This is where broadcasting meets the wonders of the Internet. Without this strong programme concept and reality television, Susan Boyle would never have emerged into the public sphere. The drama building before her singing is something that TV professionals can do so superbly. That´s talent.
But without the Internet and YouTube, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore would never have become fans of this English lady or she wouldn´t have become a world-wide phenomenon. Currently at 12 million hits. I love TV, I love YouTube and there´s no contradiction there. I think writing of television as a medium is just bull crap.
Some people use Easter for quieting down - I did not. In the midst of Bree van de Kamp -like cooking and baking (muffins and what have you), I managed to accidentally bump into an episode of Skins on SubTV. I had forgotten how bloody brilliant this Channel4 teenage drama actually is. Thank you, Sub, for the reruns.
Skins is amazing and quite unique as its handles teenage angst and torment in full honesty and without irony. It reminds everyone what kind of an emotional rollercoaster it is being young and there is often very little the parents can do. It reminds one of the importance of handling the emotions of teenagers with care but also shows how smart they already are. Not a kid, not an adult - Skins captures well that tripping in and out of adulthood.
Here´s a clip (Channel4/YouTube apparently does not allow embedding)from this Friday´s episode where the class practices Osama - The Musical. It shows well how frank Skins is - maybe too frank for some. The writing of this programme is quite amazing. As it was pointed out to me while watching, could you think of a US series where teenagers sing:"Then came the day Osama blew us away and now I know how I feel."
Great ad by Demos Helsinki and advertising agency PHS as part of Ilmastotalkoot (Climate Action) on the impact of travelling. Apparently Finnish TV stations did not want to show the ad due to the risks it could cause for travel and airline ads. The advertisement won the Audience Prize in the Voitto competition for the Best Ad of the Year. (Source: Markkinointi ja Mainonta)
Last weeks have been quite exciting in terms of finding a new way of working. Going from an office job to freelancing has meant learning a new sense of pace. All the things I do currently are assignments where my work is measured on the originality of the ideas I produce, not based on the hours I spend at the office. It has also meant that I need to learn a new way of implementing reading and browsing as an essential part of my weekly routine. They count in the end much more than coordination meetings. It is fun - I give you that -, but it is also work.
I have developed a completely new way of using the Web. At the hectic office I used the Internet mostly like fast food, like media snacks (munched easily with increasing frequency and maximum speed – like chips – a description from Miller in Wired) between emails and phone calls. Now I take daily an hour or two to go through a dozen or so blogs, mark interesting stuff on Delicious and develop a more systematic way of finding content. Finding content that matters takes time and diligence.
The best thing I have discovered is Henry Jenkins´ blog. MIT´s Media Professor Jenkins focuses on what people are doing with media rather than on what the media is doing to people. His approach is critical but enthusiastic and he does not shy away from using very current examples for making his case.
His 8-part essay If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead is something I would recommend for everyone working with brands and media culture. Jenkins sees consumers as empowered and intelligent species using media for their own purposes and goes beyond the discussion on virals. He talks about the spreadability of media – that citizens spread and reform content rather than passively carry a virus. That spreading media is an essential part of reputation management online. Just think of your own Facebook usage – what you link and post tells your “friends” a lot about who you are.
A statement by Jenkins that is highly useful for instance for my work with StrangerFestival: loss of producers´ control over meaning is a precondition for circulation. Spreadable media memes have to available for remixing before transferring so that people can use them for their own purposes to recreate meaning. As John Fiske puts it: this is where mass culture turns into popular culture. From a producer´s point of view creating media content that “sticks” on people would be wonderful but today´s successful content is one that spreads, shapes and puzzles. Which is actually quite liberating and empowering if you really think about it.
"All men are created equal. No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words." That quote from gay activist Harvey Milk was one of the most moving scenes in Milk, the film on his life and death. Milk´s bold stand on equality led finally to his assassination. Some of his positions sound radical still in 2009 like the strategy that only by showing that we all have gay friends, teachers and family members, you truly pave the way for general support for equality.
Gus van Sant´s film is a great act in showing the struggle Milk and his peers went through, how far we as societies have come from those days (homosexuality is largely decriminalised) and, sadly, how far we still are from living up to those words (Proposition 8 passed in California just a few months back). And in the Obama era, it is good to remember that he was not the first one coining a phrase like:"You gotta give them hope."
The Academy Awards take place in a week or so and I have now seen three of the Best Picture nominees: Milk, Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire. Even before seeing Benjamin Button and The Reader, I dare to state the wish that these three films would win the main prizes. As much as The Reader looks into guilt and human responsibility, I feel the other three films are ones that need more the boost of the win: Milk is a powerful caption of the human sacrifices on the road towards true equality and one of the people who have paved way for all minorities. Slumdog Millionaire captures the aspiration, diversity, celebration and inequality called India and is also one of the rare films that do not need a white man telling a story of Asia or Africa (read: The Last King of Scotland etc.). And finally, Frost/Nixon shakes us awake of the corrupting influence of power and shows what is really the power of journalism.
I would dare to make the following wishes: Best Picture: Milk Best Actor in a Leading Role: Frank Langella or Sean Penn Best Director: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) Best Actress in a leading or supporting role are tricky as I have seen none of the films and actor in a supporting role is hard to judge before seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michael Shannon.
Today Frost/Nixon premieres in Finnish cinemas. Just yesterday the film was nominated for an Academy Award for best direction, best actor in a leading role and best picture. I have been waiting for this film with an eagerness I have seldom experienced. There are a number of reasons why.
Some years back I was visiting London for work and met up with a friend of mine, a British playwright of Indian descent. The British media had only one issue on that day and neither us or anyone else could avoid the topic: Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 4 showing how nonsense celebrity Jade Goody and a number of other contenders were bullying Indian actress Shilpa Shetty in a racist manner seldom seen on primetime television. The white English women were according to my interpretation intimidated by the successful and beautiful Indian superstar and decided to gang up on her revealing all their prejudices on the Indians.
A large portion of the British quality media took a unified stand: the fuss around the programme was exaggerated. However, during our drink on that London afternoon I got another look into the issue. I still remember her telling me:"I am born in this country and so are my children. My children have been glued to the television during Celebrity Big Brother as they see on screen remarks they hear daily in school. As Shetty, they are told to go back to their own country. What country is that for a 10-year-old child with both parents born in the UK and one of them having Indian parents?"
That personal take showed me a part of the media often forgotten in academic media analysis and journalistic critique. The way the media validates and presents everyday situations and in that way acknowledges that these things do happen. By the media covering them, they are also submitted to a list of subjects suitable for private discussions. This has been the power of telenovelas in South America covering HIV-AIDS or As The World Turns showing a gay kiss.
After our drink she rushed to the theatre to see the "IT" play of the moment: Frost/Nixon. I tried to get tickets to it without success on the last moment.
I ran into Frost again two years ago when visiting the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles and watching clips of his most famous interviews - including the Nixon one. Using the same strategy as he got Nixon to talk, his soft, direct but polite style brought into the surface some of the deepest thoughts of Muhammad Ali on black supremacy or Robert Kennedy opening up in his ideals. As one can see also in this clip from an interview with Thatcher, his background research forces people to answer directly without having to take refuge in hostility towards the guest.
I love television. I really do. In the work of David Frost as well as in the fuss around Big Brother, television has the power to reveal truths of ourselves and our societies - in more and less idealistic manners. It can facilitate people opening up sensitive discussions using commenting of a television programme as the cover up.
I never understood the people who take pride from not watching TV. How would it sound like if I would state at a fancy dinner party that I categorically don´t read printed material as I just don´t have the time?
There are some things that I absolutely love in the English. One of them is the existence of people like Stephen Fry. People who remain authentic, peculiar and unconventional and still loved by the nation. Fry is one of the leading forces in the British public eye when it comes to cherishing the English language. I highly recommend his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, which functions as a verbal aerobics class without falling into the common trap of trying to be pretentious. The book is an extraordinary caption of the peculiarities of English public schools.
My admiration for the gentle giant Fry re-emerged yesterday evening when watching Stephen Fry in America, a wonderful BBC series where the actor/writer/presenter travels through 50 American states with a black English taxi. The journey takes him from mansions of East Coast and hippy groups of the deserts to Thanksgiving celebrations in Deep South. The programme is entertaining while respecting the people who take time to show him their daily life.
His approach is something I truly love, not laughing at the common man but really making the effort to understand what drives people. So less Borat-meets-Michael-Moore and more Sir-David-Frost-meets-Oscar-Wilde. He makes fun of phenomena, not of the people and really lives up to his promise: understanding the American soul. He finds new stories of America and with his trip writes a new narrative of the great nation with a Can Do attitude.
My next Fry project will be the podcasts of him reading short stories of, indeed, Oscar Wilde.
Having spent a tremendous amount of time in discussions on diversity in the last few years, I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to hear at times also something different than the standard "let´s all just get along" rhetoric. Yesterday´s Diversity Show conference by the Dutch public broadcasters and the European Broadcasting Union was a fresh and bold attempt to get beyond the discussion about problems and cultures. Diversity Show looked at multiculturalism in a way that inspires people and offers us in culture and media fields much more solutions: how diversity on screen and in the workforce allows us to do our work better, find new subjects and make more interesting content.
I was most impressed by the approach, which the presenter Saira Khan and many others had chosen. They defined themselves on stage before the audience had a chance to make their assumptions. They made the statement I would love to hear more often: this is who I am, I am not asking for any special treatment and I have no problem talking about my background - but allow me to do it on my terms. Saira Khan coined the issue well referring to her experience in The Apprentice TV show:"When the rules are the same, you get surprising results."
Personally and professionally the conference was a great inspiration for me. It gave me more confidence that we are doing things right in StrangerFestival: we allow the young video makers to choose what they talk about and what matters to them. We are all experts in our own lives and equality allows us to co-exist and share and feel part of something bigger. This does not mean shying away from differences, it means recognition of everyone´s right to define themselves. Diversity for us in StrangerFestival means that we strive for getting as different voices as possible from a diverse youth population, i.e. giving opportunities for more people and getting better content. In this manner we take a deliberate stand away from projects where minorities are invited to explain how different they are.
Way too often diversity is tackled on the level of an individual and not on the level of the system. Diversity needs to come in to the game in the recruitment phase and when negotiating the shared rules, not only in individual job interviews. As the speaker from IBM said in the Diversity Show:"If I would ever feel that I am promoted because of my cultural background and not my performance, I would leave. But the fact that I know the number of women and minorities in executive positions at IBM, means that someone is keeping score."
And as the last praise for yesterday, the great thing the Dutch public broadcasters had done was making a conference on diversity fun, visually incredible and good entertainment. I have often wondered why people who are able to do great programmes, are not able to translate their skills into making great events. Diversity Show built on competences from television in terms of length and formats of speeches, use of visuals and interaction amongst people. As EBU´s Head of Television Björn Erichsen put it yesterday: Diversity Show has set a new standard for European media conferences.
Last Thursday I flew to Helsinki for a reception of the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, one of the funders of the StrangerFestival. The event started with a seminar on the role of public service in public broadcasting. The discussion on a role of a public service goes to the heart of the Nordic model so it was not a surprise that a) the seminar gathered all the Finnish big shots in Finnish media b) the discussion turned very heated when some commercial actors threw punches on YLE, the national public broadcaster
Helsingin Sanomat Foundation picked the subject at a convenient time (and the newspaper continued stirring things in today's paper). YLE has gone threw some rocky waters over the last year with license fee income dropping dramatically, YLE signing an exclusive deal with the American HBO channel and the energetic CEO changing people, reducing staff and increasing subcontracting. But at the same time YLE has grown its market share and is still by far the most trusted news broadcaster. YLE’s turmoil has not been helped by the gossip journalism around the CEO’s private life.
The discussion was bizarre and then again not. When anyone raises discussion around public services, the social democratic jargon kicks in and people start referring to democracy and minorities in a conveniently blurry manner that makes it difficult for the opposite side to continue. Personally I found it a shame – as a supporter of quality public broadcasting - that the argument by many of the defenders of YLE was more or less the following: we need YLE because YLE is needed because YLE provides crucial services and because YLE plays a key role in building a democratic welfare state and because politicians want support the system. This circle argument avoids all specification and making choices.
Even if it would save you in a panel, this argumentation is bad for YLE in the long run. It disregards the problems YLE has in reaching out to younger audiences but also the quality work that is done at YLE in the fields of Finnish drama, culture and current affairs. But I feel the problems go even deeper.
The roles of public broadcasters are currently outlined as educating, informing and entertaining. All these tasks allow the audience to do is the take the message in, enjoy and learn. They exclude all interactive tasks and are by and large the reason why young audiences are zapping to other channels. With the technology and resources public broadcasters have, they could do much better. One could try and let some air into the tasks and think for instance of words like empower, represent, mobilize, voice out, help and encourage. But this would mean radical changes such as opening the conglomerates called YLE, listening to the audiences more, doing programmes in collaboration with stakeholders and acting as a guide through user-generated content.
All and all, I remain a firm supporter of public service media. But I am not sure about the broadcasting.
One of my regular joys is the New York Times series of podcasts based on their TimesTalks events. As the advertising for the podcast says, it is a series of "compelling conversations" between New York Times editors and their guests. I think the best one I have heard by now was the one with Madeleine Albright on power but they never manage to disappoint me.
The latest podcast was with Lauren Zalaznick, the Director of the Bravo TV channel, and Tim Gunn and Gail Simmons from their programmes. Tim Gunn is the coach in Project Runway, I believe the biggest hit of the channel. Simmons is a judge from Top Chef.
I highly recommend listening to the podcast. Zalaznick sheds light to the way their programmes differ from normal "intervention" reality television and how the changes in television threaten the dominance of the big networks. Zalaznick talks about how Bravo bases its programming on excellence, professionals and people driven by a desire - whether fashion or comedy. Gunn and Simmons talk about how their programmes helps people to understand professionalism and talk in a new way about food and fashion.
I like Bravo, I really do. I watched quite a lot of it while on holiday in the US. The channel is genuinely feel good and free from cynicism. It is about fascinating people doing the only thing they can see themselves doing - great example being Kathy Griffin and her show My Life on the D-List.
Bravo is a good example of clever programming and profiling. It caters for a diverse audience but still manages to put a Bravo label on the programmes. It is not trying to be the most intellectual channel but manages to bring very different people together.
The interview is also a clever example of dedication to understand television. It is a rare example of printed journalism where the journalist actually want to understand television and dares to say she loves television. Highly recommended (easily subscribed through iTunes).
This was not how it was supposed to work. On Thursday I left the office energetic to prepare for the next day's evening with my team members. I had invited them over for casual dinner and drinks. My idea was also to use some of the evening for preparing for my lecture next Saturday in Geneva. After Friday I had planned an active Saturday of studying, shopping and so forth.
Well, as I got back from work on Thursday it was clear that the flu had caught me. And it came over like a flood. By the hour it only got worse and by the evening it was evident that the next day would be ruined. Before two I could not get up from bed as my head was pounding. I had to cancel the party planned a month back which sucked big time. In the end I ended up staying home also most of Saturday as I still felt relatively weak.
My weekend was however saved by two things: Professor Henry Jenkins and a sunny Sunday. Jenkins is MIT's Professor of Comparative Media Studies and writes phenomenally and in an entertaining manner on popular culture, fans, convergence of old and new media as well as media education. He has a critical but not cynical take on media, he admits being a fan of popular culture and he provides suggestions for improvements. I also like the fact that he often consciously looks at phenomena from the point of view of the viewer. His research on how Americans watch American Idol socially is awesome. Highly recommend his book Convergence Culture. Here I also need to thank Daniel and Celia for leading me to his literature.
The weather does not need explanation apart from pointing out that I am sure everyone knows how it feels when you get outside after being ill. Superman is back! Seriously, you feel reborn. I felt so energetic that we ended up discussing the European Dream for five hours on a terrace. It functioned as a good training camp for a debate in Stockholm on Thursday on the very existence of European culture.
There have been very few TV programmes that I remember capturing me in the same manner as BBC Two's Choir: Boys Don't Sing. The programme is a typical public broadcasting take on reality television: youth meets empowerment. The programme idea is fairly simple: Choirmaster Gareth Malone goes to an all boys' school with the goal of making sports boys love singing.
I work with young people and we often struggle with the issue of sustainability. Malone's dedication is something I see also in my work: people working on a local scale on a long-term basis making change happen. Due to its superlocal take, Malone's experiment can be duplicated: he shows how change in young people starts from believing in them, taking them seriously and getting personally and emotionally involved.
Every time I have seen the show it has made me cry. The way singing helps these boys in believing in themselves is what culture really is about. It gives recognition and blows your mind. And most importantly, Malone guaranteed that once he left the school with the camera crew, the school board had guaranteed a choirmaster for the future as well.
I have had a day of YouTube. I remembered that a while ago I heard in a podcast Robert Redford describing taking part in the Kennedy Center Honor Ceremonies so I decided to check what we are talking about. I was hooked. It is a series of events celebrating great entertainers and sources of inspiration by other world-class starts performing their material. This is one of my favourites, honouring Beach Boys' Brian Wilson by a British boy choir Libera. I also highly recommend the parts like Oprah and Beyonce celebrating about Tina Turner or a parade of performances celebrating Diana Ross and Dolly Parton. Only Americans know how to do this right.
Today I started my day with a meeting at the headquarters of MTV Networks here in the Netherlands.
MTV for me means Ray Cokes and Maria G, it means the thing from London that I and my friends all used to watch after school. The thing that somehow made you feel that even if you live in a small town in Finland, you are part of it. Somehow the localisation has been painful but I am adjusting.
Currently I am totally hooked on MTV's programme called Made where young people are helped by a coach to achieve their goals. Maybe I am getting old or I am still having goals to achieve, you tell me.
But MTV stands for MUSIC television. Watching it today at the gym and seeing this video made me remember once again how much I love music videos.
It’s around eight on Friday evening. I can feel the sun of Lisbon on my face. I feel a bit like a Finnish friend of mine once described Finns travelling South: due to the lack of light we spend the first day lurking and squinting like prairie dogs.
Lisbon is amazing. We spent five hours walking up and down the hills, photographing the bright houses and the street art and stopping for an espresso (0,60 euros) and cake (0,80 euros) in small cafes. Now it is time for some rest before heading out for dinner.
For yesterday’s flight I bought the Guardian which is always a highly pleasurable experience. One thing that I truly miss in the Netherlands is the routine of reading daily the paper. The best quote in yesterday’s edition was in an interview with Deborah Meaden, an investor taking part in BBC’s entrepeneurship programme Dragon’s Den. The idea of the programme is a simple one: 5 investors listen to pitches of starting entrepeneurs and then decide whether they will invest their own time and money into the proposal. The dragons (the investors) are harsh, smart to a scary extent and extremely success-driven multimillionaires. Meaden is the only woman amongst them. Meaden rocks:
Hannah Pool: Are you as mean in real life as you are on Dragon’s Den?
Deborah Meaden: Stand in front of me and ask me for a quarter of a million pounds when you can’t be bothered to tell me what your turnover numbers are and I am that person. People try to let me off the hook and say I’m much nicer in real life – but if somebody is asking me for my money, my job at that moment is to establish whether or not this is a good investment, not to win friends and influence people.
H.P.: It mush bother you when the reviewers describe you as charmless.
D.M.: (Laughs) Well, I hope I’m not. My friends don’t call me charmless, people who meet me don’t say I’m humourless. People can call me what they like – fat, ugly, sour – but tell me I’m not fair, tell me I’m not ethical, those are the things that bother me.
H.P.: You are much softer in real life.
D.M.: It’s a different environment. Nobody is like the person I am on TV, surely, only Cruella de Vil, or the wicked witch from Snow White. It’s me, but it’s me in that environment. I’ve got that job to do. It would be worse if I tried to be different, if I tried to be soft. I’m a business person first and I happen to be doing television.
I really admire her. This is true equality. Her attitude reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s comment after last week’s attacks towards her by all the other candidates. She said that people are not attacking her because she is a woman, they are attacking her because she is winning.
Two weeks back I spent a week in Berlin seeing and judging the best of the best when it comes to European television. I wrote a piece for the website of the European Cultural Foundation on the subject.
Last Sunday I got back from a working trip - having spent nearly a week watching the best of European television. I still need to watch the winning documentary of Prix Europa, a BBC documentary on alcoholism from Paul Watson. I saw people - top professionals in the TV field - coming out of the screenings with watered eyes. But even without it, I was inspired, shocked and moved.
The best thing I saw at the festival from David Okuefuna's documentary called Racism: A History. Without the need to create a happy ending, Okuefuna showed how brutal and cruel we the whites have been towards blacks in places like Congo, South Africa and the United States. The pictures of lynchings of blacks or of a young black man beaten to death with his face bloated after having spent weeks after his death in the bottom of the river do not leave my mind. I felt guilty for being white and rightly so.
So on Sunday I crashed on my sofa with a pizza delivered to my door and instead of watching the Dutch talent competition for the main role in Evita, I ended up spending two hours watching the CNN documentary God's Warriors on Christian Fundamentalism in the US. Even if in the beginning the subject sounded slightly too heavy, I was glad that I pushed myself through it. Christiane Amanpour's incredibly powerful take on the misuse of religion is part of a three-hour series and a year of work covering fundamentalist Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Best of all, Amanpour's dedicated investigation - as well as Okuefuna's documentary - remind me how there still is a great need for journalism which is not only about speed but also about depth. All these makers were able to show something to me that I did not know. They had spent a year doing these programmes and it shows. They were able to move me and they made me talk about the issues they covered. This is something that a news bulletin or an SMS is never able to do.
I have been in the US now for more than a week and haven't posted a single thing linked to television. American television would turn me into a couch potato in a few days. Just the fact that in the house I am staying at they have something like 300 channels. I find it difficult to understand that someone can even concentrate on a programme without flicking through the others for something better.
By watching the current affairs TV programmes, one could easily think that the presidential elections are next week. From Meet the Press to Face The Nation they all concentrate on Hillary or not Hillary at the moment. Yesterday's Meet The Press (political journalists commenting on current affairs) one of the biggest topics was the decline in Barack Obama's popularity. The question these professionals were pondering was whether Hillary is starting to be unbeatable.
Ah yes, professionals. Yesterday's LA Times had one of those articles about professional commentators which I thought were already past times. Professor of Journalism Michael Skube from Elon University of North Carolina (Pulitzer winner) shared with us his concern for the way political discussion especially around the presidential elections is losing its quality. And his blaming finger - as a professional journalist - was pointing of course to blogs.
Some quotes from Mr Skube: "One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt." Skube also refers to blogging as "armchair commentary". He refers to a famous piece in a Washington Post in the following manner:"Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, preseverance. It's not something one does as a hobby."
Just the obvious remarks to Mr Skube:
1. Have you checked what kind of scum and propaganda is on newsstands under the name of journalism?
2. Seeing the blogosphere as a unity is more than one would expect from a professor of journalism at a time when Senators, Editors-in-Chief and other professional journalists, Chairs of NGOs and researchers among many are blogging.
3. The whole blogging has to some extent challenged the idea of journalism as objective practice. I do agree with Mr Skube that our society needs more in-depth analytical discussion but to claim that can only be done by professional journalists is just silly. Many print journalists tend to think that print is superior to other media but just yesterday we saw at the Paley Center for Media (Museum of Television and Radio) how Sir David Frost mastered in interviews with Robert Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Richard Nixon.
4. What would you suggest, Professor Skube? That bloggers would shut up? That politicians should stop listening to them? That we should all start writing for print journals? Where does your argument take us?
Things and ideas worth sharing from videos to news, from Finland and abroad, out of private and public self with a bigger emphasis on enthusiasm than irritation.
kiplekker (Dutch): fit as a fiddle, chicken lickin´ good
Owner of Argumentti Com, a consultancy on corporate social responsibility, civil society, culture and media.
Location: Helsinki
Interest: Democracy, Idealism, Pop Culture, Sustainability, Cool T-shirts, TV, Generations
Action: Writing, Speaking, Hosting, Moderating, Thinking, Sharing
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