October 16th, 2006

Message From Michael                    (image placeholder)
                                                  October 16, 2006                                                                                                         

• THE ZOMBIE KILLING NEWS ANCHOR


• CONAN THE BARBARIAN IS BACK


• IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA WE TRUST


• FAKE NEWS IS NO JOKE


• COCKTAIL CHATTER  -- $100 LAPTOP AND 300 MILLION PEOPLE


• GOOGLE DISCLAIMER

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• THE ZOMBIE KILLING NEWS ANCHOR:  The InfoLab at NorthWestern University has created a virtual news show with a system that collects both information and video on the web,”parses and edits” it, and then presents it through an artificial, computer-generated anchor.  Called the News At Seven, the computer-based system picks up national and international stories along with human interest stories and then presents it in a three-minute newscast.  Although it is somewhat of an exaggeration when the website calls it “compelling, cohesive,” it is nevertheless pretty interesting to watch.  The “newscast” I caught was from September 24th and lead with the decision by the African forces to remain in Darfur, followed by a ‘report’ from the blogosphere with another faux ‘person’ commenting about Darfur.  This was followed by the NASA decision to bring Atlantis back and ending with the story about the death of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.  In the middle of this, the young, female faux anchor, dressed in military garb, stops to blast a zombie who comes out on set.  Visit infolab.northwestern.edu and click on the projects tab to see a summary of the project and a demo.


• CONAN THE BARBARIAN IS BACK:  While the news anchor was stiff and anything but human (like some anchors we’ve all known), a company in Santa Monica has created software that creates a virtual person who is so life-like and has so much personality that the creators call it “soul transference.”  The software duplicates the facial expressions of a real person through modeling and does it in one-tenth the time of previous software.  According to an article in the New York Times, the software was used to create a commercial using Fred and Ethel Mertz from the old I Love Lucy show to pitch the merits of a Medicare package.  Now, the company, Image Metrics, is looking at using the process to ‘revive’ dead actors. For example, creating a new Bruce Lee movie. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is reportedly using the system to create a political ad using his Conan the Barbarian character.


• IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA WE TRUST:  A survey by information company Lexis-Nexis shows that when consumers are faced with major events, they turn to and trust the mainstream media.  Or, put another way, when the going gets tough, the tough watch mainstream media.  More than half of those surveyed said that, if faced with a major event such as a hurricane, they would first turn to network television, followed by radio (42%), the daily newspaper and/or cable news (33%), with a quarter relying on the Internet sites of mainstream media.  Only one in 20 (6%) said they would use ‘emerging news.’  The mainstream media also won out when it came to general topics of interest.  Those top topics included entertainment, hobbies, weather and food/cooking, followed closely by sports.  The survey showed consumers are four to six times more likely to TRUST (the key word in the survey) you mainstream media mavens.  Looking into the future, the picture changes somewhat,with more than half (52%) still saying they will ‘mostly trust and rely’ on traditional news sources, but with a third (35%) saying they will rely on both.  But more than one in ten say they anticipate relying most on emerging media, which is a little scary since the Lexis Nexis folks defined emerging news media as ‘citizen journalists, pundits, and organizations who create alternative or Internet-only publications, blogs and podcasts, often with a personal or particular point of view.’


• FAKE NEWS IS NO JOKE:  At least when it comes to political information.  A study by Indiana professor Julia R. Fox found that even with all the bantering, there is “substantive dialogue going on” in the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and she declares it a “legitimate source of news.”  Since so many young people say they rely on it for political information, Fox did a second-by-second analysis of the Daily Show’s audio and visual content and compared it with network coverage, using the 2004 Presidential election campaign as the base.  Not surprisingly, she found ‘considerably more humor than substance’ in the Daily Show.  BUT she also found ‘considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts.’  And she found the broadcast news stories were significantly shorter than the Daily Show stories.  So, she argues, even though the network newscasts may have had proportionally more substance, the Daily Show had proportionally more stories devoted to the campaign.  In the end, she says the Daily Show is just as substantive as “the source that Americans have relied upon for decades.”  As a footnote, subscribers to MfM will recall that last week’s report on Future of News study found that most people still ranked the Daily Show low in comparison to other media in terms of ‘newsiness.’  As a further footnote, Julia is a regular subscriber to MfM, and interestingly, this is the second report of hers that has gotten national news coverage.SIDENOTE:  As long as I’m on a roll with universities, Ball State University which is the home of the RTNDA salary survey and the Middletown Media Studies has formed a News Research Insitute to “identify, explore and seek practical solutions to issues important to the future of the news industry and its consumers.”  The institute will form an ‘interdisciplinary group’ of students, faculty and professionals  who will “anticipate consumers’ future needs by creating interactive, multimedia content.”      


• COCKTAIL CHATTER:  First, a little myth busting -- AARP says the number one myth about baby boomers is they’re so brand loyal, they’re not worth pursuing for advertisers.  In actual fact, 60% of them research various brands before making a choice and are more likely to make case-by-case decisions.  Myth #2:  Most online gamers are young men.  In actual fact, according to Nielsen Entertainment, women account for 64% of all online gamers.  And, yes, teenagers still account for the largest percentage (40%), but adults 45 years old and older account for 8%.  Videos of the Iraqi insurgency are making it on to video websites like YouTube and Google, and they’re not being posted by insurgents but by citizens in the U.S. and other countries who are picking them up off Jihadist sites.  The leaders of Kazakhstan have taken out a series of full page ads in the New York Times and other national publications to counter-balance the image created by a British comedian who created a satirical Kazakhstan journalist named Borat.  Singer, songwriter, novelist and general weirdo Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas.  And before you dismiss him, take note that his media manager is Bill Hillsman, the same guy who helped Jesse Ventura become governor and Ted Lamont’s campaign against Joe Lieberman.  And as long as I’m on a celebrity kick, British experts surveyed by TMZ.com named Kate Moss the most influential celebrity in the world ahead of Madonna, Bono and Brad Pitt, based on the number of times her name was mentioned in the media.  Okay, this part isn’t cocktail chatter, but it’s too important not to note and I wanted to get it in.  The folks at MIT’s Media Lab have created a prototype of the $100 laptop.  The idea is to make something not just low cost, but low power and durable for children in poor countries to use.  Countries, including Thailand, Brazil and Argentina are looking at buying the units.  This part does qualify as cocktail chatter.  Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte is the brother of John Negroponte, former ambassador to Iraq and now Director of National Intelligence.


• COCKTAIL CHATTER – U.S. POPULATION:  Sometime this morning (yes, this morning), the U.S.A. will officially pass the 300 Million mark in terms of population.  I know, you’re already read about that, but here are some additional facts to throw into the mix.  The way we reached that, according to the Census Bureau, is that we have one birth every 7 seconds, one death every 13 seconds and one international migrant added every 31 seconds resulting in a net gain of one person every 11 seconds.  As of this morning when I checked the ‘population clock,’ we were at 299, 999,230.  Yesterday, when I checked it, it was at 292 Million, give or take a thousand.  In case you, too, don’t have a life, you can check out the census bureau clock at http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html.  The world population, BTW, was 6,550,750,690.  The population growth will make the U.S. the third most populous country in the world, behind China and India.  Although the U.S. accounts for only 5% of the total world population, it accounts for 25% of the world energy use.  According to an analysis by the New York Times, married couples are now a minority in the U.S.  In 1930, 84% of Americans wer married.  By 1990, that figure dropped to 56%.  Last year, it was 49.7%.  There were 5.2 Million unmarried, opposite sex couples, 413,000 male couples and 363,000 female couples.


• GOOGLE DISCLAIMER:  Normally, I avoid stories that have received such widespread coverage that you all know about it, but I have to note the Google purchase of YouTube.  (If you want to watch something surreal, look up the video announcement on YouTube by the company founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.)  But let me also note some other announcements about the search superstar site:  Several media sources report Google is moving “full steam ahead” with plans for print, broadcast and mobile advertising. Google has announced it has created an on-line equivalent of Microsoft Office with Word and Spreadsheet capabilities.  Google has announced that it’s adding hundreds of miniature programs to independent websites so that people don’t have to go to its site to download its programs.  Hitwise recently announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 15% of all visits to shopping and classifieds.  Google has joined with the University of California-Berkeley to provide college courses, including ‘physics for future presidents’, online.  Google unveiled a literacy website at the Frankfurt Book Fair, allowing groups worldwide to upload and download multimedia teaching resources.  And several analysts are questioning what the merger means to competitor Yahoo’s future.  As a final note, Google recently held a massive think tank retreat which included not only top media executives but executives from some of the country’s most powerful companies.  (No, I wasn’t invited either.)   The host introducing the Google executives joked that there was a rumor that Google was going to consolidate with the United States.  The Google executive dismissed that and then, adding to the joke, coughed “China.”  


• SUBSCRIPTIONS:  If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail newsconsultant@aol.com with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM from 2006 are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com.