Samuel Ebersole – Page 18

August 17, 2015

Stadium Rock: 50 Years Ago

50 years ago the Beatles played to a crowd of 55,000 fans at Shea Stadium in NYC. At the time it was the largest concert crowd ever.

See more photos here.

Know what else happened 50 years ago?

Answer: the Mass Communications program was founded by professor Richard Pavlik!

June 15, 2015

Rewiring my brain…this could take awhile

I’m approaching the mid-point of my year-long experiment. For 2015 I’m avoiding (as much as is professionally possible) all forms of electronic mass media. No TV news, no NPR or music on the radio, no podcasts, no Facebook or Twitter (except for an occasional post to the MCCNM department’s pages). Essentially I’m allowing myself print media. I resubscribed to the Pueblo Chieftain (newsprint edition) and have been reading a lot of books. (So far over 30, about 10,000 pages!) I continue to use email, course management software for classes, and I post content to various websites (this blog, YouTube, etc). I cannot turn off the switch entirely without taking a sabbatical from work.

I’m sure some of you may be wondering whether this constitutes professional malpractice for someone who is a professor in a Mass Communication department. Unplugging, while demanding that my students pay close attention to the media event or scandal du jour, may seem unfair or irresponsible. Perhaps you think that I’m just a curmudgeonly old fool, a closet Luddite, a technophobe, and a recluse. I can assure you that most (not all) of those assumptions are unfounded.

This has been, and continues to be, an experiment. It is not unique…many others have run this experiment before, and for many different reasons. And with such a small sample (n=1) you know that this qualitative experiment will have very little generalizability in the end. But it will matter to me. One way or the other I expect to learn a lot about myself, my media habits, my thinking process (with and without the constant barrage of media shrapnel), and my relationships.

Our discipline has a long history of media deprivation studies. Usually a researcher looks for a naturally occurring interruption in media services and uses the occasion to collect data on how people respond and react to the loss of service. Strikes by journalists or union workers who drive the delivery trucks, extended power outages, and natural disasters are all sources of media outages. Self-inflicted media blackouts are another matter altogether.

The reason for this experiment is to see if there has been a slow and steady decline in my thinking and my thought process as a result of my media consumption behavior over time. Reading Nicolas Carr’s prescient essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid, when it was published in 2008 initiated my concern. In the essay Carr bemoans his own ability to read deeply…and to think deeply about what he has read. For an academic, this is NOT good news. When I assigned Carr’s essay to students in my Media & Society class, they complained that it was too long…thus supporting Carr’s thesis. Can’t I have my internet, my social media, my podcasts, my news sound bites AND an intellectual capacity to contemplate the big issues? Not according to Carr.

A friend of mine who works with people with addictions tells me that it takes three years to change the mental processes that frequently drive compulsive behavior. The big question that remains for me is whether this one year of partial withdraw will be sufficient to see a significant effect. I’ll keep you posted…just not on Twitter or Facebook!

May 27, 2015

Stumbling Upon a Little Slice of America the Beautiful

Monday was Memorial Day, and since I had no other plans I decided to head east of Pueblo to grab some footage of the Arkansas river at flood stage. I’m working on a documentary about the Arkansas river, and footage of it flooding might be useful as I try to explain how this precious, over-tapped resource occasionally delivers more water than anyone wants or needs. I grabbed a few shots at the bridge at Avondale and then continued east towards Rocky Ford.

On my way I noticed a small crowd beginning to gather at the Fowler Cemetery. With American flags flying, and Boy Scouts and veterans of war in uniform, it quickly occurred to me that this was a Memorial Day observance at the local cemetery. Since I wasn’t on a schedule I decided to stop and grab a few quick shots. As I moved through the crowd I saw young and old, mostly ranchers and farmers, turning out to honor those who died fighting for freedom. They sang patriotic songs, a local minister delivered an inspirational speech, and the local Boy Scouts raised the flag…to which the crowd recited the pledge of allegiance.

After returning home a few hours later I edited a short piece that attempted to capture this little slice of America…and a scene that I’m sure was repeated in hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns across America. KOAA-TV used a portion of it in their 10pm newscast and uploaded the entire video to their Facebook page where it attracted more than 17,000 views, 570 likes, and 182 shares in the first 12 hours.

https://youtu.be/6T1mKhvU4yM

April 17, 2015

Stop, or I’ll Record

Stop CSU-Pueblo MCCNM alum Daneya Esgar (class of 2001) is co-sponsoring legislation before the Colorado state legislature. Before becoming a State Representative, Esgar was a news producer for local affiliate KOAA-TV. In her new role Esgar is promoting legislation that expand protection for citizen journalists and ordinary citizens who may find themselves eye witnesses to law enforcement agencies working in the local community.

HB 15-1290 “would allow a civil suit against a law enforcement agency if an officer seizes or destroys a recording without a person’s consent, possibly resulting in damages of up to $15,000.” Recent incidents in the news have demonstrated the value of civilian video recordings that have brought to light misbehavior by law enforcement personnel.

Body cameras on officers are becoming the new norm and many expect this change to have a positive effect. Now, with nearly every citizen having the ability to record and broadcast (in near real time) video from the scene of the incident, we may have even more evidence of wrongdoing and…perhaps more important…incentive to do the right thing in the first place.

Of course one downside is the loss of privacy that we all will experience as the “surveillance state” expands.

April 14, 2015

What happened in Vegas…

Many companies were demonstrating drone technology — Drone demo on the exhibit floor

Actually, it’s still happening. It’s the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters and it will be continuing through Thursday. According to their press release, “With more than 98,000 attendees from 150 countries and 1,700+ exhibitors, NAB Show is the ultimate marketplace for digital media and entertainment.” Conveniently for academics, the Broadcast Education Association annual convention runs concurrently and overlaps the NAB for a few days.

I, along with several of my colleagues from CSU-Pueblo, made presentations, attended sessions and workshops, and toured the more than 1 million square feet of exhibit space. Of course I didn’t see it all. Even if I had been there for the entire 4-day run I would have had a hard time seeing all of the booths, exhibits, and displays.

But I can tell you one thing…in just a few hours today I saw more pixels than some people see in a lifetime. There were 4K displays everywhere, and quite a few 8K displays as well. Monitor walls stretched from floor to ceiling, and there were $50,000 digital cinema cameras everywhere you looked. Companies (including: Adobe, Arri, Canon, Dolby Laboratories, GoPro, Red Digital Cinema, Sony, and Zacuto, just to name a few) were showing off the latest and greatest hardware and, perhaps more important, software used by radio and TV broadcasters and media content producers. One of the highlights this year is the aerial robotics and done pavilion. Other buzz words for 2015 include UHD (Ultra High Definition), ATSC 3.0, Virtual Reality, and SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand, e.g. Netflix and Hulu+).

So, what was my ah-ha moment? During a State of the Industry report one of the speakers made the point that the media production/distribution industry was moving from hardware to software. More and more of the tools that we use to acquire, edit, manage, and distribute content are primarily software tools. Once media content is digital, software allows us to do any number of things to it in the process of making it available to our intended audience. The future of media production will be less about engineering breakthroughs and more about software development. And in the future most of our media and software will live in the cloud. It’s an exciting time to be in this business.

April 2, 2015

Marketing Missteps Turn Into PR Pratfalls

Companies take risks and try new things. Sometimes they work, and other times…well, let’s just say they sometimes fail to produce the intended result. Starbuck’s “Race Together” campaign is just one of the most recent examples of a well-intended effort that backfired when consumers used social media to push back. Interactivity is one of the things that makes social media so incredibly powerful and valuable. But like any powerful force, if it gets out of control (which it so frequently does) it can wreak havoc.

Mae Anderson, of the Associated Press, makes the point that this is not unique to the coffee giant. Plenty of other marketing blunders have mushroomed into PR blunders when corporations lose control of their message in social media spaces. Coke, the Gap, Lululemon, and even J.P. Morgan have felt the wrath of consumers who didn’t like the: new taste, new logo, new transparency, or lack thereof.

In another AP news article the Starbucks campaign was defended as simply a failed attempt to try to do the right thing.

At its annual meeting, Schultz said he didn’t think Starbucks would solve the country’s “centuries old problems of racism” but that he thinks it can make a difference. He said workers don’t have to participate, and that stores will make customers another drink or cover up cups if they don’t like the message. “This is not a marketing or P.R. exercise,” Schultz said.

Even if we take their word for it and accept that they did not intend for this to be a marketing or PR exercise…it is clear that it has become exactly that.

March 31, 2015

The Infamous Spaghetti Tree Harvest

April Fool’s Day is a time to prank your friends and family members with a tall-tale or fib designed to make them believe something that isn’t true. When I was growing up it was not uncommon for one of us to look out the window first thing in the morning and exclaim, “Wow, look at that…it snowed last night!” Of course one could only hope that the target of the prank would look outside before remembering what day it was.

But how would you feel if your local news broadcaster pulled a fast one on you this April 1st? In 1957 the BBC’s Panorama program broadcast a 3-minute segment about the spaghetti harvest in the south of Switzerland. Here, see for yourself…

According to the hoaxes.org website,

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax generated an enormous response. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

To this day the Panorama broadcast remains one of the most famous and popular April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time. It is also believed to be the first time the medium of television was used to stage an April Fool’s Day hoax.

You can read more about it here.