“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. 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 moment’s 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 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of May 21, 2017
Due to a technical glitch there is not podcast for this week. We apologize for the inconvenience.
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.
Media Business Models
The question of how to succeed as a media business in the digital age is still waiting on a definitive answer. There are plenty of attempts that continue to come up short. Many old-line media companies have seen their fortunes tumble and they continue to scramble looking for answers. Those are the stories that are covered most often. Let’s face it, we tend to love the doom and gloom over success stories most days.
But we need to recognize that there are some companies finding ways forward as well. They may be the harbingers of what the media business looks like in the future.
It may not be very sexy, but the Wall Street Journal continues to move forward with a simple concept. If you want to read their reporting, pay for it. They have a paywall and offer subscriptions to their online content. In the last year, they have seen their digital subscriber base increase by three hundred and five thousand. Their commitment to this model appears to be complete. On Election Day last year, when many other companies dropped their paywalls, the Journal left it up and saw subscriptions rise.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia they’re trying something else. What is you made the newspaper a not for profit corporation? There are some obvious upfront gains. A change in tax status, plus eliminating the push by stockholders to make profits right now. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News are published by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. It’s one of a very small number of experiments in taking newspaper publishers non-profit. The early results seem to be promising. The individual newspapers continue to work on a profit basis, but without the pressures coming from a parent corporation looking to please investors. The not for profit institution is looking to create an environment that allows for independent news reporting.
Meanwhile, the print magazine Monocle has stuck to very traditional methods. The global news and lifestyle magazine just celebrated its tenth birthday. They’ve done it by focusing on print, subscriptions and newsstand sales in real life stores. When the iPad debuted and publishers raced to join the supposed “revolution”, Monocle declined. Given the generally poor results for everyone else, the old school magazine appears to have made the right decision. But here’s my favorite part of what they’re doing. They added a twenty-four hour radio station to their web presence! The publisher saw the two old line media as obvious partners.
Whether or not any of these actually turn into the golden ticket for the media business remains to be seen. But it’s good to keep in mind that there are folks finding ways to create quality media and make money doing it.
Defending Steve Harvey
I would not normally count myself as a fan of comedian Steve Harvey. I’m not saying I have anything against him, the couple of times I’ve seen him on TV he’s struck me as a pretty funny guy and a pretty good show host. And yet, I find myself feeling called to defend him more than any other media personality out there today. It was a year ago, maybe a little more that there was the huge mess up at the Miss Universe pageant when he was handed a card that did not clearly indicate which name was the winner. I was on his side back then.
And I’m on his side again this week.
Last week an e-mail from Harvey to his production team was leaked. You should know upfront that Steve is moving his production headquarters from Chicago to Los Angeles this summer. About eighty employees will not be making the transition and it’s most likely that one of those disgruntled employees chose to leak the e-mail.
In it, Harvey set some boundaries for when various folks working for him could talk to him. No talking him in his dressing room or in the makeup room unless you have arranged to do it beforehand. Don’t stop him in the hallway to chat. It was all played to make him sound like an enormous ego who was too good to talk with the people who work for him.
I’d like to offer a different point of view. Steve Harvey is a busy guy. He has a morning radio program, a TV talk show, he is the host of the long-running game show “Family Feud” and the host of the TV show “Little Big Shots”. Plus he’s the head man for the company that coordinates all that plus his other activities. And his staff had gotten into the habit of just popping in to chat while he was busy. They would stop him in the halls looking for a funny story or an autograph for family and friends. In other words, they were keeping the busiest guy in the company, the bread winner for them all, from doing his job. And he got tired of it and set some new limits.
Tell me this, do you just stop into your boss’s office any time of the day, to just chat? Do you interrupt the boss while she is preparing for a big meeting? For trivial reasons? If you do, my bet is you don’t do it more than once or twice.
Maybe Steve could have phrased some of that e-mail differently. Certainly, he never should have let the behavior of his staff get this far out of hand.
But expecting his employees to respect his boundaries so he can do his job is not any reason for people to criticize him.
Politics in Our Media
We live at a moment when politics seems to have taken possession of center stage to a degree not seen in many years. Maybe ever. With it has come the question of whether there should be boundaries on the intrusion of politics in our media and where those boundaries might be.
Now, obviously, we are not talking about things like journalism and political commentary. That’s the bread and butter for those parts of the media and they are going to be filled with it one way or the other. No, what I’m talking about are the various other places that media runs into politics. As an example, last year San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick took advantage of the media coverage of the NFL to make a political statement about race relations in the United States. An uproar ensued that seems to continue to today, as Kaepernick finds himself unemployed the last time I checked. While the discussion tends to center on “politics in sports” I say it’s really not.Kaepernick didn’t kneel down in the middle of a play, he did it before the game began. At a time when he knew he would get massive media coverage.
The other high profile example was the ill fated Kendall Jenner/Pepsi ad. Pepsi and their ad agency decided to go for some advocacy along with their advertising. Again, there was an enormous, if misplaced, in my opinion, uproar. The push back on this ad was so unexpected and overwhelming that the entire advertising industry is shying away from tying commercials with political statements. Advocacy advertising just seems too fraught in times like these.
I’ve gone back and forth on this one. First, because I’m a huge supporter of political discussion. I’d be all in favor of anything that gets people to actually think about the issues of the day.
Therein lies the problem of course. We’re not in a real “Deep Thought” moment in our history. I’ve also never been a fan of businesses taking political positions. Alienating half of your potential customer base has never struck me as a sound business model. If you sell widgets, or offer a service, shouldn’t that be the center of your media effort?
One of the things that makes our nation great is the freedom all of us have, left, right and center, to express our political beliefs. If you’re willing to take the hit that may result, putting your politics into your media is something I would never say you shouldn’t be able to do.
But maybe, just maybe, our grandmothers were right. Some things don’t need to be discussed everywhere. Let’s leave some places politics free.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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