MediaTide

I’m back just long enough to brag about two of my “star pupils”, who produced a five-minute documentary-style video for WCET-TV 48, a major PBS affiliate! It ran as part of “Focus”, a weekly public affairs show on June 5. This is a real “feather in the cap” for the students, the Interactive Multimedia Technology program, Clermont College, and the University of Cincinnati. Yes, the Program Coordinator/Faculty Advisor lined his promotion dossier with this, too.

Here is a link to the press release with all the details, and here is a link to the archived video. The students’ piece runs right after the anchor’s introduction, which is after the pledge pitch. Hey it’s PBS!

I was at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) annual conference last week in Las Vegas, NV.

My highlights: I was on a panel that discussed how old media can survive in the new media world. My segment dealt with how extra content on mainstream media websites can affect their ratings. The ratings data was already subject to inaccuracy before stations had websites, but now the ratings are even more suspect. I’ll make a separate post on this subject sometime soon.

I attended a panel discussion from some Kent State faculty who gave us some research data about social networks. Bottom line: They are here to stay and business need to understand how to capitalize on them.

On Wednesday night, a keynote address was given by two gentlemen who are heavily involved in reality TV production. They talked about their current project, “The Biggest Loser“. They told us some fascinating things about TV production. For example, crews shoot about 2000 hours of video that needs to be edited down to 15 hours! By contrast, the average non-reality TV series shoots a 3-1 ratio of raw footage to edited show. Each installment looks structured when the viewers see it, but it is chaos during the shooting. Unlike other shows, reality directors do not attend the shooting. The producers hand them the raw footage tapes and say “Edit them.” The directors and editors then have to go through the footage and put together an episode that makes sense and captures the viewers’ attention. Lots of stress, burnout, and turnover in the editing bays!

I was also elected vice-chair of the BEA’s Research Division. I’ll be coordinating the division’s annual research paper competition.

Perhaps my greatest moment of glory was in the Circus Circus sportsbook. Three-for-three, baby! Wednesday night I had the Portland TrailBlazers getting 11 points, and they lost by only 9. Then on Thursday it was the Dallas Stars and Tampa Bay Devil Rays taking care of business.

And kudos to the airports in Cincinnati, Charlotte, and Las Vegas. Free wifi is a blessing when you’ve got two hours to kill waiting for a flight. Circus Circus, unfortunately, charges $12 a day, but I guess if you spend a lot of time on the web when you are in Vegas, maybe you are the biggest loser!

Totally unrelated comment…Hey WordPress: Your new dashboard interface sucks! Hire one of my students to help you fix it.

For those who live in, visit, and pass through Cincinnati: Bring your laptops and PDAs!

The Queen City now has free wifi on the city buses. They just added this last week.

A few weeks ago, the international airport did the same.

It’s been down on the riverfront at Yeatman’s Cove park for over a year now.

Many outsiders might consider this a stodgy old burg, but in the tech area, it’s moving forward.

Here’s a pertinent news item with the advent of the new baseball season.

Major League Baseball is trying to restrict the activities of credentialed media. MLB wants to limit things such as the number of photographs that can be used and how often a blogger can update a game.

Welcome to the new millenium! Now that MLB and its member teams have their own websites, they are competing with the media outlets who cover the games. The more MLB restricts them, the less attractive their coverage will be. Thus, baseball fans might migrate more and more to mlb.com to get their baseball fix. You know how it is: More hits = more advertising revenue. The teams don’t need to depend as much on media outlets covering the games.

That’s one of the messages of Web/Media 2.0: The company has more control over their message. Look for other sports to follow suit.

It might be easy to catch bloggers who work for mainstream media outlets, but what about the others? MLB’s “bots” will be busy!

Will MLB try to limit my coverage of this story? And when was the last time you saw the word “conundrum“? I mean before today.

This just in…The Department of Justice has approved the merger between XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. The DOJ saw no monopoly (neither did I) and said, “What-the-hey?”.

The FCC has to approve it, but that is expected.

The NAB is steamed, as expected. Funny how they were OK with the feds passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened the floodgates for consolidation.

I expect that the first orders of business will be eliminating duplicate channels, reassigning the surviving ones, and figuring out how to make the radios compatible.

I am a Sirius subscriber and stockholder, and I can’t wait for this to happen!

All four sports on one radio. Heaven!

I expect that they’ll keep Sirius’ Howard Stern. I hope they keep XM’s Jonathan Schwartz.

I knew the DOJ would see it my way!

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival wrapped up Sunday. SXSW is quite possibly the hippest event on college students’ radar. New media/Web 2.0 plays a big part in covering this event.

Entertainment gossip blogger Perez Hilton got a warm reception from a crowd of attendees. He and his site are very popular.

Another blogger covering the event was Whitney Matheson, who authors the Pop Candy blog for USA Today. I wonder how she rates with the SXSW crowd. I’m guessing that USA Today isn’t on many of their “A” lists.

Just a guess, but I get the feeling that young people have a built-in distrust for anything corporate. Matheson seems to be a credible reporter and has that Gen Y “look”, but the fact that she is employed by Gannett might hurt her “street cred.” Or “cyber cred”, if you prefer.

Today is the first of two sports geek holy days that occur every spring: NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection Sunday. The other is the first day of the NFL Draft, which happens on Saturday, April 26.

At 6:00 pm Eastern Time, we’ll find out who made the tournament field of 65. The magic number in the decision-making process is the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI). In the Dark Ages, this mythical formula was kept secret. So, of course, a smattering of mathameticians and stat guys tried to simulate the NCAA numbers and published their own rankings on the web. Two of the more credible gurus are Jeff Sagarin and Jerry Palm. Sagarin’s are free, but Palm actually charges a few bucks.

Now, these sites are rendered useless because the NCAA publishes their numbers every Monday, and daily during the last week of the season. If there is a basketball analyst wannabe (don’t look at me!) who wants to predict who’s in and who’s out, or if there’s a moaner who wants to complain about their team getting left out (not me, either…none of my teams came close), why would they look at a simulation when they can get the numbers straight from the horse’s mouth?

OK, I admit that I’ll play “Dickie C” today and try to project the field from my living room. There’s only one site I’ll visit to get my numbers. Sorry, Jeff and Jerry. Your numbers just don’t matter to me anymore.

Two bold predictions before I even look at today’s RPI: The 31 conference tournament winners will get in, and New Jersey Tech will not!

I already got my free VIP Pass from CBS to watch and listen to games that I can’t get on the local TV stations.

Prior to getting into the teaching biz, I had an illustrious OK career in radio. I got out in 1999 after 25 years in the talent and programming end. I thought that was it, until I was asked to fill in for two quarters as the Interim Faculty Advisor for Bearcast, the University of Cincinnati’s student Internet radio station. That time officially ends Saturday, March 22, in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t have a lot to do. The student directors and staff members ran the station very well on a day-to-day basis. I presided over the weekly meetings, occasionally dispensing some real-life experience and knowledge so that they and the station could grow. I also performed admiministrative duties like approve purchases and put out the rare fire.

The highlights of my tenure:

We decided on an automation system that will be used when live DJs are not on. Right now, we “loop’ some CDs. We’ll sound a lot more professional in the off hours after it’s up and running.

The students picked a new logo, which will be officially licensed by the university. It will be unveiled in the near future.

The station hosted some very well-attended promotional functions on campus and at neighborhood businesses.

Some neighborhood businesses agreed to run the Bearcast stream on their in-house audio system.

Some of the students took a field trip to world-famous Internet radio station woxy.com to observe how they do radio.

I gave them some tips on streamlining their shows so they don’t ramble, a common symptom of college radio. I played some airchecks from some of the local rock stations, and played one of me on the old 96 ROCK from 1985. They got a big kick out of it.

We had a very productive discussion about profanity on the air. Some of the DJs were dropping F-Bombs and other similar words. The majority of the staff members don’t think it sounds professional, and wanted to impose penalties on DJs who did that. The consensus was that even though Bearcast isn’t bound by FCC regulations, it is a representative organization of the university. I found their views surprising and refreshing. It has nothing to do with censorship or prudishness. They want their station to sound better.

I learned a lot by working with these fine young students of radio. They are very mature, they are good, rational decision-makers, they get along well with each other, and they are serious about their studies and their careers. I will miss working with them. There’s not much else to say.

Hopefully, I’ll come back as a guest lecturer in future quarters. Their permanent advisor, Dr. John Owens, will be back from sabbatical. He won’t have a thing to worry about with this group!

I am wicked ticked off at what I saw on ESPN Wednesday night. No, not about my Cincinnati Bearcats loss to the Pittsburgh Panthers. I expected that, and I don’t let stuff like that ruin my day.

Here’s what got my goat. On the studio break at half-time, decked out in his standard red sweater, was one Robert Montgomery “Bobby” Knight. Talk about a mercenary. Here’s a guy who ripped ESPN apart for scheduling late night games because they interfered with academics. He also had a history of being volatile with media reporters who were just trying to get a story.

But now, because he needs a job and craves the attention, he takes a paycheck from the place he used to criticize. I would love to see him get an interview with a coach, just to have the coach tell him to jump in a lake, or something to that effect. That would be poetic justice.

The purpose of this blog is not to brag about my place of employment. However, UC-Clermont is farther ahead of the curve than many other institutions. We upgrade our computers every three years and our software every summer.

We have been using Microsoft Office 2007 since September. Some people hate it, but I’ve adapted to it. It’s not perfect, and it’s a total learning curve removed from its predecessor. Once you figure out what’s on all the tabs, it’s not that bad. The problem for me is that a lot of places are still using Office 2003. When I send a document to one of these neanderthals, I keep forgetting to save the doc in Office 97-2003 format. So I get the inevitable reply to resend it in the outdated format so they can open it on their computer. That’s OK when my 70-year-old cousin Frank, a retired construction worker, asks me. However, when a colleague at one of the top-rated research universities in the USA asks, then I get a little irritated.

If you want to play the tech game, upgrade regularly or step away from the workstation! And go play with your TRS-80.