…“the war is over,” based on US public-opinion trends. Unfortunately, this is a premature announcement, just like the newspapers that called the WWI armistice a couple of days early. As in that case, people will still die, get maimed, etc. during the interim before the real end, whenever that day (month? year?) comes.

All three of the stalwart network news anchors of the modern era have now left their posts; two by retirement, one by more drastic means.

An American institution for a half-century, the country’s largest selling weekly, is dying.

They’re calling it a relaunch, a transformation. But don’t believe ’em.

No, the new-look TV Guide, announced today and hitting the stands in October, sounds all-too-eerily reminiscent of when Laverne & Shirley moved to LA, or when Mike Douglas moved to LA, or when the Moonlighting kids “did it,” or when All in the Family replaced Mike and Gloria with a cloying little girl.

Yes, TV Guide is jumping the shark.

The new mag will dump the 140 regional editions, making it useless as a reference for locally-produced or syndicated fare. What’s left of the listings section will be dramatically truncated, making it useless for future TV historians. Instead, it’ll be a regular-sized magazine (along the lines of its recently test-marketed Inside TV), full of big color pix and fawning celebrity puff pieces. As Rolling Stone has become a celeb-hype mag tangentally related to music, so will TV Guide become a celeb-hype mag tangentally related to TV.

Already, TV Guide Classic has shown signs of discomfort with itself, as best seen with all those multiple-cover gimmicks about theatrical movies that aren’t even on TV yet. And in an age of hundreds of national cable channels, a digest-sized database of thousands of shows is a monumental ongoing undertaking.

But without the local listings, it’s just not TV Guide anymore. And it’d take a monumental effort to re-create the national and local databases TV Guide‘s scrapping. Time Inc. tried in the ’80s with TV-Cable Week, but that was a massive money pit of a project that never got past test markets.

The only other way would be to start a print mag based on the newspaper-syndicate databases of TV listings (such as that of Tribune Media Services); but that’d compete with the newspapers that are the syndicate’s current customers.

Three and a half years before the FCC’s scheduled to turn off the original channels 2-13 (all current stations must migrate to digital UHF feeds before then), the “permanent” (i.e., print) medium that chronicled those channels is going away in all but name.

Here are further links to the story, from TV-biz analyst Phillip Swann, the blog site TV Squad, and entertainment historian Jerry Beck.

…believes in local media, I don’t regularly weigh myself down with the Sunday NY Times. But yesterday’s edition contained two major pieces of local interest–a profile of Seattle industrial and waste art-photographer (really!) Chris Jordan, whose work I’ve long admired and even occasionally imitated, and a supportive text piece lauding Costco for being kinder to its employees than Wall Street analysts want it to be.

Forbes reports Apple Computer’s contacting the major record companies about selling music videos through iTunes, to be played on computers and/or a future video iPod. Sony’s PlayStation Portable game machine can already be easily used to play motion-picture content.

Don’t think of this as the Forbes writer does, as a way for the deservedly-beseiged music giants to make another buck. Think of it as a way for indie videomakers to make a buck, at last.

During the dot-dom madness days, a lot of fly-by-nite outfits popped up (including several in Seattle) making and/or distributing short online video productions in many genres–sketch and standup comedy, animation, documentary, alternative news, erotica, and even video art. Most of the nonporn efforts failed financially. (The ad-supported, big-money-backed iFilm is the chief surviving exception.)

But, following on Apple’s embracing of audio podcasters, iTunes could provide a simple, open-to-all-comers pay-per-view system. (And because it’s Apple, it wouldn’t be annoyingly Windows-only, like so many subscription net-Video systems out there.)

Of course, having a workable business model doesn’t mean indie short-video makers will have an easy path to profitability. Cheaper means of production since the ’90s have led to an explosion of indie feature-film making, resulting in a glut of unviewable semipro movies.

But freed from the need to keep a compelling story going for more than an hour, these nascent artistes with their digi-camcorders could learn their craft while getting audience feedback. Film/video is a complex collection of skills, best learned via the high-concept, immediate-impact form of the short.

In the ’90s, several instructors and advisors told young filmmakers to skip shorts and start directly in feature projects. Chief among their reasons: There was no market for live-action shorts, but features could be hawked at Sundance and other festivals, or at least sold on video from your own website. For a middle-class kid looking at a lifetime of credit-card servitude just to break into his/her chosen craft, it was an easy idea to accept.

We’ve all seen, or scrupulously avoided, the results: Innumerable, interminable exercises in “hip” violence and relationship whining, with bad acting and terrible audio.

With shorts, these kids can say what they really need to say and then stop. Like I’m doing now.

…of corporate-music industry “politics,” Dave Marsh ponders whether the Live 8 concerts and their surrounding hype did more to preserve third-world dependancies than to subvert them.

The new narrower P-I arrived at my doorstep this morning. The new narrower Seattle Times is in the vending box outside my building.

As promimsed/threatened over the previous week, the papers are an inch narrower than they were before, as are many other papers around the country these days. (The narrower size has become the de facto standard for national full-page newspaper ads.)

I still don’t see how the narrower page saves paper. In order to fit the same amount of square-inchage of editorial and ad space, a paper would have to add pages. The smaller page size means the ratio of ink area to trim area is smaller, so more paper is unprinted-upon, not less.

No, the only way this scheme can save paper is if (1) advertisers are charged the same amount of money for less space, and (2) the news hole is similarly cramped. But those measures could be accomplished on the old page size. So the expensive retooling of massive printing presses is all for show, for telling fickle stockholders that we’re really doing something to keep those unreasonable promises of 20 percent profit margins.

And as for the excising of approximately one-eighth of the papers’ news holes, I’ve always been a brevity fan. There’s no need for any paper that’s not the NY Times to try to write like the NY Times. Heck, even the Times of London writes short-n’-sweet.

NOW LISTENING TO Music Out of Century 21, a Seattle World’s Fair tie-in LP that even I hadn’t known about until last week, when it was offered online at the out-of-print music site The Collector. (It’s since “scrolled off” from that site, alas; scroll down this link to read about the disc).

It turns out to have been the product of Atello Mineo, creator of the even more wacked-out World’s Fair disc Man in Space With Sounds, and his wife Toni. (The credited “artist” on Music Out of Century 21 is big-band conductor Vincent Lopez.) This one’s not as far-out as Man in Space (pun intended, as always). But it’s still a smash, a dozen tracks of lushy lounge sounds that snap in a beat from syrupy strings to badass brass to swooning choristers. The listening experience is only enhanced by the fact that I’m watching the Space Needle out my window whilst listening to the tuneage, in the century that evoked such high hopes way back then.

…deftly describes the right-wing “noise machine” as characterized by a “ferocity that is only surpassed by its nihilism.”

…make a USA TODAY countdown of the “greatest American rock bands.” Guess who’s #1. C’mon, guess…

Current TV, the quasi-news cable channel being funded by Al Gore and friends, still hasn’t begun cablecasting, but it does have a website with a FAQ list. It’s not very clear about just what the programming will be, except that it will be short on breaking news and big on “short video segments–each just two to five minutes long–with recurring themes and styles.”

Haven’t these guys heard about the Long Attention Span Generation? The kids today don’t want little pre-digested chunks of info; they want engaging multithreaded storylines.

I’m not one of those kids, as you know. I happen to luv quick info-bytes. But what I like might not be what’s most marketable to my juniors.

…claims there are now eight million Americans regularly making “blogs” and similar personal websites.

If true, it means my once-lonely pursuit now has a lot of company; albeit often-isolated company.

When I began this site a decade ago, it was an extension of a newspaper column that I’d been writing in monthly, then weekly formats for nine years. As you can tell from the archive pages here, my range of subjects, styles, and lengths has remained fairly consistent from then to now. The biggest difference is I’m writing and posting one item at a time, instead of in batches.

I make no claims to have invented this form. At the start, I was copping the formula of the “three dot” newspaper column, one of the most dynamic and flexible literary formats America had ever generated. Now, an alleged 2.6 percent of the entire US population has taken up this art form, for varying reasons and in varying styles.

And to imagine–when I started the site, I thought it would be “unique” enough to generate a full-time income from banner ads. Apparently I, too, was caught up in the dot-com hubris of the era, even while I openly scoffed at it.

…claims there’s a new conversation-based paradigm for commuincations these days, and that mass marketers still don’t get it.

A research study quoted in the 6/21 NY Times claims one’s political/social leanings may be influenced by one’s genes, which “prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group.”

Lemme take the personal-gut-feeling test to this.

For whatever reason, and I’m still trying to figure out why, I’ve got a brain that questions everything. It responds harshly to authority figures (religious, political, cultural) who demand total mindless obedience.

This means I don’t fit in well into tightly-bonded subcultures, whether they be Republicans, Christians, hippies, punks, gamers, etc.

This means I’m disposed toward a belief in total human diversity (not just PC faux-diversity) and personal liberty (not just the corporate power-licentiousness of some Libertarians).

It also means I’m highly wary of any utopian or revolutionary schemes that would lead to a society just as repressed as this one or worse, but merely with different people getting to do the repressing.

My odd li’l mind isn’t as fully focused or analytical as those of some political dreamers, so I don’t view the whole world through a single issue (such as gender, drugs, terror, or stem cells). Hence, I don’t believe every problem in the world will be solved by any one easily-explainable course of action.

I believe life is work. Nothing will ever be perfect, but everything can be better.

And I believe the world should become a more hospitable place for people with nonconformist minds such as my own.

Check out the juxtaposition of image and headline on Wednesday’s P-I front page. I’m talkng about the blurbs directly beneath the “Intelligencer,” above the main headline.

If you still don’t get it, come to my housewarming/birthday/site-anniversary shindig tonite to have it all explained to you. Email and RSVP for address and other pertinent info.

…about media conglomerates getting ever-bigger? It’s working out to be a poor business strategy, at least as viewed by executives who only pay attention to The Almighty Stock Price.

Thus, Viacom’s thinking of spinning off CBS into a separate company. This comes just five years after Viacom (originally formed when CBS spun off its local cable systems and its pre-1972 rerun library) picked up CBS, which had been previously bought and spun off from Loew’s and Westinghouse.

The new CBS would include not just the eye-branded network and network-owned TV stations, but also the Infinity radio stations, the UPN mini-network, and the UPN-branded Viacom-owned TV stations (including KSTW here). Viacom would keep its cable channels (MTV, Spike, BET, et al.) and Simon & Schuster publishing.

Paramount Pictures would be severed, Solomon-baby-like. Viacom would keep the feature-film and DVD businesses; while CBS would get Paramount’s TV production and syndication arms (including all those old CBS shows). Among other results, this would mean TV Land (to remain part of Viacom) would have to pay CBS for most of the shows it airs.

American society and American discourse could still use more voices, more choices. There’s no guarantee that the split-up pieces of corporate media giants would behave any less corporately.