Slumber
1. Happy New Year! I hope you had fun doing whatever you were doing to ring in 2008. Did you make any resolutions? I never do. It’s certainly not that I don’t feel the need for self-improvement, I just don’t really buy into the idea that promises made on December 31 have any more merit (or chance of success) than those made any other day.
2. Congrats to our reader Eve, who won the December drawing for a limited edition matted photograph. You could win too - I give away art every month to some lucky commenter - details for the January drawing are here.
3. Congrats also to Charlottesville TV station WCAV for their creative spelling of the last period of a football game. That’s some damn fine journalism there, kids!
*** Edit: It’s been fixed! Do you think they’re reading this…? ***
4. If you don’t read Bill Emory’s blog, you should.
5. If you have a few minutes, read the always smart and thoughtful John Hockenberry’s article about his disillusionment with the teevee news biz, “‘You Don’t Understand Our Audience’; What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC”
In the spring of 2005, after working in television news for 12 years, I was jettisoned from NBC News in one of the company’s downsizings. The work that I and others at Dateline NBC had done - to explore how the Internet might create new opportunities for storytelling, new audiences, and exciting new mechanisms for the creation of journalism - had come to naught. After years of timid experiments, NBC News tacitly declared that it wasn’t interested. The culmination of Dateline’s Internet journalism strategy was the highly rated pile of programming debris called To Catch a Predator. The TCAP formula is to post offers of sex with minors on the Internet and see whether anybody responds. Dateline’s notion of New Media was the technological equivalent of etching “For a good time call Sally” on a men’s room stall and waiting with cameras to see if anybody copied down the number.
6. Slumber:
