Posts Tagged ‘radio’
Mine.
This is a quickie.
And I may be way off about this. If I am, somebody tell me.
Yesterday, KOIN Channel 6 did an exclusive interview with Donald Trump. Later, KPTV Channel 12 referenced the interview and used video from it but didn’t identify the station that conducted it.
I’ve noticed that reporters and outlets, (whether broadcast or print), can be very protective of their work and their brand. In a society of professionals like journalists, I’m not sure why that is. But rarely do some outlets credit other outlets for stories they either break or conduct. And the times that I’ve called an outlet to follow up on information in a story of theirs, they share source contact information almost never.
Maybe, the case of yesterday’s pair of stories is a special case. Perhaps, there is an internal agreement amongst stations that works with video in a pool the same way it works with audio. FYI, when a bunch of stations decide to air an event, often one of them agrees to collect video and audio for all of them so all of them don’t have to duplicate the effort and expend those resources. That’s called a “pool”.
Maybe it’s a selfish thing – “I had to work to get it, you work to get it”. Or maybe it’s a mistrust that they won’t get credit from their competitive peers. But if that was the case, nobody would ever again use anything from anywhere and claim proper “attribution” or “fair use”.
Legitimately, record company X could say, “Why, media outlet, should I let you use a snippet of a Prince song? If you haven’t paid a royalty fee, you need to find some musician to create a Prince sound-a-like, and BTW, if it sounds too similar, expect to be sued.” Or author X could say, “My article is fully copywrited and even if you properly attribute me as the author of its conclusions, but without my expressed and written permission, expect to be sued.”
Or maybe it’s a liability thing, as in, reporters don’t want any other reporter suffering from the outcomes of stories they uncover if those outcomes are bad. Or perhaps reporters can be protective of their scoop like some researchers, who don’t necessarily want any other longhairs dinking around with their original conclusions.
Those two are kind of longshots.
Sometimes, I wish the society of professional journalists behaved more like a society.
P.S. Coincidentally, I found this article by NPR media critic David Folkenflik as I was researching my book about the public radio fund drive. In it, he asks some of the same questions I ask about why media can be so insular. I admit that the subjects of companies not giving each other credit and companies not letting reporters talk are not directly related, but in the areas of trust giving and trust getting, they are first cousins.
When Elephants Fight
“When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” – African Proverb
In the course of working on my book about the public radio pledge drive, I stumbled upon a conversation between two leaders in the public radio realm. Adam Davidson, who has been a content producer for NPR and APM with a particular interest in economics, and John Sutton, a long time radio researcher and fundraising consultant who has been following audience behaviour for decades.
Mr. Sutton responded to a conversation Mr. Davidson posted about the future of audio content and how public radio in general is facing an existential threat from new, long-form journalism from podcasts like “Serial”. Mr. Sutton responded that people don’t use podcasts the way they use radio as it currently exists and even with the technological changes that have rocked public radio, their effect in the long term will be smoothed out. As time went on, their conversation got a lot livelier and their critiques of each other’s point of view, much more, … um … pointed.
Fortunately, what I’m working on isn’t specifically about program production, audience behaviour or technological innovation as it affects public radio. There are people are much smarter about those things than I will ever be. But it reveals the problem with experts. What is the public to do when standing between two people who have the credentials to clearly and cogently defend opposite points of view?
Pubcasters do everything they can to keep the public happy and in a giving mood and that means drawing as little attention as possible to such conversations. But in the deep underbelly of public radio, they ultimately direct bigger conversations. Like, for example, those over the success of Jarl Mohn, NPR’s new CEO who wants to bring more high value donors into NPR. It’s a strategy that drew justifiable skepticism from the host of OPB’s daily flagship radio news program in 2014.
Maybe the extra cash will help public radio rely less on pledge drives, give producers more freedom to produce higher quality programming and help it avoid future bloodbaths like the one that rocked the network in 2014. ICYMI, NPR made deep cuts in staff and programming in a cost saving move.
In their August 2015 conversation, both men do agree on one thing – the key to public radio’s success is producing programs the audience will listen to and pay for. Their discussion, found here, is probably only one of many such fights between such elephants deep within the public radio milieu.
How to Be Smooth
This is a quickie.
TV and radio are technical professions. Everybody depends on everybody else for a smooth outcome. Mistakes happen; lights burn out, things fall over, the wrong button gets pushed, a graphic disappears, a computer crashes. But when they happen, people work to make them as unnoticable as possible. That doesn’t always happen. Reporters, anchors and hosts get caught off guard by flubs, both those of other people and their own. They might apologize, do double takes, start something over, laugh or do any one of a thousand things people do when they’re surprised.
But being smooth is part of being professional, and sometimes, someone is so simply casual about fixing a fix that you have to admire them for it. Such was the case with KOIN’s Sally Showman this morning. At the 8:30 local news, traffic and weather break, the camera cut to her giving her weather forecast. Her lips were moving but nothing was coming out. There was a problem with her audio. And smoothly, almost unnoticably, she reached around behind her own back, switched on her wireless microphone, and, as they say in the Army, “continued to march.”
How did she know we couldn’t hear her? Possibly someone on the studio floor motioned to her that her mic wasn’t working. Maybe (if she was wearing an earpiece), the director told her to turn it on. But considering the blooper tapes I’ve seen in my life, even pros can sometimes make something as simple as pushing a button look like a Steve Martin routine.
Live broadcasting is an acquired skill. It is a dance; gear, people, timing and electronics all choreographed while you drink your coffee. You’ve seen so many dances that you, discerning audience that you are, know when somebody is stumbling. So, when there’s a problem, it’s not enough to just fix it. The fix must also be as ordinary as it is elegant.
Smooth.
Hertz
I know people who can’t take a tone above about 4000 cycles per second, or hertz. That’s about the frequency of the standard 1950’s plastic whistle. Spending so much time in TV and radio, you get used to hearing test tones, squeals, hums and buzzes as you wander through a station and past various studios, editing bays and engineering benches. But you assume they are temporary; the equipment is warming up, somebody is checking gear, whatever.
But tonight I heard something in an NPR story by Tom Bowman that I’m sure couldn’t have made him happy. While he reported on a story, I heard a tone at about 12,000 hertz. At that frequency, the sound is like a teeny, needle sized drill going into the side of your head. And I know how it happened.
Sometimes, when you’re working in a studio, something isn’t quite right. There is a mismatch somewhere, a loose cable, a bad circuit, a bleedthrough, an open pot – something. And you think you’re hearing it but you’re just not sure. So you record your narration and you edit the soundbyte and the piece is finished. But then, you hear it later and you hear that thing you hoped wasn’t there, but clearly now; 12,000 hertz that isn’t in the soundbyte. And you know what that means … it was you. Not the field gear, not the phone, you.
And to the audience, they might think they’re hearing something else coming from somewhere else; it’s the refrigerator, or the TV or the computer. Maybe it’s the Android. But for Bowman and every newsie or producer/editor who spends their day hunched in front of Audacity or Adobe Audition, they know it’s not that. They know the audience isn’t imagining things. They’re hearing something that shouldn’t be there, they just aren’t sure what it is.
But we know, and man, that sucks.
Media Questions About Charlie Hebdo Not Naval Gazing This Time
Media is a human institution, just like every other institution on this planet. It is not perfect. The media has been accused of everything from under focusing on the right thing to over focusing on the inane thing. But sometimes, it gets the hard look at itself right.
NPR’s Here and Now had a discussion with Eric Wimple, Media Columnist for the Washington Post on whether there is a level of hypocrisy amongst the media regarding the reprinting of debatable political cartoons by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Two and possibly three terrorists involved in the killings of Charlie Hebdo staff and French police were killed in and outside of Paris by French police. The hashtag “#Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) has popped up as a sign of solidarity with the right to free speech as expressed in their political cartoons.
But there has been a counter hash tag, “#Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo” (I am not Charlie Hebdo) as a way of saying although the killings were unacceptable, some of the cartoons the magazine published were purposely incendiary and equally unacceptable to some.
This has landed some media smack in the middle of the question of how much support they will give Charlie Hebdo. It should be noted that the publication itself has already said they will meet their next printing deadline on time and publish as usual. But the New York Times and Slate are revealed to be on opposite sides of that intention of support.
Here and Now reported that the New York Times will not re-publish any of Charlie Hebdo’s more controversial cartoons, esp. those that depict the prophet Mohammed. Slate, by contrast, will. And the question for journalists is, where is the line separating the brotherhood of the pen from what their audience (including advertisers) will bear?
Charlie Hebdo does not need other publications to carry their water. They have hoisted their own load onto their own shoulders, terrorists be damned. The ink still pulses within them and that makes anyone who truly is a “journalist” proud. But journalists don’t make the business decisions where stockholders and cultures with fickle morals compasses are concerned.
But at least this time, the conversations within the Fourth and Fifth Estates are actually rocking the houses.
Just Say it!
Here’s the thing.
Whenever I hear many commentators talking about an issue that involves black people, they almost always hit a speed bump in their pacing whenever the teleprompter rolls up to the words “black people” or “African-American people”. I’ve noticed this for years now and it really stands out compared to whenever they have to give the nomenclature for any of the other four federally “protected” minority groups, to wit:
Asian-American
Native-American
Hispanic-American, or
Pacific Islander American
There just doesn’t seem to be the same kind of angst there. Those groups seem to roll off the tongues of commentators, announcers, pundits, whoever. But when it comes to saying “black” or “African-American”, it seems there’s some kind of an asteroid collision happening in the heads of the talking heads, as if they are torn between not wanting to sound bigoted and not wanting to seem bigoted.
The difference being, in the former, “This is how I should say this which is how other culturally informed, color blind professionals in my field say this in the second decade of the third millennium”, versus the latter “I’m really uncomfortable with this because I’m uncomfortable with a lot connected to this and I don’t want to expose that un-comfortableness but I’m afraid I will”. Most recently, I heard this on my beloved NPR, the supposed broadcasting paragon of diversity and enlightenment.
For God’s sake, just say it and move on. As I heard a grown black man, who was no doubt prompted, stand up and say in a Denny’s in Cincinnati on New Years Day, 2000, “This is the year Two-Thousand! You people need to get over it.”
Seems like we still do.
Good Stuff
Last night was the last of three, live candidate forums I moderated. Two candidates for US Congress showed. Tuesday night, three gubernatorial candidates came. And Monday night, eight legislative candidates (four vying for the same district) were there. This whole process of being immersed in politics was nothing planned.
It started with me annoyed that the federal government was doing so much illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens. So I built a website to give people more direct access to their state constitutions – http://www.stateconstitutions.us.
Then, I got the idea to interview political candidates in advance of the 2014 state elections. In many cases, the parties anoint who they want to be the frontrunners and the smaller candidates with no money and no name recognition get no exposure from the media. I wanted to change that and give them all a voice. Of the 283 candidates that filed their candidacy on the Secretary of State’s website, I’ve interviewed about 40 of them since December 2013.
Those led to the idea of having debates between candidates running for different branches of government. And come June, after the Secretary of State opens filing to third party candidates like the Greens or the Constitution Party, I’ll probably repeat the process over for them who get even less love.
I’ve learned a lot about government, what it aspires to be and what it often is. And that has made me both discouraged and encouraged. Most people who want to be judges care because they know the judicial system can be intimidating. Most people who want to be lawmakers are not greedy, self-centered whores of moneyed interests. By contrast, they are passionate about serving their neighbors and trying to make a better world. And most people running for governor are clear thinkers capable of making truly executive decisions that try to balance the reason of courts against the passion of the legislature.
Before this project, I would’ve dismissed politics as an impediment to people trying to conduct their day to day lives. But now, I see it as a process that is absolutely essential to be at least aware of, if not engaged with. It is your right to not engage. But I’ve learned that if you have that kind of apathy, other people who don’t have your best interest in mind, will engage in your name for their own benefit. They will sponge your resources, make your decisions and they will affect your life in ways that you will only accidently discover when you day to day runs into their deaf, ubiquitous and unyielding bureaucracy.
Bread versus Wheat
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Sometimes, reporters want wheat. For example, they might want to see where something comes from; the raw version – the data – before other people have had the chance to put their interpretation on it. Other times, reporters want bread, meaning they want to hear the interpretation and compare it against the raw information. When a reporter asks for bread and gets wheat, it’s useless. And when a reporter asks for wheat and gets bread, again, it’s useless.
Another bread versus wheat example is when a radio reporter in particular asks a source for information via the medium of audio and they get text. If they specifically ask for an audio interview and get text, it’s not really helping. Why? Because one of the things that makes reporting credible is being able to attribute comments to a source. Yes, text can be quoted, but it’s a layer removed from the source. Sources know this, which is why sometimes, some of them refuse to respond with their voice to a question for comment. Or, during an interview, they will ask a reporter to turn off their recorder but allow written notes.
As a reporter, this has always struck me as a little cheesy, like the source is saying, “OK, you can have proof, but not very good proof”. If a source promises something and they don’t deliver, and then rationalizes it later, it can be frustrating. But it certainly tells you something about that source.
Written by Interviewer
September 11, 2014 at 04:17
Posted in Scratchpad
Tagged with audio, Bread, Comment, credibility, Information, Interpretation, Medium, radio, Raw, reporter, Source, Wheat