Consider the source(s)
Thursday, August 24, 2006
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Bush Administration unveiled a new $64 billion spending package Monday for a joint CIA-Pentagon program aimed at neutralizing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's global humanitarian network.
"The fight against Gates will not be easy, will not be quick, and will not be without enormous cost," said Director Of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte of the new program, which calls for the creation of a new $20 billion Counter-Philanthropy Unit aimed at punishing those countries that accept or use, directly or indirectly, any financial support from the Gates Foundation.
Now, why does that "news" item NOT seem so totally unbelievable? Because it comes from that wonderful, unbeatable spoof-newspaper, The Onion – which began as a lark among a set of University of Wisconsin slackers and has now become a veritable institution of sophomoric but often cutting humor, both on paper and online.
Onion writers repeatedly manage to capture with devastating mimicry both the style of the mainstream press and its often gullible tone, plus indeed the air of simultaneous self-righteousness and idiocy that emanates from the White House Briefing Room.
Those of us in cities where The Onion sits in street-corner boxes (or as in my neighborhood, flies out of them - it is free, after all) can count ourselves fortunate. But the online version, available every where - though not on every browser these days (tut-tut, Onion) - does offer a hilarious extra. There has existed for a while now, as desktop listening or as a podcast, Onion Radio News, no less.
Again, gut-clutching laughter can be provoked by the insistently chintzy, rapid-fire theme music and the anchor Doyle Redland's archly pompous tones, delivering some terminally glib, formulaic scripts. These could all-too-easily come straight off the archive shelves of 1010 WINS Radio in New York, or the CBS Radio News Network nationally - if the stories themselves weren't QUITE so ludicrous and beyond the pale. One especially sonorous description hit me - "a wistful side-trip into yesteryear" - from a story headlined "AOL E-Mail Checked - For Old Times Sake".
And very soon now, we’ll be able to enjoy Onion Video News as well. The satirists have been running (for-real) ads on Craigslist seeking staff to work on Final Cut Pro video-editing software, who are familiar with “The Onion’s style of comedy”. Managing Editor Peter Koechley is, in the preferred cliché of Britain’s top satirical organ Private Eye, remaining tight-lipped about if and when video will appear, but watch for some provocative and lunatic viewing.
FEATURING VIDEO ON A WEBSITE is of course a prerequisite nowadays. Indeed some observers have been unfavorably contrasting The Onion’s lack of moving pictures (until now) with humor and social networking sites where viral video is an essential focus. Not least of these, of course - indeed the nonpareil market leader - is the phenomenally fast-growing YouTube.com. And just after the eMarketer market research outfit recently reported that video advertising is without question the fastest-growing area of marketing on the Internet, YouTube has now announced its own video advertising plans. This is the site’s first effort to “monetize”, in the ugly jargon of the trade, its previously commercial-free, fun-filled, come-one-come-all video playground.
Advertisers are being offeredtwo main features — “brand channels”, where companies can create their own ads, in pretty much the traditional TV way, and also what YouTube is calling "participatory video ads”. These will appear in the top right-hand corner of the home page; when users click on them the advertiser’s video begins playing in place, next to a menu of clips self-posted by users. Viewers will be encouraged to draw the ads to the attention of all their friends and contacts, in the viral tradition that created YouTube in the first place.
YouTube CEO Chad Hurley says the new video ad plan "gives advertisers visibility in our system without disrupting the user experience."
I certainly hope so – but it sounds more like advertisers are getting a free, if amateur (and remarkably big) team of distributors for their commercial material.
AN INTRIGUING PIECE OF RESEARCH – perhaps even counterintuitive by current measures - escaped much mainstream notice recently, even though it might comfort many mainstream media practitioners. It set out to answer the question: where do young people get their news these days? It almost expects the answer: wacko sources such as The Onion, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, You Tube and the like. But not so.
In fact, a US-wide poll jointly conducted by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News found that local TV news – a communications dinosaur in many observers’ view – actually ranks top with 15 – 24 year olds. And the internet? That ranks, surprisingly, only at number four in the list of most-used sources, below word-of-mouth at home and in class, and national TV news.
And I would like to add some other data that might moderate what Jill Darling Richardson, deputy director of Los Angeles Times polls, calls “the zeitgeist”, our prevailing anecdotal impression the internet must be completely dominant.
Let’s look, as Nielsen/NetRatings recently did, at exactly where on the web internet-users, of any age, are actually going (having already decided that the web is their favored medium). Inevitably heading Nielsen’s “Top Ten Fastest Growing Web Brands" are Yahoo!, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace. But also up there in the Top 10 is The Associated Press. Yes, the good old AP, that august and somewhat elderly cooperative owned by 1500 daily dead-tree merchants throughout the US.
It took another dead-tree merchant, the weekly Forbes magazine, to ask in a headline - perhaps wishfully - if the AP’s success represents “An Old Media Revival?”