Newscoma

“When everybody is famous for 15 minutes, it is no longer worth 15 minutes of a viewer’s time to tune in and see it.”

A compelling article from the LA times about how ad prices have gone down in late night. I think that can be considered for just about everything right now from television to newsprint.

Bottom Line: no one wants to pay. Not the little guys and not people/corporations that can. Even Old Spice doesn’t want to pay online advertising that they committed to which is another story for another day.

Here’s how I see it, and I don’t like what I’m writing really, but Leno will come back unscathed from this amusing and telling episode of ego, greed and self-absorption. O’Brien is walking away with millions, but remember many people are counting pennies to buy groceries, so although he was somewhat representative of how Americans are being laid-off like crazy, he’s still not going to have to worry.

Average folks are gonna keep on worrying. We will find other diversions because although we are loyal to a degree, we are also saturated with nonstop information. What is news today is at trivia night tomorrow.

And the American public, including myself, will find something else to get outraged over because we are an OCD society. A Jonas brother dropping his abstinence ring, a presidential candidate making a sex tape (Wait a minute …) or something else will be the news du jour in roughly, oh let me think, … 15 minutes.

Where is keyboard cat to play a ditty when you need him?

Wow. This is embarrassing.

Chicago – Barack Obama has chosen Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia as his vice presidential running mate, bringing to the ticket a politician who could reinforce Obama’s message of change but who also shares the drawback of inexperience.

Obama’s decision – kept secret amid intense speculation as next week’s Democratic convention draws near – was announced via text messages and e-mails to supporters.

Kaine, who took office in January 2006 and who previously was lieutenant governor and mayor of Richmond, grew up in the Kansas City area. Fluent in Spanish, he worked as a missionary in Honduras before graduating from Harvard Law School, where Obama also earned a degree.

Together with the 47-year-old Obama, Kaine, 50, would give the Democrats the youngest presidential ticket since 1992, when 46-year-old Bill Clinton selected 44-year-old Al Gore as his running mate.

Umm, this obviously didn’t happen.

Your Dewey Beats Truman moment of Zen.

Mark directs us to a new policy at CNN.

Basically, employees of the network cannot use Facebook, Twitter, Blog or even comment in forums and chat rooms without permission from the CNN higher ups according to Chez Pazienza, who was famously fired from CNN for blogging at Deus Ex Malcontent. His story is here.

You can head to their blogs to get the vibe of what’s going on.

I agree with Mark who says this:

Did I give up my right to protest or vote when I started working for a newspaper? I hope not.
Many newspapers are actively encouraging reporters to take up blogging.  Newspapers invite reporters to express opinion in the print editions. Newspapers have long held that as long as the opinion expressed is marked clearly as that of the reporter, it is acceptable.

I talk about evolving trends in the news business a lot. I don’t understand why more media folks don’t blog or use Twitter. I’ve seen more breaking news on Twitter that it still boggles my mind.

Ryan Sholin points us to a post written by an outgoing newsman of the LA Times, who is getting out of the dead tree business.

1. Technology has run laps around the print media — giving readers instant news, open-source journalism, no barriers to become publishers, and an infinite news hole.
2. The idea that your daily news is collected, written, edited, paginated, printed on dead trees, put in a series trucks and cars and delivered on your driveway — at least 12 hours stale — is anachronistic in 2008.

I think these things are connected. The writer talks about his 18 years with the Times. I’ve worked in news off and on for nearly 20 years. The way I started out has vastly changed in those two decades.

And the blogosphere has changed in the nearly three years I’ve been blogging. Some media outlets get it and have actively worked toward changing their model to accommodate changes that will happen in the future, which is smart. Even some rural outlets do although there are a great deal of folks who do not and angrily (yes, I said angrily) hold on to that the old ways are the only way to do news.

There is chasm that exists between old and new.

And CNN is treating online communication like a dinosaur. When you edit free thought, then what do you have?

Zombies in a newsroom.