Miller High Life ad that will air today tries to gain some edge by taking a whack at the absurd cost of the Superbowl ad.
What a *great* way to spend a client’s money by coming up with a storyboard that questions the logic of the ad! I get the feeling that it’s not the ad that will get traction, but the several “one-second ad” cuts that apparently got left behind on the editing floor a.k.a. Mahalo, YouTube etc! Watch them here.
Watch all the other commercials here!
“I’ve got one question: WTF? Where’s the funding?”
“Our model is not for a quick rebound,” he said. “Our model is things go down, and then they reset.”
“pop culture and media that’s ripe for parody”
“It kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.”
“He’s all about PR.”
“Digging into work. Must turn off Facebook. Too distracting. So why am I now on Twitter? Argh!”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: “You have handled this ordeal with a lot of political skill—so far.”
Yeah right!
Watching Rod Blagojevich self destruct on the public airways made me wonder if the former governor of Illinois was master of the cottage industry -selling sound bites to the hungry media.
If you switched between channels on Tuesday it was wall-to-wall Blagojevich. From Larry King to NBC’s Nightline, to CNBC. He even managed to say the same things to the hosts, who alternated between inquisitor, cheerleader and mesmerized host.
So here’s my question. Does the media sometimes lose its journalistic compass and get sucked in by the bad guy (the old case of OJ comes to mind, doesn’t it?) or is this an instance of masterly media handling by Blagojevic?
Speaking of the cottage industry, check who else other than the TV hosts is making hay while the ex-governor heads to Crowbar Hotel.
Laurie Roberts’ analysis of Arizona’s education cuts by myopic legislators, for once puts things in perspective. It also adds to the pile of colorful ways to describe what Arizona faces if it goes through with the proposed budget cuts.
Sure, everyone’s trying to do more with less, but more powerful than the metaphors is how a writer can put things in perspective:
“Put another way, the state would be supplying $358 less to educate today’s college student than it did 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the state is kicking in roughly half of what it contributed 20 years ago.”
Of course she also notes that “the ripest, juiciest and most available budget that can be squeezed” has always been the universities.
When I wrote about Photosynth in June 2007, I wondered what it might do for crowd-sourcing mega events, even political ones.
That day has come.
Microsoft (which now owns Photosynth) has teamed up with CNN to enable all those snapping up the moment in history, to share those images, and more importantly knit them together as one composite.
It’s not just the collaborative potential of this technology that’s mind-boggling. It gives new meaning to what we often refer to as the Big Picture, letting you look at a something in fine detail from multiple angles and distances, and in a thousand of different ways. You can zoom, tilt, look at a person or an object from its side, and often get a close-up view.
From a surveillance angle, this could be a great deterrent to anyone planning mischief. After all, any moment during the inauguration will easily be captured not by the surveillance cameras — there are some 5,000 in the area –but by the hoi polloi.
Take a look at this image of the Capitol (Sorry, but you’ll need to download a small application on your computer first to use Photosynth) and you’ll see what I mean. You could move in so close to the dome, and the windows below, you could spot the surveillance camera looking down at you!
Chicago Public Radio has put out the word that it needs additional community support to keep podcasting free. FACT: The ‘free’ podcasts (such as This American Life) that we listen to via NPR, really cost them some $150,000 a year. “That’s not staff. Not computers. Just the bandwidth.,” they say.
WBEZ Chicago saw some recent layoffs, wants to avoid more, and is asking for small contributions.
But it’s not just podcasts that may be cut at the knees. There’s good radio journalism. Last December a reporter Ketzel Levine, began working in a story -actually a series of stories– about layoffs. While doing it she was laid off by NPR as well.
End of story.
Dana Perino, in her farewell schmooze with the White House Press Corps made a wish that is worth as the next administration moves up behind the podium.
“America needs more reporters, not fewer, so let’s hope someone figures out a business model that will keep you in your seats for a long time to come.”
Her final statements were interrupted by the likes of Helen Thomas –she who grilled any Press Secretary— whom Perino never seemed to like, but is of the journo caliber this country needs more of.
“Steve Jobs a ‘national treasure”
“We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?”
“The blogosphere and new media are another war zone.”
“Sea of Culture,” Gulf of YouTube,” Bay of Angst”
“I am not ready to leave journalism; journalism is leaving me”
“The rebooting of our democracy has begun.”
“I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan”
“There are people standing on the wings as the plane sits half submerged in the hudson”
“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!'”
My local newspaper, The Arizona Republic, has slimmed down so much it’s a ghost of what it used to be. I adamantly continue my subscription since I like the idea of getting my news both ways –in analog and digital formats.
Sure, I have my RSS feeds –to save time visiting all other sources I trust– but I wouldn’t let that replace my magazines and how I relate to information off the printed page. Yesterday, as the story broke about the US Airways crash landing on the Hudson in NY, new, new journalism sprung to action. I followed the incident on Twitter and Flickr –not CNN– even though the story was available in our lobby just a minute away from me. But that does not make the old model completely irrelevant. The Tweets provided real-time coverage, but not enough background. For that, we had to wait for reports like this and this.
Kathleen Parker, syndicated journalist for the Washington Post Group, had an interesting observation last week about the relationship between Big Media and Social Media.
“What, meanwhile would Twitterers and bloggers tweet and blog about if news organizations no longer provided the meat on which most chew?”
What, indeed! (Her column in my paper got me started.)
We could all have different opinions of this. But before you take a side, here’s something to ‘chew’ on. Parker’s column, carried in many newspapers across the country, got printed under some interesting headlines.
WashingtonPost.com used “Mainstream media on life support”
The Arizona Republic used: “Big Media still kicking”
The Topeka-Capitol Journal used: “Journalism will survive media’s evolution”
The News Tribune used: “Death of manistream media greatly overstated”
The flurry of tweets, the text message updates, these pictures –and the one below at DayLife—
shows that just like the ‘reporting’ out of Mumbai last year, citizen journalism is filling the gaps.
Hoipolloireport 