This is John McQuiston's blog, where you can subject yourself to his musings, his music, his photographs and even some of his professional work. John does not always write about himself in the third person.
A cliche to be sure but what is a cliche but a well-said phrase that we are too lazy to restate. The tombstones in question here are sometimes cracked, broken and even scattered. Tampa's first mayor is among the city's luminaries buried in Oaklawn cemetery.
You can see a slide show of more images on my photo blog, to which I send you not to drive up its traffic but because its format lets me display larger images.
WPTV-TV in West Palm Beach has canned its sports staff and handed its sports coverage to a local radio station, according to the Palm Beach Post.
Axing sports departments was once the province of bottom-feeding stations throwing in the towel on a segment of the audience it was never going to reach. But West Palm's NBC affiliate is a long-time powerhouse in that market, just like WFLA in Tampa was when it decided it could get by with just one on-air sports anchor. Instead of outsourcing to a radio station, WFLA shares sports reporters with the Tampa Tribune — which, like WFLA, is owned by Media General.
WFLA does still have a sports photographer. The Post article does not explain how a radio station is going to put together video highlights and stories or how a guy whose afternoon drive radio show begins at 4 o'clock will do TV segments at 5 and 6.
Not that it matters. One reader comment to the WPTV story sums up a growing attitude toward sports among many stations: "nothing personal... but ch 5’s sports was a minute or two of headlines... my 8 yr old could do it and for $100 a week... welcome to the new economy."
The TV station probably figured that no one was watching that "minute or two of headlines" so why not put someone on who will promote his appearance on the radio all afternoon. Click here to see a clip of the radio host Even Cohen who will now tackle TV duties.
This will make more sense — and be funnier — if you have worked in television. But maybe not so give it a try for ten seconds. If you hate it, I'll refund your purchase price.
More than a decade after the term was coined, tradition media have not learned how to avoid becoming roadkill on the "Information Superhighway." The question facing journalism in a free market is how to make enough money from it to pay the people who produce it.
"Technology makes it cheap and easy to distribute news for anyone with Internet access," says media mogul Rupert Murdoch. "But producing journalism is expensive."
The obvious solution, he says, is to force readers of online news sites to pay for the privilege. That works for entities such as the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch now owns, but the WSJ generates content for which readers will pay a premium. The stories you read there aren't available anywhere else.
How many other media outlets can say that? Even the WSJ, which once charged for access to all of its content, now gives a lot of it away for free. People can find most stories in too many places for any of them to be able to charge money for them.
Ads don't seem to be enough. People who are willing to let commercials interrupt their TV viewing get offended when ads pop up in front of what they're reading online. But just because ad revenue from websites don't make up for what newspapers and TV stations have lost from tradition ads doesn't mean that an ad-supported model won't work for a strictly web-based outlet.
Eventually, some enterprising reporters — in more than one sense of the word — will come together to form cooperatives that will take advantage of the cheap distribution channels now available without any of the baggage (printing presses, delivery trucks, broadcast TV towers and too many middle managers) that are sinking traditional media.
Bing made a big splash but left little ripple effect. Microsoft's attempt to edge into Google's hegemony of the search engine market has not made much of a dent, at least not among visitors to my sites.
I wrote back in June about the challenge ahead for Microsoft. To say that Bill Gates & Co. still have an uphill climb understates the Everest that lies ahead.
So far in November, 85% of visitors to this blog who arrived using a search engine got here through Google. Six percent used Yahoo; four percent bing. For JohnMcQuiston.com, it's 90% for google vs. 8% for bing, with Yahoo mopping up the remaining 2%.
Google is only slightly less dominant among searchers who land at Personal-Documentary.com. Seventy-nine percent use Google, six percent Yahoo and 2 percent bing, tying it with Google Puerto Rico.
So says a guy trying to sell it a resuscitator. "Burn down the buildings," says Michael Rosenblum on the Mark Joyella's LocalNewser blog. Rosenblum is a consultant who claims that his VJ newsroom model, in which traditional two-person reporter/cameraman crews become one-person do-it-all video journalists, will cut costs and increase content.
I have nothing to fear if the buildings burn down. Though I've spent most of my career on camera, I own cameras and am happy to do freelance jobs as a one-man-band, especially since it means I don't have to share my fee!
However, I'm struggling to understand Mr. Rosenblum's math when he claims that local stations have two-hundred newsroom employees yet put only eight cameras on the street. First, where are these local newsrooms with 200 people? Second, where are these newsrooms that have only eight cameras?
But if you market yourself as a media messiah, you need the faithful to feel the doom. Before you sell the cure, you have to sell the disease.
Not that TV news doesn't have its ills. But it's interesting that the lynch pin of Michael's solution is to get rid of the photographers — half of the people who are generating video content — when it's not too many people on the street we have but too many special projects producers, executive producers and anchors who only anchor that bloat newsroom staffs.
Michael would be cheered to learn that stations have gotten rid of sound men.
Unfortunately for Michael — and for the increasing number of TV stations that have decided that two-person crews are a luxury — operating a video camera is not equivalent to using a pencil. That is evident in the video on this page, in which Michael is nearly in silhouette thanks to a distractingly bright computer monitor in the frame and no light on the subject.
If no camera light was available, it would have taken approximately ten seconds to find a darker web page to display on the monitor and another ten to put the camera's iris on manual and open it up to brighten the subject's face so it wouldn't look like we were trying to hide his identity.
This matters because video quality affects how viewers judge the product's credibility. If you don't have 20 seconds to get the camera shot right, how can I think that you took the time to get the facts right? If your video looks amateurish, the reporting will too.
Competent camera work doesn't require a PhD but it does take more than two days of training and a week of practice to master. In a business based on video, I'd look for other fat to trim before I started cutting the source of my best pictures.
I wrote back in June about a local TV weather guesser whose previous TV credits include a co-starring role in a movie called "Assault of the Killer Bimbos."
Said weather guesser is apparently under the mistaken impression that this is not common knowledge. Hint: If someone as far outside the loop as I am knows about it, it's not a secret.
Yet she continues to edit her Wikipedia page to delete reference to her former career as an actress. Yeah, yeah. Hold the jokes about how acting is not a former career for anyone working on air in TV news.
In today's edit, she asks that people not restore references to "previous careers for security reasons." Job security reasons? Interestingly, she did not ask people to cease noting her acting credits because they weren't true, which is pretty solid confirmation that they are.
As the person who posted the latest update about this continuing saga on a local TV-related message board noted, it's not the crime; it's the cover up. The cat is out of the bag. Attempting to put it back in will work as well as trying to unscrew a pregnant woman.
And those are all the cliches I can muster at the moment.
Forget Hiring "Proofreader's" -- Just Read Some Guy's Blog
Update on CNN's "Obama's (sic) celebrate first Halloween at the White House" story: CNN has corrected the error in the headline. Perhaps not coincidentally, my web counter shows a visitor from the CNN Political Ticker blog admin account this afternoon.
Click image for larger version.
I'm happy to help. But disappointed that they needed it.
Apparently even headline writers at CNN don't realize that plural words don't use apostrophes before the S. Or as they might have written, "plural's don't use apostrophe's before the S."
Update: CNN has corrected the error. Perhaps not coincidentally, my web stats counter shows a visitor from the CNN Political Ticker blog admin account this afternoon.
Reporter, Writer, Video Producer, Essayist, Photographer, Musician, Observer. On air, On-line, Whatever it takes to tell the story. These are some of mine. See more @ JohnMcQuiston.com
It will become immediately apparent that these pages and the opinions they detail are neither sanctioned nor endorsed by any of the fine people or companies that hire me to do freelance work for them. It will help your reading experience greatly if you enable your browser's tongue-in-cheek font.
