Search results matching tag 'E-Journalism'

Battle Of The Gossips

Anonymous — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:03:35 GMT

Little has changed in a month away from the daily journo-whoredom grind.

This afternoon, La Finke is SCREECHING about Variety's Michael Fleming "scooping" her on the official closing of Fox Atomic... but she knew... she just didn't tell... because even though she runs true and false gossip on a regular basis, she is a virgin media princess when someone else beats her to it.

Stupider even... Fox Atomic has been all but officially shut down for a year already. The division of the division has had their name on product for three years... and released just six movies, including a whopping total of ZERO last year. Woo Hoo!!!

Was there hope that the Peter Rice perk division (for not going to Paramount) might turn itself around under Debbie Liebling? Sure. Then Miss March made under $5 million and 12 Rounds did $11.3m. Game over. (Did you think that a mid-September release for Jennifer's Body was a sign of belief in the product? Did it occur to you that Juno started its run at film fests in August '07, five months after production ended... and that Jennifer's Body finished shooting more than 11 months ago? Should I mention that I Love You Beth Cooper finished shooting over a year ago as well... and that the Heroes phenomenon is over, making a Hayden Pants sell brutal on any outlet other than Perez Hilton?)

Fox Atomic has been a walking corpse, much as Paramount Vantage now is, for well over a year... and this fighting over who gets to pronounce the corpse dead first - and Fleming did a nice job of making it sound a lot better a situation than it has been - is pathetic... especially from someone whose primary ability to "scoop" is based on running rumors of who is being fired next and then squealing "Toldja" like the pig (moral, not physical) she is.

And those of you in the talent community that think she is your friend, does it bother you at all that she slams the work of people who write, direct, and act in movies... that she hasn't even seen? Fake journalism... not even good gossip.

Maybe we should ask Patrick Goldstein what the kids in his neighborhood think? Or even better... maybe Slate can hire some freelancer to extol the virtues of media piracy because that's what he wants.

My city screams...

And Counting...

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:52:58 GMT

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Piracy & News

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:00:54 GMT

It's an interesting discussion...

Phil Spector was found guilty today. Vikram Jayanti made a wonderful documentary about Spector for BBC2 - The Agony & The Ecstasy of Phil Spector - that ran a week on the BBC2 website then was pulled down after a week. Spector gave Jayanti access to and allowed the use of all kinds of materials that Spector holds the rights to and this makes the doc truly one of a kind. The interview with Vikram took place right before and/or during the first trial. Great stuff. So much so that the film won an award for Best Single Documentary at the 35th annual Broadcasting Press Guild Awards in the UK just a couple of weeks ago.

The film is not scheduled to play in America... and I have no idea whether it ever will. It seems likely that Spector will allow it to play here after the legal battle is completely over, but this conviction, which will be appealed, may keep it out of view for years to come. The film actually leans towards Spector's argument that he could not have had his hand on the trigger when Ms. Clarkson was shot. But who knows what kind of spin writers and potential jurors might take on the film.

So a few hours ago, I look on the MCN front page and Ray Pride had stumbled upon the documentary, in full, on a major streaming website.

After a bit of investigation... and after excitedly preparing an entry about the film here on The Hot Blog, I pulled the link down and dumped my planned entry.

Obviously, this is frustrating. It's a great film. It should be seen. I have no idea whether it is not being shown because Spector set the rule or because there is a US deal still pending or whatever. Still, the moral issue is the moral issue. I don't have the legal right to see or distribute the film and clearly, neither does the person who posted it to the web... in good conscience, solely interested in sharing similar materials with others who are interested.

It frustrates me in these situations that we don't even have the right to pay for access to content, like this, which is so valuable to those with an interest. I would surely pay for access via BBC's website or buy a DVD of this film. But no.

Of course, the next step is to question whether watching a region coded DVD on a region-free player is morally valid.

Sigh...

Date Rape Redux

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:24:22 GMT

I'm not sure what is more disturbing... David Edelstein using someone who has not seen the film as the standard for moral outrage over Observe & Report OR David Edelstein oversimplifying both the argument that the date rape in the film is offensive and the argument that it is acceptable as an artistic choice ("I hope I also wouldn’t harass a Muslim co-worker, use a Taser on a man who parks next to a loading dock, break into a mall and assault policemen, or triumphantly shoot an unarmed criminal. Although I adore Lolita, I hope I am never tempted to lay a finger on a prepubescent girl. Although I grew up watching the Three Stooges, I shall endeavor never to jam two fingers into someone's eyes or yank anyone by the nose with a ball-peen hammer.")

This is, really, Clinton territory. What are the moral standards if you either love or hate the person/film being examined?

I can say, unequivocally, that someone liking O&R does not disqualify them morally in my eyes, for the date rape scene or any other politically incorrect scene.

But it is all too easy to lazily dismiss cruelty because it is either funny to us or because it abuses a group that we do not respect.

The three women who sleep with Javier Bardem in Vicky Cristina Barcelona are worse for the grape, disregard other relationships, and make excuses for what some would say is slutty behavior. Yet none of the three ever seem objectified in anything close to the way the character in O&R is.

Much of what Edelstein argues are "mitigating factors" in the controversial scene in Observe & Report are textbook examples of power inequities that define the somewhat blurry concept of date rape. In other words, if the woman sleeps around and gets herself loaded, a man who has to carry her - literally - into her home should feel free to mount her seemingly unconscious body – “Live and learn—or don’t and pay the consequences.” – so long as at some point, he recognizes that she is not moving at all and may need medical attention, which inspires her, in her inebriated state, to demand that he keep pumping along. After all, according to Edelstein, she is, “apparently enjoying herself.”

Let’s use the basic standard. If your family member was profoundly broken, on a bender, not saying “no,” but clearly out of it, would you think it was funny for some guy – who btw, added to the haze by giving her his prescription drugs – to have sex with her? Would you laugh out loud?

And when she shows no further interest the next day, would you think she deserved what she got and had enjoyed herself?

No, I don’t think it makes you a jerk not to think about all of that like I just laid it out. It is a movie… just like The Three Stooges.

But it doesn’t make you a tight ass to be unamused by a movie making light of date rape either… especially when part of the reason it’s “funny” is that it is white trash being screwed… just the way momma’s fall-down drinking is a hoot. Ha ha.

Baby, The Sky Must Fall

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:34:00 GMT

I wish the discussions of the future could be had without the hysteria.

Jeff Jarvis went all drama queen after the New York Times did a story about the AP trying to find a legal way to regain control of their content.

Thing is, this IS the discussion of the future. And the notion of AP or anyone else expecting to get paid by people who link to their content is as dead stupid As Jeff Jarvis screaming about the old white men of Traditional Media. It is not a one or the other conversation and surely, nothing like that can ever be a solution.

There are two kinds of aggregators in the game... those who just link and might comment and those who steal significant chunks of content, making a click-thru an unlikely choice for a large portion of their readership.

I would say that, as Jarvis notes, the first group is responsible for the survival of the AP and pretty much all the news organizations that will survive and thrive in the web era. Drudge, for instance, is the King of the Aggregators and can deliver page views in the hundreds of thousands for many of the stories to which he links. And, in fact, the creation of Breitbart.com to funnel wire service links to a controlled site that can produce more revenue from those links was not only very smart, but, as I assume Breitbart pays AP for their content, it makes sense for them as well.

The other side of it is sites that use other people's content to not only fill the giant holes in the coverage they claim to offer, but take large chunks of content, stuck on branded and (theoretically) ad-sold pages, sometimes multiple internal pages, knowing full well that only a small percentage of readers go past the first few graphs anymore online. So they grab with a heavy headline, create a another page view or two by copying the content (and another when people click back to the homepage where they found the initial link), and more often than not, never send eyeballs to the organization paying for the wire service in the first place.

I consider this stealing... even if Jeff Jarvis thinks its old thinking. Linking = good. Reprinting content for free with no consideration = bad. Just like all piracy.

This doesn't make the failure of Old Media to convert to New Media any less real. But it is a different argument.

There is another category of what AP is chasing (along with other content creators), which is control of Google placement. And that is a more complex issue. If AP and/or Reuters and/or TribCo and/or NYT and/or WashPo, etc, have easy and clear access to their stories with one site as the source, do they deserve to be the link people use and Google puts on top? It is my philosophy that, yes, they do. We have always tried to work our way back to the source when linking at MCN. For years, the wire services have not had home pages and we have chosen between hundreds of wire service subscribing websites for links. Drudge used to link most AP stories through the Washington Post web pages until Breitbart.com. At MCN, we spread it around. But if AP wants the link to their story and I can find it and it is the complete story, hell yeah, happy to offer readers the source.

The lesson of a closed web has already been learned. It doesn't work. If you close your content off, someone else will run a similar story and you will get fewer and fewer links. Almost nothing, in this age, is actually exclusive in any way for more than a few minutes. There are stories that don't actually get re-reported, but just re-printed in some form or the other. I have no use for that. But think about what happens on most industry stories when they break. There are, usually, at least four or five outlets that have already done some reporting on the story. That is the speed nightmare... everyone is on it... who is going to break it, even if it isn't really news yet.

Even the legendary NYT wrote a story just a day or two ago in which they ascribed - with zero way of knowing the truth - a "most people found out" status twice, not based on any objective facts, but clearly on the personal experience of the authors of the story... a detail that used to be (and still should be) irrelevant in journalism.

Anyway...

Jarvis sounds like a buffoon when he bloviates: "You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news."

Both sides of the argument need to start realizing… nothing, but printed content being sold daily in the quantity of hundreds of thousands of full-price-paying customers loaded with full-price-paying ad buyers, is lost forever… nothing is over… standards will change… some things will be better… some things will be worse…

Everything in life is not a fucking trend story. Please step away from the hysteria.

In Closing...

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:52:05 GMT

"Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately. Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman's ten years of contributions to building foxnews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors. Mr. Friedman is grateful to his colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade."

I have to say, I am amazed by the sympathy some have shown towards Mr. Friedman finally being hoisted on his own petard of long-standing. If this makes you think less of me, so be it. If you know what I know about the man and his work, this makes you either remarkably generous or remarkably foolish.

As I have written before, I expect Roger to rebound quickly with as nasty a website as any gossip site we have ever seen, except for those who line his Ziplocked pockets with food and access, competing more than he has with Ms Finke, his natural competitor in this arena. And while he will never cause the tumult inside the movie beltway that Nikki does, he has a real shot at being much more widely popular, given that his interests are broader and more celebrity focused. TMZ would be well served, given their moral position in this business, by hiring him.

Does Brooks Barnes Have An Editor?

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:09:06 GMT

Okay... let's put opinion aside... let's just look at the facts....

Barnes writes,"Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers"

Here are the numbers...

Rank - Title - Total - Domestic - Foreign - Year of Release
1 - Finding Nemo - $864.60 - $339.70 - $524.90 - 2003
2 - The Incredibles - $631.40 - $261.40 - $370.00 - 2004
3 - Ratatouille - $621.40 - $206.40 - $415.00 - 2007
4 - WALL - E - $534.80 - $223.80 - $311.00 - 2008
5 - Monsters, Inc. - $525.40 - $255.90 - $269.50 - 2001
6 - Toy Story 2 - $485.00 - $245.90 - $239.20 - 1999
7 - Cars - $462.00 - $244.10 - $217.90 - 2006
8 - A Bug's Life - $363.40 - $162.80 - $200.60 - 1998
9 - Toy Story - $362.00 - $191.80 - $170.20 - 1995

Even just using domestic gross - which only someone who is ignorant or willful would do - there are two movies that didn't break $200 million while Ratatouille and Wall-E did. But The Rat is Pixar's #2 ALL TIME foreign and Wall-E is #4.

Do those numbers not count?

And here is a personal note... the same idiots were saying the same crap about Wall-E last year... and were dead wrong.

But back to the facts... this is a complete embarrassment for the Paper of Record.

How Very Wolverine

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:11:33 GMT

So on Sunday, Roger Friedman starting telling people that he had not yet been fired. This was after private and then public confirmation of the firing, spinning the alleged immediacy of it all.

Another Veteran Gone

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:02:39 GMT

So now... Peter Bart gets kicked up and out. (Remember when The Hollywood Reporter did the same to Bob Dowling a few years back?)

This was inevitable, but not quite a solution. Bart was in the way of the future. Bart is no longer in the way of the future. But Variety has not answered the same question plaguing other Traditional Media outlets that have a much wider path on which to seek answers.

New Media, which Bart resisted fiercely, is not a panacea for an outlet like Variety, since the one thing the paper has that really differentiates it from the now endless stream of show business media out there IS the paper. 45,000 subscriptions - whether or not more than 30% of those hard copies are being read anymore - is the only unique proposition that Variety has left... especially now that they have cut way back on the one other area where they had a unique proposition, a role as one of the few places to review virtually every film you might want to see reviewed.

Want to top Variety in that area this very year? Hire 4 out-of-work quality critics for $30k a piece to write you a minimum of 3 reviews a week every week. Add another $50k for freelancers another $100k to the budget for travel. And for $250,000, YOU are Variety's superior. And frankly, you wouldn't really have to spend that much. You could cut the travel budget back to $50k, lay more heavily of festival freelancers, and you could probably get some really good critics to work for less than $30k.

But those 45,000 print copies a day, during the award season, expected to sit around the office for a week or more each... those are worth some big money... that one cover is. 100 days a year... $75k a year (and dropping… off 11% in last year’s fourth quarter)... that's $7.5 million. Online, I'm guessing they can do another $1.5 million or so. The number is surely low… but let’s use it to float the discussion…

Could you run Variety for $9 million a year? What do you do to maintain the legitimacy of the paper and website for that kind of money?

Truth is, there are many of us out there who could build a competitive trade magazine with that kind of revenue base. But we are starting with much smaller infrastructures, particularly in printing. Even with a retail price tag of more than $1 a day for a subscription, Variety takes a loss on its annual subscriptions. How much does it cost to publish 60,000 copies of Daily Variety, 250 or so days a year (roughly 15 million copies printed and delivered a year)? I don’t know, really.

And there’s the rub. How far can the Reed Business folks cut through the on-Oscar season and still ramp up the prices during the award season itself?

The painful reality is that content is the cheapest part of the product for Variety. They have to pull back and to be less extravagant than they have been… but they have to keep publishing enough of a paper with enough of an impact to keep from becoming… well… The Hollywood Reporter.

Anyway…

Tim Gray is a good man and a very good company man. I have no bones to pick with him. But I don’t see him as the visionary of the paper’s future either. He will keep the machine running and running with less personality issues than Bart, but he will surely be managing someone else’s idea of the future.

Of course, news of the move is indicative of the problems that face Variety, above and beyond revenue issues. Variety ran the story at 5:30pm, then Nikki Finke ran it while claiming she could have broken it but got jobbed by Tim Gray (who she didn’t call until Sunday at 5 even though she “knew about this” last night… perhaps too busy talking to Roger Ailes to bother to report much bigger industry news… but then again, Nikki is known for her careful restraint, especially regarding Peter Bart), followed by The Wrap doing nothing but reiterating the Variety story, and then Anne Thompson, who linked to The Wrap (where she might get a freelance gig eventually) and Variety (where she has one) … and now, me and surely others now and before me and after me… yadda yadda yadda.

I’ve certainly had my share of scraping for position in my day… but now, it’s all day, every day, on every story. Who is first with which scrap and who are they crediting for the work they didn’t do, etc, etc, etc. And Variety, as most media blogs know, is as guilty of these thefts as anyone, though they don’t tend to have the balls to claim an EXCLUSIVE. (The exclusive is becoming like a virgin counting which acts she/he has experienced so far. First kiss, first copped feel, first show and tell… all are EXCLUSIVE! these days.)

Good luck, Tim. Sorry it didn’t happen when your paper was at full power.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Anonymous — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:44:32 GMT

And so... Roger Friedman is dead at Fox...

I wish I could say, "Long Live Roger Friedman," but he should fall into the void... but won't. I would expect a Crazy Nikki-esque standalone site before the month is out, likely financed (silently) by Harvey Weinstein.

To be fair to Nikki, Roger Ailes did use her to cover his ass by giving her word of the firing first last night. It took about 20 minutes for me to have it confirmed after word popped up on the Blackberry after she ran it late Saturday night.

To be fair to everyone else, Nikki missed this element of the story 100% until she had an excuse to go back and pilfer from everyone else's coverage of the issue while failing utterly to explain that it was other web writers who pointed out this story to Fox on Thursday night and then were relentless about demanding Friedman's firing all day Friday.

There is little doubt that this incident - as so many in Friedman's Fox News career - would have been disappeared, like his column was disappeared - were it not for this public approbation in the midst of a bigger story for the studio. But Nikki, given that - as usual - her source was not so much interested in breaking news as breaking spin, skipped over all that and spins the lie that Fox News acted "promptly on all fronts." Not only did editors at FoxNews.com run the copy... not only did their legal department not stop the copy from being published or pull it down on their own... but when confronted about the Thursday column late Thursday night and then again Friday, the column came down mid-afternoon on Friday - about 36 hours after it posted - and at the time of the late Friday night press duel releases, Friedman was still employed by Fox News. It wasn't until another day over coverage that Ailes took action to commit to firing Friedman on Saturday afternoon.

Way to get it wrong and late but to whore out for that Drudge link, Nikki. Congratulations on being the future of journalism!

The great irony of all of this is that it was the folks who most raged at Fox for pushing in a way that for that Fantastic Four 2 projectionist/AICN "reviewer" fired that were most aggressive about pressuring Fox on Friedman and enlisting others, like myself, to do the same. And I can't say that I am 100% clear on what that really means.

There is certainly a change in the tone out there in GeekLand. Ain't It Cool News - led on this story by Mr Beaks/Jeremy Smith - and HitFix, as embodied by former AICNer Drew McWeeny/Moriarty, both condemned the leak, downloading of the film, and reviewing the film based on the leak.

This is an interesting moment for Geek Culture in general... and Drew in particular. When we get into the WayBack machine and look back to the last time this came up on a big movie, it was June 9, 2003 and Drew was saying, "Shame on you. All of you. Not everyone reading this, of course, since most of you are sane, normal, law-abiding citizens. I’m speaking directly to that percentage of Internet users who simply can’t exhibit a modicum of self-control, who feel the need to pirate films at the absolute first second they possibly can, and specifically... I’m speaking to the person who leaked the workprint of Universal’s HULK in the first place. Shame on you."

This was followed by Harry Knowles' in-house response: "'What is wrong with downloading a movie early'

Harry here... Well Moriarty certainly stirred up the *** yesterday didn't he?

Is there a double standard, a certain level of hypocrisy when it comes to condemning the widespread piracy of film via the internet when often times Moriarty and myself come into contact with materials that we shouldn't be seeing early, by most accounts?"

This led to Drew's follow-up: "I have no business telling anyone what decision to make regarding the trafficking of stolen materials. And I wouldn't even if my hands were squeaky clean. Which they aren't.

At this moment, with me dealing with the people I deal with all day long and all week long, and with my career developing the way it is, I have a particular perspective on the issue of the duplication and distribution of copywritten material. It's my personal perspective. It's not more right than someone else's. It's not more ethical. It's not more moral. It's simply mine.

When I wrote what I wrote, I spoke down to my readership. And that's absolutely a mistake. The minute you condescend to the person reading your work... whoever they are... you risk alienating them.
When I first met Harry Knowles... the very first time... we hooked up because I was looking for a way to get something onto the Internet for other fans to enjoy.

It was something I wasn't supposed to have.

It came from someone's office who had no idea I had it.

I was told by someone online to try Harry Knowles. I got in touch with him in Texas. He hooked me up with a guy in Australia.

Why?

To circumnavigate US copyright law. That's why.

Hello, kettle? It's the pot. I'm black.

So mea culpa. No other arguments are really needed to convince me that I made a colossal mistake the other day."

Here are my before and after commentaries on it all.

So... all of this defense of the Wolverine leak... it's a new day.

As most of you will be aware, there is no love lost between Drew and Tom Rothman, which makes Drew's arguments not to download this film all the more dramatic. Is it a call of morality or a response to a more personal appeal by Gavin Hood, who has been supported vigorously by the geek community against Evil Fox throughout his making of his first action film which is also his first with a budget over $30 million.

Regardless, it's the right call.

Finally... and perhaps this is burying the lead a bit... but I did find Wolverine on DVD on the streets of New York yesterday. As always, I will offer the copy to Fox for it to do with as it will. But it is, as has been reported elsewhere, a pristine digital copy that looks as good or better than most DVDs. It also is, as reported elsewhere, pretty much complete - whatever cut it is - except for clearly missing effects shots.

What was most shocking to me, while looking over the DVD - I haven't really watched it as a movie and don't intend to do so - was the lack of any markings on it. Now, of course, there might have been markings in the letterbox margins that were covered over when it was printed by the pirates. What does happen at one point is that a header comes into frame, very briefly, for the length of just one shot, as though you were on a computer, which says, "Rising Sun Pictures" and is dated "02 March 2..." as it goes past the right edge of the frame.

Anyway... there it is. I guess it was inevitably that once this was in the Bit Torrent stream that it would end up on DVD across the globe, including here in New York and across America. That is, in my eye, the tipping point for Fox losing some audience... probably in the single digits on millions on opening weekend. The difference between this and the online access is that it will reach a much wider audience on hard copy, street-sold DVD whereas the web surfers who bother to watch the whole film are, as others have said, a group that's more committed to genre film and will want to see it finished and on a big screen with an audience.

Also on the street was Sony Classics' May 22 release, Easy Virtue, which was already released in Europe... and also appears in pristine digital form. The only real effect in the film, Jessica Biel's shape, is complete.