I still like to read the State Journal Register because they have career journalists on hand who work full time to get their stories and photos. For a while I even had the notion of applying for work there. But the tide is going out for good on the old media, thanks to the Internet.
I wonder how many generations it will take before subscriptions to actual hard-copy newspapers fall into the red zone of being cost-prohibitive? Would online advertising be sufficient to support the structure that remains after the printing presses have ceased forever?
Remember radio? Radio is still a good hands-free form of entertainment, but AM is dominated by right-wing conservatism, a philosophy which proved its worth over the last eight years in the political spotlight, and evidenced by the presidential election of 2008. Unpopular.
As for FM radio, it depends on the artist and not the genre.
Genre radio is old hat. The Internet has exposed us to the reality of music. That there are really good songs, not really good types of songs. We as an audience can no longer accept being pigeonholed into arbitrary categories of Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Lite-Jazz, Classical, Heavy Metal, Blues or Big Band.
I occasionally listen to Amy Winehouse, Bjork, Tom Waits, Dethklok, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, Ozzie, Tchaikovsky, Sly and the Family Stone, etc. No radio station will be able to keep me as an audience for very long.
Local Broadcast television is not doing too well either. The local news anchors most of the time are repeating the national news when they can't find local stories. Most of the remote news crews were once Union and are now gone.
During the time slot used by local news broadcasts I'm watching PBS. I'm already searching blogs and YouTube for local video on my computer instead of watching television. The Internet provides weather reports too. I don't know what the local broadcasters have left to hold up against the Internet. I think they are in worse shape than newspapers. Popular shows can be watched at Hulu.com
Barack Obama said change is here. This change is bigger than just politics. We are about to usher in a whole new cultural structure, the likes of which we can't yet imagine. Biggest of the changes is perhaps that there may be no such thing as mass communication anymore. Sub-cultures will re-arrange under totally different flags.
Philosophies will shatter and pieces from different ideologies will combine into never before seen colors.
People will be different in unheard of ways, because they will have their own custom-designed preferences thanks to the Internet. Everyone will be a stranger to everyone else, so we will simply have to shed fear.
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Cable Tightens Its Belt
Now the National Geographic Channel, probably one of the most aesthetic and educational channels on cable, has been moved to digital cable channel 450. Basic Cable viewers are now unable to experience the high quality production work of people who have the most respect for the environment.
The channel perhaps needed to be moved to digital to take full advantage of high definition video signal, but denying a majority of the cable subscribers such good programming may be dire for the company itself, as well as the overall behavior of an audience denied the education provided by the National Geographic Channel.
Does Comcast Cable hate the environment? Maybe, if they get their kicks blocking environmental programming from the basic cable audience?
Do we need Comcast to get access to National Geographic? No. we can now go to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com
The Internet Prevails again, proving that even cable television will subside along with the rest of the old broadcast television, radio and print media. Goodbye Comcast. Lots o' luck.
The channel perhaps needed to be moved to digital to take full advantage of high definition video signal, but denying a majority of the cable subscribers such good programming may be dire for the company itself, as well as the overall behavior of an audience denied the education provided by the National Geographic Channel.
Does Comcast Cable hate the environment? Maybe, if they get their kicks blocking environmental programming from the basic cable audience?
Do we need Comcast to get access to National Geographic? No. we can now go to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com
The Internet Prevails again, proving that even cable television will subside along with the rest of the old broadcast television, radio and print media. Goodbye Comcast. Lots o' luck.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Methemphadvertising and the decline of the main-stream media.
Pew Internet research finds further evidence of main-stream media decline.
More people are now able to see media spin when they go online and watch political speeches from start to finish at YouTube, then share the video clips with their friends at MySpace and Facebook.
The “main-stream” media are paper publications, radio and television, all of which are limited by time and space. Because of these limitations, the main-stream media must only select portions of political speeches or news stories they deem “newsworthy.”
Consequently, they choose portions of information that serves their own agendas.
The main-stream media agenda is simply to survive in a competitive environment. They did that at first by trying to make friends with the largest portion of its audience.
Unfortunately, when you try to please as many people as possible, you wind up on the wrong side of all of them, because people more easily remember negative things that positive things. It’s just human behavior.
So the main-stream media chose to make friends with only audience members that could best help them survive, advertisers.
The main-stream became dependent on advertisers like Heroine ever since the late nineteenth century when newspapers could not longer just depend on their own sales revenue.
Cable television began as a non-advertising television medium. It was supposed to be the biggest threat to the broadcast networks in the late 1970’s and Ted Turner almost had ABC, CBS, and NBC completely over a barrel when he launched CNN. Cable was standing on only subscription revenues.
And cable television had no commercials, do you remember that? But low and behold, satellite television came along and cable had to become publicly traded on the stock market, and shareholders demanded growth and more money, so cable television buckled and started running television commercials. CNN, Fox News and other cable news networks are now no different than any of the broadcast networks because they too are addicted to Methemphadvertising.
The advertisers are of course, the drug dealers who make the networks do their bidding, or they hold back the “stuff” (advertising).
Now, Pew Internet Research has reported "A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others."
The broadcast, cable, radio, and print media are suffering from the addiction of advertising dollars as their only source of survival, and people are walking away because they are all tired of little sound bites and slogans.
There is no withdrawal from Methemphadvertising, only death.
PEW RESEARCH: The Internet and the 2008 Election
More people are now able to see media spin when they go online and watch political speeches from start to finish at YouTube, then share the video clips with their friends at MySpace and Facebook.
The “main-stream” media are paper publications, radio and television, all of which are limited by time and space. Because of these limitations, the main-stream media must only select portions of political speeches or news stories they deem “newsworthy.”
Consequently, they choose portions of information that serves their own agendas.
The main-stream media agenda is simply to survive in a competitive environment. They did that at first by trying to make friends with the largest portion of its audience.
Unfortunately, when you try to please as many people as possible, you wind up on the wrong side of all of them, because people more easily remember negative things that positive things. It’s just human behavior.
So the main-stream media chose to make friends with only audience members that could best help them survive, advertisers.
The main-stream became dependent on advertisers like Heroine ever since the late nineteenth century when newspapers could not longer just depend on their own sales revenue.
Cable television began as a non-advertising television medium. It was supposed to be the biggest threat to the broadcast networks in the late 1970’s and Ted Turner almost had ABC, CBS, and NBC completely over a barrel when he launched CNN. Cable was standing on only subscription revenues.
And cable television had no commercials, do you remember that? But low and behold, satellite television came along and cable had to become publicly traded on the stock market, and shareholders demanded growth and more money, so cable television buckled and started running television commercials. CNN, Fox News and other cable news networks are now no different than any of the broadcast networks because they too are addicted to Methemphadvertising.
The advertisers are of course, the drug dealers who make the networks do their bidding, or they hold back the “stuff” (advertising).
Now, Pew Internet Research has reported "A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others."
The broadcast, cable, radio, and print media are suffering from the addiction of advertising dollars as their only source of survival, and people are walking away because they are all tired of little sound bites and slogans.
There is no withdrawal from Methemphadvertising, only death.
PEW RESEARCH: The Internet and the 2008 Election
Monday, April 21, 2008
The Internet Killed The Television Star
Why are television news reporters being so nice to Senator John McCain? MediaMatters.org noted recently that McCain has been getting the red carpet treatment and softball questions on the broadcast networks, as well as cable news networks. It's shocking to see the media fawn and flatter a political candidate.
Following the November 2008 election, there may be no more broadcast television as we know it. The results of the election will throw mud in the face of the mainstream commentators.
The news media needs McCain so it can create content and justify its own existence. It's fast becoming totally irrelevant. Most viewers have enourmous quantities of information from the Internet with which to hold up against what these people are saying, yet the television personalities continue to operate under the assumption that most of their audience is stupid, has yet to adopt Internet technology, or never will.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The evolving perception of media power
Media Matters (mediamatters.org) has once again launched a campaign to squelch media pundit Chris Matthews of NBC’s cable network MSNBC for expressing his negative opinion about Senator Hillary Clinton while under the sheep’s clothing of objective journalism.
Broadcast television before Cable was so limited by time that they only had room for straight news. Through this limited capability, journalism was given its reputation.
Suddenly, cable television had so many channels that it didn’t know what to do with them so they invited experienced talent from talk radio. Talk radio talent was a good choice because now the cable news networks had to fill twenty four hours a day.
The old guard television news anchors held a firm grip on their reputations while they had a limited amount of time, but they soon faced competition from their inflammatory talk-radio-to-television-gatecrashers.
The public perception is that what was once considered straight news has now become stained by opinion journalism. The truth is that most information is biased. All news was only covered by one perspective, that which was allowed by the gatekeepers.
We live in an era now where we must understand that an opinion is an opinion, and we can sit back and say “Well, he has his opinion and that’s okay.” A few years ago, during the period between the invention of cable and the birth of the Internet, most of us would still have a problem with that statement.
Today, I have my own media outlet. In fact, I have at least eight. If there was a topic that interested me, I would look it up, find as many differing positions as I could on it, and decide for myself. If it’s interesting enough I might write about it?
So who gives a rat’s ass about Chris Matthews or what he’s saying about Hillary?
Broadcast television before Cable was so limited by time that they only had room for straight news. Through this limited capability, journalism was given its reputation.
Suddenly, cable television had so many channels that it didn’t know what to do with them so they invited experienced talent from talk radio. Talk radio talent was a good choice because now the cable news networks had to fill twenty four hours a day.
The old guard television news anchors held a firm grip on their reputations while they had a limited amount of time, but they soon faced competition from their inflammatory talk-radio-to-television-gatecrashers.
The public perception is that what was once considered straight news has now become stained by opinion journalism. The truth is that most information is biased. All news was only covered by one perspective, that which was allowed by the gatekeepers.
We live in an era now where we must understand that an opinion is an opinion, and we can sit back and say “Well, he has his opinion and that’s okay.” A few years ago, during the period between the invention of cable and the birth of the Internet, most of us would still have a problem with that statement.
Today, I have my own media outlet. In fact, I have at least eight. If there was a topic that interested me, I would look it up, find as many differing positions as I could on it, and decide for myself. If it’s interesting enough I might write about it?
So who gives a rat’s ass about Chris Matthews or what he’s saying about Hillary?
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