Rosenblum TV

Attack of the Librarians

Michael Rosenblum — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:15:17 +0000

One way…

Last week I wrote a blog about the future of physical libraries in an online and digital world. Can they survive? Is there a place for them?

I also published it in The Huffington Post.

I have been blogging pretty regularly now for five years, but I have rarely seen a response like the one I got from the librarians.

Hundreds of tweets.

And the vitriol. And the invective!

You get the idea.

Hundreds of digital librarians gathered beneath my window with their pitchforks and torches.

Good writing, I think (and this is just my opinion, of course), like good art should challenge you and make you feel uncomfortable. I would (personally) rather be provocative than banal. But that is just me.

That is what I was trying to do. The question was, do libraries have a future in the digital age. And, in case anyone missed the point, the final paragraph was an analogy to Fahrenheit 451 (although I don’t support book burning, so stop with the tweets).

Well, in trying to provoke a conversation, I was certainly successful. It was the personal attacks that I found so astonishing.

In any event, this astonishing response made me start to think about the nature of public discourse in the age of the Internet.

And I don’t think it’s such a good thing.

When I was young (admittedly, a long time ago), there were only three TV networks.

As a result, everyone ended up watching pretty much the same thing.

And, in those days, which was a long time ago, the networks used to (on occasion) present controversial topics.

My mentor in the TV business, Fred Friendly, made his career by using the new medium of television to go after Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Later he produced Harvest of Shame, about the lives of sharecroppers in the American South.

These were also documentaries that made many people ‘uncomfortable’.

Bill Paley, who owned CBS, famously said that Fred’s work (along with his correspondent Edward R Murrow) gave him stomach pains in the middle of the night.

But that was a long time ago.

We have gone from three networks to a thousand cable channels to millions of websites.

The upshot is that you can always find something you like and someone with whom you agree.

MSNBC viewers all talk to themselves on MSNBC while FOX viewers all talk to themselves on FOX. In the meantime, everyone else runs Cupcake Wars to avoid annoying or alienating anyone.

The web allows us to avoid being confronted by the uncomfortable.

Ever.

Which, I think is a mistake.

Being confronted with the ‘uncomfortable’ makes you think.

Burger King used to run an ad (with a very catchy theme song) that said ‘have it your way’.

Well, having it your way all the time means you are never prepared to have it anyone else’s way.

Breaking Bad Vs. The Great Gatsby

Michael Rosenblum — Sun, 19 May 2013 15:38:28 +0000

We went to see The Great Gatsby last night.

Hated it.

Hated… hated… hated…

OK.

Hated.

Talking about it to Lisa over dinner after the movie (she rather liked it, I think), she asked why I hated it so much.

Aside from all the gratuitous 3D ‘special effects’, my biggest problem was the simplicity of the characters; their two-dimensional characters (ironic in a 3D movie).

I said, “compare it to Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad the characters are all so complex and engaging.”

Like everyone else, (as far as I can tell), we are watching Breaking Bad in one of those marathon events that Netflix now allows you to do.

We also watched Mad Men in this way.. and The Killing (the Scandinavian version), and The Bridge (likewise), and now House of Cards (BBC version).

Overall, with the exception of House Hunters International, we have pretty much abandoned conventional TV.

In the ‘olden days’ we used to compare TV to movies. Movies won.

Movies were ‘overpowering’, when they worked.

Watching Star Wars (to show my age and then some) on the ‘big screen’ (to show my age again) was simply mind-blowing compared to watching something on a TV set, even if it was 25″ (again, to show my age).

The technology of movie-making, always on the cutting edge of CGI, was astounding.

But then, a funny thing happened.

As the technology got better, the story lines and character developments seemed to get progressively weaker.

Maybe this was bad writing, but maybe it was something else.

As Lisa pointed out to me, Breaking Bad and Mad Men have lots of time to allow their characters to develop. The Great Gatsby doesn’t.

The Great Gatsby is only (only???) 142 minutes.

Even if it seemed like endless hours, 142 minutes, while very long for a movie, is a fairly short time to develop complex characters (particularly when you have to leave space for dead bodies being tossed into the air, particularly if you repeat the same shot three times. (But enough complaining)).

Breaking Bad is now in its fifth season. At 13 shows to a season, that is 780 minutes per season, times five seasons or 3900 minutes devoted to Breaking Bad vs. the 142 minutes devoted to The Great Gatsby.

That’s a big difference.

The Great Gatsby was produced at a cost of somewhere between $105m and $127m (that’s the web for you). That comes out to just a tad under $775,000 per minute.

Breaking Bad is produced at a cost of $3m per episode, which comes out to $39m per episode or just a tad under $200m for the five seasons combined. (OR… $50,000 per minute).

By way of comparison, Mad Men is budgeted at $2.5m per episode or $41,666 per minute.

Where is your money better spent?

One might argue that the returns on The Great Gatsby will be far greater than the costs. Maybe this is true, maybe once you factor in the distribution and promotion costs this is not so true (see Hollywood Bookkeeping). But even if it is a success, for every Great Gatsby there is a Water World.

What makes the Netflix/Online experience of watching Mad Men or The Killing or House of Cards or Breaking Bad so interesting is that it is not television; and it is not the movies.

The web is evolving into a third medium or entertainment. A place where you can watch what you want, when you want for as long as you want.

And, as things like Mad Men or Breaking Bad live on the web forever (unlike The Great Gatsby which will soon be replaced by something else at my local theater), have an extremely long tail.

It is true that The Great Gatsby will soon enough migrate to Netflix, but there it will be measured head to head with Breaking Bad. Complex characters vs. simply drawn characters. I think in that post-cinema world Breaking Bad wins hands down.

The .01% Solution

Michael Rosenblum — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:11:25 +0000

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. A. J. Liebling (1904 – 1963)

The world of the media used to be a rich man’s playground.

It cost a lot of money to buy a television network, or a magazine, or a newspaper.

You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in, 60 years. - Charles Foster Kane

But that was the only way to get your message, or your product, in front of millions of people.

Even today, the Koch Brothers seem to be angling to buy a few newspapers for exactly the same purpose.

And if you didn’t have the money that a Charles Foster Kane or a Murdoch or the Koch Brothers had (or have), then you could rent a few pages in the form of ads to get your stuff before a few million people. But that was also expensive.

The Internet, however, continues on its disruptive course, and one of the greatest disruptive elements is that the cost of accessing all those people has fallen, from billions of dollars, to nothing.

That’s a big drop.

Today, simply by going online you can get your message (or your ad) in front of a potential audience of 2.4 billion people… with more to come.

Let’s put this in perspective. The New York Times has a circulation of about 1 million people per day. Murdoch’s SKY is in about 10 million homes in the UK. NBC is in 114 million homes in America. But the web is in 2.4 billion homes worldwide, and you don’t have to pay NBC or The NY Times or Murdoch a dime to get on it.

You can see what this means, in the long run, for The New York Times or NBC or Murdoch. That is old news. But what does this mean for you?

Here’s a fun mind game.

Do you have something that you are good at? Say, cooking or tennis or golf or writing?

Suppose I put you in a room with 100 people in it. Could you convince one out of those 100 people to pay you, say, $1 in exchange for your teaching them how to cook a meal or improve their tennis game or put on makeup that looks good. It can be anything you like. Come up with something. Could you convince 1 person out of those 100 to pay you a single dollar?

No.

OK. Let’s make it easier. Let’s say there are a thousand people in the room. Could you convince just one out of one thousand people to pay you a single dollar to teach them how to do something? (Or maybe you could sell them your watch?)

Nope.

Let’s make it 10,000 people.

Ten Thousand People in a room. Could you convince just one of them to part with just one dollar?

I bet you could.

And so do you.

Now, here’s the truly amazing part of this. If you were to take that skill set (or watch) to the web and get that rate of return, that is, one out of every 10,000 people to part with a single dollar in exchange for teaching them how to organize their lives or make an omelette or do their hair or whatever it is you can offer, you could net $240,000.

That’s right.

A quarter of a million dollars.

Get them to do it with you once a month and you are netting $3 million a year.

And at no cost.

Is this really possible, that anyone could become an online global merchant?

I think so.

This is a very radical idea, but perhaps no less radical than the idea that first surfaced a thousand years ago that as a peasant you could take some of your crops to a local market and sell them yourself. Rather a revolutionary idea for medieval serfs, but the foundations of the capitalist revolution.

Today, thanks to the web and its obliterating the barrier to entry to a global marketplace, you (and anyone else) can in fact now take your ‘wares’ (whatever they are) into the ‘market’ and sell them, just the same – only this time with a lot more customers!

A few people are doing this already.

Michelle Phan is the daughter of a single-parent mom who emigrated to the US from Vietnam.

Instead of going to art school, in 2006 she began creating videos at home about beauty and makeup and posting them online.

Today she has over 3 million subscribers to her website and more than 700 million views. She has signed deals with Lancome and Bride’s Magazine and has netted millions. And she is just getting started.

She got in early, but there is plenty of room for anyone who has the drive and determination and a video camera and an internet connection.

Phan (and others) have until now depended upon advertising to pay them. But that is all about to change.

It is far better to go directly to transactions.

This too used to be complex, but no more.

A German company called Clickandbuy.com (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, so you know they know what they are doing) now makes it possible for anyone with a website to embed a ‘click and buy’ transactional app into your website, whether you own a store or just want to sell your services from home online.

It’s a remarkable opportunity to migrate from a ‘social’ website to turning your ‘likes’ into real income.

After all, you may have spent a lot of time and effort getting your 3,000 ‘friends’ or 10,000 ‘likes’ but you can’t pay the rent with those.

Scott Pelley Is No Fred Friendly !!

Michael Rosenblum — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:15:24 +0000

Scott Pelley (CBS) accepts the Fred Friendly Journalism Award…

Fred Friendly was a friend of mine.

He was also my teacher at Columbia University, and later my professional mentor.

He launched my career in television and media.

So it was with a great deal of interest that I watched as Scott Pelley, the anchor at The CBS Evening News accepted the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award.

As Scott gave his speech, it became increasingly clear to me that he had no idea of what it was that Fred stood for… unfortunately.

I have embedded the speech above. You can see it for yourself.

Let me put aside the cheap shots at bad grammar (‘spend some time with she and Fred’ 12:27), and get down to the core of the problem.

Mr. Pelley says ‘our house is on fire’. That would be the ‘house of journalism’ that Fred and AO Sulzberger and others built.

Our house is on fire because ‘we are getting the big stories wrong’.

And why are we getting the big stories wrong? Because we are now awash in ‘bad information’ from the Internet. 15:27: “Never before in human history has more information been available to more people”.

17:15 “Twitter, facebook and reddit, that’s not journalism. That’s gossip. Journalism was invented as an antidote to gossip.”

Um.. no.

Journalism was not ‘invented as an antidote to gossip’. Quite the contrary, actually.

And Scott Pelley would do well to read one of Fred Friendly’s books, The Minnesota Rag

This is one of the best books that Fred ever wrote (and he wrote a lot of them). It is the story of Near v. Minnesota, a landmark Supreme Court decision that became one of the foundations of the free press that Scott seems to love so much. It was, in fact, later the basis of the Court’s decision in NY Times v. United States (1971) in which the Court upheld the right of the New York Times to continue to publish The Pentagon Papers.

The problem here is that Jay Near was, in the words of Scott Pelley, publishing ‘gossip’. Near’s Minnesota newspaper, The Saturday Press, was, (and here let me just copy from Wikipedia to speed things up):

The State Supreme Court wrote that a scandalous publication “annoys, injures and endangers the comfort and repose of a considerable number of persons,” and so constituted a nuisance just as surely as “places where intoxicating liquor is illegally sold,” “houses of prostitution,” “dogs,” “malicious fences” “itinerant carnivals,” “lotteries,” and “noxious weeds.” The court considered that a newspaper may also endanger safety, because “scandalous material” tended to disturb the peace and provoke assaults.

Well, Jay Near was, among other things, an Anti Semite, Anti-Catholic, Racist, and Anti-Labor. Makes Twitter look pretty good!

As Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote in the majority decision:

Hughes (Ct): “…the fact that liberty of press may be abused does not make any less necessary the immunity of the press from prior restraint…a more serious evil would result if officials could determine which stories can be published…”

Scott then goes on to note that 15:46 “Our nation was attacked by terrorists. When our country is under attack.”

How does Mr. Pelley know that ‘our nation’ was attacked ‘by terrorists’. That’s some pretty inflammatory stuff there. Maybe they were just two very messed up people who built home made bombs on their own. No better and no worse than someone who shoots up a movie theater or a school. Maybe. “Our nation was under attack?” Really? The Boston Marathon was ‘attacked’. Our nation was attacked when the Japanese Navy and Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor. I may just stick to Facebook in light of this kind of ‘journalism’.

Further in the speech, Mr. Pelley notes that The FBI and The President were telling the networks how to report the news and what not to say. This, Mr. Pelley, seems fine with, although a bit earlier he praised the Sulzbergers, who famously told LBJ to ‘get stuffed’ when Johnson asked Punch Sulzberger to remove David Halberstam from reporting in Vietnam. Sulzberger actually extended Halberstam’s tour for another year. Sulzberger also always regretted listening to JFK when he was asked not to write about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion.

Finally, Scott Pelley talks about the thousand year old traditions of journalism. 22:08 “The principles by which we gather the news and write the news have not changed in 1,000 years.” Really? And just what principles of journalism were being practiced in Medieval Europe in the year 1013? The printing press wasn’t even invented until 1452 and the first newspapers didn’t appear until the 17th Century.

The Alzheimer’s Syndrome and The Web

Michael Rosenblum — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:23:40 +0000

Have we met before???

There’s an old joke: The good thing about Alzheimer’s? You always meet new people.

What does this have to do with media on the web?

Everything, I think.

Up until now, we have always lived in a linear world of very limited shelf-space.

That is, there were a limited number of TV or cable channels, a limited number of hours of broadcasting. In the world of music, there was only so much shelf space at Tower Records. In the world of books, only so many shelves at Barnes and Nobles.

The upshot of those physical limitations was there there were only so many movies, or TV shows or albums or books that you could be exposed to in any given time period. With limited shelf space came the need to constantly create new material. Once an album had been played X number of times on the linear radio and Y number of albums sold, it was time to ‘find the next hot act’. Likewise with TV. How many seasons of Seinfeld or I Dream of Jeanie could you watch before it had become stale. Even in re-runs?

But the world of the web is different.

It is different because the ‘stuff’ is non-linear, on demand, and in fact available forever.

So what was old can, to a generation that has never been exposed to it, be incredibly new.

We see this to a very very limited extent in the world of literature. For each new generation exposed to MacBeth, it is as though it was for the first time. But those kinds of things, until now, have been a rarity.

As the nonlinear online world of infinite shelf space becomes the norm, I think this notion of what is old for you is new for me may become in fact the dominant feature of the world of media.

When the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years, they didn’t do that because they were lost. They did it so that everyone with a memory of what it was like to be a slave could die off. The new world required fresh thinking.

Soon, (sorry to say), everyone with a memory of The Beatles will die off.

Then, there will be a whole new generation for whom The Double White Album will be as new to them as it was to me when I first heard it at the age of fourteen.

And it should, in theory, be just as good.

In the past, this kind of thing was possible, but a rarity.

There were a few ‘oldies but goodies’ radio stations; a few vinyl record stores. But let’s face it, they were on the margins.

Now they will become mainstream.

In the digital world, nothing ages (except the consumers). Everything that is created continues to exist forever. Forever.

As you can see, over time, we are going to build up A LOT of stuff.

And it is all going to be available to everyone… forever. (Apparently)

So in the not too distant future, ‘the newest’ may not be the most attractive. It’s going to change the equation of value and quality.

Owning the rights to ‘classics’ - great music or film or video libraries means an annuity in perpetuity. Think of this as buying Rembrandts. They stopped making them years ago.. and so the value only continues to appreciate. Forever….

We are, all of us, the products of our life experience in the linear world. This is what we grew up with. We have a natural expectation that the ‘new stuff’ is going to be better and much more desirable than the ‘old stuff’. We would rather have a 2013 Mercedes than a 1987 one. We would rather see the ‘new’ Great Gatsby than the ‘old’ one.

But in the future, this may not be the case.

The value may be much more for the ‘old’ stuff than the ‘new’. (What is worth more, an ‘old’ Rembrandt or a ‘new’ one?)

It used to be that we outlived our TV shows and music and movies.

Gilligan’s Island came and went.

We continued.

But as the world goes to digital and infinite, it is the content that will survive long after we are gone.

Or certainly past the time that we can remember that we actually already saw that movie.

Or did we?

What’s a Library?

Michael Rosenblum — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:29:39 +0000

Library under construction – along with a 50 story hotel and condo….

I live across the street from a library…

or at least what used to be a library. The Donnell Library on West 53rd Street.

Today, it is a big hole in the ground.

There is going to be a 50-story condominium and Baccarat Hotel where the Donnell Library used to be.

Frankly, I will not miss the library.

Even though I lived right across the street from it for many years, I never went inside. I never sat in its reading room. I never checked out a book. I never explored its stacks to go through old volumes of bound periodicals in some research project.

Why would I do that?

Why, when I can order up pretty much anything I want online, any time I want. Admittedly, the library is free (thank you Benjamin Franklin for that concept), but the web is also free (at least so far), and instant and much much easier to reference and find stuff than in the stacks (though less romantic, in a literary sense).

I am old enough to remember wandering through the stacks at Sawyer Library at Williams when I was a student. I even had an assigned carrel – a small desk wedged in the stacks where I worked.

Those were the days.

I have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on my bookshelf, but when I went to see if carrel was spelled with one ‘L’ or two, I didn’t pull out the OED. I just went to Dictionary.com.

My niece, upon seeing the first Harry Potter movie asked why Harry and Hermione and Ron always went to the ‘library’ at Hogwarts to look stuff up. “Why don’t they just google it?”

A reasonable question.

At any rate, like the OED, the notion of a physical library still has some emotional pull for those of us who grew up with library cards and card catalogues and such. But we are old.

This morning, the NY Times announced that the design of the ‘new’ Donnell Library (they’re putting it in the basement of the Baccarat Hotel and Condo Complex) is going to be unveiled today. It isn’t exactly a library anymore. Says Enrique Norton, architect of the plan:

“It has become more like a cultural space, which is about gathering people, giving people the opportunity to encounter each other,” Mr. Norten said. “It’s not really about just being a repository of books.”

Library: a place for gathering people, giving people the opportunity to encounter each other….

Well, there you have it. Another 3,000 year old institution killed by the web.

Library of Alexandria? Oh yeah, that’s where all those ancient Egyptians and Romans got to encounter one another.

Is this the future of all brick and mortar institutions? Will The New York Times building one day be seen as a place for ‘gathering people’ so that they can ‘encounter one another?’

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel of the dystopian future, (and also an excellent film by Francois Truffaut (1966)), Oskar Werner plays Montag, a ‘fireman’ whose job is to burn books.

We seem to have bypassed all that nasty burning stuff.

But the result is pretty much the same.

From Walmart to Success via Youtube

Michael Rosenblum — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:26:30 +0000

“

We’re spending a lot of time down in Nashville these days

A LOT of time.

And one of the main things to do while in Nashville is to go the Grand Ole Opry.

Now, to be perfectly honest, before I came to Nashville, I knew nothing about Country Western music (and to continue on this thread of honesty, I still don’t). However, what we saw at The Grand Ole Opry was astonishing. Five thousand crazed fans who just love it. I am sure there are millions (so I am told). And an appearance at The Grand Ole Opry is, well, it’s like playing at Carnegie Hall if you are a classical musician.

Do you know the old joke where a guy stops someone on the streets of NY and asks ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and the answer is “Practice, practice, practice”. (I said it was an old joke. But it has a point).

Now, there’s a new way to get to The Grand Ole Opry (and probably soon Carnegie Hall – Youtube.

Kayla Sloan was literally a coal miner’s daughter.

And she worked in her local Walmart in Logan, W. Virginia.

One of the things she did in the Walmart (besides selling stuff, I assume) was to sing country western songs in the aisles.

If you worked in Bloomingdales in NYC and you started singing heavy metal in the aisles, my guess is that you would soon find yourself in Bellevue wrapped in wet sheets. But not, apparently, in Logan, W. Virginia.

At any rate, one of Kayla’s friends decided to videotape (and isn’t that an archaic term there days) her performance with her iPhone (next time, turn the phone lengthwise), and put it on Youtube.

The next thing you know, she’s ‘discovered’ and asked to perform at The Grand Ole Opry.

Apparently, she also was on Anderson Cooper 360 (but I didn’t see it).

In any event, to say this is a rocket of a climb for a music career is probably an understatement.

So mazel tov Kayla, (as we say down here in Nashville).

and for the rest of you, who needs American Idol when you have Walmart?

And you don’t even have to audition to get in.

(But you should probably buy something).

“

The Digital Slaves (that would be you)

Michael Rosenblum — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:01:58 +0000

$0.0 an hour…. with a 100% raise after two years…

Want a look a the new ‘digital’ economy and how it works?

Here’s an interesting experiment:

List the top 10 corporations in the US in 1960. Do you know what they were? (at least according to Forbes)

General Motors
Esso
Ford
General Electric
US Steel
Mobil
Gulf Oil
Texaco
Chrysler
Esmark

(And what the hell was Esmark?)

In any event, all of this giants of American capitalism all had one thing in common – they all made ‘stuff’. They also employed a lot of people.

Now, let’s take a look at the Top 10 website companies in 2012:

Google
Facebook
Yahoo
Youtube
Wikipedia
MSN
Amazon
eBay
Twitter
Bing

It’s a very different list.

Is it a fair comparison? I think so. The Ford Motor Company is today valued at $59 billion. Facebook is valued at $63 billion, so it’s close.

But there is a very very fundamental difference between the two.

In the 1960s, the people who worked for Ford or Chrysler or US Steel got paid a salary for what they did, for what they contributed to the net worth of those companies.

But the people who work for eBay and Twitter and Facebook don’t get paid.

They work for free.

And who are those people?

Those people are ‘you’ and me.

That’s right.

You. (And me)

You are toiling away, day after day, ‘making the content’ that drives the enormous valuations of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and eBay and pretty much all of them. Companies like Twitter and Facebook don’t ‘ ‘make’ a single thing that they sell. What they sell is your labor. Even Google, the ‘mother of all online companies’ today worth $272 billion is nothing more than an agglomeration of all the ‘stuff’ that we all collectively put ‘into’ the web. Were there no content, there would be nothing to ‘google’, so to speak.

But the average American now spends more than 3 hours a day on ‘social networks’.

That’s 3 hours a day, every day, working for free to build the wealth and value for someone else, for free.

(If that isn’t slavery, I don’t know what is).

And how much is all that ~~slavery~~ free labor worth?

Well, if we were to pay everyone who ‘worked’ for Twitter or Facebook or Instagram at minimum wage, that would be worth?

Well, if 100 million of us (that would be 1/3 of the population) were on social networks (and my guess it is higher) then the net aggregate worth of our labors is… ready (and I did the math three times because I could not believe it at first)… $1.095 trillion.

Per year.

That is a LOT of free labor.

Of course, not everyone is working for free.

Just you.

And your friends.

Some people are actually profiting from your labors.

Like Mr. Zuckerberg.

Last year he cashed out a small portion of his stock for $2.3 billion. Well, it’s nice to know that all your hard work is paying off at for someone at least.

Of course, it’s not like you aren’t getting paid.

(Slaves at least got food an housing). What do you get?

“Likes” and “Friends”.

Try taking those to the bank.

The sheer genius of the new slave digital economy is that people get compensated in ‘likes’. And it only makes them (us) work even harder.

Napoleon once said, “It never ceases to amaze me that I can make men die for a piece of ribbon”. Had Napoleon only known about ‘Likes’, they might be speaking French in Moscow today.

Perhaps, in the not too distant future, Instagram will start to post ‘Employee of the Month”. (with photo, of course).

Wow!

Now there’s something to aspire towards.

Get to work!!!

Jenna Marbles – 1 Billion Views – How Video Changed My Life

Michael Rosenblum — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:44:21 +0000

Her name is Jenna Mouray and if you have never heard of her, you are obviously either not spending enough time on YouTube or not reading The New York Times carefully enough.

I had never heard of her either until 6 days ago, but since then I have been watching her videos.

She is smart, funny and has clearly found her niche on YouTube.

And people have found her as well.

By the millions.

She has what Katie Couric doesn’t have – (besides an audience), the ability to be ‘real’ on TV (or video, which is pretty much the same thing).

If she had tried to get ‘on air’ with conventional TV, she would still be waiting – or working as an intern or some Associate Producer somewhere; or maybe in some God Forsaken local TV station in market 435.

But instead, she simply turned on the camera and began posting.

And it worked.

I like her stuff.

OK. She doesn’t use the 5 shots and there are no sequences, and maybe her filming style will expand (I would not say improve, because she clearly is the master of what she does).

There must be hundreds (millions) of other people who could take the same route to success.

The long term question is, what next?

If YouTube is the gateway, what’s the end game?

I am not sure, but I think it’s going to be something entirely new as well.

Meanwhile, enjoy her video.

I did.

The Star Ledger Newspaper Wins 3 TV Emmy Awards, Gets 19 Nominations!

Michael Rosenblum — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:00:36 +0000

The Newark Star-Ledger is a newspaper.

Several years ago, thanks to Jeff Jarvis, we were invited to their offices to talk about taking them into video.

Over the course of the next few months, we trained about 15 of their reporters to shoot, edit and produce their own stories.

It was a kind of experiment.

The experiment has succeeded beyond all expectation.

Last week, the Star-Ledger, a newspaper, won 3 Television Emmy Awards and garnered an astonishing 19 nominations, not only more than any newspaper in the country, more than most local TV news operations.

And they do this at a tiny fraction of the cost of conventional TV news.

How do they do it?

Newspapers are magnets for great reporters and great storytellers. The Ledger is no exception.

Many newspapers today have moved gingerly into the realm of TV (as opposed to video), and have tried to create a kind of ‘online TV’ network, circa 1982. This doesn’t work. At the Ledger, the decision was made early to make their reporting staff ‘digital’, as fluent in video as in text, and to provide them with the right equipment and the right training.

Empowering and unleashing already talented and motived people is no bad thing.

The results are quite clear, as is the future.

In a world of smart phones with screens and iPads with screens there is more to taking a ‘newspaper’ online than simply moving the printed page from paper to laptop or phone. You have to rethink the content and how it is both gathered and presented. The Newark Star Ledger has done both.

Congrats to all the winners, and to the management team that had the vision and the courage to see it through properly.

• Andre Malok for Journalistic Enterprise, a portfolio award. This was his second Emmy.

• Adya Beasley, Seth Siditsky, Bumper DeJesus and Jennifer Brown, for “State of Reflection: New Jersey Ten Years After 9/11,” in the Human Interest Program or Special category.

• Seth Siditsky, Bumper DeJesus, George Frederick, Adya Beasley and Jennifer Brown, for “Enduring Memories of Sept. 11,” in the Interactivity category.