2013-06-28

Turning the morning news into soap opera

Ann Curry, the second fiddle on NBC’s Today show, is apparently being shown the door. That news was broken yesterday afternoon by Brian Stelter, the prolific media reporter of the New York Times on the newspaper’s website, and that 1,100-word story earned prominent placement on Page One of the business section of this morning’s paper.

I’ll forgive you in advance if you don’t care whether Curry continues on Today or if you don’t care whether she finds a slot elsewhere in the NBC empire, just as long as you forgive me for not giving a fig either. It’s not that I dislike Ann Curry or Today‘s first fiddle, Matt Lauer, or even Today‘s morning-show competition. It’s just that I dislike the shows for being dulled-down messes of news, entertainment and talk. If I watch any of them, it’s by accident.

My lack of interest in the morning-show mix puts me in the majority. Today, which is usually the number-one-rated program, and ABC’s Good Morning America, which took that position a couple of times this spring, draw an average of fewer than 5 million viewers. The third-ranked show, CBS’s This Morning, pulls in a little more than 2 million viewers. In a country of 311 million, that’s minimal interest.

The length and placement of Stelter’s piece, on the other hand, conveys a level of importance to Curry’s rumored departure that’s hard to justify. Stripped to its essence, the Curry saga might justify a 300-word short about Today‘s recent ratings volatility, Lauer’s alleged estrangement from Curry, and NBC’s judgment that she wasn’t as good a co-host as predecessor Meredith Vieira, all leading to her impending exit.

Instead, Stelter serves an extended story packed with anonymous sources – ”some at NBC,” “some staff members,” “people with knowledge of the negotiations, who insisted on anonymity because the matter was confidential,” “several people who know Ms. Curry,” “one of the people” who know Curry, “friends” of Meredith Vieira, and “one of the people with knowledge of the negotiations” between Curry and NBC – that makes the departure of a TV co-host sound like the final days of Richard Nixon. How much of the anonymous dancing is Curry’s people spinning her story and how much of it is NBC framing the ouster as necessary strategy to save the show is anybody’s guess.

Overdramatizing the comings and goings of on-air talent and the hirings and firings of network executives is a traditional part of the TV beat. The People Who Cover Television never have to worry about material: The TV industry defines itself by ratings, ratings produce winners and losers, and from winners and losers flow an endless river of copy to bottle and sell. The People Who Cover Sports have been doing a similar thing for more than a century. The toughest choice in covering the TV industry (or sports) is to decide whether to make the loser or the winner the day’s story. It’s not that difficult a choice. If you cover the loser today, just remember to put the winner in your calendar for coverage in the future.

A case can be made that the fate of Ann Curry constitutes big news because Today is a $300 million profit machine dependent on ratings for its ad revenues. If ratings drop and she’s to blame, the network’s stockholders must know! But Stelter spends little time there. In the worst tradition of TV coverage, he’s writing a soap opera about a TV show.

I pick on Stelter, but he’s only one of the several dramatizers working the TV beat. His Times colleague Bill Carter has been known to indulge this tendency, and a couple of years ago, critic Bill Wyman took pleasure in hosing Howard Kurtz (Washington Post and the Daily Beast) for his inappropriately thorough pieces on the fading of Katie Couric’s nightly news lights. The extreme coverage of Curry echoes Politico’s coverage of the Washington beat: While the outlet routinely breaks legitimate news, it also tends to inflate whatever political lint it collects into giant mainsails.

At least one newspaper reporter on the TV beat keeps a sense of perspective about her work: Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post. (Here’s my 2003 appreciation of her work.) With her oeuvre more resembling that of a sports columnist than a sports reporter, de Moraes still delivers as much news about the industry as the writers at the Times – only she doesn’t weigh the beat down with high word counts and Timesian puff. And she’s funny. When CNN’s Lou Dobbs Moneyline was renamed Lou Dobbs Tonight, de Moraes explained that it was “because CNN would not let him rename it “I’m Lou Dobbs, Not Some Darn Islamist.”

With no disrespect to Curry, who is an accomplished reporter, if her impending exit from Today is big news, so is every segment on Entertainment Tonight.

Beat sweetener The Benjamin J. Rhodes edition

If you’ve ever wanted to see a White House staffer dressed in frosting and candy sprinkles like a gourmet cupcake, pull your Saturday, March 16, New York Times out of the recycling pile and read Mark Landler’s adulating “beat sweetener” about Deputy National Security Adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes, “Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice.”

A beat sweetener, as press-watchers know, is an over-the-top slab of journalistic flattery of a potential source calculated to earn a reporter access or continued access. They’re most frequently composed on the White House beat when a new administration arrives in Washington and every Executive Office job turns over, but they can appear any time a reporter is prepared to demean himself by toadying up to a source in exchange for material.

As a beat sweetener, the Rhodes piece excels on so many levels that I’ll bet the subject’s parents have framed and hung the clipping over the family mantel. Landler portrays Rhodes as a young fella with “old man” wisdom; as possessing a “soft voice” that delivers “strong opinions”; as one whose “influence extends beyond what either his title or speechwriting duties suggest”; and as someone who “cares” to the point of “anguish” but is “very realistic.”

The information content of these testimonials, made by both Landler and his sources, is just about zero. We learn that he “channels Mr. Obama on foreign policy,” as if a 35-year-old deputy who writes speeches for the president would have his boss on a leash. His unnamed friends and colleagues attest that he’s “deeply frustrated by a policy [in Syria] that is not working,” as if anyone could be anything but frustrated by a policy that isn’t working. Indeed, in the article’s next sentence, we learn from anonymous “administration officials” that Rhodes “is not alone in his frustration over Syria.”

Drawing liberally from the reporter’s big book of clichés, we learn that Rhodes wrote Obama’s “landmark address” given in Cairo in 2009 and that the upcoming Israel speech he has composed for Obama will assert America’s “unshakable support” for that nation. The salient fact about Rhodes’s landmark address — unmentioned by Landler here — was that it flopped, at least among the locals. According to a Pew survey, confidence in Obama in Muslim countries dropped from 33 percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2012.

According to Landler, in “many ways” Rhodes was “an improbable choice for his current job at the heart of the national security apparatus.” Improbable? How so? After a couple of paragraphs of biography, in which we learn that Rhodes has an unfinished novel in his drawer (show me a speechwriter who doesn’t have at least one), that he grew up in Manhattan and that he worked briefly on Rudy Giuliani’s 1997 re-election campaign, we’re told that Rhodes toiled for former Representative Lee Hamilton, a “Democratic foreign-policy elder,” and helped him draft the 9/11 Commission report and the Iraq Study Group report. The latter document was “a template for the anti-Iraq war positions taken” by Obama when he was a senator.

Hiring Rhodes — or somebody with his resume — wasn’t an improbable choice. It was entirely predestined. Unnoted in the Times profile are the facts that Rhodes also wrote policy speeches for former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, that other Hamilton aides joined the Obama campaign, and that Rhodes’s wife, Ann Norris, works for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) on foreign policy and defense issues. For more Rhodes details, see this PR sketch published by his alma mater, Rice University: He studied there with novelist Max Apple, double-majoring in English and political science, and later got an MFA in fiction at New York University, where he also taught writing.

Why pretend Rhodes was an outside shot for the job? Did the Times decide the piece lacked sufficient tension to hold reader interest, and inflated the story with the bogus notion that he’s an accidental West Winger? Your guess is as good as mine.

Sucking up to Rhodes won’t necessarily earn Landler or other journalists covering the White House an automatic scoop. But beat sweeteners aren’t written with anything so crass in mind as scoops. They’re designed to keep the information conveyor lubricated (“source greaser” is another term for the practice) with journalistic goodwill. As someone who is inside the White House decision loop, Rhodes is a much better friend than an enemy.

2013-06-26

The long, slow decline of alt-weeklies

Alternative weekly colossus Boston Phoenix cracked and fell yesterday, ceasing publication after 47 years. According to a Phoenix executive quoted in the obituary in today’s Boston Globe, the alternative weekly was losing more than $1 million a year, and a format switch last fall from newsprint to glossy had failed to attract the sort of national advertising it desired.

Once one of the leading alt-weeklies in the nation, the dead paper leaves behind $1.2 million in debt and roughly $500,000 in assets. The fact that its owner didn’t — or couldn’t — sell the publication to cover some of its debt signals the illness of the greater alternative weekly market.

Like its daily newspaper counterpart, the alt-weekly has enjoyed a terrible half-decade of plummeting revenues, circulation and page counts in the 100-plus markets currently served. One large chain that owned papers in Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte and elsewhere filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and was eventually spun apart, but that financial disaster was as much about clueless proprietors overleveraging themselves as it was the decay of the alt-weekly business model.

The formula, pioneered by the Village Voice in the 1950s, finessed by the Phoenix in the 1960s and perfected by the Chicago Reader, the Phoenix New Times and others in the 1970s, became such a cinch that know-nothing bar owners and recent college graduates (or dropouts!) eventually made millions off it. Some papers, like the Phoenix New Times, built immense chains from the links they forged and acquired. The formula connected underserved readers with overcharged advertisers in both compact, urban settings like New York and Washington and sunbelt expanses like Phoenix and Dallas. In 2005, the two largest alt-weekly chains, anchored respectively by the Phoenix New Times and the Voice, combined to create a company valued by the participants at $400 million, with annual revenues of $180 million. Newspapers started in bar booths had become big business, but like many of the daily newspaper merger and acquisition deals going down during same period, this deal also proved too rich.

Many former alt-weekly editors would like to persuade you that their cutting take on city politics and the arts combined with their dedication to the feature form won readers. Actually, it was the whole gestalt that made the publications work. Comprehensive listings paired with club and concert ads to both entertain and help readers plan their week. Classified ads, especially the personals, often provided better reading than the journalistic fare in the front of the book. No better venue for apartment rentals existed; even people who had long-term leases used the housing ads to fantasize. Even the display ads, purchased mostly by local retailers and service providers, were useful to readers.

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2013-06-24

Fashion Trend – Neon

Ever since color blocking came over last summer, neon colors are all over the place. But it didn’t do too well after the take off as it can come off as tacky when not put together well. However this season there are plenty of more sophisticated neon fashion items to choose from. Whether you have a bag fetish or you are a jewelry aficionado neons are the go to colors for this season.

For the uninitiated neon are bright fluorescent colors (the ones you see on highlighters like fluorescent yellow, orange, green, pink and blue). These colours are very luminescent in nature and hence can be worn solid as a base or as an accent depending on your style, personality, the occasion and your body type. Neon is not easy to wear and you need to take effort to put them together. Here are some ideas on how you could incorporate neons into your ward robe.

Neon dresses: Neon T shirts are so passe, neon dresses (knee length or shorter) are the latest trend. The shorter ones can be paired with jeggings or fitted jeans and the longer ones can just be worn as a dress, as is or with a blazer if required. Accessorize with some long chains for a smart look.

Neon Pants: If you have the body type and the attitude to carry it off, then there’s nothing like pairing fitted fluorescent denim with a black/white tank/ Tshirt and a blazer. Accessorize with gladiator styled heels in black/white and you are good to go.

Muted neons: Think neons are too bright for you? Mute them by layering them with a sheer fabric like tulle or lace. Or you could take a cue from Louis Vuitton ads and sport dress with cut work or cut outs in them with neon lining.

Neon accessories: Try your hand at some spring colour blocking by teaming neon shoes with faded pastel clothing. Colourful, oversized clutches are an on-trend choice of accessory. Big totes in neon (esp. green) also do work really well. It is not necessary that all neon bags will be in plastic or coated materials. These days you get neon bags/ clutches made of leather and jute too. But if you like the frosted finish of the water proof bags, then you are in luck, for that is in trend too.

Neon Jewelry: Most big brands in costume jewelry are into neon these days. Big chunky stones in fluorescent green, orange and pink, when put together create quite an impact. Obviously, they are expensive. So the easiest way is to buy white rhinestone jewelry, according to your taste and budget (most local markets and malls stock them) and color them with a few coats of funky nail polish colours. You can even add pieces of neon rope or ribbon to make them look unique. Team such pieces with something simple like a black dress and heels for a truly stunning look.

Don’t like too much of neon, then use it as an accent in your clothes and accessories. A piping here, a patch there is enough to make your clothes look trendy this season. So go on pick up some neon colors and highlight your wardrobe with them.

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2013-06-14

The Best Homemade Cinnamon Rolls Without Yeast

With the aromatic and tantalizing smell of cinnamon blended with melted brown sugar that hangs in the early morning sunlight, no one in their right minds would say no to a piece of this delectable breakfast treat.

                  
Making cinnamon rolls is relatively easy but making homemade cinnamon rolls without yeast would also be a piece of cake for anyone. Adding yeast to the dough is a bit time consuming as there would be a need to wait for the dough to fully rise and be properly kneaded. Here is a cinnamon roll recipe that you can do from scratch with no yeast included.

Yeast -Free Cinnamon Rolls

    4 tsp. baking powder
    1 c. sugar (granulated or brown sugar)
    3 tsp. cinnamon Glaze
    1/2 c. confectioner’s sugar
    1/4 c. milk


Preparation:

In making this homemade cinnamon rolls without yeast, start by preheating the oven to 400 Farenheit In a medium sized bowl, combine the ingredients for the filling. You can opt to use either granulated sugar or brown sugar depending on your personal preference. Once the filling ingredients are mixed, divide into halves. Spread one half of the filling at the bottom of a 9”x9” pan. In separate bowl or container, shift all dry ingredients until well combined. Cut in the butter into the dry ingredients by either using the tines of a fork or just by using your clean and dry hands. Once the butter is mixed, slowly pour the milk into the flour mixture to form a soft dough. On a floured surface, light roll out the dough to a rectangle about 1/4 thick Spread the remaining half of the filling to the dough and roll the dough again until it forms a log. You can now slice your cinnamon rolls by using a knife. If you want bigger portions, slice the rolled up dough into 12 slices and for smaller sizes, you can slice this into 18 slices instead. Bake the cinnamon rolls for around 20 to 25 minutes. While the rolls are baking, combine the ingredients for the glaze.

Some people would prefer a thicker glaze instead of a runny one, try to adjust the amount of powdered sugar in ratio to the milk. Once the rolls are baked, drizzle the glaze on top and serve these warm.

Making this homemade cinnamon rolls without yeast, you can also make some twists to these rolls. Instead of using a glaze on top, others would try other frostings such as cream cheese or even butter cream or use melted butter with sugar for a more rich and flavorful cinnamon roll. For a healthier spin to this recipe, substitute the flour with whole wheat flour and lessen the sugar used.


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