By Josh Dean
It's not hard to find someone who delights in attacking the show Family Guy. Which isn't a criticism, per se. Much of the animated sitcom's purpose seems to be to stoke the opposition, to offend the easily offended. But that's not the only reason it annoys people. There is a school of thought that says the show is hackish -- crudely drawn and derivative of its cartoon forebears. Members of this school would include, most prominently, Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the fathers of South Park, which is probably the only show on television that rivals Family Guy for objectionable content per half hour. South Park has devoted entire episodes to attacking Family Guy, portraying the show's writers as manatees who push "idea balls" with random jokes down tubes to generate plotlines. Kricfalusi has said, "You can draw Family Guy when you're 10 years old."

What does Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane -- who earlier this year inked a $100 million -- plus contract with Fox, followed by a breakthrough deal involving Google -- have to say about that?

"I would say, 'How many violas do you have?' "

MacFarlane is hovering over the soundboard in the control room of the Newman Soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. Various engineers twiddle knobs and adjust levels as he looks out on a gymnasium-size room full of classically trained musicians tuning their instruments. Every piece of music on every episode of Family Guy is recorded live by an orchestra that on this day numbers 56. The only music that ever repeats, even once, are the opening and closing themes, and those too are frequently updated, just because. Now, it is not unprecedented to use a live orchestra in today's TV world. But it is highly unusual. "All the shows used to do it," laments Walter Murphy, one of Family Guy's two composers. "It's mostly electronic now -- to save money." The Simpsons, he says, still uses an orchestra, as does Lost. King of the Hill has a small band. And, of course, there's an orchestra on American Dad, the other show created by MacFarlane, who is now the highest-paid writer-producer in the history of TV.

MacFarlane, despite being 35 and looking like an average dude, possesses the musical inclinations of a septuagenarian drag queen. A significant percentage of Family Guy episodes feature extravagant Broadway-inspired song-and-dance numbers (because, really, why have the cartoon doctor tell his patient he has end-stage AIDS when a barbershop quintet can break the news via song?), and only some of them are sacrilegious or scatological. Among the features of his new contract with Fox is a Family Guy movie he imagines as "an old-style musical with dialogue" in the vein of The Sound of Music, a poster of which hangs above his desk. "We'd really be trying to capture, musically, that feel," says MacFarlane, whose father moonlighted as a folk singer. "Nothing today feels like it'll play 50 years from now, like Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart."

If you're waiting for the punch line here, there isn't one. Critics may dismiss MacFarlane's show for being vulgar, but when he writes a song, it's going to be lush and jazzy and, at least musically, exactly as you might hear in something by Irving Berlin. It's all part of a manic attention to detail that not only gives the show its layered humor but also has made MacFarlane a massive multiplatform success.

MacFarlane is more than just an eclectic entertainer. Stripped of its crude facade, Family Guy -- indeed, all of MacFarlane Inc. -- exposes itself as a quintessentially modern business with lessons that extend far beyond TV land. MacFarlane has divined how to connect with next-generation consumers, not simply through the subject of his jokes but by embracing a flexibility in both format and distribution. He has also stepped outside the siloed definitions of a single industry (Hollywood) and exploited opportunity wherever he could find it (Silicon Valley). And perhaps most instructive, his success is not predicated on his product being all things to all people. He has bred allegiance from his core customers precisely because he's been willing to turn his back on (and even offend) others -- a model of sorts for how to create a mass-market-size niche business in our increasingly atomized culture.

MacFarlane is a fairly unassuming young man. He is partial to long-sleeve T-shirts, fraying jeans, and laceless black Chuck Taylors. Various stories have described him as prematurely graying, but today his hair is convincingly black and lightly gelled, and he's wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Beard stubble is a staple. The net effect is the look of a full-grown, thinking man's frat boy, which also pretty well sums up the target of his comedy (minus, perhaps, the full-grown part).

His show concerns the Griffins of Quahog, Rhode Island, whose patriarch is Peter, voiced by MacFarlane. Like Homer Simpson, he is lovable but bumbling, overweight, and a little slow-witted (a recent plot development is that he's mentally retarded, but just barely). His wife is Lois, cartoon sexy and much sharper; she adores him despite his flaws. They have three children: Chris, overweight and dim, in so many ways his father's son; Meg, smart but underappreciated and ever the butt of jokes about her homeliness; and Stewie, the infant pedant with the football-shape head who secretly wishes to murder his mother. Rounding out the clan is Brian the talking dog. He lusts after Lois, drinks martinis, and has been known to snort the occasional line of blow. (MacFarlane also voices both Brian and Stewie.)

Back in the soundstage control room, with the orchestra on the other side of the glass, a bank of flat screens are frozen on an image of Stewie staring out a window, forlorn. MacFarlane tells me that in this future episode, Stewie has been left home alone while the family goes on vacation.

"Let's try it once with the dialogue," Murphy says to his musicians. Stewie's quasi-British voice -- inspired by Rex Harrison, MacFarlane says -- booms through the control room. "Oh, Mommy! Thank God you're home! I promise with all my heart that I'll never say or do anything bad to you for the rest of the evening." Comedic pause. "By the way, I disabled the V-chip and watched so much porn."

Out in the orchestra room, trombonists erupt in laughter.

It is a violent collision of high and low -- classical musicians accustomed to the Hollywood Bowl recording music for a show heavy on poop jokes -- and a perfect lens for examining why this man sipping coffee from a paper cup emblazoned with the Fox logo has such an enormous and perpetual grin.

*****

It would be fair, at this point, to call Family Guy a juggernaut. If you're looking to get acquainted, it airs Sunday evenings at 9, just after The Simpsons, which it has surpassed as the most-popular animated show on TV. Among males 18 to 34, often cited as the most desirable demographic in advertising, Family Guy is the highest-rated scripted program in all of television (American Dad ranks sixth). It is the second-highest-rated show among males 18 to 49. It is among the most-downloaded shows on iTunes and the most-watched programs on Hulu, and it was the eighth most-pirated show of 2007 on BitTorrent sites.

Next spring, MacFarlane will introduce The Cleveland Show, a spin-off starring the Griffins' African-American neighbor. The show will be MacFarlane's third in prime time and the first new product of his megadeal with Fox. (He is also prepping a live-action movie, but no title or dates have been announced.)

A common complaint about MacFarlane's shows is that they are random and disjointed, with episodes that veer wildly off course for no apparent purpose. A human-size chicken, for example, has been known to show up and battle Peter, apropos of nothing, in elaborate fight scenes that mimic movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and stretch for more than a minute.

The show's tangents are intentional, but in no way intended to advance plot. MacFarlane admits that sometimes vignettes are inserted into an episode just to fill time, or just because they're good for a laugh, regardless of plot relevance. As a result, Family Guy is easily digested in bite-size portions -- the breakout gags, like the musical numbers, can be watched in isolation, at any time, and still work. This makes MacFarlane's show especially well suited to the Internet and mobile devices -- perfect for viewing during a boring history lecture or on the dreary commute home on the 5:07 to Ronkonkoma.

Easily masticated comedy -- plus a fervent audience of college kids in baggy cargo shorts bursting with disposable income and electronics -- also made MacFarlane a natural fit for Google. In September, the first of 50 bizarro animated shorts by MacFarlane appeared online. Seth MacFarlane's "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy," distributed by Google via its AdSense network, is a series of Webisodes that MacFarlane describes as edgier versions of New Yorker cartoons come to life. Running from 30 seconds to just over two minutes, the shorts are sponsored by advertisers and noteworthy for a host of reasons. For fans, they are MacFarlane's first non-TV venture and so exist outside the reach of censors and network suits and introduce a universe of entirely new characters. For the entertainment industry, they mark the first experiments with a bold new method of content distribution (and the entry of the beast Google into its world). This purportedly unsophisticated hack comic now finds himself, in some ways by accident, at the intersection of advertising, television, and the Web -- all of which are blurring together.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that while a MacFarlane product like Family Guy may seem slapdash when you're watching it, the creative process behind it is decidedly sophisticated. "He's kind of a modern-day cross between George Lucas and Norman Lear," says his manager, John Jacobs. "He thinks on a big canvas."

Says Norman Lear himself, a man who was once also the highest-paid creator on TV: "I'm crazy about him and his work. I can't think of anybody doing a better job right now of mining the foolishness of the human condition."

*****

A Family Guy episode is more or less a nine-month undertaking, from first script to finished animation. All episodes take shape in the writers room on the third floor of an unremarkable office building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door Productions. It's pretty much as you'd imagine: a conference table surrounded by rolling chairs and covered in computer monitors, action figures, and the assorted detritus of the comedy writer's diet: soft-drink cans, candy wrappers, half-finished bags of beef jerky. MacFarlane takes a chair in front of a dry-erase board as his 16 writers stagger in drinking coffee and stabbing at cups of fruit. One of them asks the boss how a concert he'd seen the night before had gone, and when MacFarlane complains about the bathroom lines, the guy suggests he stick to "lesbian shows, like the Indigo Girls."

The typical episode begins with a single writer producing a script, but then the whole team gets involved, dissecting each scene and line to decide if a) it's actually funny and b) it can be made funnier. In a loose but laborious process, each gag gets chewed over ad infinitum in this peanut-gallery forum. The goal is to produce an episode overstuffed with jokes -- something that gives fans plenty to discuss late at night on bulletin boards. "I think we're the most joke-per-minute show on television," asserts executive producer David Goodman.

This late-summer afternoon, the challenge is to fill out a scene in which Stewie and some friends are at nursery school. Ideas are tossed out in various impressions of Stewie's voice: There's a molestation joke, some poop jokes, a joke about a rogue chicken because, according to the writer who pitches it, "chickens just wander around the yard at some schools."

"Is that safe?" MacFarlane asks. "Aren't chickens aggressive and, like, poke your eyes out?"

Anyone can speak, and jokes are called out with no introduction. MacFarlane sits up front, along with Goodman, reclining in his seat and appearing in no way dictatorial. He'll chime in, but his input seems no more or less important than anyone else's. "If the writers in that room don't laugh -- it's not going on," says Goodman. "That's a tough room. If we laugh, it's probably funny."

The prevailing meta-joke about Stewie is that, despite being an infant, he is the most intellectual character on the show, even if the only family member who can hear him speak is Brian the dog.

"Stewie could wear a cop hat and go up to a white girl standing with a black kid and say, 'Are you okay, miss?' " one writer suggests.

Awkward, almost embarrassed laughs break out around the table. It's a joke that could be viewed as offensive, or as fairly pointed social criticism. A digression on race follows, before everyone moves on to another idea, about toddlers as obnoxious art critics picking apart one another's finger paintings.

There isn't a comedy writers room in America where the banter doesn't often veer toward extreme subjects. The difference with this crew is that the extremes are the goal. Watch enough Family Guy and you'll almost certainly see something that makes you cringe; it might not offend you personally, but you can imagine how someone won't find it funny. Family Guy savages politicians and celebrities, and is more than willing to tackle all manner of touchy subjects in the name of comedy -- race, Islam, Christianity (Jesus is a recurring character, because FCC rules stipulate you cannot use "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation unless the deity himself is present), homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, the physically impaired. A favorite example tossed out by opponents is a sight gag that involved a JFK Pez dispenser in which the candy emerged from a hole in the president's head. (MacFarlane later admitted that maybe, just maybe, that one crossed the line.)

MacFarlane doesn't argue with the notion that many of his jokes border on offensive, but the notion that the content is actually offensive irks him. Each episode is vetted by a team of Fox censors editing with the FCC in mind. But beyond that, he contends, "There's an enormous amount of self-policing that goes on and a lot of intelligent conversations about whether a show is worth doing. I would stack the ethics of one of my writers up against the average Washington bureaucrat on censorship any day." MacFarlane is mystified in particular by the two things that most upset the FCC -- two basic elements of human life that, in his view, are far less sensitive than, say, religion. "For the FCC, it's sexual references," he says. "But even more than that, shit jokes. Any time we even show somebody on a toilet, we get in trouble."

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that his jokes border on offensive. But the notion that they are actually offensive irks him.
Which brings us back to the writers room. A source of ongoing consternation is Stewie's inability to master the commode. MacFarlane assumes the child's erudite voice and says, speaking in character to his fellow children, "I'd like to make an announcement: It's the elephant in the room. I made a stool. Now let's just all go about our business as if nothing happened, and it'll take care of itself in due time."

Most everyone in the room laughs. The joke is in.

*****

Seth MacFarlane was basically fated to this life. His middle name, Woodbury, was chosen by his mother as an homage to the town drunk back in Kent, Connecticut. "Some of the foulest jokes I've ever heard," he has said, "came from my mother." MacFarlane started drawing at 2 and published his first cartoon, "Walter Crouton," in a local paper at the age of 8. At 18, he left for the Rhode Island School of Design and, after his adviser sent his thesis film, "Life of Larry" (starring a lovable schlub with a tolerant wife and a talking dog), off to Hanna-Barbera, he was hired to work as an animator and writer on shows like Dexter's Laboratory and Johnny Bravo. In 1996, he created a sequel to "Life of Larry" that aired in prime time on the Cartoon Network. Fox development executives took notice and hired him away to work on interstitials to run between sketches on Mad TV.

A few years later, Fox asked MacFarlane, then 25, to develop an animated pilot, giving him a scant $50,000 to do it. MacFarlane emerged three months later with a nearly completed pilot, for which he had drawn every frame and voiced every character.

Fox bought the show, gave MacFarlane a reported $2-million-per-season contract, and premiered Family Guy in the highest-profile slot possible, following the 1999 Super Bowl. He was the youngest person ever to be given his own primetime network show.

It drew 22 million viewers but then became a sort of network foster child. For the next two years, Fox execs moved the show all over the schedule, trying it in 11 time slots, including in the death zone opposite Friends. Despite the fact that Family Guy tracked well with young men, the show's ratings were low. Fox canceled it in 2000, revived it briefly the next year, then canceled it again.

But a funny thing happened. The show lived on over at the Cartoon Network, with even edgier versions specially edited by MacFarlane. Regard for the show was so low that Fox essentially gave the Cartoon Network the first 50 episodes for free; Fox simply asked for promotion of the show's DVD in exchange. (They were having trouble persuading retailers to stock it -- another in a list of miscalculations that seems inconceivable in retrospect.) Family Guy's audience, ignored at every turn, followed the show to the Cartoon Network, dug in, and swelled, regularly beating both Letterman and Leno in the desirable young-male demographic. When Fox released the first 28 episodes on a series of DVDs in 2003, it sold more than 2.5 million copies. (In 2005, a straight-to-DVD movie called Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story sold about 3.5 million copies, bringing in almost $80 million.)

Twentieth Century Fox TV president Gary Newman (now chairman) summoned MacFarlane to his office in 2004 and did the unthinkable: He asked him to restart production. "I had gone into the meeting not knowing why I was going in there," MacFarlane recalls. "He said, 'We'd like to put this back into production,' and I almost fell out of my chair."

David Goodman says that when Family Guy was initially canceled, MacFarlane told him Goodman's job would be safe if it ever returned. "I'd been on 14 canceled TV shows," Goodman recalls. "They never come back. It's never happened before -- ever."

Fox brought the show back in a big way, ordering 35 episodes (22 is typical) and handing over the Sunday-at-9 slot, where it boomed. The 100th episode aired in November of 2007, pushing the show into syndication. Though schedules vary, Family Guy airs up to 27 times a week in a single market, with reruns on Fox, TBS, the Cartoon Network, and in 20 major markets on channels owned by Tribune Broadcasting.

"Animation is something that, if it works, it's more profitable for a studio than any other show," MacFarlane says. People don't buy Everybody Loves Raymond T-shirts, but they do buy shirts bearing the devious visage of Stewie, as well as action figures, stickers, posters, and video games. Increasingly, they also buy song clips and ring tones. And Fox, which owns the show, also owns the intellectual property (but kicks a percentage of sales back to MacFarlane). Reports have valued the Family Guy franchise at as much as $1 billion. Though neither Fox nor MacFarlane's team would confirm that number, a little back-of-the-envelope math indicates that it is overly conservative. At a reported $2 million per episode, Family Guy has garnered at least $400 million up front from syndication. DVD sales have totaled almost another $400 million, while 80 licensees have contributed at least $200 million from sales of various clothing and baubles, actual and digital. Fox's ad revenue off Family Guy can be estimated at at least $500 million over the years. "Suffice it to say, with it being a studio-owned show, and being on the Fox network, it's of substantial value," Newman told me. And none of this figures in revenue from MacFarlane's other hit product, American Dad.

Team MacFarlane, of course, also recognized the value of what MacFarlane has brought to the network. By the time negotiations on a new contract began more than two years ago, the challenge for both sides was how to put a number on MacFarlane's worth, considering that he isn't just a writer-producer but also an animator and actor. MacFarlane's team felt the need to let his contract expire, "to have him on the open market," explains one of his representatives. For more than two years, MacFarlane worked on Family Guy in good faith, without a contract. "There were a couple days when I was 'sick,' " MacFarlane says. "At times, that helps bring the negotiations back when they're stalled."

When the writers strike broke out last year, he sided with the guild and walked off the set. Fox decided to go forward and edit episodes without MacFarlane's participation -- they did own them, after all. MacFarlane called it a "colossal dick move." When asked about it now, he says it's a sore that's been salved ($100 million has a way of doing that). "They gave us money to go back and edit the shows the way we wanted, and we made nice."

One Fox-inflicted bruise that has yet to fade involves shots taken at Family Guy by The Simpsons, a show that MacFarlane says he admires greatly. Most famously, in an episode called "Treehouse of Horror," Homer creates a sea of clones even dumber and more dim-witted than himself. One of these is Family Guy's Peter Griffin. MacFarlane decided to return fire. He wrote a joke in which Peter's perverted friend Quagmire attacks and molests Marge Simpson. Fox, he says, nixed the idea. "They said, 'We want the feuds to end.' I thought it was very conspicuous that this came about only when we decided to hit them back."

What did he do? He left it in anyway, and delivered the edit to Fox, which then edited it out. "It's still a sore point," MacFarlane says. "It's still this wound that has never quite healed that says, 'We don't value you quite as much,' which I can't imagine is true, but ..." The thought trails off and, perhaps realizing that it's best not to follow this logic, he turns a corner. "To be fair to Fox -- for the most part, creatively they have been a very easy company to work with. This was kind of a rare lapse in judgment."

*****

MacFarlane's contract hiatus didn't just buy him leverage with Fox; it was an expansion opportunity. While the studio was noodling on the deal, MacFarlane's management team went out and signed him up with Google. The resulting "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy" is outside the bounds of the Fox relationship. "In a completely perfect world," Dana Walden, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, has said, "he wouldn't be able to do that."

He did. The idea stemmed from conversations between MacFarlane's lawyer and agent and representatives of Media Rights Capital, an L.A.-based multimedia financier. Loosely tied to the talent agency Endeavor (which reps MacFarlane, naturally), MRC partners with content creators -- whether that's director Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel; or Sacha Baron Cohen on his next film, Bruno; or MacFarlane -- giving them funding and a share in ownership, plus creative control.

MacFarlane produced the Cavalcade shorts with a team of six writers. The animation is instantly recognizable as his, as is the humor. The shorts lean heavily on pop culture (say, "Fred and Barney Try to Get Into a Club," which is fairly self-explanatory); they're rude (in one, Tara Reid's grotesque belly flab talks); and of course, they're crude (a boy is told he is adopted by two parents with nipples that stick out of their chests like javelins; his name, they tell him, is not Michael Sticknipples but rather Albert Horsefeet Turdsneeze -- whereupon the boy sneezes a turd that sprouts horse feet and gallops off).

The Cavalcade shorts are also distributed in an innovative way: targeting young males where they lurk by popping up in ad windows on sites such as Maxim.com and Fandango.com (while simultaneously appearing on YouTube). "The idea is not to drive someone to a Web site but to make content available wherever the audience will be," explains Dan Goodman, president of digital at MRC.

Also unprecedented is the way MacFarlane is being paid. MRC is not Fox; it can't just write him a nine-figure check. Instead, MacFarlane's status as an equity partner in the deal entitles him to split the ad revenue with Google and MRC. Because the whole idea is new, it's hard to draw parallels to current entertainment and marketing models but, essentially, MRC provides the funding and sells the ad partnerships, MacFarlane provides the content, and Google serves as distribution outlet, providing the "broadcast" via its AdSense network. Then all three split the proceeds. It can, and will, be replicated with other content providers. Already, MRC is working with the Disney Channel's Raven-Symoné on kids-targeted programming. You could easily imagine it with, say, Rachael Ray.

Each Cavalcade short carries a single advertiser. The first 10 were bought by Burger King, and -- in yet another unprecedented move -- MacFarlane animated the company's ads for them. It's an option available to any of the sponsors if they choose to pay extra for it.

For Burger King, the appeal was obvious. "Seth's fan base intersects squarely with our audience of young men and women," says Brian Gies, vice president of marketing impact for Burger King. In other words, MacFarlane's comedy provides a very powerful and friendly connection to a very targeted audience, one that tends to get the munchies. Says Google's Levy: "We know where to find them, and we're putting the advertising in an environment they're comfortable in."

"The idea is to take the TV experience and provide it on the Web," says Alex Levy, Google's director of branded entertainment. "But brought to the people you want to reach, when, where, and how you want to reach them." For a company that likes to say it's not in the content business, that's a remarkable statement. Google, in essence, is trying to use its ad-distribution network to turn content distribution upside down. (Google calls it the Content Network.)

There's no guarantee the new model is going to stick, of course -- advertisers could decide they get as much value by just buying regular Web ads and avoid paying extra. But early returns showed viewers were responding well to the shorts. In its first days, Cavalcade was the most-watched channel on YouTube, and the videos racked up 5.5 million views across the various sites running them. And MacFarlane wins no matter what. Unlike his Family Guy characters, every horny frog and lusty princess and sarcastic talking bear created for Cavalcade is owned by him, and can be deployed for future revenue. And for all this, he has zero financial risk.

*****

A couple of years ago, MacFarlane nearly worked himself to death. He collapsed at his desk and was rushed to the hospital. He was sick, he says, and "didn't have the time to stop." So he passed out right there under the Sound of Music poster. He ended up spending, as he tells it, "a lovely afternoon at the emergency room."

"We've been behind schedule on Family Guy since day one," he explains. "In reality, you can't do a prime-time animated show in the time allotted, so that always puts a glaze of stress over the whole process." He takes a breath. "I refuse to let that control my life. I did that in my twenties. Now I insist on a balance."

MacFarlane has handed off the day-to-day control of both American Dad and The Cleveland Show, and he is increasingly delegating on Family Guy. He reviews all the drawings and obsesses more than a little over the music -- there is some stuff he just can't give up. And what's easy to forget is that MacFarlane is also the star of Family Guy. Actually, several stars of Family Guy. He voices three of the six main characters, and is in virtually every scene, sometimes playing several parts at once. He's also the voice of Quagmire, a major secondary player, and hundreds of ancillary characters and one-timers. And, of course, he's the voice of Stan, the lead on American Dad, and almost certain to guest-star often on The Cleveland Show. This summer, he showed up as a voice actor in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II and is very soon planning to step in front of the camera in live-action projects. He also intends to direct movies.

One afternoon in August, MacFarlane and two sound engineers are in the tiny control room outside the recording booths in the Family Guy offices. In strolls the actor Gary Cole wearing shorts and sunglasses. For a show that likes to pick on celebrities, Family Guy has little trouble attracting them, especially those whose résumés include the kind of wonderfully awful performances that ultimately get embraced as cult in-jokes: Drew Barrymore, Haley Joel Osment, Gene Simmons, Bob Costas, Phyllis Diller ... Michael Clarke Duncan was in earlier this morning. Richard Dreyfuss is due to arrive this evening.

Cole has done the show 23 times. Today, he's doing Mike Brady, reprising a role he played in The Brady Bunch Movie. In this script, Mr. Brady is verbally abusing Mrs. Brady in one of those trademark pop-culture tangents.

"You know, you can really go as loud as you want," MacFarlane says in director mode. "We've never heard Mike Brady yell before, so this is new territory." He then assumes the role of Carol Brady.

"Huh, I don't remember asking for a warm beer," Cole says, his voice quiet but seething.

MacFarlane, as Carol, flips out: "I didn't want to quit working -- you made me!"

Five minutes later, Cole exits and MacFarlane is off to the next thing, laying down lines in furious fashion, typically in three or four takes, which he then selects from on the fly. His sound engineers tag his favorite takes and move on. He swaps from voicing Stewie to Peter to Quagmire to various odd parts, including a bit as Paul McCartney and another as Vince Vaughn.

Next up: A writer is doing Patrick Swayze, who is not, as you might expect, the butt of a cancer joke, but rather a tight-jeans joke followed by repeated takes of the writer growling, as throaty redneck Swayze, "Roadhouse!" It's another one of those cult jokes, a little snippet of Dada theater.

"Even a hair more badass," MacFarlane directs, and over and over they go until that one simple word becomes absurd in its own right. You can already hear it as a ring tone.

Josh Dean wrote about the legal woes of Bodog CEO Calvin Ayre in July/August.


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Labels: Media, Stuff

by: Burt Helm

This morning when I blogged about the “Wassup 2008” Obama video, two questions sprung to my mind. First, who paid for this thing? The production values are very high – one person from Budweiser’s ad agency, DDB, estimated it could have cost as much as $750,000 (she also said DDB had nothing to do with the video). Second, how could Budweiser possibly be cool with such a clearly partisan advertisement?

After some digging, I found out. First, it cost way less than $750k. Second, Budweiser had no clue it was happening until after the video hit YouTube on Friday.

The man with the answers? Charles Stone III, the director of the original “Wassup” commercial and the movie Drumline (and the guy who answers the phone in the first frame of the video). He decided to make it about two weeks ago, he told me, with a crew of about 50 volunteers (all professionals working pro bono). They put it together in 9 days.

It was all possible, Stone says, because Budweiser never owned the rights to the idea. He’d originally made it as a short film independent of the brand, and Budweiser had only leased the rights, paying a mere $37,000 for five years of use. Back then, people gave him a hard time about the low price. Now Stone, a diehard Obama supporter, says it’s more than paid off. “That I’m able to use an idea distributed by a huge company, who made a lot of money off it, so that now when I put out what I want to say, it’s recognizable, and it sparks -- that’s worth $1 million to me.”

It came together after emailing with friends about ways they could make a video supporting Obama. Once they’d settled on the concept, he got on the phone with the original cast (all friends of his, who are now actors living in New York, Philadelphia, and LA), and called up his Director of Photography from Drumline, Shane Hurlbut, who brought in his crew. He also signed up Gerard Cantor and Maurice Marible, from commercial production house Believe Media, who co-produced. They shot over two days. The war-torn Iraq setting is actually a preexisting set in Santa Clarita, CA.

After they finished, they uploaded it to YouTube with distribution company 60Frames, set up a website, wassup08.com, and sent links to everyone they knew. As of writing this, it’s been viewed almost 1.8 million times, and picked up across the blogosphere, including on BoingBoing, Daily Kos, and Huffington Post. The final price tag? About $6500 out of his own pocket, Stone says.

Labels: advertisement, Media

By Dylan Stableford

User-generated content has been buzzed about in magazine circles for a few years, but editors—save for a select few—have largely been reluctant to turn over pages from their shrinking folios to readers. Now, a magazine is taking the concept to its extreme: a 100-percent user-generated issue.

For its June issue, Budget Travel has allowed its readers to generate all of the text and photography—only the “40 Best Deals” section was written by staffers.

The magazine solicited some 2,800 pitches from readers, according to editor Erik Torkells. In the end, he says, there were 324 contributors for the issue. A piece called “50 Reasons You Love New York” elicited 500 submissions alone.

“Let’s be perfectly clear,” Torkells wrote in a blog post for FOLIO:. “Making this issue was neither cheap nor easy.”

The magazine paid “normal fees” to its contributors, Torkells says, as well as travel expenses for companions—“something we don’t do for professional writers.” (Sending a family of four to Hong Kong, Torkells says, blew out the magazine’s travel budget, no pun intended.)

And without an “extraordinary amount” of editing, the issue “would’ve been a mess,” he says. “Editing non-professional writers is never easy, especially when you’re asking them to write long.”

User-Gen X

The concept of a user-generated magazine is not new. In fact, it’s already been done in the travel category. 8020 Publishing’s Everywhere magazine—comprised entirely of user-generated content—was launched in 2007 after 8020’s successful launch JPG, a magazine is comprised entirely of submitted photography.

It’s a nod, Torkells says, to one of the major changes to have affected travel industry in the past 10 years—namely, that consumers are turning to each other as much as to so-called experts. “You still need editors,” Torkells says of Everywhere, adding that there’s a “broad, service element” to Budget Travel’s issue that Everywhere doesn’t have.

Larger magazines have dabbled in user-gen, too. Wired has experimented with user-generated content in the magazine and on special covers; Dennis Publishing recently announced that its Bizarre magazine in the U.K. would relaunch with a direct focus on user-generated content; and magazines such as Time and Esquire have devoted feedback-style sections to content generated on their Web sites.

Torkells says he plans to do another user-generated Budget Travel issue in 2009. “In the future,” Torkells says, “love it or hate it, an editor’s role will be to lead a conversation, not deliver a monologue.”

Labels: Media

Aggressive moves build new model for music industry

By Brian Hiatt

WHILE THE MUSIC business as we know it collapses, one company is sweeping in to pick up the pieces: Live Nation, the world's largest concert promoter, made another set of aggressive moves beyond its core business in recent weeks, striking broad deals with U2 and Jay-Z. "Live Nation is growing very, very fast," says U2 manager Paul McGuinness. "It's going to emerge as one of the centers of the music industry, if not the center of the music industry."

The U2 pact guarantees that Live Nation will promote tours by the band for twelve years, as well as handle the band's merchandising, run its Website and sell its tickets (financial terms were kept under wraps). The $150 million, ten-year Jay-Z deal (which was not finalized at press time) is even broader, much like the $120 million deal Live Nation made with Madonna in October: The company will release his future albums, promote his tours, handle his merch and partner with him on various entrepreneurial ventures under the name Roc Nation.

After a series of acquisitions and other moves, Live Nation is becoming a company like no other in the history of the music business, with tentacles extending into ticketing, recorded music, merchandising, fan clubs and artist Websites. By committing to releasing albums by Jay-Z and Madonna, it is taking on roles traditionally performed by major labels. But more important to its bottom line, Live Nation is also treading on Ticketmaster's territory. The company — which books more than 150 venues worldwide — will dump Ticketmaster beginning next year, instead offering tickets through its own system, which will allow sites such as U2.com to sell directly to fans.

In the past two years, Live Nation also bought Musictoday, which runs artists' fan clubs, and Signatures Network, a leading music-merchandise company.

"There are a whole bunch of products that are based around live concerts that we've never participated in, where we didn't have the infrastructure," says Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. "We really just moved into that infrastructure and became a vertically integrated music company." Ever-decreasing sales for recorded music give Live Nation an advantage. "For us, it happens to be great news because the live show is becoming the center of the wheel for artists. [Most] of their revenues are coming from the road, which is a very different economic model. We say to artists, 'If we're going to do your tour, what else can we do around that show to maximize our revenue and do a great job for you?'"

It also helps that, unlike record companies, Live Nation will deal directly with consumers online, allowing it to offer, say, Madonna or Jay-Z MP3s to fans who just bought tickets to their shows. In this scenario, albums become just another form of merchandise.

Some in the music industry question whether Live Nation is overpaying for artists: They doubt that Jay-Z and Madonna have the longevity to justify the multiyear pacts, and they challenge why the company paid U2 a presumably huge advance for the right to promote tours it would have likely promoted anyway. "With Jay-Z, no one in the record industry would have made that deal," argues Randy Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, Live Nation's biggest concert-promotion competitor, pointing out that Jay-Z has never been a U2-level force on the road. "Too much money. If you're looking for a rationale for what Live Nation is doing, you're not going to find it in a business model that makes sense."

He adds, "They're trying to figure out how to move the needle on their stock price, or they're looking for a buyer. And they feel having all these big names and assets will help." Live Nation lost nearly $12 million last year, and its stock price has been trending downward.

Rapino insists that Live Nation will sign very few Madonna- and Jay-Z-style deals. "It's hardly a scalable proposition," he says. He notes that Jay-Z's current arena tour with Mary J. Blige is expected to gross $30 million, likely making it the most successful of the rapper's career. And he says the U2 deal, which partners Live Nation with a band that has earned $706 million on the road over the last twelve years, is a no-brainer: "When you've got one of a handful of bands that can sell out stadiums worldwide, you don't want to leave that one to 'Oh, we've got a great relationship — let's not worry about them,'" he says. "And now we're in a true partnership with the greatest band in the world."

Overall, Rapino adds, all of the new businesses Live Nation is entering — from T-shirt sales to recorded music — have far better profit margins than live concerts: "We have learned that if you have a longer relationship with the artist and you have more revenue streams with the artist, your model is much more robust."

"Live Nation is going to emerge as one of the centers of the music industry — if not the center."

Labels: Media, Music

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Spike Lee says the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crudely phrased criticism of Barack Obama won’t affect the Democrat’s campaign, which the filmmaker expects to succeed at bringing “seismic” change to the world.

“I don’t think his (Jackson’s) comments help anybody. It’s just unfortunate,” Lee said after taking part in a Television Critics Association panel.

Lee predicted Obama would be elected in November.

“When that happens, it will change everything. … You’ll have to measure time by `Before Obama’ and `After Obama,”‘ Lee said during the panel. “It’s an exciting time to be alive now.”

The presidency of the first African-American will ripple throughout arts, sports and more, said Lee, whose films include “Malclom X” and “Do the Right Thing.”

“Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe,” he said.

Lee attended the TV group’s annual summer session to discuss documentaries he’s making for ESPN Films, including one about Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Jackson’s comment about Obama came last Sunday during a break in Jackson’s appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” Unaware his microphone was on, Jackson told a fellow guest that Obama was “talking down” to blacks in speeches on morality at black churches; he also used a slang reference for wanting to sever Obama’s testicles.

Jackson apologized Wednesday for “hurtful and wrong” remarks. Obama’s campaign offered a low-key response, accepting the apology and defending against the notion that he neglected issues important to blacks.

Lee was more pointed when speaking of Jackson’s remarks.

Asked if there was any validity to the criticism of Obama, Lee replied: “No. Here’s the thing: I don’t know why people are questioning whether Barack Obama is black enough. For me, that’s an ignorant statement.”

“There are middle-class, educated black people who speak the way he does. … We have to try to move away from this so-called image of what black is, which is largely influenced by rap and that type of stuff,” Lee said.

“I’m for Mr. Obama,” Lee said. “I think he’s gonna win. And it’s going to be a better day not only for the United States but for the world.”

Labels: African Americans, Media, Stuff

Perception management is a term originated by the U. S. military. The U. S. Department of Defense (DOD) gives this definition:

perception management—Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.

Emily Goldman characterizes the phrase "perception management" as a "euphemism" for "an aspect of information warfare." She notes a distinction between "perception management" and public diplomacy, which "does not, as a rule, involve falsehood and deception, whereas these are important ingredients of perception management; the purpose is to get the other side to believe what one wishes it to believe, whatever the truth may be."[2] Although perception management is specifically defined as being limited to foreign audiences, critics of the DOD charge that it also engages in domestic perception management. An example cited is the prohibition of viewing or photographing the flag draped caskets of dead military as they are unloaded in bulk upon arrival in the U.S. for further distribution, a policy only recently implemented. The phrase "perception management" is filtering into civilian use as a synonym for "persuasion." Public relations firms now offer "perception management" as one of their services. Similarly, officials who are being accused of shading the truth are now frequently charged with engaging in "perception management." Although perception management operations are typically carried out within the international arena between governments, civilian use of perception management techniques have been carried out by some practitioners.

Labels: Media

By Chris Faraone

The New York Times rarely refers to rock stars such as Alice Cooper, Moby, and Elton John by their birth names. With few exceptions, Vincent Furnier, Richard Melville Hall, and Reginald Dwight get free passes on their alter egos, as do the likes of American Idol icon Clay Aiken (Clayton Grissom) and anti-Christ
superstar Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner). For some reason, though, the unofficial guideline that once compelled former Times critic Donal Henahan to make subsequent reference to Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious as Mr. Pop and Mr. Vicious (instead of Mr. [James] Osterberg and Mr. [Simon John] Beverly, or even Pop and Vicious) does not apply, apparently, to hip-hop artists. At the Times, the penalty for being a rapper is twofold: you are routinely called out on your birth name (no matter how nerdy and ironic it might be), and you rarely are addressed as “Mr.” This nominal double standard surfaces from time to time in hip-hop articles throughout the mainstream press, but due to the Times’s extensive urban-music coverage and its eternal struggle with honorific conformity, rap handles seem to inspire more copy dilemmas there.

Despite having sold several million discs and served as president of Def Jam Recordings under his alias, Jay-Z still gets pegged as Shawn Carter. The Times’s David M. Halbfinger and Jeff Leeds did so in reporting on the Brooklyn rap entrepreneur’s 2007 comeback, as did Los Angeles Times staff writer Richard Cromelin and the Boston Globe’s Sarah Rodman. No hip-hop artist is immune—Wu-Tang Clan ringleader RZA (Robert Diggs), Queens heavyweight 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson), and urban mogul Diddy (Sean Combs) are all routinely birth-named in the mainstream press.

Sam Sifton, the Times’s culture editor, says that while such decisions are handled on a case-by-case basis, rap artists often get special treatment. “There’s a big difference between [Houston rapper] Bun B and Tony Bennett,” Sifton says, referring to Bernard Freeman and Anthony Dominick Benedetto, respectively. “Tony Bennett took a stage name, which I think is a little different from taking an alias. Someone like Jay-Z can be Mr. Carter, certainly, or he can just be Jay-Z, but he’s never going to be Mr. Z.”

But is there a meaningful distinction between a “stage name” and an “alias”? That Sifton made an example of Jay-Z—rather than someone like, say, Ghostface Killah, whose chosen moniker is further outside the mainstream nomenclature—suggests that at the Times, at least, there is, and that rappers are in a class by themselves. Why else would Alicia Keys, a performer from beyond the rap realm—who took a stage name (or devised an alias) based on the instrument she plays—have never been outed as Alicia Augello-Cook? In Kelefa Sanneh’s October 5, 2003, Times CD roundup, Outkast rappers André 3000 (André Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan Patton) got name-dropped, while Erykah Badu’s birth name (Erica Wright) was never mentioned.

Even more confusing are articles that seem to follow no logic whatsoever: a December 3, 2006, Times profile on celebrity Sirius Radio hosts refers to rap personality Ludacris as Christopher Bridges (and as “Mr. Bridges” in subsequent references), but allows Eminem (Marshall Mathers), Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus), and Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) to use their stage names. On second reference, though, Bob Dylan is “Mr. Dylan,” while Eminem remains Eminem; Snoop is only mentioned once, but judging by former Times treatments he would have been called “Snoop” or “Snoop Dogg” had his name come up again.

“If you look in our archives, which we famously refer to as our compendium of past errors, you’ll see plenty of examples of us looking ridiculous,” Sifton says. “One of the difficulties that the Times has in addressing contemporary culture, and certainly hip-hop culture, is that we risk looking stupid all the time.”

Since it doesn’t look like it will be abandoning honorifics any time soon, blanket uniformity might be the best bet for the Times to look less foolish, or at least more consistent. After all, if they can call Brian Warner “Mr. Manson,” then surely America’s finest newsrooms can honor Calvin Broadus as Mr. Dogg.

Labels: Media, Music

Written by Eric J. Adams on April 19, 2004


Business books tend to fall into two categories; those that do a great job of restating the fundamentals (or the obvious, depending on your level of experience) and those that tend toward the theoretical, so much so that they make it difficult to put their prescriptions into practice. "The Next Economy" by Elliott Ettenberg is one of those rare books that falls squarely in the middle. Ettenberg is former chairman and CEO of Bozell Retail Worldwide and now a big-time marketing consultant.

Though "The Next Economy" is skewed toward retail, the lessons are valuable for creative professionals, both for their own marketing purposes and also to help deliver more effective marketing campaigns for their clients.

What is the Next Economy?
Ettenberg contends that the next economy (as opposed to the "old economy" and Internet-driven "new economy") will be shaped by a number of key factors:

The first factor is that growth is no longer a given. The next economy will be characterized by "customer infidelity" where every company faces the prospect of losing the majority of its clients. It is going to be a tougher marketplace and only those with the appropriate marketing and servicing methodologies will command the loyalty necessary to survive and succeed. Call it "the concierge economy."

The second factor, and most important new currency, will be dialogue. "Communication should not be one way. There must a procedure by which customers are able to dialogue with the sellers. Dialogue suggests that the customer initiate a discussion and brings it to a conclusion," writes Ettenberg.

As a result one-to-one marketing (a very "new economy" term) will be a must for most businesses. The winners tomorrow will be the companies that figure out how to take steps using online and other technologies to improve, enhance, personalize, and deepen customer relationships.

Here's how Ettenberg describes one-to-one: "A mass marketer tries to acquire a constant stream of new customers, while the one-to-one marketer tries to get a constant stream of new business from current customers."

That said, successful marketing campaigns in the next economy will substitute the old four P's of marketing -- product, place, price, and promotion -- with the four new R's -- relationships, retrenchment, relevancy, and reward.

The Four R's
Here's what Ettenberg has to say about the four Rs:

Relationships: We all know about service. At least we think we do. But service is about more than offering a trouble-free shopping experience or a smooth business transaction. Every contact point with your customer is a serviceable opportunity to delight that person. It is more than "please" and "thank you." It is about meeting a person's or a company's wants, not just needs.

Companies should re-learn the art of delighting the customer. The challenge is to make the experience from your company different than that of your competitors. This concept is not limited to retailers and e-tailers, companies in all sectors can develop or re-engineer this competency in powerful and creative ways.


Retrenchment: A whole generation of baby boomers are withdrawing from traditional consumption environments. They are moving from what they need to what they want. This is transforming the economy. In addition, a new generation of consumers will expect to be catered to, and that will extend into the workplace.

The strategy of retrenchment involves going to the customer rather than trying to entice the customer to come to you. Using technology, you can bring the store, the brand, the product, or service to the person's home or office. Retrenchment is a natural outgrowth of the consumer demanding what they want versus the old line push strategy of offering and trying to anticipate what consumers need.


Relevancy: Once your best clients have been identified and retained, keep them by continually reestablishing your relevancy. Do so by making your company the number one source of ideas and information about the category in which you compete. You can further extend relevancy by offering products and services that are intelligently selected to cater to your clients.


Rewards: Define strategies that reward customers for doing business with you. You can do so by knowing what your best customers value most and designing rewards that recognize, validate, and promote those values. (For creative professionals, the most valued client commodity is often time. If you can save a person or a company time, you have rewarded that person for doing business with you.)
Concierge Marketing
This new focus on marketing will lead to what Ettenberg calls "concierge marketing." A concierge is someone who represents the buyer and makes sure that his wants are met in the best possible way. While clients buy and sell products and services from many people, they have a concierge relationship with only a few, and those relationships last the longest.

For creative professionals, concierge marketing can mean brokering other products and services allied to your field -- helping your client find writers, illustrators, and Web developers, for example.

"In fact, the age of concierge marketing is ideal for small and midsized businesses. Their flexibility and ability to customize make small businesses especially suited to this style of business -- far more so than the traditional, large Fortune 500 Company." Ettenberg says.

There is a lot of marketing-ese in Ettenberg's book, but if you can read past the jargon, you'll find a strategic vision for marketing success, suitable for you, for your clients, for the next economy and certainly for this one as well.

Labels: Media, Stuff

By CATHY HORYN
RACIAL prejudice in the fashion industry has long persisted because of tokenism and lookism. “We already have our black girl,” says a designer to a fashion-show casting agent, declining to see others. Or: “She doesn’t have the right look.” Laziness, paranoia and pedantry may also have something to do with the failure to hire black models for shows and magazine features in any meaningful number, but, hey, that’s just a guess.

A decade ago the thing to deplore was the stereotyping of black models by dressing them in African-inspired clothes (or the Asian girls in kimonos). This at least gave work to minority models, but it also encouraged a Western view of African culture of the many-bangles-many-beads variety.

O.K., so fashion ain’t deep. It looks into a mirror and sees ... itself. The irony in fashion is that it loves change but it can’t actually change anything. It can only reflect a change in the air. But what changes fashion? What would finally move American designers to include more black models on their runways? That 30 percent of the country is nonwhite? That black women spend $20 billion a year on clothes? That an African-American is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party?

The answer is the individual eye.

In fashion, one of the most influential eyes belongs to the photographer Steven Meisel. His pictures have caught an America basking in the earnest, self-reflected glow of celebrity and money. He has taken innumerable risks, especially with “Sex,” the 1992 volume he did with Madonna, that have paid off with a career that allows him to do whatever he wants.

And he has almost lovingly photographed some of the world’s beautiful women, tapping into their psyches, connecting with them on a human level, while transforming them into fashion deities.

As the model Veronica Webb, who first worked with Mr. Meisel 20 years ago, said: “Steven knows every single tic, every talent that every girl has. He just pulls it out of them.”

For the July issue of Italian Vogue, Mr. Meisel has photographed only black models. In a reverse of the general pattern of fashion magazines, all the faces are black, and all the feature topics are related to black women in the arts and entertainment. Mr. Meisel was given roughly 100 pages for his pictures. The issue will be on European newsstands next Thursday and in the United States soon after.

Under its editor, Franca Sozzani, Italian Vogue has gained a reputation for being more about art and ideas than commerce. Ms. Sozzani also doesn’t mind controversy.

She said that, as an Italian, she has been intrigued by the American presidential race and Mr. Obama, which was one source of inspiration when she and Mr. Meisel began discussing, in February, the idea of an all-black issue. Also, she was aware of the lack of diversity on the runways in recent years and the debate it fueled last fall in New York, where Bethann Hardison, a former model who ran a successful agency, held two panel discussions on the topic.

Ms. Sozzani said the issue was not a response to criticism that she, too, has under-represented blacks or portrayed them as stereotypes.

“Mine is not a magazine that can be accused of not using black girls,” said Ms. Sozzani, noting that Naomi Campbell has had several covers, and that Liya Kebede and Alek Wek have also had covers.

Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue — Iman, Ms. Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, Ms. Kebede, Ms. Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander — Mr. Meisel had his own feelings. “I thought, it’s ridiculous, this discrimination,” said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race — every kind of prejudice.”

He began casting in March. “I love the history of fashion, obviously, and I love old, and I tried to get as many of the older girls as I could,” he said. Over Ms. Sozzani’s initial objections, he also hired Toccara Jones, a full-figure model, who became known from “America’s Next Top Model.” “I wanted to say something about weight, and I’m never allowed to do that,” he said. “I met Toccara and thought, she’s beautiful. What’s the deal with her? She’s great and she’s sexy.”

If these pictures have a heightened sense of glamour, it probably has something to do with the atmosphere of a Meisel shoot. According to Ms. Webb, “it’s the darkest studio, like a studio at MGM.”

There are fans and reflectors; many assistants. An area is marked “Hair” and another “Makeup.” (Pat McGrath did all the makeup for the issue, and Guido Palau did the hair.) A mirror is placed behind Mr. Meisel, so the model can see herself.

“It’s a dark world,” Ms. Webb said, “and you’re in the spotlight.”

The four pictures that Ms. Campbell was supposed to make turned into 20. She also appears on the fold-out cover, along with Ms. Kebede, Sessilee Lopez and Ms. Dunn. “Franca doesn’t realize what she’s done for people of color,” Ms. Campbell said the other day. “It reminds me of Yves using all the black models.” She was referring to Yves Saint Laurent, who, like Gianni Versace and a handful of other designers, routinely cast minorities.

Mr. Meisel has his own theories about why black models, save for the token few, have disappeared from runways. “Perhaps the designers, perhaps the magazine editors,” he said. “They are the powerful people. And the advertisers. I have asked my advertising clients so many times, ‘Can we use a black girl?’ They say no.” The concern is that consumers will resist the product, he said. “It all comes down to money.”

Ashley Brokaw, an independent casting agent in New York, believes that designers want more diversity in their casts but, she said, “what they want and what the reality is are two different things.” She thinks that agencies don’t spend enough time to groom new models for the catwalk, making it easy for designers to reject them, and then the cycle of new faces is spinning faster and faster.

But it’s also true that designers, in spite of their creative powers, yearn for the approval of insiders. “They are looking around, over their shoulders, asking, ‘Is that cool?’ ” Mr. Meisel said. He agreed that it’s a crazy kind of paranoia. Whether it’s a new model or hip style, he said with a laugh, “It can only be stated by a certain five people and then they go with it.”

What is striking about Mr. Meisel’s pictures, especially a portrait of Ms. Banks in a soft head-wrap and one of Ms. Lopez in a neat brocade turban, is how much beauty and life he was able to extract from them, so that you almost feel you are seeing these women for the first time.

Ms. Hardison hopes that the Italian Vogue issue (to which she contributed) will open people’s eyes in the industry. “They need to see what they’re missing out there,” she said. This week, in its July issue, American Vogue will have an article about the dearth of black models.

Perhaps no individual, though, will know what it means to be included more than Ms. Lopez. Last year, she barely worked. Ms. Brokaw predicts that after insiders see Mr. Meisel’s pictures, she will have a terrific season.

This kind of perplexes and delights Mr. Meisel.

“Here’s this exquisite girl,” he said, addressing no one in particular. “What don’t you get? She’s a beautiful woman. There was no trick to it.”

Labels: African Americans, Media, Stuff

By Aric Chen
Arriving for breakfast on a recent morning in Beijing, Jennifer Wen Ma looks as self-assured as the glittering new buildings rising around her. Her eyes convey a kind of benign ferocity, a flicker of knowingness that's jarring in a 33-year-old. But then again, for all her youth, Ma is carrying an unlikely burden: the aspirations of 1.3 billion people.

A Beijing-born, New York-seasoned artist, Ma is part of the seven-member creative team masterminding China's great coming out party--the opening ceremony of next year's Beijing Olympics. Leading her group is acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower); celebrated artist Cai Guo-Qiang (New York's Museum of Modern Art, London's Tate Modern, an upcoming retrospective at the Guggenheim) is also on board. But, younger than her colleagues by a generation or so--and with an artist's résumé that includes a video work, projected onto a tousled bed, of a woman engaged in what she politely calls "self-comfort"--Ma is emblematic of a newer, edgier China. The opening ceremony will no doubt be a G-rated affair, but when the Olympic torch finally arrives in Beijing next year, Ma wants to smoke out your clichéd ideas about her country--and those of your 4 billion fellow viewers--right along with it. "We're going to try to keep the ribbon dancing to a minimum," she says. "Whatever we end up doing, the bottom line is to showcase the innovation of the Chinese people. Everyone wants to project a very modern image--one that will stun the world."

China is not content to serve as factory to the globe. Call it economic foresight, or cultural pride, but despite the stratospheric growth of its economy--10.7% last year--China knows that cheap labor alone can't sustain the boom. While a flurry of activity (and, yes, a government five-year plan) has stressed scientific and technological innovation, look a little closer and you'll see that creativity in art and industry--in design, fashion, media, and the like--is fast becoming a driving national mission.

Look past the behemoth Three Gorges Dam, past a highway system that will be larger than America's by 2020, and China is building a creative infrastructure, too, at breakneck speed. You can sense it in the trendy restaurants and slick boutiques popping up in major cities--and in the gritty ex-warehouse and factory districts where imagination-driven companies are joining the cafés and art galleries that first settled in. Newsstands are brimming with glossies such as Vision, Urban, and Modern Weekly that, joined by online counterparts like Coldtea, feature international trends alongside promising local talents. China's answers to YouTube (Tudou and Yoqoo) and social-networking sites (Douban)--along with an estimated 34 million (and skyrocketing) blogs--are bringing in digital reinforcements on a national scale.

Combine all of that with a counterdiaspora and reverse brain drain of talent, and the overall result is a kind of primordial soup thick with the building blocks of creative enterprise. Emerging from it is an army--small, but growing--that's working to reinvent how China thinks and works.

Of course, that process has been under way for some time. Homegrown corporate giants such as Lenovo, which swallowed up IBM's personal-computing unit in 2005, and the appliance maker Haier, have made notable strides in design and innovation. The Sonys and GMs of the world are starting to get real mileage out of their Chinese design studios. Veteran filmmakers such as Zhang and Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) and stars like Ziyi Zhang (click here [1]) are producing work that competes internationally while fashion designers Vivienne Tam and Han Feng (both long based in New York) have earned global followings as well. Judging by the country's Olympics plans--expect some of the most radical architecture the world has ever seen--even the old-guard bureaucrats seem to be getting the idea.

But does China have what it takes to become a creative superpower? At first glance, even the Chinese seem unsure. "We asked a thousand 15- to 35-year-olds in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to rank the 20 or 25 words that best describe China," says P.T. Black, an American-born partner of Jigsaw International, a Shanghai-based trend-forecasting firm that counts major multinationals as clients. And "'creative' placed close to last."

Still, for those raised with the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the world of Communist Youth Leagues and Little Red Books doesn't figure into the equation anymore--it's all about the Internet, new media, and MTV. China's overall population may be aging faster than almost any on earth, but its younger generations benefit from one creative staple long denied their elders: a sense of possibility. "These are people who have seen nothing but growth," Black says, "nothing but China getting the Olympics, Yao Ming going to the NBA, nothing but optimism." And, for some, nothing but the tantalizing proximity of a vast new affluence: By one count, the average age of China's 400 richest people stands at 46.5, versus 65.7 in the United States--bringing a 25-year-old in China a full generation closer to the average gazillionaire. "There's a sense that creativity is where you make money," Black continues. "People are getting rewarded for it, and that's only going to inspire more."

If anyone could be called Great Leader in this new countercultural revolution, it's Ou Ning. Originally from the southern province of Guangdong but now based in Beijing, Ou, 37, is typical of the kind of frenetic multitasker you're liable to run into here these days: A writer, filmmaker, music promoter, and graphic designer, he has founded several alternative magazines to boot. His latest project is Get It Louder, a roving biennial exhibition of young creatives that's billed as the first of its kind in China--a road show for the country's grooviest generation that, this spring and summer, is having its second run in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. "In Chinese society, it's always the old people who have power," says Ou, who's dressed in a pair of pea-green Nikes to complement his austere eyewear and uniform of black. "We want to create a platform for young people to speak their own voice."

Packed with everything from animation and illustration to architecture, fashion, and (almost literally) the kitchen sink, the first iteration of Get It Louder in 2005 was a designer-palooza that showcased 100 mostly Chinese up-and-comers--half from the mainland, with an average age of 25. Thousands came to check out the punk and skater graphics; sound, video, and art installations; and enough cool T-shirts to outfit New York's Williamsburg, L.A.'s Silver Lake, and London's East End combined. And then there were the parties. "A lot of people drank so much they just crashed on the sofas," Ou recalls, "which is how I think exhibitions should be."

It might sound like Sino-slacker anarchy, but Ou and his cadre are on the international business radar--and getting bigger. At the inaugural Get It Louder, the German faucet maker Grohe was so impressed by Shanghai architect Chen Xudong's "Water Corridor" installation that the company asked him to come up with some new product concepts. And Chivas tapped another participant, a collective called Unmask, to design whiskey and cocktail glasses for its sponsored events. "The most interesting work is coming from advertising, PR, and marketing, because they have the money," says Shaway Yeh, the editorial director of the Shanghai-based publication Modern Weekly. Pulling out a boxed set of 13 books, sponsored by Rémy Martin's Louis XIII cognac, she flips through a tour de force of sophisticated layouts, pull-out postcards, origami-like pages, and photographs that can be rearranged as in a scrapbook. Each book pays homage to one of China's cultural movers and shakers; all are the work of Les Suen, a 31-year-old Shanghai design whiz.

The massive influx of foreign multinationals, and the growth of their Chinese competitors, has given local talents new chances to stretch and prove themselves at home. More significant, those talents are starting to find demand overseas. Last November, the People's Daily proudly announced that China had become the world's third-largest exporter of creative services and products. Granted, how creativity was defined--and how much of the country's $969.1 billion in 2006 exports was "creative"--seems a bit unclear. Still, "the last 20 years have been about the West moving East," says Philip Dodd, a consultant and BBC radio host whose London-based firm, Made in China, is helping Chinese cities develop their creative industries. "But the next 20 years will be about the East moving West."

Dodd, who's at work on everything from an electronic-arts biennial in Shanghai to an animation festival in Beijing, isn't just talking about Haier washing machines at Best Buy or Chinese herbal remedies at Whole Foods. He means culture, too. He points to a contemporary rendition of the ancient tale of The Monkey King, directed by a Chinese theater impresario--and set to a score by Blur frontman Damon Albarn--that will headline the inaugural Manchester International Festival in England this month. And Dodd could have gone on: Not long ago, Cao Qiang, a young Chinese fashion designer, won the grand prize at an international competition--sponsored in part by the lofty French body that designates haute couture. From Germany to Japan, Chinese industrial-design students are also starting to rack up awards. Guest-edited by two Chinese artists, the latest issue of the global-culture quarterly Colors pays homage to the country's emerging creative gusto. And products by young designers like Lin Jing and Eddie Yip are making the cut at choosy retailers such as Milanese style mecca 10 Corso Como and "urban vinyl" phenomenon Kidrobot in the United States.

On a more monumental scale, three Beijing architects erupted onto the international stage last year when they clinched the competition to design a condo high-rise outside Toronto. Their winning scheme, set to begin construction this year with an estimated $114 million price tag, is a dramatic 56-story tower that spirals and undulates like a giant ergonomic barbell. And the units were such a hit that these young architects--who call their firm MAD Design--have since been asked to build a second tower next to the first, while other commissions have been flooding in from Denmark to Inner Mongolia. China, known as the playground for the world's most adventurous architects, is now exporting some flash-forward designs of its own.

"The young generation in China is unbelievably strong," says Stefano Boeri, who, as editor of the Italian design bible Domus (he's now at Abitare), oversaw the launch of the magazine's Chinese edition last year. Boeri is referring to China's emerging architects, but his words resonate more broadly: "They still need to metabolize," he continues, "but in a few years, they'll produce something new. Of this I'm absolutely sure."

Meanwhile, don't overlook that other Chinese characteristic: determination. "Recently," says Ou, the Get It Louder founder, "there was a series of television documentaries explaining the rise of empires. Everyone here watched it very closely." They were, he says, looking for pointers.

To get a sense of how Chinese creativity might evolve, just look across the East China Sea. "The Chinese see Japan as a role model, because it was able to modernize without losing its visceral culture," says Amy Gendler, who runs the AIGA's Chinese outpost--the design organization's only presence outside of the United States. Indeed, those who once dismissed Japan as a backwater of the imagination eventually ate those words as the nation became a global force in fashion, design, architecture, and pop culture--not to mention cars and consumer electronics.

Likewise, "there's a strong desire in China to become internationally relevant while maintaining a Chineseness," says Gendler, who also teaches graphic design at Beijing's top-notch Central Academy of Fine Arts. She's not talking about dragons and phoenixes. She's talking about people like Li Weiran. A soft-spoken 31-year-old, Li graduated from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy and went on to make TV commercials in China for the likes of Nike, Pepsi, and Google. With a keen cinematic eye and brilliant wit, Li's ads spoof hackneyed scenes from Chinese life: a generations-old family feud, complete with a flying chicken (don't ask), that's finally resolved over a bottle of Master Kong green tea. Or an unwitting utility worker, perched high on a telephone pole, turned into a human basketball hoop by a group of teens slam-dunking his workman's bag. (It was part of a series for Nike called "Anytime.")

"I like to get my creativity from real life," Li says, sipping a coffee at a trendy bar overlooking Beijing's Houhai Lake. "Most of my ads are localized, about experiences the Chinese can relate to, while maybe borrowing some Western ideas," he continues. Li started off with a bang when, at just 25, he directed a television commercial for UNICEF, which won China's first-ever Gold award at advertising's career-making One Show in New York. "It was an extraordinary ad that I remember well," One Club president Kevin Swanepoel recalls six years later. "As good as any I've seen." Apparently, Sony agrees; it just hired Li to help produce some new ads for the domestic markets in China, Japan, and Korea.

In other words, as China's influence expands, and its young creatives refine their export-grade material, the notion of Chineseness is expanding along with it. After all, you wouldn't think of MAD's Toronto towers as being typically Chinese. But "there's a reason we hid the buildings' structure," explains firm partner Qun Dang, referring to their torqued, sinuous exteriors. "China didn't have an industrial revolution like in the West, so the structure isn't the main concern. Instead, it's about the beauty of the natural form, a more eastern philosophical or Chinese way of thinking." In light of the current infatuation with expressive architectural gestures--think Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid--it's tempting to argue that the world is catching up with China.

Not that China doesn't have some work to do. Overall, its education system still does little to inspire. And then there's the weight of government censorship (a heavily redacted Internet, for example), red tape, and all that nagging piracy--though Beijing is working on a national design policy that promises, officially at least, to better protect intellectual property rights while promoting new education initiatives. What's more, while the country has spectacularly leapfrogged into contemporaneity, the flip side, many Chinese will tell you, is that there's not much of a pop- or sub-culture foundation to build on.

Even here, however, the vacuum is filling fast. "Street culture is becoming the biggest influence in China," says a hip and prolific Shanghai designer who goes by the name Ji Ji. His branding and identity clients already include Nike, L'Oréal, and Shu Uemura, but the 35-year-old also has five stores: four for Shirt Flag, his T-shirt line known for ironic takes on Mao-era graphics, and one for Under Oath, a more architectural and conceptual fashion collection. "Right now, we're following the Western world, but we don't want to copy," he says. "I think we'll have our own street culture soon."

Or consider Da>Space. A year-old gallery and store in a former factory building in Shanghai, it has hosted everything from a life-size, apocalyptic take on an army tank to an extravaganza, called "I, China," that got more than 80 emerging artists and designers to personalize a speciallycommissionedtoyfigure. Da>Space is entirely self-funded--no corporate sponsors allowed--which makes it an anomaly in this cash-hungry milieu. Sponsors tend to want to take over, explains Lin Lin Mai,oneofDa>Space's four 35-and-under partners, and while her design firm, Jellymon/JMGS, has counted Nike and ad giant Wieden+Kennedy as clients, she and her cohorts want to "go more slowly here," she says. "It takes time to develop a subculture before it gets latched onto the mainstream."

That's it: time. China just needs time. Yet in a country where everything is happening at warp speed, where neighborhoods and even skylines are transformed overnight, waiting around isn't an option. And so, from the grassroots to the very top, young Chinese are ramping up. Just think of Jennifer Wen Ma, as she spends her days and nights contemplating how to project an ascendant China at the Olympics next year. "It's a heavy burden--not only to show the world a new side of China, but the Chinese people are expecting a lot too," she says. "Everyone, it seems, is ready for a renaissance of creativity." They won't have long to wait.

Labels: advertisement, Media, Stuff

By Louise Story

NEW YORK: Like executives at advertising agencies, Richard Beckman and his team talk to managers at consumer brand companies about the customers they want to reach. Four to six weeks later, they present a marketing and advertising plan.
But Beckman does not run an advertising agency. He is president of Condé Nast Media Group, a division of the magazine company that publishes titles like Vogue, Wired and The New Yorker. Over the past five years, Beckman has developed an agency-like business within Condé Nast's ad sales unit, generating new revenue by planning events for advertisers and creating advertisements that help sell more magazine pages.

Customarily, magazine companies have made money by selling ad space in their magazines or, more recently, on their Web sites. Now some of them have set up what amount to internal mini-agencies that work with clients to design campaigns for the media company's pages. Sometimes this work spills out into other forums, like radio and television ads.

Like Condé Nast, Meredith, which publishes such titles as Family Circle, More and Ladies' Home Journal, is now handling some creative work for its advertisers, and so is even Surface, a small, independent magazine dedicated to fashion and design. The trend poses a challenge to traditional agencies and has created some unusual partnerships (think of Vogue designing ads for Wal-Mart).

Condé Nast Media Group has been developing sweepstakes, television specials, radio ads, in-store events and, of course, magazine ads for companies like Dillard's, Kohl's, Grey Goose and Lexus. The unit, which relies on a panel of more than 100,000 consumers to evaluate advertising, generated about $200 million of revenue last year.
Beckman's group has drawn the most attention for Fashion Rocks, a concert and television special about music and the fashion industry. The event, now in its fourth year, ties in several large advertisers (like Chevrolet, Citigroup, L'Oréal and Cingular) and was featured last year in a custom magazine sent to Condé Nast subscribers.

This year, Condé Nast is planning another large event to sell to advertisers, Movies Rock. Produced by Beckman and some Hollywood heavyweights, it will feature music that has been influential in movies.

The idea behind both programs is to create major television events that showcase each advertiser. During the Fashion Rocks event last year, for example, Elton John performed a private show the night before that was streamed only onto Cingular Wireless cellphones. (AT&T, which now owns Cingular, has since started eliminating the Cingular brand name.)

Andrew McLean, president and chief client officer of Mediaedge:cia, the ad-buying agency that represented Cingular Wireless when it worked with Fashion Rocks, said that his client's work with Condé Nast had moved from "just buying bits of paper in a magazine to a much more multifaceted relationship." Mediaedge:cia is part of the WPP Group.

Beckman's unit also has access to relationships with celebrities who would not often work directly with advertisers. For example, Condé Nast arranged for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear in an ad for Lexus that also showcased the Waterkeeper Alliance, a water protection group that Kennedy heads.

"They have the cachet and the credibility for top-tier celebrities to want to partner with them," said Robin Steinberg, senior vice president and director of print investment and activation for MediaVest, an agency that buys media in the Publicis Groupe.

Condé Nast's internal agency evolved organically, but Meredith took a different approach. Last summer the company established Meredith 360, an advertising consulting group that operates as a business unit separate from the publishing group. Meredith has purchased three advertising agencies in the past year, allowing it to offer a broad spectrum of services.

"A lot of our different divisions do what a lot of different agencies do," said Nancy Weber, Meredith's chief marketing officer.

Meredith 360 charges for its services, while Condé Nast charges only for costs when it creates custom programs for advertisers, Beckman said. (Condé Nast also makes a profit from such events as Fashion Rocks.) The rate structure means that Condé Nast can often beat ad agencies on prices, Beckman said.

"We don't have to make money from our creative, because we make money from our media," he said.

Some advertisers think that's the way it should be. Condé Nast is currently working with CIT, the financial services company, on a series of interviews with people like the fashion designer Marc Ecko. The interviews are featured online, and Condé Nast will produce live events and magazine sections over the next several months for CIT.
Kelley Gipson, director of brand marketing and communications for CIT, said she did not expect to pay Condé Nast anything more than the cost of the advertising pages her company purchases.

"I look at it as part of the value chain for media," Gipson said. "We don't charge for it when we're working with our customers. We look at the opportunity to provide sort of intellectual capital as the glue in the relationship, so we challenge our media partners to think about it the same way."

Labels: advertisement, Media

By G Becker

It would be interesting if the standards of Truth in Advertising were applied to television news as they sometimes are to television commercials. In that unlikely situation, TV news writers would be required to use phrases and words that convey accurate information – as opposed to the phrases and words they use today.

I want to help you break the code of alarming newspeak so that you can more easily find the valuable information that may (or may not) be part of a story.

Given the disturbing reasons we’ve all been watching so much TV news, it would be understandable to overlook the sheer ridiculousness that is inherent in some of the sensationalism. Occasionally, the way TV news is delivered can be downright funny, and indeed, the ability to laugh at something indicates that we are beginning to gain perspective on it. Accordingly, some of what follows is funny, and I have a very clear purpose in offering it: I want to help change your experience of television news, help you actually watch it differently. I want to provide some tools you can use to ensure that when you watch TV news, only actual information gets through.

Though not offered as a comprehensive glossary, here are some examples of words and phrases I think you’ll quickly recognize:

POSSIBLE: As in “Next Up: Possible links between Saddam Hussein and tooth decay…”

The word “possible” doesn’t really have the specificity one hopes for in journalism, given that it is completely accurate when applied to anything anyone can possibly imagine. “A possible outbreak of…” means there has been no outbreak. “A possible connection between memory loss and the air you breathe…” means there in no confirmed connection.

“Officials are worried about possible attacks against…” means there have been no such attacks.

Anytime you hear the word possible, it’s probably not happening right now.

LINKS:
“Next up: Possible links between convicted murderer Charles Manson and yesterday’s traffic jams in the downtown area.”

Are these two things linked? Absolutely, if you loosen your criteria enough, everything is linked by its presence on the same planet at the same moment in time – but only a very few links are instructive or meaningful.

Links are a great news trick, because you can tie a remote, unconfirmed, or even unimportant story to something that’s really pushing buttons. “Next up: Possible links to Bin Laden” is all you have to say to get attention these days.

Almost always when you hear the word link, there is no confirmed link.

“OUR NATION’S…”

“...our Nation’s water supplies…”
“...our Nation’s roadways…”
“...our Nation’s shipping ports…”

They use this trick to imply some large scale to a story. “A new threat to our nation’s water supplies” won’t be a threat to our nation’s anything. Our nation is enormous. Nothing, not even nuclear bombs, poses a threat to all of any system in our society at the same time. When they say “our nation’s” anything, they are usually trying to give grand significance to something that doesn’t have grand significance. We might not perk up as much if they said, “A new threat to Klopp County’s water supply…” The incident in which old Doc Ames truck leaked oil into the reservoir just isn’t gonna scare up enough ratings. But it could: “Next up, a new threat to our nation’s water supply. An alarming incident that experts say could happen anywhere!”

SHOCKING NEW DETAILS:
“Shocking new details when we come back.” Well, first of all, the details are not likely to be new, and if so critical, why are we waiting till after the commercial, and anyway, what does shocking mean at this point? Unless the news anchor reaches through the screen and pulls my hair, I don’t imagine he could shock me. They’ve ruined another word for themselves.

AUDITORS
OBSERVERS
ANALYSTS
INSPECTORS
LOOPHOLES

“Auditors cite loopholes in security at our nation’s libraries.”

That’s right, anytime you have an audit or an inspection, you’re going to find something. Auditors are people who’ve been hired to write reports identifying deficiencies. Have you ever heard of a one-line audit report? “The auditors didn’t a find one damn thing that could possibly be improved.” Did you ever hear of an inspector who said: ‘We’ve wasted six months on this inspection, because the place is bloomin’ perfect. Whoever’s running this show sure thought of everything.”

The implication projected in a story about a security loophole is that someone will come crashing through the loophole – but that is not necessarily so. They tell you (and the terrorists) about the loophole because it is frightening, not because it’s enlightening.

“IN A CAREFULLY WORDED STATEMENT…”
“In a carefully worded statement, the President said…” Is this as distinct from those statements that world leaders just have the kids throw together? “Carefully worded” is often used to imply that something is being hidden.

SERIOUS…
“Officials consider the threat to be serious.” Is that to distinguish this threat from the threats they laugh about over lunch? Taking something seriously does not mean the risk is great or imminent. It just means officials are doing what anyone would do.

“Officials here are taking no chances when it comes to school safety.” Sort of. More likely, they’re taking no chances that reporters will broadcast a report accusing them of taking chances.

OFFICIALS ARE CLOSELY MONITORING…
Implies that something is imminent, and worthy of being closely monitored. “Closely monitoring” is like “Officials are on the lookout for…” Both phrases suggest that something bad is surely coming, as if officials are standing outside looking around with binoculars.


COULD
PERHAPS
POTENTIAL
MIGHT

“NASA reports that a large piece of space junk -PERHAPS as big as a freighter– COULD enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime tonight over North America. Experts warn that it is could potentially slam into the earth.”

What are we to do with this report? Move a little to the left or right? They don’t say, of course, that every night, thousands of pieces of space junk enter the Earth’s atmosphere and completely burn up before ever hitting the ground, or that no person on Earth has ever been struck and killed by a piece of space junk. Or that if something’s as big as a freighter before entry, it might end up as small as a grain of sand – but it could potentially hit your house, I suppose.

AN ALARMING PERCENTAGE…
15%, 20%, 25%…
“15% of Americans are at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents on our nation’s highways this year.” Whenever you see a percentage cited, reverse it and think about the other share in the equation. For example, from the story above you can conclude that 85% of Americans are not at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents this year. Sort of good news, all things considered. Also, phrases such “a sizeable percentage,” or “an alarming percentage” can be applied to just about any percentage. Get the actual number, and then you decide if it’s sizeable or alarming to you.

AS MANY AS:
“Experts warn that as many as 25,000 people in America may be carrying the deadly gene…” or “As many as twenty states may be susceptible to radiation leakage disasters.”

“As many as” means somewhere between zero and the number given.

“IN A DEVELOPING STORY…”
A phrase used when they don’t really have the story yet.

FORMER EMPLOYEES:
“But one former employee at the doomed refinery reveals shocking new information…”

What does he reveal? That they fired him because he was too ethical, or because they didn’t want to hear the truth? Or that he knew all along? Anyway, he wasn’t there the night of the fire, so is he the best source of information? Truth in advertising would require the reporter to say: “We interviewed one man who hasn’t been to the refinery in three months – his opinion, next.”

LANGUAGE FROM ONE STORY BEING USED IN ANOTHER:
As certain words and phrases become symbolic or evocative from one type of story, they’ll use them in another. In the days after 9/11 I saw a TV news report about a tropical storm making “a direct hit” on a tiny coastal community, as if the hurricane were aiming. (And the word tiny is used because it implies vulnerability. Storms that make direct hits on tiny places are frightening bullies.) A story about a flight that experienced extreme turbulence is headlined “Terror in the Sky.”

DEADLY:
As in the popular “deadly virus;” this word is used to imply that everyone who gets the virus perishes, when the truth is that very few people die from the virus. If a really serious virus ends up being fatal for 20 percent of the people who contract it, then truth in advertising would require language such as: “Next up, a local man is stricken with a highly survivable virus.”

It’s quite a bit shy of deadly when someone tests negative for anthrax, yet in the weeks after 9/11, even a negative test for a “deadly” virus was presented as a frightening thing.

To put this into perspective, flu-related disorders killed 5000 times as many people as anthrax in 2001. Is anthrax still scary? Yes, and all the more so because of the implication that it was everywhere (colored maps showing the places in the U.S. where anthrax was found or suspected). It wasn’t everywhere. Reports were everywhere. And the same report repeated seventy-five times is still the same report. But you wouldn’t know that by the excited delivery: “New details emerge in that anthrax case.” Details maybe, but not new – far more likely when you watch TV news, they’ll be the same “new” details for the tenth time that day.

A storm is described as deadly: “We’ll have new information on that deadly hurricane that’s heading up the coast.” A hurricane qualifies for the word “deadly” when someone, somewhere on the hurricane’s round-the-hemisphere journey dies as a result of the storm. That does not mean the hurricane tries to kill all people it encounters, but that’s the implication – that something dangerous is coming. You’ll note that the people who die are usually in a situation far different than yours: They are on a small fishing boat at night off the coast of Peru, and you’re at home 1200 feet above sea level.

“IN A LAST MINUTE DEVELOPMENT…”
“IN A SURPRISE DEVELOPMENT…”
Usually means they didn’t get a news crew there in time. Or they didn’t warn you about it yet, which actually is interesting, since there’s only two or three possible awful outcomes involving human beings and they haven’t warned us about yet.

DISTURBING QUESTIONS:
As in “Disturbing questions have been raised about the safety of our nation’s…” Yes, the questions are disturbing. They’re disturbing everyone. Please stop raising them.

“A NEW STUDY REVEALS…”
“A NEW REPORT WARNS…”
“EXPERTS FEAR…”
“EXPERTS WORRY…”

Yes, reports and experts do seem to warn, fear, and worry a lot.

“EXPERTS SAY IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE…”

They sure do.

BUT NEW YORKERS FEEL…
Global conclusions drawn from man-on-the-street interviews represent literally nothing. You can edit a story into “New Yorkers feel terrified,” or “New Yorkers are ready to move on” – and it all depends upon which of the five interviews you cut into the piece broadcast.

Here are two quotes brought back by one NBC News crew:

“I think if you change your life, they’re winning,” says Captain Frank Carver. “So the more we continue our daily routine, better off we all are.”

At Pat’s Country Bakery nearby, Joann Charters concedes she’s still apprehensive. “It’s a really scary feeling with kids in school. You don’t know what’s gonna happen,” says Charters.”

To accurately summarize these quotes you’d have to say: “Some people feel one way and some other people feel another way. Back to you, Tricia.”

Joann Charters citing that it’s scary because “you don’t know what’s going to happen” is right on. That’s why it’s scary: because you don’t know what’s going to happen – not because you do know, not because danger is advancing toward you, but because it is not.

TV news stories like this are filler, background, static, irrelevant. You don’t need a reporter and a video crew to bring you man-in-the-street opinions. There are men on your street you can get opinions from. Or you could just talk to your friends and family.

WARNING SIGNS…
Any list of warning signs implies great risk. I recall a rash of reports about car-jacking in Los Angeles, and this list of warning signs:

Armed stranger approaches car;
Taps on closed window;
Looks around suspiciously.

And then they offered the checklist of precautions, given by an “expert on car-jacking.” (Is there a college course on that?) The checklist:

Keep doors locked;
Don’t let strangers into your car;
Drive away.

This is tantamount to:

“NEXT UP: CRIMINALS WHO HIDE OUT IN YOUR PURSE AND ROB YOU WHEN YOU GET HOME!”

Warning Signs:
Purse feels extra heavy;
Strange noises coming from purse.

OFFICIALS ADMIT…
“Officials admit that the incident could have developed into a full-fledged riot…” In this context, admit means that when a reporter asked, “If police had never reached the scene, and if a hundred other factors had fallen into place in an extraordinarily unlikely way, couldn’t this have developed into a full-scale riot?” Yes, it could have – an admission.

EXPERTS…
It may seem you are getting expert advice on the news, but that’s far from so. The moment you edit what an expert says, it’s just words you might as well put in the blender. Would you let a TV news crew mediate your doctor’s advice? Imagine being challenged by a difficult illness and your doctor’s compassionate and complete 30-minute presentation was edited down to 23 seconds.

That’s what the local news brings you: expert opinion edited, mediated, and minimized by non-experts who ask questions designed to elicit the most alarming responses. “Yes, yes, Dr. Stevens, but if it did happen, it would be terrible wouldn’t it?

NAMES
MONIKERS
When the news media assign a nickname to a wanted criminal (e.g., The Night-stalker, The Hillside Strangler) or to a disease (Legionaire’s or Flesh-Eating Diseases), it is indicative of a hoped-for series of reports. When it’s a type of crime (Follow-home Robberies), a trend is not far behind.

For example, freeway shootings and “Road Rage” led to all these headlines: “AGGRESSIVE DRIVERS TURN FREEWAYS INTO FREE-FOR-ALLS,” “ROAD RAGE: DRIVEN TO DESTRUCTION,” “HIGHWAY VIOLENCE SPREADING LIKE AN EPIDEMIC.”

Next comes “Officials are concerned,” and soon enough –as with Road Rage, you’ve got hearings before the House Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, and somebody (in this case, committee staff member Jeff Nelligan) calling the issue, “A national disaster.” Presumably, Mr. Nelligan would tone that down a bit today – all of us having found a new meaning for the words “national disaster.”

I TOLD YOU SO…
An NBC News story quotes a member of a university task force on weapons of mass destruction: “We’ve been talking about this for years and people in general have not been interested.” Is there some surprise there – that someone on a task force about weapons would be talking about weapons? The intended implication of these stories is that if someone had just listened, this could all have been prevented. How could discussions at some college task force have been used to prevent anthrax scares? If we had listened, what would be different? This is like an earthquake happening and earthquake experts saying, “We warned you.” Yes, you did; you said there’d be an earthquake sometime. If only we’d listened.

DISASTER UNREADINESS…
These are stories where TV news people cannot lose. They ask hospitals or public health officials or the utility company or the fire department if they can handle a disaster of X magnitude. If the response is yes, they just keep upping the disaster magnitude until the response is no.

Here’s an example from NBC News: “A survey of 30 hospitals in four states and Washington, D.C., found them ill-equipped to handle a widespread biological disaster.” A guaranteed fear-inducer, pokes right at our insecurity. First off, just asking the question implies that a “widespread disaster” is coming, and it’s even better if the survey was part of a “new study,” because that implies that the question itself is well founded.

Either way, the basic premise of the story is true: If hospitals currently able to handle 500 patients an hour get 5000 patients in some terrible hour, they will be unprepared. The standard of care will drop. Is there something surprising about that? Do TV news writers think Americans assume there is some extra team of 200 doctors and an extra 5000 fully-equipped hospital beds waiting in their community somewhere just out of sight?

Indeed, hospitals are unprepared for that which they have never had to be prepared. Being able to deal with what predictably comes down the pike and putting your resources where they are most likely to be needed is good planning. An emergency room would have to trade some daily-used resource to be ready for mass casualties that don’t appear to be coming. Yes, as the world changes and events change, so does preparation – but expecting hospitals to be fully prepared, for example, to treat thousands of inhalation anthrax casualties when there’s been a few lethal cases in 30 years would constitute bad planning.

One can make an “unprepared” story about anything; America’s police are unprepared for a “widespread crime disaster;” our supermarkets are unprepared for a “widespread food shortage.” It all depends upon how you define the word widespread. Put a microphone in some official’s face and ask if he’s adequately prepared for an attack on the harbor by Godzilla, and you’ve got an unreadiness story.

WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN…
“Being stuck in the elevator for six days is an experience Betty Hamilton will never forget.” This is used as a measure of how serious an incident it was, but did anyone imagine she was going to forget it? “I think I was stuck in an elevator for six days, but I can’t quite remember.”

THE WRAP-UP…
Pay attention to the very last line in news reports. They are rarely summaries, but rather are designed to keep the story open for more reports. Most often, the closing line takes a last bite at the fear apple, one final effort to add uncertainty and worry. “Many here are left wondering if it will ever be safe.” “Fear continues its tight grip on this tiny community.” “Whether more will die remains to be seen.” In the world of TV news, frightening stories never end. We never hear the words “And that’s that.”

Let’s put a few of these newsroom strategies together into a story and see how it looks. As the basis for our mock TV news report, I’ll draw on something that actually happened to my assistant. Earlier this year, her wrist was injured when a dog bit her.

THE TEASER:
“NEXT UP: DOGBITES! THE BONE-CRUSHING POWER OF DOGS. Experts warn that even friendly dogs can bite, sometimes without provocation. And they’re everywhere. A new Government study estimates as many as 300 dogs per square mile, with the numbers climbing each year. How many backyards in your neighborhood are hiding a deadly menace? We’ll tell you what experts say – when we come back.

THE STORY:
A shocking bite from the dog everyone described as “a little angel” leaves one area woman nursing her wounds. Dog-jaw experts say that even a small dog can produce as much as 500 pounds of biting force, and given the rate at which dogs breed, it’s just a matter of time before more people are placed at risk. A former employee with the Department of Health says hospitals are unprepared for a major increase in dogbites, and officials are closely monitoring this situation that could pose a deadly threat to our nation’s neighborhoods. Disturbing questions have been raised about loopholes in the licensing system, and observers point out that dogs who bite can receive licenses and be released into neighborhoods.

THE WRAP UP:
It’s no surprise that many local residents are living in fear: “You never know when somebody is walking their dog right behind you. We’re scared.” Officials say links between the recent dogbite and one that occurred in the tiny town of Ames, Iowa have not been confirmed, but either way, it’s a nightmare few will ever forget. And one that many fear will not be over in the morning.”

Coming to understand these popular phrases and strategies, and being able to see around them has made me appreciate those news reports that are direct, clear, and informative. Since many news people use these tricks, those who do not stand out as all the more special and valuable.

If you watch TV news, you’re probably going to spot lots of sensationalizing tactics I’ve missed, and maybe even start a list of your own. If finding them becomes an occasionally enjoyable part of your news-viewing experience, that in itself will be great news.

Labels: Empire, Media