Dude, I live where my iPhone rings

Home delivery of my paper failed the other day. Irksome
I got to thinking about people who never take the paper at all. They have 100 percent satisfaction with their subscription option. Why can’t I, since I’m a paying customer?
It’s not that newspaper companies don’t know what the non-paying public wants. Believe me. There’ve been lots and lots of studies, especially of the young.
News consumers want information on demand. That means delivery on their schedule, not the distributor’s.
They want portability. Don’t send news to their physical home. Send it to their online home, which may be in a pocket or purse.
They want to make their own news decisions. So let them select and tailor the choices of news topics feeding to them.
They want only what they want. They don’t want my experience of letting unwanted, unread sections of the news product fall to the floor while I look for something else.
They want news they can use. They probably don’t listen to opera but perhaps to rap or salsa. They may not read musty Russian novels but might check out current hot fiction. So there’s no point lecturing them into reading long, dry policy analysis that goes “on the one hand this and on the other hand that.”
They want fairness, transparency and accountability. They don’t want or need claims of objectivity, which they consider phony anyway. Everyone has an opinion, a slant, a viewpoint. Just give the other side, state yours and tell who your sources are – be fair, lucid and answerable.
They are not hung up on race, gender and social class issues. It’s not that they are rebels or “libruls” or freethinkers in the old sense. They’ve just moved on from those issues and hang-ups. So news stories and news figures playing to a divided nation seem irrelevant.
They want to feel their news organization is on their side. A certain insurance company must have read the same research – you know, “Nationwide is on your side.” It doesn’t have to be blatant, out-and-out advocacy. A sense of identification between provider and user of news will suffice.
They also want to stay connected through instant messaging or with a cool Web app that reports where friends are located at any moment or with social networks or with sites that store and exchange photos and videos. (Don’t like what you see? Don’t look). Much of their current events information and personal entertainment come person-to-person from the buzz of their friends.
Oh, and did I mention they want their news package to be free? A few Google type ads are okay, but no glaring flash or pop-ups. And no registration fees or rigmarole to get online; the view still prevails that anything on the Internet should be free for the taking.
These ideas run rampant through the information industry. A good access point I've tapped several times are the We Media showcase-seminars of iFOCUS, founded and run by Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin. http://ifocos.org/about/
But now here’s a weird contradiction. This target group of news consumers who shun paid print subscriptions will spend money on technology. The cooler the better, like an iPod.
Or Apple’s iPhone and its clones – the smart devices that are camera, PDA, mobile computer, music and video player, game board and, oh, well, if you must, use it as a phone too.
If you want to wager on what media platform will carry information in the future, bet on the phone.
Whoa! Why, see here! What’s this I find in my own pocket? As I live and breathe, I believe it’s my personal cellular communicator, my new Apple iPhone. Scotty’s dead, but beam me up, anyone.
Does that mean I am “they” at my age? No. It means the culture is merging with the counterculture, which points to the future of media.
I sympathize with all those content characteristics of the young and the restless, although I am not one. Well, maybe I get a little restless now and then.
I even believe the old-style publishers have only themselves to blame for the traits of their customers and the ones they wish they had.
Newspapers trained us to be idiosyncratic readers. And, er, non-readers. They prepped us for the Web with all its own peculiar crazy quiltness. The difference is you had to buy everything the publisher printed, like it or not. But the Web browser points only where the surfer wants to go at the speed and in the manner of his or her own choosing, depending on broad band access.
Before there was an electronic smorgasbord of topics the user chooses, we had newsprint cafeterias. But we couldn’t just call up what we wanted. We had to slog through coverage of events, sports, features, business, advice, service information, celebrity gossip, politics, trivia, games, cartoons, truss ads, opinion and all the other cover-to-cover glory and inanity that comprise what’s starting to project deadly quaintness – a newspaper.
Americana and something our parents and grandparents cared more about than we do isn’t cool.
The newspaper experience even yet speaks warmly and wistfully of home.
But not when the carrier doesn’t come.
Besides, home is anytime and anyplace I get my IM or meet a friend on Facebook or download from iTunes on my iPhone.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Press agentry is the rough among the diamonds

Never trust anyone who uses “paradigm” in a sentence -- the instant sign of a phony.
So I agree with that one piece of advice from Sally Stewart, a communications consultant who wrote Media Training 101. She also gives eight rules to “Ace a Press Interview” in a Wired magazine how-to.
Talk from notes, know your interviewer, know you’re on the spot, know you’re talking to an enemy who hopes you trip up, expect pressure and so forth.
Odd. I don’t see anywhere in Sally’s list where you should tell the truth. The plain, simple, statement of fact made with knowledge and sincerity would be a thing of uncommon beauty in press interviews.
Public relations is the fork in the road not taken by journalism. PR seeks a persuasive goal. Reporters quest ever onward for the elusive approximation of truth.
The late R. W. Apple, extraordinary raconteur and remarkable reporter for The New York Times, once told a teaching colleague of mine they were not in the same business. The professor taught public relations.
Would that it were so, Johnny! The relationship is more like parallel universes. They often merge, because press agents and The Press often find they need each other to do their separate jobs.
Departments of media relations can make necessary connections between reporters and principals, usually hoping for a desired slant. In worst cases the press spokesman is treated as the ultimate source, guaranteeing the spin gets out there.
In my world of journalism, truth is the best defense. Veracity may be the unavoidable last refuge of scoundrels in PR.
A former State Department spokesman and normally no scoundrel at all, told me he never lied to reporters. He simply made sure he had no knowledge on hot, sensitive subjects. He felt “clean.” I felt uncomfortable with his strategically planned ignorance, an avoidance of hard truth.
I suppose the truth, like a gemstone, shouldn’t come to the surface easily. Candor, authenticity, fact would all lose value.
In the long wait for truth certain, we examine its substitute with skepticism.
That’s how I view Sally Stewart’s advice to the interviewed.
Then again, if she had advised them to be truthful, she'd have to call her recommendation a paradigm in public relations.
Automatically we couldn’t trust what she said.