meish dot org: life, unfolding

The Kübler-Ross model famously describes the stages a person goes through when dealing with grief or tragedy, and the model has been latterly adopted by change management consultants the world over – because, after all, discovering you have a terminal illness is exactly the same as being told your department is moving to a different building. Ahem

Anyway, if that’s the case, then the hue & cry/hoo-ha/a>/furore surrounding the week’s big media story provides growing evidence of what what I’m going to call an emerging Jönäthän-Ross model, which depicts precisely how a major media organisation deals with a rather public fuck-up.

Just like the Kübler-Ross model, there are stages through which the subject must pass in order to get out the other side, and they are, at least in part, somewhat familiar:

1. Shock: Initial organisational paralysis at hearing the bad news. Shit. Hope no-one noticed.
2. Misdirection: Redirecting attention onto OH LOOK, IT’S BILL ODDIE RIDING A BADGER!/STEPHEN FRY IN A TAXI!
3. Blamestorming: Internal frenzied finger-pointing.
4. Bargaining: Public justification and debate of the merits and facts of the case on and in national news vehicles.
5. Scapegoating: Someone has to go.
6. Auto-flagellation: Saturated coverage of public contrition from all involved (and quite a few besides, who weren’t), especially on the media channels owned by the organisation.
7. Tempered Relief: Hoping everyone forgets in time for the next licence-fee hike.

We’ve seen the same pattern play out several times now at the BBC and others, in the wake of misnamedkittengate, fakecompetitionwinnergate, RichardandJudyfraudulentphonelinegate and so on.

I think it’s time the Jönäthän-Ross model of embarassing public crisis management was formally adopted by our friends in the media, in the hope that acknowledging the path they seem destined to follow every time will speed things up a bit, because it’s bloody tedious for the rest of us.

Speaking, as we were not so long ago, about unreferenced advertising homages to internet viral creative endeavours….here’s another one for the collection.

First, watch this new ad from Berocca.

People dancing on treadmills.

Strangely familiar? Indeed. OK Go did this to great viral effect not so long ago:

I know. Ad creatives in ripping off internet shocker.

<rolls eyes>

Some of you who keep up with my Flickr stream will be aware that one of the things which crops up with alarming regularity in my camphone snaps is the misuse of apostrophes.

I am an apostrophe dullard: it’s true. I can’t help spotting them when they’re misused, and let me tell you it nearly killed me to write that headline up there. Seriously. I keep looking at it and wincing.

I classify public apostrophe abuse into three buckets:

1. Permissible Error
This usually means that the sign is handwritten, chalked or otherwise home-produced, and is generally an indication that the writer was in a hurry, or without English as a mother tongue, or both, and can therefore be permitted to make a small, apostrophe-sized slip once in a while. Classic greengrocer’s apostrophe territory.

2. Should Know Better
These are usually printed items which are created for a one-off, limited audience purpose. It tends to be that this usage is seen in charity shops, local church/school/community organisation newsletters and on the stand-up A-frame boards for independent delicatessens and sandwich shops. Most of these will have either been created by the proprietor or, occasionally, created by a signwriter acting under direct comission commission (oops!) from the owner. 99% of the time, it’s a plural error.

3. Utterly unforgivable
These are the real clangers. High distribution (vast print run – adverts, merchandise and the like), very visible channels (like billboards and television), otherwise high production values (design, or materials used) and – most importantly of all – very likely to have passed, in copy, design and approval stages, through the hands of several people, at least one of whom should have spotted the mistake. This is a quality issue, and is something that creative or marketing agencies (especially) are particularly bad at managing. Hang your heads in shame (and then get it together! It’s not that hard!)

After the jump, some other favourite examples of this latter type…

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Last night, out for dinner with a group of friends in celebration of one of our number’s birthday, I mentioned that I had noticed that in an awful lot of articles lamenting the lately departed entertainer and king of trivia and video clips, Jeremy Beadle, he was referred to as a “Prankster”.

In fact, a casual search on the interwebs shows that he’s been referred to as such online on no fewer than 464,000 occasions, and that his name occurs in nearly a fifth of all search results for “prankster”. This is surely the only proof required.

This got me thinking about where “prankster” registers in the general field of japes and subterfuge, which in turn got us talking about whether there was, in fact, a continuum of such things, into which all of the various shades of japery, trickery and subterfuge might appear.

And you know, there is. And here’s how the categories break out, with a full explanation of each, and examples, after the jump.

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[or: Haven't We Seen This Somewhere Before?]

I’ve been noticing recently a number of ad campaigns which seem to have “taken inspiration from” (which is a polite way of saying “copied wholesale from”) works of art.

In recent years there’s been controversy over the origin of Sony Bravia’s Bunnies ad (was it ripped off from LA based art due kozyndan?), the Honda Cog ad (did it borrow extensively from a 1987 art film?) and (while the original doesn’t really count as art, perhaps), even the Bravia’s Bouncing Balls commercial (was it all Letterman’s idea?)

While there’s always been a liberal approach to homage in ad agency’s bulging toolkits, I’ve been especially interested to see that some of the more recent examples seem to be directly inspired by art projects and works which have been heavily viral – the sort of links which people regularly send to each other on facebook, blog about and which rise to the top of digg and del.icio.us rankings.

It seems possible that creative ad agencies are turning to web trends/organically viral stuff to inform or inspire at least some of their creative vision – indeed, it’s hard to imagine how they might be able to get away without doing so, at least subconsciously, in an increasingly broad and social-infoflow-driven world. They may not be stealing ideas, but the influence of things which have also been popular on the web is clear in a many cases

I also wonder if the same circumstances of perma-connectivity and social object exchange by consumers means that concept appropriation is getting easier to spot because the circulation of information and sources is getting broader and more rapid?

Here are just a few examples….
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So, I didn’t really get podcasts when they first became popular a few years back. This is probably mostly to do with the fact that, since my commute was a) above ground and b) short, I was more than happy to just listen to the radio on the way to and from work, which seemed to coincide perfectly with BBC Radio Four’s morning slot (9am – things like Andrew Marr’s Start the Week plus The Long View, Midweek, Desert Island Discs and Thursday’s Boffinmungous (oh, alright, In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg, and then on the way home at about 6.30, the comedy slot.)

Since starting my new commute, back in April, I have experimented with reading (books, not shit free newspapers), listening to music (I found KD Lang’s Hymns from the 49th Parallel to be particularly soothing as I got to grips with being trapped in a sardine tin), watching things (Seasons 1-6 of Seinfeld and the first couple of seasons of Futurama) and finally, listening to the odd podcast.

And, you know, I’m a convert. I’ve found some which are absolutely fabulous for the commute – about an hour long, and by turns intelligent, interesting, entertaining and engrossing. In fact, I find myself frequently transported out of the tube carriage and to another place, the place where my attention is when I’m watching a film or on the phone – it’s not here where my body is, but it’s not anywhere else, so where is it? – and on at least one occasion have overshot my stop through being so rapt.

So for the sake of reference, I thought I’d share a rundown of what’s on my subscription list at the moment (with asteriskification denoting the ones I ALWAYS make a point of listening to)…

Magazine

• Start the Week
• Midweek
• Excess Baggage
• Resonance FM

Documentaries & Features

• TEDTalks
• Theory of Everything
• Thinking Allowed
• WNYC’s RadioLab*
• This American Life
• alt.NPR B-Side Radio
• Re:Sound*
• Third Coast Featurecast
• World Service Documentary Archive
• From Our Own Correspondent

Music

• Sunday Best
• Take Your Medicine*
• JustLikePodcast*

Now, obviously, I don’t listen to all of these every time there’s a new episode – but it is remarkably easy to plough through them, especially since I spend a minimum of 2.5 hours in transit each day.

I’d love to hear if you have any recommended podcasts. Stick your suggestions in the comments…

A few months ago, I made a televisual gold programme name generator which TV commissioning Editors (especially those from BBC3/Channel five/Sky three/ITV3) could use to create titles for their summer season of programming.

Now that the all-important autumn season is swift approaching, it’s time to plunge once again into the bottom of the programming barrel and see which tired old formats can be recycled with a new twist for the gaping sofa-dwelling hoardes.

After whole nanoseconds of analysis, I’ve discovered that the secret to this type of television planning is as follows:

a) find an established programme concept
b) keep the basic format, but substitute the focal aspect

Hey presto, new programmes! You’ve already got the sets, too (not that anyone uses sets anymore…), not to mention the ‘talent’.

Like a monkey with a typewriter, simply hit the big shiny button below and – hey presto – eventually you might find the highly derivative televisual concept the world’s been waiting for!

Your show pitch concept will appear in the box beneath. Simply copy, paste, get a prime-time slot scheduled and await your inevitable promotion. (NB: may not work in non-Firefox browsers)
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One of the essentials of any trip up to Argyll to visit my mum on the Isle of Mull is reading the various local papers – The Oban Times, Round and About Mull and Am Muileach – to find out what people are talking about.

Checking in with local news organs in any area gives you a good sense of what’s important, and what’s preoccupying the locals, plus it can provide handy background/context for conversations, so when people refer to “the new road” or “the knife incident” you know what they’re referring to.

And one of the highlights of reading The Oban Times, at any rate, is the weekly local dispatches from outlying areas, in which special resident correspondents submit regular news and updates on life in their bit of the Western edge of Scotland.

My favourite is D Morrison, who writes from Scalpay (a small island off the Isle of Skye) and often uses a rather cryptic prose for his dispatches, covering some surprising topics. One recent favourite is this:

Which is interesting and almost manages to be informative. Another, from this week’s paper:

The man’s a local legend and clearly popular with OT readers who look forward to seeing what snippet of Scalpay life he uncovers each week – a quick search reveals he has fans across the area - and beyond, I’d warrant.

If I could see his stuff online, I’d subscribe to that feed, for sure, but unfortunately The Oban Times only seems to offer a tantalising glimpse of his headlines. I’ll have to get my mum to start cutting them out of the paper…

So, anyone who reads this site at meish.org rather than via the feed might have noticed (via the little speaking events chunk on the right hand side of this page) that I’m speaking at NMK Forum tomorrow. Actually, I’m participating in a panel in the morning, which wil explore the following burning questions:

How is so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media? Is it absorbing social media strategies or ignoring it? What does social media mean for the bottom line of big media? And how do the social media startups view their efforts?

Forum chair Mike Butcher has asked each of the panellists to provide a short positioning statement to serve as a starting point for the discussion. I decided to go for the short & sweet approach this time around, so without further ado:

New technology and community approaches are challenging and changing established media businesses to rethink the creation, consumption and curation of content – and even what content itself means in this era of user-focused, user created media. Much of what was once known and safe – The Way We’ve Always Done Things – is now ripe for reinvention, including issues of control, user engagement, distribution, monetisation and more. These are exciting – and sometimes daunting – opportunities for MSM organisations.

The other panellists are Nico MacDonald (spy.co.uk); Jem Stone (BBC Future Media & Technology); Tom Bureau (CNET Networks); Adam Gee (Channel 4 Television); Paul Pod (Tape It Off The Internet); and Ashley Norris (Shiny Media). It should be an interesting discussion in the middle of a very stimulating day.

I’m looking forward to it.

Proof, yet again, that that the well-honed craft of the ingenious subeditor is alive and well, and following in the fine tradition of fortuitous circumstances which conspire to make a headline-writer’s day (as discussed at some length in these pages, last year) m’colleague (and new desk neighbour) Neil pointed me in the direction of an odd story about a recent contest in South Korea to determine the fastest crossing by a high-wire walker, unsupported, over a famous wide river.

The headline?

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo

But of course.