“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 24, 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.
Commercial Rant
If you’ve listened to this program for a while, you have likely picked up the fact that I have a bit of a thing for commercials. They are, in my opinion, one of the uniquely American art forms. It doesn’t mean I want to see or hear them all the time, but more that I appreciate when one is done really well.
Which means I am disappointed quite often. Most commercials are just “blah”. Uninspired, not really interesting or effective. Recently I’ve been seeing a bunch of ads that make me start yelling at the television screen. Which results in my family slowly edging their way out of the room. So a moment now to get these spots off my chest.
The latest one is for a fantasy football service that makes fun of people who like to do live action role playing. The kind where you dress up in armor and have at each other with blunted weapons. The idea that an activity which requires you to sit in one place with your nose stuck to your phone is going to mock one that takes you outside in the company of others for some exercise, strikes me ridiculous. It’s also a bad commercial since I have no idea who the company is that runs it.
Speaking of which we have the commercial for Gillette razors. They are offering a service where you just text a message to them and they will send you new blades. Kind of a cool idea actually. In the ad, you have men, caught getting ready to shave. They lack a razor, which doesn’t say much for their brains, but the part that gets me is that they have covered both hands in shaving cream for some unknown reason. As a veteran of some 45 years of shaving, you’re doing it wrong.
But my real question in all of this is – when did creepy become an advertising concept? There are the Addiction Network people who look like refugees from some dystopian media future trying to convince me I have an addiction problem. We have the cinnamon breakfast cereal that is so delicious apparently that the cereal itself resorts to cannibalism! But the apex of the creepy scale has to be the “Creepy Colonel” campaign that’s been running for several years for KFC. I’ve mentioned before my reservations about the “new” Colonel, but they just keep getting creepier. The “Crispy Colonel” may be the worst of them. Among other reasons, of the eight or so hands he seems to have, they all appear to be right hands. Not a left in sight.
(Note: further viewing of the Extra Crispy Colonel spot it appears that there is at least one left hand)
A good commercial leaves you thinking about what is being pitched. A bad one leaves you thinking about the commercial.
Taming The Web
I remember back in the day, I had an employer who went through this management technique phase. About twice a year, we’d get a new book or have a meeting about some new way to manage people that was going to change our culture. They were all resounding flops, but I still remember a few of them. There was one about “catching people doing things right”. The idea was to positively reinforce good work rather than spend all your time being a “Debby Downer” manager.
With that in mind, I want to give a nod to some folks out on the Interwebs who are getting it right. Over the years there has been a lot of discussion about the general poor behavior to be found online. Trolls, flame wars, revenge porn, Gamer-gate, the list seems endless. Finding ways to fight back that don’t involve returning like for like has been a hit or miss proposition.
So kudos to the folks at Misscliks, a gamer channel on the Twitch platform. Twitch is a place you can go to play video games, watch other people play games and/or participate in one of the largest gamer communities online. They currently have some one hundred million visitors a month. Misscliks is one of the channels there. It is headed by four women and is designed to offer a safe and diverse space for gamers.
Their motto is “Build Up, Never Tear Down”.
From day one, the channel has been designed to offer a more positive environment and a positive reaction to negative comments. The first thing that happens when they spot someone straying from their goals is to simply remind that person of the community standards. If the behavior becomes persistent, the user can go into a time-out, or eventually wind up being banned. I like that they are focused on changing the behaviors through positive reinforcement when possible. Since the ultimate goal is to create a place where all gamers can feel safe, I give them a lot of credit for avoiding the easy answer of going on the attack against negative posters.
At the moment Misscliks is still a relatively small channel, with viewers numbering in the tens of thousands, compared with the big name channels at Twitch can run into the millions. With the added publicity that they are getting they may face an influx of viewers, including, unfortunately, some folks who just want to be bad actors. How the collaborative behind the channel handles that challenge will say a lot about their future and the future of their approach to Internet civility.
I will certainly be rooting for them.
Fake News Quiz
For two decades now, the folks at Snopes.com have observed the news, both real and fake. They are the most popular fact-checking site on the Internet. Now they find themselves in the news and facing a very serious problem.
Snopes.com launched in 1995 as an urban legend fact checking site, and as a hobby for the founders, David and Barbara Mikkelson. They were interested in modern folklore, e-mail forwards, rumors on the Internet and any story with a questionable pedigree. They would post the original story, do some digging and then post what they had found. As the years went on, the site became immensely popular. By 2010 they were logging around three hundred thousand visits a day.
While the site has vocal critics, repeated investigations into the Mikkelsons and alleged bias, particularly on political stories, have found nothing other than solid, reliable work.
In fact, if you had told me a couple years ago that there would be an issue that could bring Snopes down, I would have thought that the bias problem would have been it. I mean, it’s an issue for a great many other media outlets. In this case, it’s all about the money.
Snopes just put up an appeal to its users to help overcome an income problem. According to David Mikkelson (he and Barbara divorced several years ago), the company hired to help with marketing and monetizing the site, Proper Media, has been withholding advertising revenues for several months, putting the future of the business in jeopardy. Here’s where it gets complicated.
Snopes parent company is called BarDav (for Barbara and Dave, I assume). Proper Media claims that it owns fifty percent of that company after Barbara Mikkelson sold it to them following the divorce. There are all the usual legal positions being taken about who owns what and in what amount. Proper Media wants Mikkelson removed from the company and claims that the sixteen employees of Snopes.com will be paid on schedule. All of this will be decided in court, as Bardav and Proper Media are suing and counter-suing. The case is set for the beginning of August.
All the details of the case are too much for a short program like this. It involves high tech startups, old school family businesses, S Corporations, Puerto Rican tax shelters, honeymoon expenses and more. At the bottom line is the survival of a respected fact checking service.
It would appear that the immediate financial issues are being resolved. At the time I write this the GoFundMe page for Snopes has raised over a half a million dollars from eighteen thousand plus donors in just over a day.
Good news for people who want the truth.
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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