“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-14 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Program scripts from week of March 31, 2014
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Business Reality
As a lifelong science fiction fan I am very familiar with the concept of “virtual reality”. Writers have been playing with the concept for decades now. From the earliest ideas of three dimensional projections up the holodecks found in the “Star Trek” universe the idea of being able to interact with other people as if they were in the same room or to interact with completely created worlds has fascinated us.
Recently virtual reality hit the front pages when Mark Zuckerberg and his minions at Facebook dropped two billion dollars on the purchase of the company that makes the best of the current generation of virtual reality headsets, known as the Oculus Rift.
The reaction to this news is kind of funny. The gamer community promptly lost their fanboy marbles. Facebook is the digital equivalent of a minivan. It is many things but cool is not one of them. So the idea that a company so astoundingly uncool was trying to sit at the cool kid’s table was more than a lot of folks could bear. The creator of the iconic game “Minecraft” went so far as to declare that they would cease work on bringing their game to Oculus Rift because as the founder notes “Facebook creeps me out”.
I think a lot folks have lost touch with reality, virtual or otherwise. Oculus Rift began with a two and a half million dollar Kickstarter campaign. That’s nice but the reality is that’s a drop in the bucket of what will be needed to make this “the next big thing”. That will need big bucks. Billions of big bucks. Which means that some big corporate entity was always in the future of the Oculus headset.
Could Facebook screw this up? Oh, certainly. The Zuckerdroids have shown some astoundingly tone deaf moves over the years. Facebook’s increasingly aggressive and almost unavoidable advertising is one of the greatest bogey men in the gamer closet. Facebook is moving into a field where they have ZERO experience and less than zero credibility. If they stay out of the way of gamer development while simultaneously exploring the social media possibilities they could, to use a gamer term, level up in the digital world alongside folks like Google and Microsoft.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens after the angst settles. Because in the end there is no save point on a two billion dollar investment.
School and Social Media
A 13 year old girl in Minnesota went on her Facebook account and posted that she didn’t like one of her school’s hall monitors because, in the young lady’s words, the adult in question was “mean”. That’s the entirety of the comment that sets the following events in motion.
The school gave her an in school suspension for the comment. They then brought her into the office, and in front of school officials and a police officer, forced her to give them the password to her Facebook and e-mail accounts. These adults then began searching all of her communications looking for any additional “offenses”.
Just a clarification. The girl had made the comments on her personal Facebook account. On her own time, not school time. On her own computer, not school computers. And the young lady’s mother says the school district did not get parental permission for this search.
Has your head exploded yet?
This astounds me because it indicates that at least this school district has decided that they have control over all aspects of a student’s life, even when they’re home. This astounds me because professional educators ought to have a better grip on how teens talk. The monitor was “mean”. There was no attack on the reputation of the adult (seriously, you want to argue that being called “mean” by a 13 year old damages an adult?), there was no call for bad behavior. She just thinks this adult is mean. Finally, where were the legal advisors for this school district? Surely they didn’t advocate for this approach?
The family sued and won a $70,000 verdict.
I know that school districts have plenty on their plates today. So I don’t understand why they would decide to take on social media use by their charges with so little advance planning and thought.
Let’s hope they can at least serve as a bad example for other school districts.
Most listeners to this program are aware that I have worked in local radio for a good portion of my adult life. For many years I worked for radio stations here in the Jamestown area. Before that I worked for two stations in Erie, PA and one in a tiny little town south of Pittsburgh. I have been part of the “local media” as compared to the “national media”. And that was absolutely fine with me.
In my heart of hearts I am a local media guy. I like the ability to reach out and be involved with your listeners. To have common reference points and experiences. The fact that you will run into your listeners pretty much everywhere you go is also a great way to keep your ego in check. When you step over a line you will hear about it.
So what I’m about to say may shock you. It certainly saddens me. I think local media may be doomed.
We’ve touched on this in a couple ways, talking about the difficulty of old line media to find new business models, the reluctance of old line media to embrace the new digital world and more philosophical discussions like the future of journalism.
The longer I think about it I’m not sure there’s a way that local media can survive. I have serious doubts that the people running local media companies. I don’t think they have the imagination to find a new way of thinking about their industry. At the same time the insistence among too many on the Internet that they don’t want to pay for information services shows how little they understand about what it takes to offer the kind of services newspapers, radio stations and TV stations can offer.
It’s not that I don’t believe there is a solution out there. The challenge is that local media outlets need to start thinking of themselves in new ways. Are you a media company or a radio station, a newspaper? A media company needs to move with the times. The alternative is what happened to the buggy whip industry.
At the moment most local media (everywhere, not just here) are focused on cutting costs and offering a more efficient but more generic product.
If that’s the best they can do then the end of local media is a lot closer than I’d like.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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