It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:
1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.
2. The Sonics go blort.
3. Safeco goes doink.
4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.
5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.
6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.
7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).
8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.
9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.
10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.
Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.
We’ll miss ’em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.
And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.
My mother told me that she’d once heard my late father tell of the delightful and luxurious time he once had staying in the Taj Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai), as he was about to be shipped home at the end of WWII. Now, the place is a battle zone instigated by one of those thug bands that think blowing stuff up + killing people = victory (or its emotional equivalent). How macho; how dumb.
Forty-five years after JFK’s slaying, it’s still poignant to view the initial TV coverage. CBS happened to be the only network feeding programming to its eastern/central affiliates at that hour. As the World Turns was such a ratings powerhouse in those days, NBC and ABC didn’t bother to program against it.
Thus, the catastrophe that (according to some perverse nostalgists) jump-started 12 years of further catastrophes first came to the nation’s attention by interrupting the most sedate and reassuring TV series yet devised.
ATWT creator Irna Phillips had sensed that TV was, by nature, a more ambient medium than radio. (Former ABC exec Bob Shanks called TV “the cool fire.”) So she toned down the melodrama and the histrionics, and devised an extremely quiet, low-key drama, in which an average Midwestern family discussed its average Midwestern daily doings.
Thus, the media’s most lulling, calming tribute to Ike-era ideals gave way to Walter Cronkite telling us, indirectly, of that fantasy America’s violent demise.
This year, T-Day week sees the nation in another cusp between eras.
A “perfect storm” of economic collapse has yet to reach bottom.
An unneeded, unending war continues to destroy lives.
Yet tens of millions of us still bathe in the afterglow of that great joyous moment three weeks ago.
There’s a feeling in the social zeitgeist. A feeling of optimism, of unashamed sincerity. A feeling that we really can turn the corner on all our crises. A feeling that the world really canturn, into a better place.
I share this feeling, and hope you do too.
Bonneville International, which just regained ownership of KIRO Radio last year, will switch KIRO-AM to all sports talk next April. KIRO-AM’s news and news-talk fare will move exclusively to 97.3 FM.
Thus will end more than 35 years of what was successively billed as “KIRO Newsradio 7,” then “KIRO Newsradio 71,” then “710 KIRO.” (Each more precise frequency reference responded to the prevalence of more precise tuning displays on car radios.)
KIRO-AM is one of the city’s oldest stations. It goes back to the Old Time Radio golden age, during which it amassed a larger collection of CBS Radio network recordings than CBS itself had (a collection of phonograph records that’s now owned by the UW). It eased into a middle-of-the-road music and news format by the early 1960s.
In the early 1970s, Bonneville spent its way to the top of the local ratings by ditching the DJs (except on weekends) and hiring a full news reporting staff.
I heard Nixon’s resignation speech on KIRO. I heard the start of the first Gulf War on KIRO. The voices of Bill Yeend, Dave Ross, Jim French, the late Wayne Cody, et al. are permanently etched in my brain’s ROM.
It was weird, on Election Night, to bring a cheap, FM-only portable radio to my temp office site and try to listen (during a dinner break) to NPR’s blathering “analysis” of returns that hadn’t come in yet. KIRO had already begun simulcasting its news-talk on FM, but I couldn’t pull in that signal from where I was.
But that’s one reason why they’re doing this. The public now associates AM talk with looney right-wing demagogues. FM is now where the targeted demographic audience segments go for everything except sports (with a few notable exceptions such as KIXI and KPTK).
Crosscut, ex-Seattle Weekly tycoon David Brewster’s attempt to bring his lifelong dream of a Seattle New Republic to online life, may turn nonprofit in hopes of survival-thru-donations.
Mind you, Brewster’s initial concept didn’t have the greatest mass-appeal potential to begin with. And the online-ad market hasn’t yet matured to the point of supporting such a niche product with a small yet paid staff.
Still, this admission of need may signify another dead end in the ongoing drive, here and around the world, to find a path toward profitability for professional online journalism.
…the end of The Christian Science Monitor as a daily newsprint product. The website, and a print weekly, will continue.
The Monitor was seldom, if ever, a moneymaker. It was subsidized by the CS church, which has faced dying-off memberships and financial belt-tightening in recent decades.
Its circulation peaked in the 1970s, before the NY Times was widely available outside the Northeast. To tens of thousands of readers over the years, it was a small but assured voice of reason and solemnity.
As an anomaly of the U.S. newspaper biz, the Monitor‘s very existence attested that serious “boutique” journalism was feasible in this country, so long as it didn’t have to turn a profit. These days, some industry analysts have offered up the idea that local daily papers might turn to nonprofit models as a means to preserving themselves.
In recent years, the printed Monitor hasn’t been widely available at newsstands or vending machines, only at CS Reading Rooms. It was still available by subscription; but if dead-tree journalism was becoming passé in the Internet age, a dead-tree journalism product distributed five days a week via the Postal Service was even more behind the times. Which simply added to its image as a charming oddity.
Telemundo’s now cablecasting Mr. Bean dubbed into Spanish! My day is now complete.
Just now watching the night’s parade of Repo Men and Repo Women.
Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani: They’re not even trying to convince undecideds, or to promote policy platforms. They’re only repeating the same old brand slogans. Strength. Patriotism. Military fetishism. POW. 9/11. Country. Leadership. Drill, drill, drill. Abortion. The sanctity of (only one kind of) marriage. Anti-intellectualism. Everything wrong these past eight years was them durn libruls’ fault. Daring to be racist. Daring to suck up to the oil companies. War, more war, war forever. The (nonexistent) Saddam/Al Qaida connection. Saint Reagan. Jesus (not quite as venerated as Reagan, but close). Washington DC’s broke and needs fixing, but don’t even think we had anything to do with breaking it.
Now for Sarah Palin.
I do not denigrate Palin for being from Alaska. I live in the city that’s the official jumping-off point for Alaska. It’s a great state. It would be even greater if it didn’t have so many corrupt Republicans running everything.
(And besides, I remember in 1992 when the John Carlsons pooh-poohed Bill Clinton as having been nothing but the “failed governor of a small state.”)
Nor do I denigrate Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.
Nor do I praise Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.
Having lived under the governorship of Dixy Lee Ray, I know that A Strong Woman can be just as capable of graft, cronyism, and regressive ideas as any man.
No, there are plenty of substantive reasons why Palin is a poor choice for vice president.
Just as there are plenty of substantive reasons why today’s John McCain is a poor choice for president.
As for Palin’s speechifying: Perfectly perfunctory by rabid-right standards. She held her own with the better-known demagogues who preceded her tonight. But by the oratorical standards of the party of George W. Bush, I know that ain’t saying much.
I watched part of the Repo Men’s convention tonight on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that’s the HBO-esque drama (actually on AMC) about an ad agency in 1960 that’s so behind the times, it still devises whole major national product campaigns around two-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post.
Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party’s retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that’s so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven’t got.
Note the convention slogan, “Country First.”
In the first half of the last century, “America First” was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries’ business when it didn’t directly affect us. In practical terms, the America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.
Today’s “Country First” means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else’s kids have to fight ’em.
But “Country” could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that’s no more real than the world within a ’50s magazine ad.
Meanwhile, several blogospherians have noted that the most outlandish (and probably false) rumor about Sarah Palin (that she’d faked a pregnancy to hide that of her own teenage daughter) resembled a storyline in the past season of Desperate Housewives. As you may know, that’s the ABC drama set in a refined residential suburb where fantasies of The Good Life violently clash with brutal reality on a regular basis.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which Republican Convention celebrities are more like which Desperate Housewives characters. (To me, Cindy McCain looks like a Bree but acts more like a Gabriele.)
Other thots: Fred Thompson’s speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Lawn Order star I like is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I’ll always remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.)
Same could not be said for George W. Bush’s satellite speech. NBC’s prime-time convention hour included an excerpt from Bush’s speech in D.C., without the applause audio from the convention in St. Paul. It just made this failed-head-of-state seem even clumsier.
It seems like just six days ago, instead of six years ago, that the headlines were full of gloom-n’-doom about economic hardship and consumer cutbacks.
Then, for a while, the media (particularly much of the “alt” media) were back to ignoring the poor and the working families, preferring to inhabit (or imagine) a world of unlimited luxury.
Around here, this meant slick magazines and online shopping guides dedicated to the highest and best possible spending of money. It meant “progressive” local politicians who unashamedly sucked up to the upper castes, and to the merchants and real-estate developers who outfitted and supplied upper-caste households. It meant hundreds of elegant bistros and whole grocery chains dedicated to ever-dearer visions of The Good Life.
Now, though, we’ve got front-page wire stories talking about Americans’ supposed “newfound frugality.”
As if tens of millions of us haven’t been pinching pennies all along.
In my current stompin’ grounds of Belltown, the alleged Good Life has been what it all was supposed to have been about for a long time. I’ve got old condo ads from 1992 offering up fantasy visions of unparalleled beauty and elegance, quoting old British aristocrats in wedding-invitation typefaces.
Later in the decade came the big billboards with the manically grinning young couples striding happily into their utterly fabulous view homes.
But behind the marketing images, there were a lot of young couples whose parents had donated down payments, hoping to get their kids into home ownership while it still could sorta happen.
There were law-firm junior partners and hospital physicians living just beyond their means, trusting/hoping their careers would grow to match their mortgages.
There were AARP-agers downsizing from bigger homes elsewhere with more stuff in them.
There were Microsoft stock-option early retirees, who’d pinned the whole rest of their lives on the premise that their accumulated nest eggs would remain uneaten by inflation.
They, and much of the rest of us, now await whatever’s next, wondering how to stay afloat.
I’M THINKING OF TURNING the print version of MISCmedia into something closer to a slick magazine, with prettier paper and a real cover and everything.
Three things are keeping me from making the jump:
1. The startup costs.
2. The time commitment involved (which is really an excuse for the emotional commitment involved).
3. The iffy current state of the magazine biz.
Specifically, there’s a glut of newsstand magazines out there. Publishers have tried to seek out every potentially lucrative demographic niche market, and have accordingly shipped hundreds of new titles in recent years.
We’ve previously mentioned such hi-profile attempts as Talk, George, Brill’s Content, O: The Oprah Magazine, those British-inspired “bloke” magazines such as Maxim, those corporate-warrior business magazines such as Fast Company, and those Helvetica-typefaced home-design magazines such as Wallpaper.
But that all’s just the proverbial flower of the weed.
The shelves of Steve’s Broadway News and the big-box bookstores are verily flooded with unauthorized Pokemon collector mags, kids’ versions of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan, Internet magazines forever searching for excuses to put movie stars on the cover (“This celebrity has never actually used a computer, but somebody’s put up an unofficial fan site about her”), superstar-based music magazines, genre-based music magazines, fashion-lifestyle magazines, ethnic-lifestyle magazines, and “ground level” magazines a step or two up from zinehood (Rockrgrl, No Depression).
(Then there are all the ever-more-specialized sex mags, from Barely Legal to Over 50.)
In all, there are now over 5,200 newsstand-distributed titles big enough to be tracked by trade associations. (That figure doesn’t include many ground-level titles. It also doesn’t include most comic-book titles, which these days are sold in specialty stores with their own distribution networks. It does include many regional and city magazines that don’t try to be sold everywhere.)
The good news about this is that it proves folks are indeed reading these days, no matter what the elitist pundits rant about our supposed post-literate society. Or, at least, that the media conglomerates are willing to place big investment bets that folks are still reading.
And it means a lot of writers and editors (even mediocre ones) have gotten work.
The bad news is it can’t last. Literally, there’s no place to put them all. Not even in the big-box stores.
Even the ones that make it into enough outlets can’t all attract attention through the clutter. Some big wholesalers now find only 33 to 36 percent of the copies they ship out actually sell through to consumers. The rest are shipped back to warehouses, stripped of their covers (which go back to the publishers for accounting purposes), and either recycled or incinerated.
One industry analyst estimates more than half the newsstand mags out there now will be gone within a year.
Granted, there are still enough startups in the pipeline that the net reduction will likely be smaller than that.
And many, many of these threatened titles won’t be missed much, maybe not even by those who work on them. (Though I could be wrong; perhaps in 2002 there will be eBay auctions for scarce old copies of Joe or Women’s Sports & Fitness).
So where will all the thousands of potentially soon-to-be-jobless word and image manipulators go?
Barring a sudden revival of commercial “content” websites (now intensely disliked by investors), a lot of them might end up trolling the streets of New York and other cities, trying to round up nickel-and-dime investments from pals to start up their own publishing ventures.
Just like me.
TOMORROW: Men’s designer fashions become just as silly as women’s.
ELSEWHERE:
…the International Channel. It aired blocks of programming from all different countries, right on basic cable, with ethnically-targeted commercials and everything.
Part of what I loved about it was the music shows. Samba, Bollywood, tango, Afropop, Hungarian operettas, Japanese techno, and much much more. And it was all curated by and for folks of these various ethnicities themselves! It was the real stuff, not Paul Simonized for baby-boomer comfort listening.
Some of this joyous cacophony is back, thanks to the National Geographic Channel. It’s got a post-midnight music block, Nat Geo Music. The block runs in Italy as a 24-hour channel; Geographic’s talking about launching it as a separate channel here.
The show compiles music videos (remember those things?), documentary shorts, and concert clips by lots of different people in lots of different places. Sure, the show’s got mellow folkie stuff, reggae, salsa, etc. But it’s also got digital cut-up music and raucous celebratory stuff and dissonant percussion. (And, in good National Geographic tradition, they’re not afraid of a little artistic nudity in the videos.)
About all you won’t hear on Nat Geo Music: Elmer Bernstein’s bombastic orchestral theme from the old National Geographic network specials.
…Kids WB signed off in May. Someone calling himself Peter Paltridge did notice, and offers a retrospective of the cartoon programming block’s first and last days on the air. If you don’t understand why Earthworm Jim was a greater show than Skunk Fu, you soon will.
Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.
“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.
I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.
Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.
Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.
Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.
KOMO-TV’s long-running afternoon talk show will disappear in August, ending a 24-year run.
Producers had tried to shake up the show in recent years, slicing it into four or five segments per hour instead of its traditional two. But the lure of low-cost, high-profit syndicated talk fare has finally done it in, just like it’s done in most of the local gabfests around the country.
Also threatened by the dictum of talk-is-cheap: The daytime soap operas, which NWA cohost Cindi Rinehart has chronicled since the show’s debut. At that time, there were 14 daily serials on American TV. Now there are just eight (not counting Spanish-language imports). Almost all of those shows are scrambling to cut their budgets and shrink their acting and writing staffs.
In the ultimate unintended irony, the syndicated show that will replace Rinehart and co. has the same title as a former long-running soap, The Doctors.
Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.
And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.
Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.
Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.
So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?
Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)
Please feel free to suggest your own.
