Fiscal frenzy or “Why the media should use its power for Good”

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “fiscal cliff.”  Actually – you have heard of it, and you probably believe that jumping off of it will cripple the United States for the foreseeable future.

I’m confident that you know this, because at every second of every day, almost every news outlet is screaming it at the top of its lungs.  At the moment of this writing (11 a.m.), CNN has 5 stories on their home page with headlines including “No sign of progress” and “Conservatives rip Boehner.”  The New York Times has Op-Eds and a section of their website labeled “Debt Reckoning” devoted to the issue.  On the Wall Street Journal’s home page, there are three stories – including a link to a live feed that covers all things fiscal cliff, 24/7.

Yes, a live feed devoted entirely to the fiscal cliff and just how horrible life will be 27 days from now.

Let’s take a beat here and discuss reality.  The fiscal cliff is real, but it simply isn’t news.  Over the past few days lawmakers formulated, they debated, they may have even thrown up their hands in disgust.  They didn’t reach an agreement.  But they don’t have to yet, do they?

The media is using its megaphone to the wrong end. 

Shaken up over the speed of bad information

When the Great East Coast Quake of 2011 nudged the office building here (in MA), I made a quick call to building management to see if it was their doing.  When they denied responsibility, I checked three online news sites and fully expected an explanation.  I was surprised and even a little annoyed to still be in the dark less than 2 minutes after the quake.

Fear not.  Within another 10 minutes, all the news sites had it: I knew where, when, I could see how far the experience ran around my social media circle.  A client even noted that the earthquake gained its own twitter account (@DCEarthquake) by 2:30 pm.

Where does this leave us?  We already have difficulty with a 24 hour news cycle that elongates and extrapolates hard facts until they’re barely recognizable.  Now we have a nearly instantaneous reaction time – a need to get information as events unfold.

This is fine for live broadcasting or tweeting planned events, but when it comes to hard news…I fear we’ve been down this road before.   Raise your hand if you remember the early call of the Presidential election in 2000.  That was a seminal moment for news networks, as they acknowledged that the race to get the news out became more important than getting it right.

We’ve just reached a stage at which social media has become an entrenched part of media overall.  It is not its own practice, or its own medium, or its own industry – it is part of the media overall.  Journalists use it.  Networks use it.  Consumers use it.  Cats, apparently, use it.  At the intersection of all these users is a chaotic ball of yarn (for lack of a better metaphor), and we were just getting to a place where we could identify which threads  are trustworthy and which are entanglements.

Alas and alack, we are back at the beginning.  Now that social media is an accepted flow of information, the emphasis is on speed and wit – both outstanding qualities, but not the cornerstones of journalism.  As we gear up for another election season, I’ll stay wary of the quick feed and keep hope alive for long form knowledge.

Is social media killing your big idea? Probably.

Ideas and leadership are mutually inclusive concepts.  Simply put, you can try to lead without original thought, but any success will be short-lived.  And original thought comes from within, not from the masses; in fact, the more divorced an idea is from the norm, the more likely it is to give rise to leadership (for more on this, I recommend multiple viewings of The Hudsucker Proxy…”you know, for kids!”).

A convergence of technology and a generations-long legacy of success in the U.S., however, has put a crimp in that inclusivity.  We have an army of incoming leaders that have been weaned on constant connectivity and rapid dispersion of ideas, but very little indication that our environment is conducive to creating visionaries.  Too many brilliant minds see something online, and pass it along.  They have the inkling of an idea, they post it, and they hope everyone “likes” it.  They take the easy road to acknowledgement and set up camp, satisfied.

Social media isn’t wholly to blame, but this is a marketing blog so we may as well tackle that part of it here.  There have always been detractors and words of caution against the virtual frenzy, generally labeled as grumbling from an old guard resistant to constant connectivity. But the arguments for ratcheting back participation in social media are starting to come together with a little more cohesion.

My qualifier, as with similar posts, is that I engage in social media. Our clients engage in it. My wife, my friends, my sister, and someday my sons. It’s an outstanding channel for maintaining relationships and it’s not going away. However, it is going to change. Soon.

But don’t take my word for it.  Consider three viewpoints that seem to be running in parallel with one another:

Bitter Twitter, silly CNN

I hop onto CNN’s home page to see this headline under their Tech section: “Twitter could fuel G-20 violence, warns expert”?

Naturally, I read on…The story tells us that “Headlines proclaiming that G-20 activists and police are following each others’ activities on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites may give one the impression that a new age of surveillance and political activism has dawned.”

I honestly have to wonder if this is a joke. The headline is so clearly guilty of the conveying the exact tone the story warns us against…it has to be joke. Right?

Given CNN’s history, I don’t know. Laugh or cry, laugh or cry…?

The mission to save media integrity

The Stewart vs. Cramer “event” has been bled pretty dry, and I resisted writing about it to avoid repeating what every other web outlet has already covered. So I won’t even touch on how Jon Stewart could very well instigate a movement to restore the press to its true function.

Ok, fine, I will…but the short version.

In 2004, Stewart took CNN’s Crossfire to task for wasting their on-air influence by allowing politicians and business leaders to write the rules (and interview questions). Key message from Stewart: “We need help from the media, and they’re hurting us.” Talk about an uphill battle – that was five years ago, before the media staged a full collapse into the role of conservative enabler and (some have said) contributed to an economic free-fall.

If you’re interested, here’s a refresher:

Fast forward to last week, when Stewart went back to work against CNBC. He pounded out a similar message that the network prioritizes entertainment over journalism, when its position in the business world really lent them power to recognize the ethically gray trading and corporate trends, call out the culprits and curtail the financial damage.

Here’s a summary (full acknowledgment of the irony of using the clip from CNN):

The notable piece of this is not that the confrontation occurred, but that with his Crossfire appearance five years ago Stewart cemented his position as media arbiter. Jim Cramer’s doe-eyed surrender not only showed us how accurate Stewart’s assessment of CNBC is, but how networks recognize they have to start appeasing his base — and therefore appeasing him.

I’ve commented before on the need for the press to turn back to their roots as investigators and truth-tellers. Another Pravda isn’t going to do us any favors here, and the country’s crisis of conscience and image calls for some “true grit” to remind us of the value of, well, values. With real-time reporting (blogs, Twitter, etc.) emerging as the next evolutionary step, reporters have the opportunity to move the country back in the direction of transparency and progress.

The point? I think Jon Stewart gave us a watershed moment last week. I’m marking the calendar and will check back in another five years…

Obama website brings change online

Awhile back I tipped my hat to UK PM Gordon Brown for embracing the power of online communications. The funny-because-it’s-true footnote was the outrageous idea that the Bush administration might one day be that smart.

Moot point, as Obama starts packing up his belonging for the road trip to D.C. CNN reports that the President-elect has his website up and running:

Within 24 hours of last week’s historic vote, his transition team rolled out change.gov, a Web site that promises to be “your source for the latest news, events and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama administration.”

…Visitors can fill out a form to share their stories about what the election meant to them, or they can give their vision of an Obama presidency. They can even apply for a job.

The site is at http://change.gov/, and the blog makes extensive use of multimedia.

I feel the Change!

Election night: the news media’s Superbowl

Watching election night coverage, an hour of random media observations:

8:20 — I can’t help but hand over the Most Improved Camper award to CNN. The network has come a long way since the primaries in its use of technology and interactive material; its “magic” touchscreen was a silly prop rife with bugs in January, but tonight it’s being used to add solid information and value to the telecast. They’ve also streamlined all the various graphic tallies to be much easier to read than they were nine months ago.

Well done on that point.

8:30 — A new element to the online media evolution: now print publications can join the fun of calling the race in real time. This caught my eye when I logged onto WSJ to see that the outlet called Pennsylvania for Obama. In fact, they beat CNN to the punch by a solid 10 minutes. Is this a window into the future convergence of internet and television? What kind of news alliances can we look forward to as the media merges into one giant reporting mechanism?

8:50 — Fox News has some catching up to do in the technology department. They seem very proud to have a screen that shows red states for McCain and blue states for Obama…and the corresponding electoral votes in a sidebar! Brit Hume tells us it’s called “the launch pad,” and they’re “very excited about it.” I wonder if they ever watch any other channels…? They do have that fancy touchscreen, at least.

9:03 — CNN’s touch screen freezes. Always good fun, even with a quick recovery.

9:10 — And about those print publications…have they completely lost their value? Last week a New Mexico paper declared Obama the winner (tongue in cheek) because their editorial schedule demanded they make a call. That’s weird enough, but what new angles will print media be able to add in tomorrow morning’s editions?

Enough rambling. Normal blog posts to resume forthwith…!

CNN reports in future tense

Media doesn’t just report the news in near real-time anymore: now they do it in what I like to call “pre-real-time.” That’s right, CNN can now report news before it happens, including this gem:

Obama will claim victory during a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to prepared remarks released by his campaign.

“Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” he’s expected to say.

I’d like to repeat that for emphasis: “he’s expected to say.” I have mixed feelings about the media in general, but none about CNN: they drive me insane. Their insistence to be first to the punch now pre-empts the actual utterance of quotable speeches. They steal thunder not only from competitors, but from the speaker (in this case, Obama) and amazingly from themselves — instead of capturing real emotion from a real speech, they’re more than happy to dilute the moment by filling in the gaps with assumptions and prepared comments.

Here’s the link, but because CNN has this great habit of micro-changing their online content once editors or readers point out their various idiocies, I’ll include a screenshot for posterity:

It’s truly amazing what they can accomplish by doing this, and equally amazing that the whole 1948 “Dewey Defeats Truman” thing didn’t actually teach anyone a lesson that lasted more than four minutes.

CNN Praised for Seizure-Inducing Primary Coverage

There’s been some congratulatory silliness for CNN on its “winning” coverage of the New Hampshire primary. That’s a nice take, but it gets funny if you stop to think about how much these outlets are struggling with the word “interactive.” I recall Wolf Blitzer actually suggesting I get my laptop out to visit CNN.com while I watch CNN…a nice plug, I do that sometimes, but missing the point if there’s no real additional education value to getting online.

The humor lies in television’s attempt to use new technology and visual advances to trick viewers into thinking they’re being interactive. The CNN screen looked like a video game dashboard, running much more information than a normal human should want to see at once. The studio set that featured an imposing herd of 60 inch monitors didn’t help, either…I applaud film.com, which quipped “When did the CNN newsroom become the bridge of Star Trek Voyager?”

That’s not interactive, it’s bombardment. Commentators (that’s you, John King) also got to play with some funky touch-screen technology which I say to CNN is – yes! – interactive. For you. Not for us.

I could head down a similar path with the Wall Street Journal and its new layout, which nearly crashes my Firefox every time I log on. On the plus side, WSJ.com is most definitely interactive…but again mistakes information overload for quality delivery.

This will all shake out with time. Outlets will realize that readers/viewers want to be educated one or two (or even three) steps at a time, but not 20. For now, though, color me disappointed. What is that, violet?