Showing posts with label magazines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magazines. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Not including sales tax; time machine extra


Yes, Tape Recording magazine! I do want to get the most practical use, fun and personal profit from my own tape recorder! Please show me how!

Here's my $2 for a year's subscription under your special money-back guarantee offer. I can't wait to get better recordings and greater use from my machine!

Sound on magnetic tape . . . a veritable electronical memory! What will science come up with next? Personal UNIVAC machines for the home? Television programs on a video record album?

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Never judge a mag by its cover


When I saw the magazine in the racks while picking over the carcass of our local Borders last weekend, my first thought was whether I could pull off a credible northern Minnesota accent while laughing at "those people."

Actually, that's a lie. My first inclination upon spying
Garden & Gun amid our Borders death watch, was "Hey. y'all! Look at this!"

I suppressed it. That would have given me away as one of "those people."

Garden & Gun. Can't be good. Sounds like my redneck childhood in south Louisiana.

IT SOUNDS . . . it sounds . . . it sounds so damn "Hey, y'all! Look at this!"

I mean, it sounded about right in describing the South I knew in my youth, but still. . . . You know?

Of course, in the midst of working up a good snark, I made the horrible mistake of picking up the damned thing. Pssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhew. That was all the air going out of my smugness and superiority.

Sure, you have some of your self-congratulatory "moonlight and magnolias" clichés about the superiority of all things Southrun . . . like the Southern belle. (As a longtime resident of the Midwest and husband of an Omaha belle, I can tell you the Yankees can hold their own). But you also have elegant design, an impressive stable of writers like Clyde Edgerton, Roy Blount, Jr., and Julia Reed . . . and a publisher who used to run The New Yorker.

Don't tell Bubba that last thing.

AND IN THE the archives, in the June/July 2010 issue of Garden & Gun, you also have one of the truest things ever written about the region that birthed me and formed me. The thing -- if you're a Southerner inclined toward introspection --
that also haunts you and makes you think about things that still can get you in a lot of trouble in many quarters of America's peculiar quarter.

Alice Randall
wrote it. She herself got in a lot of
trouble in many quarters of America's peculiar quarter for taking on The Myth . . . and The Book that so perpetuates it, Gone With the Wind.

In an article by the name of A Letter from Harper Lee, she says this:

Back in the late nineties, I suggested Mockingbird for a mother-daughter book group that my daughter and I helped found. Together an integrated group of five mothers and five daughters discovered and rediscovered the truths of Lee’s pages: that Lee realized that black men could be desirable, that white women could be liars, and that girls were bold and curious. We noted how much more intelligent the domestic servant in Mockingbird was than Mammy in Gone with the Wind. We noted that the town drunk only pretended to be drunk so he could get away with loving a black woman. We learned that having a daddy who practices civil rights law can be terrifying.

When we had finished, my daughter wrote a series of poems in homage to Lee. One of the mothers baked a Lane cake. We started dreaming of a field trip. I will never know what Harper Lee would have done if we had shown up uninvited on her doorstep with a Lane cake and five eleven-year-old girls. I know that when I showed up in her life as an accused plagiarist, she stepped into the hullabaloo that engulfed me to stand by my side.

I will always be in her debt. Not because she wrote to the court and then exchanged six letters with me over a decade. Before she knew of my existence, I knew of hers. Her words made me braver than I might have been from near to my very beginning.

I was born in 1959. Mockingbird was published in 1960. I read it for the first time not long after reading Gone with the Wind. I have long divided the world into Scouts and Scarletts—and I have always wanted to be Scout.

And for every year of my life but the first, Mockingbird’s very existence, reader by reader, thirty million strong, has made the world a better place for me and for mine, just as before I was born and for every single year of my life Gone with the Wind has made the world more difficult for people like me.
I WAS BORN in 1961 into a world of people with less polish than Scarlett but with souls just as arrogant. Souls just ugly enough to see every blessed thing through the dirty lens of the South's original sin.

I, too, always have wanted to be Scout, because Atticus might be a bridge too far. God give me the strength to overcome my Southern upbringing of a certain age.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Only a (bleep) calls a body a (bleep) on TV

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


Here's what I learned pretty much on the first day of my high-school radio broadcasting class: The microphone is always on.

Of course, not always, but if you don't act like it is when it's not, time will come when you think it's not but it is. And $%&* me if generations of actual broadcasters have found themselves eating government cheese in a van down by the river after forgetting that simple rule.

The other thing I learned shortly thereafter at the voice of Baton Rouge High,
WBRH, is that when you try to bleep stuff on the fly, a certain percentage of the time, it doesn't work out. Have you ever heard the version of Pink Floyd's "Money" where the "bull" gets bleeped but the "s***" doesn't?

I have. Praise be that one wasn't actually my fault. I was to blame for various other transgressions.

SO NOW we have the world of cable "news," where entertainment trumps all and former pols and present ink-stained wretches take to the airwaves because that's what all the cool kids do. And the pay ain't horrible, either.

It was only a matter of time before the guy from Time, Mark Halperin, decided to be the coolest of the cool kids by calling the president a d*** on national TV. He thought the seven-second delay would allow him to engage in safe-badassery.

Of course, the condom tore . . .
er, the brand-new producer couldn't find the "dump" button.


AND THAT "cool kid" from Time? They got him on the rag, rag.

Shove that up your royal Timese machine

Monday, February 28, 2011

Simply '70s: Defund public broadcasting


If you hadn't noticed, there was a hell of a fierce debate going on about federal funding of public broadcasting. In 1971.

Why, we could have the specter of taxpayers funding a fourth network! Both on television and on the radio. We hear they're very liberal. Not friendly at all to conservative values.

And what about localism?


Tsk, tsk. There's something very un-American about this whole pointy-headed enterprise, I tell you.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Your Daily '80s: With this ring


About this time in 1980, Broadcasting readers were getting sold on how a program about weddings and marriage could help radio stations rake in the advertising dollars.

Thirty years later, I would imagine With This Ring is just as obsolete as 39 percent of Americans think marriage is.

A society without marriage, or at least one where the institution is about as significant as the next Harry Potter movie? (Check that, less significant than the next Harry Potter movie.)

What could go wrong?

Thursday, December 10, 2009

If the presses stop and. . . .

If a newspaper dies and Editor & Publisher isn't there to tell us about it . . . does that mean everything's OK?

We're about to find out.

But I wouldn't bet my severance check on the whole "see no evil, hear no evil" thing working out for ink-stained wretches.

After either 108 years or 125 years, depending on how you count things, the bible of American newspapers
has become obituary fodder. I guess that about says it all, doesn't it?

Well, no, actually.

But you'd need a history the size of William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill to say it. No doubt, there would be a few chapters about talented people suddenly deemed useless by society and the captains of the economy.

There would be others touching on betrayal, and yet more about meaning lost and "right-sized" professionals struggle to redefine themselves.

THESE ARE the stories Editor & Publisher no longer will be telling us in real time. Amid the apocalypse, the live feed has gone dead. We're trying to establish alternate means of communication.

For now, though, this is a bit of how E&P
reported its own demise:
Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.

An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.

The expressions of surprise and outpouring of strong support for E&P that have followed across the Web -- Editor & Publisher has even hit No. 4 as a Twitter trending topic -- raise the notion that the publication might yet continue in some form.

Nielsen Business Media, of which E&P was a part, has forged a deal with e5 Global Media Holdings, LLC, a new company formed jointly by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners, for the sale of eight brands in the Media and Entertainment Group, including E&P sister magazines Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. E&P was not included in this transaction.

As news spread of E&P's fate, the staffers have been inundated with calls from members of the industry it covers, and many others, expressing shock and hopes for a revival. Staff members will stay on for the remainder of 2009.
CALLING Romenesko . . . CQ . . . CQ . . . requesting status report . . . CQ . . . calling CJR . . . is CJR on the air?

There was a time when I lived and died by my copy of Editor & Publisher.
I wasn't the only one. Another was T.J. Sullivan:

Like a lot of journalists, I wouldn't be where I am without Editor & Publisher. I'd still be a journalist, of course, but I definitely wouldn't have followed the same path, which means many of the important stories I fought to report might never have been reported. I might not have met the same friends. I might not have even met my wife.

No joke.

I'm in Los Angeles today because E&P sent me to Idaho ... and then New Mexico ... and then ...

I'll explain.

As I approached graduation in the late 80s, the classified section of E&P Magazine was the most valuable item in the newsroom. It was to me, and every other journalism grad hoping to land a job at a newspaper, the only link to our future, the only publication that listed what few jobs the industry had to offer.

Unlike most of my friends, I applied to all of them. Regardless of whether I met the qualifications, I wrote each and every newspaper that placed an ad.

(snip)

But, the job I did take also resulted from an E&P classified. It was in Ketchum, Idaho, a weekly with an editor who let me crash in a spare room at his house for a few days until I found a place of my own.

Less than a year after that, still in Ketchum, I received a phone call at work from an editor in Santa Fe. He said he'd kept my letter of application for a job they'd advertised in E&P long before I took the job in Idaho. He'd tracked down my whereabouts by calling the references I'd listed. He said they'd already filled the investigative reporter slot, a post for which I clearly wasn't qualified, but they had an opening in sports and wanted me to fill it.

Sports? The closest I'd ever come to sports reporting was to take agate while working the late-night shift on the sports desk at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I wasn't a sports writer. I was an investigative reporter, or, well, I was going to be.

The editor didn't care about that. "You don't belong in Idaho," he said. "You belong here."

Two weeks later, I was again packing everything into my little, gray Chevette and driving hundreds of miles to live in a place I'd never been, all because of a job I'd found through E&P.

AMID THE triple whammy of the Internet, the economy and stupid, stupid management, whole modes of mass media are collapsing atop newly useless people like . . . well, myself.

I know newspapering . . . which is about gone forever. I know radio . . . ditto.

And I know "new media" is the place to be . . . just as I know that very few are getting rich in new media, and just as I know there probably isn't room for all us fossils in that brave new world.

By the time you're hearing that Editor & Publisher is biting the dust, you know that it surely must be the End of the World as We Know It.

And I don't feel fine.