Brad Marley

The iPad is truly a tremendous piece of technology.

Restaurants use them in place of wine lists. Hospitals show their patients X-rays on them.

There’s no doubt they are going to revolutionize how we consume data. Especially when it comes to the content we read.

But whether you are flipping pages in a magazine, or swiping your finger across the iPad’s screen to flip digital pages, aside from the multimedia additions the iPad can deliver, the story remains the same, no matter the vehicle.

The one qualm I have with the iPad (most Apple products, actually) is the elevated importance we have bestowed upon this device; as if using it to complete a task as mundane as reading a book is so much more awesome because, dammit, I read it on my iPad, bro.

It’s no longer enough to tell your buddy you read Stieg Larsson’s latest. No. You read it on your iPad.

I didn’t misplace my cell phone. I misplaced my iPhone.

There’s a difference.

Now, we’re seeing examples of this in the media.

In an excellent piece of investigative journalism on Deadspin on ex-Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl’s past transgressions, there was a line toward the end of the article that struck me as off. It spurred the thought for this post, if you must know.

To put it in context, the other coach mentioned (Jimmy Collins) has a long-standing quarrel with Pearl. Here’s the line that was used to describe Collins’ reaction when he read what Pearl said about his latest controversy:

Reading that quote on his iPad one day, Collins smelled a familiar skunk.

That’s all well and good that Collins had seen this play out before. And it was totally relevant to include it in the piece.

But a mention of the iPad? It did nothing to advance the story, other than, maybe, the coach is hip. Or Deadspin is hip.

I don’t know.

Deadspin gets a ton of readership. I’m sure of it. So there’s no need to stoop to name-dropping hot products.

But they did it anyway.

And it was pointless.

What do you think? Does this kind of unnecessary mention in your media bug you? Or am I splitting hairs?

Image courtesy of Limbic.

I promised myself I wouldn’t write a blog post about Charlie Sheen.

But in a world where everyone complains about the attention showered upon celebrities who are seemingly mentally unbalanced, we sure do like watching their antics, don’t we?

It’s not out of the ordinary right now to turn on your local 11 o’clock news and see them devote two minutes to airing Sheen ramble about whatever it is he rambles about. But that is two minutes we will never get back. That is two minutes they could have devoted to a segment about your client’s work with local schoolchildren.

You know: something worthwhile?

Nobody wants to turn on the five o’clock news to watch 30 minutes of doom and gloom, of course. But some of the content that makes the cut surely boggles the mind. Part of me thinks the producers air this crap with a knowing smirk, understanding that it is, indeed, ridiculous. In fact, that’s the story I’m going with because I refuse to believe the other reason.

Anyway, in the spirit of this blog post, here are five authentic news stories that will leave you shaking your head. And we wonder why we can’t land that local broadcast story…

1. Bubb Rubb

2. Cleveland Bear Attack

3. Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wives

4. Warlocks Perform Intervention for Charlie Sheen

5. Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama

Celebrity gossip site TMZ.com was always in the unique position of not being held to any sort of journalistic code. They could afford to be wrong and suffer no ill consequence because their readers didn’t expect any sort of “real” news to come out of the outlet. Traditional outlets viewed them in the same way we view our younger siblings: as a nuisance. A pesky nuisance, but a nuisance all the same.

Then they broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death, and everything changed.

Editors across the country sat up at their desks, banged their fists, and shouted at the top of their lungs, “By golly! We need to change our ways!” (I’m pretty sure that’s how it went down.) Suddenly, it was that pesky TMZ writing the book on breaking breaking news in the digital age. Newspapers could no longer afford to do silly things like check their facts, or confirm their sources. They had to move fast.

The public suddenly had an insatiable appetite for news as quickly as they could get it. Like, yesterday. And the outlet that provided the news first, won.

Of course, their is a downside, which brings us to the ongoing sage that is the future of University of Michigan football coach, Rich Rodriguez.

If you follow college football and live in the state of Michigan, you are aware that Michigan fans and alumni, like, want this man gone. And, on the afternoon of January 4, Channel 2 in Detroit reported that Rodriguez had been relieved of his duties. But shortly after breaking the news, they disabled the link.

Why? Because, as recently as 8 p.m., the Associated Press was reporting that Rodriguez’s job was still in limbo.

Oops.

In a rush to be the first news outlet to report this must anticipated announcement, the local affiliate ran with a story that, it appears, wasn’t confirmed.

So why is this TMZ’s fault? Because when they finally nailed a big story; they changed the game. They proved that anybody with a computer, a smartphone and a video camera could be a “media outlet.” The big boys no longer owned the news. They were in for a fight they were ill-prepared to win. In a weird sort of way, their years of doing reporting the right way came back to bite them in the ass.

They were too slow. And now they’re playing catch-up with an opponent who is built for speed.

If I was somebody who makes decisions for the Detroit Free Press, I would eliminate the reader’s ability to leave comments on the online version of the paper.

There are three reasons why:

1. There is no two-way dialogue. Blogs — which the online version of a daily paper strives to emulate — are built on two-way communication. Here, there is no conversation taking place between the reporter and the commentators.

2. Feedback is ignored. As far as I know, the writer doesn’t review the comments to get a sense of what his readers think about the content. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d venture a guess that the comments provide no value to the paper.

3. Anonymity leads to verbal sparring. Nine times out of 10, the comment section becomes a virtual yelling match between people based in conflicting opinion camps. Add to that idea the fact that you can be totally anonymous, and it can get pretty ugly.

That last reason is the one I want to focus on, using a recent article about what Detroit could look like in the year 2020 as an example.  

In a city that is rife with anger and apathy, an opinion piece stating that the city needs to change to survive was sure to ruffle some feathers.

But, by the fourth reader comment, all sense of decorum was thrown out the window when a reader named “JumboFishSticks” called the city a “turd,” blaming it all on the “great white flight.” A response to that comment called Detroit “the worst place in America to live.”  From there, we were off and running.

As you can imagine, the constructive comments were far overshadowed by, well, the less-constructive comments, calling the plan to fix the city a “Utopian dream” and “a foolish daydream.” One commentator even took the Web editor to task for inserting a graphic of future Detroit that was too hard to read.

It it within these negative comments that we can see first-hand why the city is in such dire straits. Readers and citizens, alike, would rather spend their energy spouting negative retorts at other commentators on what amounts to an online message board than doing something positive with their time.  But what’s the point of trying to change things when so many others (read: other online commentators) clearly don’t feel the same way? It’s enough to cause more people to become fed up with the direction of the city in a city that is already teaming with lost citizens.

I’m not saying that shutting down comments will magically save the city, but anything we can do, right now, to nip negativity in the bud is a step on the right path.

And the less we hear from people who just want to see the city burn, the better.

Some of my friends don't trust the media. Until last week, I didn't understand why.

I grew up in a household where the newspaper hit our front porch every morning and I devoured it — along with my oatmeal — every day before school. News gathering was as common a daily task to me as food gathering was for Cro-Magnon man.

How could anybody go about their daily lives ignoring the news?

Then, one morning last week, I turned on my computer and saw the catastrophic news: a shortage of Eggo waffles.

While I tried to imagine a future where breakfast tables sat waffle-less, I was blindsided by another piece of news that will surely dampen the holiday spirit: canned pumpkin pie filling is in short supply.

I didn't have to scrounge to find the news, either.  It was front and center on Yahoo - a site that averages four million visits per day.

Suddenly, I had an inkling as to why my friends are so anti-news: most of it is non-news.

As the hard copy newspaper goes the way of the woolly mammoth, we are forced to sift through the noise on the Web to find the hard news.

If it's any indication of where our priorities lie, historians might look back on 2009 as the year the One Piece of Pumpkin Pie Rule was signed into law, and real news became extinct.