'We are Katie Couric'
Posted: Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:30 AM by Will Femia
This Katie Couric plagiarism story is just so rich I can't even stand it. She should at least be thankful it wasn't discovered by bloggers first. Can you imagine CBS suffering another humiliation like that at the hands of bloggers? Hopefully independent online volunteer journalists won't have to endure as much preaching from mainstream news with this as a rebuttal.
Something I've been wondering about lately that bears some relation to Katie's gaffe is whether it is the result of a necessary risk of mass media. I'm not sure where the line is, but at some point in mass media a person becomes a brand. Their image is controlled by a marketing department, their schedule is handled by assistants and their words are written by producers (or assistant producers or interns or in Katie's case, WSJ columnists).
Part of what's so hard about someone like Katie Couric writing her own "notebook" is that included in the price of her celebrity is that in a sense she is only the "news actress" in the Katie Couric show. What I wonder is whether this is just part of television legacy culture or if it's a necessity for a certain level of celebrity. For all of the success of the Internet, I can't think of anyone who regularly performs at a network TV mass media level. Even when MSNBC.com regularly clears a billion page views a month, that's a different dynamic than the 8 or 9 million (ballpark) who watch Brian Williams every night. Will the Internet's model of cumulative, long tail, on-demand traffic volume eventually dissolve the idea of constructing a mass-market brand personality? Or is it just a matter of time before Web stars are reading scripts prepared by teams of producers and writers?
Speaking of puppet masters, remember when we saw that some anti-Bush bloggers were duped by a fake photo of Karl Rove with a Coptix folder under his arm? If you read the comments on that entry you saw a brief exchange I had with a reader named John Doe who asked about the background of the conspiracy theories surrounding the photo. It turns out there's a belief that the White House is using a private service to host its e-mails on GWB43.com so they don't become part of the public record (even if they're technically doing public business). I never paid much attention to the story (the anti-Bush conspiracy theories start to blur after a while) but there's plenty to be learned in a simple search. The reason I bring all this up again is that GWB43.com has reached mainstream news. It won't assuage online accusers that e-mails on that service have reportedly been accidentally been deleted. What were the chances?
Speaking of mainstream media types using other people's words without credit, ESPN radio big guy attacks sports blog little guy - The coverage has a real "Imusian" quality, including questions about whether the apology is sufficient.
Speaking of Imus, I feel like I should say something about it since I'm getting so many comments and e-mails, but I'm not sure I have anything original to contribute. From inside this building and sort of inside NBC I can offer that the company is very diverse so it's not surprising that there was a lot of internal pressure to fire him. I've been thinking about whether Imus's act is old fashioned (compare with the comedic social/political commentary of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) but I could just as easily believe that the whole episode is nothing more than MSNBC hiring a jerk and getting more than they bargained for (wouldn't be the first time). I've been reading all the comments and mail people have been sending me but I haven't approved any for the blog because I don't care to host any fights about the characters of Imus, Sharpton and Jackson. I am, however, interested in whether folks think this is a sign of some larger trend. Again, I'm nursing the idea that it's indicative of a generational shift, but I'm not totally convinced. Let me know if you see a bigger picture.
The hamster powered paper shredder (not real)
O'Reilly's lessons learned so far in drafting that blogger code of conduct. To his credit, he's not at all intimidated by the number of dissenting voices on the subject and is viewing criticism constructively.
Why I fired my secretary - This is the kind of thing you get in an e-mail with a thousand names on the To line but it gave me a laugh so I'm sharing.
I expected a page with the title "The Power of Make-up" to be another one of those beauty myth series. Instead it shows how one woman's look can change. It's a little over the top but still fun for a quick scroll.
Florida Legislature Forces University To Idolize Jeb Bush - Because the university wouldn't grant Jeb an honorary degree, his colleagues in the state legislature forced the renaming of the university's education school to the Jeb Bush College of Education.
This feels a little like spam, but it's a cool service, so who cares? It's based on some kind of image recognition software that can search images in the media and find uses of a certain face or photo. It's worth noting the phenomenon of Everywhere Girl who I think we may have seen in Clicked before. She's a model whose image in stock photography databases has put her in lots of ads.
Speaking of spam, Spam to overtake human-issued e-mails in 2007 - It's not clear from this article whether the amount of personal e-mail being exchanged is decreasing, though it does mention that people are using other means of communicating like VOIP and IM. When RSS first started to spread some people predicted that it would replace e-mail because you only get messages from people you want messages from (by subscribing). We see a similar situation with Twitter and all the friends lists people are compiling on social software around the web. More effective than filtering mail is to use a system that only involves people we know and trust. I already don't answer my phone because most likely the person calling is a spammer so it's not hard for me to imagine e-mail following a similar fate.
Still sort of speaking of spam (though it's not a very nice joke to make), remember those inexpensive laptops that were going to be distributed to poor people in developing countries? Here they are in action. (You thought that sentence was going to end with bad news, right? I don't know what the accounting looks like for the program but I'm impressed at how quickly it went from idea to practice.)
Juvenile snicker headline of the day
Mom, I'm an atheist. NOTE: Mom curses out loud. A lot.
The math of the Weeble
I had no idea the distribution of single people in America was so east/west. What's that about?
The belt flip - This has tragic local newspaper headline written all over it.
Malaysian rap - The last few seconds are in English. Reading the comments I think the song is about conflicts between people who speak different dialects.
Following in the vein of thinking about women in the tech community, I enjoyed these two women reviewing some Bluetooth gadgets. It made be revisit Shiny Shiny with an eye toward what it means for tech material to be geared to women.
Diabetics cured in stem-cell treatment advance - This story is seeing heavy linking from two communities. The headline itself is an obvious draw but political bloggers have picked up on a sentence in the middle of the article: "But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush." Defenders of Bush point out that he actually only opposes federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines, but doesn't oppose research using already existing lines. It's confusing to me that the article says that the stem cells in this study were drawn from the patients' own blood. So that would mean non-embryonic stem cells, right? Given the current efforts in Congress, it's probably a good idea to study up in preparation for what will surely be some dramatic election year propagandizing on the issue.
Over a million people have watched this Harry Potter puppet video in just a couple weeks? I don't get it.
Insights from the people who decide what cell phones look like.
"David Belle invented parkour in France. It has spread mainly by videos on the Internet, and has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill-seekers and martial-arts adepts." One such David Belle video.
"A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America" That song being "This is why I'm hot."
