Looking back

In the article tied to the archive TV news report about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, the incident is called "the beginning of the age when the whole world knew what happened as it happened." The main reason why this tragedy earns that distinction is because many schoolchildren were watching the launch live since the shuttle would be carrying a teacher.

As a member of Generation X, of course I remember where I was when I found out: seventh grade, sixth period, biology class. I did not see the live telecast. I don't know if anyone was watching it in the junior high school, although it would make sense for a science class to have it on.

The details are fuzzy. Given the time it occurred, chances are I was at lunch or in one of the home economics classes. (The rotating series of courses--typing, cooking, sewing, metal shop, and wood shop--wasn't called home ec, but the name escapes me.) The biology teacher told us what happened. Random remembrance: I think we were studying reproduction that day.

If the explosion happened at 11:38 a.m., I didn't find out about it until sixty to ninety minutes later. For 1986 that certainly would have been fast-spreading news, especially inside a school's walls. Think how slow that would seem today.

Rewatching the TV news report above, I'm struck by the relatively leisurely cutting compared to the style of today. Perhaps the nature of the story slows it down, but I'd venture to guess that the pace is typical of that time.



To end on a lighter note, here are The Today Show anchors in January 1994--or so the clip info says--trying to figure out what the internet is and how to read an e-mail address. In fairness to Bryant Gumbel, the @ is a lowercase a in a circle, possibly because the symbol wasn't in the graphics program at the time, which is revealing enough in its own right. That said, the woman who isn't Katie Couric knew what it was.

As funny as this clip is now, seventeen years ago I think I would have been just as bewildered as they were.

Update: Although I referred to what happened to Challenger as an explosion, National Geographic says that it is a myth that the shuttle blew up. The problem is that it was often characterized as such in reports, and it certainly looks like that's what happened. The article clarifies it as breaking apart.

The article also claims that reports of those who watched this incident on live TV have been greatly overstated.

Friday night videos

My traveling of the last month is catching up with me, but let me add a little content to go with the videos. If you're of a certain generation, you likely remember when new music videos were exciting and relevant. Obviously MTV used to thrive on them, but NBC had a show that was sort of a must-watch if you wanted to be on top of things musically in one's formative years.



Music videos are still made, but aside from the occasional Lady Gaga video that raises a ruckus, now it's hard to believe that Friday Night Videos and the work they featured had any kind of cultural cachet. (For that matter, there was also Night Tracks on WTBS and the more offbeat Night Flight on USA Network.) Although Friday Night Videos lasted a lot longer than I would have guessed. It seems native to the '80s even if I knew it lasted into the '90s and improbably stuck around until 2002 (at least according to Wikipedia).

It's unlikely that either of the videos I'm showing here were featured on any of those shows, although The Tribe Called Quest video would have stood better chance of getting a slot than Velocity Girl. I picked them because they seemed like fun to put here. (They're also very of the '90s.)



Anyway, it's Friday night. Hope you enjoyed the videos.

Liquid nostalgia

I would like to believe I am a savvy media consumer and not subject to marketing gimmicks, but of course I'm fooling myself if I think that. I don't remember the last time I bought Mello Yello, but when I saw the revamped late '70s packaging now adorning the soft drink's bottles, I couldn't resist buying one.

Granted, I've always been partial to Mountain Dew when it comes to highly caffeinated citrus-y carbonated beverages, but I remember drinking Mello Yello when I was a kid. I was kind of excited to see the old logo. Was the updated branding really what turned me away from it? Does the old logo, modified slightly for this relaunch, have that strong of a pull on me?

Probably the answer to both questions is yes, to a degree. I don't recall making a conscious choice to stop drinking Mello Yello, but from a design standpoint the modern logo does absolutely nothing for me and even irritates me. Maybe it did push me away. The new retro version of the logo is close to what I grew up with and generates some small waves of nostalgia. It sounds silly, but seeing it reminded me of my childhood and prompted a desire to drink it again, even if just once.

But it's just a soft drink, you exclaim. I know! I'm a fairly levelheaded person, yet something as relatively innocuous as changing the logo on a product to one from my youth was all it took to get me to buy it on impulse. I hadn't been craving Mello Yello and haven't been drinking it regularly. It may have been a decade since I last had one.

And that, dear readers, is why it's sort of terrifying to think how vulnerable we can be to advertisements and branding. Even if we guard ourselves against the attacks, something will sneak up on us when we least expect it and override our rationality.

Oh, and I might buy one again.

Yesterday's news

I've been a loyal newspaper reader since I was a kid. I don't know what got me started, but I tended to read nearly anything and everything in it, whether it was reviews of movies I couldn't see or news stories about stuff that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I cut out some comic strips and pasted them in a spiral bound notebook. I loved a contest that the Dayton Daily News had in which one needed to scour the paper, or maybe just the classified ads, to find each day's special word or clue.

I moved off campus for my senior year of college, and that meant sharing a newspaper subscription with one of my roommates. After I graduated and moved into an apartment of my own I started my own subscription. Getting and reading the newspaper was important to me, and in a way having my own subscription was a mark of adulthood.

I love reading the newspaper, and working for one was a career path I considered. It happened that electronic media is where I ended up, perhaps because I had those college classes first, but there was still a certain mystique about having one's work in print. In 2008 I was paid for a hundred-word movie capsule published in a Nashville, Tennessee alternative weekly. It's the only time I've been a paid writer. I never saw a physical copy of the publication, but knowing that my name was in black and white was a point of pride.

Needless to say, I'm a publisher's dream subscriber. I remain on the younger end of the readership spectrum, and I've been getting the daily paper on my own for nearly fifteen years.

I've now gone a week without having the local newspaper delivered to my home Sunday through Saturday. The last bill I received showed an enormous price increase--it had essentially doubled from a year earlier--and I balked at paying that price. A call to subscriber services got me a reduced rate, but even that discount reflected a hefty raise in the cost. I decided to hold off on making a decision whether to accept this lesser, but by no means insignificant, rate boost.

Then I got distracted by the aftereffects of the car accident and taking care of more immediate matters. The subscription lapsed last Thursday, and no one was answering the subscriber hotline when I called on Wednesday afternoon to suck up the higher cost for another few months.

No paper was on my doorstep the next day. While I did miss seeing it and thought I should follow up and restore my subscription, I decided to give the situation some time. Would I really miss getting the newspaper every morning?

The answer is not a good one for an already struggling industry. Starting the day I have a nostalgic ache for the newspaper. It just doesn't seem right to open the door in the morning and not see it there. Nevertheless, I haven't felt like it's been necessary to renew. There were plenty of days when I never ended up with the time to read it, and the content I do want is accessible online, which I can easily pull up on my computer or iPhone. The time I miss it most is if I'm eating a meal alone somewhere, but in a pinch the smart phone will suffice.

I realize that subscription costs were raised because readers and advertisers are disappearing at an alarming rate, but in this instance the necessity or greed of doubling the subscriber price let me acknowledge what the daily newspaper was worth to me, even on those days I never actually consumed what I purchased.

Yes, I love reading the paper, and I won't hasten to pick one up if having a physical copy is more convenient in a given situation. Still, like so many others, I have a feeling I'm lost as a subscriber and doubt I'll spring for an online subscription if the local paper goes behind a paywall. I'm sad it has come to this, but the information remains accessible. It's just not arriving like a precious gift dropped on the doorstep in the early morning hours anymore.

Black and white and read all over

I suspect that I am a rare breed among those in my age group. I am a longtime newspaper subscriber. I got a subscription once I was on my own after college and have had it ever since. I read the newspaper with regularity as a kid and have really never stopped.

Recent years have not been kind to the newspaper industry. The internet has cannibalized a lot of the audience because much of the content is available online for free. The Columbus Dispatch tried putting articles behind a pay wall a few years ago but eventually relented. Their reason for backing off seems pretty obvious. Not enough people were willing to pay for the content, so they just went elsewhere.

Yesterday I received a letter informing me that my subscription rate will be increasing at the start of the next billing cycle. The shocker was what the new price will be. It's going up an unbelievable 48% from when I was last charged in November and 51% from a year ago. (I'm paying about $44 per thirteen weeks of delivery. The adjusted price is approximately $84 over the same time period.)

I still prefer to read a physical newspaper, but as much as it hurts me to cancel the subscription, there's simply no way I can justify paying that kind of exorbitant increase. I expect my reaction is or will be a common one among subscribers. If this is a tactic to keep the paper financially strong, the result may hasten its death instead.

I don't know how healthy its finances are, but this reeks of desperation. I checked out the subscription rates posted online. A discount is shown only for subscribing every day. All the other packages show "convenience" as the savings off the newsstand price. The weird thing is that the Sunday only price is actually 99 cents more than what's listed on the product itself. (Perhaps this means the price is going up.) Whatever, the case, so much for considering getting just the Sunday paper. Just getting it would roughly cost what an annual subscription has been.

I guess I better enjoy the papers that will still be coming until early March. After that a regular part of my longtime daily routine will come to an end.

Addendum: I think my percentages are off and should be double what I have listed, but you get the point.

Leftovers

A couple observations made during recent travel...

-The 1980s revival in popular culture is definitely here. The songs, references, and style pepper films, and today's pop music definitely leans that way. Flo Rida has scored a hit with "Right Round", which heavily cribs from a 1984 Dead or Alive chart topper. The difference: yesterday's songs sounded like robots were playing the music; today's sound like robots are singing.

-I was almost completely ignorant of the news of the day while at the film festival, so this swine flu stuff caught me unaware when I first heard it. It's funny how I could go about the day without worrying about PANDEMIC!!!!! until I was bombarded with doomsayers at every turn. (Honestly, I'm not that concerned.)

The news folk, particularly those on TV, need to get off their high horses about the swine flu story. I caught one piece talking about how dangerous Twitter is in spreading bad information, whether through jokes or misinformed comments, about the virus. Umm, maybe Twitter isn't as big of a problem as news reports and stories that prey on the public's concern.

Attention media

Repeat after me.

Knitting is not crocheting. Knitting is not sewing. The terms do not mean the same thing.

The Early Show on CBS recently did a segment on the supposed health benefits of knitting. Of course, for much of the piece the key across the bottom of the screen asks, "Can you crochet your cares away?" If that's not bad enough, one of the interviewees, vaguely identified as the founder of Behavioral Associates, says, "People who sew on a regular basis do have drops in physiological mechanisms like blood pressure."

This is the third media report I've found in the past week that freely substitutes the crafts for one another. As a writer, member of the media, and knitter, this sort of carelessness drives me up the wall.

Black and white and read all over

Back when I was deciding such things, "journalist" was one of my prospective careers. Unlike most kids, I regularly read the newspaper, and not just the comic strips and sports section. I had a favorite local sportswriter whose columns played a part in developing my pop culture awareness and humor-inflected style. (It's there...really.)

I don't recall why, but I didn't do much with the school paper beyond my freshman year in high school. I entered college undecided between print and electronic media, although I suppose even by that time I was leaning more toward radio and TV. Both my diminished high school participation and college choices may have had something to do with being uncomfortable conducting interviews, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering what I ended up doing. Maybe I felt okay as long as I was the primary one talking, or perhaps it had to do with making the calls to get the interviews in the first place.

Anyway, as I started publishing reviews online, I entertained the notion of one day doing film criticism for a paper. How novel, the idea of getting paid for writing. Today, however, I realized that even if someone offered me a fulltime job as a critic at a newspaper, the wisest choice would be to decline.

Longtime newspapers are shutting down or considering ceasing hard copy distribution because sufficient readership and advertisers aren't there to make a go of it. My local daily eliminated forty-plus positions last week, including just about all of the life/arts section. Working at a newspaper may not be the least secure job around, but it certainly doesn't look like an industry one wants to be entering or staking long-term prospects on.

Hearing today about newspaper cuts (and who got the axe) didn't necessarily surprise me, but it brought to light how bad things are in the industry. I feel bad for those out of jobs, especially those I know or whose work I've enjoyed, but I feel worse that I fear it's only going to get uglier from here. It's nice to know that I'm in a (hopefully) more secure job than if I'd entered the newspaper business, but it's a shame to see an institution like that crumbling before our eyes.

Radio radio

Coming out of college I was interested in getting into radio programming. I held the music director and program director positions, among others, at the campus station. I devoured Radio & Records and kept tabs on industry mags like Billboard and the usual suspects (Rolling Stone, Spin) in music publications. I was interested in what had come before, but I was also interested in what was new and exciting.

I listened to the radio quite a bit. Even before I had any aspirations to get into the business I can remember listening to the radio waiting to hear a new song from a favorite band or, if luck would have it, an entire new album at midnight before it was in stores. For that matter, I recall being in junior high and taping songs off the radio, usually trying to get versions without DJs talking over the intros and hitting posts.

When I got an iPod a couple years ago I almost stopped listening to music on the radio entirely, although in all fairness I had already been ignoring the medium in favor of CDs for awhile before then. Station playlists were ridiculously small and resistant to anything slightly unusual or untested. My tastes went more indie too. Still, there were some circumstances in which the radio had to be relied upon to hear something desired, whether it was yet to be released or an old favorite. You just couldn't lug around days' worth of music in your pocket.

No longer. The new (and perpetually delayed) Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses and Kanye West album are streaming online prior to release. (For what it's worth, I'm kind of surprised that the GNR record isn't terrible.) If my iPod could hold a charge long enough, its current contents would take almost eighteen days to play before repeating anything.

Advertisements, movies, music blogs, and, in my observation, video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have become better avenues for breaking new songs and repopularizing catalog tunes. Granted, the radio industry has consolidated ownership and standardized their product to the point of hastening their obsolescence.

Do under-30s even pay attention to the radio? It used to be that one's favorite station suggested something about the listener just like any other brand preference. What is the future of radio when we can easily program our own personal, portable stations without commercials or inane between-songs patter? Is losing what used to be community voices important?