I’ll be continuing my early shift at Paramount (5:45 a.m. to 9 a.m.) today and tomorrow.
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DVDs, and the paradox of choice
So it’s not just me. This Fortune blog article attributes this year’s 2% drop in DVD sales to consumer paralysis over which of the new formats to buy:
Market research showed it wasn’t just NetFlix (NFLX) or Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes hurting traditional DVD sales, either. Consumers who bought HDTVs were so afraid of backing the wrong high-definition movie format that they decided not to buy movies at all.
It’s a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who’s read Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice: in our desire to not pick wrong, we often don’t pick at all.
Thanks to Mike Curtis for the link.
Benazir Bhutto on Parade
I’ve pretty much given up on my campaign to mock and/or eliminate Parade Magazine. It’s an embarrassing publication that no self-respecting American newspaper should include, but it’s not worth the time to regularly dissect its inanity. Particularly when it can embarrass itself so well.
This morning’s Parade Magazine (January 6th, 2008) cover article is on Benazir Bhutto — a refreshingly newsworthy subject for the magazine. After all, Bhutto was assassinated on December 27th, and her death has brought new concerns about the future of Pakistan and the region.
However, the cover headline asks an unsettling question: “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?”
Gosh, I hope not. Considering she died ten days ago.
The article by Gail Sheehy was written before the assassination. That’s okay. But the printed version makes no clarification whatsoever about what’s happened in the meantime: in Parade-land, Bhutto is still alive, racing towards the election. She’s our best hope!
Obviously, Parade is printed in advance. From the website: “The assassination of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 occurred after PARADE’s Jan. 6 issue went to press.”
But does Parade really need to be printed ten days in advance? Did the editors spend the last week and a half sitting on their hands, hoping their average reader would be so clueless to world events so as not to notice that the subject of their lead article was gunned down for the world to see? (Sadly, the editors’ gamble may be reasonable.)
The web enables print media to amend and expand their reporting, which Parade did to some degree. From the site: “After her assassination, PARADE immediately posted the entire interview online,” which is a great start, but then, “and Sheehy appeared on network and cable TV news shows to discuss her face-to-face conversations with Bhutto.”
So you put your journalist on television to talk about the interview, but then declined to frame the article in context for your publication?
I’ve worked in media enough to know that nothing is impossible. They could have fixed the cover. They could have added an introductory paragraph pointing readers to the web for more information. And failing that, they could have wrapped the issue with an explanatory note.
But they would have only done that if they were an actual news publication, rather than a crappy info-tainment tabloid pretending to be one.
My beef about their “long lead time” excuse is that the insert is included in daily newspapers across the country, which creates the expectation that it’s at least somewhat timely. Which it’s not.
And so the onus really falls on newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which need to be proactive about how they’re going handle such errors. After all, the printed copy of Parade says “Los Angeles Times” at the top, in the newspaper’s logotype. In simple fact, the January 6th, 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times says Benazir Bhutto is still alive. That’s embarrassing.
Update: I’m delighted to find I’m not the only one aggravated.
On horseshit, and the New York Times
I’m quoted in an article in today’s New York Times about how the strike has affected relationships between writers and executives. More accurately, the blog is quoted; I didn’t speak to the writer.
In November, John August, the writer of movies like Charlie’s Angeles[sic] and Corpse Bride spied Peter Roth, president of Warner Brothers Television, at Osteria Mozza, a Los Angeles restaurant. “When you see someone you kind of know at a restaurant, it’s always a process to figure out whether or not to say hi,” Mr. August wrote on his blog. But the strike makes that decision process much more complicated.
Instead of confronting the studio executive, Mr. August returned home and wrote a vulgar blog entry about what he would have liked to say. One part of it that is printable here said: “Everyone knows the C.E.O.’s are talking out of two sides of their mouths.”
Really? What vulgar thing did I write about Peter Roth? I only remembered an insider reference to how Peter Roth tends to hug people. (He does.)
Let’s look back at the original post from November 15th, and my imagined conversation:
ME
Hey Peter. John August.
PETER ROTH
John. John August! How are you? This strike, huh? Crazy. I can’t wait for this to be over.
ME
Then tell your side to come back to the table with an internet residual plan that isn’t horseshit, and you could be shooting pilots by February. Because I’ve been on the picket line for seven days, and every writer wants to come back to work. But not a single one of them would take that shitty deal. Because everyone knows what’s at stake, and everyone knows the CEO’s are talking out of two sides of their mouths.
Obviously, the word in question is “horseshit.” I immediately did a web search of the New York Times website to find all the other instances in which they used “horseshit” in a quote, and found exactly zero results. They really don’t print the word.1
Honestly, I find it charming that they deem certain common words too coarse for their readers. They also insist on using polite forms such as “Mr. Smith,” even when it creates more confusion. It’s their newspaper, and they’re entitled to their quirks.2
So it seems that the writer of the article was following Times policy in not printing the full, horseshit-inclusive quote. I can’t object to that.
But what I can object to is labeling my original statement vulgar. That’s a pretty condemnatory remark to slip into a light news piece, considering the word in question is barely PG-13. “Horseshit” may not be an approved word for the New York Times, but it’s a stretch to claim that the mythical New York Times reader would consider it vulgar. It’s basic cable at this point.
Worse, by omitting what I actually said, the article creates the implication I said something much worse. Something — gulp! — unprintably awful. Which I didn’t. I said that the AMPTP’s offer on the table was horseshit. Which it was.
- They will use “shit” on occasion, such as when the president was quoted as saying, “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over.” ↩
- I’m also a fan of Technology Review‘s predilection for the diaeresis, such as coƶperate. ↩