P.S. A Column On Things

Where have all the Editors gone?

Where have all the Editors gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the editors gone?
Long time ago.

Guy? Really?

East Bay Times, final home edition, Sept. 21, 2024

 

Broadcasting Giant Gary Owens

While we’re on the subject of radio (from age 5 to age 21, I wanted nothing more than to be a radio man myself), in the process of preparing a (coming soon) tribute to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, I fell down the Google Hole looking for information on the show’s announcer. Like many announcers and gameshow hosts back in the day, Owen’s day job was at LA radio station KMPC, the crowning glory of a long radio career.

What I discovered was that “shallow fakes” long preceded deep fakes. I ran into a clip of Owens claming to be an aircheck at KORN (no kidding!) radio  in the 1950s.

I wrote the same radio friend as above: “Neither his voice, nor his delivery, nor his sense of humor, changed much in the intervening decade or so before KMPC and Laugh-In.”

To which he pointed out it was unlikely Owens sounded like that as a beginner; most likely it was a recreation he recorded for some much later event at KORN.

Turns out I’d been victimized by a similar “shallow fake.” As a boy, I was given a record I presumed was the actual recording of CBS coverage of the start of World War II, as spoken by the reporters at the time. Many years later, I learned that it was a recreation for the CBS radio series Hear It Now. All it takes for a shallow fake: you’re still employing the same people years later, who can read the same scripts.

--Mogul, the Friendly Drelb

This Is What You Get When You Fire Half Your Staff

Shame must be a foreign concept to the modern newspaper staff. From the Bay Area News Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of vulture capitalists:

Northwest of what?

The kicker is the line above the headline. The decks are the lines below. Those words are supposed do be replaced with actual content. “More Mush From The Wimp.”

And from CNN:

How much longer before on-line headlines become incomprehensible? Moved from where?

 

Meme O’ The Week: Can You Spot The Error?

You will need to double-click the image to see it full size. First correct answer gets an all-expenses paid Tip of the PSACOT Hat for one.

 

 

 

This Is What You Get When You Fire Half Your Staff

Shame must be a foreign concept to the modern newspaper staff. From the Bay Area News Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of vulture capitalists:

Northwest of what?

EBT2

The kicker is the line above the headline. The decks are the lines below. Those words are supposed do be replaced with actual content. “More Mush From The Wimp.”

And from CNN:

How much longer before on-line headlines become incomprehensible? Moved from where?

cnnhead

The World’s Best Groundhog Day The Movie Site

Modesty forbids… oh wait, it doesn’t. I created the best Groundhog Day fan site. You can tell by the URL: groundhogdaythemovie.com.

The two most common questions (among many others) are answered therein:

Why The Loop?

There is one question that has come up several times that I feel I must answer at the top of this tribute site. One of the early drafts of the script explained that Phil was trapped in the loop because of a curse, placed by a jilted girlfriend. Fortunately for the world, director Harold Ramis and writer Danny Rubin decided to drop the explanation, which is one of the major contributing factors to this being a perfect film.

How Many Times?

There has been much speculation as to how many times Phil repeated the loop. There are a few websites that speculate it was fewer than 30. I say to learn how to ice sculpt and play piano like that he repeated the day hundreds if not thousands of times. Some speculate the number is in the 10s of thousands.

Journalism Expert

I can only assume I appear in a footnote or syllabus somewhere, given the constant trickle of clicks on Women in Journalism Movies. In the early part of the century, I got some thoughtful queries. The answer to one:

And, of course, the societal stereotype is that a journalist who loves his job more than his family is a hard-working hero whose wife doesn't understand him, while a woman who loves her job more than getting married is a frustrated soon-to-be spinster, who will drop everything to get married when the right man comes around. A double standard to be sure.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by movies featuring reporters and made an extensive list. I presume new journalists today share the fascination, explaining the click rate. I also cite other good journalism movie sites.

[Why so many journalism films?] Newspapermen were fast and witty conversationalists, Hollywood was full of ex-newspapermen screenwriters (write what you know) and because a headline has the impact of a head shot...a news lead is the opening of a film.

[Moviegoers like] The hardened city reporter, the crusty editor, the visionary newspaper boss, the debonair foreign correspondent."

Jon Carroll Cat Columns

Jon Carroll was, prior to his 2015 retirement, simply the best personal newspaper columnist in America. Take that Anna Quindlen. Once a month, he indulged himself and enterained us with Cat Columns. I could scour the SFGATE archives and find more, but there are the ones I plugged in my column: Jon Carroll Cat Columns.

 “Isn't it obvious? More cats, fewer people. We walk lightly on the land; we carefully bury our waste; we require neither paper products nor petroleum derivatives. Why don't you all blast off for the moon and leave Earth to us?

"So I hide their food bowls in the refrigerator. Childish, I know, but I had to show them who's the boss. Who is the boss?"

Media: Quality Vs. Convenience

Long-time friend and contributor Daniel Dern noted an NPR item about cassette tapes that mentioned sales quadrupled last year. If you’d asked me before I read the item, I’d have told you there were no more cassettes. But if you’d asked me five years ago about a resurgence of vinyl, I’d have laughed in your face. Who would want skips, surface noise and degradation with every play? Answer: apparently, a bunch of young people who have no idea what they’re in store for. Give me a CD.

As an audio guy, of course, I think cassette tapes are an abomination. The quality of audio on a tape is directly proportional to the width, and the speed. Broadcast quality was defined as 7 1/2 ips on quarter inch tape, so 1 7/8 ips on a .15 tape didn’t fill the bill for me; just for everybody else in the non-pro audio universe.

And Betamax should have beaten the vastly inferior VHS, while Laserdisc should have beaten them both, HiDef before its time.

Evergreen

Can you smell it? The faint scent of evergreen―you know, the scent that fills your car when you put one of those tree-shaped deodorizers in it. (Do the still even make them anymore?). Of course, the volatile organic compounds used to release that scent are based on petroleum, not trees.

But, as you’d know if you’d ever been in the dead tree media, evergreens (once known as stories “on the hook” before health and safety removed metal hooks from media offices) are the stories you keep on hand in case of a sudden news shortage. They are timeless stories, with no news hook, that can be used to prevent white space from appearing in the publication.

If you were paying attention, you noticed that I recently ran entirely through my stack of evergreens. Then in a burst of fecundity, I wrote 21 of them.

But it is in the nature of evergreens to disappear into the publication, sometimes en masse.

You will smell evergreen for the next few weeks, should I be subjected to a much desired medical procedure whose name I won’t mention because I fear it has fallen into the same category as The Scottish Play.