Out of the Newsroom

Every summer comes along and I try to make a list of the things I want to accomplish. Many of the items are of the home or self improvement variety, as is probably true for most people at my “station in life”.

But prolific Twitter user Victor Hernandez of CNN points us to a simply amazing list on the website 10000words.net The 10,000 words people have assembled a great list titled “Journalism Grads: 30 things you should do this summer.”

Except they underestimated the audience.

The post should be retitled “30 things every journalist must be able to do by the end of this summer.”

So, now I pretty much have a whole new list to work on. Plus, I’m pretty sure that my wife will not be letting me off the hook for any of those home improvement items, either.

I’ve gotten more than a couple of indignant communications from viewers, friends, and whomever over the past few days–all asking about why we were quick to broadcast the news reports from TMZ.com on Thursday about the fate of Michael Jackson. All of the questions share a common thread along the lines of “how dare you report on a rumor?” Most share some dismissal of TMZ as a “gossip website”… or worse.

The last thing in the world I am going to do is defend TMZ as a bastion of journalism, but at the same time the three most important rules in the journalism business are:

1. Get the story right
2. Get the story first
3. Get more on the story

Please note, that the order of those first two rules are often interchangeable for anyone whose deadline falls in the next two minutes. But the point is that while TMZ.com may not be your idea of great journalism, the fact is that they have been right and first on many stories, and for one of the biggest stories of the year (so far) they were both –by a wide margin.

You can criticize their methods, their presentation, their focus, even that odd green water bottle that Host and creator Harvey Levin carries around on their TV show–you can’t criticize them for being wrong.

And OK, they might have been wrong on something in the past (though off hand, I don’t know of instances to cite here), every outfit in the news game has been wrong from time to time. It happens. It is a business driven by human beings, and sometimes human beings make mistakes. Particularly ones under a lot of pressure to perform in a very short time. Any good journalist, corrects the mistake as soon as he/she can, and moves on.

In the aftermath of the Jackson story, there has been the discussions about who reported what, and how quickly they did so. Robin Wauters on the influential website TechCrunch wonders if “the mainstream media still has their eyes wide shut?”

I can only answer that here in Connecticut, I might occasionally squint, when looking at TMZ.com (not sure whether that is the nature of the story or my declining middle-aged vision) But in this case my eyes were staring straight at the computer screen on my desk and I believe I witnessed their coming of age.

Sometimes the facts are the facts, even if we don’t particularly care for where they came from.

Epilogue: As I was finishing this item up, I was interrupted by a phone call, so I saved the file and didn’t come back to it for a bit. In the interim, I noticed that TMZ’s emergence was also noted by crosstown anchor Gerry Brooks of WVIT, on his own blog. Having worked with Gerry more years ago than either of us want to admit, let’s just say that I know he isn’t kidding when thinks that it just might be that hell froze over.

June 25, 2009 will forever be the day that Michael Jackson died. The man called by some reports as “the most famous man in the world” if not certainly one of the most famous and successful musical talents in the world, passed away at the age of 50 from an apparent cardiac arrest. In the process of doing so, he literally pushed the earlier tragic death of another celebrity “below the fold” of the front page. That would be one-time “Charlie’s Angel” Farrah Fawcett, who succumbed after a long battle with cancer, at age 62.

Of course, either of these two news stories are remarkable enough to occur by themselves on any given day–but both happening on the same day, made it almost surreal in the newsroom that I spent my working day in.

But for the second time in this day, perhaps a more amazing thing (at least to me) occurred when I realized that I had learned of the breaking news, but this time not from one of the many traditional news sources that are at my desk.

Let me try to put that in a little better perspective. I have at my desk wire services from the Associated Press (the biggest there is), ABC News, and a couple of other smaller ones. I also have five television sets tuned to the major networks and CNN. I routinely also have four or five web sites open, ranging from the New York Times to an industry gossip blog called “TV Newser”.

And despite the size of that “river of news” that flows in front of me all day long, the first word of the deaths of two very notable people actually reached me via a device that is just a week old, announced by the sound of toy horn. That would be on the screen of my iPhone 3GS, displaying Twitter messages from @cnnbrk and @HarveyLevinTMZ

My colleague Ann Nyberg has called Twitter the modern-day equivalent of the old style teletype machines that were the standard for news delivery when she and I both entered the news business. The first true news bulletin I remember getting this way, was when I learned that President Gerald Ford had pardoned former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in office. The bulletin moved on a Sunday in September of 1974, when the United Press International (UPI) teletype starting clanging its bell in the newsroom of my first radio station job.

That little 35 year old trip down memory lane was necessary, because most people under 40 have likely never heard of UPI, as it really ended being a wire service in 1999, selling out to it’s larger rival, the Associated Press (AP). UPI was, for the most part, done in by changes to the news business at the time. (The UPI lives on, mostly in name only, at a website that syndicates content to online publishers.)

One could be forgiven for thinking that word of today’s celebrity deaths could be seen as a watershed moment for another change to the news business–just how word of major stories is now flashed around the globe. It certainly hasn’t been the only recent time that the Twitter service has been integral to delivering–and also gathering–a major news story.

The unrest and demonstrations following the recent Iranian election has shown how Twitter has created the equivalent of a “wire service”, but this is one that anyone can participate in–as either a reader or a writer. As messages poured out of Iran from both professional and impromptu journalists, the paradigm shift was truly palpable. (Twitter even powered a viewer backlash when CNN was taken to task for being underpowered in its first weekend coverage of the situation in Iran by the #cnnfail movement.)

Now just days after that moment, comes yet another “stop the presses” kind of moment when the celebrity news website TMZ.com is so far ahead of everybody on the breaking news that most every news organization around the world (including the one I lead) repeats TMZ’s first reports from 4:30pm eastern time, that Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest. (That is, if they even bother to report the initial story from TMZ at all.)

It is perhaps the most massive “re-tweeting” of a news exclusive by other news organizations. In a matter of minutes internet traffic soars and in under an hour, TMZ beats everybody again with the first word that “the King of Pop” is dead at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Many newsrooms turn cautious and wait until other “major” news organizations, such as the LA Times, before going with the story.

Twitter’s servers become so slammed with use that the service turns off some features so that it doesn’t completely crash under the load. This comes just nine days after the US State Department asks Twitter to delay a scheduled weekend maintenance event to help preserve communications with those in Iran.

So the way I look at it is that in the space of ten short days, there were two budding revolutions that were Twittered.

One is still unfolding as a country tries to find it’s future in the world.

The other now seems quite a bit further along, as we may have found the future of how we will get the first word on what is happening in that world.

My friend Gary asked me for some advice on buying a new “smartphone”, specifically wanting to know which way he should go between a Blackberry and an iPhone. In thinking about answering him, I decided to make it a three way comparison, adding in the new Palm Pre, the other “do it all” phone that is getting good buzz these days.

I’ve limited the discussion to those three, because in my mind they are the best implementation of a true “smartphone”, meaning a phone that is equally capable of voice calls, email, internet surfing, and multi-media entertainment. There are other good phones out there, and I’ve looked hard at all of them, but I just don’t find any other models that rate with this trio. (Sorry, Windows Mobile phone fans.)

Let’s start with the Blackberry. Actually Blackberry is a whole family of phones, built on the oldest and probably most “bullet-proof” smartphone platform. There are a bunch of different models, but right now the two most popular Blackberry units going are the 8300 series known as the “Curve” which sports an actual small QWERTY-style keyboard and the 9500 series, the all touch screen Blackberry Storm.

The Curve is available on all of the major cellular carriers, while the Storm is only on Verizon at this writing. While both phones use the Blackberry operating system, they are quite different in how they look and function, given the Storm’s attempt to be “iPhone-like” with its touch screen interface. Simply put, I tried the Storm (twice actually) but just didn’t find it intuitive, and was underwhelmed by it’s touch and sometimes touch and press-to-click interface. If you can get past that hurdle, the Storm does a good job with all of its functions, including the best looking pictures and video of any phone out there.

The Curve might be seen as more pedestrian, but its’ form is light and modern enough to not be as completely buttoned up for business as most other Blackberry models. The latest Curve model on the Sprint network also includes the Nextel 2-Way “walkie talkie” capability, which makes it even more of a first-class business tool for many.

The Curve will be improved upon this summer by Blackberry maker Research-In-Motion’s latest model, the Blackberry Tour. The Tour will be Verizon and Sprint’s counterpart for the Blackberry Bold, which is available from AT&T and T-Mobile. Both the Tour and the Bold are larger than the Curve, but feature a bigger, higher resolution screen with an operating system more in line with the Storm–with that actual keyboard.

No matter what Blackberry we are talking about, the number one thing to know is that all Blackberry phones are built around their number one strength, which is email. If you are buying a smartphone just for making calls and sending/receiving email, you can stop reading the rest of this and just go buy whatever Blackberry model that you like. Blackberry does industrial-strength email, so much so, that many companies have a Blackberry specific server to their email system.

So why then would someone buy anything else? Well, the answer my friends, is everything else. Because that is what the iPhone has been about since being introduced two years ago. The iPhone is of course, what happens when you take the idea of merging a phone, an email device and that entertainment phenomenon known as the iPod. And because it was put together by Apple, it has redefined the design of cell phones ever since.

My position is that many people missed what the real key to the iPhone’s success would be, much like they missed why the iPod would be the most successful music player made since the Sony Walkman redefined the concept of high quality portable music in the early 80s. Apple created an infrastructure to allow for the on demand delivery (via the internet) of music, then movies and TV shows.

So it would make sense that when Apple added a phone and email functionality to the iPod, it would be capable of playing the music, movies and TV shows. And most companies would have thought that was enough. But where other companies see just a high powered cell phone, Apple saw a small form computing platform, and so added the ability for third parties to write small software programs to run on the iPhone, and created the ability to distribute these programs on the same iTunes distribution platform. The applications store.

And thus the word “app” entered the language.

So why is it so important, as Apple has shown us through so many television commercials, to be able to say: “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” Because it means that the iPhone is not only able to make phone calls, send/receive email, play music, movies and TV shows–but it can also do about 50 thousand other things–from being a E6B flight computer (a kind of specialized calculator that pilots rely on) to making simulated fart sounds at the press of a button. There are some 50 thousand “apps” in the app store, and they make the iPhone capable of doing so many other things. So many that there have been over a Billion apps downloaded to date.

Speaking of dates, the third generation of the iPhone was released today, the 3Gs. After spending about 12 hours with one, I can say that it does so much, so very well–that the only real criticism of the phone will still be from the naysayers who will bemoan the lack of a physical keyboard. (The majority of the rest of the criticisms revolve around the shortcomings of AT&T–the exclusive cell phone carrier of the iPhone since its debut and, if we believe the company’s executives, for the foreseeable future.)

And that lack of a keyboard would be where the new Palm Pre comes into the battle. Palm invented the idea of carrying around an electronic gizmo with a touch screen that would organize your life. The Palm Pilot created the PDA (personal digital assistant) category in 1996, and then a company called Handspring added the functions of a cell phone to the Palm software, ultimately creating the first practical and affordable “smartphone” with it’s Treo device in 2002. Palm eventually bought out Handspring and while it lead the category for years to come, in recent years Palm has fallen behind Blackberry and more recently the iPhone.

So Palm brought on board a team of former Apple gurus, including Jon Rubenstein who was instrumental in the creation of the iPod itself. And after two years of development, the Palm Pre was launched on June 6th, and for a first generation product shows some of the best elements of both the Blackberry and the iPhone, rolled into one stylish device that features both an iPhone inspired touchscreen married to a slide-out Blackberry inspired keyboard.

But as you might suspect, the Palm Pre is targeted at both Blackberry users with a very strong emphasis on email, along with other text messaging and social networking features–and iPhone users with a small, but growing assortment of “apps”. The Pre’s WebOS software is, as the name suggests, very integrated into using the web and appears to best the iPhone by being somewhat more facile in running multiple programs at one time, and by having a replaceable battery pack (the iPhone’s battery is sealed inside the unit.) So far, the Pre is also locked into one cell phone carrier, Sprint.

So what to tell Gary? He’s a busy executive who relies on email, so a Blackberry would be a great choice. But he also travels a bunch, so carrying an iPhone would also be a solid choice to give him so much functionality–and dare I say it–fun things to do while on the road. Finally, the Palm Pre isn’t just a good compromise between the two–it actually is defining some new standards of its own.

Each of these phones will run between 200 and 300 bucks to purchase along with a new 2 year contract, though Apple has repositioned its iPhone 3G–the model introduced just last year with just a few less features and a slightly slower batch of electronics inside–for about a hundred dollars.

My best advice on which to get is to first make the determination of which cell phone carrier gives you the best service where you need it. Then spending some time playing with each of the phones available on your service is a must. (Or borrow each from a friend who already owns one.) What one person loves, is of course another person’s most annoying feature.

Of these three, I find my love, particularly in it’s latest incarnation, is Apple’s iPhone. Still the sleekest form, but now more powerful in the 3Gs model than the prior two generations. The App Store seems to always have “an app for that”, no matter what it is I want to do. And now with a version that stores a massive 32 gigabytes of whatever you want to put into it, the iPhone really is the electronic Swiss Army Knife of both road warriors and regular folks, alike.

Simply put, I agree with reviewer Jason Chen of the website Gizmodo, who writes the iPhone 3Gs is “the best all around smartphone available.”

Today was update day for owners of Apple’s groundbreaking iPhone.

(That’s right, I called it groundbreaking–and for any of you Apple haters out there–please just resist the temptation to argue with me. The thing is two years old and for anyone to even suggest that it hasn’t changed the face of the cell phone business, just reveals an ability to ignore the obvious at a level I cannot rationally deal with.)

iPhone owners were able to update their phone today to the latest version of operating software, the third major release, which is named simply 3.0 (You could if you could connect to the servers that were pretty slammed through the afternoon and evening by users trying to get the latest and greatest on their iPhones.) The update brings along a slew of features, some of which users have been asking for since the device debuted in the summer of 2007, other things a bit more recent on the development curve.

Of course, this update doesn’t add every feature that the newest model of iPhone, the 3G S, will have when it arrives on Apple and AT&T store shelves on Friday of this week. That’s because the hardware in the new model has some upgrades too, which make the new model a bit faster and capable of shooting videos, being a digital compass, and responding to commands from its’ owner’s voice. (Here’s a review from the Gizmodo website.)

But as an iPhone owner since the day it went on sale–you might ask if I don’t feel cheated that the new model will have more cool features than the unit I have been using for the past year? No, not really, because I haven’t ever owned a phone that even came close to the user experience of the iPhone–and furthermore, I’ve never owned a cell phone that was updated with new features not once, but actually three times in almost the year that I’ve owned it. (To be clear, I owned the first model of the iPhone for one year, then replaced it with the updated iPhone 3G model in July of last year because of the jump to the faster data connections that debuted in the 3G model.)

Think about that for just one second. I bought a 16gigabyte model iPhone 3G last July, for a bit under three hundred bucks. Yes, that’s pretty pricey for any phone, even a so-called “smartphone” and even if it does all kind of cool things (and yes, it does all of them). But the bigger deal is that on three occasions, Apple has pushed out a
“software update” which both fixed minor problems on the phone and added new features each time. How much did I pay for these additions? Nothing.

When was the last time any company (other than a computer one maybe) said, “Hey, we want to add some cool features to that thing you bought from us–so let us give you that added capability for not one extra cent out of your pocket?” I can’t think of one.

Which is why that Apple will continue to sell the plain old iPhone 3G (without the S in the name) the same one I have had in my pocket for nearly a year.

At a newly reduced price of just 99 bucks, particularly now running the new 3.0 software, even “last year’s model” of the iPhone is still so far ahead of any other cell phone out there this year (and believe me, I look at all of them) that it just isn’t even funny. Even close competitor the Palm Pre, which has some features that aren’t on the iPhone, still comes up short when you look at everything both phones have to offer.

Of course, I’d be even happier if the iPhone was on every cell phone company’s network instead of just an AT&T exclusive, so that everyone could choose which company has the best coverage for where they live. That and maybe wake up AT&T a bit to realize what a great phone this is and why they should step up their act so their service matches the phone.

Certainly, we couldn’t have seen it when he was Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy”. Probably not as the real life Pat Conroy in “Conrack”. Ditto as Luke Martin in “Coming Home”, because for heaven’s sake he was hooking up with Jane Fonda! And for shit’s sake, he played the captain of the Greenpeace ship in “The Rainbow Warrior”!

But maybe the signs were there all along.

After all, he did make “The Tin Solider”, which some poor sap on The Internet Movie Database suggested might just be “the worst movie ever made.” Within a few short years, he turned out to be the completely two faced Jim Phelps, opposite Tom Cruise in the big screen version of “Mission: Impossible”

That should have been our first big clue.

Then he was a general with a dual identity, in charge of a secret operations execution squad who frames Keenan Ivory Wayans in “Most Wanted”. A murdering politician who goes after Will Smith in “Enemy of the State”. A major league dick of a high school coach in “Varsity Blues” who delivers this bit of script that would be so profound in 2009: “The hard work of so many, sacrificed by the disrespect of few.”

He was also legendary Basketball coach Adolph Rupp in “Glory Road”, Not to mention being a Pope (“Pope John Paul II”), the father of Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander”, and even the father of Angelina Jolie’s Laura Croft, Tomb Raider–which is a bit ironic, since he is Jolie’s real life father, though notably she decided not to take his last name as her own.

But you would think that having been the actor who so admirably channeled a performance as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in “Pearl Harbor”–that maybe, just maybe he would understand the challenge of somebody becoming the Chief Executive of United States at a time when the economy is sliding fast into the toilet from the colossal bunglings of your predecessor, a Republican who history would judge as one of the weakest Presidents in the nation’s history.

Furthermore, you think being assuming the identity of FDR on the big screen would help you understand that the decisions you have to make to try to save the country from a deepening depression are sometimes as unpopular and unsupported as say…the government seizing all of the gold owned by private citizens.

So maybe someone can figure out exactly what the hell happened to Jon Voight to make him host a Washington dinner last night to raise $15 million for Conservative candidates like say, Newt Gingrich and Sara Palin, and during his remarks actually call out the current occupant of the Oval Office–one who was actually elected to the office, rather than winning it at an audition, as a “false prophet.”

In fact, Voight went on to peg most all Democratic leaders as being responsible for the “downfall of the country”.

Fortunately, Voight’s current acting gig, the one he is doing in Hollywood mind you, is as a madman and insurrectionist Jonas Hodges, on the TV series “24”.

Who says life doesn’t imitate art?