Michael Grant

The Internet, after the alphabet, the printing press, and the telegraph, is only the fourth revolution in media history. The alphabet gave the media distance, or portability. The printing press gave it volume. The telegraph gave it speed. The Internet is turning the direction of information around 180 degrees, and eliminating hours in the day and the edges of the page. And computers continue to shrink information, moving information storage and retrieval toward the infinite.

That's where we are in 2009, riding the crest of a media revolution still in its semi-primitive stages. Now let's turn around, away from the past, and look from 2009, into the future, 50 years distant, to 2059. Using the differences between 1959 and 2009 as a reference, what is the media world of 2059 going to look like?

It will be faster, smaller, fuller. If visitors from 2059 swooped in, picked us up, and carried us forward to their world, could we survive? I doubt it. We would be literally in the dark. There will be visible evidence of media. No screens, no print, no hardware clutter, no snarl of cables under the desk! No download times!

But mainly, information will be moving too fast for us to see, and in strange forms we would not have thought possible in 2009. We will have learned to process two tracks of information at the same time. The tracks will be coded, informing our brain which is which, then woven together and delivered. Today, it would be like the CBS Evening News assigned one code, the commercials another code, and then the two merged and run at the same time. We would get 30 minutes of news and 30 minutes of commercials, and we would understand both clearly.

Only in 2059, it won't be the "CBS Evening News." In 2009, we already know what it feels like to find channels of information tailored to our specific interests and demographic profile. It started in the 1970s, when cable television introduced "narrowcasting." The growing number of channels made it possible, and a good business deal, to dedicate channel content to specific interests, such as news, sports, business, weather, shopping and music. Advertisers loved the new focus, because it enabled a more direct connection with their target audience, which saved money and, most importantly, increased consumer response rates.

But even the cable world needed a relatively large audience base, a Neilsen rating of 3 or 4, to stay in business. That meant 8 to 10 million provable sets of eyeballs to attract enough advertisers to stay in business (remember the First Law of Media).

The Internet is changing all that. This is just so fascinating. In the 15th century, the printing press turned the direction of media information flow around 180 degrees. No longer did people walk to a central place to hear a speaker deliver the news; the news was now sent out to them from a central place. It was the dawn of broadcast. Now, the Internet is turning the information flow around again, by 180 degrees. In the media-public delivery system, a circle has literally closed. We are living in the twilight of broadcast, and, as it turns out, going in to the information is the vastly superior system, as long as you can do it at the speed of light through Internet connections, and not on the back of a donkey.

By turning the direction of information around 180 degrees, the Internet is removing all that broadcast transmission expense, and moving narrowcasting into the next phase. No longer does media have to broadcast content out to consumers. Consumers come in to the content, which in the emerging media world is only a directory in a computer. The result is an incredibly cheap connection with an incredibly focused audience. In this world, an audience of 100,000 hits a day may be enough to be a great business deal both for the content provider and the advertisers. In this world, a single individual with a good idea, a computer, and an Internet connection, can create fabulous wealth with businesses like FaceBook, YouTube and Google.

Even as we speak, all of these businesses, connections, content, advertising, and wealth, are based on media codes. Right now, the time has come, after the thousands of years bringing us to the 2009 media world, with its speeds and access, for the reader to become aware of this strange, ironic, ominous screen between your eyes and this page, and of the media codes embedded in all the media content you consume. The greater the access of media to consumers, and the faster consumers can absorb content, the more powerful the codes become.

Above all, as this world begins the voyage toward 2059 and phenomena such as parallel information processing – all content, and all advertising, 24 hours a day – people need to acquire information and knowledge about the codes the media uses to attract us, inform us, persuade us, and threaten us. In professional hands, the codes have enormous power, and that power needs a check and a balance that only an educated, informed public can provide. In the media-public relationship of 2009, the power equation leans heavily toward the media side. When the public starts to understand the media codes, and the media starts to realize the public knows what the media is doing, that equation will start to change, just slightly at first, then more. After that, the public will be positioned to influence the equation at will, and the final great irony will arrive when the people, laughing and embarrassed, realize just how much media power they have, and where it comes from.

If media literacy and education projects do their job, then that awareness will have become part of the 2059 media world, and it will be a good thing. In 2009, media delivery devices were becoming quite small, and wearable, and there was success reported with research showing that a switch could be turned on or off simply by thinking about it.

That is a stunning direction, and if it is followed, by 2059, it is reasonable to suppose that the media delivery system could be a microscopic, internal coating on a key nerve in or near the brain through which the wearer connects with a media of choice, or two or three mediums – visual, audio, print – the wearer being capable of processing and understanding all three simultaneously – read, watch, listen – at any hour or any place without the slightest disturbance to neighbor, office colleague, seatmate, or sleeping spouse, unless the media might be an ancient Monty Python piece and laughter, spontaneous and disembodied, erupts.

In that world, it will be crucial that a person knows how the media works, how to turn the media off, and has the power to do it. People need to start thinking about this. Standing in 2009, at the exact center of this history, I am glad the ninth-graders of this world are going to be getting to 2059 only one day at a time.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

I am standing in the year 2009, at the exact center of 100 years of American media history. Behind me, into the past, I am looking at 1959. When I turn to face the future, I am looking at the year 2059.

I can't imagine what America will look like in 2059. I can barely believe what it looked like in 1959, and I was there, 16 years old, in the 11th grade. When I tell you about it, I am truly a visitor from another planet. The cars had radios, but radio stations were few and far between, and they were all AM. My town had three stations, presenting a grab-bag of news, farm news, cooking shows, Arthur Godfrey, "The Breakfast Club," and music.

The music was an intriguing mix of standards and the new music, rock and roll. It was the most interesting shock, to hear a Vic Damone song end, and in the same breath hear a Little Richard song start. When the atmosphere was right, kids cruising in their big Chevys and Fords (gasoline was 13 cents a gallon) could bring in the real rock, and blues, stations, from New Orleans and Nashville, and the background static imparted a sense of distance, and adventure.

Most towns and cities had newspapers, and cities over 50,000 had both morning and evening editions, with strong local and regional coverage. The post office delivered Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look. The library had many books.

Television still had a novel feel. My town had a station, that came on the air at 6 a.m. and went dark, after "Vespers," at midnight. All the content was black-and-white. Watching television in 1959 required some technical skill. There were two tuning knobs, a big one for the VHF channels 2 through 13, and a smaller one for the UHF stations at channel 15 and above. To watch television, you turned it on and selected a channel, almost always VHF. You adjusted the antenna, that sat on top of the television set, either a "rabbit-ears" or, if you had the money, a control knob that rotated an antenna on the roof of the house.

Then you adjusted the horizontal hold control, the vertical hold control, and the fine tune control, so the picture was fairly clear, no snow, and hopefully free of a double-image. To switch channels, you got up from the couch, clicked the VHF knob, rotated the antenna toward the new source, adjusted horizontal, vertical and fine-tune controls, and hoped for the best. Most shows were 30 minutes, so at the end of the half-hour, if you wanted to go back to the first station, you got up and repeated the process.

Our local station was an NBC affiliate. The other networks were CBS, ABC and Dumont, and if you had a good ChannelMaster antenna, sometimes you could bring in the Dallas and Fort Worth stations.

And for media, 50 years ago, that was it. The planet still turned under a relatively quiet sky.

But things were happening. Television was revolutionizing advertising. Elvis Presley and other rockers were revolutionizing not only music, but creating an extension of the culture that would become a culture unto itself. Entrepreneurs were developing a product called videotape. Hugh Hefner was developing a new magazine. Research and development people were thinking about wiring, not television affiliates, but homes themselves, with cable. A federal highway system, intended to move armies efficiently in the event the Cold War turned into a hot one, instead started moving people, and products, efficiently, from coast to coast.

And computers were starting to get smaller. In the quiet sky of 1959, after tens of thousands of years of human development, conditions were starting to appear, and fall into place, for a perfect storm of media codes.

It would take time. It took 50 years, one day at a time, no faster, to get from the bizarre world of 1959 to the autumn of 2009. It is the only way people from that planet could survive the trip. If you were on Earth in 1959, imagine visitors from 2009 swooping down, beaming you up, and carrying you forward to their planet, this planet, in the blink of an eye, and dropping you off in the current media world. Could a human brain survive, that could process information only at 1959 speeds? I don't think we could survive the hour. I think our brains would blow up.

As fast as this world is, and as fast as we can process information now, we still are in a primitive age. The Internet in 2009 is like television in 1959, or telephones in 1889. You have to know something about it, in order to use it. And the Internet, for a little while longer, is still totally primitive, basically a print medium with fascinating bells and whistles developed for sale by every entrepreneur who knows a little code.

Very quickly, though, the Internet is racing toward a convergence of print, video, and audio. What will happen to media then? Well, the television and computer screens will be one and the same, and the remote will also be a mouse, or whatever the mouse, or the "interface," evolves into. But what will that mean to us? Technology is so far ahead of the user, in 2009, that no one really knows. Next week: Looking at 2059.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments

I couldn't help but laugh at myself for laughing at the people in the audience who were laughing at David Letterman's confession of sex relations with co-workers. It sounded so bizarre. But the people couldn’t help themselves. They are attenuated to hearing Letterman use the “conflict” media value to produce hilarity. When he tried to speak seriously about conflict, they couldn’t make the shift.

In media literacy studies, we learn the Human Reaction Package (HRP), which consists essentially of 12 media values – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity – and a definition: news is any thing that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. These values and definition can be found in any Journalism 101 textbook. I created the HRP to provide convenience and flexibility to the package, which drives all three media products: information (news), entertainment, and manipulation (particularly advertising).

The 12 values are not presented necessarily in order of importance, though most would agree that conflict is, in fact, the first value because of its ubiquity. Conflict is certainly felt by all people. We are born with it. Very soon after we are born, we understand that we are going to die. By age 5, children talk about dying. Life and death is the essential conflict. Because conflict is such a strong news value, in a news story in which someone has died, the death is always in the first paragraph.

Survival is another strong example of conflict, because survival means staying alive. Stories about staying alive, or how to stay alive, are very important to us. Stories about new treatments or drugs to use against diseases like cancer or AIDS are always big news. We see stories all the time about living longer by eating right or developing good habits of exercise. We see stories about global warming and other threats to planetary survival. When nine miners in Pennsylvania became trapped 300 feet underground, the media followed the story without interruption because people wanted to see the miners survive. When they did, it was the biggest story of the day. Survival is also a very strong value in entertainment media. One of the most popular shows in television for the past three years is in fact named “Survivor.”

People also pay a lot of attention to other kinds of conflict. The first mass media product ever created was a book about the conflict between good and evil. It was the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1452, the first book ever printed using moveable type. The Bible is still the best-selling book in the world today. People are also very interested in good-and-evil stories such as crime and murder. Novels about crime and murder earn their authors millions of dollars. Crime and murder movies make even more money. Murders become particularly strong stories because they have in them both the life and death conflict and the good and evil conflict. Of course those are the two types of conflict that made the World Trade Center attacks the biggest news story of 2001.

The conflict between winning and losing is the key value in many different kinds of media stories. All sports stories are essentially conflict stories about winning and losing. In politics, election stories are all about winning and losing. Since we live in a democracy in which we send representatives to government to vote on important issues, stories about those issues are very much about the win-lose conflict. Those stories are also about the kind of conflict that exists when there are two sides arguing about how to best get something done.

There are many other kinds of conflict based on people being on two sides of an issue. War is a classic example of this kind of conflict. War also presents us a good example of a conflict about a conflict. This is the “hawks and doves” conflict. For several years, the Iraqi war has been an excellent example of this type of conflict.

There is also conflict where you might not expect it. Love is full of conflict. Shakespeare made a career of finding the conflict in love, “Romeo and Juliet” being a famous example. Anyone who was ever married, or even went steady, knows about conflict in love. This is another strong conflict value found in novels and movies.

Conflict is also a very dependable source of humor, as long as it is someone else’s conflict (people laughed maniacally at Lucy Ricardo, but could you imagine living in the same building with that woman?). Many sitcoms on television are based on a conflict that is funny. In a famous “Seinfeld” episode, Seinfeld mugs an old lady for a loaf of rye bread. We laugh hysterically. George’s fiancé dies after licking adhesive on envelopes. We laugh darkly, but we laugh. Now David Letterman admits sex with co-workers. Funny as hell, coming from him.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.

This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 66. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies, because that is the only kind of living there was.

In America in the 1950s, American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was "Three Coins in the Fountain," and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios. In the youth of that era, it set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Recently, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”

That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change.

In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2009, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.

I had it easy. I only had to check in on a few cable channels. Parents today, if they are to remain aware of the children world, have numerous cable channels, tons of magazines, and of course the Internet. All are swollen with opportunities aimed at the 8-to-18-year-old demographic. It gives kids today terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2009 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. At the college where I teach journalism and media studies, female students began to adopt anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they would expend quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. One student told me that when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”

Then in the San Diego media, a story developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl was also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.

Shortly after that, being 16 years old and pregnant landed a teen idol named Jamie Lynn Spears (she is Britney's sister) on the cover of OK! Magazine. And that story inspired a teen-world reaction story on the front page of The New York Times. Talk about a fame party!

But that's another story. The story here is about three recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful, if occasionally terrifying, information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to. More often these days, I get that feeling when I am speaking to them from the front of my classroom. Maybe educators should put the entire curriculum on YouTube and just go home.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

I hope Nicholas Negroponte doesn't get mad if I quote two full paragraphs from his 1995 book, "Being Digital." I only do it because 1) I desperately want newspapers to survive their transition from newsprint to digital, and 2) I desperately want other Internet content to survive. It is history's greatest library, and it can only survive if the paragraphs that follow become reality. Here are Negroponte's words from 1995:

"It was through The New York Times that I came to know and enjoy the writing of the computer and communications business reporter, John Markoff. Without The New York Times, I would never have known of his work. However, now that I do, it would be far easier for me to have an automatic method to collect any new story Markoff writes and drop it into my personalized newspaper or suggested-reading list. I would probably be willing to pay Markoff the proverbial 'two cents' for each of his stories.

"If one two-hundredth of the 1995 Internet population were to subscribe to this idea and John were to write a hundred stories a year (he actually writes between one-hundred-twenty and one-hundred-forty), he would earn $1,000,000 per year, which I am prepared to guess is more than The New York Times pays him. If you think one two-hundredth is too big a proportion, then wait a short while. The numbers really do work."

Now that it is 2009, Negroponte's figures will need updating. The target percentage of the 2009 Internet population, to make the system work, may by now be one two-thousandth. It would be easy enough to do the math. But the key words in the two paragraphs are "two cents" and "subscribe."

In the old, traditional days of newspapering, subscribers didn't make the publishers rich. Advertising did. But the Internet is truly revolutionary because 1) between the media and the public, the Internet turns the direction of information around 180 degrees, and 2) it eliminates the old, traditional distribution costs, which was – still is – cruelly expensive. That's why advertisers have fled traditional newspapers. The cost for companies to do their own online advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of the traditional distribution arrangement.

A third revolutionary effect, which Negroponte realized 15 years ago, is the multiplier effect. Since the Internet is global, immediate, and available for pennies to the masses, Internet businesses can attract millions or billions of visitors, and make billions or trillions by charging each visitor two cents each per visit. I realized this myself, in the 1990s, when one day I was trying to tie my necktie. For decades, I wished I could tie a Windsor knot. By then, I was familiar enough with the Internet to understand its reach, and the ease of that reach. So I decided to search.

My search engine at the time was Alta Vista. I searched "Windsor knot" and was presented with 37 returns for sites about Windsor knots. At that instant, I knew that the Internet was something of great power. Just now, Googling "Windsor knot," I am presented with 105,000 returns. This volume is possible because the information is only files in a computer, waiting to be accessed by a global audience whose only expense is access to the Internet.

Why should Windsor knot merchants spend a penny on advertising? So newspapers, and other traditional distributors of advertising, are left high and dry. If the advertising money tree has dried up, where can newspapers turn? Subscribers. It is truly revolutionary. Reading his book, I believe Negroponte thought it would happen naturally. But it hasn't. On the Internet, businesses give away information for free. This can't go on. On the Internet, the only businesses that advertisers will support is themselves.

What should transpire? A subscriber system. Every time an Internet user clicks into a Website, that site should receive two cents from the visitor. Every Internet user will open a subscription account of $30 a month (1,500 site visits) through a central payment system. The account will be debited two cents for each site visited. If the site is The New York Times, the fee will be charged to each story visited. The Times and the reporter will negotiate an agreement in which the reporter gets a cut of the two cents – let's say it is 50-50 – which means, in Negroponte's aging Markoff example, both the reporter and the newspaper will earn $500,000 a year from the reporter's stories. I am prepared to guess the arrangement would be acceptable to both parties.

Every content provider – this blog, for example – will receive two cents per visit. Popular blogs will realize considerable revenue, which is appropriate, and schlock blogs will wither, which seems equally appropriate. Internet surfers, when they are required to pay for it, will think twice about where they deposit their two cents, always wanting their two cents' worth. The result will be better Internet content quality. That will be a nice bonus. My only concern in writing this today, though, is the quality of the free, aggressive, well-staffed, well-edited press. Without that, this country is in danger of collapsing.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

The World Wide Web is only the Fourth Revolution in the 16,000-odd-year history of media.

The First Revolution was the alphabet, introduced into practical use around 1500 B.C. The effect of the First Revolution was to let information travel across distances. With an alphabet, people could put ideas, fables and histories on paper, or stone, or into clay, allowing the information to be carried, or distributed, from place to place.

The Second Revolution was the printing press, introduced in commercial form by Johann Gutenberg around 1450 A.D. The printing press provided the means to reproduce many copies – and exact copies – of books very quickly, as opposed to the old, “scribal culture” tradition of reproducing a book one copy at a time, which was very slow and very expensive. So the effect of the Second Revolution was to provide the media with volume. Many historians believe the printing press has been the most important invention in the history of humanity.

The Third Revolution was the telegraph, introduced in 1844 by Samuel Morse. The telegraph provided the media with speed. Before 1844, information traveled only as fast as a man on foot, a man on a horse, or a man on a steamship or railroad train. In 1844, it became possible to move information from Point A to Point B at more or less the speed of light.

The Fourth Revolution is the Web, which we may date from about 1995. The effect of the Web is to turn the direction of information around 180 degrees. In the old, and still dominant, “broadcast culture,” information goes from a central location out to the masses. It has been a very effective technology, but also a very expensive one, and very inefficient.

In the Web age – let’s call it “Incast” – the masses come in to the information. Web information, whether it is print, audio or video, is nothing more than files on a computer, accessible globally to anyone with a phone and a computer. Incast is ridiculously inexpensive and almost totally efficient. It is the first one-to-one marketing model in the history of media. Broadcast is so expensive that not many people become broadcasters. Incast is so cheap that practically anyone can go into the media business. The result is an enormous democratizing effect. The Fourth Revolution is the reason that a publication like this one can exist.

We are now on the crest of the Fourth Revolution, headed at global high speed toward an unseen destination. One result we do know is that eventually, print and television will merge. They already have, sort of. When you watch television news, at the end of a story you are told, “For more on this story, go to our Website at www.msnbc.com.” Very soon, the merger will be complete, and your television set will work like a computer, and your remote control will also be a mouse. When you watch a news story on this new television, there will be a link right on the screen. Click on it, and you go to the in-depth, “print” version of the story. Media students already are aware that in the new journalism, they are going to have to write for both print and television: the 90-second version (about 210 words) for television, and the 4,000-word version for print.

The TV version, meanwhile, will “wait,” since it is only a file in a computer, for you to go read the in-depth story, and then click back to the TV news, which will resume where you left it. It is difficult to imagine what that simple change will mean to the media-public relationship.

Right now, we are in a primitive stage of the new relationship, like people in the 1890s who suddenly had a telephone they could use. To use it effectively, they almost had to understand how to build one. Same with the Web, that has caused enough hair-pulling to fill a billion pillows. But the Incast business model is strong, only the fourth revolution in media history, and it won’t be long before we know more than we do now.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments

Did you know that in the United States, the mainstream media has more power than the Constitution?

The framers of the Constitution set it up that way, at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.

By 1787, newspapers had been in business more than 200 years, long enough to give publishers at least a chance to discover the media codes and how they worked. Whether they had, or not, nobody knows. You have to understand, mass media at the beginning arrived as a complete mystery. Batteries not included, some assembly required. Johann Gutenberg, when he chose the Bible as his sales tool, only knew that the Bible had a proven audience. He didn't understand why. He was a goldsmith, a tinkerer, and an entrepreneur. His role in media history was mechanical. He was a printer, not a mass media professional. There were no mass media professionals in 1452.

What Gutenberg did was establish the first link between media codes and mass media audiences. In the last half of the 15th century, and well into the 16th, that link must have been as mysterious an object as black holes have been in modern times. What is it? Why is it there? Where did it come from? What is this thing, this link, that persuades people to learn to read, just because the material is there?

It's a fascinating question, because general audiences still don't understand the link, why it's there, what it is, where it came from. The early publishers learned as they went. They didn't need to understand the codes. They only needed to know that this mysterious link rolling off their presses had great power. The politicians recognized that power almost immediately. Rulers and church leaders enjoyed reading about themselves as much as anybody, as long as they agreed with what was written. When Martin Luther, and other pesky critics of those in power, starting publishing challenges to that power, and readers gathered around those challenges in disturbing numbers, rulers and church leaders started shutting the presses down. It begged a very big question: just how great was the power of the people, in the new age of print?

Newspapers, with their popularity, followed the European migration to the Americas started by Christopher Columbus in 1492. By 1732, a stable landscape of British colonies was in place in North America, and friction had developed between the governing and the governed. The New York colony that year acquired a new governor, William Cosby. By 1733, a New York newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, was publishing unfavorable editorials that accused Cosby of election rigging, land appropriation, and tax embezzlement.

Cosby had the Journal publisher, Peter Zenger, arrested on charges of seditious libel, "sedition" being defined as "the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion, against the government in power," and libel being "anything false published about a person that damages that person's reputation or ability to make a living."

With Cosby controlling the judges and the attorneys, Zenger appeared to have no chance. But Zenger's backers retained noted Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who conceived an argument that the editorials had to be confirmed as libelous, or false, before they could be judged seditious. Since the editorials were based on known facts, they could not be seditious. The truth could never be libelous. The jury agreed, Zenger was acquitted, and truth as a defense against libel provided the press a freedom it had not previously enjoyed.

The colonial leadership thought about this. Here was a newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, so popular that it attracted advertisers, who would actually pay to place their products in the pages of the newspaper. This suggests that publishers, and merchants, by 1735 knew something of the existence of the media codes; advertising is nothing but the manipulation of media codes.

And now, after the Zenger verdict, the Journal was not only popular, it was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.

That change, in the status quo, was the primary media code in this huge story, but whether the publisher or the public realized it, the other codes were there, too, all of them, as they always are, in every story, each with its own strength scale of zero to 10. Readers of the Zenger verdict story felt them as excitement, or exhilaration, or hope or fear or challenge. Very strong feelings, and very real, the same kind of reaction people have today, when they read a big story.

The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

John F. Kennedy during his presidency said a famous thing about Jefferson. In 1962, President Kennedy invited 49 Nobel Laureates to the White House. Kennedy said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

It is tempting to think that a figure of Jefferson's intellect and perception may have been among the first to become aware of, and understand, the power of media codes, and to do so at such a critical time in his country's history. He obviously believed that newspapers were the vehicle for the opinion of the people, and of course opinion – what people think and why they think it – is pure media code.

But when the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Happily, the Constitution is brimming with the media codes themselves, which has a lot to do with the document's effectiveness and durability. It is a document that, after all, describes the laws that will apply when a free people give their consent to a democratic system of government.

Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."

Edited down to the scope of media literacy, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press."

Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, into an amendment? Where is the power in that?

There are three answers.

The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.

The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.

They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?

And so we arrive at another position where it is useful, once more, to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If the Bible begat mass media, did mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.

Such a government was wonderfully tailored to the newspaper business. Newspapers let the people know what the government was doing. And newspapers let the government know what the people were thinking. The role of democratized information empowered Lincoln to get into Bartlett's with another quote about the American system: "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

At the time, Lincoln was talking about political credibility. He was also, with those words, anticipating, 150 years in advance, the media business model of the early 21st century. And the message in the next half-century is only going to make bigger headlines.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments

This Monday morning, many more San Diegans woke up feeling better than they would have on any other regular Monday morning.

The reason: our own Little League team, the Park View All-Stars from Chula Vista, on Saturday won the U.S. Little League Championship, and then on Sunday beat Taiwan, 6-3, for the Little League World Championship.

See the words, "our own?" Three weeks ago, the people claiming the team as "their own" would have numbered about 500. This morning, the number is certainly as high as 50,000, probably more. Park View, even though the team has played here all summer, for many summers, first came onto the San Diego radar when it was winning games in the regional playoffs at San Bernardino. When they won those playoffs and went to Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series, they established a secure place in San Diego newspapers and newscasts.

The team kept winning at Williamsport, and not only winning, but really clobbering people, with scores like 14-0 that started to sound routine. When that happened, San Diegans really started to jump on the bandwagon, adopting the Chula Vistans as "their own."

Actually, co-opting, or "appropriating," might be a better word. People like to win. It feels good, in the humdrum of routine. And when people can enjoy the thrill of winning without doing any work, well, there you have the sports industry in a nutshell. TV ratings go up so much when Tiger Woods plays because viewers know it gives them their best chance of seeing their own favorite player win. They appropriate his skills as a strategy to feel good.

The Park View team has offered the same deal, providing an early example of an autumn reality affecting millions of Americans, on Sunday and Monday mornings. If their college team wins on Saturday, they have such a good feeling on Sunday morning. If their team loses, they feel, well, conflicted. On Monday morning, if "their" NFL team won on Sunday, they have that same good feeling, a genuine, relaxed feeling of well-being. If the team lost, it's a blue Monday. It's the chance that fans take.

In media literacy terms, the values at work are conflict, which people have to live with; progress, which people love; prominence, which people are drawn to; proximity, which empowers people to connect; and novelty, which people seek for its rarity. Our good feeling about Park View in Southern California this Monday morning starts with proximity, both physical and emotional. I say Southern California because the proximity weakens with distance but most likely extends beyond San Diego County, since a Southern California team had to beat those uppity Northern California teams to get to the World Series at all. Proximity means "feel close to," empowering San Diegans to co-opt both the Park View Little Leaguers, who are actually Chula Vistans, with the same power they co-opt the Chargers, whose players come from all over the country but play for a billion-dollar sports business which has a franchise in San Diego.

The players have become prominent to the level that we know their names: Luke Ramirez, Bulla Graft, Kiko Garcia, Andy Rios, just like they were the lineup of the 1927 Bronx Bombers. They became stars, to the men who remember their own Little League experience, and to the women who saw the stars as little boys. Progress was great, as the team resolved its sports conflict at the highest level, and let its fans escape their conflicts for a little while, in the process. A note to the fans arriving late: Park View's colors are not blue, the uniforms assigned to them for the World Series; their Chula Vista uniforms are green and gold.

"TOP OF THE WORLD!" trumpeted the top-of-the-front-page headline in Monday morning's San Diego Union-Tribune, in sensational 96-point bold all-caps type. Front page? Top of the world? That's the natural power of novelty; a San Diego team (El Cajon/La Mesa Northern) had not won a Little League World Series since 1961. In a Starbucks, a man picked up a paper off the rack, looked at the headline and smiled to a clerk: "San Diego!" "Yeah!" the clerk grinned back.

Well, yeah. Nothing wrong with a good sports fix. I am happy this morning that the team won, for them, and for me. But there's nothing wrong, either, with having a handle on the dynamic. Park View is a one-time media story, with nothing at all to gain, compared to the NFL, a billion-dollar media business reliant on these same media values to keep the ad revenue coming in. The feeling of proximity is very important to the Chargers, who have built their pre-season advertising around the word "own." Fans who want to send a message to a business like the NFL, about prices, for example, only need to distance themselves. Another story in the papers this morning tells of the new stadium going up for the Giants and Jets, and worries about filling seats because fans aren't buying tickets. Sports consumers, through media, have more power than they realize.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments

When I talk about "media literacy" – or the absence of same – I always run the risk of offending educated people. I never mean to be offensive, but you have to agree that the average, aware, involved, hard-working American with a high school or college education may not take kindly to being called a "media illiterate."

The trouble is, people tend to immediately associate the word "illiterate" with "can't read or write," as opposed to "not schooled in." Being not schooled in is what I mean when I talk about media literacy. It is the same as being not schooled in surgery, or accounting, or engineering, or education. No one would call a university president a "surgical illiterate." Nor would I call him or her a "media illiterate." It's just that he or she has not been schooled in it.

Today, in my classrooms at Grossmont Community College, in a suburb of San Diego, classes in media literacy begin. There will be around 130 students in all, in five classes. Four of the classes teach the basic tools needed to produce media content. Specifically, these students will be learning journalism, but the same tools apply to all the media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television.

One of the classes will teach the basic tools needed to consume media content. These consumer tools are almost exactly the same as the tools the producers use. And that is an overlooked, but fundamental requirement in consuming media. In education, we call this consumer course a "survey" course. More than 90 percent of the students in the class will not become media producers; they will become surgeons or accountants or engineers or educators. They take this course, "Mass Media & Society," because a) it is a required course; b) they like mass media; and c) it looks more interesting – and easier – than philosophy.

There are dozens of scholars and academics who have written textbooks about the relationship between society and its mass media, and they are thoroughly instructive. However, they all tend to use social constructs and communication theory to explain the relationship, which is fine, but it misses some important nuts and bolts: the tools used by media producers to develop content, and the tools used by media consumers to interpret that content. And they are basically the same tools.

The awareness of these tools, and the ability to use them, whether to produce media or consume it, is what I call media literacy. But in the present American educational system, these tools are taught to the media producers of the future, but not to the media consumers. U.S. Labor Dept. statistics from 2007 show 1,007,000 Americans working as media producers. They learned the production tools in specific media production classes, at the high school and college/university levels. There are no equivalent classes for media consumers, all 300-plus million of them in America, in the general curriculum. Those 300 million are not schooled in media.

Is that important? Well, it's important enough for practically all institutions of higher learning to require classes like "Mass Media & Society." It's important enough to make "media literacy" a hot topic among secondary school educators and parent associations. It's important to those of us defending the media from extremism. And it is important in uncounted other ways, some of which you can already read about in this Media Literacy series, and some that will appear later.

It has been about seven years, through teaching both media producers and consumers, since I realized that the same tools were used by both sides. Today, another 130 start receiving the information. At this rate, the entire American population could receive the information in another 115,384.6 years. You always have to start somewhere.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments

Today's media literacy blog was first published in the summer of 2006.

I look at Paris Hilton and can’t for the life of me understand what people find so exciting about her.

Paris Hilton looks at a picture of me and says there is not a single reason on earth why she should try to excite me.

Her view is closer to the truth than mine.

Sigh. I live in an old world. My biggest entertainment excitement of the summer is wondering if the CBS Evening News will start showing car commercials when Katie Couric takes the anchor seat in September. It would be the first time since 1993 that the advertising world believes I might actually be interested in buying something you can’t find in a drugstore.

Paris isn’t the narcissistic one. Well, yes she is. Narcissism is her business, and she is very good at it. She was shopping in New York City not long ago, trying on shoes, and one pair she was looking at cost $1,000. She argued to the management that she should be given the shoes, because when others saw her wearing them, they would come in and buy a pair, too. For the $1,000 investment, they might get $15,000 back. They gave her the shoes.

But in our unique relationship, Paris isn’t the narcissistic one; I am. Mine is a narcissism of time and place. The time I was 15, or 20, or 25, was the best time in all of history to be 15, 20, or 25, and if everyone understood that, what a wonderful world it would be.

I need to go sit in a large mall for a couple of hours every day, until I reach a point where I can acknowledge that youth has changed. I just need to let go of June Allyson, Phyllis Thaxter, Donna Reed, Wanda Hendrix and even Jean Arthur, as the femme for whom the hero eventually falls. June Allyson sets a good example. June Allyson has grown up; the last time I saw her on a screen, she was selling incontinence apparel.

I need to follow her lead, start to live in 2006, and let Paris be Paris. Matt Leinart has fallen for her, and he certainly is not George Gipp or Monty Stratton or Glenn Miller or an F-86 Sabre fighter pilot with seven kills over Korea. Matt Leinart, falling for Phyllix Thaxter? I need to give myself a break. In a recent Sunday supplement magazine, some fossil in his own recliner at home took a big gulp off his oxygen bottle and wrote Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, wondering, “Why would quarterback Matt Leinart, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner, who is going to make millions playing for the Arizona Cardinals, hook up with a total airhead like Paris Hilton?” Walter’s reply: “Because he likes tall blondes and L.A.’s club scene. Next question?”

Thank you, Walter. Your answer was like a pail of cold water thrown in my face. Mattworld and Parisville are not strange places at all, in 2006. I am the one who is strange. I am the anomaly, not Paris.

The mall looks so strange to me because I am the only one sitting on the lip of the planter box with my bermudas buttoned at my waist, the hems above my knees, my shirt cut to fit my size, my baseball cap on frontwards, no tattoo on my body, and my cellphone on the kitchen counter at home. From my narcissist 1959 fortress I will peer through a portal at 2006 for an hour today, maybe a little longer tomorrow, and when I am finished I will go over to Marie Callendar’s for a martini and some oatmeal.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments

Professionals in the business of information-gathering have always looked at information with a caveat: "Consider the source. The information is only as good as the source."

With the Internet, history's greatest source of information, the caveat creates a couple of problems. First problem: most of the millions of Internet users are not professional information-gatherers, but amateurs. Considering the source is not a caution that would occur to them, and we have already seen the dangerous stampedes that unchallenged bad information can cause, as instantaneously as lightning crackling above a cattle herd.

That problem can be fixed with education, patience and time, and eventually, no doubt, with a bit of professional standard-setting. The second problem is a stranger duck, an original duck that the professionals haven't seen before. It has to do, not with sources that use the Internet, but the Internet itself as a source. It feels like a suspicion, gradually rising, that the Internet, as a source, is flawed. It's like asking the reader of a book to consider not only the author, as a source, but books themselves, as sources. How would one go about confirming the reliability of books as sources, even if one were moved to?

It's not a question being openly asked, about the Internet (not yet, anyway), but a subliminal suggestion. "Consider the source," as it applies to the Internet, seems to appear peripherally, almost unconsciously, in conversations that didn't start with the Internet at all. Joe Morgenstern senses it in his Friday Wall Street Journal review of a move, "Julie & Julia." The movie comes at the audience in two halves, he says, and the half about Julia – Julia Child, the celebrity chef – provides far more than half the movie's substance. The other half is about Julie Powell, a New Yorker who had the idea to cook all 524 recipes in Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year, and write blogs about the experience.

The problem for the audience is watching half a movie about someone who really does something – Julia Child – and watching the other half about someone writing a blog. It's a good blog, and a great idea, cooking all those recipes in a single year, but to the observer, it's still only a blog. Monty Python had the same idea 30 years ago, imagining an audience watching an author composing the opening lines of a great novel. Great sketch, but not so great that I can remember the author or the novel, which I will recognize instantly, once somebody tells me. See? What Julia Child did was real accomplishment: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." What Julie Powell did was blog. One is on the field. The other is on the sideline. The world will remember Julia Child, who mastered her art, but not Julie Powell, because she couldn't even overcome her source.

That same feeling pops up in a Sunday essay in The New York Times Book Review. This essay is one in a series that "will explore the dominant themes and currents of thought in a particular area of American life." This essay, by author Kurt Andersen, is about American pop culture "in the Age of Obama," when cable TV and the Internet represent a "vast new maw" for consumption of pop culture. He concludes:

"There's a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy."

The lesson is important for the masters of the Internet, who all agree that, on the Internet, content is king. If so, then it should be original content, and made well enough that the consumer, in considering the source, will be able to discriminate it from the shoddy. Otherwise, content on the Internet may never be king, or prince, or even duke. Nobody will ever remember its name.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

When you have media literacy, you understand how a story about a feud between two motivated but minor entertainers like Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly could possibly wind up on the front page of The New York Times.

There are three reasons, actually. The first is the second law of media, which we talked about just last week: the media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. It doesn't take all that many sets of eyeballs to make a person a media celebrity. Olbermann hosts a weekday talk show on MSNBC, mostly political, called "Countdown." It has a viewership of about one million, which is 1/304 millionth of the national population. O'Reilly hosts "The O'Reilly Factor," a weekday talk show on Fox, mostly political, that has a viewership of about three million, which is 3/304 millionth of the national population.

It means that while these shows are on, 300 million Americans are doing something else, which brings into focus the media's third law: the most misused word in the media-public relationship is the word "we." When you hear a media pundit say, "What are we to make of the Olbermann-O'Reilly feud," you know the pundit is badly misusing the word "we."

Yet the second law bestows enough power into their minuscule percentages to provide Olbermann and O'Reilly the kind of fame that gets them coverage on page one of The New York Times. And it is legitimate power, measurable in revenue. If these same two guys were local hosts, duking it out for ratings superiority in metropolitan Rapid City, nobody outside of western South Dakota would know their names.

The second reason for the story is the "conflict" media value. Olbermann and O'Reilly have maintained a long-running feud, based on their social and political views., and recently the feud, in the view of the only two people who really matter – the ones with the money – started to get too far out of hand. The personal conflict is long-standing. Olbermann's viewers – and I am one, occasionally – commonly tune in to hear Olbermann call O'Reilly "Bill-o the Clown." O'Reilly's viewers – and I could not bear to watch O'Reilly even if I agreed with him – tuned in to hear O'Reilly call Olbermann a "vicious smear merchant."

Though it was entertaining, the personal conflict lacked the strength, as a media value, to merit the attention of the Times. Then corporate chieftains – General Electric behind Olbermann, the News Corporation behind O'Reilly – became involved, providing strength aplenty, in the minds of Times editors, for the conflict value. A reporter was dispatched. Olbermann was reported saying, "The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.” But that would mean Fox losing a tidy revenue center. In turn, O'Reilly said on the air, "Federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business." This is not the kind of allegation G.E. would love to deal with, no matter the source.

That was enough, the Times reported, for Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and for G.E. chairman Jeffrey Immelt. In a bit of fascinating negotiating (you really should read the story), overseen by the remarkably (comparatively) level-headed talk show host Charlie Rose of PBS, the two corporate bosses set up a deal, which provided the story its third strong media value, novelty. "Even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs," reported the Times, a "cease-fire" was arranged. It is a cold day in hell when you find corporate media ownership pulling the plug on anything that increases audiences. But then, as a source told the Times: "“They’ve won their respective constituencies. They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”

Which brings this story full-circle, back to the second law of media.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

Media critics like to describe Oprah Winfrey as "The Queen of Media," but this is an illusion. In reality, Oprah is "The Queen of the Third Law of Media."

In the media literacy toolbox, the third law of media states: "The most misused word in the media-public relationship is 'we.' " The third law is set up by the second law: "The media is an exercise in the power of small numbers."

Here are a couple of common examples:

Dwight Garner, The New York Times: "Why are we willing to shell out $24.95 at the local Barnes & Noble to read about someone else's pets?"

Kyra Phillips: CNN: "I mean, are we just so pathetic and so lonely that we have to live through people like Paris Hilton?"

Garner was writing about a cluster of books on the best-seller lists that told stories about animals. His specific interest was in "Water for Elephants," which, in a nation of 303 million, had sold about 248,000 copies.

Instead of writing, "Why are 248,000 people willing . . . ," he wrote, "Why are we willing . . . ," as if "Water for Elephants" had the entire nation in thrall. Why does he do that?

Kyra Phillips was one of a group of media professionals talking about media coverage of the hot celebrity Paris Hilton's on-again off-again time in jail. Remember, that was the story with the photo of Paris bloated with tears, through the window of a car, that ran on the front page in an embarrassing number of newspapers.

I don't know about you, but I don't think Kyra should have counted me among those who are so pathetic and lonely that I have to live through people like Paris Hilton. I have the Nielsen Ratings to back me up. Hilton's celebrity is essentially a creation of magazines like "People," whose circulation is a little under 4 million, in a nation of 304 million, and of cable television breathlessers like "Access Hollywood," whose Nielsens don't reach a 3 rating, in the nation's television universe of about 114.5 million homes.

"We"? Not me. If I am going to do some living through somebody else, it would be somebody more like Willie Nelson. A part of me aspires to sound like him and look like him. Seldom has so compelling a voice so nearly matched the persona. I'll bet I could find at least 10 million people in the country who would agree with me, and buy a million copies of his latest CD.

But, we? All 304 million? Don't think so. The celebs don't need nearly all of us, anyway. Dwight Garner was writing about "Water for Elephants" because its author, Sara Gruen, on the strength of 248,000 copies sold, had signed a contract to write two more books, for which she would be paid an advance of five million dollars.

Therein lies platinum proof of the media code's second law, about the power of small numbers. If just one-half of one percent of the population buys a copy of each of those books, the publisher, Spiegel & Grau, will be delirious with joy. If a tenth of the nation's high schools adopt "Michael's Media Literacy" as a contemporary studies text, I will get my own monogrammed chair on "Oprah."

Then a media pundit would go on the air and say, "This is the book we have been waiting for," and of course that would be wrong. The correct word, in any discussion of the media-public relationship, is "you." If Kyra Phillips would just look into the CNN camera and say, "Are you just so pathetic, etc.," it would provide me, and 95 percent of the 250,000 watching CNN at that moment the opportunity to yell back, "No!"

That leaves just five percent of the 250,000 – 12,500 viewers of this particular program in real time – to yell "Yes!" at Kyra Phillips and defend Paris. Not many. But they're out there, hard as that may be to believe, and they're enough. Enough to make Paris famous, and to mislead media pundits into opining that somehow paying attention to Paris Hilton represents a bad end for us all. The next time you hear someone say that on television, or read it in a newspaper, fire off an email explaining the Second Law of Media.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

When thinking about Walter Cronkite, it is best to remember that the most important person present at any television newscast is not the anchor, but the viewer. Don Hewitt himself, the famed CBS producer who worked right alongside Cronkite, made the distinction nicely when he brandished a remote control and said it was not a remote control at all, it was a gun, with which viewers killed people on the screen that they didn't like. It doesn't matter how famous the anchor is – Katie-Couric-famous, for example – if enough viewers kill her, she'll be gone.

In 1962, when Cronkite became the CBS News anchor, the remote control metaphor didn't work, because there were no remote controls. Anyone not watching CBS already, had to stand up, go to the set, click the channel selector, and go through a mini-engineering routine with the antenna, the vertical and horizontal holds and the fine-tuner, until the CBS picture came in clear. It speaks in Cronkite's behalf, that viewers were willing to apply such slow deaths to the competition, to make Walter Cronkite the star that he became.

This is only one viewer's opinion, but Cronkite had the best pipes, by far, of any of the 1960s anchors. If I sit quietly and concentrate, I can remember what John Cameron Swayze's voice sounded like. The Huntley and Brinkley voices were distinctive, and recognizable, but Cronkite's was not only recognizable, there was an authority chord in it, like FDR, that made it more than affable. To the ubiquitous question, "What two people would you most like having dinner with," I would answer Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt, just to hear those two voices in conversation.

Probably at least one TV executive in the 1950s found cause to wonder if movie stars, with their huge fan bases, should be solicited as "news stars" on this new, explosive, small-screen medium. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been in radio news. But it would have been a short-lived thought. Television news was not competing with the movies, but with the evening newspaper, so news integrity was paramount. Then, as now, with the 30-odd-million remaining viewers of (legitimate) television news, it is news integrity first, fame second, which is why Katie Couric, with all her fame as an entertainer, has had such a hard time gaining traction as the CBS anchor.

It would hardly hurt, however, in 1962, if your untested host of this untested television newscast in fact reminded potential viewers of a "looks just like him" movie star. Cronkite had the perfect not only "looks like him" but "acts like him" match: Melvyn Douglas, a legitimate star (see "Ninotchka"), but ultimately an affable, even avuncular, one (see "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House"), and a two-time Oscar winner. Douglas also became a familiar television face in the 1950s, with roles in "Kraft Mystery Theater," "The Alcoa Hour," "Goodyear Television Playhouse," "General Electric Theater," "The United States Steel Hour," and "Playhouse 90."

Cronkite, who could have played the "Blandings" role as effectively as Douglas, took the evening news anchor chair on April 16, 1962. Viewers took to him. In September, 1963, the Evening News expanded from 15 to 30 minutes, and the modern network news show was born. It continued to be shaped very much by Cronkite, who understood the viewer's power, and the reason for it. Viewers literally invite their television news providers into their living rooms. Students learning broadcast news skills today are taught to assume a mental image as they are about to go on the air: assume you are sitting on a couch in the viewer's living room, telling your friend the viewer, who is sitting just across from you, the news. Cronkite created that image. Sitting comfortably on that couch five evenings a week, Walter Cronkite became the most trusted man in America.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

Empathy – the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Empathy-wise, I am a white, educated, married, male in his 60s. I understand, even if it has not been explicitly explained to me, things about other white, educated, married males in their 60s.

Thus I can say, plainly, that there are things we do, and do not, never will, understand about women, both in general and in their demographic subsets, including Latina. I, personally, am on record, long since, as saying that men and women are so completely different that it is astonishing that we can occupy the same general physical form. (You white men, if you are nodding, that's okay.) My wife, Karen, and I, have frequent, lively, discussions, including a humdinger yesterday, based on those differences. Empathy tells me, without it being explicitly explained to me, that this is the reality in practically all marriages.

It is from this empathy base that I have followed the Sotomayor hearings and occasionally heard a voice screaming under its breath. It is my voice, and this morning it is screaming at Sen. John Cornyn. I am not proud of it, but I fear that many white, educated males in their 60s scream under their breath while watching Sen. John Cornyn on TV, though I have no objective citation for this feeling.

Sen. Cornyn is talking to Judge Sotomayor again about her remark that a wise Latina can make better decisions than a white male. He is saying this like it is a bad thing, in a judge. My empathetic while male voice, with its awareness of the difference between men and women, is silently screaming something like, you idiot, it very well could be a bad thing, or it may be a good thing (depending on whose ox is getting gored), but it is most definitely a THING. Many times a woman's decision will be better than a man's, and vice versa. The point is, that dynamic is ALWAYS ON THE TABLE. I feel strongly that that's where it should be, between women and men, because negotiating the decision starts to develop an empathy for the negotiation.

My feeling is that Sen. Cornyn knows something about this. He is married, and if he is not aware that Sandy, his wife of 29 years, knows things about Sonia Sotomayor that he could never, ever, know, then he will never, ever, understand why Sandy starts yelling at him, when he gets home, about why he asks such stupid questions on television. But 29 years is a long time not to kick a total blockhead out the door, so I feel he must be smarter at home than he is in public, and he has figured out it is better to check his brain at the door of the Capitol. I wish that brought some relief to my empathetic self.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments

Joseph Pulitzer is the granddaddy of modern media code.

Recognize the name? The Pulitzer Prize is the ranking award in the journalism profession, but not the career equivalent of the Oscar, which does light-years more for the winner's media codes than a Pulitzer Prize does. That is not to say I would complain if I won a Pulitzer. It would make me much more famous than I am now, which is an extremely valuable, but also risky, media code. But people wouldn't recognize me on the streets, the way they would Oscar-winner Russell Crowe, which adds millions to the fan base, and thus millions to the paycheck.

The media codes were in full development in the media in the 1870s, when Pulitzer came along, but no one had ever used them quite the way he did. He recognized the power of the media codes to manipulate response and build that into a business plan, which revolutionized the media as a business and set into motion what today we call sensational, and tabloid, media. If you want to view Pulitzer's genius first-hand, find a page or a screen showing Paris Hilton's picture, and look into her eyes. What is in there? Nothing. Why are you looking into them? That is the genius of Joseph Pulitzer, embedded there.

Because the Pulitzers and Paris Hilton both started with him, media historians pat Pulitzer's back with one hand, and slap him with the other. He was an immigrant, an Austrian, who worked in newspapers and then found his way into publishing in St. Louis, in the 1870s. He founded The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, still in business 130 years later and, on its website, still embracing as its platform these words from Pulitzer written at his retirement in 1907: "I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

That was the pat-on-the-back Pulitzer. Joseph Pulitzer's mission as a publisher was to give his readers quality, responsible journalism that would make a difference in their lives and in their communities. The historians call it the birth of a "new journalism," and Pulitzer worked so hard to set the new standard, with the Post-Dispatch and later The New York World, that at the time of his retirement, he was blind, and afflicted with a nervous disorder so severe he could tolerate only the softest sounds.

Pulitzer, as he went to work as The Post-Democrat's publisher in 1878, also knew all that noble journalism wasn't going to make a difference to anybody if the readers didn't pick the paper up. So he attracted readers to the paper by manipulating them. Readers, he understood, were both useful and usable. Useful as informed citizens, which was the noble part, and usable as humans who could be persuaded, through strong forces they might not understand, to pick up a newspaper, just as you were persuaded by the bare curves of a beautiful leg to pick up this book. That was the business part, and it is still in wide use today. It is called the "Pulitzer rationale:" use crass manipulation on the front pages to sell the paper, at which point you have placed quality, responsible journalism in the reader's hands.

I say "crass;" manipulation is manipulation. But some types of manipulation are legitimate. Some stories and images are so powerful that the viewer can't resist being drawn in, even if he or she is simultaneously repelled. The sequence of images from the morning of 9/11, produced and directed by media code experts in Al Qaeda, is the reigning example of such power. The attraction can also be as subtle as National Geographic's photo of a beautiful Afghan girl, or a gentle story about octogenarians being married in their hospital beds. It can be as standard as wildfires raging through national forests, or a last-second pass deflection caught and carried forward for the winning touchdown, which a legion of Americans remember four decades later as "The Immaculate Deflection." Some things that happen are simply sensational. It is an extremely useful media code.

It is so useful, in fact, that media producers look for ordinary things that happen that can be made to look sensational, by tweaking the facts in some way, or a bit of artful misrepresentation, or perhaps stretching the truth slightly, or by outright lies, so long as nobody is libeled. This kind of sensationalism is at the heart of what is called tabloid media, for which there is a huge audience. For this, media guardians reach back in history and slap Joseph Pulitzer a good one on the side of his head.

But artful sensationalism shows up every day in legitimate, mainstream media. It can be as simple as a huge headline on the newspaper editions that are sold in vending machines on the streets. The headline is sized big enough to be read from a distance of 25 or 30 feet. Why? To catch the eye, and the curiosity of a potential customer who otherwise might have kept on walking. Pulitzer used that trick all the time, but not so effectively as his New York newspaper publishing enemy, William Randolph Hearst.

Pulitzer knew something else about readers being usable. He made his newspapers more appealing by making them appealing in more ways. The media codes are like DNA. All DNA is made of the same stuff, but it combines itself in unique ways that make us who we are. Media codes are all the same stuff, but show up in people in combinations that create specific interests which can be marketed to. These combinations are based not only on individual tastes, but on sex, age, income, ethnicity, nationality, education, all those groupings that today we call "demographics."

Pulitzer recognized and seized the business advantage of publishing a newspaper not for an audience, but for a group of audiences. He introduced "sections," focused on a range of demographic interests. His New York World featured national news, local news, city hall, government, business, Wall Street, editorials, sports, theater, books, music, food, homemaking, gardening, fashion, society, weddings, weather, color comics, crosswords, games, stunts.

Stunts? There has always been a substantial demographic who liked stunts, which tend to be strange and dangle an element of the unknown. In the 21st century, they have become the foundation for television reality shows. You don't see many stunt features anymore in newspapers, or that have actually been produced by the newspaper. That has become too lowbrow for the serious press. But if someone came along named Evel Knievel and launched himself on a motorcycle over a couple dozen cars side-by-side, that photo might find its way onto the front page of many serious newspapers.

Pulitzer's most memorable stunt involved a woman, and therein lay another lode of code. Even in New York, in 1887 women were expected to remain in what was then called the woman's world. Pulitzer made good use of that demographic with the sections devoted to fashion, home, garden, society. Then along came Elizabeth Cochrane, young and pretty and not at all interested in remaining behind a white picket fence. She was a very good reporter with a strong grasp of media code. Nobody had ever heard of Elizabeth Cochrane, so in the paper, she made herself more famous by using the byline "Nellie Bly," a name from a popular Stephen Foster song. She attracted readers by doing rough, totally unexpected stories, including a famous investigative story in which she faked being insane, spent 10 days in an asylum, and reported gruesome facts of the treatment of women there. The story was sensational, and caused a sensation, and an embarrassing official investigation.

It made Nellie Bly genuinely famous, and famous women newspaper reporters had rare value in the late 19th century. Pulitzer knew just what to do. He sent her around the world. Jules Verne had written a popular fantasy novel, "Around the World in 80 Days." Pulitzer decided to bet his readers it could actually be done, and not by a man, but a woman, making the stunt's media code doubly outrageous and 10 times as seductive. The paper ran a contest to guess her elapsed time, which attracted more than a million entries. When Nellie Bly completed the trip in 72 days, the stunt became real change, and therefore real news, that was reported in newspapers nationwide.
The year was 1889. People wanting to follow Nellie Bly's around-the-world adventure had to read about it in the newspaper. But as Pulitzer was introducing modern media code and the "new journalism," elsewhere in New York a researcher named Nikola Tesla was opening a laboratory to experiment with sending voices through the air from a transmitter to a receiver. In 1891, at penny arcades in New York City, Thomas Edison, with patents already on electric light and recording, introduced a machine called the kinetograph, that made pictures appear to move. In Europe and America, scientists were working with spinning discs, mirrors, electricity and selenium, a chemical element with interesting conductive properties, in pursuit of the growing conviction among researchers that not only voices, but pictures, could be transmitted through the air. How quiet the sky must have been, at the close of the 19th century. With the first tendrils of media code escaping off pages into the air, immediately finding sensational new form and dimension, the silence could not last long.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments

After resigning the Alaska governorship last Friday, Sarah Palin posted this on Facebook on Saturday, July 4, Independence Day:

"The response in the main stream (sic) media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans . . . How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country."

Palin is wrong. The media IS the country, and the documentation for that is IN Washington, in the National Archives. Most ordinary Americans, including Sarah Palin, don't understand this, because they have never been taught, that they, the people themselves, are the authors of the media principles, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by media professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."

Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Here's how it happened:

After the 1734 Zenger verdict, which established truth as a defense against libel or sedition, the young American press was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.

The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

When the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment, on display in the National Archives: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."

Edited down to the scope of modern media, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, buried in an amendment? Where is the power in that?

There are three answers.

The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.

The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.

They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?

We arrive at a point where it is useful to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If, in Gutenberg's time, the Bible begat mass media, did, in Jefferson's time, mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty-seven years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.

One hundred and forty-six years after Lincoln's quote, Sarah Palin speaks of media as "detached from the lives of ordinary Americans" and, "How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country." Hers is simple ignorance, yes, but also simply dangerous, for a national leader to believe and say such things.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

On this July 5, Rush Limbaugh is cursing John McCain for even being born. Bill O'Reilly has gone into 24/7 production mode on his next book, which he knows will be his last. Sean Hannity is polishing his resume to send to The Weather Channel. Ann Coulter is packing her surgical tools. William Kristol is looking into his mirror and saying, over and over, "What have I done? What have I done?"

All of these people make their living in conservative media, and they know, better than anyone, what is happening with Sarah Palin. She is getting out of politics, where she is a relative, low-paid nobody, into media, where she is still going to be a relative nobody, but an extremely wealthy, and visible, one. She is about to become the white, right, Oprah. Bye-bye, O'Reilly.

She already IS the white, right, Oprah, trapped in the wrong business. There are 20 million Americans out there who worship Sarah, who will attach themselves to everything she does, every move she makes, every product she endorses. By comparison, Oprah averages 8.6 million viewers daily, a Nielsen rating of about 5, and those levels have made Oprah an international celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Sarah only needs to switch businesses, from politics to media, and she started that switch Friday, when she resigned the Alaska governorship, which of course is a total waste of her star power.

If "Sarah" could start tomorrow, the show would be pulling a Nielsen of 6 or 7 by September, and I'm not talking about some Fox News production. She would be crazy to go to work for Fox. She has a proven business model for creating her own production company, down to the company's name, which would be Haras, Inc., just like Oprah's Harpo, Inc., which everybody knows is "Oprah" spelled backwards.

She won't have to learn anything, change the way she looks, change the way she talks, change the way she thinks. She is a media star waiting to happen. All she needs is a studio. Look for her to relocate from Alaska soon, to a media center in a conservative part of the country with a hub airport. Atlanta would be my guess.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

My God. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays. A cultural Apocalypse.

And so instructive, a sad but golden opportunity, in acquiring media literacy. Please note: media literacy remains constant, just as reading literacy remains constant. Only the characters change, presenting the new opportunity to understand the constant literacy. Below is a blog from two years ago, about media literacy. It was June, 2007, and famous people were making news, as they always do. At that time, the celebrities were Paris Hilton, being arrested and taken to jail, and Anna Nicole Smith, who had died too young. It may seem creepy, the way the sad stories about celebrities all look the same, but, like the old blog begins, it is only the media codes at work . . .

June, 2007 – So many opportunities lately to review the media codes at work. If you are wondering about media coverage of the Paris Hilton situation, the media codes are working pretty much as they are supposed to, just as they did three or four months ago after the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

Both stories would be tragic, if they had happened to just anybody. Since they happened to Paris and Anna Nicole, they made news. And the news made news.

People seem forever mystified by the media and how it works, but it is only a relatively simple matter of ages-old media codes at work. The codes are a collection of values, definitions and principles that the media uses to do its work. A few of the codes were developed by mass media, after its introduction to civilization in the 15th century, but most of the codes were already at work tens of thousands of years before that. All the media did was take those ancient codes, the original human "reaction package," and turn them into a business.

In fact that is the first key to acquiring media literacy. When you wonder why the paparazzi would chase Princess Diana into a tunnel, or swarm over a squad car to get photos of an airhead Paris Hilton in anguish, remember the First Law of Media: the media is a business. Paparazzi regard Paris Hilton with the same impersonal professionalism fishermen regard a prize tuna. The catch will sell for a lot of money to the purveyors, who know there is a select and faithful clientele for it. When you can think of CNN as a popular sushi joint, then you are starting to understand the Paris Hilton media coverage.

In the age of the Internet, with its very low production overhead, it starts to make good media business sense to focus exclusively on the Paris types. Hence the success of tmz.com, the Los Angeles-based online purveyor of celebrity news and gossip. The vast majority may call it tripe, but tmz.com doesn’t care about the vast majority. Its customers love tripe, and it wants to be the best menudo café in town. It's only business.

Given that reality, the media stories about the media stories about Anna Nicole, and now Paris, are amazing in their stances of bemused befuddlement, and cautionary clucks of concern. Media professionals – reporters, editors, critics – go to school and get four-year degrees in the media codes. Surely they understand that which they profess not to. So the media stories about the media stories must also be a business deal, based on an audience they know is there. This is the audience, and it is a significant one, of people angrily demanding that the media explain itself. Those people are serious about that, because they honestly have no clue about the media codes, and how the media does its job. That is perfectly normal; they lack media literacy, because they didn't study it in school. The New York Times took that audience seriously enough to place a Paris story on its Saturday Page One, one-column, left bottom of the page.

A meaningful media story about the Paris media stories would simply explain that it is media business as usual, nothing to worry about, that the nation is not in danger of falling in line to be led by Paris Hilton into the slimy bog of celebrity hugging at the end of civilization. Yet in its first paragraph, The Times spoke of a "national obsession with celebrity." If you check the CNN and Fox ratings for last Friday, the Paris peak day, you probably will find Neilsen ratings in the 3 range, translating into maybe eight million viewers, meaning 97 percent of viewers, or 292 million of the population, was doing something somewhere else.

I would not credit eight million people with constituting a national obsession. They do make a crowd at the menudo café, though, which is fine for the tripe lovers, who are not going away however much the "story about the story" audience may tremble for the nation. That audience, whatever its rating size, is only a spike audience, good for one or two newspaper editions or evening news segments. Then it will disappear, as the Paris story becomes old, which it will, as ancient as the Anna Nicole story, which was four months ago.

Footnote from the present: I would guess that the ratings would be about a 10 for Michael Jackson's death, 7 for Farrah, 4 for Ed McMahon, and less than 1for Billy Mays. Taken together, that means about 22 percent of the available audience paid much attention to the coverage, in accordance with the Second Law of Media, which states, "The media is an exercise in the power of small numbers."

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments

If it comes down to putting God or literacy first in my life, then, in front of God and everybody, I choose literacy. God, if you disagree, so be it. But I don't think you do. I am one of those people who keep you in my life, but not first. I am a believer in the God who gives people the gumption to help themselves.

My kind looks curiously at people, well-meaning as they may be, who trust you to take care of them completely. A present example: On Friday, The New York Times published a story about a football league in Georgia, created for kids of high school age who are home-schooled, probably for reasons of faith, because the name of the league is the Glory for Christ Football League.

Among several photos accompanying the story is one of a sign on a chain link fence at a practice facility. The sign reads:

North Ga. Falcons
Priority List
1. God
2. Family
3. Acedemics
4. Atheletics
There are no exceptions! – Coach McDaniel

God, this makes me mad. I am a teacher, and I bust my butt, semester after semester, to teach kids the important of literacy. In my subject, which is journalism, literacy is the First Cardinal Rule. Why? Because it is a matter of credibility. If a reporter misspells a word, or fractures grammar, in the first paragraph, the reader will ask: How can I trust this reporter to give me an accurate story about the game, or the election, or the budget, or the Glory for Christ Football League?

Yes, we all make mistakes, but literacy, God, gives us the power to minimize those mistakes, and the willingness to look up the spelling of a word, such as "academics," or "athletics," before committing it to public view. My kind of people thank you for contributing to the events that provided us the kind of brain which recognizes our opportunity to seize that option.

Please, God. You have such a high place in Coach McDaniel's life. Encourage him to consider an exception in his priority list for the young people in his charge. As it stands, he is not providing them their best chance to get into college. Forgive me, but they would not pass my class.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments

The young Elvis Presley gave the illusion, most clearly in 1957's "Jailhouse Rock," he could move his legs in two directions at the same time, which pretty much says it about Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

Thus, Elvis was the young Michael Jackson's role model. Neither man could sit still, while singing a song, and both men knew how to move it. They knew that moving was part of singing, at least the way they sang. More importantly, they knew, or learned, that's what their fans wanted. He's got a great voice, a powerful, sexy, voice, but an Elvis fan can't watch "Jailhouse Rock" without being moved, powerfully, by how the man is moving. By then, the movements were not spontaneous, but choreographed, and much deeper, sensually, than Elvis might have managed by himself. The movement was that important.

A Michael Jackson fan can't watch "Thriller" without wanting to move like the man, whose moves, if they originated with Elvis, were different from the King's because they were not only choreographed, but tightly choreographed. The step Elvis created was compared to a dead man walking. By Michael Jackson's time, he looked like a robot responding to a remote.

Did Michael take off on Elvis? I think so. Michael was the black Elvis. I have heard several commentators compare Elvis and Michael as being "unique," and I think that is right. The only difference is, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, came first. Michael may have liked to be the King of Rock and Roll, but that was already taken. So he became the King of Pop. He couldn't be "Michael the Pelvis," so instead he grabbed his crotch. Elvis had Graceland, Michael had Neverland. He COULD wear outlandish performing outfits, and he wore them a lot better than Elvis could, strapped into his white flight suits. And, of course, Michael married Elvis Presley's daughter.

Their lives - brilliance decaying into the bizarre - and deaths were eerily the same – cardiac arrest bringing down dissipated bodies in the early afternoon, at far too young an age – but Michael's death didn't rock me, the way Elvis's did, because I was an Elvis fan, and only a Michael observer. Fans attach, physically and emotionally, to their stars. In media literacy studies, we call it the "proximity value." There is a direct connection between what the star is doing and how the fan is reacting. That's physical closeness. Emotionally, the fan wants to be like the star. I wish I looked like that. I wish I could sing like that. I wish I could move my legs like that. I wish I was rich and famous like that. I'll buy stuff that will make me feel closer to him.

Michael's fans are shocked today, and every Elvis fan knows how they feel. It was early afternoon in The San Diego Union newsroom when news of Elvis's death arrived, on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 1977. Denise Carabet, an erudite, worldly, brilliant, business world expert and financial writer, came back from lunch with her mouth open a foot. Elvis never had a bigger fan than Denise, or me. Getting out the Wednesday paper that day was an exercise in professionalism for many of us.

Elvis had long since become a blubbery caricature, but he had long since given me what I wanted. I had those 1954-57 years, and when Elvis came back from the Army in 1960 and started singing pop songs and making snoozer movies, I more or less left him behind. It wasn't fair. But fans are rarely fair with their stars. I will take his Sun Studios songs with me to my grave, and when he died at 42, I discovered, angrily, that I had wanted him to live up to that immortality. Not for his sake (though that would have been nice) but for mine.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

A couple of weeks ago, in the Media Literacy series, I used the word, "paperazzi." That was not a spelling error. "Paparazzi" use cameras. "Paperazzi" use words. In the spring of 2008, Mayhill Fowler became the first paperazzo in digital media history.

Fowler was functioning at the time as an unpaid macramé journalist (another unfortunate, if not so dangerous, category of digital new-age journalism) for the online publication The Huffington Post.

The Post, exploring the potential for this new macramé journalism, had created a feature called "Off the Bus," in which volunteer "citizen journalists," performing essentially as bloggers, fanned out to write about the 2008 presidential campaign. Under its "Off the Bus Masthead" page, HuffPost describes the operation: "Off the Bus is a citizen-powered and –produced presidential campaign news site sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net . . . The project depends, in large part, on its on-the-ground citizen reporters and on cutting-edge distributed reporting techniques." No professional journalism experience was required.

It was not an original idea. Traditional print organizations, mainly newspapers, were already experimenting with "citizen journalism" as a trendy, attractive, feel-good (and very inexpensive) feature of their online operations. But by summer, 2008, Huffington Post was easily the largest citizen journalism venue, with 7,500 contributors on the rolls. Boston journalist Mike Barnicle likened citizen journalism to "300 million columnists with access to a computer." Someone else said it was like "a huge letters to the editor page."

As a veteran journalist and recipient of who knows how many letters to the editor, I read this "citizen journalism" news with sadness. It reminded me of the old town squares. Town squares, at the center of the small rural towns across America, achieved a place of heartfelt distinction in American 20th-century lore. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, insurance, movie stars, blue-plate specials and fountain Cokes had flowed.

In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macramé." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts hobbyists learning to knot yarn in a certain trendy way.

The business of journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now journalism is being gutted by backdrafts of stockholder economics and technology, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a fourth world that will not be easily explored or understood.

Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism on the rise, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. Mayhill Fowler became one of these. She is a pretty good writer, though long-winded and totally chronological, as most non-journalists are, and she has said some things that chill me. To Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post she said she "refuses to read her postings online, in part because she doesn't like the way editors sometimes change her lead sentence 'because they want people to click on it.' "

In the history of journalism, reporters have spent cumulatively thousands of years wracking their brains over a lead sentence (we call it a "lede" in the trade) that would click with people. People in journalism share a common living nightmare. We spend hours trying to think of a great lede, and, with sufficient experience, 75 percent of the time we succeed. But sometimes deadline arrives and we have to send the story off, a single chance gone forever, a bullet that has been fired, with a lede that is just functional. At 3 a.m., we wake up and there, in the darkness, is the lede we wanted to write, glowing, gloating, screaming at us.

But that's not it. All writing is hard work, and Fowler's writing shows that she works hard, even if she does not know a good lede from a bad clam. What is troubling is her indifference to readers who want to be clicked with, want a good lede, and the media illiteracy that reveals. Macramé journalists don't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."

Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close. Mayhill Fowler, unaware of the principles, writes to a mirror, in which only one person appears.

Escorting her through the looking glass would not be difficult. It is only the same screen, between the public and media literacy, that could so easily be removed by one semester in the public's education. In one of probably millions of comments posted online on the citizen journalist topic, journalist Patrick Salem hit the nail almost on the head when he said: "A good grammar book and a couple of hours with an old city editor is about all the training anyone needs to be a journalist." I might give the old city editor a couple of weeks, but otherwise I agree completely. The same result would be achieved if Mayhill Fowler read this Media Literacy series every Monday. As a citizen journalist, she is the subject of a purpose of this blog: If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to "open up" newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101.

The code is the subject – and I am trying to keep it the sole subject – of this blog, but once a media literacy project is under way, it is almost impossible to keep its subject from expanding. For example, not until now did I suppose I would have to address the common good sense of journalists identifying themselves to people they want to question. Now that Mayhill Fowler has introduced the word "paperazzo" into the media glossary, it is important to take a couple of paragraphs to look at journalism ethics and strategy.

It's probably not necessary to go into too much detail about the original paparazzi. That famed, or infamous, industry, seeks to record with cameras the unguarded moments of well-known people. Celebrities employ laborious, often degrading, and sometimes devastating defenses against the paparazzi, but the best defense – the ability to disappear on command – is not available to them.

Not so with the paperazzi. Twice, as of this writing, Mayhill Fowler has succeeded in publishing unguarded quotes from famous people – then-Senator Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton – who didn't know she was a paperazzo. They do now. And now that the threat is known, they have an effortless, foolproof paperazzi defense to employ. They can simply shut up. Thus is journalism's access to "the widest possible range of information" crimped, in a way that may be difficult to undo.

“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Newsweek political journalist Jonathan Alter told The New York Times.

“In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question,’ ” said Jay Rosen, a journalism educator and the co-creator, with the Huff Post, of Off the Bus. “We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this. We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.”

What a strange thing for a New York University journalism professor to say. His explanation begs a question. Well, several questions. What guidelines were there to think up? Wouldn't the old ones do? They have worked well enough for more than 200 years. Is media literacy relative in the fourth world? Does one standard apply to professionals like Jay Rosen, and another standard to media-illiterate macramé journalists who Mayhill Fowler represents so well? If so, won't that crimp the people's access to the widest possible range of information? Won't that abridge the freedom of the press? Could macramé journalism and roving bands of paperazzi ("Guidelines? We don't need no stinking guidelines") torch the First Amendment, and make the gutting of the old journalism complete? Will people, who gave the press its power, be the ones finally to take it away?

Are there answers to these questions? Yes. Two weeks with an old city editor should do it. Or you can read this blog, and go to the media literacy sites it links to. It's only education.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Every time a pair of human eyes falls on a newspaper page, an ironic screen, as strange as it is ominous, slides automatically into place between the two. Strange, because it exists. Ominous, because of its power. Ironic, because of its source. Only a few people know it is there. The general public has no idea.

The screen conceals media codes that are embedded in the page. The same is true of whatever media your eyes are looking at: a television screen, a movie, or the pages of a magazine, or a book. The codes determine the design, content, delivery and effect of the media message, much the same as the rules of English determine the design, content, delivery and effect of an ordinary sentence.

With this code, the media can read you like a book. Media professionals use the code to create thousands of media products that are offered to the public every single day. From this blizzard, the public picks and chooses, without ever understanding why, the media products – from categories of information, entertainment, and manipulation – it wishes to consume.

Some of this content is necessary, indispensable in a democratic nation of free people. And some of it creates problems that cause the public great worry, such as "Hannah Montana." Children as young as four and five years old become swept up in media influences they don't understand, particularly influences to worship celebrities, both living and animated, to imitate their heroes and, most crucially, to buy things they are made to feel will bring them closer to their heroes.

Children and young adults, ages 4-18, become the financial backers (through their parents' wallets, routinely) of billion-dollar media industries, best exemplified by celebrity worship and professional sports, without the slightest idea of what is happening. This is not to say nobody should emulate stars or watch sports, which is fun and has emotional benefits, but fans should be at least provided with strategies used by media megabusinesses targeted at them, and some details about how it works.

Thousands of adults in America, never having received a day of media schooling, complain openly about media performance, and the deterioration of that performance in the last 20 years. Media-bashing is a primary activity in the blogosphere. True, much of it is blogoblather, but much of it is serious. The Project for Excellence in Journalism cites "growing skepticism about journalists, their companies and the news media as an institution."

The skeptics write letters to the editor like this one from my files, from a perfectly serious San Diegan named Stuart Jewell, which goes to the heart of the issue in a single sentence: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”

It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs.

This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they didn’t receive any media education in school. How can a consumer complain about the job the media is doing, with no idea of the rules the media uses to do its job?

Scariest of all, media consumers of all ages are being invited to become part of the 21st-century media, actual practitioners of the trade. If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to “open up” newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101. These are the principles that I want known to citizens in places where newspapers are introducing what they call “participatory journalism,” or “citizen journalism,” or what I call "macramé journalism." It scares me to read, in The New York Times, that such newspapers mean to become “a virtual town square, where citizens have a say in the news and where every reader is a reporter,” without some assurance that those readers are least are familiar with journalism principles that are older than the Constitution and are the bedrock for the First Amendment. I want to know if these macramé journalists have ever even heard of the media code.

Most of them haven't, even though the media code is no big secret. It is a relatively simple system of values, definitions and realities. You can learn it at any college or university that offers courses in journalism, marketing, public relations and advertising. I have known the code and have been using it in my work since 1969, as a reporter, columnist, essayist, author and educator. As a college educator, teaching journalism, I teach the code to more than 200 new students every school year. Practically all of them pass with ease.

It is only education, then, that keeps anyone from seeing and understanding the code. The screen, between the eyes and the subject, exists only because no one has taught the eyes how to see through it. Learning the media code is no different from learning algebra, except algebra is taught in American schools, and the media code is not. American children by the millions have graduated from its high schools with the algebra screen lifted, and the media code screen still in place. They are sent out to fly blind into lives that are informed, entertained, manipulated and shaped by daily blizzards of media code that they can’t see, and don’t understand.

It's best for all if the public knows what the media knows about this business relationship between the two. In this age, of all ages, the study of media code should not be confined to university journalism studies; it should be at least introduced in elementary school, and become a core curriculum class in every American high school.

Though that goal is not around the corner, the vital importance of making media literacy available to children in the digital world is attracting the attention of educators. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the News Literacy Project are two organizations working to bring media literacy studies into the public education curriculum. Says NAMLE: "Media literacy is a basic life skill for the 21st century. It is essential for a healthy democracy."

One of the NAMLE founders, Dr. Renee Hobbs of Temple University, in 2007 published a book, "Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English," a study of high school teachers who incorporated media analysis – journalism, television, movies, and Internet media – into the English curriculum. That is a logical step, and in the right direction, though understanding the media code might require a curriculum unto itself.

A non-profit organization called Common Sense Media, overseen and operated by a board and staff with impressive educational and professional pedigrees, is running a lively Website "dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families." Among their "Ten Common Sense Beliefs" is this one, No. 3: "We believe in teaching our kids to be savvy media interpreters – we can't cover their eyes but we can teach them to see."

All that is missing from that statement is the currency of media language, as it is spoken and employed in their work by media professionals and educators. When children – and adults – know the media code, they will have no problem reading the media the same way the media reads them: like a book. It starts with education. To change the media, change the audience.

That is the goal of this Monday Media Literacy series. When people learn to use the media code in reading the media, they take power back from the media. They pull back the curtain on the new Wizards of Oz. They become more informed consumers, whether the product is information, entertainment or manipulation. Informed consumers have the best chance to make choices they will feel good about. When the media Wizards start to realize that the consumers know the media code, know what is going on, it will move the media-public relationship toward a more honest balance of power. It can only happen with audience education, and accountability.

Labels: Media, Media Code, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments

The next time you read a story in the newspaper, look at the reporter's name, called the byline, at the top of the story. Let's say the reporter's name is Tracy Clark.

Tracy Clark considers you a best friend. In fact, you are the reporter's hero. Reporters have been taught to think of readers that way since their first semester of journalism school. Tracy is now a veteran reporter with 20 years of experience, and this morning he has a new story for you. He has been thinking about you since he started work on this story. Now, here he is, running toward you, somewhat out of breath, his eyes excited, lines of sweat on his cheeks. The more exciting the story, the more excited he is.

"Guess what!" he says. "What?!" you ask.

And then he tells you what happened. He gives you the first sentence of the story: who won a baseball game, a city council vote, a far-off devastating earthquake, a good (or bad) day on Wall Street, a medical discovery, an investigative story on lobbyists.

"No kidding!" you say, and then you ask your friend Tracy a question. The question is the first thing you want to know about the story, the most important first information you need that will explain what happened.

Tracy will answer. His response is the second paragraph in the story. Knowing that answer, you ask the next-most important question in your mind. He answers that; it is his third paragraph in the story. And so it goes: your questions, his answers, in your logical order of interest, until you have no more questions about the story.

That is the relationship, precisely, between a reader and a reporter. Unless it is a scheduled event (a stadium, a rally, a royal marriage), the reader has very little chance of experiencing the news first-hand, say, in an entourage following a president on a trip to Cairo. The growth of television and global communications, symbolized so dramatically by CNN, sometimes empowers readers to witness distant news as it is happening: 9/11, the "shock and awe" attacks in Iraq, a shuttle disaster, a Katrina, a Super Bowl, the World Series. Because of their onboard reaction package, humans are eager consumers of news happening before their eyes. The famous "white Bronco" slow-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson along Los Angeles freeways drew 90 million viewers, a Super Bowl-sized number.

But most news, even big news, happens away from the reader's view. And so the reader says to Tracy Clark, "Go get me the news," and hands over his reaction package, the ancient definitions and values of news that constitute the heart of the media code. Of course the reader remains blithely unaware of the transaction. Do you see the totality of the irony? In the media literacy gap in America, the media code is a secret hiding in plain sight. That may be in part because reported news looks so different from news as it is happening. It is also in part because the public is reluctant to admit its attraction to media displays of conflict, disaster, prominence, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. And demographics play a part, when specific groups with specific interests take exception to how editors democratize the news on any given day (see "What is News?").

Meanwhile, the Tracy Clarks have the tools necessary to complete their tasks, both in the field as they collect information for the story, and at their computers, as they analyze all that information, assimilate it into clear thinking, and then organize it into a story. Tracy uses a media code toolbox similar to the "reaction package," but including other tools essential to his craft.

Throughout the reporter's work with the toolbox, the reader remains his hero. Tracy, doing the work, is constantly aware of the reader looking over his shoulder. The reader has priorities. The first is accuracy. Thus accuracy, though it is an impossible goal, becomes the cardinal rule of journalism. Tracy has made mistakes in his 20-year career, and he remembers them more clearly than all the good stuff he has done, because accuracy is a matter of credibility. His workable goal is to minimize mistakes, of fact, of spelling, of grammar, of punctuation. He hasn't made many. His rule: when in doubt, check it out.

The reader's second priority is complete, objective content. Tracy must provide answers to all the questions the reader may have about the story. When he feels the story is finished, from both sides, Tracy will actually ask himself: "Will the reader have any questions about this story that I have left unanswered?" If Tracy's answer to that question is, "No," then the story is finished. If the answer is, "Yes," Tracy has some more work to do. Remember the guess-what scenario; Tracy will keep answering until you have no more questions about the story.

In many stories, all the questions can't be answered, because Tracy can't get them. Reporters must attribute all information to authorities or sources; the reader should never be under the impression that the information is coming from the reporter, unless it is a first-hand account such as a reporter covering a baseball game (and even then, only the players and managers can answer some questions). Routinely, authorities can't provide answers, usually concerning the fifth W: Why? Why did the Air France plane crash? When those answers are known, Tracy will write a new story.

When he feels that he has all the answers, Tracy will have a few pages of notes or tapes, if it is a simple story, or many pages, with other documents, if it is a big, complex story, that he must organize into files before he even thinks of writing the story. Imagine the files compiled by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in their series of stories about Watergate that resulted in the resignation from office of a sitting United States president. Imagine the files accumulated in answering the Why of 9/11. Throughout, Tracy has relied on the media code to guide his search. Remember, he is your proxy when he asks authorities for the answers he needs to bring you the story.

When Tracy's reporting work is complete – well, let's pause for a clarification. "Reporting" actually means collecting information. When that work is completed, the reporter sits down to write the story. Most of the time, stories are written on deadline. The simplest expression of deadlines is to picture the reporter in Abilene, Texas, a city of about 100,000 population, covering a Friday night football game for The Reporter-News. The paper prints only one edition, and Tracy's deadline is 11:30 p.m. (At large metropolitan newspapers, there will be later deadlines, as many as five or six, depending on the number of editions printed, and before the night is done, depending on when the game ends, Tracy may have written six versions of the story.)

In Abilene, the game ends at 10:15. Tracy leaves the pressbox, sprints down the stadium steps to the locker rooms for some quotes he knows you will want, and by 10:45 is back in the pressbox. He has 45 minutes to finish and file his story. In front of him are pages of notes and scribbled quotes. These he will analyze, assimilate, and organize, and write the story, which typically run 750-1,000 words for a high school football game in Texas.

At no other moment in the process is the media code more essential than in these next 45 minutes. The values and definitions, and other codes, de-mystify his task, no matter if the story is a football game, a Senate debate, or a hotel fire. He scans the information, looking for news. What is news? It's in the code: anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. He finds four bites of information that satisfy the definition. In the trade, these are called "features." A feature is the news; it is what the story is about. The rest of the information is details, and details explain features.

Next, Tracy determines: what kind of story is it? He makes the determination using the 5 W's and the 12 event values, scoring each in the story on their individual strength scale of 1-10. (Next time you read a football game story, score it yourself for the presence of the 12 values. Hint: proximity will score high if your team wins, and low if it loses.) As soon as this step is finished, Tracy can start, in his head, working on the lede. At this moment, with 35 minutes left, Tracy is furiously multi-tasking. He is working on the lede, he is grouping together features with the details that explain them, he is editing details, and he is starting to arrange the features and details into logical order.

The lede, a spelling of "lead" unique to journalism, is the first paragraph of the story, one clear and hopefully provocative sentence that tells the reader what the story is about. It is Tracy's "Guess what!" line. Editing details is a process of choosing the details that must be in the story (to answer all the reader's questions) and which details can be left out. Logical order is arranging the features and details in logical order of importance, from most important – the lede – to auxiliary details in the last paragraphs that may not even make it into the paper. Who tells Tracy, there in the pressbox, working at 110 miles per hour, what logical order is? You do.

This design of lede, edited details and logical order, is the famous inverted pyramid. Unlike the values and definitions, the pyramid did not originate with the public, but it exists today because the public approved it. The media actually created the inverted pyramid and introduced it into the media code at the time of the Civil War, 1861-65. Reporters had available a new technology, the telegraph, to send their stories back to their newspapers from the battlefields. Instead of days or weeks in the pouches of couriers, stories could be telegraphed to appear in newspapers overnight. This new speed was one of the four true revolutions in media history.

But there was a catch. Civil War correspondents wrote their stories in the only composition style they knew: the ages-old narrative, story-telling style typified today by novels, TV dramas, and movies. This design presented information in chronological order, and included many details for interest. The story developed slowly, to create drama, and the climax was at the end. Readers of the day had no cause to object to these 2,000-3,000-word stories.

The problem was access. In the 19th century, operating a mobile telegraph in wartime presented considerable logistics problems. Reporters found themselves lining up to use the same machine. Sending a narrative-style story required considerable time, and the line of reporters waiting their turn outside grew combative. Before long, the military officer in charge of the telegraph was agreeing to limit time on the machine and kicking the reporter out. "But," cried The New York Times, "I'm not even halfway through! I haven't told them who won yet!" Out he went, anyway, and in came the next reporter.

Under the circumstances, the reporters learned very quickly to flip their stories over – thus, the inverted pyramid – put the climax first, edit details to save transmission time, and send the story in logical order, so that nothing in the story after the officer cut it off was more important than any information that came before. In 1865, the Civil War ended, and reporters had no more need for the inverted pyramid. But it survived, and survives today, for one reason only: the reader liked it. It made the reader an editor. He could still read the whole, now condensed, story. But, in time, the reader learned that he or she didn't have to read the entire story to get the news. He could read five paragraphs, or seven, know he had the story's most important facts, and go to the next story. This is the way millions of Americans read the newspaper every morning.

When Tracy finishes his story at 11:29.50, and sends it, the story will pass under two and perhaps three sets of eyes before it is set into the page: the sports editor (or assistant editor working nights) and copy editors. These worthies edit the story with you-know-who in mind (when I edit, I actually imagine myself at home, reading the story in the newspaper). Copy editors, by the way, write the story's headline. Reporters DO NOT write headlines.

I need to acknowledge that what you have just read is an account of the media code's role in classic journalism since the mid-nineteenth century. More than 140 years later, the media code remains the heart of journalism. Journalism's body, however has changed radically. Television news has required reporters to condense stories to fit an average broadcast delivery speed of 140 words per minute, at a price of loss of story content and depth. Starting in the 1970s, television's evening news programs, both national and local, essentially killed the circulation, and eventually the existence of, evening newspapers. Business aspects, particularly corporate ownership, have exerted dangerous cost-cutting and political pressure on objective news operations. Internet news and information operations, with 24/7 deadlines, ridiculously low overhead, and a revolutionary business model, prompt media analysts to portray traditional news organizations – newspapers, certainly, but also television news – as dinosaurs lumbering toward the final abyss.

The traditional organizations are scrambling and struggling to adapt the Internet model, and those struggles are outside the scope of this Media Literacy series, except when journalism's 21st-century body seeks to reject the heart. Many online versions of newspapers and several all-online operations such as The Huffington Post, invite – nay, encourage – the participation of what they call "citizen journalists." Unless these participants are at lease as conversant as Tracy Clark in the media code, then they are not "citizen journalists" at all, but what I call "macramé journalists," or, worse, paperazzi.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab had it right in 1995, in his book, "Being Digital." He viewed the World Wide Web in a straightforward, uncluttered way, describing a new media world in which content no longer went out to the audience (the expensive, inefficient "broadcast" model), the audience came in to the content (it would only be files in a computer). He predicted the Internet would be a "spoke" system, like telephones, as opposed to a "loop," like cable companies. He said bandwidth problems would be solved by the replacement of telephone's "twisted pair" copper wiring with fiberoptics.

He even saw a new business model, in which Internet content providers, such as journalists, would be paid by the hit, or pageview. Each time a consumer visited the journalist's story online, the journalist would receive two cents. The Internet communications world that Negroponte envisioned was relatively simple, totally achievable, and utterly believable.

But the simple solution, in a revolutionary shift like the Internet, easily gets diverted, complicated, clogged up, slowed down, and damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the inevitable corporate question, "What's in it for me?" America Online (AOL) is a leading example. As an access route to the Internet, AOL in 1995 had no reason to exist; all a person needed was a computer, a modem, and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Once connected, the user moved about the Internet with free browsers such as Netscape. It was a simple A to B connection, but AOL managed to position itself between A and B, and sell memberships. It was a business model based on the ignorance of the audience. Other business models looked like interventions but were actually fierce resistance being put up by traditional media providers who saw the Internet as a threat to their old and lucrative way of doing things.

Simplicity quickly became the finger in the Internet dike, and all those business models blew right on through. It's hard to say how badly interventions like these may have deflected, damaged, and retarded the growth of what, in the beginning, looked like a simple, but magical, system that achieved its revolutionary effect by doing nothing more than turning around the direction of information by 180 degrees. Instead of progressing directly from A to B, the Internet lurched through a long and cluttered Web 1.0, iteration into a Web 2.0, and now seems to be trying to find its way into a Web 3.0. Tuesday morning, The Wall Street Journal in a special "Journal Report" section, summed up an All Digital Conference – the seventh annual – held last week in Southern California with such names as Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Carol Bartz of Yahoo, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and cable TV mogul John Malone. Their mission: to look at the Internet in 2009, "trying to figure it out." A fine time for that.

What they are trying to figure out is: "How do we get paid?" Nicholas Negroponte had the gumption to address that question in 1995: payments will move through the Internet in tiny amounts and accumulate dramatically through a multiplier effect. His Internet reporter of the future would be paid two cents for every visitor to his story. Given a global circulation, and it is a good story such as you might see in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the reporter might reasonably expect 200,000 visitors. The reporter earns $4,000 for the story, and we consumers have gotten our two cents' worth. At last. But first, there is all that business model wreckage to be removed.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments

I heard someone being interviewed on radio last week say, "The media loves conflict."

Of course that is not the case. It's the audience that loves conflict, and the media loves anything the audience loves, which is a fundamental principle in media literacy. The audience – people – developed reaction values like conflict, hundreds of thousands of years before the media existed. Mass media, brought into existence by the printing press, just turned those values, called a "reaction package," into a business.

Before media, people on this planet reacted to events around them – exactly the same way people still do – according to the values in this reaction package. There were – are – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity (physical and emotional), timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. Additionally, people reacted to changes in their status quo, and also to whatever threatened to change their status quo.

To experience the reaction package at the individual level, the same way people did before media, simply give up all media for one week. No books, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, or television, or Internet presentations of same. You will still react to events that happen near you, close enough to see, hear, or feel. The experience will be made most effective by placing yourself in a survival context, in a wilderness, say, where danger – the threat to the status quo – hones your keenness to respond, your reaction package.

The mass media, blasted into being as part of the Gutenberg Singularity, simply created a system for sharing the values in the reaction package. Today, that system lets people share the experiences of people reacting to actual events occurring far away, or fictional events presented as entertainment (such as "Survivor"). People love the system, because it empowers them to experience actual events vicariously, and to be excited by fictional events created to provide that excitement. The media lets people be life voyeurs. Is this the media's fault? People who lack media literacy, like the interviewee on the radio, like to think so. Thus the media comes under attack by people for giving the people what they want.

It's probably time to start putting a stop to this transference of blame. It's probably time for the radio interviewer, one of only about a million media professionals in this country, to correct interviewees when they say things like, "The media loves conflict." "No," the interviewer might say, "it's the audience that loves conflict, as long as the conflict is somebody else's." Audiences long before mass media, in ancient civilizations typified by Greece and Rome, were being magnetized by plays with conflict at their hearts. When Gutenberg needed a book title to market his new machine, he chose a book that laid out the medieval mind's direst question, the conflict between good and evil.

The Bible became a huge player in mass media, and it still is, still the best-selling book of all time, and now, maybe for the first time, presented as the definitive answer to the chicken-egg media question. When Gutenberg introduced the first printed Bible, he could not have done it because the media loves conflict; the media didn't exist. But an audience did. It wasn't long before the audience started to grow, and it dragged the media along with it. The audience is dragging it still. The audience needs to be reminded of that, every time one of its members goes on radio and says, "The media loves conflict." If he's going to shoot the messenger, he's going to have to start with the Bible.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

Webster's defines "literacy," in its most general sense, as "having knowledge or competence," as in "computer literate," or "politically literate." Thus "media literate" means having knowledge or competence in understanding media.

Without media literacy, you can only know what others tell you about "American Idol," such as this story in Monday's New York Times.
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With media literacy, you have knowledge and competence for looking at "Idol" in a way that gives you information to make your own judgments and decisions. The difference? Without media literacy, you may think that the talk about "conspiracy theories" is all about who won. With media literacy, you will realize that, if there were a conspiracy theory, it was partly about the winner, but mostly the show. You will understand why the Fox TV and the show's producers gave deep, satisfied sighs of relief when Kris Allen won.

The main media literacy tools in play here are timeliness, novelty, prominence, the threat to the status quo, emotional proximity and sensationalism.

"Timeliness," in media, means that everything gets old. News starts to get old as soon as it is published. That is why, in mass media, there has always been a race to be first with the news. But it also applies to entertainment and advertising. It's a longer shelf life than news, but on television (since we're talking about television), sooner or later entertainment gets old. Even "Seinfeld." Even "American Idol." Audiences never tire of conflict, or of the threat to the status quo, which are the core values of "American Idol." But they weary of this particular conflict, or that kind of threat.

After four to six years, the producers start worrying about the show getting old, and the audience losing interest. That was the big story about "American Idol" before the present season began. "Changes" were made, a judge added, auditions modified. "Reinvention" is a media buzzword; Madonna is the ranking expert in "reinventing" herself. Always, timeliness is the enemy, and it is as relentless in the media field as entropy is in physics. The remedy is novelty. How do we make it new again?

This season, the changes didn't work. Ratings were down. Producers got defensive. "It's ridiculous how big this show is," one told The Times. Something needed to happen. Then something did. Nothing like a sudden star, a fresh sensation, startling prominence, to bring the audience back to a show. In Britain, it was Susan Boyle. In America, it was Adam Lambert, whose impact was compared to Elvis Presley. The audience started to fall helplessly in love with him, a phenomenon called emotional proximity.

Trouble is, Lambert became too much of a sure thing. He moved to the front early and stayed there. If there's no horse race, no conflict, no "who's gonna win" threat, people lose interest. People started looking back in the pack, looking for someone to restore the threat, even hoping for someone to make it a race. They were looking for an underdog, which is the "David and Goliath" form of emotional proximity that is even stronger than Elvis worship, because more people identify with it. The economy crisis has turned America into a nation of Davids. Two hundred million adult American backs can hold up a lot of weight, but this is ridiculous.

And now "American Idol" has provided a David. Kris Allen. How lucky can Fox TV get? The threat lives! Millions more Americans, who will take their Davids where they can find them, even ones named Mine That Bird, are aware of "American Idol" than if Adam Lambert had won. Lambert will still get rich, Kris Allen will get rich, and, most of all, the guy that Fox needed to win, did. Next season Fox can play the threat card for all it is worth, framing "American Idol" as the all-American show where anything can happen, and probably will.

Last but not least, the "Idol" David comes with minimal cost to American culture. Critics fret that entertainments like "American Idol" threaten to drag the culture into a mindless, unprincipled wasteland. But the critics overlook another media tool, a law, actually, which states that the mass media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. Nielsen Media says 28.8 million viewers out of a population of 304 million watched the "Idol" finale, meaning 275.2 million of us were doing something else. Remember that, when critics try to call mass media the end of civilization.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

We are in the campus television studio this week, taping our newscast projects. Three talents per team, two news and one sports or weather. I sit over in the shadows and feel warm and fuzzy, watching the 20-year-old faces in the bright lights trying so hard to do good on TV.

We began the semester way last January learning the tools that journalists use to write stories. They are the same tools used to create all media products: news, entertainment and advertising, which I also call manipulation. Then we learn to write stories for print, as if we were newspaper reporters. But I tell them from the first that print is also a totally online medium now, also. I don’t know of a newspaper that doesn’t operate a Website.

What the students really need to understand, though, is that in the converging print and broadcast journalism world, they must know how to write the in-depth story, 1,000 words or so, and the quick 30-second story for broadcast. Already in television, reporters are required to write both. Right now, on television at the end of the 30-second story, the anchor will say, “For more on this story, log on to our Website, at knsd.com,” or wherever. There, you will find the 1,000-word version, written by the same reporter.

Very soon, however, the television will also be a computer, and the remote will also be a mouse, and if you want to know more about the 30-second story, you won’t have to go to no steenking Website; you’re already at it. You will only have to point your remote at the screen, click, and you will be taken to the in-depth “print” story. You can stay there, read as long as you like, then click Back to return to the newscast, which will be waiting exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a server.

Amazing, what this convergence will do to watching television. If you are a sports nut, a baseball fan, say, it will take forever to watch a baseball game. Anywhere in the game, at any time, if you want a player’s complete statistics, click on the player and they will appear. Such stats are already available online at mlb.com. Then when you have settled the bet, click Back, and it will take you to the game exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a computer, not an analog train at a crossing anymore, passing in front of you an inning at a time.

Back to my students. Writing for print is difficult for them, because they don’t read newspapers. They aren’t familiar with the rhythm of a story written for print. At mid-semester, when we shift into broadcast, you can see lightbulbs going on over their heads; this is the writing rhythm with which they are familiar, and they are much happier when their papers come back for rewrite without so much of my red scribbling on them.

I give them the raw information for the stories. The news stories are like “Parents Against Porn,” “Yacht Drug Bust,” “Fatal Auto Wreck,” etc. In sports and weather, the home team always wins (San Diego State NEVER loses to BYU), and the weather is always interesting (in our newscasts, it’s very stormy in San Diego). Finally, toward the end of the semester, the three-person teams produce the newscast script package, and we go into the studio where production students tape the show as if it were live. Today we started looking at the tapes in class. Most students are seeing themselves on the screen, at the anchor desk, for the first time. I never get tired of it.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

I closed last Monday's media literacy blog – "The Wizard's Toolbox" – with the argument that journalism, and all media, is practiced exactly the way people want. That is because people, not the media, created the Wizard's tools, the values and definitions that media professionals use to provide the public with news and entertainment. The mass media, created with the arrival of the Gutenberg press, simply took those values and definitions and turned them into a business.

If you want to verify this independently, close your computer right now and do not consume any media for one week. No news, no entertainment, no newspapers, no television, no movies, no magazines, no books, no radio, no recordings, no Internet, no advertising, including billboards.

When you have separated yourself from media, you will be living exactly as people did before media, before Gutenberg, going back to the beginning of humanity. Just as those pre-media people did, you will still react to the immediate world around you, using the same code with which you respond to media, a "reaction package" created from the basic Wizard's tools: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity, plus the "definition of news:" anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

Where did this reaction package originate? How did it arrive on the planet? Let's go back to "The Dawn of Man," the title that Stanley Kubrick provided for the famous opening scene of his 1969 movie, "2001 – A Space Odyssey." That scene could just as easily be titled, "The Dawn of Media," as it unfolds before us on YouTube.

(Note: the link doesn't show the entire sequence; for the completion of the sequence, click here. The musical score accompanying this section was discarded, happily, before the movie's release.)

That planet was inhabited by primitive humans, still ape-like, in Kubrick’s vision, who lived in groups of 20 or so in forbidding terrain. Watch them, for evidence of the code emerging as they reacted to their world. Conflict surrounded them: the heat of day, the dark of night, the growl of big cats in the darkness, the search for food, the conflict for water, animals competing for the food. Disaster struck suddenly, sensationally: a cat springing from a ledge, bringing a human down, and death was the consequence. The people were never free of the threat to the status quo. They huddled in terror under rock overhangs in the darkness, listening to the cries of the cats.

They knew about prominence. Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight. He acquired prominence.

People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. They were bound demographically, and felt a comfort in their physical and emotional proximity. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 20 to 30 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. They shared a strong human interest. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them.

When two groups came close together there was conflict. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s display dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.

Then something happened. A leader scratching for food beneath a mound of animal bones picked up a bone shaft, a femur, to move it, but it tapped the ground and small fragments flew up. The leader, curiously, tapped again. Bones flew. Again, harder, and harder, and bones broke, a skull shattered, and in the leader’s brain, a connection was made. Something had changed. Now we saw a tapir fall, killed by the bone weapon, who no longer would be a competitor for the food, and that was progress.

Then, in a transfixing moment, the tapir became food. At the end of his bone club, the leader saw a red color. He became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the tapir. He saw the same red color on the tapir’s battered skull, and it gave the same scent. He touched the red with his fingers. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat gathered a growl that grew into a roar of discovery. He knelt and lifted the tapir’s head. This took great courage. With equal care and helplessness, he sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled, and the flesh came away. Then he chewed, and then swallowed, and a novel new circuit in humankind was closed.

It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply that could be killed with a bone club. And at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways. Irrevocable changes had occurred.

At that point, Kubrick had his ape-man throw the bone club into the air and fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, where the reaction package remains intact, but life is not so intense, as you will discover in your week of media deprivation. In fact life in the civilized 21st century can be totally boring, day in and day out, which is why you will yearn for more action. Your reaction package cries for it. That is why, after Gutenberg, and the introduction of the media and shared media codes, for humans, there was no turning back. They discovered they didn't need to witness a sensational conflict; it could be imported to them, from far away.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

Media professionals – the new Wizards of Oz – use a deceptively simple set of tools in their work. There are 12 "event values:" conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity. There is one definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

There are other tools that come into play as needed, but these are the basic set. Let's call them the Wizard's Tools. They are the starting place for all existing media literacy education: Media Code 101. The Wizard's Tools create the code that resides in every scrap of print, video, and audio content produced by the seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. Professionals who work in those businesses learn the media code in schools of journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, script writing, filmmaking, campaigning, and terrorism.

Yes, terrorism. Terrorists in the last 20 years have realized they aren't in the bomb business at all. They're in the television business, just like the National Football League. Terrorists are frighteningly expert in the media code. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately. The answer is at the bottom of this blog.

All media has but three functions: to inform, entertain, and manipulate. The information stream includes news of all kinds. “News” has been defined in any number of ways, but the media wizards use a good generic definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. A plane crash, an economy crash, right-doing, wrong-doing, or a city council vote changes the status quo. Anything that may happen, but hasn't yet, is a threat to the status quo. Sports and weather are classic threat stories. In fact, sports is a multi-billion dollar business based on nothing more than the threat to the status quo.

The entertainment stream reaches the public through all seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. The most visible, literally, entertainment stream is television. Manipulation, or persuasion, shows up in media products such as books, commentaries, terrorism and advertising, intended to influence thought, inspire reaction, impact choices, and trigger spending.

Media professionals, knowing the media code, know how it works, and how they can make it work, to inform, entertain and manipulate the public. The public, at its end, is unaware of this. The media/media code/public circuit runs in one direction only, from the media toward the public, a dangerously unbalanced equation. When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, the power equation will start to change.

The American educational system never has exposed the general student population to the code, and that is strange, and dangerous, given the dominance of media in our lives. Even half a century ago when media was slow, and arrived in a newspaper, a couple of television and radio stations, a movie house, and some magazines and books, the media was still a significant part of a person's week, both as news and entertainment, and advertising.

Now, early in the 21st century, 100 years after the media code escaped into the air, the population is inundated in a media code hurricane. With their growing power, since the 1950s, to reach, inform, entertain, and manipulate people, media producers have learned to embed the code with sophisticated skill. The media codes themselves have evolved, and in many cases mutated into forms that in turn feed the sophistication. People have become aware of this new media power, and they complain about it, without having any knowledge of the power's source. This power, according to reports published in the summer of 2007, has turned American teenagers and pre-teens, down to age six, into a fifty-billion-dollar consumer group, obviously highly prized by media producers and marketers. Shouldn't their parents, and the kids, know more about media code? Like starting in third grade? Shouldn't the curtain be pulled back, on the new Wizards of Oz?

The media code is to media as DNA is to a human being. A human being, in all of his or her improbable complexity, is based on four DNA codes, A, T, C and G. Bringing a media product to life may involve divine inspiration, hundreds of sophisticated techniques, and cadres of highly skilled professionals, but the finished product is always based on the codes created by the Wizard's tools. This isn't rocket science, but media code is as genuine, and real in its discipline, as DNA is in biology, or the physics code on which Albert Einstein founded his great equation e = mc2. Media students typically go to school for four years to learn what the media codes are, how to identify them, how to quickly find them in huge piles of raw information, and how and where to embed them in media pages, scripts, layouts, campaigns, and plots.

The 12 media values, for example, are all present, each on their individual strength scales of zero to 10, in every media product you consume. You in the general public haven't seen them, until now, because you didn't know what to look for; no one ever showed you. When you see it, you will start to understand how and why the code influences and manipulates your reactions. Those strength scales, incidentally, are grossly simplified, for illustration purposes. A human being, reacting to an event on the ground, or one in the media, effortlessly produces a code combination whose composition may be described in parts per million, and is an exact, individual measure of response, unique to that individual. That combination, in its precision, is also an exact reflection of the individual’s identity; no two of us are alike.

Much of the time, your reactions are spontaneous and legitimate as you gain information being reported to you about events as they happen in the world. And much of the time, your reactions are being manipulated by code users whose job is to make you feel a certain way, particularly desirous, or make a particular choice, or decision. These code users create vastly lucrative markets composed entirely of American consumers who are too young to get a driver's license.

In the meantime, Americans are losing faith in the media. In its 2007 report on "The State of the News Media," the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that less than 20 percent of Americans "believe what they read in print." They claim bias and manipulation, even in the legitimate news flow. The study cites "continuing doubts" about whether print journalism "is being practiced in a way people want," a phrase I want you to come back and read again, when you realize how it screams with irony.

Yet evidence routinely surfaces, indicating these same people, in their doubts, really have no idea how the media does its job. In September, 2006, my home-town newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, stripped across the top of its Letters to the Editor page a series of letters complaining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.

One griped about a huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another letter thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of local teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.

Such reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions are there for all to see, right there in the page. Those values and realities are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. People know, without knowing, what the values are, because they created them. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business.

But the people don't realize that. Glance up at the Wizard's tools again. For now, just look at the event values. We know now that there are in fact 12 such values, each with a strength measured on a scale of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the newspaper, each on its strength of zero to 10.

When a media professional, in this case an editor, looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune the day after Hoffman sets a new Major League record, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.

Novelty is the event value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego! Clinton jumps to GOP!). Setting a record in major league baseball, "America's pastime," is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, and they were talking again in 2007 about Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades, until Trevor Hoffman achieved it in 2006. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.

The proximity value means the story happened close to you, either physically or emotionally, or both. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. San Diegans are physically close to stories about the home-town team. If Hoffman pitched for far-away Cleveland, or even Los Angeles, in San Diego the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page.

Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Winning releases strong feel-good emotions; most of us like to win, and millions of Americans get a vicarious charge from watching their team win, and, in San Diego, from watching Trevor Hoffman become the best relief pitcher ever. A "sports fan" is one who gets to share the famed "joy of victory and agony of defeat" without ever doing any work.

Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. Aside from 9/11, which is in a media code league of its own, the biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in San Diego against the Chicago Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.

Even after they know the code, and are able to see its presence in the page, more people than not may gripe about the front-page content selection. Why? Because of demographics, defined in the media code as "the science of dividing people into groups." Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see, based on personal interest. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story?

On that day, it was Trevor Hoffman. The "largest number of readers," in the editor's estimation, may have been only 20 percent of all readers, inviting 80 percent to gripe. But because of another code phenomenon, the Second Law of Media, the 20 percent was enough. In fact, a 20 percent response is enough to make an editor, or any media producer for that matter, weep with gratitude. It would be good if the paper could please everybody, get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 15 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader. It's the Abe Lincoln rule of media. You could give all the people all the news all the time, but it would be terrible for business. A reader knowing the media code would understand that, and perhaps be less inclined to doubt that journalism is practiced in a way that people want. In fact it's practiced exactly the way they want. As we shall see.

Quiz answer: The Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks, and the foiled airliner plot, were scheduled on routine weekdays to ensure maximum events values, and timed to maximize the hours of daylight that television cameras could focus on the disastrous, novel, sensational, images.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

You wouldn't ordinarily go to a newspaper's letters to the editor column if you were looking for a multimedia work of art, but one showed up this morning in The New York Times. From the headline – "In the Old Balducci's, a Hollywood Sighting" – to the writer's signature – Michael Tilson Thomas – the presentation was distinguished. It was a unique story, with provenance, sentiment, surprise, erudition, humor, whimsy, affection, correct writing, and stunningly illustrated – yes, a letter to the editor with an illustration – and, for complete enjoyment, requesting of the reader a degree of cultural awareness.

Balducci's was a Manhattan gourmet food shop, founded by an Italian immigrant in 1946, expanding from a single shop into a chain. Last week, its corporate owners (since 1999) shut down Balducci's Manhattan locations. Michael Tilson Thomas was one of thousands of New Yorkers, in New York and around the world, who read the news "with regret." At the end of the letter, Thomas is identified as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and artistic director of the New World Symphony.

In his letter, Thomas recalled a Christmas Eve morning in the 1980s when he went to Balducci's for some Christmas dinner fixings. It was early, before opening time, "but if you were there a few minutes early and they knew you, there was never any problem." In the deserted store, Thomas saw a woman, in fur coat and hat and oversized sunglasses. Thomas artfully describes how he recognized her – Greta Garbo – and honored her space when she recognized his recognition. She resumed her conversation with a Balducci's meat man.

Then, Thomas wrote, "At a certain moment, she turned toward me and said, 'It must be a fine old bird to make strong soup for a sick friend – at least five pounds!' " She got her chicken, paid, and left the store. When he got home, Thomas said he called his parents and told them he had had "an ultimate Jewish show business experience! I saw Garbo buy a chicken!" And then, with understatement and class, Thomas simply signed off: "I'll always be grateful to Balducci's for fresh food and lasting memories."

Above the letter and below the headline was the illustration, by Louise Fili and Jessica Hische: a caricature of Garbo, in an art nouveau style, one eye and famously arched brow, and a brush of hair, and in cursive script these words: "I vant to buy a chicken." Perfect. You can see it, with the entire letter, here.

It blew me away. Maybe I am overeager in a search for signs that newspapers should not, cannot, be abandoned. The new argument says don't worry about newspapers, it's not newspapers, but journalism, that must be preserved. Of course that is correct. The true battle for the future of the democracy is to move journalism online at as high a professional level as it has enjoyed in newspapers. But what about the future of casually turning a page and, in the midst of the journalism, discovering a short letter that has been recognized as a work of art, and presented in that way? You cannot link to discoveries, of art or anything else unique.

And the complete enjoyment of this art depended not on anything new or searchable, but on the individual reader's awareness that Greta Garbo was sensitive about her space, and she knew her chickens. It does in fact take a fine old bird – at least five pounds – to make a strong soup. I am beginning to think it's that reader awareness that I am really going to miss, after newspapers are gone. I wonder if that has become part of the editors' thinking, at least those who treated us to this art, in The New York Times.

Labels: Food, Media Literacy, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

In physics and mathematics, a “singularity” is a point or an event where the rules break down: nothing makes sense anymore. Thus, nothing about the future can be predicted. There is no way to “describe” the singularity or the world on the other side of it. It’s a world we can’t see, because we have no system for looking at it.

It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.

It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.

In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.

Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.

That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.

In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.

The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?

Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.

Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.

Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.

You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.

After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:

1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.

He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.

Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.

Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.

Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.

Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.

So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.

“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”

“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”

“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”

The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.

The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.

Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?

Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.

Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.

In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.

Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.

Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.

Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.

That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

On Wednesday, The New York Times published a story about the public becoming panicked by media coverage of the swine flu pandemic.

“Without the news media,” the story said, “the public would be dangerously unaware of the swine flu outbreak, but perhaps without saturation coverage on cable news networks and the velocity of information on the Internet, the public would not be so hysterical, medical professionals said.”

Protecting the public from saturation coverage may be one way to prevent hysteria. A far better way would be to provide the public with the power of media literacy. If the public knew how the media worked, in providing both essential and saturation coverage, they could rely not on protection, but their own understanding of media, in dealing with the coverage of a huge story. They would be empowered to receive essential information and non-essential information, be able to tell the two apart, and know how to react to it. How powerful an improvement would that be?

Here is a definition, used daily by media professionals, that makes the swine flu story so big. It is the definition of news: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo, or the way things are. The epidemic has begun and spread to a global level, which is a terrific change to the status quo. But look at the second part of the definition, the threat to the status quo. In the swine flu story, no one, from global leaders to heads of households, knows what is going to happen. This threat to the status quo – not knowing what is going to happen – truly makes the story as big as it is, both to media professionals and in the public mind.

So that is the way the story is reported: here’s where we are, but what happens next? This is not the media trying to scare people; it is the media reporting how scary things are, because of the threat. People have a total right to be scared, when a virus with original, unknown properties threatens to break free and roam the earth. Movies are made about such circumstances. Speaking of which, this very day, dozens of writers and producers, believe me, are busily collecting swine flu material, with just such a project in mind.

Is this cynical, or unethical? If it is, then why was there such mourning at the loss of Michael Crichton, a master at fictionalizing the threat to the status quo? In fact Americans love the threat to the status quo, which drives almost exclusively two of the leading media businesses, sports and weather. The threat also drives most novels, movies, soap operas and sitcoms consumed by Americans.

The threat is also a strong temptation to cable news producers battling for viewership in a cutthroat-competitive 24/7 television world. So Fox News Channel, to promote its newscast, airs a commercial saying “swine flu plagues the nation.” Of course Fox shouldn’t be doing this, but the only party with any control over such manipulation is the public. Media literacy would empower the public to recognize the line not as a call to alarm, but as a marketing hook, giving people a better chance to make the viewing choice they would feel good about.

As ever, the ultimate irony inherent in this kind of discussion is the origin of the definition of news, and the other values and definitions that media professionals use in their work, whether it’s news, entertainment or advertising. The media didn’t create these values and definitions; the people did. They don’t realize it, and should be made aware of it starting in, say, third grade. You’d be amazed how much media literacy people can acquire in a single semester, if only educators decided to teach it to them.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous movie titled, "The Wizard of Oz." Dorothy is whisked by a Kansas tornado up to the wondrously bizarre kingdom of Oz and embarks on a journey to find her way back home. "We're off to see the Wizard," she and her companions sing, and off they go, down the yellow brick road until, after several adventures, they reach the Wizard's castle in the Emerald City.

The Wizard is one big mysterious dude, a shadowy monster looming above all in his royal chamber, shooting out flames and smoke and roaring noise whether he is pleased or displeased. He, truly, is the fearful Wizard of Oz, whom no one in Oz dares challenge. Except Toto, Dorothy's cute little dog, who trots to a curtained cubicle at the side of the room, and tugs back the curtain, showing Dorothy and the others that the mighty Wizard of Oz is only an old humbug (definition: a trickster; a deceiver) gent, pulling levers and speaking into a microphone.

Media literacy is exactly like that. "The Wizard of Oz" is an allegory for media literacy, as that dilemma so perplexes critics of media and culture in the 21st century. Warnings about the absence of media literacy, and attempts to teach it, take the approach of finding ways to understand the monster, when all that needs to happen is for a curtain to be pulled aside, revealing the instantly recognizable truth. The media monster, which so intimidates citizens and critics alike, is only an ordinary person, using a set of tools that a third-grader could learn to use.

And should, too. No academic subject in America's schools – not language, not reading, not math, not social studies, not science – takes a greater role in the average American's life than media. But media is not a core subject in American schools, never has been. Students are graduated from high school and sent out into a media blizzard they literally don't understand. They have not been taught to "read" media, and so they stare at Oz without a clue.

A few of these graduates go on to become media professionals. In college, they learn the media tools and how to use them, in schools of print and broadcast journalism, entertainment production, marketing, public relations, and advertising. They learn which levers to pull, and when, and how to speak into the microphone for maximum Oz effect. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. The other 238.93 adult Americans go into other careers and remain essentially media-illiterate, which creates all kinds of problems in a media-saturated world. Americans today accuse the media of bias, irresponsibility, moral decay, Hannah Montana. And many of those accusations are true, because media professionals, the new wizards of Oz, know they can get away with it in a media-illiterate world, at least until someone pulls the curtain back.

The media literacy gap has become a wedge. The result is an American crisis, creating fear and mistrust, even loathing, of a media institution that is the life blood of democracy, vital to our society’s constant and reasonable demand for information and entertainment, and a huge hub of the economy.
Every Monday, we'll be pulling the curtain back and talking about these problems and the media tools with which to solve them. Learn the tools, unmask the wizards. Simple. Speaking of problems, here's one. Terrorists are, of course, not only media literates, but media experts. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately.

Labels: Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments