Drew Curtis' book ”It’s Not News, It’s FARK" concludes with an; ”Epilogue: What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead?".

I’ve blogged this book twice, on July 30 and August 10.

In his 'Epilogue' Curtis continues to work himself into a lather over mass media daring to publish articles that are lightweight pap. Yet, I contend what is one reader’s lightweight pap, is to another an interesting article. E.g. some people regard gossip-driven women’s magazines as journalism out to lunch, though given the circulation figures a lot of people disagree.

In discussing the future of mass media Curtis claims that newspapers are dying. He’s quite wrong here, as he fails to understand the nature of display advertising in newspapers.

For example, the large retail chain stores and supermarkets on a weekly basis need to get their advertising message (specials, sales etc) across to a mass market and the most effective method remains newsprint.

Radio and TV were never able to replace print as this mass-message carrier and the internet certainly isn’t going to. Moreover, in New Zealand at least, newspaper circulations are buoyant. People still buy them and advertisers continue to advertise.

He then gets upset because wire stories get repeated through numerous newspapers and online. So what! The vast majority of people only access a limited number of news sources. For me that’s the local daily newspaper here in Auckland, the Stuff website through the working day and if I get the time the late news bulletin on TV. I’ll wander through some of the heavy-hitter international newspaper/magazine sites now and again, though not all that often.

Curtis states this: ”Their [Mass Media] danger is the subject of this book, which is whether they lose themselves in this morass of crap they are cranking out on a daily basis. You can be a news leader or a crap peddler, not both."

Oh dear. Look there is a difference between serious broadsheets and tabloid newspapers. Yes, some of the broadsheets do run articles that might, by some, be considered lightweight. Another word that could be used is entertaining, although certainly not by Drew Curtis.

Then there is this on page 259:
”Mass Media outlets have a decision to make: Either embrace the dark side and throw away all pretense of being a serious news media outlet, as some have already done, or retrench and become a leader of real honest-to-god serious information. It turns out there’s a way to do both: split off the Not News from the news. Make another Web site, spin off another TV channel. Put all the Not News into another section of the newspaper. Keep it away from the real news. Stop poisoning real news with the kind of spoon-feeding filler garbage that we’ve discussed throughout this book"

I believe quality newspapers and magazines such as the New Yorker, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal etc make a mockery of that statement and he actually states this on page 253.
”People don’t really want to watch or read news that does the right thing. The McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour was a great example of this. Quality news, mostly information, and no one watched it."

Curtis also goes on to claim that the real challenge for Mass Media is the ”looming catastrophic drop in advertising income". It has already happened. Classified advertising has been decimated in newspapers because of the internet, particularly international buy-sell sites like Ebay and locally, here in New Zealand, Trade Me.

Display advertising, generally, is sticking with the only format that can truly deliver a mass market; newspapers and magazines.

He points out the baldly obvious point that the internet delivers reliable advertising statistics. However, a shop that has just sold out of a product after advertising in its local newspaper is going to regard the ”Sorry, sold out” sign as a pretty reliable ‘statistic’.

He wraps up his ‘Media Critique’ with this Yoda-like saying.
”OK, enough of this serious crap. I will swear by one thing though: Things are bad but they’re no worse than they have been in the past. And in many cases they’re a damn sight better.”

The book concludes with the weirdest story Curtis has seen on Fark. In the bizarro world of Fark.com the most memorable story for Curtis was: ”Man who stapled his penis to a cross and set it on fire in a bar bet says he couldn’t be more thrilled to have received an honorary Darwin Award”.

No wonder Curtis has such a one-eyed and mean-spirited view of the media that his website parasitically feeds off.

For a media-synthesis site (that likes journalists) try this link

Utne

Or this

Private-eye

Or this ”The internet and the news business”

Posted by Rodney Fletcher August 24, 2007 10:39 AM | Comments (3)

It is with a sigh of relief that I can announce I survived Tech Ed 2007.

This Microsoft event dominated what was an incredibly busy week on the Reseller News calendar, which also included Datastor’s celebration of its new services division and relationship with Juniper, and a screening of Die Hard 4.0 with Marshal and Express Data.

But back to Tech Ed…

While we all love hearing all about techy stuff and adding another official Tech Ed bag to our collection, the RN team is not as geeky as you may expect and largely focussed on attending the more social activities at Tech Ed.

This involved spending many hours networking in the exhibition hall sipping Provoke’s Red Bulls or flat whites courtesy of Ace Training, all the while chomping Smarties thanks to Auldhouse, whose Da Vinci Code-like cryptic puzzles none of us could crack to enter the draw for a Zune - like I said we are not all that geeky.

Of course we made an appearance at the opening cocktail party and Women in Technology dinner, but the highlight of TechEd, from a social perspective, was the Vegas-themed Techfest on Tuesday night.

Overall this was a great party with Fielding’s best-ever export, Evermore, leading the entertainment, which also included the burlesque-ish Candy Lane Dancers and a casino complete with poker and roulette tables (no real money was in play though).

But being a Tech Ed party meant Techfest was also a bit of a geekfest, which is why we bring you this list of Top 10 signs that you may very well be at a Geekfest…

1. During Evermore’s performance of "Light Surrounding You" everyone waves smartphones and other Windows Mobile devices in the air

2. While doing this, concertgoers start comparing features on their devices

3. The queue for the bank of Xbox 360 consoles is longer than that for the bar

4. The male/female ratio is less balanced than at a Texas gun rally

5. The groupie-wannabies at the front of the stage are all middle-aged males who curse at each other in programming code as they jostle to get as close to the Hume brothers as possible

6. You find yourself in a huddle with the Microsoft marketing team sporting t-shirts with "Geek" written on them, singing "Stand By Me" together

7. Someone who looks like the 40-year-old virgin attempts to stage dive during "Running"

8. There’s chaos in the men’s room as tech-heads who know the intricacies of .Net and Visual Studio try to figure out how to operate the automatic hand-towel dispensers

9. Half the people at the afterparty at Cowboy, didn’t even go to Techfest - they just came from a Cure concert

10. And the top sign that you are at a GeekFest - it’s 2am and Mr Tech Ed, Sean McBreen is still wearing his conference name badge

Posted by Louis Van Wyk August 17, 2007 12:30 PM | Comments (1)

I’m still reading Drew Curtis’ septic attack on the media with his book ‘It’s Not News It’s FARK’, subtitled How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News.

In the third chapter, Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Articles, his outrage over newspapers running lightweight PR stories as news is palpable. He uses some examples from his website, rubbishing the media for daring to publish the stories. He might like to consider that not all news stories can be of a Watergate-type impact and that a number of people like reading lightweight stories.

Yes, sometimes these stories are over the top or just plain wrong as Curtis is so keen to point out. But, generally, such stories are factually correct and are meant only as light reading.

In chapter four, Headline Contradicted by Actual Article, he displays a basic ignorance of how the media functions. ”Some journalists aren’t allowed to write headlines; this job is left up to the editor", he states.

Curtis clearly has no comprehension of the role of a sub-editor and that of the sub-editor’s desk in the production of major metropolitan newspapers, magazines and mass-distribution free publications. Sub-editors write the headlines for stories.

Yes, subs can get it wrong with a headline. Though, more often, they get them right.

Later, in a chapter The Out-of-Context Celebrity Comment, while tearing into an article about Radiohead singer Thom Yorke he states ”I’ve never heard of CND; sounds like some kind of congenital disease" and ”I’ve never heard of Friends of the Earth either”. This is written by a man who refers to journalists as ”lazy" - amongst other less flattering descriptions - in this book.

The Seasonal Articles chapter has him outraged over the media daring to repeat articles on an annual or seasonal basis.

He writes this; ”Nowadays, Mass Media has no qualms whatsoever about hiding behind the flimsy argument that popular news items are somehow important or relevant".

Actually, I think it is really good for Mass Media to run regular articles on issues of, for example, spiking of drinks, date rape, stranger danger (a warning to parents), regular car servicing, alcohol abuse, home security… oh I could go on and on and on with this list… because people need to be constantly reminded of these topics.

In the Media Fatigue chapter Curtis hits an all-time low in his comprehension of the media.

In critiquing the media over media fatigue he writes about a ‘pretend’ court case.

”The third article comes out when the sentence is handed down. Dumbass Receives (0-1000) Years in Prison for Shooting Friend. Again, the news information, in this case the prison sentence, will be the first paragraph, followed by yet another copy and paste of the original article. This allows the journalist writing the article to run an entire piece after about fifteen minutes of so-called work, giving him ample time to finish off the day’s sudoku puzzle or surf more tentacle [sic] porn than usual from his work computer."

Curtis, on the above statement, has clearly failed to grasp that not everyone spends their days, as he does, ”reading nearly 2,000 news articles a day". The news media background stories because there is no guarantee a reader will have seen previous articles on the topic. This is especially so in reporting on court cases.

As stated in my first blog on this book, I regard it as a mean-spirited, one-eyed view of the media. Curtis rubbishes the profession of journalism throughout, from his lofty pinnacle as founder of a website that (parasitically) publishes stories from the media.

However, there is an epilogue. What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead?

Curtis does not understand the mechanics of how newspaper/magazines are produced, that is evident from what he has written in this book. Yet his epilogue lectures Mass Media on how to do their job!

There is one more blog on this book. It's here.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher August 10, 2007 11:39 AM | Comments (10)

One of the key factors in the success of Toshiba’s newest local laptop releases is whether or not its backing of the HD DVD format is also successful.

Fronting the local launch of, among other laptops, the impressive Qosmio G40 and its latest Satellite range, Toshiba’s information systems division general manager for ANZ Mark Whittard wanted to downplay the battle between the HD DVD and its optical format rival Blu-ray. Toshiba, of course, has its feet firmly in the HD DVD camp.

”I’d rather not use the term war,” Whittard says, referring also to the escalation of the term in the media overseas, and saying he believed the two formats could co-exist in coming years.

However, he also referred to propaganda by Blu-ray backer Sony, and disputed the worth of some statistics which he says compare sales of high-definition format products which included PS3s (X-Boxes have an optional HD-DVD drive rather than the former’s Blu-ray) and didn’t just compare players with players.

”I’m not knocking Blu-ray, it’s great technology, you just have to compare apples with apples,” he says.

However, the results of the fight have too much at stake for backers of each format not to be called a war.

Uptake of both has so far been delayed by price (which is typical for most new technologies), but also consumer confusion over which is best.

Toshiba says it wants to make a technology statement with the G40, the latest in its Qosmio line with extensive multimedia features and a top performing notebook PC. The inclusion of an HD DVD-R (recorder) drive is part of that statement. In fact, the product release states that HD DVD is ”the future of high definition entertainment” and the company plans to incorporate the drives in all of its new machines in time.

The advantages and disadvantages, some more contentious than others, of each format are well known by now - with Blu-ray gaining the support of more movie houses eyeing high-definition movie distribution, and HD DVD dominating in interactive functionality. HD DVD may also be able to leverage price advantage as a result of being able to use current DVD manufacturing plants.

The initial co-existence seems more a result of these contentions and consumer reluctance to make a move either way than any harmony between the two. It may be a drawn out war, but it is a war none the less and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Posted by Amanda Sachtleben August 8, 2007 5:23 PM | Comments (0)

Now that Cisco CEO John Chambers and the world’s technology press have told us the Linksys brand will be a thing of the past, it should be phased out sooner rather than later.

As Chambers said, there’s little advantage for Cisco in higher recognition of Linksys as a consumer brand, especially as Cisco seeks to move down the market from its traditional territory among corporates.

It has recently formed a small and medium business-focused division and is trying to make it easier for partners to sell its brand and that of the subsidiary it bought in 2003.

With its recent brand refresh, Cisco would do better to continue to maximise that newsness by pushing it into the SME space and progressively into the consumer market than proceed with Linksys, even though some consumers may be loyal to the latter’s home networking product set.

Some vendors have made a success of retaining acquired brands, but that’s been due to establishing a clear differentiation in the target markets and the values associated with the name. As Cisco focuses more on Linksys’ small and medium business and consumer markets, these lines are blurring.

Partners and customers have had four years since the acquisition, and are well aware of the recent moves to bring the brands closer together.

Now the Linksys phase-out has been publicly declared, making it happen quickly will eliminate any doubt over timing.

Posted by Amanda Sachtleben August 1, 2007 10:19 AM | Comments (0)