s the top story we’re following at this hour: For the first time, there’s definitive proof that Fox News, the U.S. cable network that claims to be ‘fair and balanced,’ is neither fair nor balanced. Next up this hour: Experts say temperatures will drop when winter comes. And finally: Eating regularly is key to good health. Stay tuned for more details.”

OK, maybe these aren’t great revelations. But Fox News’ coverage of Comedy Central’s “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally on October 30 is worthy of a second look. The story posted on their Website stands in stark contrast to the pieces published by other media outlets, both liberal and conservative.

Disputing Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan is a “man bites dog” kinda story. However, it’s instructive to both lovers and haters of the leading cable news operation because the 1996 launch of Fox News in 1996 is one of the most significant events in cable new history, second only to Ted Turner’s 1980 creation of CNN. So an analysis of how a leading — albeit controversial — news network frames a story can tell us a lot about their journalism. And the people who watch the network.

Here are a few “leads” written by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Washington Times, the Associated Press, Fox News and the Christian Science Monitor. See if you can tell which one fits the Fox News narrative.

Source #1: “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show, part Halloween celebration and part political rally to call for common sense before Tuesday’s congressional elections. Satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, hosts of late-night cable TV shows, poked fun at politicians and media for stoking partisan fervor.”

Story #2: “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show. But what seemed to unite the tens of thousands who converged on the National Mall on a sunny Saturday in Washington for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was a genuine desire to push back against the strong rightward tilt of the 2010 midterm campaign.”

Story #3: “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right, Saturday’s crowded Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear marked an ironic uprising by those who want to turn down the volume. Three days before midterm elections, tens of thousands of people packed the National Mall to listen to Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, looking for a laugh and a chance to display their disenchantment with what they say is the bitter tone of the nation’s political discourse.”

Story #4: Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts entertained a huge throng stretched alongside the National Mall by poking fun at the nation’s diversity and its ill-tempered politics. Stewart is popular especially with Democrats and independents, a Pew Research Center poll found. Colbert of “The Colbert Report” poses as an ultraconservative, and the stage Saturday was stacked with entertainers associated with Democratic causes or Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Story #5: In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng Saturday at a “sanity” rally poking fun at the nation’s ill-tempered politics, fear-mongers and doomsayers. “We live now in hard times,” Stewart said after all the shtick. “Not end times.”

OK, pens down. Which one did you pick? Maybe it was easy — or maybe it wasn’t.

The pro-business, right leaning WSJ, owned by the same News Corp company that owns the Fox News Channel, wrote “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right…”

The Christian Science Monitor published “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show.”

If you chose “Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts…” you found the Fox in the cable news hen house.

Strangely, the Washington Times, a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post, used the the AP story without sending a reporter to the rally (“In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng…”)  Which makes you wonder: if their reporter couldn’t afford the $5 Metrocard to get to the Washington mall, things must be REALLY tough in the newspaper business…

Finally, Reuters wrote “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show…”

(One honorable mention that didn’t make this list: “whilst” surveying foreign news reports for their take on the event, I ran across the The Guardian blog of Richard Adams. His Jon Stewart rally ‘as it happens‘ entry provided an amusing play by play of the event as it unfolded from the vantage point of an outsider looking in. It was very funny with lots of wry Brit observations about American culture.)

What makes the Fox story unfair and unbalanced? Journalists are trained to report what is “new” when reporting the news. Glen Beck’s August rally was news because a conservative political pundit gathered thousands of his followers on the Washington Mall in the same location on the same day as Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech. If you were there and didn’t that wasn’t your story, you must have had an another agenda. That *was* the story. The day was about GB and his ability to muster his masses to the Washington Mall. It was an unprecedented event because it had never been done before by a cable TV celebrity — until Saturday.

Using the same logic, Saturday’s story was about how between 60,000 and 250,000 people gathered on the mall (Stewart put the number at “millions” as a pre-emptive strike for those who would try to compare his rally to Beck’s) to see two TV celebrities in the company of Discovery’s The Mythbusters, The Roots, The OJays, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Waterson, Tony Bennett, Jeff Tweedy, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Ozzy Osborne and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Among many others.

If there was a political message, it was relatively weak. Telling everyone to think for themselves and stop believing everything you read on Websites, see on cable news and hear on talk radio isn’t exactly a revolutionary manifesto. It may have been a little hard to write that sentence if you worked on the copy desk at Fox, CNN or MSNBC — the three networks that dominated the mocking clips shown by Jon Stewart — but you’d have to be an idiot to have missed that point. Or, perhaps had an agenda that reinterprets the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

In the second sentence of the Fox News story, the network reported that “there were political overtones…poking fun at the nation’s diversity and ill-tempered politics.” Actually, Stewart and Colbert weren’t poking fun at the nation’s diversity, but at the tendency of the news media to characterize events by who shows up. Fox seemed to deliberately miss the point that the Comedy Central kids were poking fun at news pundits who tune the facts to fit a particular news narrative targeted to their core audience. Writing “news” which rings of truthiness but doesn’t try to capture what happened isn’t news – that’s entertainment.

Google time line for the phrase "fair and balanced." It wasn't much of an issue until FOX News was launched and George W Bush became president.

Which is OK. The “fair and balanced” phenomenon in journalism is fairly new. Biased reporting in newspapers has a much richer history that predates the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

Fox News is to the 65+ audience what MTV is to 18-34’s: a consistent stream of content which tells people in a demo niche what they want to hear. Both networks have relatively small audiences which exert an oversized influence on the American culture. Both Fox News and MTV are extremely good at what they do: aggregating a high concentration of similar people to resell to advertisers. MTV gets heat because they don’t play music videos anymore; Fox gets heat before their definition of news isn’t what many regard to be fair and balanced. It’s a marketing disconnect which occurs when a cultural icon behaves differently than “we” think they should.

Fox News may not be “news” in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow. But I bet that William Randolph Hearst would be impressed.

Stewart and Colbert are right when they suggest you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV. As long as that healthy skepticism includes Comedy Central, we should all be ok.

Dave Zornow has worked as a media research consultant and applications developer at TNG Research for 20 years. He publishes MediaNewsAndViews and the hyperlocal Website NyackNewsAndViews.

See also:

• Fox News Freaks Out Over Stewart/Colbert Rally, PoliticusUSA
• Can Fox News be ‘fair and balanced’ if News Corp. gives to Republicans?, CSMonitor.com
• Rally For Sanity: They Also Want Their Country Back, Mediate.com

The partners at Sterling Cooper Draper & Pryce would be happy to know that Mad Men’s audience likes advertising just as much as they do. Their viewers also have a lot in common with Don Draper, Joan Harris and the other “Mad Men.” True to the Emmy-award show’s characters, their audience is considerably more likely than the Ordinary Joe to dress for success, enjoy a shot of whiskey and set out to impress others.

GfK MRI says Mad Men viewers — beyond standard demographics — distinguish them from the typical U.S. adult. For example, they are at least 25% more likely than the average adult to plan on buying a new car in the next year, to be interested in magazine ads and to give others advice on purchase decisions.

Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce could learn a thing or two from syndicated research:

Peter would know that when prospecting for new accounts, he should pitch auto companies, TV manufacturers and home improvement businesses. Why? Because within the next year, Mad Men viewers are 62% more likely than the average adult to plan on buying a new vehicle, 31% more likely to get a new 27” – 42” screen TV and 37% more likely to remodel their kitchen.

Peggy and Don would use psychographics to develop creative executions that relate to viewers’ desire to be fashion-savvy early adopters, along with their drive to impress others.

Of course if Harry Crane were buying media, well, he would be sure to buy Mad Men, but magazines would fare very well. In fact, Mad Men viewers are 41% more likely than the average adult to agree that advertising in magazines provides them with meaningful information about the product use of other consumers and are 29% more likely to say it provides useful information about bargains.

Joanne Zornow edits The Source newsletter for Gfk MRI.

New York, July 7 — Nielsen has announced organizational changes which will give set top box data greater visibility in the ratings company. In addition to announcing STB analyses from Charter systems in St. Louis, Greenville/Spartanburg, and Reno, Nielsen told clients about organizational changes designed to integrate STB data “formally within our existing audience measurement product leadership teams.”

The letter to Nielsen’s clients also announced that Matt O’Grady will be responsible for testing and incorporating STB data into Nielsen’s national and multi-platform products. Cheryl Idell will have integration responsibilities for local products.

Kantar (formerly TNS Media Research), Rentrak and TiVo have existing products and client bases already using these data. Rentrack’s Station Essentials product, using AT&T and Dish Network data, has been adding clients to its sec-by-sec no-demographics alternative to traditional NSI local market data. It’s not clear from the announcement if Nielsen is upping the ante or if they are just publicizing previous efforts.

The July 7 announcement was nuanced so as not to discredit the current local and national TV measurement services which serve all DMAs with a combination of people meters, household meters and paper diaries. “While STB data is incomplete on its own, we believe combining the stability and granularity afforded by this data with the representative quality of our panels will provide enhanced capabilities, analytics and insight,” says Nielsen’s Dave Thomas and Steve Hasker.

The new Nielsen tests will compare the ratings currency to STB data “to determine if the STB data can help supply greater fidelity to our ratings projections and enable more granular reporting, including to additional stations and regional networks.”

It’s Independence Day 2010 — and many of us aren’t feeling quite as independent as we did a few years ago. At least a million people will lose their unemployment benefits this week as their eligibility expires and the Senate failed to pass an unemployment benefits extension.

The pressures of meeting a mortgage, feeding a family, paying taxes and staying afloat are obvious. Valerie Menowsky says some of the other impacts and frustrations of being less than fully employed are less visible.

To those co-workers loudly proclaiming how many days they have left till they fly the friendly skies to alluring places far away…To those friends complaining about trying to find time to pack for their Caribbean cruise…To those neighbors who are “getting psyched” for their trip to Hawaii by wearing colored plastic leis to the grocery store…ENOUGH ALREADY!  You ‘vacationers’, you ‘cruisers’, you “I have to go shopping for clothes to pack” people are particularly annoying right now.

Especially to us, the underemployed, or people who don’t get any paid vacation because we’re part of a pool of workers defined as “involuntary part time workers.” (Statistics)  We’re either professional people working in survival jobs at a greatly reduced salary outside our expertise, working two or more jobs to make ends meet or would like to work a 40 hour week but can only find part-time jobs.  According to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 9 million people are employed part time for economic reasons because their hours were cut or they were unable to find a full time job. (Statistics) And to add insult to injury, Gallop reports that because we spend 36% less than employed workers or $48 per day instead of $75 we are negatively impacting economic recovery. (Marlar)

We’d be glad to pump money into the economy by purchasing airline tickets and new clothes for a vacation but most part time jobs don’t offer sick pay, health or vacation benefits so if we do take a few days off, we lose money which isn’t really the rest and relaxation we deserve.

So as millions of us suffer vacation envy as we watch you return all tanned and refreshed, please be grateful for what you have, take pity and don’t show us your pictures.  And we’ll greet your return as sincerely as we can with “I hope you had a nice time.”

Valerie Menowsky is an underemployed returning college student at the University of New Orleans.

Sources:  Gallup, Economic News Release/Employment Situation Summary (Statistics, Bureau of Labor).

by Dave Zornow

If you find yourself going online to learn what’s going on around town, you’re not alone. More Americans are using digital tools to complement face time with neighbors and friends to keep current on what’s up — downtown.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, one in five adults (20%) used digital tools to talk to neighbors and keep informed about community issues. Online blogs about community issues (21%), emailing (9%) and texting (4%) with neighbors are some of the ways that we are now wired (sometimes wirelessly) to our communities.

Interactive marketing consultant Richard Dysinger says people use digital media to  communicate because it’s faster and easier. Although the average letter is read within a week of being sent, “the average text message is read within fifteen minutes of being sent and emails on average are read within 48 hours,” he says. “This level of immediacy coupled with a buffered level of intimacy is at the heart of the new age of communication.” It’s another example of how technology is shrinking the world — making small towns even smaller. “Digital media and social media have facilitated  communication across a vast virtual network. We have gone from six degrees of separation to three,” Dysinger says.

Pew reports that there’s still a place for conversations on the front porch or over the back fence: Almost half (46%) of all Americans talk face-to-face with neighbors about community issues. The phone is used by about one in five adults (21%) — about the same number who say they stay connected with digital connections.

What’s the message here? If you are trying to get the message out about a community issue or event — or even run for public office — word of mouth is still your best friend. But more and more words are being digitized for posting, emailing and texting across town as well as around the world.

This story was also cross posted at NyackNewsAndViews.com

Source: Neighbors Online, Pew Internet & American Life Project, 4/9/2010

At the 1964 World’s Fair, AT&T introduced a new product that combined the telephone and television into a surefire hit for businesses and consumers. Three million Picturephones were predicted to be in use by the 1980’s. Instead of Picturephones, we now remember the 80’s by a different cultural failure: disco music.

AT&T is estimated to have spent up to $500 million developing the Picturephone. Why wouldn’t you want to see the person to whom you were speaking? If facial expressions weren’t important, why did those thoughtful Internet pioneers invent all of those emoticons to express what words alone couldn’t do? AT&T failed partially because they charged $21 a minute for the bandwidth hungry picture phone in a pre-fiber, barely satellite communications age. Today we can do it for free via iChat or Skype — but even free hasn’t made consumers want to be heard and be seen.

Last week Google announced a new service which will join two commonly used communications technologies. Google TV will marry TV with search to improve the consumer experience and, in Google’s words, “change the future of television.” Anyone who has ever tried to use a remote control to text search a TV interactive program guide can see the possibilities of searching “all of your channels, recorded shows,  YouTube and other Websites” in one place.

Long before the industry anointed  “convergence” as the holy grail of media synergy, AT&T learned that consumers can be a fickle bunch. Google, a dominant communications company of the 21st century, might want to take a history lesson from AT&T, which was the largest communications company of the 20th century.

Google and their technology partners hope to sell new TVs (from Sony) or new HDMI-connectible set top boxes (from Logitech) to merge your desktop and set top digital words. Google TV Product Lead Rishi Chandra says Google TV will let viewers use the voice search feature of Android phones to query Google TV. NewTeeVee.com provided a play-by-play of the new service as demoed at the Google I/O conference. First, Chandra searched for live TV content and scheduled TV programming to program a DVR.

Then he searched for House, and Google TV returned search results Hulu, Fox.com and Amazon. Clicking on the Amazon search result led to the website of Amazon’s VOD service. The search bar can also be used to directly input urls and search saved bookmarks. “It’s just as easy to go to any site on the web as it is to go to any channel on your television,” says Chandra.

Google’s business model is to make money by bringing search to TV and extending the reach of advertising through Adwords. In an interview on the Fox Business Channel, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that because Google TV seamlessly combines TV and computers, “we know a lot more about what people are doing and can make more relevant television advertising  — which should be worth alot of money.”

Will Google succeed where AT&T once failed and Apple TV and Microsoft’s Media Center have stalled? There’s only one way to end an article that talks about almost 50 years of TV and technology: Stay tuned.

Sources: DavidZondy.com, Porticus.org, Google TV, NewTeeVee.com, Digital Daily, Fox Business Channel, BobLucky.com

See Also: Engadget, timeline.com, BusinessInsider.com

Back when HBO was new and before ad supported cable hit its stride, a handful of UHF stations in major markets offered a subscription over-the-air TV service to compete with cable. Now a Silicon Valley start-up wants to dust off that business plan with a digital twist. The San Jose MercuryNews says

Sezmi’s service differs from those of traditional pay-television operators. Its customers get local broadcast channels via the public airwaves. But the company also relies on those airwaves, via deals with local broadcasters, to send pay-TV channels to its customers. It also plans to send on-demand and Internet programming to consumers via customers’ broadband connections.

The startup promises an integrated media experience, delivering broadcast, cable and select Internet sites (READ AS: YouTube) in one place managed with a DVR. They also offer 6,000 VOD titles, too.

There’s a free three month trial in LA and the SF Bay area. Southern California testers will see Comedy Channel, TNT and CNN but deals haven’t been secured yet for Bay area viewers.

The secret sauce to Sezmi is a small digital antenna called the  “Smart Reception System.” The company says “for the first time, advanced techniques used in other applications such as wifi and wireless have been applied to TV reception.” Translation: it’s a digital antenna in an enclosure which should cover 85 percent of LA. Maybe.

These features will make cable and satellite subs yawn as most of this has been done before. Except the price:$4.99 for basic service and $24.99 for premium channels. The gotcha is paying $300 for Sezmi’s proprietary equipment. You also can’t Sezmi unless you have a broadband internet connection — which means you are still most likely tied to an MSO or a Telco.

In May, 2008, USA Today reported that Sezmi  “is counting on phone companies, and perhaps also wireless carriers, to market the service as a bundle with Internet service.” The California beta tests suggest that plan may not panned out as telcos have aggressively pushed services like FiOS and U-Verse.

Sources: Sezmi, San Jose MercuryNews, Wikipedia, USA Today, 5/2008, Technologizer 11/16/09

See also: PC Magazine