“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of March 18, 2018
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.
Snapchat Snap Back
It never ceases to amaze me the number of times that folks in social media show that they don’t REALLY understand how their media work after all. You would think that folks working in social media would understand just how volatile their medium is just from the day to day observation of their own companies.
But apparently not.
Social media is all about relationship. If you get that wrong, you are in trouble. So you have to wonder just what was going through the minds of the folks at Snapchat. It was just a couple weeks ago that negative reaction to their new user interface caused the company’s stocks to drop six percent, losing over a billion dollars in market value. But that wasn’t the end of the bad news.
Singer and actress Rihanna hit Snapchat again last week when she snapped back at an ad that seemed to make fun of her domestic violence history at the hands of her then boyfriend Chris Brown. She pointed out that the messaging service certainly knew better than to make that kind of joke. The result was another billion dollar loss by the company in a year that some business experts have already declared is make or break for the company.
I will note that the service quickly issued an apology for the ad, terming it “disgusting”. But that still leaves the question of how it got there. In this case, it is the use of self-service advertising platforms. Automated services that put ads directly onto the social media service without having to go through any human interaction between the advertiser and the media outlet. The dangers of that concept should be pretty clear right now.
Snapchat maintains that all content that appears on their platform is, quoting now, “…subject to our review and policy”. Which makes what happens even more disturbing. But the most disturbing part for me is later in the release where they discuss that they don’t allow content that shows, quoting again, “excessive violence”. Parsing out just what that means, and where and how you draw that line, is a topic for another program. Or maybe an hour long documentary.
In the end, I have serious reservations about Snapchat as a social media anyway. Its premise that the messages are ephemeral, which is dubious, and other concerns about privacy and safety is why I have never been a fan. Two billion dollar failures in maintaining a good relationship with it’s core audience in the span of a couple months, makes me wonder if we are about to see the service flame out sooner rather than later.
Virtual News Reality
When I was growing up, and just beginning to be aware of the media as a thing unto itself, I remember people talking about the enormous impact that television had on our culture.
It began by changing how we entertained ourselves. Uncle Miltie, “I Love Lucy” and “Your Show of Shows” brought the kind of entertainment you could only get at a club or theater right into our homes. Edward R. Murrow shrank the world with programs like “See It Now” and “Person to Person” that brought far and wonderful places right into our homes.
But it was in the second television decade, the 1960s, that saw television bring something less pleasant into our homes. Scholars have discussed for decades the effect that having a war brought into our living rooms had on our nation. This was not the prettified propaganda of previous wars. The images that joined America at the dinner table showed more of the ugly side of combat. General Sherman is said to have stated that “War is Hell”. Well, television brought that hell home from Viet Nam.
It is with that history in mind that I ponder the growth of a new technology in the news. Virtual Reality is a growing presence in the media. CNN just announced that it would be expanding its VR offerings to now include the Oculus Rift along with Samsung, and Google Daydream.
While I haven’t had the chance to experience VR, the descriptions are of a sense of “reality” that comes from a three hundred sixty degree immersion. While a quick look at the news network’s offerings shows plenty of feature material, there are also hard news stories about the war in Yemen, and the battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul.
If seeing the war in black and white on a small screen changed us as much as is argued, how will this immersion in the news affect our worldview? How much more stunning would a war be if it looks and sounds like you are standing in the middle of it?
In my heart, I want to believe that there is an even more profound change that is possible. How much harder will it be to turn people on the other side of the planet into a feared “other” if we have the chance to walk with them in their hometowns?
We keep talking about the world becoming a smaller place. If we can make it all just part of our neighborhood, we may find that a change that benefits us all.
Passion vs Profit
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a “car guy” household. From high school on, my father loved cars. He even started his career in the design department at Ford Motor Company. Over the years he taught me a lot about cars. One of those pieces of wisdom popped back into my head last week.
My father believed that if a car company was having trouble you would find, at the top of the corporate hierarchy, someone who wasn’t a “car guy”. By “car guy” he meant someone who came up in the product side of the company rather than finance or even sales. Not that you couldn’t find good leaders from other parts of the company, but he believed that you needed someone who was passionate about what you did to truly be a success. Over the years, I have seen many instances that seem to support that idea.
What brought it back to mind last week was the announcement by iHeart Media that they were headed to bankruptcy court, burdened by more than twenty billion dollars in debt. iHeart is the largest radio ownership group in the nation with over eight hundred stations and seventeen thousand employees worldwide.
What’s interesting to note is that all that debt did not come from running the company badly. In fact, they have done better than most in using streaming media via it’s app, live events and more to try and find a new model for the oldest electronic medium. Most of that debt came from the leveraged buyout by a private equity ownership group in 2008. What happened is this, the group made a bid to buy the company for billions of dollars. Billions of dollars that they didn’t actually have. So they borrowed it. The problem is that they then assigned that debt to the company itself. So at a time when the radio group needed to be flexible and agile, it was burdened with this profound debt. iHeart Media hasn’t shown an annual corporate profit in a decade. That bird came home to roost last week.
This isn’t an unusual arrangement. It’s a large part of why the ToysRUs brand is closing its doors as well. Financial decisions that have nothing to do with the service or products offered by the company.
In the end, iHeart Media will probably emerge in some form from bankruptcy. The various creditors and members of the ownership group are maneuvering for increased power at the top of the company.
But in an industry already facing profound challenges, my prediction is that they are going to find themselves in trouble again if they end up with somebody other than a “car guy” in charge.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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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