World Press
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. Bob Garfield is away. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Often on this program we check in with experts to see how Bush administration policies are playing in the overseas press. On the move toward war in Iraq there seemed to be little but skepticism around the world, but then on September 12th President Bush went to the United Nations and on the 16th, Saddam Hussein relented on weapons inspections. And then this week British Prime Minister Tony Blair released a hefty report intended to show the threat the Iraqi leader posed to the world. Joining us now is Bill Falk, editor in chief of The Week Magazine. His staff spends their week watching the international press, and he's here to tell us if the world's press is warming up to the idea of war. Bill, welcome to the show.
BILL FALK: Thank you, Brooke. I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In general, before we get to the specific countries, any common threads? Do you think that the appearance by Bush at the UN did create a kind of unifying effect?
BILL FALK:It's been a partial success. Bush disarmed some of the critics who were in high dudgeon about his unilateralism by just going to the UN -- just walking in the doors -- and there were some I think palpable relief in the UN that the U.S. was not just going to careen off into this war without listening to any of our traditional allies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:England's Prime Minister Tony Blair released a 50 page anti-Saddam dossier this week. How did his local press react to that and then how did the rest of Europe?
BILL FALK:There was a lot of skepticism and even some horse laughs. I mean he was compared quite unfavorably to Churchill and-- one commentator noted that he needed to practice his deep bulldog growl; that next time he should show up with a Homburg and a watch chain. And Boris Johnson [sp?] in the Daily Telegraph which is actually a more conservative, often pro-American newspaper, laughed at the whole argument about Saddam wanting to procure plutonium or uranium, and he said, you know, if Saddam had some plutonium he could blow up British bases in Cypress in 45 minutes - is what Blair argued. Well if we has some ham, we could have ham and eggs. If we had any eggs. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about the papers in Germany? I mean Gerhard Schroder seems to have won his election at least in part by opposing what appeared to be the Bush administration's rush to war.
BILL FALK:I think now that he's won there's a little bit of trepidation that we saw in the German press this week about what it will mean for U.S.-German relations, and the Bush administration very quickly said that it would mean a lot --that they were very angered-- and that the relationship had been quote/unquote "poisoned."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well how about Russia? I mean how is the Russian press covering Putin's relationship with Bush and the war on terror?
BILL FALK:Well the, the Russian press is actually somewhat bemused by the chess game that's going on. We, we saw some speculation last week that basically Putin is going to demand for his vote on the Security Council -- that he's going to ask Bush to stand by and say nothing while he pursues Chechan rebels into Georgia -- across the border, and that he will essentially use the same rubric of pre-emption -- that he feels that these Chechan rebels who are now hiding out of the reach of his military in a, in what is now another nation -- that he, he wants the right to go get them, and that he wants America to stand by and say nothing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Russian press is still seeing this as a political-- shell game in the, in the true Kremlinological tradition.
BILL FALK: Yes. Yes. The Russians tend to be fairly cynical about politics.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now from Kuwait we've seen a softening, it seems at least very recently about the possibility if the UN provides its endorsement of giving the United States a, a place to launch the war from-- but in general has the Middle East been moved by any of the goings-on in New York?
BILL FALK:No, not really. I mean most of the Arab nations are very threatened by the very notion of pre-emption. I mean we saw a piece in a Pakistani newspaper where they basically said this could be open war on Muslims throughout the world. The writer was basically saying we in Pakistan really need to keep our fundamentalists in check, because if there's a lot of demonstration of anti-American sentiment, god knows what could happen to us or perhaps if India could seize on the doctrine of pre-emption to go after our fundamentalists and start a war.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So aside from-- nervousness, fear and skepticism, were there any unusual or original takes from the European press this week regarding the war in Iraq?
BILL FALK:In the London Guardian which is their most left-leaning newspaper there was a lengthy article comparing the United States in great detail to Imperial Rome whereas the Romans provided their colonies with roads and aqueducts-- and-- bread and circuses, that America provides television, movies-- and Disney World. That we have the internet uniting the world just the way the Roman road system did. And that we are now-- have armies in 40 nations and that-- essentially the whole point of invading Iraq is simply to expand upon our empire. And of course the recurring them there and in, in the French press is that this is really all about oil -- that America just wants to get its hands on Saddam's oil.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week. Bill, thanks for the update.
BILL FALK: Thank you, Brooke. [MUSIC] Homeland
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Late last week in the Capitol Hill publication called Roll Call the headline read: War of Words Snarls Senate. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security has been bogged down in a labor dispute, so the president charged the Democrat-controlled Senate with paying more attention to special interests than to protecting the nation. Senate Democrats then counter-charged that the Republicans were stalling Homeland Security legislation to keep it front and center until the November elections. Homeland, homeland, homeland -- it's invoked a hundred times a day inside the beltway, and yet despite very real fears of external and internal terrorist attack, it still has no currency on the American street. Security we get, but Homeland still won't catch on. So as part of our occasional Word Watch series we asked OTM's Leon Wynter to look into it.
LEON WYNTER: For a department that hasn't cleared the Senate yet, Homeland Security has been everywhere in Washington. On a single day this month, no less than four different seminars and conferences around town addressed the subject by name, including the Homeland Security Technology Expo and Conference where over 200 companies displayed their homeland security wares. Its high point -- an address by designated Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge. He's heard the negative buzz about the Homeland part of his proposed fiefdom, but he still likes the word -- a lot. Here's Ridge in a July NPR interview explaining what his new department will do for homeland security technology.
TOM RIDGE: Giving strategic focus to the science and the technology and the public dollars that are directed in that direction through this agency as it relates to Homeland Security. Right now dollars are expended in a, in an ad hoc fashion. There's no real strategic focus as it relates to Homeland Security -- again a very specific mission.
ELIZABETH BECKER: He's a very seasoned politician.
LEON WYNTER: The New York Times' Elizabeth Becker brought the word "homeland" up with Ridge in a recent interview.
ELIZABETH BECKER: He recognizes that homeland security is not an automatic concept - that Americans have not had to worry about whether their homeland is secured. So he has a number of these catchy phrases that he uses such as: "When the hometown is secure, the homeland is secure" to start educating people that listen, unfortunately we're going to be like all those other countries in the world who've been invaded and had wars fought on their soil.
LEON WYNTER: Becker says linguists confirm her gut feeling that after nearly a year "homeland" isn't tripping off the average American tongue. She traced the problem with American acceptance to "homeland's" better-known application in Germany -- specifically the Nazis' usage of the words "heimat" and "heimwher" for "homeland" and "homeland defense" respectively. Becker asked officials at the German embassy about it.
ELIZABETH BECKER: They said the Nazis totally misused it. It had more to do with the romantic ideas of the 19th Century, and it has more to do with what we would call our roots, our origins. To Americans, homeland just sounds like a foreign concept; not our own concept.
LEON WYNTER: The Bush administration didn't invent the new usage of homeland; the inherited it from a fairly obscure 1997 Pentagon review of defense readiness. Had they looked it up in the dictionary, they would have found two short, simple meanings. 1. The land of one's allegiance. 2. The place of origin of a people.
MICKEY KAUS: But I'm bothered by that second meaning. It implies a sort of ethnic homogeneity. The Armenians have a homeland; you know, the, the Turks have a homeland. Everybody has a homeland, and they are sort of ethnically or racially homogeneous, and that's not the idea of America.
LEON WYNTER: Writer Mickey Kaus has blasted "Homeland" in his Slate.com column. For Kaus, embracing homeland's Germanic land-and-blood definition feels unnaturally tribal.
MICKEY KAUS: We have to convince the world that we are not just another tribal imperial power. It sort of puts us in the wrong mindset right from the start of the war on terrorism to think all we're doing is we're just another tribe and we're mighty mad and we're going to drop a bomb on your tribe.
LEON WYNTER: It's not that Kaus is unmoved by all the American flagging and pledging etc, since September 11th, 2001. They're all good, provided they point to a higher expression of American ideals.
MICKEY KAUS: We're not just protecting our homeland; we're protecting the idea of freedom, and we're n--in a, in a worldwide war to promote this idea abroad against other ideas such as-- Osama bin Laden's ideas.
LEON WYNTER: Ken Bacon was a spokesman for the Clinton Pentagon that gave the phrase "homeland security" birth.
KEN BACON: It has sort of a, a gray bureaucratic tinge to it, I suppose. It's maybe not a term one can rally around with a great deal of passion. But it's descriptive.
LEON WYNTER: Yet, Bacon, too finds fault with the term. He now heads Refugees International which works on behalf of people displaced by conflicts worldwide. From this vantage, Bacon's problem isn't the sense of homeland security as a bright line around the interests of hearth and home; his problem is where that line is drawn.
KEN BACON: Homeland security begins abroad. That's the lesson from September 11th. And we have to think of security as, as seamless. It has to begin in distant lands and end in the United States.
LEON WYNTER: Critics from across the political spectrum are uncomfortable with the adoption of the term "homeland." Even loyal Republican Peggy Noonan has written that "homeland" isn't really an American word and gives people the creeps. It shouldn't be that serious.
MICKEY KAUS: It's just a word.
LEON WYNTER: On line columnist Mickey Kaus.
MICKEY KAUS: If the homeland security is very efficient and, and respects civil liberties yet stops terrorism, it will be a good word. But it just starts off as asking people to swallow something they don't have to swallow in order to come together across races and to love New York. Why ask people to go that extra step?
LEON WYNTER: It is, after all, just a word. Maybe we haven't decided to see ourselves as a land-and-blood tribe yet. Still, with the choice of "homeland," the name-givers in Washington seem to have made the decision for us to look inward rather than outside ourselves to find a safe place in the world. For On the Media, I'm Leon Wynter. [MUSIC]
Google News
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And now yet another breakthrough for news on line -- the world's leading search engine, Google, has taken on the task of providing up-to-the-minute news -- with no editors and no reporters -- for the most part, with no people -- and yet in short order Google is likely to become the news junkies' web site of choice. Jack Shafer is editor at large for Slate.com where he wrote about what's been called the internet's first artificial newscast. Thanks for coming on the show, Jack.
JACK SHAFER: Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you wrote: The Google news page exceeds every editor's dream to produce a first-rate publication without the meddling interference of reporters by making the editors themselves extraneous as well. So this is a good thing.
JACK SHAFER: Well there are people behind the news that Google is serving. The advantage of the Google news robot editor is that it's there plucking news for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, giving you the most timely news from 4,000 sources. I think that's a - a huge improvement over some of the human intelligence that you see behind the news choices in a lot of newspapers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How does it technically pick its stories? I've heard references to crawlers and spiders, but I'm not altogether clear on what all that is.
JACK SHAFER: There are two ways that Google News provides the news that it does. First it's web crawlers - its spiders - go out on the web and surf the web much as you do with your mouse and your pointer, clicking to sites that you're interested in. But their spiders are very automated, like a search engine's spiders, and they go out and collect thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of links -- and then another piece of software that Google News has written examines those links, grades the information for timeliness, credibility and newsworthiness and then re-purposes the headline, the first sentence, maybe a photograph and a link back to the original site.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can't program a computer with news judgment can you? Yet?
JACK SHAFER:I think you can program it with some sense of news judgment. The question is, is the news judgment any good? You could look at a lot of second tier American daily newspapers that pull a lot of their national and international news straight off the wires. Any intelligent person offered Google News to search for relevant national, international sports and entertainment news or the Cleveland Plain Dealer would pick Google News automatically.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But the fact is, is that Google is relying on the news judgment of any of the 4,000 web sites that it draws its news from. There are people all over this process!
JACK SHAFER: I'm not saying that you can factor human beings out of the news equation. I'm just saying that the Google News robots do some things that human beings can't do, and they do some of the things that human beings can do better than human beings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They can design it better? They can make it more thorough? They can update it more frequently? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JACK SHAFER: Sure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They can offer a wider range of views.
JACK SHAFER:Exactly. I think it's the web equivalent to the 24 hour AM news station. Does it replace the New York Times and the Washington Post? No. It supplements them, and I think that's what Google does too. It also reaches out and taps a lot of regional newspapers, international newspapers providing lots of views that you wouldn't ordinarily read in the top three or four or five U.S. dailies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Still, it doesn't seem as if Google distinguishes much between sites that are credible and those that aren't! The Washington Post noted that the lead story for 15 minutes on Tuesday was basically propaganda from the official Iranian News Service complete with the negative spin on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech about Iraq!
JACK SHAFER: And I would say Google news is guilty as charged there. You have to remember it's their debut week; they're going to learn from their mistakes like lots of editors. And I think that they'll recognize the Iranian news source that they used this week as not exactly credible next week. And you have to remember that readers are very discerning. There's a recent Pew study that rated a whole variety of news sources as to the credibility and the National Enquirer had something like a 4 percent credibility rating. People know that it's not a credible news source, yet they go to it for a different reason other than to gather credible news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And were you being deliberately outrageous when you said, you know: "Whoa, happy day" at the beginning of your column - "The dream is realized. No more editors, no more reporters"?
JACK SHAFER: Well I think that there are a lot of news functions that are better served by machines. What Google is doing is they've found a new way to bake the cake. If you want to gather and experience news from a multiplicity of sources -- from 4,000 sources -- and have it constantly updated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- Google News is your baby.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer, thank you very much.
JACK SHAFER: Any time, baby. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer is editor at large of Slate.com. Media Matrix
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The convergence of TV and the internet has been forecast almost from the moment the net was born. Any day now, we were told, there would be one set-top box through which we could access both technologies at the same time. Well the fact is even though we still have two boxes, if they're in the same room, many of us do use them at the same time, but we don't use them the way the forecasters planned --comScore Media Metrix - a company that tallies web usage - found that three quarters of people who are on the computer while they're watching TV are doing things unrelated to the show they're watching. They are chatting with friends, shopping or using the computer for off-line activities. Two boxes in the same room -- very little convergence. Stephen Kim is vice president of comScore Media Metrix, and we wondered what he thought of the findings.
STEPHEN KIM: Yeah, I was surprised that the number was this high.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So getting people to go on line to look up something related to the television program is that sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What are some of the attempts to reach that pot of gold?
STEPHEN KIM:Well right now I think the success stories in this arena have been fairly easy to identify. So you've got big events like the Super Bowl, or even big cultural events like Survivor or Big Brother where we have seen people are both looking at the TV show and then going on line to find out more information. We've got some examples of things like Push, Nevada - the new ABC series that's trying to drive people to the on line site related to the TV program. And they're doing it through what has historically been the easiest way to drive traffic on line which is to give away money. There's a contest involved. So, you know, if you have an audience that's really focused on a particular show, that's where we've seen success to date. Where we haven't seen a whole lot of success to date are the examples of people trying to draw internet audiences into longstanding series -comedy series or drama series. That is a tall order.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You haven't mentioned news. You know the CNN site - the MSNBC site - are they in a different category?
STEPHEN KIM:I do put them in a different category, and I think a lot of new out-- news outlets are just confined by the format they're in. You only have a 45 second story or 2 minutes to get a story across. But if you can put a crawl across the screen, or you can make an announcement at the end of the story that says: If you want to hear more about - from this interview - click on KQED.org and you can get the full interview there. In the early days, people were worried: will the internet steal people away from TV and radio news? The opposite is sort of emerging in terms of actually we're learning how to use the two in a complementary way which is just to get more information out to, to consumers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But for entertainment programming your data are pretty depressing for television programmers.
STEPHEN KIM:You know I, I don't know if it's depressing for programmers. I think it's just -- people need to shift gears a little bit, because the good news here is that there are a lot of people who have the capability of getting on line and watching TV at the same time. So it's really at this point a conversion problem which is a lot less difficult than getting people to move their PC into the same room as the TV.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay. I said your data are depressing, but your attitude is very optimistic. But frankly, I'm not buying it. I mean as long as the computer is in the same room as the TV and you can do two things at the same time, and the show that you're watching isn't that compelling -- and that's a decades-long problem -- how are TV programmers suddenly going to come up with a way to drive people where they want them to be on the web?
STEPHEN KIM:I think what these data are saying that's interesting is that maybe the goal needs to shift. Right? Because in a sense that I don't expect and none of us expect people to stop multi-tasking at work, maybe we should expect that people are actually multi-tasking at home and that maybe this is a signal for folks in the programming industry to say rather than try to drive people always to the same content, maybe I should be looking in this as another competitive avenue which is -you know - I know if I am a network that's competing with Friends -- that's a tough audience for me to get them to switch a channel. But during the hours when Friends is broadcast, maybe I should provide compelling internet content that will steal away some of the attention -- knowing that people are inclined to do something unrelated on their PC, this competitive angle may be one that develops alongside people trying to develop convergent use.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Stephen Kim, thank you very much.
STEPHEN KIM: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Stephen Kim is senior vice president of comScore Media Metrix. [MUSIC] Black Press
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As new media change our habits, some grand old traditions are just hanging on. Among them, the nation's 200-plus black newspapers. Once regarded as the voice of a stifled people, the black press suffers from steadily declining readership and advertising dollars, stiff competition and even a generational divide, as OTM's Phillip Martin reports.
PHILLIP MARTIN:If the free press to Walter Lippman was like the beam of a searchlight, then the black press for W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders directed that light for the first time on their lives and their cause, says scholar Hayward Farrar.
HAYWARD FARRAR: Well the black press for all of these people were the best and in some instances the only outlet for their writings, for their thoughts, for what they stood for. Basically at least up until the '60s, '70s and '80s the black press was an integral part of the black community.
PHILLIP MARTIN:As an example, says Farrar, the Baltimore Afro-American -- the subject of his 1998 book -- regularly published stories detailing racial discrimination and lynchings as well as listings of black weddings and black culture that were usually ignored by white newspapers. Other black papers like the award-winning Michigan Chronicle also carried the banner for civil rights. During the riots of 1967 which many African-Americans described as "uprisings," the Chronicle ventured into burning neighborhoods where many white reporters dared not go physically, and it covered allegations of police violence which many mainstream papers were reluctant to explore.
MICHAEL GOODIN: When the riots broke out in Detroit, our headline was: It Didn't Have to Happen.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Michael Goodin is the editor of the Michigan Chronicle. He says among the other top stories covered by his paper during that period was on-the-scene accounts of the Attica Prison rebellion by black and Hispanic inmates in 1971.
ATTICA INMATE: We're tired of being beaten. We're tired of being oppressed. We're going to get this if we all have to die. All of us.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Among those whom inmates asked to mediate was Michigan Chronicle columnist Jim Ingram. At that time the Chronicle had 120,000 readers. Today its circulation is 47,000. Michael Goodin.
MICHAEL GOODIN: One of the reasons that we could count the circulation so high in the late '60s and early '70s was that there was much more of a consciousness about being supportive of black institutions. Since then the commitment to a struggle has diminished in some sense. The current generation feels that African-Americans have made it, and of course supporting the black press is not seen as a method of contributing to the cause.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Hayward Farrar who teaches history at Virginia Tech says those generational changes have contributed greatly to the decline of black newspapers.
HAYWARD FARRAR: Most of the readership of black newspapers now happen to be Blacks in their 50s or over; large numbers of young black folk -- they're more inclined, again, to patronize BET or the Tom Joyner Show or the electronic media than they would the print one.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Rick Wright, a professor of communications at Syracuse University, says that the reach of Tom Joyner's syndicated radio program of news and entertainment has made even the granddaddy of all black publications seem less relevant these days.
TOM JOYNER: In the African-American community, many of us used to call JET Magazine, you know, the "Black Dispatch," meaning it's the -- if you really want to communicate with the African-American community in a print format, JET Magazine was the way to go. But the plain buzz on the street -- if you want to reach the African-American community in America, the Tom Joyner Show should be number one on your list. [TOM JOYNER SHOW JINGLE PLAYS]
GROUP: [SINGING] Ho, ho, ho and a ho, ho, ho-- it's the Tom Joyner Morning Show...
PHILLIP MARTIN: And while companies are lining up to advertise on the Tom Joyner Show which reportedly reaches nearly 10 percent of African-Americans, they're abandoning black newspapers. Newspapers also are competing with web-based popular news sites like Africana.com. Black newspapers in the aggregate are attracting only around 80 million dollars or about 5 percent of the 1.6 billion dollars spent on ads targeting African-Americans each year, according to E. Morris Communications. But lost advertising dollars and dwindling circulation aren't the only problems. Hayward Farrar says there's also resistance to change due to the fact that many of the newspapers are family-owned.
HAYWARD FARRAR: The problem with a lot of these family-owned newspapers is that dynasties tend to deteriorate over time, and so-- the descendants of the original founders and the owners tended not to be as strong as the original ones because they didn't have to fight to create the newspaper or keep the newspaper open.
PHILLIP MARTIN: But there are exceptions.
ALEXIS SCOTT:I had spent 18 years as a reporter, editor and executive at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, so in my family I was uniquely trained, if you will, to bring the skills and the experience to bear on seeing if we could in fact save the paper.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Alexis Scott is a third generation journalist. She quit her job five years ago as the head of diversity for Cox Communications and went about the task of trying to turn around the fortunes of the newspaper founded by her grandfather in 1928 -- the Atlanta Daily World -- the first black-owned daily in the United States. By 1997, the Daily had become a weekly in order to save on printing costs, and in the words of one observer was "sputtering toward extinction." One of Scott's first changes was to update the technology.
ALEXIS SCOTT: When I got here we didn't have voice mail. We didn't have but one computer and we were still using typesetting machines and doing hard copy pasteup on pasteup boards and taking the boards to the printer.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Then she moved to update the content, applying the standards she learned at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution; and in an area where Blacks vote 90 percent Democratic, she also shed the paper's Republican editorial page stance that was long favored by her uncle.
ALEXIS SCOTT: And I also think that we can have a black perspective that speaks to our readers and still is professional journalism -- we don't write editorials and call them news stories.
PHILLIP MARTIN:In five years the Daily World has increased its circulation 30 percent to about 10,000 readers. Scott's top priority now is to draw a new generation of African-American readers. But to do that she'll have to draw a new generation of African-American journalists, and that's not easy. [PARTY AMBIANCE]
PHILLIP MARTIN:Greg Moore is hosting his own goodbye party at his home in this upper middle class suburb of Boston. Moore, the former managing editor of the Boston Globe, was on his way to Colorado to take over the helm of the Denver Post, making him one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in mainstream journalism. Moore, who grew up reading his local black newspaper, says there's no question that they've been hurt by the fact that African-American journalists such as he have had many more options.
GREG MOORE: When I was growing up in Cleveland, I grew up reading the Collin Post Newspaper. I think when I first began to think about a newspaper career, I wanted to be the editor of the Collin Post, and now I'm the editor of the Denver Post, and the opportunities that I've had and other black journalists to work in mainstream media meant that a lot of us didn't have to make stops at the Pittsburgh Courier or the Collin Post, the Amsterdam News -- and those papers have been hurt somewhat.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Meanwhile, says Moore, mainstream newspapers began covering issues of importance to African-Americans that once were covered almost exclusively by black newspapers, and that may be the biggest hurdle faced by black newspapers -- the belief by some that they are no longer needed. Michael Goodin disagrees.
MICHAEL GOODIN: There is always going to be a need for the black press to be there to tell our story, to tell it fairly and tell it honestly.
PHILLIP MARTIN: But to have a future, papers like his own Michigan Chronicle will have to make some adjustments.
MICHAEL GOODIN: The newer generation is looking at things that move at the speed of light, and we -- just like every newspaper in this country -- have to get on board that light train, and we have to get into cyberspace - we have to find ways to get on television - to get in the radio -to create new advertising streams. We have a whole crop of younger publishers and they come in with a, a new kind of sophistication, trying to replicate what some of the more successful newspapers look like today.
PHILLIP MARTIN:In Atlanta, Alexis Scott says the Daily World is competing fiercely with smaller upstart black periodicals that are trying to tap into a metropolitan market of 4 million African-Americans. Scott acknowledges that when the smoke clears in her region and around the country, many black newspapers will no longer exist. She does not expect the Atlanta Daily World to be among the casualties. For On the Media, I'm Phillip Martin.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, two ways to build an audience for your tunes -- little musical hooks and big old juke boxes. This is On the Media from NPR.
Letters and Updates
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone with your letters and a few updates. First, on our interview with the editor of USA Today on the occasion of that papers 20th anniversary, Steven Gilmore of Charlotte, North Carolina writes that he "begs to differ with Garfield" that the paper lacks stories you rush to tell everyone about. "I don't read it for the stories," Gilmore writes. "I read it for the editorials, letters to the editor and guest columns on the op-ed page. These opinion pieces not only prompt me to tell others about them, but are most often what prompts me to write letters to the editor of USA Today -- just as I'm doing with you now." M. Frost of Sound Beach, New York wrote in to say quote: "I found the discussion on this fall's family-friendly television programming to be what I would expect from public broadcasting -- arrogant, condescending and firmly counterculture in its attitude and bias. We've had enough 'edgy' programming to last a lifetime. What makes you or your critic (and here the writer's talking about me and James Poniewozik of Time Magazine) think we want more of the same garbage?" [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Please don't take this to be condescending, but we do enjoy your thoughts, comments and story ideas, so send them to us at onthemedia@wnyc.org and don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name. Music Testing
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the early days of Top 40 radio some 50 years ago, programmers used rather crude and unscientific methods to determine their play lists -- record store sales, phone requests, the number of plays on the local juke box. And of course some programmers and deejays took pride in their gut ability to pick the hits. In the '70s, as all-music stations specializing in different genres took over the dial, competition heated up. Stations experimented with more accurate devices to survey listeners' music preferences, and today most commercial music stations test each and every song in the laboratory of public opinion research. For listeners hoping these tests mean longer play lists and less repetition, the news isn't too good. OTM's Paul Ingles has the story.
MALE RESEARCHER: Put on your poker face. Don't let anyone know what you're thinking when a song, song comes on - how you feel about music is a very personal thing.
PAUL INGLES: A researcher we can't name is speaking to about a hundred 25 to 54 year old men (whom we can't name) seated at long tables in a hotel meeting room in a city we can't name. To eavesdrop on this top secret music research session called an auditorium test, we had to promise complete anonymity to the radio station that on this day is determining its play list for the next year. Each participant was pre-screened over the phone and offered about 40 bucks to come here to rate hundreds of song clips. Each has the old scantron [sp?] sheet and the number 2 pencil, ready to fill in a circle --1 through 5 -- 1 meaning you'd switch stations you hate the song so much -- 5 meaning "It rocks, dude!"
MALE RESEARCHER: 57. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] WHEN I SAY I LOVE YOU, YOU SAY YOU BETTER--
FEMALE CHORUS: YOU BETTER, YOU BETTER, YOU BETTER--
MALE RESEARCHER: 58. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] [...?...] TO THE OTHER SIDE--
PAUL INGLES: The most recognizable 10 seconds of reach song, called "the hooks" go barreling by, about 5 a minute for over two hours. If the test-takers don't recognize a song, they fill in a box marked U for Unfamiliar. If they're just plain tired of hearing it on the radio, they can also blacken a box marked T.
MALE RESEARCHER: 62. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] I HAD A BONE...
PAUL INGLES: This auditorium test is one of many kinds of music testing that costs stations 25 to 40,000 dollars a pop. There's also a high tech version wherein each participant gets a little transmitter.
ALAN KEPLER: It's a little box with a dial on it, and it allows the listener to respond more emotionally.
PAUL INGLES: Alan Kepler [sp?], who heads the research company Broadcast Architecture, says the dial twist is a more true to life measure.
ALAN KEPLER: You hear a song on the radio that you like --what do you do? You reach over to the knob and you turn it up! Or if you hear a song that you really hate, you reach over and you turn the volume down or you punch to another station.
PAUL INGLES:But getting everyone who's invited to turn up on the given night of an auditorium test can be a trick. Weather, traffic, the prime time TV schedule can get in the way. So some stations are taking the test to their listeners via the telephone.
WOMAN'S VOICE: Now let's play the first song. You'll need to wait until it finishes playing. Then you can vote your opinion -- 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - or the star key if you don't recognize it. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN [HA HA]: [SINGING] YESTERDAY... ALL MY TROUBLES SEEMED SO FAR AWAY... [SHORT BEEP]
MAN [HA HA HA]: [SINGING] MY FRIENDS SAY I'M ACTING WILD AS A BUG-- I'M IN LOVE -- I'M ALL SHOOK UP. [SHORT BEEP]
PAUL INGLES: Mike Maloney, whose company Music Tech [sp?] offers this phone method, believes it's more natural and relaxing to take the test at home than with strangers in a hotel ballroom. People can take several days to finish if they choose, and there are built-in safeties to prevent at-home distractions from contaminating results. Periodically through the test subjects are asked to state their name to confirm they haven't handed the phone to their kids to do the test. Maloney says they record the name and more.
MIKE MALONEY: We're able to record background noise. In other words if we get an idea that maybe there's-- a TV blaring or a child screaming --if there's something that tells us that they're not in an, in an environment that allows them to sort of take the test conscientiously, we throw it out. We don't use it.
PAUL INGLES: For stations that play new music, frequent phone surveys are a way to keep tabs on the tastes of fickle fans.
CAROLINE GILBERT: They can warm up to and love an artist and six weeks later they're done.
PAUL INGLES:Caroline Gilbert [sp?] oversees research for hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations across the country. She recommends that hit music stations do call-out research 40 weeks a year to look for signs of song burnout which she insists comes much later than station staff thinks.
CAROLINE GILBERT: When you're sick of a song in the building, in the radio station, it's not time to stop playing it yet. When your core -- you know, 8, 9 hours a day people -- start burning on a song, it's still not time to stop playing it so much. When the broad base starts burning out on a record -- that's when you back off on the rotation.
PAUL INGLES:To maximize audience, many programmers say they must minimize low-testing and unfamiliar tunes that give listeners a reason to punch out. The result is active title lists of just a few hundred songs. Hit music stations have the shortest lists and play their best-testing songs many times a day. Stations like oldies, classic rock or classic country play more songs, but their strongest play three or four times a week in different times of the day so people are less likely to hear them too much.
BILL LEWIS: You know when you, when you drive right down the middle of the road, you, you don't have to worry about ending up in a ditch.
PAUL INGLES: Bill Lewis [sp?] is program director at WNCX, a classic rock station in Cleveland, who cites another reason why playing less familiar album cuts is risky. The station wants the younger listeners who never had the original albums to begin with. Testing shows that 18 to 35 year old classic rock fans have had their music tastes completely defined by stations that have played, for example, only Steve Miller's biggest hits.
STEVE MILLER: [SINGING] I WANT TO FLY LIKE AN EAGLE...
BILL LEWIS: Those people are just wanting to hear Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Airliner and, you know, they have no cognizance of the Sailor album, you know, nor will they ever unless they become dyed in the wool Steve Miller fans, but you know -- I mean they, they're, they're just more Fly Like an Eagle fans.
PAUL INGLES:While like-formatted stations across the country may seem mostly the same, research Alan Kepler says local music testing will help stations reflect their own markets.
ALAN KEPLER: We see differences, and a lot of the differences are driven by what was played in that market years ago -- for example, Denver is a real rock market -- so even with an adult contemporary station you see much more of a rock lean in the older music that the AC stations play, whereas in Philadelphia there was a lot of R&B music in the '60s and '70s and you see a lot of that stuff pop. [STATION IDENTIFICATION: THAT BIG OLDIE 98.5]
PAUL INGLES:Still there are commercial stations that haven't hopped on the research bandwagon. Some can't afford it. Some don't seem to need it. Lawrence Dominguez [sp?] programs big oldies KABG in Albuquerque and draws solid ratings.
LAWRENCE DOMINGUEZ: What we're doing is working, and we're not using consultants; we're not doing music testing; and you know, we're not doing, we're not doing a l-- whole hell of a lot of research out there.
PAUL INGLES: Deejay Bobby Vox [sp?] stands at the controls of his weekday morning show.
BOBBY VOX:Thank God, too - I want to tell you - these consultants -- I, I've got a book to write about those guys - and it's, it's not good.
PAUL INGLES:Vox, who's been on Albuquerque radio for most of his 40 years in the business, blames consultants and researchers for gutting the risk-taking heart from radio. Vox is given rare freedom to play tunes not on the station's regular oldies list. Muddy Waters' Hootchie Cootchie Man was blaring when we came in.
MUDDY WATERS: [SINGING] WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT? BUT YOU KNOW I'M HERE...
PAUL INGLES: They're not concerned about playing a, a rare song like this on an oldies station and having them punch away to your competitor.
BOBBY VOX: I, I guarantee it, they won't. The problem is, when they turn to the competitor it's the same thing they heard yesterday and the day before and the day before. Now this is--unique stuff, and I'm very proud of it.
PAUL INGLES: The freewheeling KABG in Albuquerque may be a success, but still the vast majority of commercial stations in the country are programming just the top half of the results of their most recent music test. Bill Lewis of WNCX in Cleveland makes no apologies.
BILL LEWIS: You know, we're commercial radio. We'll do anything not to have to have pledge drives. [LAUGHS]
PAUL INGLES: Hmmmmm. Touche. Despite the practical attitude toward his stations's play list, Lewis is himself a rock connoisseur and will slip in something like a rare David Bowie track late at night hoping to keep other rare rock and roll fans from abandoning his station for their own CD changers.
DAVID BOWIE: [SINGING] DON'T FAKE IT BABY...
PAUL INGLES: For On the Media, I'm Paul Ingles.
DAVID BOWIE: LAY THE REAL THING ON ME, THE CHURCH OF MAN LOVES A-- SUCH A HOLY PLACE TO BE-- TAKE ME, BABY-- MAKE YOU KNOW YOU REALLY CARE, MAKE ME JUMP INTO THE AIR...
Jukeboxes
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There is a former music industry heavyweight that still hangs out in your neighborhood bar -- a real big shot. It's the juke box over there in the darkened corner. For a handful of coins, he'll tell you his story. OTM's Rex Doane drops the first quarter. [COIN DROP]
REX DOANE: [PUNCHING NUMBERS] 1 - 0 - 4-- Pork Chop Stomp. [SONG PORK CHOP STOMP PLAYS]
REX DOANE: For those who believe that the worth of a restaurant or bar can be accurately measured by the quality of its juke box, then the Great Jones Cafe, located in Manhattan's Lower East Side, may just represent the Promised Land. The authentic Jambalaya and Cajun Martinis on the Great Jones menu are equaled only by the wild and rare records you find on the Jones Juke Box. [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] JUKE BOX... JUKE BOX...
REX DOANE: In fact, the well-worn juke box at the Great Jones has been written up in everything from an issue of Rolling Stone a few years ago to a popular Swedish travel guide. Despite all the praise, it is still the source of confusion to many who walk through the door.
BILL JUDKINS: Most people come in and look at that thing and they just scratch their head -- they go I don't know any [LAUGHS] of this stuff. What is this stuff?!
REX DOANE: Bill Judkins is the manager of the Great Jones Cafe.
BILL JUDKINS: And then every, like you know one out of every ten people come in here and look at it and they go oh, my God -- look at this thing! And they, and they-- it blows their mind. The other 9 people, it's just a curio; they just--are [LAUGHS] confused.
REX DOANE: Make no mistake about it -- the juke box is much more than a curio; it's been on the job for nearly 80 years, and at one time had deep ties to the music industry. Glen Streeter is the CEO of Rock-Ola -- one of the earliest juke box manufacturers and a major player during what Streeter considers the Golden Age of the Juke Box. [30'S STYLE MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
GLEN STREETER: They started primarily in the '30s -- getting very big -- and exploded after the war. There were literally juke boxes in every restaurant - every bar - every bus station -train station - they were literally everywhere. They were just part of our culture.
REX DOANE: Streeter estimates that there were over a million juke boxes active in the field during that period. As a consequence, juke box play was once an important factor in the career of big time recording artists.
GLEN STREETER: But every major celebrity that was a singer was paid to pose with juke boxes of one brand or another and promoted them! I mean we're talking Bing Crosby, Perry Como -- everybody! Black artists -- all of 'em!
REX DOANE: Significantly, juke box play also brought widespread exposure to material deemed unfit for radio air play. Again, Glen Streeter.
GLEN STREETER: Well radio just wouldn't play a lot of stuff. Radio was very homogenized. Nothing but the clean cut stuff.
WYNONIE HARRIS: [SINGING] HOOOOLD BACK THE DAWN-- -- STOP AAAAALL THE CLOCKS-- --
REX DOANE: While radio stations were slow to program artists like Wynonie Harris, juke boxes were far less discriminating. Up until the mid-1950s, entire genres, including blues, R&B, country, ethnic music and even early rock & roll reached its biggest audience not through radio but by way of the juke box. [COIN DROP] [MUSIC CHANGES]
REX DOANE: But the romance between the music industry and the juke box did not last. The growing demand for live rock music in the 1960s slowed the juke trade, and the invasion of Pong in the 1970s nearly killed it. Vic Lavay, owner and publisher of Vending Times, recalls these dark days.
VIC LAVAY: In the middle '70s the video game craze came in and, and the juke box started disappearing.
REX DOANE: Ironically, after a 10 year reign, video games evolved into a major home market and quickly disappeared from the bars and restaurants they had once wrestled away from the juke box. In conjunction with the emergence of the compact disk format of the mid-1980s, juke boxes made a modest comeback, and with 250,000 units currently operating in the U.S., they're once again considered a staple of the coin-op business. For Lavay, the staying power of the juke box is self-evident, even in today's crowded entertainment market.
VIC LAVAY: You'd think that, okay, they have all, they have all these new technologies -- CD - DVDs and CDD disks and, and all this stuff at home - but when they went to hi-fi they still went out to the juke box. You know. Like when television came in, the movie industry still remained. They just -- people want to be out! [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] JUKE BOX, JUKE BOX, JUKE BOX...
REX DOANE: Juke boxes have also begun to adapt new digital technologies including the ability to download countless songs from off-site data bases -- further assurance, says Lavay, that the juke box is here to stay.
VIC LAVAY: Well, it'll stick around, but what form it'll take the juke box operators are trying to figure out now, because-- the, the new, the new technology is being downloaded.
REX DOANE: While the juke box back at the Great Jones is about as high-tech as the gumbo they serve, Bill Judkins still swears by its curative powers.
BILL JUDKINS: [LAUGHS] Well, there was one guy-- who-- came in here - had -- after a bad break-up -- he and his girlfriend used to socialize in here together -- and they broke up, and it was pretty bad; he was pretty despondent, and--came in here night after night and played The End of the World by Skeeter Davis -- over and over and over again -- until he would clear the bar night after night. Come back the next night -- pump it in again -over and over again. [MIMICKING] This is such a great song! WO
MAN: [SINGING] WHY DOES THE SUN GO ON SHINING? WHY DOES THE SEA RUSH TO SHORE? DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD CAUSE YOU DON'T LOVE ME ANY MORE.
BILL JUDKINS: Matter of fact, I tell my bartenders to --just to, to not dispense with the advice and just turn the juke box up a little bit louder, so -- let the juke box handle that. [LAUGHTER] Juke boxes are Dr. Phil here. WO
MAN: DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD? IT ENDED WHEN I LOST YOUR LOVE.
REX DOANE: Though commercial radio is as homogenized as ever these days, it is unlikely that juke boxes will fill the void as they once did some 50 years ago, but if you're lovelorn or liquored up or both -- there is still no better destination for loose change. [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] THAT'S THE MEANEST JUKE BOX IN TOWN
REX DOANE: In New York, for On the Media, I'm Rex Doane.
MAN: EACH DREAM I'VE TRIED TO BUILD, IT CRUMBLES TO THE GROUND, AND SINCE SHE'S GONE-- 58:00
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Megan Ryan; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Weisberg [sp?], Rob Christianson [sp?] and George Edwards, and edited by-- me. We had help from Natasha Korgaonkar. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. WO
MAN: [SINGING] YES, THAT'S THE MEANEST JUKE BOX IN TOWN EACH DREAM I TRY TO BUILD, IT CRUMBLES DOWN.
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. Bob Garfield is away. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Often on this program we check in with experts to see how Bush administration policies are playing in the overseas press. On the move toward war in Iraq there seemed to be little but skepticism around the world, but then on September 12th President Bush went to the United Nations and on the 16th, Saddam Hussein relented on weapons inspections. And then this week British Prime Minister Tony Blair released a hefty report intended to show the threat the Iraqi leader posed to the world. Joining us now is Bill Falk, editor in chief of The Week Magazine. His staff spends their week watching the international press, and he's here to tell us if the world's press is warming up to the idea of war. Bill, welcome to the show.
BILL FALK: Thank you, Brooke. I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In general, before we get to the specific countries, any common threads? Do you think that the appearance by Bush at the UN did create a kind of unifying effect?
BILL FALK:It's been a partial success. Bush disarmed some of the critics who were in high dudgeon about his unilateralism by just going to the UN -- just walking in the doors -- and there were some I think palpable relief in the UN that the U.S. was not just going to careen off into this war without listening to any of our traditional allies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:England's Prime Minister Tony Blair released a 50 page anti-Saddam dossier this week. How did his local press react to that and then how did the rest of Europe?
BILL FALK:There was a lot of skepticism and even some horse laughs. I mean he was compared quite unfavorably to Churchill and-- one commentator noted that he needed to practice his deep bulldog growl; that next time he should show up with a Homburg and a watch chain. And Boris Johnson [sp?] in the Daily Telegraph which is actually a more conservative, often pro-American newspaper, laughed at the whole argument about Saddam wanting to procure plutonium or uranium, and he said, you know, if Saddam had some plutonium he could blow up British bases in Cypress in 45 minutes - is what Blair argued. Well if we has some ham, we could have ham and eggs. If we had any eggs. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about the papers in Germany? I mean Gerhard Schroder seems to have won his election at least in part by opposing what appeared to be the Bush administration's rush to war.
BILL FALK:I think now that he's won there's a little bit of trepidation that we saw in the German press this week about what it will mean for U.S.-German relations, and the Bush administration very quickly said that it would mean a lot --that they were very angered-- and that the relationship had been quote/unquote "poisoned."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well how about Russia? I mean how is the Russian press covering Putin's relationship with Bush and the war on terror?
BILL FALK:Well the, the Russian press is actually somewhat bemused by the chess game that's going on. We, we saw some speculation last week that basically Putin is going to demand for his vote on the Security Council -- that he's going to ask Bush to stand by and say nothing while he pursues Chechan rebels into Georgia -- across the border, and that he will essentially use the same rubric of pre-emption -- that he feels that these Chechan rebels who are now hiding out of the reach of his military in a, in what is now another nation -- that he, he wants the right to go get them, and that he wants America to stand by and say nothing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Russian press is still seeing this as a political-- shell game in the, in the true Kremlinological tradition.
BILL FALK: Yes. Yes. The Russians tend to be fairly cynical about politics.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now from Kuwait we've seen a softening, it seems at least very recently about the possibility if the UN provides its endorsement of giving the United States a, a place to launch the war from-- but in general has the Middle East been moved by any of the goings-on in New York?
BILL FALK:No, not really. I mean most of the Arab nations are very threatened by the very notion of pre-emption. I mean we saw a piece in a Pakistani newspaper where they basically said this could be open war on Muslims throughout the world. The writer was basically saying we in Pakistan really need to keep our fundamentalists in check, because if there's a lot of demonstration of anti-American sentiment, god knows what could happen to us or perhaps if India could seize on the doctrine of pre-emption to go after our fundamentalists and start a war.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So aside from-- nervousness, fear and skepticism, were there any unusual or original takes from the European press this week regarding the war in Iraq?
BILL FALK:In the London Guardian which is their most left-leaning newspaper there was a lengthy article comparing the United States in great detail to Imperial Rome whereas the Romans provided their colonies with roads and aqueducts-- and-- bread and circuses, that America provides television, movies-- and Disney World. That we have the internet uniting the world just the way the Roman road system did. And that we are now-- have armies in 40 nations and that-- essentially the whole point of invading Iraq is simply to expand upon our empire. And of course the recurring them there and in, in the French press is that this is really all about oil -- that America just wants to get its hands on Saddam's oil.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week. Bill, thanks for the update.
BILL FALK: Thank you, Brooke. [MUSIC] Homeland
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Late last week in the Capitol Hill publication called Roll Call the headline read: War of Words Snarls Senate. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security has been bogged down in a labor dispute, so the president charged the Democrat-controlled Senate with paying more attention to special interests than to protecting the nation. Senate Democrats then counter-charged that the Republicans were stalling Homeland Security legislation to keep it front and center until the November elections. Homeland, homeland, homeland -- it's invoked a hundred times a day inside the beltway, and yet despite very real fears of external and internal terrorist attack, it still has no currency on the American street. Security we get, but Homeland still won't catch on. So as part of our occasional Word Watch series we asked OTM's Leon Wynter to look into it.
LEON WYNTER: For a department that hasn't cleared the Senate yet, Homeland Security has been everywhere in Washington. On a single day this month, no less than four different seminars and conferences around town addressed the subject by name, including the Homeland Security Technology Expo and Conference where over 200 companies displayed their homeland security wares. Its high point -- an address by designated Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge. He's heard the negative buzz about the Homeland part of his proposed fiefdom, but he still likes the word -- a lot. Here's Ridge in a July NPR interview explaining what his new department will do for homeland security technology.
TOM RIDGE: Giving strategic focus to the science and the technology and the public dollars that are directed in that direction through this agency as it relates to Homeland Security. Right now dollars are expended in a, in an ad hoc fashion. There's no real strategic focus as it relates to Homeland Security -- again a very specific mission.
ELIZABETH BECKER: He's a very seasoned politician.
LEON WYNTER: The New York Times' Elizabeth Becker brought the word "homeland" up with Ridge in a recent interview.
ELIZABETH BECKER: He recognizes that homeland security is not an automatic concept - that Americans have not had to worry about whether their homeland is secured. So he has a number of these catchy phrases that he uses such as: "When the hometown is secure, the homeland is secure" to start educating people that listen, unfortunately we're going to be like all those other countries in the world who've been invaded and had wars fought on their soil.
LEON WYNTER: Becker says linguists confirm her gut feeling that after nearly a year "homeland" isn't tripping off the average American tongue. She traced the problem with American acceptance to "homeland's" better-known application in Germany -- specifically the Nazis' usage of the words "heimat" and "heimwher" for "homeland" and "homeland defense" respectively. Becker asked officials at the German embassy about it.
ELIZABETH BECKER: They said the Nazis totally misused it. It had more to do with the romantic ideas of the 19th Century, and it has more to do with what we would call our roots, our origins. To Americans, homeland just sounds like a foreign concept; not our own concept.
LEON WYNTER: The Bush administration didn't invent the new usage of homeland; the inherited it from a fairly obscure 1997 Pentagon review of defense readiness. Had they looked it up in the dictionary, they would have found two short, simple meanings. 1. The land of one's allegiance. 2. The place of origin of a people.
MICKEY KAUS: But I'm bothered by that second meaning. It implies a sort of ethnic homogeneity. The Armenians have a homeland; you know, the, the Turks have a homeland. Everybody has a homeland, and they are sort of ethnically or racially homogeneous, and that's not the idea of America.
LEON WYNTER: Writer Mickey Kaus has blasted "Homeland" in his Slate.com column. For Kaus, embracing homeland's Germanic land-and-blood definition feels unnaturally tribal.
MICKEY KAUS: We have to convince the world that we are not just another tribal imperial power. It sort of puts us in the wrong mindset right from the start of the war on terrorism to think all we're doing is we're just another tribe and we're mighty mad and we're going to drop a bomb on your tribe.
LEON WYNTER: It's not that Kaus is unmoved by all the American flagging and pledging etc, since September 11th, 2001. They're all good, provided they point to a higher expression of American ideals.
MICKEY KAUS: We're not just protecting our homeland; we're protecting the idea of freedom, and we're n--in a, in a worldwide war to promote this idea abroad against other ideas such as-- Osama bin Laden's ideas.
LEON WYNTER: Ken Bacon was a spokesman for the Clinton Pentagon that gave the phrase "homeland security" birth.
KEN BACON: It has sort of a, a gray bureaucratic tinge to it, I suppose. It's maybe not a term one can rally around with a great deal of passion. But it's descriptive.
LEON WYNTER: Yet, Bacon, too finds fault with the term. He now heads Refugees International which works on behalf of people displaced by conflicts worldwide. From this vantage, Bacon's problem isn't the sense of homeland security as a bright line around the interests of hearth and home; his problem is where that line is drawn.
KEN BACON: Homeland security begins abroad. That's the lesson from September 11th. And we have to think of security as, as seamless. It has to begin in distant lands and end in the United States.
LEON WYNTER: Critics from across the political spectrum are uncomfortable with the adoption of the term "homeland." Even loyal Republican Peggy Noonan has written that "homeland" isn't really an American word and gives people the creeps. It shouldn't be that serious.
MICKEY KAUS: It's just a word.
LEON WYNTER: On line columnist Mickey Kaus.
MICKEY KAUS: If the homeland security is very efficient and, and respects civil liberties yet stops terrorism, it will be a good word. But it just starts off as asking people to swallow something they don't have to swallow in order to come together across races and to love New York. Why ask people to go that extra step?
LEON WYNTER: It is, after all, just a word. Maybe we haven't decided to see ourselves as a land-and-blood tribe yet. Still, with the choice of "homeland," the name-givers in Washington seem to have made the decision for us to look inward rather than outside ourselves to find a safe place in the world. For On the Media, I'm Leon Wynter. [MUSIC]
Google News
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And now yet another breakthrough for news on line -- the world's leading search engine, Google, has taken on the task of providing up-to-the-minute news -- with no editors and no reporters -- for the most part, with no people -- and yet in short order Google is likely to become the news junkies' web site of choice. Jack Shafer is editor at large for Slate.com where he wrote about what's been called the internet's first artificial newscast. Thanks for coming on the show, Jack.
JACK SHAFER: Glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now you wrote: The Google news page exceeds every editor's dream to produce a first-rate publication without the meddling interference of reporters by making the editors themselves extraneous as well. So this is a good thing.
JACK SHAFER: Well there are people behind the news that Google is serving. The advantage of the Google news robot editor is that it's there plucking news for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, giving you the most timely news from 4,000 sources. I think that's a - a huge improvement over some of the human intelligence that you see behind the news choices in a lot of newspapers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:How does it technically pick its stories? I've heard references to crawlers and spiders, but I'm not altogether clear on what all that is.
JACK SHAFER: There are two ways that Google News provides the news that it does. First it's web crawlers - its spiders - go out on the web and surf the web much as you do with your mouse and your pointer, clicking to sites that you're interested in. But their spiders are very automated, like a search engine's spiders, and they go out and collect thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of links -- and then another piece of software that Google News has written examines those links, grades the information for timeliness, credibility and newsworthiness and then re-purposes the headline, the first sentence, maybe a photograph and a link back to the original site.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can't program a computer with news judgment can you? Yet?
JACK SHAFER:I think you can program it with some sense of news judgment. The question is, is the news judgment any good? You could look at a lot of second tier American daily newspapers that pull a lot of their national and international news straight off the wires. Any intelligent person offered Google News to search for relevant national, international sports and entertainment news or the Cleveland Plain Dealer would pick Google News automatically.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:But the fact is, is that Google is relying on the news judgment of any of the 4,000 web sites that it draws its news from. There are people all over this process!
JACK SHAFER: I'm not saying that you can factor human beings out of the news equation. I'm just saying that the Google News robots do some things that human beings can't do, and they do some of the things that human beings can do better than human beings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They can design it better? They can make it more thorough? They can update it more frequently? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JACK SHAFER: Sure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They can offer a wider range of views.
JACK SHAFER:Exactly. I think it's the web equivalent to the 24 hour AM news station. Does it replace the New York Times and the Washington Post? No. It supplements them, and I think that's what Google does too. It also reaches out and taps a lot of regional newspapers, international newspapers providing lots of views that you wouldn't ordinarily read in the top three or four or five U.S. dailies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Still, it doesn't seem as if Google distinguishes much between sites that are credible and those that aren't! The Washington Post noted that the lead story for 15 minutes on Tuesday was basically propaganda from the official Iranian News Service complete with the negative spin on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech about Iraq!
JACK SHAFER: And I would say Google news is guilty as charged there. You have to remember it's their debut week; they're going to learn from their mistakes like lots of editors. And I think that they'll recognize the Iranian news source that they used this week as not exactly credible next week. And you have to remember that readers are very discerning. There's a recent Pew study that rated a whole variety of news sources as to the credibility and the National Enquirer had something like a 4 percent credibility rating. People know that it's not a credible news source, yet they go to it for a different reason other than to gather credible news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And were you being deliberately outrageous when you said, you know: "Whoa, happy day" at the beginning of your column - "The dream is realized. No more editors, no more reporters"?
JACK SHAFER: Well I think that there are a lot of news functions that are better served by machines. What Google is doing is they've found a new way to bake the cake. If you want to gather and experience news from a multiplicity of sources -- from 4,000 sources -- and have it constantly updated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- Google News is your baby.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer, thank you very much.
JACK SHAFER: Any time, baby. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer is editor at large of Slate.com. Media Matrix
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The convergence of TV and the internet has been forecast almost from the moment the net was born. Any day now, we were told, there would be one set-top box through which we could access both technologies at the same time. Well the fact is even though we still have two boxes, if they're in the same room, many of us do use them at the same time, but we don't use them the way the forecasters planned --comScore Media Metrix - a company that tallies web usage - found that three quarters of people who are on the computer while they're watching TV are doing things unrelated to the show they're watching. They are chatting with friends, shopping or using the computer for off-line activities. Two boxes in the same room -- very little convergence. Stephen Kim is vice president of comScore Media Metrix, and we wondered what he thought of the findings.
STEPHEN KIM: Yeah, I was surprised that the number was this high.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So getting people to go on line to look up something related to the television program is that sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What are some of the attempts to reach that pot of gold?
STEPHEN KIM:Well right now I think the success stories in this arena have been fairly easy to identify. So you've got big events like the Super Bowl, or even big cultural events like Survivor or Big Brother where we have seen people are both looking at the TV show and then going on line to find out more information. We've got some examples of things like Push, Nevada - the new ABC series that's trying to drive people to the on line site related to the TV program. And they're doing it through what has historically been the easiest way to drive traffic on line which is to give away money. There's a contest involved. So, you know, if you have an audience that's really focused on a particular show, that's where we've seen success to date. Where we haven't seen a whole lot of success to date are the examples of people trying to draw internet audiences into longstanding series -comedy series or drama series. That is a tall order.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You haven't mentioned news. You know the CNN site - the MSNBC site - are they in a different category?
STEPHEN KIM:I do put them in a different category, and I think a lot of new out-- news outlets are just confined by the format they're in. You only have a 45 second story or 2 minutes to get a story across. But if you can put a crawl across the screen, or you can make an announcement at the end of the story that says: If you want to hear more about - from this interview - click on KQED.org and you can get the full interview there. In the early days, people were worried: will the internet steal people away from TV and radio news? The opposite is sort of emerging in terms of actually we're learning how to use the two in a complementary way which is just to get more information out to, to consumers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But for entertainment programming your data are pretty depressing for television programmers.
STEPHEN KIM:You know I, I don't know if it's depressing for programmers. I think it's just -- people need to shift gears a little bit, because the good news here is that there are a lot of people who have the capability of getting on line and watching TV at the same time. So it's really at this point a conversion problem which is a lot less difficult than getting people to move their PC into the same room as the TV.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Okay. I said your data are depressing, but your attitude is very optimistic. But frankly, I'm not buying it. I mean as long as the computer is in the same room as the TV and you can do two things at the same time, and the show that you're watching isn't that compelling -- and that's a decades-long problem -- how are TV programmers suddenly going to come up with a way to drive people where they want them to be on the web?
STEPHEN KIM:I think what these data are saying that's interesting is that maybe the goal needs to shift. Right? Because in a sense that I don't expect and none of us expect people to stop multi-tasking at work, maybe we should expect that people are actually multi-tasking at home and that maybe this is a signal for folks in the programming industry to say rather than try to drive people always to the same content, maybe I should be looking in this as another competitive avenue which is -you know - I know if I am a network that's competing with Friends -- that's a tough audience for me to get them to switch a channel. But during the hours when Friends is broadcast, maybe I should provide compelling internet content that will steal away some of the attention -- knowing that people are inclined to do something unrelated on their PC, this competitive angle may be one that develops alongside people trying to develop convergent use.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Stephen Kim, thank you very much.
STEPHEN KIM: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Stephen Kim is senior vice president of comScore Media Metrix. [MUSIC] Black Press
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As new media change our habits, some grand old traditions are just hanging on. Among them, the nation's 200-plus black newspapers. Once regarded as the voice of a stifled people, the black press suffers from steadily declining readership and advertising dollars, stiff competition and even a generational divide, as OTM's Phillip Martin reports.
PHILLIP MARTIN:If the free press to Walter Lippman was like the beam of a searchlight, then the black press for W.E.B. DuBois and other civil rights leaders directed that light for the first time on their lives and their cause, says scholar Hayward Farrar.
HAYWARD FARRAR: Well the black press for all of these people were the best and in some instances the only outlet for their writings, for their thoughts, for what they stood for. Basically at least up until the '60s, '70s and '80s the black press was an integral part of the black community.
PHILLIP MARTIN:As an example, says Farrar, the Baltimore Afro-American -- the subject of his 1998 book -- regularly published stories detailing racial discrimination and lynchings as well as listings of black weddings and black culture that were usually ignored by white newspapers. Other black papers like the award-winning Michigan Chronicle also carried the banner for civil rights. During the riots of 1967 which many African-Americans described as "uprisings," the Chronicle ventured into burning neighborhoods where many white reporters dared not go physically, and it covered allegations of police violence which many mainstream papers were reluctant to explore.
MICHAEL GOODIN: When the riots broke out in Detroit, our headline was: It Didn't Have to Happen.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Michael Goodin is the editor of the Michigan Chronicle. He says among the other top stories covered by his paper during that period was on-the-scene accounts of the Attica Prison rebellion by black and Hispanic inmates in 1971.
ATTICA INMATE: We're tired of being beaten. We're tired of being oppressed. We're going to get this if we all have to die. All of us.
PHILLIP MARTIN: Among those whom inmates asked to mediate was Michigan Chronicle columnist Jim Ingram. At that time the Chronicle had 120,000 readers. Today its circulation is 47,000. Michael Goodin.
MICHAEL GOODIN: One of the reasons that we could count the circulation so high in the late '60s and early '70s was that there was much more of a consciousness about being supportive of black institutions. Since then the commitment to a struggle has diminished in some sense. The current generation feels that African-Americans have made it, and of course supporting the black press is not seen as a method of contributing to the cause.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Hayward Farrar who teaches history at Virginia Tech says those generational changes have contributed greatly to the decline of black newspapers.
HAYWARD FARRAR: Most of the readership of black newspapers now happen to be Blacks in their 50s or over; large numbers of young black folk -- they're more inclined, again, to patronize BET or the Tom Joyner Show or the electronic media than they would the print one.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Rick Wright, a professor of communications at Syracuse University, says that the reach of Tom Joyner's syndicated radio program of news and entertainment has made even the granddaddy of all black publications seem less relevant these days.
TOM JOYNER: In the African-American community, many of us used to call JET Magazine, you know, the "Black Dispatch," meaning it's the -- if you really want to communicate with the African-American community in a print format, JET Magazine was the way to go. But the plain buzz on the street -- if you want to reach the African-American community in America, the Tom Joyner Show should be number one on your list. [TOM JOYNER SHOW JINGLE PLAYS]
GROUP: [SINGING] Ho, ho, ho and a ho, ho, ho-- it's the Tom Joyner Morning Show...
PHILLIP MARTIN: And while companies are lining up to advertise on the Tom Joyner Show which reportedly reaches nearly 10 percent of African-Americans, they're abandoning black newspapers. Newspapers also are competing with web-based popular news sites like Africana.com. Black newspapers in the aggregate are attracting only around 80 million dollars or about 5 percent of the 1.6 billion dollars spent on ads targeting African-Americans each year, according to E. Morris Communications. But lost advertising dollars and dwindling circulation aren't the only problems. Hayward Farrar says there's also resistance to change due to the fact that many of the newspapers are family-owned.
HAYWARD FARRAR: The problem with a lot of these family-owned newspapers is that dynasties tend to deteriorate over time, and so-- the descendants of the original founders and the owners tended not to be as strong as the original ones because they didn't have to fight to create the newspaper or keep the newspaper open.
PHILLIP MARTIN: But there are exceptions.
ALEXIS SCOTT:I had spent 18 years as a reporter, editor and executive at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, so in my family I was uniquely trained, if you will, to bring the skills and the experience to bear on seeing if we could in fact save the paper.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Alexis Scott is a third generation journalist. She quit her job five years ago as the head of diversity for Cox Communications and went about the task of trying to turn around the fortunes of the newspaper founded by her grandfather in 1928 -- the Atlanta Daily World -- the first black-owned daily in the United States. By 1997, the Daily had become a weekly in order to save on printing costs, and in the words of one observer was "sputtering toward extinction." One of Scott's first changes was to update the technology.
ALEXIS SCOTT: When I got here we didn't have voice mail. We didn't have but one computer and we were still using typesetting machines and doing hard copy pasteup on pasteup boards and taking the boards to the printer.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Then she moved to update the content, applying the standards she learned at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution; and in an area where Blacks vote 90 percent Democratic, she also shed the paper's Republican editorial page stance that was long favored by her uncle.
ALEXIS SCOTT: And I also think that we can have a black perspective that speaks to our readers and still is professional journalism -- we don't write editorials and call them news stories.
PHILLIP MARTIN:In five years the Daily World has increased its circulation 30 percent to about 10,000 readers. Scott's top priority now is to draw a new generation of African-American readers. But to do that she'll have to draw a new generation of African-American journalists, and that's not easy. [PARTY AMBIANCE]
PHILLIP MARTIN:Greg Moore is hosting his own goodbye party at his home in this upper middle class suburb of Boston. Moore, the former managing editor of the Boston Globe, was on his way to Colorado to take over the helm of the Denver Post, making him one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in mainstream journalism. Moore, who grew up reading his local black newspaper, says there's no question that they've been hurt by the fact that African-American journalists such as he have had many more options.
GREG MOORE: When I was growing up in Cleveland, I grew up reading the Collin Post Newspaper. I think when I first began to think about a newspaper career, I wanted to be the editor of the Collin Post, and now I'm the editor of the Denver Post, and the opportunities that I've had and other black journalists to work in mainstream media meant that a lot of us didn't have to make stops at the Pittsburgh Courier or the Collin Post, the Amsterdam News -- and those papers have been hurt somewhat.
PHILLIP MARTIN:Meanwhile, says Moore, mainstream newspapers began covering issues of importance to African-Americans that once were covered almost exclusively by black newspapers, and that may be the biggest hurdle faced by black newspapers -- the belief by some that they are no longer needed. Michael Goodin disagrees.
MICHAEL GOODIN: There is always going to be a need for the black press to be there to tell our story, to tell it fairly and tell it honestly.
PHILLIP MARTIN: But to have a future, papers like his own Michigan Chronicle will have to make some adjustments.
MICHAEL GOODIN: The newer generation is looking at things that move at the speed of light, and we -- just like every newspaper in this country -- have to get on board that light train, and we have to get into cyberspace - we have to find ways to get on television - to get in the radio -to create new advertising streams. We have a whole crop of younger publishers and they come in with a, a new kind of sophistication, trying to replicate what some of the more successful newspapers look like today.
PHILLIP MARTIN:In Atlanta, Alexis Scott says the Daily World is competing fiercely with smaller upstart black periodicals that are trying to tap into a metropolitan market of 4 million African-Americans. Scott acknowledges that when the smoke clears in her region and around the country, many black newspapers will no longer exist. She does not expect the Atlanta Daily World to be among the casualties. For On the Media, I'm Phillip Martin.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, two ways to build an audience for your tunes -- little musical hooks and big old juke boxes. This is On the Media from NPR.
Letters and Updates
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone with your letters and a few updates. First, on our interview with the editor of USA Today on the occasion of that papers 20th anniversary, Steven Gilmore of Charlotte, North Carolina writes that he "begs to differ with Garfield" that the paper lacks stories you rush to tell everyone about. "I don't read it for the stories," Gilmore writes. "I read it for the editorials, letters to the editor and guest columns on the op-ed page. These opinion pieces not only prompt me to tell others about them, but are most often what prompts me to write letters to the editor of USA Today -- just as I'm doing with you now." M. Frost of Sound Beach, New York wrote in to say quote: "I found the discussion on this fall's family-friendly television programming to be what I would expect from public broadcasting -- arrogant, condescending and firmly counterculture in its attitude and bias. We've had enough 'edgy' programming to last a lifetime. What makes you or your critic (and here the writer's talking about me and James Poniewozik of Time Magazine) think we want more of the same garbage?" [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Please don't take this to be condescending, but we do enjoy your thoughts, comments and story ideas, so send them to us at onthemedia@wnyc.org and don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name. Music Testing
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the early days of Top 40 radio some 50 years ago, programmers used rather crude and unscientific methods to determine their play lists -- record store sales, phone requests, the number of plays on the local juke box. And of course some programmers and deejays took pride in their gut ability to pick the hits. In the '70s, as all-music stations specializing in different genres took over the dial, competition heated up. Stations experimented with more accurate devices to survey listeners' music preferences, and today most commercial music stations test each and every song in the laboratory of public opinion research. For listeners hoping these tests mean longer play lists and less repetition, the news isn't too good. OTM's Paul Ingles has the story.
MALE RESEARCHER: Put on your poker face. Don't let anyone know what you're thinking when a song, song comes on - how you feel about music is a very personal thing.
PAUL INGLES: A researcher we can't name is speaking to about a hundred 25 to 54 year old men (whom we can't name) seated at long tables in a hotel meeting room in a city we can't name. To eavesdrop on this top secret music research session called an auditorium test, we had to promise complete anonymity to the radio station that on this day is determining its play list for the next year. Each participant was pre-screened over the phone and offered about 40 bucks to come here to rate hundreds of song clips. Each has the old scantron [sp?] sheet and the number 2 pencil, ready to fill in a circle --1 through 5 -- 1 meaning you'd switch stations you hate the song so much -- 5 meaning "It rocks, dude!"
MALE RESEARCHER: 57. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] WHEN I SAY I LOVE YOU, YOU SAY YOU BETTER--
FEMALE CHORUS: YOU BETTER, YOU BETTER, YOU BETTER--
MALE RESEARCHER: 58. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] [...?...] TO THE OTHER SIDE--
PAUL INGLES: The most recognizable 10 seconds of reach song, called "the hooks" go barreling by, about 5 a minute for over two hours. If the test-takers don't recognize a song, they fill in a box marked U for Unfamiliar. If they're just plain tired of hearing it on the radio, they can also blacken a box marked T.
MALE RESEARCHER: 62. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: [SINGING] I HAD A BONE...
PAUL INGLES: This auditorium test is one of many kinds of music testing that costs stations 25 to 40,000 dollars a pop. There's also a high tech version wherein each participant gets a little transmitter.
ALAN KEPLER: It's a little box with a dial on it, and it allows the listener to respond more emotionally.
PAUL INGLES: Alan Kepler [sp?], who heads the research company Broadcast Architecture, says the dial twist is a more true to life measure.
ALAN KEPLER: You hear a song on the radio that you like --what do you do? You reach over to the knob and you turn it up! Or if you hear a song that you really hate, you reach over and you turn the volume down or you punch to another station.
PAUL INGLES:But getting everyone who's invited to turn up on the given night of an auditorium test can be a trick. Weather, traffic, the prime time TV schedule can get in the way. So some stations are taking the test to their listeners via the telephone.
WOMAN'S VOICE: Now let's play the first song. You'll need to wait until it finishes playing. Then you can vote your opinion -- 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - or the star key if you don't recognize it. [MUSIC CLIP PLAYS]
MAN [HA HA]: [SINGING] YESTERDAY... ALL MY TROUBLES SEEMED SO FAR AWAY... [SHORT BEEP]
MAN [HA HA HA]: [SINGING] MY FRIENDS SAY I'M ACTING WILD AS A BUG-- I'M IN LOVE -- I'M ALL SHOOK UP. [SHORT BEEP]
PAUL INGLES: Mike Maloney, whose company Music Tech [sp?] offers this phone method, believes it's more natural and relaxing to take the test at home than with strangers in a hotel ballroom. People can take several days to finish if they choose, and there are built-in safeties to prevent at-home distractions from contaminating results. Periodically through the test subjects are asked to state their name to confirm they haven't handed the phone to their kids to do the test. Maloney says they record the name and more.
MIKE MALONEY: We're able to record background noise. In other words if we get an idea that maybe there's-- a TV blaring or a child screaming --if there's something that tells us that they're not in an, in an environment that allows them to sort of take the test conscientiously, we throw it out. We don't use it.
PAUL INGLES: For stations that play new music, frequent phone surveys are a way to keep tabs on the tastes of fickle fans.
CAROLINE GILBERT: They can warm up to and love an artist and six weeks later they're done.
PAUL INGLES:Caroline Gilbert [sp?] oversees research for hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations across the country. She recommends that hit music stations do call-out research 40 weeks a year to look for signs of song burnout which she insists comes much later than station staff thinks.
CAROLINE GILBERT: When you're sick of a song in the building, in the radio station, it's not time to stop playing it yet. When your core -- you know, 8, 9 hours a day people -- start burning on a song, it's still not time to stop playing it so much. When the broad base starts burning out on a record -- that's when you back off on the rotation.
PAUL INGLES:To maximize audience, many programmers say they must minimize low-testing and unfamiliar tunes that give listeners a reason to punch out. The result is active title lists of just a few hundred songs. Hit music stations have the shortest lists and play their best-testing songs many times a day. Stations like oldies, classic rock or classic country play more songs, but their strongest play three or four times a week in different times of the day so people are less likely to hear them too much.
BILL LEWIS: You know when you, when you drive right down the middle of the road, you, you don't have to worry about ending up in a ditch.
PAUL INGLES: Bill Lewis [sp?] is program director at WNCX, a classic rock station in Cleveland, who cites another reason why playing less familiar album cuts is risky. The station wants the younger listeners who never had the original albums to begin with. Testing shows that 18 to 35 year old classic rock fans have had their music tastes completely defined by stations that have played, for example, only Steve Miller's biggest hits.
STEVE MILLER: [SINGING] I WANT TO FLY LIKE AN EAGLE...
BILL LEWIS: Those people are just wanting to hear Fly Like an Eagle and Jet Airliner and, you know, they have no cognizance of the Sailor album, you know, nor will they ever unless they become dyed in the wool Steve Miller fans, but you know -- I mean they, they're, they're just more Fly Like an Eagle fans.
PAUL INGLES:While like-formatted stations across the country may seem mostly the same, research Alan Kepler says local music testing will help stations reflect their own markets.
ALAN KEPLER: We see differences, and a lot of the differences are driven by what was played in that market years ago -- for example, Denver is a real rock market -- so even with an adult contemporary station you see much more of a rock lean in the older music that the AC stations play, whereas in Philadelphia there was a lot of R&B music in the '60s and '70s and you see a lot of that stuff pop. [STATION IDENTIFICATION: THAT BIG OLDIE 98.5]
PAUL INGLES:Still there are commercial stations that haven't hopped on the research bandwagon. Some can't afford it. Some don't seem to need it. Lawrence Dominguez [sp?] programs big oldies KABG in Albuquerque and draws solid ratings.
LAWRENCE DOMINGUEZ: What we're doing is working, and we're not using consultants; we're not doing music testing; and you know, we're not doing, we're not doing a l-- whole hell of a lot of research out there.
PAUL INGLES: Deejay Bobby Vox [sp?] stands at the controls of his weekday morning show.
BOBBY VOX:Thank God, too - I want to tell you - these consultants -- I, I've got a book to write about those guys - and it's, it's not good.
PAUL INGLES:Vox, who's been on Albuquerque radio for most of his 40 years in the business, blames consultants and researchers for gutting the risk-taking heart from radio. Vox is given rare freedom to play tunes not on the station's regular oldies list. Muddy Waters' Hootchie Cootchie Man was blaring when we came in.
MUDDY WATERS: [SINGING] WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT? BUT YOU KNOW I'M HERE...
PAUL INGLES: They're not concerned about playing a, a rare song like this on an oldies station and having them punch away to your competitor.
BOBBY VOX: I, I guarantee it, they won't. The problem is, when they turn to the competitor it's the same thing they heard yesterday and the day before and the day before. Now this is--unique stuff, and I'm very proud of it.
PAUL INGLES: The freewheeling KABG in Albuquerque may be a success, but still the vast majority of commercial stations in the country are programming just the top half of the results of their most recent music test. Bill Lewis of WNCX in Cleveland makes no apologies.
BILL LEWIS: You know, we're commercial radio. We'll do anything not to have to have pledge drives. [LAUGHS]
PAUL INGLES: Hmmmmm. Touche. Despite the practical attitude toward his stations's play list, Lewis is himself a rock connoisseur and will slip in something like a rare David Bowie track late at night hoping to keep other rare rock and roll fans from abandoning his station for their own CD changers.
DAVID BOWIE: [SINGING] DON'T FAKE IT BABY...
PAUL INGLES: For On the Media, I'm Paul Ingles.
DAVID BOWIE: LAY THE REAL THING ON ME, THE CHURCH OF MAN LOVES A-- SUCH A HOLY PLACE TO BE-- TAKE ME, BABY-- MAKE YOU KNOW YOU REALLY CARE, MAKE ME JUMP INTO THE AIR...
Jukeboxes
September 27, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There is a former music industry heavyweight that still hangs out in your neighborhood bar -- a real big shot. It's the juke box over there in the darkened corner. For a handful of coins, he'll tell you his story. OTM's Rex Doane drops the first quarter. [COIN DROP]
REX DOANE: [PUNCHING NUMBERS] 1 - 0 - 4-- Pork Chop Stomp. [SONG PORK CHOP STOMP PLAYS]
REX DOANE: For those who believe that the worth of a restaurant or bar can be accurately measured by the quality of its juke box, then the Great Jones Cafe, located in Manhattan's Lower East Side, may just represent the Promised Land. The authentic Jambalaya and Cajun Martinis on the Great Jones menu are equaled only by the wild and rare records you find on the Jones Juke Box. [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] JUKE BOX... JUKE BOX...
REX DOANE: In fact, the well-worn juke box at the Great Jones has been written up in everything from an issue of Rolling Stone a few years ago to a popular Swedish travel guide. Despite all the praise, it is still the source of confusion to many who walk through the door.
BILL JUDKINS: Most people come in and look at that thing and they just scratch their head -- they go I don't know any [LAUGHS] of this stuff. What is this stuff?!
REX DOANE: Bill Judkins is the manager of the Great Jones Cafe.
BILL JUDKINS: And then every, like you know one out of every ten people come in here and look at it and they go oh, my God -- look at this thing! And they, and they-- it blows their mind. The other 9 people, it's just a curio; they just--are [LAUGHS] confused.
REX DOANE: Make no mistake about it -- the juke box is much more than a curio; it's been on the job for nearly 80 years, and at one time had deep ties to the music industry. Glen Streeter is the CEO of Rock-Ola -- one of the earliest juke box manufacturers and a major player during what Streeter considers the Golden Age of the Juke Box. [30'S STYLE MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
GLEN STREETER: They started primarily in the '30s -- getting very big -- and exploded after the war. There were literally juke boxes in every restaurant - every bar - every bus station -train station - they were literally everywhere. They were just part of our culture.
REX DOANE: Streeter estimates that there were over a million juke boxes active in the field during that period. As a consequence, juke box play was once an important factor in the career of big time recording artists.
GLEN STREETER: But every major celebrity that was a singer was paid to pose with juke boxes of one brand or another and promoted them! I mean we're talking Bing Crosby, Perry Como -- everybody! Black artists -- all of 'em!
REX DOANE: Significantly, juke box play also brought widespread exposure to material deemed unfit for radio air play. Again, Glen Streeter.
GLEN STREETER: Well radio just wouldn't play a lot of stuff. Radio was very homogenized. Nothing but the clean cut stuff.
WYNONIE HARRIS: [SINGING] HOOOOLD BACK THE DAWN-- -- STOP AAAAALL THE CLOCKS-- --
REX DOANE: While radio stations were slow to program artists like Wynonie Harris, juke boxes were far less discriminating. Up until the mid-1950s, entire genres, including blues, R&B, country, ethnic music and even early rock & roll reached its biggest audience not through radio but by way of the juke box. [COIN DROP] [MUSIC CHANGES]
REX DOANE: But the romance between the music industry and the juke box did not last. The growing demand for live rock music in the 1960s slowed the juke trade, and the invasion of Pong in the 1970s nearly killed it. Vic Lavay, owner and publisher of Vending Times, recalls these dark days.
VIC LAVAY: In the middle '70s the video game craze came in and, and the juke box started disappearing.
REX DOANE: Ironically, after a 10 year reign, video games evolved into a major home market and quickly disappeared from the bars and restaurants they had once wrestled away from the juke box. In conjunction with the emergence of the compact disk format of the mid-1980s, juke boxes made a modest comeback, and with 250,000 units currently operating in the U.S., they're once again considered a staple of the coin-op business. For Lavay, the staying power of the juke box is self-evident, even in today's crowded entertainment market.
VIC LAVAY: You'd think that, okay, they have all, they have all these new technologies -- CD - DVDs and CDD disks and, and all this stuff at home - but when they went to hi-fi they still went out to the juke box. You know. Like when television came in, the movie industry still remained. They just -- people want to be out! [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] JUKE BOX, JUKE BOX, JUKE BOX...
REX DOANE: Juke boxes have also begun to adapt new digital technologies including the ability to download countless songs from off-site data bases -- further assurance, says Lavay, that the juke box is here to stay.
VIC LAVAY: Well, it'll stick around, but what form it'll take the juke box operators are trying to figure out now, because-- the, the new, the new technology is being downloaded.
REX DOANE: While the juke box back at the Great Jones is about as high-tech as the gumbo they serve, Bill Judkins still swears by its curative powers.
BILL JUDKINS: [LAUGHS] Well, there was one guy-- who-- came in here - had -- after a bad break-up -- he and his girlfriend used to socialize in here together -- and they broke up, and it was pretty bad; he was pretty despondent, and--came in here night after night and played The End of the World by Skeeter Davis -- over and over and over again -- until he would clear the bar night after night. Come back the next night -- pump it in again -over and over again. [MIMICKING] This is such a great song! WO
MAN: [SINGING] WHY DOES THE SUN GO ON SHINING? WHY DOES THE SEA RUSH TO SHORE? DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD CAUSE YOU DON'T LOVE ME ANY MORE.
BILL JUDKINS: Matter of fact, I tell my bartenders to --just to, to not dispense with the advice and just turn the juke box up a little bit louder, so -- let the juke box handle that. [LAUGHTER] Juke boxes are Dr. Phil here. WO
MAN: DON'T THEY KNOW IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD? IT ENDED WHEN I LOST YOUR LOVE.
REX DOANE: Though commercial radio is as homogenized as ever these days, it is unlikely that juke boxes will fill the void as they once did some 50 years ago, but if you're lovelorn or liquored up or both -- there is still no better destination for loose change. [COIN DROP]
MAN: [SINGING] THAT'S THE MEANEST JUKE BOX IN TOWN
REX DOANE: In New York, for On the Media, I'm Rex Doane.
MAN: EACH DREAM I'VE TRIED TO BUILD, IT CRUMBLES TO THE GROUND, AND SINCE SHE'S GONE-- 58:00
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Megan Ryan; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Weisberg [sp?], Rob Christianson [sp?] and George Edwards, and edited by-- me. We had help from Natasha Korgaonkar. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. WO
MAN: [SINGING] YES, THAT'S THE MEANEST JUKE BOX IN TOWN EACH DREAM I TRY TO BUILD, IT CRUMBLES DOWN.
- Back to story:
- September 27, 2002
-
Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
-
An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
-
Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
-
A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
-
A Source for Sources
-
With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated
-
Web Only Audio Extra - TV Cord Cutters
-
Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
