blog.vanillacokehead.com

Just read about a shooting spree in Indianapolis last night in which 10 people were hurt – looked through Google News and noticed most of the headlines included the words, “Indiana Black Expo”.

I question the need to emphasize that these shootings happened in the vicinity of a “Black Expo”. This isn’t the first time media outlets have emphasized that shootings happened near events that are predominantly attended by African-Americans.

Do news outlets need to emphasize the “race angle” when shootings happen at events such as “Black Spring Break” or “Black Homecoming”? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar emphasis when shootings happen at events predominantly attended by whites – or Hispanics – or those from other ethnic groups.

It just makes me go, “hmmm” when a crime-related news story trumpets the angle that an incident happened near or at an event predominantly attended by those of a particular ethnic group.

I saw LeBron James’ decision to go to the Miami Heat coming in the one or two days leading to it. Between the rumored desire for close friends James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh to play on the same NBA team – and the reports James had put down an offer on a house in the Miami area - to me the writing was on the wall. Sure, I’m bummed; but such is the life of a longsuffering lifetime Cleveland professional sports fan.

I agree with folks such as Terry Pluto who have criticized the way LeBron James turned this into a long, drawn out soap opera. The whole thing could have been done quickly, easily, and with more class than it was. James turned the whole saga surrounding his choice of where to play next season into an egopalooza – sure he tried to make it “for charity” and about having the best prospects to win an NBA title; but in the end, it was about LeBron.

From the beginning of his decision making process, I never faulted LeBron James for wanting to look for the best opportunity to win an NBA Championship. Any professional athlete worth his or her salt wants the best chance to win and be part of a championship team.

The way LeBron James turned this decision making process into an ego-driven, drama-laden, excruciatingly drawn out soap opera showed a marked lack of class.

It reminded me of when I was active on LiveJournal a few years ago – and a user decided to unfollow me there. The person wasn’t just content to just unfollow these people. This person listed – in a public post – all the people who were gone from her friends list; she also requested said people to unfollow her. It was insensitive. It was crass. And it was an unnecessary public manifestation of what should be a private, personal decision. I had no problem with being unfollowed – I had a problem with this LJ user turning it into a spectacle.

Terry Pluto made a great point when he said that “Twenty-five year-olds are usually not the most mature people on the planet.”. I know this first-hand. Nearly 20 years ago I was an emotionally immature, hot-headed, wet-behind-the-ears television news photographer in Jackson, Mississippi. I shot off my mouth first and asked questions later. I took things way too personally. I didn’t fully realize then the consequences of my actions and utterances. It took me another 10 years to start to mellow out and mature emotionally.

I look back at how I acted in my 20s and realize what I might have done differently. I have a feeling that in 10 or 20 years LeBron James might just look back at “The Decision” he made in 2010 and wish he had handled it differently.

Call this a way to adjust the signal/noise ratio on my Twitter account, along with a way to better share web clippings that catch my fancy – and a way to force myself to comment more on said web clippings rather than just put them “out there”:

Before this weekend, I handled interesting (to me anyway) links in one of two ways: If a link simply “catches my eye”, I’d click the “share” icon in Google Reader – and up to three of these links would be automatically ported each half hour to my Twitter account. If a link really got my attention, I’d manually share it, add a usually snarky remark, and post it to Twitter (and maybe Facebook too).

One of my pet peeves is seeing “blowhards” on Twitter: users who just spout off and show little if any sign of interacting with other users. More and more lately, I felt like I was slowly showing signs of becoming a blowhard; I decided some adjustments were in order.

In addition to the already established daily journal of my Twitter posts, I’ve added a new daily post: the “link dump” – an automated blog entry that will post early each morning showing the web articles during the last 24 hours that I’ve flagged as “shared” on Google Reader.

I may or may not pimp out the daily link dump post – if there’s nothing that looks interesting on second glance I won’t tout the daily post on Facebook and/or Twitter. If I want to immediately share things that I consider pressing, I’ll still manually share said web links via Twitter and/or Facebook – or even as a standalone blog post here.

It’s my hope that these changes will make my Tweets – and Facebook posts – more interesting – and that the feeds for those who follow me on these platforms are less cluttered.

the intro to “Law & Order” should say this:

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the police who screw up the cases – and the district attorneys who pull things out of their asses. These are their stories.

A week from tomorrow, hordes of fans and media will converge on Punxsutawney, PA for Phil’s furry weather forecast: his shadow’s supposed to help predict the final weeks of the winter season.

Every year I see the video of Phil’s appearance in early February, one thing comes to mind: with all those bright TV lights and photo flashes in his face, isn’t seeing his shadow almost a foregone conclusion?

It’s kind of like a doctor blowing cigarette smoke in a patient’s face then saying he doesn’t like the sound of the patient’s cough.

I know: this and four bucks might get me a latte at Starbucks.

(local TV station is on with fire and brimstone, screaming-meemie, bible-thumping local church preacher going on and on; Trish just walked in with her breakfast)

Trish: please change the channel. I’m trying to eat.
Brian: but this is good gospel preaching.
Trish: that’s my point. change it before I have to puke.

NOTE: “Kaiser Bill” is the affectionate title for Bill Klaus, the head honcho at Media-Com, the owner of Akron-area news/talk radio station WNIR, along with LPTV stations WAOH and WAX, channels 35 and 29, affiliates of the Retro TV network. This post is an open letter to “Kaiser Bill”…

Bill,

The current schedule (PDF link) for Channels 35 and 29 shows that “Dragnet” is supposed to be aired Monday through Friday at 5:30 pm. I absolutely love “Dragnet” – and I have my DVR programmed to record the show each weekday at 5:30.

More often than not lately, when I pull up a “Dragnet” episode on my DVR, I instead get an infomercial for Humana health insurance. It’s mildly disappointing – not to mention a waste of my time and of hard drive space on my DVR.

I can understand your decision to preempt “Dragnet” for paid programming. Given the current generally crappy state of affairs in the media industry, owners of radio and TV stations need to make money wherever they can, however they can.

But if you’re gonna routinely preempt a scheduled show for paid programming – please do viewers a favor and not get our hopes up for a classic TV show – and update your program listings to reflect what you’re actually going to put on the air.

I thank you. And my DVR thanks you. Cheers!

Sincerely,

Brian Heath

You may or may not know of the 1976 movie, “Logan’s Run” (based on the 1967 book of the same name). The film centers on a society in the 23rd Century where people are killed off at age 30.

So many times during the last few years, I’ve seen media organizations deal with the tanking economy and changing landscape of entertainment and information by cutting staff. More often than not, the people targeted to be tossed first are those with the most seniority and the biggest paychecks. Often the wisest and most respected people in newsrooms or at TV or radio stations are the ones first shown the door.

It seems a lot of businesses, in and out of the media industry, are putting targets on the heads of those people over 50 – some firms specifically target those people for force reductions by offering early retirement – others take the stealth and sinister route of railroading said people off the payroll by building files on them then firing them or by making work life so loathsome that said people quit.

Whatever way businesses choose to trim their payrolls and workforces, the way older workers are often treated is reminiscent of the movie “Logan’s Run”. It’s sad that in so many businesses, age and longevity have become liabilities rather than assets.

The primary way I keep up with RSS feeds is using Google Reader. Today, I took a major step to clean up the information clutter and back down on the cyber-overload. I was getting sick of seeing 1000+ unread items every time I went to check Google Reader.

I have my feeds broken down into 11 groups:

*Android Stuff – updates on the Android mobile phone operating system: news, downloads, and other related items.
*Media Stuff – news relating to the media business and journalism.
*Nonlocal News – news feeds from places where I used to live: the Jackson (MS), Rochester (NY), and Seattle areas.
*Personal Blogs – feeds for blogs of people I know in real life and/or online.
*Points of view – my catch-all for feeds related to religion, politics, opinion, and humor.
*Spanning the Globe – US and International news feeds.
*Sports Sites – sports opinion and news feeds, including sports media.
*Tabloid Trash and Entertainment – gossip and entertainment news feeds.
*Tech News – technology opinion and news feeds.
*Yokels – Ohio local news feeds.
*Mobile Quick Reads – content in this group overlaps the other 10 – and is intended to give me a quick read on my smartphone. I have a homescreen shortcut to this web page on my G1. I have two, at most three feeds from each of the other groups also in this group.

During my Google Reader purge, I made a goal to trim each of my 10 groups down to no more than 12 feeds each (some had 15 or 20) and I succeeded. In the end, I went down from 140 feeds to 95 – a cut of one-third of the feeds I had followed. Since the feeds from “spanning the globe” are high volume, I trimmed that one down from 15 to 4.

Going through Reader this evening, it seems much easier to get the updates I want to keep up with. We’ll see how it works in the long term.

Now only if decluttering my house would be this easy. :)

It amazes me to see how many people who give themselves the title “social media guru” or “internet marketing expert” who in reality have no clue about the basics of using services such as Twitter.

It’s become a daily ritual for me to check my Twitter followers list. And it’s become a daily frustration: most times when I check new followers, I’m lucky if I follow back one or two users – one or two who even come close to using Twitter as a true social medium. Most of my new followers are little more than cyber-blowhards.

More often than not, the new Twitter followers I encounter seem to use the service as a “mass medium” – feeding a steady diet of links, quotes, promotional pabulum, braggadocio, and/or vapid crap. At a minimum, I tend to block users whose tweets show little sign of true interaction. If they’re particularly obnoxious, I’ll hit the “block and report spam” button.

There are many people out there using Twitter who truly “get it” – who take great pains to interact with other users – and who don’t primarily use Twitter as a one-way soapbox, a virtual version of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”, a megaphone, or a brag book. I’m sick of those who use it as the latter.

Twitter’s about interaction – hence the term, “social medium”. The obtuse twits who use Twitter as a mass medium are little more than shrill popinjays and cyber-nuisances. Such twits need to grab the clue phone – lines two, three, and four – STAT!