Sunday, February 15, 2015

Why Television Is Trouncing Film at Major Media Companies

TV vs Film, Part I

Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better?
By A. O. SCOTT

FOR as long as anyone in the movie world can remember (which may be only 20 years or so, but never mind), the fall season has been marked by a sober kind of excitement. The commercial entertainments of summer give way to more ambitious fare, and the grown-up segment of the audience goes back to the theaters looking for stirring performances, complex storytelling, important themes and big emotions. That’s the theory, anyway.

Recently, though, that eager, earnest sense of anticipation — which this section of The New York Times, along with similar preview issues of other publications, both reflects and encourages — has been accompanied, at least among insiders and journalists, by annual paroxysms of anxiety. A few years ago the dominant worry was that a glut of serious movies would overwhelm the marketplace, the films crowding one another out, a concern that was followed almost seamlessly by the fear that such films might disappear altogether.

Several of the major studios shut down or scaled back their specialty divisions even before the global economy began to sag. Since then producers have had more and more trouble raising money through private equity and the preselling of foreign rights. As DVD sales sink, and the best minds in the movie industry try to figure out how to take advantage of video on demand, Internet streaming and other forms of digital distribution, the business climate seems grimmer than ever.

Perhaps the movie business, as it has before, will take care of itself and figure out a way to wring profits from changed circumstances. What concerns me more, apart from the quality of the movies themselves (which will continue to vary and to seem, in successive weeks, either better or worse than ever), is the state of the audience. By which I mean you, if you have read this far. Do you still care about movies? Should you?

You probably do, and I somewhat self-interestedly think that you should, but how much of this is the force of habit and the weight of tradition? People like going to the movies. As personal screens and media platforms mutate and proliferate, with content streaming from all directions, there is still something special about the experience of buying a ticket and a tub of popcorn and sitting, alone or with friends, watching pictures projected through the darkness.

And movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video games, more important than viral Internet videos — even if those things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more fun. Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show guest spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date on the global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere! Everyone loves movies!

But love is never easy, and the relationship between cinema and its public, which has endured for more than a century, has hit a rough patch. Some data, and some impressions: This summer, box office revenue was higher than ever, but the number of people going to movies was the lowest since the summer of 1997. (Remember “Con Air” and “Men in Black” and “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”? It seems like so long ago. Or maybe just yesterday.) This apparent paradox is explained by rising ticket prices, and especially the lucrative practice of charging a premium for movies shown in 3-D. Some of the biggest hits of the season were presented in this format, which seems an especially profitable vehicle for children’s entertainment.

It was not a brilliant summer, even if some of the more dyspeptic complaining, like the novelist and screenwriter Joe Queenan’s apocalyptic late-July rant in The Wall Street Journal, might seem exaggerated. Summertime brought the usual fare — superhero sequels, action thrillers, goofball comedies, animated spectacles for the whole family, remakes and reboots and rehashes. A lot of these were not as good as previous examples, though it may be splitting hairs to distinguish levels of mediocrity. But the Will Ferrell comedy (“The Other Guys”) was not as good as “Talladega Nights” or “Anchorman”; the Steve Carell comedy (“Dinner for Schmucks”) was nowhere near “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; and, as Mr. Queenan noted at some length, the Adam Sandler comedy (“Grown-Ups”) was downright lame.

People went to see them anyway, and also “Ironman 2” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” and “Sex and the City 2” and “Salt.” And quite a few went to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a film that, whatever its flaws, showed originality rare in big-budget studio releases. It was also unusual in inspiring excited talk and obsessive argument on the Web and in multiplex parking lots. Did the top fall at the end? Did you hear that music? Was it all a dream?

“Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” virtually alone among the scores of summer releases, came close to sustaining the dream of Old Hollywood, spawned back when the movies enjoyed a monopoly on visual entertainment and preserved the utopian capitalist ideal of the summer blockbuster. Movies are for everybody.

But of course not everyone goes to the same movies. A few times a year it seems that way — the parents cry while the children giggle at the Pixar movie; even your nongeek friends need to check out “Avatar” or “Inception” to see what everyone is talking about — but more often movies follow the logic of division, splitting what used to be called the mass audience into demographic segments.

There are, supposedly, “guy movies” and “chick flicks”; genre movies aimed at teenagers; films that cater implicitly or overtly to various ethnic, religious and ideological subgroups. Sometimes there is crossover, or (to borrow from the jargon of electoral politics) high turnout from the base. And occasionally a movie seems to sweep away all distinctions — between popular and critical success; between box office power and awards prestige — and becomes the focus of passionate discussion that ripples through the culture.

When was the last time this happened? Will it happen with “The Social Network” by David Fincher or “Hereafter” by Clint Eastwood or “Black Swan” by Darren Aronofsky or any of the other ambitious movies lining up at the fall festivals? I’m not talking awards prospects or box office numbers, though these have become the easy measures of success. I mean a sense of cultural impact commensurate with the ambition displayed and the money spent.

Or will some of the festival favorites — “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this year’s surprise winner of the top prize in Cannes and showing at the New York Film Festival this month; or “Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt’s western; or Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” — send out ripples beyond the cinephile coteries that are sure to embrace them?

The salient question is this: Will any of the movies surfacing this fall provoke the kind of conversation that television series routinely do, breaking beyond niches into something larger? This bad summer movie season, in what seems to be one of the best television years ever, reinforces a suspicion that has been brewing for some time. Television, a business with its own troubles, is nonetheless able to inspire loyal devotion among viewers, to sustain virtual water-cooler rehashes on dozens of Web sites and to hold a fun-house mirror up to reality as movies rarely do.

Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”? Engaged recent American history with the verve and insight of “Mad Men”? Turned indeterminacy and ambiguity into high entertainment with the conviction of “Lost”? Addressed modern families with the sharp humor and sly warmth of “Modern Family”? Look at “Glee,” and then try to think of any big-screen teen comedy or musical — or, for that matter, movie set in Ohio — that manages to be so madly satirical with so little mean-spiritedness.

I swear, I’m not trying to horn in on my colleagues’ territory. But the traditional relationship between film and television has reversed, as American movies have become conservative and cautious, while scripted series, on both broadcast networks and cable, are often more daring, topical and willing to risk giving offense.

This may represent not an aesthetic fault line, but rather a corporate division of labor, since the television networks and the movie studios belong to the same conglomerates, and there is frequent crossover among executives and producers as well as directors, actors and writers. And looked at from another angle — from your couch to the living room wall, say, or from your armchair to the laptop or other mobile electronic device in your hand — the distinction between movies and television grows more tenuous every day. The most interesting, provocative and surprising movies of the coming season may well reach you through video on demand or Internet streaming, playing in only a handful of theaters so that critics can have a chance to spread the word about them.

Those movies will reach a smaller audience — a demographic niche existing uncomfortably within the mass public that has always represented the movies’ phantom ideal. And some of the best movies of the future may be movies for the few, or even for no one, expressions of idiosyncratic personal visions or ideas that linger happily at the margins. Oscar Wilde observed that there are as many publics as there are people, a notion that flips the utopian idea of movies for everyone on its head. At the movies, you’re on your own.

----

Important announcement regarding Exam #1

Greetings,

I need to be with my mom as she is facing some serious health issues.

This means that I won't be in Ithaca this week, so Exam #1 has been postponed until Tuesday, February 24, 2015.

We will not be meeting in class on TR of this week (but you'll still be meeting with Peter Johanns, per usual).

Instead, there will be an online exercise posted tomorrow-- Monday, February 16. You'll have one week to complete it.

Thanks.

Jack

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Review Sheet Exam #1

Review Sheet Exam #1

Intro to Media Industries

Spring 2015

Understanding Television System(s) in the United States (mostly from blog and class)

Why do the media exist in the United States?

How are the media in the U.S. different from media outlets from around the world?

Commercial broadcast network system

- networks

- affiliates

- studios

- syndicators

- advertisers

Cable/satellite television system

Public television system

Components of the broadcast system (networks, affiliates, studios, syndicators, advertisers)

How do the three different TV systems get money?

Nielsen media research (Share vs. Rating)

Ad rates for top shows of 2014 season (Sunday Night Football, The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory)

Know the major networks and the parent companies of each

Communication: Mass and Other Forms (blog + class + text)

Elements in the communication process

-source

-encoding

-message

-channel

-decoding

-receiver

-feedback

-noise

The major mass media

Intrapersonal communication

Interpersonal communication

Small Group communication

Public communication

Mass communication

Common characteristics of traditional mass media outlets

-complex and formal

-multiple gatekeepers

-need vast cash to operate

-exist to make a profit

-highly competitive

Future of mass media (segmentation, convergence, disintermediation)

Perspectives on Mass Communication (blog + class + text)

Functions of the mass media:

surveillance;

interpretation;

linkage;

transmission of values;

entertainment

Categories of the uses and gratifications approach:

cognition;

diversion;

social utility (conversational currency; parasocial relationships);

withdrawal

Historical and Cultural Context (blog + class + text)

Media time line (eight milestones in communication evolution—language, writing, printing, telegraph/telephone, photography/motion pictures, radio/TV, digital media/handheld devices

Importance of “writing” (alphabet, surface, social impact, etc.)

Printing (China, Germany)

Effects of the Gutenberg Revolution

Technological determinism

Significance of the telegraph to mass communication

Cultural impact of radio and TV

Digital media (mobile parenting, time softening)

Rules of Language (class)

Phonemic rules (pronunciation; how many sounds are there in the English language?)

Semantic rules (what we mean when we say things)

Structural/syntax rules (grammar)

Pragmatic rules (how we actually use language)

Normative rules (what is considered appropriate)

Articles Posted on Blog
FCC's Rule Regarding Internet as Utility
NBC Scrambles/Brian Williams Fallout
Importance of Live TV
ESPN Empire
TV vs Film, Part I
TV vs Film, Part II

MLB Internship info

Here's the information (my advice is to do it today, if possible). If you end up working there, please know that I'm willing to serve as your internship supervisor:

Thinking about what you would like to be doing this coming summer?

If you like baseball, enjoy working hard on award winning television sports programming, want to learn from the best, and have fun while picking up academic credit, then an internship with CKF Consulting and the MLB Television Network might be a good way to spend the summer of 2015.

CKFC staffs more than a third of the major league ballparks daily for MLB and MLB.com. We are looking for college students who want to take the next step in their professional development, pick up academic credit, and get a leg up on those looking for jobs down the road in television. You will work alongside our teams in Arizona, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado, Miami, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tampa or Washington, DC.

CKFC makes Ithaca College a priority in its internship program…CKFC COO Chris Fickes is TV-R ’80. If this opportunity sounds like something you’d like to consider, and to gain more information, please e-mail us at ckf@ckfconsulting.netwith your resume. The deadline for applications is coming up quickly.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

From the NYT:

MEDIA

Frantic Efforts at NBC to Curb Rising Damage Caused by Brian Williams

By EMILY STEELFEB. 11, 2015

The future of Brian Williams was the subject of secret meetings at NBC as it tried to contain the damage of his admission.CreditBrian Harkin for The New York Times

Hours before Brian Williams took the anchor’s chair for the nightly newscast on Feb. 4, a sense of dread began to spread through the Rockefeller Plaza offices of NBC News.

The military newspaper Stars and Stripes had just published an article in which Mr. Williams acknowledged that he had exaggerated an account of a helicopter journey in Iraq. Worse, Mr. Williams had written a weak apology, reading it first to the newspaper, then posting it on Facebook. None of his superiors knew about it.

Alarmed, the news operation immediately began scrambling to contain the damage, according to people with knowledge of the events of the last week. A team was quickly assembled to draft a statement that Mr. Williams could read during his “NBC Nightly News” show that evening to address the issue. But the Facebook post boxed them in. The explanations had to match.

Mr. Williams went on the air hours later and delivered the statement, including an apology.

That was the start of a week of rapidly cascading events that besieged both Mr. Williams and the network. Interviews with people with knowledge of the process, as well as former employees who spoke to people at NBC, portray a news division operating in crisis mode as it investigated its own celebrity anchor and assessed whether he could salvage his position.

Control of the situation quickly passed to Stephen B. Burke, chief executive of NBCUniversal. Thursday afternoon, Mr. Burke called the first of a series of secret meetings, this one at the conference room in the executive suites on the 51st floor. Those present included Patricia Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of NBCUniversal News Group, and Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News. Mr. Williams did not attend.

Mr. Burke acted decisively, according to one person, telling his colleagues to gather the facts so that they could make an expeditious but fair decision. He decided to hold meetings at 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. each day until the issue was resolved.

Mr. Burke sought advice from Mr. Williams’s predecessor, Tom Brokaw, who canceled a vacation in the Virgin Islands to offer his feedback. The two shared uncertainties about the best approach, with Mr. Brokaw expressing concerns about how the episode would affect NBC News employees, according to one person with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Burke also consulted David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast, who was busy on an issue with much higher financial stakes — Comcast’s attempt to gain regulatory approval for a $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable.

During the next week, NBC News buckled down as both Mr. Williams and the network came under scrutiny, people with knowledge of the events said. An internal investigation and high-level meetings continued through the weekend, including one Saturday morning at Mr. Williams’s Manhattan apartment, at which it was decided that Mr. Williams would have to temporarily step aside. It culminated Tuesday morning, when Mr. Burke told Mr. Williams that he was being suspended without pay for six months.

“This has been a painful period for all concerned,” Mr. Burke said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Williams, and those close to him, did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment on Wednesday. NBC did not make top executives available for comment. The people who described the events at the network over the last seven days spoke strictly on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Williams’s sudden fall captivated the media world, motivated soldiers and veterans concerned that the experiences of war be reflected accurately and set off a debate about the level of trustworthiness required from someone who explained the world to nearly 10 million people a night. But for NBC, it was about protecting the integrity of its news operation, once called the crown jewel of the company.

On Thursday, Ms. Turness and Mr. Williams addressed the staff of “NBC Nightly News” at an afternoon meeting, and he again apologized for getting the story wrong on the air and bringing an onslaught of scrutiny to NBC News. Tensions continued to build as news accounts and social media posts began to question the way that Mr. Williams portrayed his reporting, not only for the Iraq episode but also forHurricane Katrina and even in his tales of rescuing puppies as a teenage volunteer firefighter.

Mr. Williams appeared on the air that evening as speculation about his fate continued to swirl. He did not address the controversy, covering the measles outbreak, the online intrusion at Anthem insurance and the New York commuter train crash.

By Friday morning, the media frenzy was escalating. Ms. Turness and Mr. Williams addressed staff members at a broader editorial meeting held in a conference room on the third floor. Mr. Williams, who does not normally attend the meeting, apologized yet again. The mood was somber, as staff members tried to make sense of the controversy. That evening, Mr. Williams delivered what would be his last nightly newscast in six months, with executives unsure about whether he should remain in the anchor chair.

By Saturday morning, NBC executives saw that the story was not going away, the people with knowledge of the proceedings said. At the meeting at Mr. Williams’s apartment that morning, Ms. Turness, Ms. Fili-Krushel and other executives decided, among other issues, that Mr. Williams needed to get off the air. He had become too much a part of the news. Lester Holt, the anchor for “Dateline,” could step in.

Mr. Williams felt strongly that he needed to deliver the message. Executives agreed that he deserved that courtesy. He wrote the note, which executives reviewed, before it was sent to NBC News staff members Saturday afternoon. Mr. Holt informed viewers on the newscast that night.

The next day, Mr. Burke called another 10 a.m. meeting at his own apartment. Richard Esposito, the NBC investigative reporter whom Ms. Turness had assigned to lead an internal inquiry into Mr. Williams, told executives what he had started to uncover.

Mr. Esposito left, and the executives continued to discuss their options for the next several hours; a suspension was one possibility.

On Monday, top NBC officials discussed the issue again and concluded that Mr. Williams should be suspended for six months without pay. They decided to sleep on the decision that night. Mr. Burke contacted Mr. Williams to tell him to come to his apartment the next morning.

By that time, Mr. Esposito’s investigation indicated that Mr. Williams had gotten the Iraq helicopter story wrong on a recent newscast, a conclusion top officials found unacceptable. They also found problems with his portrayal of his Katrina reporting outside the broadcast. Mr. Burke informed Mr. Williams of his suspension. Ms. Turness told the staff of “Nightly News” after the broadcast that evening, with Mr. Williams calling in to tell them to take good care of the program.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Burke, Ms. Turness and Ms. Fili-Krushel addressed the NBC News staff in the third-floor conference room. Mr. Burke walked through how the decision was made, and Ms. Fili-Krushel said that NBC News was bigger than this one moment.

Indeed, NBC is hoping that it is bigger than one person. On Wednesday, the network changed the name of the broadcast from “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” to “NBC Nightly News.”

Correction: February 11, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of the chief executive of NBCUniversal. He is Stephen B. Burke, not Stephen P. Burke.

Extra credit opportunity

If you attend the event below, you will receive +3 points added to your first exam score:

Active Minds at Ithaca College is hosting "Change the Conversation," a presentation and discussion event that examines the ways that the mass media portray issues of mental health and illness. We're interested in helping students become more aware and responsible consumers and creators of media content, and believe that the event applies particularly well to students in the TV-R department.

"Active Minds Presents... Change the Conversation" takes place on February 17 (Tuesday) from 7pm to 8pm in Park 279. Students can (but are not required to) indicate their plan to attend at https://www.facebook.com/events/1419041251722233/.

Intro to Media Industries Spring 2015

Sunday, February 15, 2015

TV vs. Film, Part II

TV vs. Film, Part II

Why Television Is Trouncing Film at Major Media Companies

TV vs Film, Part I

Important announcement regarding Exam #1

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Review Sheet Exam #1

MLB Internship info

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

From the NYT:

MEDIA

Frantic Efforts at NBC to Curb Rising Damage Caused by Brian Williams

Extra credit opportunity

Sunday, February 15, 2015

TV vs. Film, Part II

Why Television Is Trouncing Film at Major Media Companies

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

PLAY VIDEO|3:28

How Brian Williams’s Iraq Story Changed

How Brian Williams’s Iraq Story Changed