Category: Media

Apple by Joe WilcoxDec 29, 201410:22 am

I Hear No Evil in Beats Music Exclusives

Someone save me from the nonsense. My BetaNews colleague Brian Fagioli’s “Apple’s rumored iTunes and Beats Music ‘Exclusives’ plan is potentially evil” is top-placed story at the site today. I messaged the day editor (who hasn’t yet replied and may still be off for the holiday): “If it racks up any significant amount of pageviews, I am changing professions. The number of comments is disturbing enough”. Should you want me to stop writing for BN, and some readers do, by all means click, click, click Brian’s commentary.

I have two fundamental problems with the post: Sourcing and its point. Brian refers to New York Post story “Beats Music lining up talent for exclusive releases“. I tell reporters: “Write what you know to be true”, which can’t be when sourcing someone else’s news gathering. For the record: I trust the newspaper’s general reporting accuracy, so Brian stands more solid than if quoting a blog. That said, he and I write for BetaNews not BetaBlog. See my four-and-a-half year-old analysis “The Difference Between Blogging and Journalism” for a primer on why one isn’t the other.

Storytelling by Joe WilcoxDec 28, 201410:12 pm

Empire State

I fancied myself a lyricist in my bygone youth (okay, still do today). Bernie Taupin and Tim Rice inspired my topical, storytelling style. I was prolific in my teens and twenties, writing words for eventual melodies. I never envisioned wordsmithery of any other kind and still wonder how prose came to be my profession. It’s not my first love.

Occasionally I put melody and verse together, as is the case with the song (or lyric to it) below. December 1979, just after Midnight on a Sunday morning, I looked down Manhattan’s 34th Street from FDR Drive at the Empire State Building. The night was cold. I was alone, bored, and angry. I wrote the first two stanzas and chorus right then, with melody, and added the last stanza about a month later.

This song, and several others, will appear in my forthcoming book My Blood, which begins serialization someday, credited to fictional character Cusper Rhodes.

Living by Joe WilcoxDec 25, 201410:03 pm

Vinyl is Vogue

Four days before Christmas, my 20 year-old daughter texted: “Out of the `60s, `70s, and `80s, which was your favorite?” That question, her reason for asking (“been listening to lots of Beatles”), and presents’ preference (“just like vintage things, haha—and music”) led me to make a last-minute purchase: Crosley turntable, from Urban Outfitters for 20 percent off. I also grabbed The Beatles “White Album”, which will be returned December 26 for full refund.

Vinyl is vogue right now. Nielsen SoundScan’s midyear report put vinyl record sales at 4 million units, a 40-percent increase over the same time period in 2013. The pace remains fairly constant, with sales approaching 8 million for all 2014—259,000 units over Black Friday weekend, a 50-percent year-over-year increase. In a time when online music purchases are easy and selective, vinyl’s tactile experience of holding the disc and setting the needle to it feels authentic; more intimate. In the not-so-distant future, some people will feel the same about caressing the printed page, when ebooks have displaced boundbacks like CDs did vinyl.

Society by Joe WilcoxDec 22, 20142:48 pm

Syfy ‘Ascension’ Review

Not since (what was then) SciFi Channel televised the Battlestar Galactica miniseries in 2003 has science fiction storytelling been so good as Ascension, which aired last week. BSG changed the tone and tenure of speculative drama, that felt altogether more real in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Later watchers won’t feel the same about the miniseries or full seasons that followed. They’re beret of the shared context that amplified the emotional content.

Ascension’s showrunners smartly seek something similar, but playing reminiscent emotions rather than anger or fear. For aging Baby Boomers, and even their descendants, Ascension is a time tunnel to the early 1960s, perfectly preserved 51 years later. Pop! Let’s look inside the time capsule! i09 calls Ascension “Mad Men in Space”, and there’s something to that allusion. But unlike later Mad Men seasons, which carried the characters forward into the decade’s crises and conflicts, Ascension harkens a golden era of innocence before Civil Rights, Vietnam, war protests, hippies, political assassinations, or even the Beatles.

Web by Joe WilcoxDec 20, 201411:40 am

Self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com?

That’s the question I asked over Black Friday weekend 2014. But searching online for comparisons brought little meaningful results. So I answer here, for others posing the same question, based on my experience.

We all make mistakes, but whoever really admits them? I do today. Simply stated: On December 1, I migrated my two sites—Five Minutes with Joe and Bunny Bows Press—from shared self-hosted WP to WordPress.com. I now regret the decision, returning to hosted WordPress 14 days later.

News Media by Joe WilcoxDec 19, 20149:17 am

‘We Are Web Journalists’

Three days ago I laughed hysterically at Nate Dern’s Funny or Die post “The First Rule Of Web Journalism Is You Don’t Fact Check Web Journalism“. This poke-in-the-gut missive is so close to the truth, I almost couldn’t chuckle. The second rule is the same as the first, by the way.

Snippet: “The eighth rule of web journalism is that if it’s too good to be true, you have to post it. The story goes up. It goes viral. It’s revealed to be fake. The apology goes up. The apology goes viral. You forget about it in a day and we’ll do it again in a week”. Funny because it’s true!

News Media by Joe WilcoxDec 14, 201410:44 am

Defending Rolling Stone

Editor’s Note: Dateline April 5, 2015, Rolling Stone retracted story “A Rape on Campus” when publishing a forensic analysis prepared by Columbia School of Journalism. Please see my follow-up post.

I subscribe to five magazines: Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair (print and digital) and Economist, New Yorker, and Rolling Stone (digital only). EW is cheap (as little as $10 a year), while the business weekly offers news analysis I mostly trust. New Yorker is for culture and the occasionally exceptional long-form feature. The other two deliver some of the best investigative journalism available anywhere. Today, I defend one of them, but also criticize its archaic news reporting methods.

Over the past few weeks, Washington Post leads blasting criticism against RS for story “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA“, which appears in issue 1223, Dec. 4, 2014. Online the dateline is November 19. The furor over the investigative report’s credibility is, ironically given the headline, a rape on Rolling Stone‘s credibility—and makes me just want to puke for the outrageous, holier-than-thou repudiation that should be pointed elsewhere. Mountains of irresponsibly-reported online news stories overshadow the amount of trustworthy content, yet the Post and other media outlets choose to gang-bang a magazine with standards for accuracy and accountability but also advocacy. The misdirected, and sometimes self-serving, attacks are shameful for their shamelessness.

Digital Lifestyle by Joe WilcoxDec 12, 201411:35 am

The #ArtofSocial is What?

This morning, on Google+, successful self-promoter Guy Kawasaki posted about the #ArtofSocial quiz, which promotes his new book co-written with Peg Fitzpatrick You can see from the screen grab my score, which isn’t as good as I expected. Dammit. (By the way, I didn’t take nearly 6 minutes to complete the quiz. I had a cat interruption midway through.)

Grumble. Grumble. Now I must buy another Guy Kawasaki book, with hopes this time there’s gold. I’ve yet to earn a living writing ebooks, even after reading APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and blame the author—meaning me, not him. 🙂

Photo by Joe WilcoxDec 9, 201412:12 pm

Finding Flickr

Closing the storytelling loop from my thinking-out-loud writing, an update: I let my Flickr Pro account renew on December 6. That may surprise some people after I questioned the photo-sharing service’s trustworthiness for plans to resell Creative Commons Commercial images and for recommending that anyone concerned should change the license (technically CC isn’t revocable when applied).

I seriously considered closing down my Flickr, and moving everything to my SmugMug or even to 500px. But something stung my ambitions. I still believe in Yahoo, and announcements yesterday and today—mobile developer conference and new opportunity for advertisers—demonstrate a company in upward motion. My oldest online identity is with Yahoo. Call me sentimental, even though my Yahoo mail account collects more spam than all the others combined by several times. That given I rarely use the address.

News Media by Joe WilcoxDec 8, 20147:36 am

Like I Said About the New Republic…

In an opinion piece published by the Washington Post last evening, New Republic owner Chris Hughes confirms what I asserted two days ago: The publication seeks to remain relevant, which won’t happen staying the current course, and that massive staff and contributor resignations are not a clash of journalistic values. My followup published yesterday, explains how I came to see the wisdom behind the magazine’s move to become a “vertically integrated digital media company”, as stated by CEO Guy Vidra.

You could sum up my original post in sentence: “Hughes and Vidra seek profitability and visibility for the New Republic“. The magazine’s owner confirms in the Post opinion: “I didn’t buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk. I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice—the things that make us singular—could survive”.

News Media by Joe WilcoxDec 7, 201410:48 am

News Gatherers, Follow the Reporting!

When starting to write last night’s commentary on the upheaval at the New Republic, I sided firmly with the resigning staff. After all, they apparently stand firm for journalistic integrity and preserving an institution that reached a century’s publication in September. But the more I researched, the more obvious the wisdom changing the magazine’s editorial distribution approach and relocating to New York. I followed the reporting rather than personal preconceptions, or biases.

I started with headline: “Say Goodbye to the Old Republic”, choosing the above photo of stormtroopers snapped during Comic-Con 2014. I assumed that anyone who ever watched Star Wars—and who hasn’t—would get the hed and art combo. But midway through writing and research, which I often do simultaneously in one draft, the story shifted somewhere else. When finished writing, I changed headline to “Say Hello to the New Republic” and photo to Manhattan’s Soho district. After some deliberation about burying the lede, I tacked on an addition to the first paragraph: “which, by the way, is totally sensible”, referring to the “magazine’s massive makeover”. The top half remains as written, which I hope doesn’t confuse the reader or misshape the storytelling.

News Media by Joe WilcoxDec 6, 20148:58 pm

Say Hello to the New Republic

The New Republic boggles the mind for what its changes represent: Large number of staff resignations as the publication relocates and transforms into something else. I can’t but think the defections make way for a new blood transfusion and clear out editorial cholesterol that could slow down the transition from the old New Republic to the new New Republic. How ironic that by quitting, the exiting editors enable the iconic magazine’s massive makeover, which, by the way, is totally sensible.

The story goes like this: Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, whose social media magic ignited Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign, purchased the New Republic in March 2012. Following foreshadowings, on Dec. 4, 2014, recently appointed CEO Guy Vidra announced the departures of editor-in-chief Frank Foer and long-time literary editor Leon Wieseltier. (Three decades!) Gabriel Snyder takes over the top editorial spot.