I had high expectations for the movie “Traitor” and, unfortunately, felt more than a bit let down. The film follows Samir Horn (played by Don Cheadle) as a devout Muslim with a storied past; born in Sudan, trained by the U.S. military, fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, turned explosives runner around the world, and eventually rises the ranks of a high profile terrorist network plotting attacks against U.S. interests abroad and, eventually, closer to home. Throughout the story, Horn’s story evokes a number of issues: Western prejudice toward Islam, racial profiling, U.S. empire building, and misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

In an interview on NPR, Cheadle explains how he reconciles the serious issues of the film with its summer-blockbuster-action-film marketing efforts, saying “movies like this, I always want to smuggle in those kinds of ideas. We don’t have to lead with them, but I like it when people can walk out of the theater with something to talk about.”

Shame on Cheadle

I agree. And I think the more people who can be introduced to a dialogue that I believe is crucial to our foreign policy, then all the better. Then I saw this YouTube clip. (It’s too shameless to embed). In it, Cheadle presents a parody of the movie (aired on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show) where his stunt double, an overweight mustachioed Latino, receives the brunt of the abuse during Cheadle’s interrogation scene. This may get more folks in the door, but it trivializes an important scene in the film.

What do you think?

Am I being too hard on Cheadle? The movie’s marketing efforts? Cheadle turns in a great performance, no doubt, and the film provides a great launch pad for some serious issues. Am I being too harsh?

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As part of the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus citizen journalism project, I interviewed Nancy Worley, a Democratic superdelegate in Alabama, and contributed to the site’s coverage.

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A friend of mine sent me the following story of a Canadian union organizer banned from Facebook for making too many friends:

He then asked me, “Does this thwart the potential for organizing through Facebook?”

No, I said. And here’s why:

Obviously, if you want to get a message out to organize a protest, a prayer service or anything else , you’ll get that message out most QUICKLY by having a lot of friends, say, more than the 5,000 limit. Note I said most QUICKLY. (This is the equivalent of broadcasting a message through a traditional one-to-many medium).

But not necessarily most EFFECTIVELY, nor most SUCCESSFULLY, if the barometer for success is how many people take the desired action you’re hoping for.

Here’s the key

Successfully organizing on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean one person broadcasting a message to 5,000 people. If anything, that message is going to be watered down for broad appeal, less relevant to each specific person, and prompt the least (percentage wise) action.

The KEY is getting 50 people to each tell 50 people to teach tell 50 people, etc., etc., etc. (Or, really, 5 people to tell 5 people, etc., etc., etc.) Each message then becomes a relevant, targeted message, and a message that the recipient of which is most likely to pass on.

And that’s what gives social networking sites, such as Facebook, such a great potential for organization.

So you sort of have two issues: 1) crafting the right message and 2) getting that message to the right people.

Obviously what I’m describing here is simply viral marketing in theory (the practitioners of which will tell you in reality is anything but simple).

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Haven’t posted in a while, but I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Boston working on a research project for the Newspaper Association of America on trends in online video and had a thought to share.

I’m taking a course in Web videography offered at Medill and taught by a Tribune Interactive video guy, Brad Piper. Longtime print reporter James Janega from the Trib put together a video on Fallujah, Iraq, and came in to discuss it. One of things he said that stood out the most to me was his point that when you’re in the news business, “It just has to work,” he said.

Although Janega had a background in broadcast before switching to print, he discussed how time constraints and the limited access reporters enjoy in Iraq due to safety concerns both limited what he could produce as a one man reporter with a handheld video camera. Furthermore, Janega was primarily responsible for coming back with a print piece of the paper.

But his piece did work. Plenty of his shots were shaky. His camera doesn’t have a jack for a microphone. And the video didn’t delve into the issues nearly as deeply as his print piece did. But his video worked. It showed a side of the story that his print piece couldn’t.

It’s an inspiring bit of news for small papers, in my opinion, with limited means to produce video. People have voted with their clicks and shown that they are willing (and eager!) to watch videos of lower production quality on YouTube, if the story is worth it.

I don’t see a compelling reason why they wouldn’t do the same when it comes to local video.

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Alex Kuczynski is scheduled to speak at the Medill School of Journalism at 12 pm on Monday, November 12 2007 in Fisk hall.

I picked up on it from a weekly newsletter I get, Flavorpill, which describes Kuczynski, saying:

“For some, the Critical Shopper columnist is bafflingly superficial, an over-privileged aesthete who sullies the paper’s reputation with conspicuous consumption and the jet-set lifestyles of the ultra-rich. Others simply see her as a shrewd and pragmatic businesswoman. After all, she delivers what people want — high-end shopping tips, luxury-product critiques, and the best place to buy a $5,000 chinchilla coat.”

I’ll be attending, so if you have any questions regarding Kuczynski, her work, or reporting on popular culture, let me know.

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Timothy McNulty at the Chicago Tribune wrote a great article yesterday on journalistic objectivity.

Objectivity is an oft-debated topic amongst journalists. To what extent is it possible? Where are the lines drawn? Has it diminished in the age of cable TV’s talking heads and the numerous opining bloggers? Or, as McNulty says, does objectivity get reduced to neutrality? “On the one hand this” and “on the other hand this,” without any attempt to truly seek the truth?

One thing that interests me is the potential of objectivity on a macro level - especially given the democratizing potential and decentralized nature of the Web.

(more…)

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Medill Dean John Lavine told a group of Medill graduates today, “we are aggressively looking at a set of new clients” for their graduate run Medill News Service.

As we at Medill here have started turning more towards multimedia journalism, the clients who subscribe to our graduate-run wire service haven’t been able to support some of the Flash-based video pieces we’ve produced for our Web site Medill Reports.

The Medill News Service, a wire service run by graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism has provided local coverage on Chicago politics, business, legal affairs, etc. for area publications since 1995. Basically, Medill graduate students report in Chicago, and Chicago-area publications who can’t afford the reporting pay for the stories. (Clients include the Daily Herald, the Daily Southtown, the Northwest Indiana Times, the Chicago Defender, among others.) The Medill News Service also runs a Washington Bureau. Washington clients include the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and the Greeley Tribune in Colorado.
(more…)

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“Quit.”

That’s what Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., told a convention of new marketers to do if their aging bosses didn’t “get” social media last week at the Forrester Consumer Forum on social media and branding in Chicago.

Get your resume out on the street, she advised.

If they haven’t seen the writing on the wall yet, you won’t be able to change their mind.

Her remark drew a laugh, and the lively room of new media advertisers and marketers (with titles such as “digital strategist” and “engagement officer”) smiled at each other in the confidence that they “get it.” But here’s why they were wrong.

If a CEO or aging marketing exec doesn’t “get it,” they’re probably on the way out

After Hefner finished her speech I spoke with a couple of account directors from Whittmanhart in Chicago. Hefner’s main point, they noted, makes sense given her position: don’t align yourselves with those who shun social media. But it doesn’t necessarily hold true for young hires.

Trusted brands don’t sprout overnight. From a media perspective, magazines are a perfect example. While plenty of them are struggling with their print editions, it may make sense to stick with them. After those aging marketing executives take their leave, it may prove easier to open up their brand and their platform than to establish brand equity in a startup from scratch..

My favorite example is Ebony, which has struggled to define itself online. But what brand has more equity than Ebony? For those wishing their companies would “embrace social media,” moving to a startup or latching onto something less-established might provide short term relief, but sticking it out could pay off in other ways.

 Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research Inc.

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“I would have fired Don Imus years ago. Because he’s boring. And if he should have been fired as a racist, that, also, should have occurred years ago. Howard Stern has been exposing his racism for more than a decade (odd, by the way, that few if any news reports went to Stern for this perspective). I’m no fan of Imus. I panned him in TV Guide years ago. I won’t miss him now that he’s gone. I think what he said was as stupid as it was offensive — that is, colossally on both counts.But I do think we need to stand back for a moment, just a moment, and examine the process of public scalpings in media, on the internet, and in politics today. This was Don Imus’ macaca moment and it was amplified to an 11 by the piranhaesque repetition of it on cable news (and, in this case, less so on the internet) and then by the calls for his execution from all the usual executioners.”

(Via Buzz Machine)

In response to the Imus debacle, Jeff Jarvis brings up an interesting question: how forgiving should the media be of public figures? As the 2007 State of the Media report has argued, the advent of 24/7 cable news has thus far led to much more news repetition than a real 24/7 news cycle. So when Imus (or Lott or whoever) makes such a statement, its impact is magnified one hundred fold throughout the media (make sure you watch the Daily Show’s take on Buzz Machine).

Jarvis believes the Imus remarks bring that discussion to the forefront. Imus’ remarks may reveal his true character and its treatment in the media may have been justified. But in the future, the public will have to examine very closely whether a tasteless comment is indicative of a character flaw (or, on a deeper level, a systemic problem) or if it’s just a “mistake.”

In any case, I’ve been loath to comment on the Imus debate for a variety of reasons (including that I think, on the face it, there didn’t remain much to be said) but I think Jarvis’ observation is an astute one.

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“Teachers treat African-American males differently from their white and Latino counterparts based on negative stereotypes and perceptions, according to a dissertation presented Wednesday.”

From Medill Reports,  a researcher who conducted her doctoral work jointly with the University of California Irvine and California State University Los Angeles looked at endemic racism in public schools in L.A.  (Watch her proposal here).

Her research attempts to combine qualitative and quantitaive research numbers behind the differences in how African-American males are disciplined in schools as compared to  other groups.

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