Chapter 4: How electronic media work

This is about Chapter 4 of the book. I'm posting two articles. The first one related to the 4th Chapter, the second one related to the topic of "Electronic Media and politics, convergence and control of the media." You have to write a short, brief comment about both of these articles (two comments: 1 for the first, another one for the second). You should be prepared to discuss this topic at our next meeting on Tuesday March 7th .

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UG.


Article ONE:

Actually, It's Amazing Anybody's Watching This Stuff

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: February 24, 2006
The New York Times
TURIN, Italy


In many ways, it is a miracle that American viewers pay attention to the Winter Olympics at all. Here is a collection of sports, except for figure skating, that fade to niches, or to black, from one Olympics to the next.

You can marvel at the achievements of Joey Cheek or Ted Ligety, but six months from now they will be largely forgotten. (Cheek is a speedskater, Ligety a skier, for those in need of a cheat sheet.) Curling will be gone from CNBC, and everyone will wonder what you do with brooms and big rocks.

The reality of those routinely crowded mixed zones — where the news media gather after events to question sweaty athletes — will yield to sports pages in this country that are devoid of coverage of nearly all these sports.

In the four years until the Vancouver Games, programs for skiing, speedskating and other winter sports will receive negligible ratings, and those low viewership figures will not soar even for pre-Olympic events.

Consider that the most popular ongoing winter sport is hockey, but National Hockey League viewers comprise a mighty small lot.

It is astonishing that NBC is averaging 21 million viewers a night for the Turin Games, which is a testament to NBC's storytelling, the power of hype (though this time less potent than usual) and a strange quadrennial routine practiced by viewers these past 40 years. Somehow, they watch, as if the sports they formerly ignored had grown hundredfold in stature.

Much the same can be said for Summer Games viewing patterns, except that the United States is better in the heat than in the cold.

And the Beijing Games in 2008 will cause NBC the same type of time-zone woes that the Sydney Games did in 2000.

NBC is likely to face new and greater challenges four years from now in Vancouver, even though it will be a virtual domestic Olympics. CBS cannot help but see what ABC and Fox did to attack NBC's soft underbelly with new episodes of "American Idol" and "Desperate Housewives."

Electronic breakthroughs will further fragment viewer attention spans, and make people wonder just why they watched the Winter Games at all.

And what has amazed viewers in the past about the technological advances that NBC deployed for the Olympics already seem routine.

What, then, should NBC do in an environment of an Olympics every two years that has diminished the anticipation of the Summer and Winter Games in the same year, a practice that ended after the 1992 cycle?

Were we excited about Turin 18 months after Athens? Hardly. The biggest hoop-de-do was over Bode Miller's interview on "60 Minutes."

NBC's prime-time model is likely to stay the same. It pays as much as it does to dominate prime time. For Turin, NBC's rights and production costs totaled about $750 million; they will be close to $1 billion in Vancouver.

The best stuff will rightly be saved for prime time because it would be asinine financially to carry the downhill live at 10 in the morning.

But here are some ideas:

¶NBC should actually return to more storytelling. Once the home of too many overwrought athlete profiles, NBC appears to have gone the other way and isn't telling viewers enough about enough athletes. The vast majority of the 21 million viewers just didn't know most of these people.

Without a stronger foundation of profiles, NBC might as well just show the always-improving world feed, and throw in some announcers.

¶NBC should invest heavily in electronic graphics that give viewers a greater sense of what these athletes must do. Let viewers feel like they know far more than they do. Let them feel like an anonymous skating judge. It is one thing to use technology to compare how two skiers, side-by-side, traverse the slalom, another to delve deeply into slalom strategies.

¶Loosen the anchor job. Unleash Bob Costas. Get him out of his blazer and tie, get him outside. NBC's studio is removed from the world, and athletes and newsmakers must be invited in. Let Bob go out and play.

¶Embrace pay-per-view, or at least study it. Let viewers pay to see live what NBC tapes for prime time. There are already lots of live events on cable, and a pay-per-view model might please some fans, especially figure skating's. NBC would, of course, have to determine if such a plan would deprive its prime-time program of a significant number of viewers.

In Vancouver, women's figure skating might start in the afternoon, so it would be held for prime time. Would the real fans want a peek at the world feed before NBC takes hold of it? Would NBC even allow it?

¶Accelerate the interactivity that it is being tested on eight Time Warner cable systems with technology from BIAP Systems. Digital subscribers can press their remotes to view medal counts, athlete biographies and news about the United States team, but the technology exists to let viewers buy video clips and vote midrace on who will win.

Winston Churchill, the chairman of BIAP (and no relation to the former British prime minister), said by telephone: "When the viewer feels like they're in the vent, it will conquer passivity from the sofa."

But was sofa passivity the enemy of these Olympics in America?

Or is it a big, expensive event on the verge of jumping the shark?

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ARTICLE 2

By The Media Line Staff
Wednesday, February 15, 2006


ABBAS TAKES CONTROL OVER ELECTRONIC MEDIA
Just days before Hamas gains control of the Palestinian parliament, Palestinian leader Mahmoud 'Abbas has decided to take control of the Palestinian media, reports the Palestinian daily Al-Quds.

'Abbas issued decrees on Tuesday, ordering the transfer of responsibilities for the Television and Radio Authority from the Information Ministry, said unnamed sources.

'Abbas also ordered the transfer to his office of responsibility for the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

Hamas leaders dubbed the move "illegal."

Following the overwhelming victory of Hamas in the January 25 elections, 'Abbas is trying to preserve some power for the day after the new government is established. Last month he announced he would have direct responsibility over the Palestinian security forces. That declaration also raised criticism from Hamas leaders. Hamas recently proposed unifying all Palestinian armed forces under what they termed the Palestinian Army.

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