McDonald's Buying Off Local Newscasts [Evil Corporations In Action]

To pimp its sugary, 200-calorie iced coffees, fast food giant McDonald's offered to pay some local TV newscasts for product placement. And of course the newscasts went for it, since local TV journalism is where ethical standards go to die. Meredith Corporation is putting the drinks in front of anchors at the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas (pictured) and at two CBS affiliates elsewhere. Tribune Company has the coffee at its Fox affiliate in Seattle. Even national Fox News is playing ball, placing McDonald's product at the News Corporation-owned station in Chicago. Station operators offered the Times any number of excuses, but the best has to be from the news director at the Las Vegas affiliate: He argues the placement is ethically OK because it is restricted to the "lighter, news-and-lifestyle" portion of his morning news show. Sounds like the portion of the program that might normally be given over to, say, segments on weight loss, fitness or preventing kids from becoming obese. But these days, if the station wants to do any reports that might upset McDonald's, it is supposed to yank the lucrative cups:

“I’m kind of relying, my client is relying, on just the inner workings of that station,” said [Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal]. “Not that editorial would ever give a heads-up to sales or be expected to give a heads-up to sales, but these are professionals. They do realize that some businesses’ brands, some businesses’ reputations, could be at stake in terms of how commerce and news are interacting here.”

Setting aside how the deal complicates reporting on certain topics, one also can't help but note how it highlights those parts of the news operation already considered journalistically weakest. For the Las Vegas station, the second part of the morning newscast can be sold for product placement, but not the first, since... the first contains the real, actual, trustworthy journalism? At other stations mentioned in the Times story, the entire morning newscast is marked off this way.

The stations are moving forward with the product placements despite the fact that the national news divisions ABC, NBC and CBS have ruled out such practices as misleading. It's almost enough to make one wonder if the local affiliates care more about ratings than presenting a balanced, helpful newscast.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll take a break from all this journalistic hand-wringing and enjoy a crisp, cool Miller High Life. It is truly the champagne of beers!

[Times]

Jezebel Moe Jumps To Radar [Jobs]

After fourteen months as a founding editor of Gawker Media's Jezebel, Moe Tkacik is jumping to Radar as a senior writer for RadarOnline.com. She joins, on the online side, Gawker alumni Alex Balk, Neel Shah and Choire Sicha (sorta — Sicha freelances). Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of Gawker Media's Wonkette, is a contributing editor at the print magazine. Jezebel's Jessica Grose went the other way, from Radar to Jezebel, in October. If Tkacik is anything like Balk, you'll want to keep up with her not only online on Radar but also on her new Tumblr (one of them, anyway). [Radar] (Photo via Moe's Myspace)

More Sex Stories Coming, Says Times [Journalismism]

Were you reading the Times this morning, wondering why there weren't more sexual stories up in there? Were you thinking some sex would fit particularly well in the metro section, squeezed between reports on rent control for VIPs, that Harlem neighborhood photographer and that guy who died in the triathalon? Well, then, you're in luck, because Joe Sexton (ahem), leader of the metro section's scoop ninjas, is saying the paper will likely deliver more discourse on intercourse. Apparently their Eliot Spitzer hooker exclusive was just the beginning! Here's what Sexton wrote on the Times website today, responding to a question about the newspaper's plans to expand New York City coverage:

Readers across the globe, I think, regard New York as a place of fascination and, in many cases, a place of destination. More good stories about a place of such wonder and absurdity, magic and outrage can't but attract more readers — in this city or on other continents.

Jim Dwyer, our gifted About New York columnist, likes to say there are three great, inextinguishable human needs: food, sex and stories. We're going to keep the stories coming, likely including many about food and sex (don't wince yet!)

The Observer wonders if this statement means the paper will create a sex beat (the San Francisco Chronicle created such a position). But maybe Sexton just knows something about one or more elected officials we're not privvy to yet!

[Times via Observer]

(Photo via Times)

End Of Roger Ebert's TV Show [The Cinema]

"After 33 years on the air, 23 of them with Disney, the studio has decided to take the program named Siskel & Ebert and then Ebert & Roeper in a new direction. I will no longer be associated with it." [Reuters]

John Cleese's Radar Connection [Gossip]

British comedian John Cleese is, as the UK tabloids would put it, dating a blonde HALF his age. But that's not the most embarrassing thing about the 34-year-old. The woman, Veronica Smiley, is also vice president for marketing at Radar magazine! (We kid, we kid. Radar has fantastic marketing.) Smiley is based out of the Chicago office, according to Cleese's quote, although Smiley's Facebook has her in New York. Apparently she's never even heard of either Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, Cleese's two most popular serials. While we're waiting for the definitive coverage of the fling from Radar, here are some basics on the couple, who've been very chatty with the press:

• Cleese, 68, is in the midst of a divorce from his third wife.
• They met at a "power breakfast" in New York.
• Smiley: "We had this natural connection and became firm friends."
• Cleese: "I never thought I would be interested in somebody in marketing but she is so acute."
• Cleese took her on a European "divorcey-moon" tour arranged by his friend. Sounds sort of rebound-ey.
• Read between the lines: Smiley: "we are still getting to know each other... it is a very close, very warm friendship."
• Read between the lines: Cleese's friend on a dinner in Zurich: "I don’t think they’d had a major consummation before that, if I may put it that way."
• Cleese: "I am not sure when we’ll be seeing each other again."

In case anyone missed her point about the nature of her relationship with Cleese, Smiley updated her Facebook thusly:

The Sunday Times coverage never called Smiley a "friend," so one presumes the clarification is hers.

Oh, Veronica. At least rent Holy Grail before you put John on permanent "just friends" status.

[Mail]

(Photo via Daily Mail)

Events for Old People [John McCain]

Hey, here is a thing John McCain should go to! New York Times Opinion Page Editor David Shipley, the man who politely asked that Senator McCain rewrite his little story and turn it in again, will be at the 92nd Street Y in January to discuss "The Art and Science of Opinion Pieces." Of course, by then, it'll be too late to win the election, but it will still be very useful for every other time McCain feels like writing a cranky letter to the editor, as most senior citizens frequently do. [92StY]

Non-Lesbians Able to Heal Baby Deer With Their Whimsical, Name-dropping Charms [Looking At The Look Book]

A reader suggested that this week's Look Book in New York magazine was so over-the-top that we should bring back our old "Looking at the Look Book" feature, at least temporarily. And, because it's cucumber season, we obliged. This week's subjects, Charlotte (Sean Lennon's girlfriend, she'll have you know) and Sarabeth, are awesome! We brought out crazed uber-commenter Lolcait (sometimes known as Richard Lawson) to help analyze the friends who met when "Charlotte walked in [to a friend's house] with one of her breasts hanging out."

"No, business PARTERS are the new lesbians."

"Well, it's really crazy, but they can taste things through their tongues... Also, they have the awesome ability to simultaneously "have" jobs and not have jobs. All at the same time."

Total names dropped in interview: only 3. Ability to heal baby deer with energy alone? Priceless.

[Photo: Glenn Glasser for NY Mag]

The Experts Weigh In On Commenter Culture [Things We Actually Like]

Statler and Waldorf were the original bloggers. Or no, wait, the original commenters? They were the cranky old Jewish men who sat in the balcony and heckled The Muppet Show. Now, for some reason, there are viral Muppet videos on YouTube, which we really have no problem with. Here's one of them, in which Statler and Waldorf explain The Internet. [Via Videogum]

Is The Bad Economy Killing The Business Meme? [Marketing]

There's no time like a recession to reassert the conventional economic wisdom that making money is harder than those guys on cable pretend. Viral marketing was huge in the mid-90's before the dotcom bubble burst and everyone realized that eyeballs didn't necessarily translate into dollars. It was only a matter of time before the next crop of counterintuitive pop business theorists — from Malcolm Gladwell to James Surowiecki to Chris Anderson — were doused with the cold waters of cash flow. What's so interesting about this latest cycle of backlash and disillusionment, though, is that the assailants are almost all former apostles turned heretics. After the jump, the spats and surprisingly friendly debates about whether the new memes of trendsetting will remain trendy for very long.

"A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power,” Watts says. “And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there." In order to demonstrate it, Watts repeated and updated sociologist Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment, upon which Gladwell based his Connector theory.

In 1967, Milgram had found that it took around six people to pass a given piece of information from point A to point F, but that in order to make it through the home stretch, a handful of savvy and tapped-in messengers needed to gather at point E. Milgram was restricted to a comparatively small messenger group and dissemination by snail mail. His trick was for decades not retested because its results sounded pretty commonsensical, and they were sexy. (If you want to appeal to marketers, tell them they need only appeal to a charismatic and influential few instead of a blundering and disparate many.) But in 2001, Watts made use of the Internet and vastly expanded the messenger group, enlisting around 61,000 people to forward emails to 18 targets around the globe. True, it did take on average six people to complete the chain of information, however, the “hubs” weren’t important after all. Only 5% of the emails, Watts found, ever passed through them; almost all reached their targets through a conduit of nobodies.

The tussle between Watts and Gladwell is largely over marketing metaphors. The Tipping Point creepily described consumer trends as being disease-like in the way they spread. Connectors act as viral vectors by increasing the rates of infection. Watts prefers to think of trends as forest fires because, as he sees it, both depend more on the environment than they do on who started them.

If I say that means "full refund at Barnes and Noble," will it spread like avian flu?

Calacanis refers frequently and derisively to James Surowiecki’s notion of the “wisdom of crowds” – all set down in the New Yorker finance columnist's 2004 bestseller by the same name – which posits that a group of loosely confederated independent minds will be smarter and more prescient than a single mind acting alone.

Surowiecki has plenty of rules to distinguish the functioning crowd from the unruly mob (Germany specializes in both), but his thesis did nothing if not propel the user-generated content movement of Web 2.0, of which Calacanis is now a sad and shattered ornament. He stormed off the Internet with all the passion of a jilted lover because he used to be a big fan of comments and the scads of traffic they produced for his site Engadget. Now Calacanis likens the squawking anonymities to trolls who reside under houses and drunken hobos who are allowed to critique Carnegie Hall performances (because when you think of blogs, you think of sturdy architecture and symphonies).

If you want to know how the Nazis got started, you could do worse than scan the user-generated content at the Guardian's Comment is Free.

Evidence: The unexpected success of the mountaineering book Touching the Void, a commercial failure when it was first published in 1988. It found an eager audience for high-altitude disaster and triumph when it was listed as an Amazon recommendation for readers of Jon Krakauer’s popular Into Thin Air, which Touching the Void soon surpassed in sales.

A few weeks ago Anita Elberse, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, published a strong rebuttal to the Long Tail in the Harvard Business Review. She found that the web had not in fact changed anything: consumers were herd-driven conformists at the keyboards just the same as they were at the shelves.

Technology writer Farhad Manjoo at Slate put it well: “There is no winning this technical debate. (Elberse calls Anderson's definitions ‘arbitrary.’) But even if Anderson is right and Elberse is wrong, the shift from hits to niches is obviously slight—we are not entering an era devoid of blockbusters.”

Which means that Anderson is still less right than many of his futuroid acolytes have made him seem. Ironically, the Long Tail theory is now a fixture of the Head of the marketing industry, which makes Anderson the Mad Hatter of the paradoxical business meme.

And that fact gets at the heart, I think, of why people are turning against the svengalis of new marketing. They've all become hugely famous and sought-after on the 5-figure lecture circuit by penning ephemeral "bibles" about the next big thing, proving only that they themselves were it. Can you really blame skeptics in a time of scarcity for denying them the ability to have their cake and pop out of it, too?

T Magazine Makes Will Ferrell Stop Clowning Around [Celebrity Science]

Oh, New York Times "T" fashion magazine: we will never understand you. We know the glossy mag brings in a ton of advertising dollars for the paper. But beyond that, its editorial mission is too rarefied for us to grasp. There's the odd indie rock fashion spread or child porn dustup, but what for? Today we were informed by a marketing person that the magazine has launched a series of celebrity "screen test" videos on its website. As far as we can tell, they're the first people to succeed in editing a five-minute long Will Ferrell interview in such a way that it is not funny at all. Beyond that, we're not sure what they were trying to accomplish. Watch the clip below, and take your own guess: