“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 July 2, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
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.
End of An Era
I want you to think about National Public Radio for a second. Some folks are fans, others are not, but that’s not what I want you to think about right now. In general, overall, what kind of image does NPR have for you? What do you think of when you think of the programs in general? My bet is that it’s a pretty serious, intellectual kind of image. It would probably be about as far from, say, reality TV as you can get, right?
Yeah, that’s my image too. Which makes the upcoming change at National Public Radio all the more amazing. Because nestled deep within the bosom of this oh-so-serious broadcasting corporation has been a giddy, iconoclastic, raucous and usually ridiculous program. One that has been hugely successful despite being pretty much everything that the rest of NPR isn’t.
The program is “Car Talk”. Carried on National Public Radio since 1986, it will no longer be aired on the network after September of this year. What’s equally amazing is that the show has been exclusively in re-runs since the fall of 2012.
But then “Car Talk” has always kind of gone its own way.
The show’s roots were in what was supposed to be a panel discussion on auto repair on WBUR in Boston in 1977. Only Tom Magliozzi showed up. He was so interesting he was invited back and brought his brother Ray. They were such a hit that they were offered their own show. It aired on the Boston public radio station for nine years before being picked up nationally.
The Magliozzi brothers were not only knowledgeable, they were extremely funny and irreverent. It was just as likely that you would end your call without getting a diagnosis as with. It was guaranteed that you hang laughing. They both sounded like just a couple of guys from Cambridge, Mass, “their fair city”, the kind you’d find at any corner bar. They were, in fact, both graduates of MIT.
Along the way, the show won a Peabody, was elected to the NPR Hall of Fame, voiced characters in Pixar movie “Cars” and much, much more.
They stopped recording new shows in 2012. Tom Magliozzi would die just two years later as a result of the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
But the serious, oh-so-professional world of National Public Radio would never be the same. Many programs beyond the national network probably owe a debt to “Click and Clack” as well. They went their own way, simply by being themselves.
It is probably time, maybe even passed time, for the show to exit stage left. But it’s worth remembering just how unique a beast “Car Talk” has been for lo these many years.
Price of Success
I have said before that I think we are in a new Golden Age, a Golden Age for the independent artist. Never has it been easier for artists of all kinds to reach out directly to a potential audience without requiring a publisher, record company, gallery, film studio or any other intermediary. Technology has largely kept pace with the process as well. Most of us have cameras in our phones that can create perfectly acceptable pictures and videos. Recording sound may be slightly more complicated but is perfectly simple as well. This program is a prime example. It is recorded in my home office, using a microphone that retails for just over a hundred dollars, on a computer that didn’t cost much more, by way of some free audio software. If you want to make movies then go for it. Write a book? Publish it. Get your comic, your artwork, your music, whatever you feel the urge to create, out where the public can see it, and maybe put a few coins in your pocket along the way.
I have also noted that the Golden Age comes with a few complexities, as well. There is a whole range of things that the independent artist will have to learn to do for themselves. For example, I had to find ways to reduce the echoes in my office. Techniques and technology are one challenge. Then there’s the question of marketing and publicity. While the Golden Age includes lots of opportunity, it also includes lots of competitors.
What a lot of people overlook is that there is something else that comes with putting your work on public display. Sometimes people don’t like what you’ve done. It’s called “criticism”. And it’s a golden age for that as well.
One of the hottest stars in the rap world in the last year has been Chance the Rapper. His mixtape “Coloring Book” became the first recording to hit the Billboard 200 solely on the basis of streaming and became the first streaming-only record to win a Grammy. He’s hot.
And he doesn’t like criticism any more than the rest of us. A story on MTV News criticized the rapper for being emotionally disconnected from the music at a concert earlier this year. Management for the music star told MTV that the story had to disappear or he would never work with them again. Sadly, MTV showed how little spine the network has and caved.
I don’t like criticism any more than the next person. But if you’re going to put yourself out there, it’s part and parcel of the package. EVERY great artist has taken criticism.
There should never be a Golden Age of “I’m above critique”.
A Question of Length
It’s always tempting to talk about things in the media having “always been this way”. It’s rarely ever been true, and certainly hasn’t been true for decades anyway. Things have changed with regularity. In fact, the only the only thing that hasn’t changed is that things continue to change.
For example, for a long time, a “season” of any television show was twenty-two episodes. Over the last decade or so that number has been tumbling. Right now, a season is more like thirteen episodes. Long term success for a show was whether it made it to the one hundred episode level. A hundred episodes are what was believed to be required to be successfully syndicated. In other words, to make it into the land of re-runs. Which means you now have to last nine “seasons” to make the grade as compared to four and a half. The programs themselves have varied in programming length over the years. In the 1960s an “hour long” program commonly had about 51 minutes of programming to nine minutes of advertising. Today, that’s more like forty-two minutes of program, although some can drop to below forty minutes.
Why the review of all these numbers? Because of a speech given by Jeffrey Katzenberg at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Katzenberg is best known as a past head of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of Dreamworks Animation. He was in Cannes to talk about his new company WndrCo. Katzenberg is talking about changing the parameters of popular media once again. Focusing on two primary areas, Millennial generation consumers, and mobile device usage, he is talking about a new challenge, what he calls the “new Everest”. That’s programming in the six to ten-minute range. I’m fascinated by what he believes is possible in that zone. Katzenberg claims that production levels can remain at the same high level we expect today, that the “creatives” (meaning writers, actors, directors and others) can be paid at the same scale as today, and that there will be a significant commercial aspect to the programs as well. His comparison is YouTube. He points to the low cost of even the best product and wants to translate that into mainstream programming.
That’s where he begins to lose me. Maybe it’s because Katzenberg is a genius, and I’m just a humble, small time media commentator, but I’d need to see a lot more details if I’m an advertiser being asked for sponsorship. And details are in short supply. There are a lot of big ideas being floated around but not a lot of specifics. The veteran movie maker acknowledges that the first product offered will have to be an “a-ha moment” for the audience.
So I guess I will just have to wait to be surprised.
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
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