500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
You see the wedding announcement? The Huffington Post was bought by AOL. Some money changed hands, like the $315 million kind, which is about $315 million more than I’ve ever been paid for writing for The Huffington Post. I’ve always viewed writing for Huffpo as a service and I’ve actually liked doing it for free. There’s been freedom in free, because you serve no one but your conscience and your inner master. Some things a person does should be like that. But when it comes to this acquisition, it’s the freedom thing that concerns me.
When I worked for NBC, I witnessed how an investigative producer tracking a story was stopped dead in his tracks by his own bosses. Seems that the trail he was tracking led to a company that was doing business with GE, and since GE owned NBC – they killed the story. I ran up against something like that, but not nearly as journalistically pure, while working on a story that later got an innocent man out of jail. While reporting it, I got some prosecutors mad. They had connections with the corporate leadership at NBC. The result wasn’t pretty when they dropped the hammer on me. So I wonder what happens when Huffpost tries to cover something the corporate overlords at AOL don’t like? Let me answer that question with another.
Have you ever seen a documentary called The Corporation? The thesis is that if a corporation was a person, it would be a sociopath.
Big-bigger-biggest isn’t necessarily better. I know you have to pay off your investors and Arianna Huffington had a few. I realize businesses have to grow and change. Bloomberg Businessweek has written that “the greatest business successes are often engineered by bold visionaries who altered industries.” Thing is, those visionaries don’t always marry off so well. Their suitors want to buy their success but can’t deal with their quirks.Take a look at AOL and Time Warner. eBay and Skype.
Big mergers and acquisitions can turn into corporate date rape. Ford bought Volvo, then sold it to the Chinese carmaker Geely. Ford also bought Jaguar and Land Rover and sold those brands to Tata Motors of India. When you start trading off a Swedish brand to a Chinese company, what does Volvo stand for anymore? Am I buying a Swedish-Chinese car? Of course, some big mergers do work. In 1965, Pepsi and Frito-Lay merged to form PepsiCo and they’ve been killing us with sugar, salt and carbs ever since, so at least that makes me feel good.
I hope Arianna can hang on to the Huffpost brand, which is rebellious, contrarian and yes, unabashedly progressive. The Skype guys tried to buy their company back from eBay, because eBay has no soul. Want proof? eBay allows puppy mills to list in its classifieds. How’s that corporate sociopathic behavior working for ya?
Give it a couple years and Arianna might need to buy back her vision from AOL.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I am a dedicated hater of Disney. Some days I set aside an hour just so that I can hate the logo. It looks like a cute mouse, but it’s really a corporate monolith that lives and breathes the profit motive. Nearly all Disney lawyers have sharp teeth and scary-long fingernails, and Disney sends its representatives into hospital maternity wards to give product demos and take emails from new moms so they can market to babies fresh from the womb.
Actually, one part of that sentence is true: The part about maternity wards and marketing to newborns. It’s true: Disney is going into hospitals and giving away a onesie and taking the mom’s email. It sounds generous, but it’s just another corporate invasion of marketing into life, and they also put a chip into each onesie to program the newborn to like Disney products.
Actually, only one part of that sentence is true. The second part, about the chip implant, is what they wish they could do, because they are closed source, not open source.
Bear with me a sec? I can explain this. Disney is closed source because it protects its intellectual “property,” even through much of that “property” originated in the public domain. Disney will sue you over your use of anything having to do with Snow White, even though nobody really owns the character of Snow White because she was created a while ago. Disney and Viacom and other big companies take ownership over lots of free media and charge us to enjoy it. We aren’t allowed to mix it or play with it, because it’s “theirs.” It’s not really, but their lawyers have sharp teeth and scary-long fingernails. Closed source means somebody can sue you. Closed source is the mark of monoliths like Microsoft who are working from the past.
Open source is different. WordPress, which is what I’m using to publish this blog, is open source. Anybody can use it, modify it, play with it. It’s free. Open VBX is another example. It’s a free interface for internet telephones, and it works with Twilio.com, a cloud computing app which is not free, but open source and cheap. Open source is good and can be used to do good. Open Architecture Network shares designs for housing, schools and community centers over the world. Its designs serve people in need. The platform? A free, open source platform called Drupal.
Open source is the future and closed source is the past.
Closed Source: The New York Times: Nice people, but they’re rumored to be on life support. It will help their longevity to keep the use of their online material free and not go to mandatory subscriptions.
Closed source: Facebook. Facebook content can’t be openly searched. Give Facebook time – it will have to become open source to survive.
Special case: The Huffington Post. It’s open source content, because people like me can write for it, but it was just acquired by one of the most evil closed source companies, AOL. What does that mean? Tell you in next week’s 500.
Photo credit: David Ashleydale via Creative Commons.
Written by Lee Schneider
One person, one idea. That’s the Auteur Theory, which refers to a film director being the solo heart and soul of a movie. A little thing called non-linear editing blew all that up. Lightworks, Avid and now Final Cut Pro are insider names to most media consumers, but if you think these technologies are a small aspect of the media that is placed before you, well, you’d be wrong. These technologies are game changers. Why? Technology drives culture. In the 1970s, VHS became the vehicle of choice for pornography. In a wonderful assignation of tech-meets-flesh, the old men who masturbated under blankets in sleazy theaters were replaced by people masturbating at home. VHS, propelled on a surging sea of porno, became a dominant way to deliver movies, leading to the decline of Western civilization and Richard Simmons’ exercise videos, though not necessarily in that order.
Can you feel the burn? It’s not your fast-twitch muscle fibers that are on fire. It’s the immolation of pop culture, consuming itself almost as fast as it can be produced.
Final Cut Pro and Avid and television are an especially combustible mix. These non-linear systems have made post-production cheaper but they’ve also dumbed it down. Anybody can edit now and it’s way faster than it used to be. Clients can order changes and expect them overnight. Multiple editors can work on the same project at the same time, even in different cities.
Reality television has been shaped by non-linear editing far more than it’s been shaped by our appetite for cheating-spouse drama or seeing if people can lose weight if they are yelled at enough. Hours of footage can be digitized and then tossed at legions of editors who shape the story. Yes, that’s right. It’s really the editors who are shaping the story, not the directors who shot the footage or the executive producers who are spending the budget. Editors, sometimes working with story editors, are running things.
This is a good thing, I think, because editors see more footage than anybody and are in the best position to judge it. Further, this editorial or curatorial function has spread like a virus across all media. Look at the Huffington Post. The Queen of the Aggregators has risen to royal status by curating the news. It started out by being a master editor and gatherer of content. So many other laudable sites, like Boing Boing, Treehugger, Mashable and TechCrunch do a little reporting on their own, but they are editors at heart. Less hunting, more gathering. Mostly they curating and assembling content in their digital workshops.
Thanks to my friend H.A. Arnarson for giving me the idea to write about this. Recently, he’s been an editor-supervising producer on a show called “1000 Ways to Die.” We first met ten years ago when I hired him to edit a documentary I was executive producing about Arnold Schwarzenegger. The production was floundering a little bit and I as executive producer was doing my job, spending the budget in quiet desperation as we hunted for the cut. Then H.A. came along and made it work with his editorial vision.
The editor is the new auteur.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
A while ago I did a search for my name on Google to check in with my Internet self. It’s time to hit “search” again to see how busy I’ve been.
I still have my old job in Dallas/Fort Worth, workin’ away at strategic procurement for HP. I also have something to do with movies in Santa Monica. When I’m not studying hard at the UC Berkeley School of Information I’m marrying Tabby Biddle, for some reason using the name Leland Schneider.
The New York Times knows I was a producer on Front Page and senior producer on Strange Universe. Hollywood.com knows that I wrote episodes of ThunderCats, and mentions that I did a documentary about Apollo 13. In 1993, they say, I did one for E! called In Censors We Trust. Back then, E! was in black and white and hosted by Lucille Ball, or it might have been a very young Flavor Flav. 
Those true credits appear with “The Hottest Alien Babes Ever,” which I don’t really remember working on. Maybe those alien babes erased my memory of it. I hope they were gentle.
If you add up all three of my Twitter personalities (leeschneider, xree and docuguy) I have 312 followers. Hey, catching up on you, Mr. Ashton Kutcher (3,449,823 followers).
We can laugh at these “errors” Google makes when you search for my name, but it makes me wonder, how do they rank all those websites and blogs? I did some investigation, checking with Google’s worldwide headquarters located at Praha City Center, Klimentska 46, in the Czech Republic. Here’s what I found out from them. The Google ranking system begins with a live goat, which they sacrifice over a bonfire. Then 27 virgins are brought in to read the charred entrails using 3D glasses. Oh, and they use some kind of algorithm too.
Even though the ranking system is a little spooky, Google has changed my Internet life. When you Google my name with the word “blog” or “500 words” I can get first page ranking. And starting my other blog, the user-content driven www.chancehappens.com, has offered the occasion to break out the pinot noir sometimes to celebrate its even better ranking.
But it’s strange to think that online I don’t own my own name and I certainly don’t own what I write. People I don’t know are re-posting these words and Tweeting them. Writing for the Huffington Post has also boosted things, sending what I write far and wide, although I have gotten a few negative comments from curmudgeonly folks who don’t like adorable puppies, Oprah or East-West medicine.
The take-home for me is that there’s only one thing more volatile than the stock market, and that’s what constitutes a hot search on Google. As I type, the number one search on Google is Maia Campbell — and that will surely change by the time you read this.
Now I have to get back to posting my rabidly devotional You Tube video about Oasis.
