off the leash

All the Truth That’s Fit to Film — Montclair Film Festival Documentaries

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Ken Dowell

I don’t know how many documentaries they show during the ten-day Montclair Film Festival. I saw five and suffice it to say that is a mere drop in the bucket. While the availability of outlets for documentaries has been increasing of late, it is still relatively rare to catch them in theaters on a big screen. Here’s some of MFF15’s nonfiction on film.

Yo La Tengo on stage playing a live score

The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller – This is like no documentary I have ever seen. On one side of the stage at the Wellmont Theater filmmaker Sam Green provides live narration. On the other side Yo La Tengo is playing a live score. R. Buckminister Fuller is best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. His designs are based on the philosophy that if we can do more with less there are enough resources in the world for everyone. Some of his lesser known inventions are even more fascinating. One was the Dymaxion car in the 1930’s. The car carried 11 passengers, got 30 miles to the gallon and could reach 100 mph. A prototype was involved in a crash at the Chicago World’s Fair that killed the driver and the project. No less curious was his public persona. Green shows a tape from Fuller’s archive of a TV segment titled Buckminster Fuller Meets Hippies on Hippie Hill. Yo La Tengo is one of my favorite bands and I would have expected them to command most of my attention. But their softy futuristic sounding score enhanced rather than distracted from the movie. I don’t know where this movie goes from here. You can’t exactly license it and show it theaters everywhere. But I’m sure glad I got to see it.

Hot Type – This is an ode to media, classic style printed-on-paper old media. The Nation is 150 years old and while the movie celebrates that history, it is more about The Nation today. And that is still about well researched long form advocacy journalism, a place where the words matter more than the visuals. You even get to see a writer print out one of his stories on paper and hand it to his editor who edits it with a pencil. Betcha they still know what editing markup symbols mean. It is also a place where they take on interns with the expectation that they are recruiting future staffers. In fact the movie introduces several writers and editors, including the editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, who came on as interns and then spent their whole career there. The list of people who have written for The Nation include Arthur Miller, Martin Luther King, John Steinbeck, Allen Ginsberg and Hunter Thompson. My favorite quote in the movie comes from Bill Moyers who comments that the Nation “can get close to the truth because it never tried to get close to power.” After watching this I went home and bought a year’s subscription.

Arts education is a topic I’m close to. I have an adult daughter who majored in music and supports herself with a variety of music education jobs. And I have an 11-year-old son who plays keyboards in the school orchestra, sings in the choir, and is in a drum performance group. So I brought him along for the arts education docs.

Some Kind of Spark – An inspirational movie about New York City kids who participate in a two-year long Saturday program at the Juilliard School of Music. This is a documentary that doesn’t take the easy story line about what wonderful things are being done for these poor disadvantaged kids. It instead focuses on the challenge and the accomplishment of these middle school aged children in taking on a violin or a trombone or a flute and working to achieve a proficiency fitting for participation in an elite music education program. Two of the children and one of the teachers appeared at the screening and it is only there that we learned some of the stories about one Haitian child who appeared at the initial audition with a recorder or about the twins who commuted for two hours on their own on Saturday morning from the far reaches of Brooklyn. Aside from telling a compelling story this documentary is beautifully filmed, marking the passage of time with city scenes denoting the seasons.

Ceremony for This Time — This is actually two documentaries. A PBS show from 1995 portrayed Montclair’s Glenfield School, a middle school with a performing arts theme. That was followed by a new film interviewing some of the people who were at the school when the earlier documentary was filmed as well as some current students. The larger theme is the value of arts in education. That not something that every school district buys into and those that do don’t always allocate the money to do it right. The goal of the film is to show why you should. Happy to live in a school district that gives us this option and my son will be entering 6^th grade at Glenfield in the fall. As far as entertainment value, this movie will be of much more interest if you live in Montclair.

Top Spin — MFF usually has a movie or two with a sports theme. In past years I remember seeing documentaries about Althea Gibson and Dock Ellis. This one is about ping pong. The film follows three American teenagers who try to qualify for the Olympics, usually against much older competitors. Unlike some young Olympian stories, none of the three appears to by ruthlessly driven by their parents. Perhaps that’s because there’s no money and little notoriety in table tennis in the U.S. But you have to sacrifice just as much and train just as hard. Who knew that lifting weights would be part of the training for ping pong? The film is as fast paced as the game they play. This is a documentary with some drama and a climax as the camera follows two girls and a boy through to the final Olympic qualifying tournament. Everybody ends in tears, tears of joy or tears of disappointment. But a big takeaway for me is how joyfully the kid who didn’t make it heads off to college instead.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged documentaries, education, film, media, Montclair, Montclair Film Festival, movies, R. Buckminister Fuller, table tennis, The Nation, Top Spin, Yo La Tengo | 21 Comments

Desperados, Nannies and Fools — Montclair Film Festival 2015

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Ken Dowell

One of my favorite things about where I live is the Montclair Film Festival that takes place in the first week in May. It started four years ago as a single weekend event with the tagline “like Sundance, only Jersier.” This year it is a ten-day event with more than 75 features in three theaters, most of which play to full houses. Some of the most memorable movies I’ve seen in those four years were at MFF, including 20 Feet From Stardom, Belle and In a World

I don’t know why it doesn’t, like most film festivals, include “international” in the title. Maybe they don’t want to get stuck with the MIFF acronym. But there are several international entries and here’s some of them.

Le Dernier Diamant (The Last Diamond). The return of French film noir! The last diamond is the goal of an intricate high end heist. And the thief is the hero. But there is more than one thief and thieves being thieves, they go after each other. Who’s the cops and who’s the robbers? And oh-no! The thief is sleeping with the victim, who happens to be an attractive young woman. What’s happening here? Takes a while to figure out who is who, but it all makes sense in the end. Reviewers often use the term riveting for films like this. It is an edge of your seat sort of movie. I’ve now watched seven movies in six days and for me this is best of the fest so far.

Slow West. Imagine a Western with the pacing of a Terence Malick movie and toss in a script that’s akin to Natural Born Killers. That’s Slow West. The minimalist plot involves a young Scottish guy wandering through Colorado on horseback in search of the love of his life who apparently had to beat it out of Scotland and head west with her father. Along the way we encounter a priest who is a bounty hunter, a guy writing a book about aboriginal people who turns out to be a horse robber and of course a thieving murderer who turns out to be not such a bad guy after all. Not too many of the characters in this movie finish up alive. There is a quick recap at the end showing the shot up bodies strewn about in forest and field. How they made a movie in New Zealand about Scots in Colorado is beyond me. Odd, but worth seeing.

Que Horas Ela Volta (The Second Mother). I don’t know any Portuguese but I doubt that Que Horas Ela Volta translates into The Second Mother. Maybe the real title is something they were afraid us gringos would misinterpret. The movie is about social standing and mores and how what is the way of the world to one generation may not be of interest to the next. The second mother is a live-in nanny and housekeeper named Val who lives with a well-heeled family in Brazil. When her grown daughter who she hasn’t seen in 10 years moves in, she shows none of the deference her mother has spent her life observing. That’s fine with the men of the household. They have their own issues when it comes to appropriate behavior. But it doesn’t play well with the woman of the house, who is Val’s employer. The movie has some humor, some tension, and a couple moving scenes. But mostly it delivers a heaping dose of social awkwardness. In the end it concludes, in Val’s words, that “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

Durak (The Fool). It you suspect that a Russian movie called Durak would be stark and somber, you’re right, it is. Nobody smiles in this movie. They don’t speak to each other without shouting and generally address each other with the Russian equivalent of bitch or scumbag or whore. The fool is a fool because he refuses to look the other way in a world of drunkenness, domestic violence and corruption. Dina, aka the fool, is a sort of public service plumber. On being called in to fix a broken pipe he discovers that a building housing 800 persons is on the verge of collapse. He brings this to the attention of town officials who are conveniently all in the same place, blind drunk at a party. There they must choose between saving 800 lives or protecting themselves from exposure as the career criminals that they are. The prevailing theory of governance in this post-Communist society is best summed up by one of the town VIP’s: “There is enough of the good life to go around. If we divide it up evenly, nobody will get anything.” Dina’s reward for being the only guy around with a conscience is not what you would hope. This is not a movie too put a smile on your face. But it is an emotionally powerful and brilliantly told story.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Durak, film, film festivals, Le Dernier Diamant, Montclair, Montclair Film Festival, movies, Que Horas Ela Volta, Slow West | 3 Comments

Venice Photo Blog — San Marco

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Ken Dowell

Piazza San Marco

The city’s cathedral, the Basilica San Marco, built in 1071

San Teodoro. Sits atop one of two columns built near the waterfront in 1172.

The San Marco pigeons

The Torre dell’Orologio, a Renaissance era clock tower built in 1499.

The Doge’s Palace

Built in 1424 the Doge’s Palace was the primary seat of government for the independent Venetian state. The Doge was the highest political office in the Venetian Republic. The building also the site for administration of justice and housed a prison.

The Bridge of Sighs,
Connects the Doge’s Palace with the prison. It is here that prisoners got their last look at the outside world before their confinement.

One of the council meeting rooms.

The View from the Campanile

The Campanile is the bell tower of the Basilica. The current structure was built in 1912 after the original 1514 tower collapsed.

Two Moors ringing the bell atop the
Torre dell’Orologio

One fo the bells in the Campanile

Looking down at the Torre dell’Orologio

Posted in Travel | Tagged Basilica San Marco, bell tower, Bridge of Sighs, Campanile, clock tower, Doge's Palace, Italy, Piazza San Marco, San Marco, Torre dell'Orologio, travel, Venice | 28 Comments

A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Ken Dowell

Detroit and Newark. Cities that didn’t bounce back.

Bounce back from what? From a downward spiral that is often dated as starting with the urban unrest of the 1960’s. From white flight and middle class flight and jobs flight. From declining populations and increasing concentrations of poverty. From lending and housing policies that created de facto segregation even at a time when legal segregation was being irradicated. From deteriorating school systems. From thugs and drugs.

That litany of ills beset most industrial cities in the northeast and midwest. But Newark and Detroit added some of their own special problems. Detroit was dependent on the auto industry with its periodic bouts of decline and desertion. Newark has a record of corruption that would make a Mafia family blush.

There are all sorts of parellels in the story of these two cities:

On July 12, 1967, a black cab driver named John Smith was seen being dragged by his legs into a Newark police station, his head bouncing on the curb and sidewalk. Five days of rioting, looting and destruction followed. Less than two weeks later on July 23, Detroit police raided an after hours drinking club and arrested 82 people who were celebrating the return home of two black soldiers. Five days of rioting, looting and destruction followed.

Three years later Newark elected its first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson. Coleman Young became Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973.

Detroit’s “Hip Hop Mayor” Kwane Kilpatrick (2002-2008) was convicted of 24 felony counts including mail fraud, wire fraud and racketeering. Newark Mayor Sharpe James (1986-2006), who also fancied himself a dancing man, was convicted of five counts of fraud.

I recently read two books about these cities: Inside Newark: Decline, Rebellion, and the Search for Transformation, by Robert Curvin; and Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff. These are insider views of what has happened in these cities. Curvin’s work is about the governance of Newark and the people who ran the city either in City Hall, in civic organizations or as local power brokers. LeDuff provides an insider view of the mean streets of the Motor City.

I’ve only been to Detroit a couple times. On the other hand, I live near Newark, go there a lot and find it to be a greatly under-appreciated city. It has a world class concert hall and hockey arena. There is a great museum and some beautiful historic architecture. On weekend nights, thousands of people from the surrounding area come to the Ironbound section for its Portuguese and Spanish restaurants. I suspect much the same thing happens in Greektown in Detroit.

But you wonder whether that stuff provides any benefit to the people who have either stuck it out or just can’t get out of these cities. LeDuff says of Detroit, “The fundamentals are no longer there to make the good life.” I hope that isn’t entirely true and if it is, that it won’t continue to be. Reading these books is about rooting for the underdog.

Inside Newark: Decline, Rebellion, and the Search for Transformation, by Robert Curvin

Robert Curvin was a civil rights leader in Newark and has spent many decades in and around various government and civic organizations in the city. Inside Newark is first and foremost a history of Newark politics since the 50’s. It is an insider’s view. Sometimes that amounts to naming the names of many and describing their roles in various acronym named organizations. That can be tedious reading for the non-insider.

But what is really interesting about this work is getting an insider’s view of Newark’s big personalities. That is something Newark has never had a shortage of. Curvin has lots to say about the mayors, Hugh Addonizio, Kenneth Gibson, Sharpe James and Cory Booker; the political bosses like Steve Adubato and the activists like Amiri Baraka.

I love the stories about Sharpe James in particular. There’s the one about the day when “wearing a straw hat, bicycle shorts, and a tight tank top, he rode a bicycle into City Hall. Carrying his reelection petitions, he looked more like a circus clown than the chief executive of a major city.” This is a guy who upon being imprisoned for various incidences of corruption considered himself a political prisoner and placed himself in the ranks of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

And who knew that Cory Booker once prayed at the gravesite of Lubavitcher leader Menachem Schneerson? Curvin is not a fan of Booker. He characterizes him as someone who as mayor was far more interested in his media persona and national reputation than he was in the people of Newark. There must be something in the water in New Jersey because we have a governor with that problem as well.

Curwin offers some insights into how Newark got to be where it is. There are the usual problems for post-industrial American cities. Issues like crappy schools, limited employment opportunities and substandard housing. But there are also problems that are unique to Newark. One is its relatively small size for a big city, 25 square miles. That has led to a higher concentration of poverty. The tree lined middle class enclaves on what would be the outskirts of town have long since been separated out as different towns.

Another is Newark’s legacy for what amounts to perpetual corruption. Two of the four mayors who preceded Ras Baraka went to jail. One was white, Addonizio, one was black, James. Payola and patronage are indeed colorblind in Newark. Of the two who didn’t end up in jail, Gibson was brought up on bribery and tax evasion charges (ending in a hung jury), and Booker’s first chief of staff was caught taking bribes to fix demolition contracts.

As a frequent visitor to Newark, I like to think the city is on the upswing. So it was depressing to read the chapter about how many times the city has been cited as being on the road to recovery when in fact it wasn’t. Curvin ends the book by proposing an agenda for the city’s leaders. Some good ideas, but overall I’m not convinced.

Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff

Charlie LeDuff left a job with the New York Times to head home to Detroit. There he takes up a reporter position with the Detroit News, the kind of dying paper where they don’t have the money to replace the light bulbs when they burn out.

Deduff’s beat is crime, corruption and general decrepitude. He rides along with the city’s firemen with their worn out gear and broken down equipment. He buddies up with homicide detectives whose case load leaves them scant chance of success. He spends time on the factory floor with his brother, a guy who tries to pull his own tooth out with a pair of pliers because he doesn’t get dental insurance.

LeDuff’s tales are full of death. The death of innocent people and particularly children, caused mainly by the fact that they live in Detroit. But not all the problems come from thugs and addicts. There’s also the car companies which the livelihood of the city depended upon. Watching the big 3 auto company executives in Washington pleading for money during the recession LeDuff concludes, “Turns out our masters of the universe couldn’t run a grocery store.”

On the lighter side, though equally pathetic, is Detroit city council president Monica Conyers, wife of U.S. Congressmen John Conyers, or as LeDuff states, “the youngish and voluptuous wife of the doddering congressman.” More to the point: “an overfed buffoon who fattened herself at the public trough.” Her political career ended with a bribery conviction.

LeDuff is a terrific writer and this is an interesting book to read. His style is similar to the late New York Times media columnist David Carr. LeDuff’s Detroit sounds a little like Carr’s Minneapolis in his book The Night of the Gun. Couldn’t help wondering if they talked to each other at the Times and what a conversation between LeDuff and Carr might have sounded like. It’d be pretty colorful for sure.

I don’t know much about Detroit. But there no doubt are many people who are working hard to make things better and those people are likely creating pockets of revival and hope. I don’t think they will have much appreciation for this book because it pretty bluntly portrays Detroit as a downright awful place.

LeDuff’s gig at the Detroit News didn’t end with the paper folding as you might expect. Instead it ended with this reaction to having a story about a dodgy judge sandbagged by its editors. “I called my buddy the janitor and had him bring a trash can on wheels up to the newsroom. When he did, I swept the entire contents of my desktop into the garbage can and walked out.”

Posted in Book reviews | Tagged 60's, books, corruption, Detroit, Newark, racism, urban riots | 6 Comments

Mr. Boardwalk, Atlantic City

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Ken Dowell

Mr. Boardwalk by Louis Greenstein

Mr. Boardwalk is not a mobster. Nor is he an unemployed casino worker. Mr. Boardwalk is a kid growing up spending his summers on the Atlantic City boardwalk in the 60’s, a time when it was neither a haven for bootleggers, nor for gamblers.

Jason Benson lives in the Philly area but heads to the Jersey shore with his family every year when school gets out. There he becomes the self-titled Jason the Magnificent, perfecting a juggling act in front of the boardwalk pretzel shop his father started after dropping out of the corporate world.

Summer at the boardwalk was also a big part of growing up for me and I’m probably about the same age as the factitious Jason Benson. So Mr. Boardwalk brought back a lot of memories, like my first serious kiss with a girl from Philly under the boardwalk. My summers were in Seaside Heights rather than Atlantic City, but it had the same smell, as Greenstein describes. “Grease and sugar wafting from the takeout stands. Cigar smoke. Roasted peanuts.”

Louis Greenstein on the boardwalk

Greenstein, whose prior works include scripts for Rugrats, has crafted a story within a story. Walking the boards some 30 years later with his wife and teenage daughter for the first time, the story of Jason the Magnificent is told in full detail interrupted only briefly by quick glimpses of the 90’s version of Jason Benson, someone who is regarded as something less than magnificent by wife, daughter and employer alike. It is a tale of failed relationships. A story of fathers and sons and wives and daughters who didn’t talk about all the things they should have.

I really enjoyed Greenstein’s coming of age tales. There’s one about how to survive a bar mitzvah when the whole religion thing seems surrealistic. And there’s the first-time toke story, something that didn’t interest Jason until he got the evil of drugs brochure in school. Shortly thereafter he “made a pipe in the kitchen by wrapping a sheet of tinfoil around a pencil…like I’d seen a guy do in the movie Woodstock.” What generation of American teenagers can’t relate to that?

If you only know Atlantic City as a setting for gangster tales of the 20’s or as the modern day gambling resort in decline, Mr Boardwalk paints a different picture. It is about Atlantic City as a family resort and a popular summer vacation destination, particularly for eastern Pennsylvania beachgoers. Greenstein’s characters are bailing out just as the casinos are moving in. One of them, the guy from the marionette theater next door to the Benson family pretzel bakery, forewarned, “Everything’s going to change. They build a casino, nobody’s gonna be on the boardwalk no more. Ghost town, ghost boardwalk.”

Fast forward to today and you have what has been referred to as ‘Detroit with a boardwalk.’ The schemers who conceptualized an East Coast Las Vegas paid no heed to the fact that ultimately you can build casinos anywhere. And they have. But you can’t take an ocean and a beautiful sandy beach and plop it down in Philly, Yonkers or an Indian reservation in Connecticut.

This is a good novel. Reminds me that I haven’t been to Atlantic City in a long time either. With summer coming up I think a ride down the Parkway is in order.

1963 photo of Greenstein as a beach patrol mascot

Posted in Book reviews | Tagged Atlantic City, boardwalk, books, fiction, JerseyShore | 26 Comments

The Art of Audience Development and Why It Matters

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Ken Dowell

If you are in any way a part of a communications business there is probably no more important a discipline right now than audience development. PR, marketing or advertising companies are only as effective as the size of the audience they create. The same is true for a news, publishing or media enterprise. Many of the hottest companies of the past decade, services like Facebook or YouTube, were evaluated and valued by investors and buyers based their audience, the number of users they attracted, irrespective of things like profitability and margin.

For publishers of all types, audience development has become their lifeblood. Finding their audience online was a challenge for anyone who used to have, and may still have, a paid circulation. Many publishers initially resisted going online for fear it would cannabilize their print sales. It did. It was just a question of whether you were going to cannibalize your own print sales or whether you were going to let someone else do it. For these publishers it was a tough decision to allow open access in place of controlled and paid circulation and it was a decision that they only made after it became clear that traditional paid circulation wasn’t going to sustain them. You may remember how some news organizations tried to stop Google from listing their headlines in search results. In Europe in particular some were successful in getting their content off of Google. Then they found they lost half their readers.

(geralt)

Commercial communicators used to piggyback on media to find their audience. Digital publishing has been a mixed blessing for them. On the one hand they are no longer beholden to media editors who had created a kind of gated community, only publishing or broadcasting what they found fit for their audience. You now have the ability to bypass the gatekeeper and go straight to that audience. That is if you can find them and if you can produce the quality that will attract them. Probably a bit tougher than forking over cash for good placement.

Businesses of all types, not just communications, have seen the barriers fall in terms of getting their message out. Surely in some ways it is liberating to be able to self publish and to do it at what can be a relatively minor cost. It can be a Web site or a blog, it can be housed on someone else’s network, a Facebook or Tumblr. Video is unleashed from the control by television stations and film companies when it can be uploaded to YouTube and images can sit on a gallery on Pinterest or Instagram.

(George Hodan)

But that means lots and lots of content. I recently listened to a presentation by Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer of the Met, during which he commented “almost everyone will miss almost everything you do on social media.” You can probably safely expand that comment to what you do on your Web site or blog. And that is where audience development comes in, whether you are the head of that department for the New York Times, an ad agency account executive, a small business owner or a solitary blogger like myself.

There are three key parts to audience development. Social, search and, while this may come as a surprise to some, email.

The Web is full of posts offering advice on how to use social media. You can find 8 tips to do this and 10 ways to do that all over the place. (Usually one of those tips is to use a number in the headline.) There is plentiful advice on when is the best time to post, what are the best networks to use and how often you should publish. I’ll leave that kind of advice to the social media gurus of the world. But I would add one suggestion, especially if, like most of us, you are not at the same level as the Washington Post or Buzzfeed. That is, be an active participant in groups, communities of people who have common interests. They are available in one form or another on most social networks.

I can use my own blog as an example. The most popular posts I have ever written, in terms of number of views, are the posts about the city of Paterson where I was born. These are not my best work. The traffic numbers were driven by my having posted them on a few very active Facebook groups made up of people who were born or who lived in Paterson. I’ve written better stuff and posted it on my news feed, tagging it to be available to everyone, and not gotten anywhere near the response. Who is often more important than how many when you are building an audience.

(Petr Krtochvil)

While many publishers say that social has surpassed search as a driver of traffic, for others search remains preeminent, and that is particularly true if you aren’t a household name person or brand. I used to work for a press release distribution company. Even though I was in the business of publishing press releases online, I knew full well there weren’t many who were going to pick up their phone, or their laptop, and say “let’s read some press releases.” And yet there were many press releases that would be very interesting to specific audiences. Those connections were never going to be made if you expected the potential reader to browse a Web site with thousands of releases. Nor were they going to happen on Facebook. They only happened through search.

A pretty substantial consultative industry has been built up around search engine optimization. SEO is a bit of a moving target. It can also be a victim of its own success. If an SEO trick, an example being loading a post with keywords, is successful, it becomes more and more widely used and at the point that it makes a noticeable difference in search results, Google and the other search engines will tweak their algorithms until it is neutralized or maybe even penalized. There are, however, many sound tips you can learn from search experts, things like the maximum size for headlines and or how to tag images. You should also pay attention to what Google says about how it plans to distinguish good quality from crap. The search engine doesn’t always work in the way Google says it will, but they tend to keep trying until they get it right.

What you shouldn’t do is write for Google’s robots instead of your readers. While this post is about the tactics you can use to develop an audience, it is all predicated on having content that will appeal to the audience you want to reach. If you don’t have that, your audience development efforts are doomed to fail.

And finally I think one of the most important tools that can be used in audience development is email. Email continues to be the single most used Internet activity. And email is device agnostic. It is just as important and widely used on a cell phone as on a tablet or desktop or laptop.

(Piotr Siedlicki)

If you want to know how to use email to drive traffic and build an audience you really don’t have to look any further than your own email preferences. And those preferences are likely to involve not sending too much and keeping it short. I probably read as much if not more news and information that I linked to from an email as I do from browsing, reading social networks or using search. Most of those links come as part of email newsletters that come either daily or weekly, but no more than that, and they include descriptive headlines for about five or six stories.

As detailed in my previous post the online audience has become self-selective. If you want to reach them, the starting point is content that entertains or educates. But just popping it online doesn’t mean it will be seen no matter how good it is. Much like the author who finds that he has to promote his own book, any company or person who is publishing information on the Web needs to be in the business of audience development if they want to find viewers.

Posted in Digital publishing | Tagged audience development, contnet, digital publisging, email, marketing, media, public relations, search, SEO, social media, technology | 5 Comments

The Empowered Audience and How It Changed Publishing, Advertising and Business

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Ken Dowell

The digitalization of the information world has changed the way advertisers advertise, the way marketers market and the way publishers publish. Digital itself is a product of technology, but the real impetus for changes for communicators came from the audience. As technology revamped accessibility and mobility it also offered choices. It created an empowered audience. If you are in the news or marketing or advertising business that means you have to change from talking at an entrapped audience to trying to appeal to a self-selecting audience.

(photo by Alvimann)

This is not solely an issue for the publishing and communications industries. One of the best examples of the impact of a digitally empowered audience occurred in the recording industry. Almost since the time when Edison invented the phonograph, the recording industry looked for ways to sell us more than we wanted at a higher price. (Remember B-sides?) So while you may have wanted a song or two, you typically had to buy a package of 10 or 12 or more songs that were embedded in an album or tape. To make things even cushier for the music labels, every few years they would render your entire music collection obsolete by phasing out vinyl or 8-tracks or cassettes or CDs. But that was before Napstar, before iTunes and before you know it, you have an empowered audience, one that can buy and pay for only the precise amount of music it wants.

The next industry to take the hit is going to be cable. We subscribe to systems that deliver hundreds or stations. I get stuff like truTV and We TV. Haven’t got a clue what they are. Even the most avid TV viewer probably only ever watches a couple dozen stations. But we all pay the price for having many, many stations, some that we wouldn’t watch in a hundred years. Netflix and Hulu have chipped into this a little bit and you hear more and more about people, and especially young people, unplugging. The recent news that HBO and ESPN would be making their family of stations available without us having to buy the high-cost Comcast or Time Warner bundles may well be just the beginning of creating an empowered audience of TV viewers. As these options proliferate do you think that audience will opt for packages that have 100’s of stations that they have no interest in? I’m not buying We TV. That’s for sure.

(photo by krosseel)

It’s easy to see how the same thing happened in the news business. Historically we were forced to buy a package of news, i.e. the newspaper. You might have read 10% or 20% or 50% but you had to buy the whole thing. There was a time in my life (before I got smarter) when I looked at little beyond the sports scores. Because of the physical nature of distribution, you were further restricted to reading what could be delivered locally. By the time the print monopoly was about to disintegrate, most readers in the U.S. had little choice other than the local paper, perhaps a regional paper and USA Today, the infographic of the pre-digital world.

Even before the Web, news started to be available digitally through subscription services like AOL or Prodigy. So the first barrier to go was the logistics. It would soon become just as easy for me to read the South China Morning Post as it was to read the Newark Star-Ledger. When they first went digital, newspapers tried to replicate some part of the print product online. That meant you were still looking for news by brand name or masthead and still being delivered a package of information based upon what somebody else thought you would or should be interested in. But the home page presentation is now becoming irrelevant and for many, accessing the information they want is done directly through search or social and it may well be seen as brand agnostic.

The disruption is no less dramatic for advertisers. Traditional advertising is based on making you look at something that you never chose to look at but which was thrust in front you. That can be a print ad on a newspaper or magazine page, a commercial that interrupts the television program you are watching, it can even be painted on a wall in the outfield when you’re at a ball game and looking to see whether or not a long fly ball is going to be a home run. The cost and value of advertising was based on a potential audience. It would cost more to advertise on page 2 of the newspaper than on page 36, just as it would cost more to run a commercial on a national network than on a small market independent station. Nevermind that as a reader I may have had no interest whatsoever in the news that appears on page 2 and as a TV viewer I may opt to take the garbage out when the commercial comes on. I was still part of a potential audience.

(imaage by jks Lola)

But once the audience becomes empowered you can see right through that type of potential or assumed audience. Just as news organizations at first tried to migrate their print content into digital content, advertisers tried to move their traditional type of content online. But guess what? In a digital world each audience member picks and chooses what to see by clicking on it and once there were sufficient tracking mechanisms in place it because painfully obvious to the advertising industry that nobody but nobody clicked on banner ads.

Still stuck in the mindset that they could thrust stuff before our eyes without ever having to take the step of building an audience that chose to see their content, advertisers then resorted to more creative ways to be intrusive. So we got things like pop ups when pages loaded or pre-roll before videos or online games. Nobody clicks on that stuff either. Because from an audience perspective, classic advertising and marketing content is crap, stuff that a company or organization feels we should see or hear, not anything that we would choose to consume.

At this point the only answer, given the new freedom of choice that consumers of information enjoy, is to produce content that some audience will find to be either entertaining or instructive. All the technology in the world, whether it’s mobile or responsive or interactive, means nothing if you don’t have what people want to see or read. That is the challenge for publishers, for advertisers and for businesses. Whether you’re producing national news and looking for a broad diverse audience or whether you are selling bicycles and trying to find a find a local community of cyclists, the requirement is still the same. You’re dealing with an empowered audience and you’ve got to attract them rather than entrap them.

Producing the content that does that is the first step. The second is to make sure they see it. In contemporary vernacular that means audience development, something that I will elaborate on in my next post.

Posted in Digital publishing, Technology | Tagged advertising, audience, content, digital publishing, marketing, media, newspapers, technology | 17 Comments

A Season of Hockey

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Ken Dowell

Dallas Stars 3 New Jersey Devils 2

Never mind the game. The Devils lost in a shootout. They always lose shootouts. This was the home opener and it was Chico Resch night. Resch was an NHL goalie for 14 years with the Islanders, Devils and Flyers. He was a Devils broadcaster for 18 years and retired at the end of the 2013-14 season. He is widely beloved by Devils fans, partly because of his work with the team but mostly because he is just a flat out nice guy. He’ll be missed. As for the Devils, things continued to go south from here. By New Year they were pretty much out of the playoff race. And since their best forwards were aged 42 and 39, “wait till next year” has a hollow ring.

Albany Devils 5 Bridgeport Sound Tigers 3

The American Hockey League affiliates of the New Jersey Devils and the New York Islanders got to take center stage at the Prudential Center in Newark. The A-Devils won a spirited, lively game. They scored 5 goals. At that point in the season the New Jersey Devils had reached that goal total 5 times in 47 games. This was a demonstration of what sports could be like without all the money. Tickets were $10 general admission. There was a spirited crowd that cheered and chanted. Some were families with two or three kids sitting in the lower deck, center ice. That could cost $1,000 for an NHL game.

Erie Otters 4 London Knights 2

An Ontario Hockey League game at the Erie Insurance Arena. This was the best game I saw all year. the teams went end to end at full speed before an enthusiastic packed house. I don’t think either team dumped the puck all game. These guys can skate. The Erie team includes Connor McDavid, a guy who is being touted as a generation player. That is, a player the caliber of which only comes along once in a generation. A Sidney Crosby or Mario Lemieus. On this frigid night in Erie, Pa., he did not disappoint.

New York Islanders 3 Buffalo Sabres 2

The Sabres are a woeful team. Coming into this game they had won twice in their previous 17 games. They were long since out of contention for everything except the sweepstakes that will result in drafting the aforementioned Connor McDavid. So that is why the picture is of the fans streaming into the First Niagara Center. Despite the terrible record and meaninglessness of this game, despite the fact that it had snowed all afternoon and was expected to continue to snow through the next day, the place was just about full. Buffalo fans surely deserve better.

Brown 4 Princeton 1

Not a marquee matchup in the world of college hockey. Coming into this game Princeton and Brown were last and next-to-last, respectively, in the ECAC Hockey Conference standings. As you can see from the score Princeton cemented its hold on the bottom of the table. But that is not the attraction here. It is Baker Rink itself, a hockey venue that was built in 1922 and named after Hockey Hall of Famer Hobie Baker, one of Princeton’s most decorated athletes. With a capacity of 2,000, this is a great place to watch a hockey game, no matter who is playing.

Southern Regional 2 Montclair 0

This was a New Jersey High School hockey Public A tournament round of 16 game. Southern went on to win one more game in the tournament before being eliminated in the semifinals. As you can see from this picture, Clary Anderson Arena in Montclair has seen its share of flying pucks. This was once the site of an outdoor hockey venue. Montclair High School would play night games here, something that was very popular with high school students even if a bit cold. And once in a while the spectators would include Montclair favorite son Yogi Berra.

Posted in Sports | Tagged Albany Devils, areans, Baker Rink, Buffalo Sabres, Clary Anderson Arena, Erie Insurance Arena, Erie Otters, First Niagara Center, hockey, Montclair, New Jersey Devils, Princeton, Prudential Center, sports | 1 Comment

Desert

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Ken Dowell

Sonoran Desert
The Sonoran Desert covers 120,000 square miles in southwestern Arizona, southeastern California, Baja California and the Mexican state of Sonora. These photos were taken in California near the Coachella Valley.

A Palm Oasis

The California Fan Palm is also known as the Desert Palm since it is drought resistant. It can grow up to 60 feet high and its crown spreads to up to 15 feet.

These palms were in a fire. The trunks are still black but they continued to grow and are green on top.

San Andreas Fault

The San Andreas Fault runs through about 800 miles of California. It is formed by a meeting of the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. These photos are from the Indio Hills area.

Posted in Travel | Tagged California, California Fan Palms, Coachella Valley, desert, Indio, palms, San Andreas Fault, Sonoran Desert | 24 Comments

The Decade of the Gun: JFK to KSU Part II

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Ken Dowell

May 4, 1970

On the morning of Monday, May 4, 1970, I was anxious to attend the rally that was scheduled for the Kent State University commons at noon. It had been a weekend of disorganized protest and disorder both on campus and in the bar-laden downtown section of Kent, Ohio. The protests had started on Friday, one day after Richard Nixon announced he was escalating the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

Many Kent State students were commuters and for them the rally had an air of catching up with what had been happening on campus. The commons is a grassy area in the center of campus. On one end was the ROTC building that had been torched over the weekend. At the other end was a hill and at the top Taylor Hall, the architecture building. To the right of Taylor was Johnson Hall where I was living at the time.

The university administration apparently tried to stop the rally by distributing leaflets that said it was cancelled. My sociology professor, on the other hand, cancelled his class so everyone could attend. The rally never got started as the Ohio National Guard moved in to disperse the gathering. Most of the students, myself included, retreated up the hill to the area behind Taylor Hall. It is there that the shooting took place killing four students and wounding nine.

Despite being in the area I can’t honestly say that I saw what happened. My only recollection was of herding several fellow students into my dorm room which was safe and, being on the second floor, had windows overlooking the area where the shooting took place.

We were soon notified that the building and the entire campus was to be evacuated. I don’t know what I did or what I was thinking for the next hour or two but before long I felt like the last person on campus. As I walked out, taking a circuitous route past Bowman Hall and avoiding the commons, there was no one in sight. I remember carrying an umbrella as it had started to rain and at one point smashing it against a street sign. I walked to a friend’s off campus house where I stayed until I could get a ride to Cleveland Hopkins Airport to head home.

Young vs. Old

The shootings at Kent State put an end to a decade that began with so much optimism and ended with Americans at war with each other. Young vs. old. Black vs. white.

The issue that fueled campus demonstrations and the growth of the radical student movement was the Vietnam War. Many of us who were on the campus of Kent State and every other campus in America at the time would soon have a lottery number put on our heads (mine was 95) that would determine whether or not we would get drafted to head off into an Asian jungle to fight against peasants who our government had decided were the enemy.

(Photo by SDRandCo)

The parents of this generation of students might have eventually been able to overlook the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll thing. But many were World War II veterans who served in Europe or the Pacific and raised their baby boomer kids in the home they bought in the suburbs with the GI Bill. What they couldn’t overlook were their sons and daughters on the street chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.” When I arrived home after the shooting in Kent, my father pronounced, “They should have shot them all.”

(OpenClips)

The student movement grew as the war had dragged on. But they didn’t have many friends other than each other. The “don’t trust anyone over 30” mantra disconnected them with the growing numbers of older Americans who were coming to the same conclusion about the war. While the student left adapted the vernacular of class struggle they in reality made little connection with the working class or the unions that represented them. If you were working in a factory or at a construction site being a student at a place like Berkeley or Columbia looked like a pretty cushy gig.

And while liberal minded whites had long served as participants in many aspects of the civil rights movement, black students were having a generational conflict of their own. They were rejecting the non-violent civil rights movement of their parents and focusing on Black Power. White allies were sometimes unwelcome and at other times viewed with a wary eye.

Black vs. White

The civil rights movement that characterized the first half of the decade achieved at least nominal success. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were signed into law in 1964 and 1965 respectively. That didn’t end discrimination and it didn’t end racism in America. In fact, it got worse. It also became clear that racism was not a Southern problem, but rather an American problem.

(OpenClips)

It has always bothered me that shortly after the shootings at Kent State a similar incident occurred at the predominately black Jackson State University in Mississippi but the latter never seemed to spark the same level of attention or indignation. James Michener didn’t write a book about Jackson State and Neil Young didn’t sing a song about two dead in Mississippi. The incident was the same, students shot dead while protesting the escalation of the war, in every way but the color of the victims.

Meanwhile blacks, and especially younger blacks, are thinking that while it’s nice to be able to sit in the front of the bus, it doesn’t matter much if you don’t have bus fare and if you don’t have a job to take the bus to. The goal after all wasn’t to hang around with white folks, it was to attain the housing, education and jobs necessary to improve black lives.

America’s race war was most dramatically demonstrated by the urban riots and rebellions that visited virtually every major U.S. city, usually sparked by real or rumored over-aggressive law enforcement. It started in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, included the riots in Newark and Detroit in 1967 and reached a peak in 120 cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

The race wars of the 60’s had a more profound and longer-lasting impact than the war between the generations. White residents fled urban areas as did white-owned business. So did blacks with the wherewithal to get out. The plants, mills and factories that provided inner city jobs packed up and moved out. Inner city schools began a decades long decline. Some cities, like Newark and Detroit, still haven’t recovered.

Nor has America overcome its war between the races. Just a few years after we could proudly point to the fact that we elected a black president, the events in Ferguson, Mo., seemed to thrust us right back into the 60’s, the decade of the gun.

(The Decade of the Gun: JFK to KSU Part I)

Posted in History | Tagged 60's, Black Power, Jackson State University, Kent State University, Student protests, Vietnam War | 25 Comments