The Warshaw Curve

THE DRIVE-BY SHOOTING OF GARY ZENKEL

douglas — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:48:07 +0000

I’m a journalist, a staunch defender of the First Amendment, someone who grew up on George Orwell and the fear of Big Brother, I’m worried about the consolidation of mass media and the co-option of much of the internet by goliath media companies, and I personally hope that everyone who knew anything about the News International Hacking scandal serves time in jail.

But I cannot believe the moral rectitude and utter lack of personal reflection with which journalists like Alexis Madrigal are writing about Twitter shutting down Guy Adams account — after Adams tweeted out to the world the email address of NBC executive, Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as part of the chorus of viewers complaining about NBC’s tape-delaying of the broadcast of many of the premiere events of the Olympic Games.

You can read many of Adam’s vitriolic tweets about NBC and Zenkel on Deadspin. Of course. (And I say that as a good thing. Honest.)

Was Twitter wrong to break its own policy and go out of it’s way to alert NBC that Zenkel’s email address had been published and that NBC should feel free to file a complaint, which basically was expedited and resulted in Adam’s account being shut down? (It’s since been reinstated, and Twitter has mea culpa‘d the fact that it did not follow its own policy.)

Yes. Twitter was wrong. And that’s no small problem.

BUT CAN WE PLEASE HAVE A MOMENT OF SANITY.

This is exactly why 99% of the people who hate the press—and by my count that’s about 99% of everybody—really hate the press.

Because “journalists” like Guy Adams just don’t give a crap about who they shoot in their drive-by shooting form of “journalism.”

And I’ve put “journalist” and “journalism” in quotes not because Adams isn’t a real journalist, he is, but because I don’t think that his tweets necessarily qualify as real journalism. (And, please, don’t interpret that to mean that I don’t think Adam’s tweets deserve full First Amendment protection, because they do.)

If Adams actually cared about other people he would have thought for a second about the implications of publishing Zenkel’s email, and then if he was a smart, compassionate journalist he never would have done it.

First, here’s what it means:

It means that an executive who has worked 40-60 hour weeks and given most of his adult life to the broadcasting of the Olympic Games basically had his email hacked. He didn’t have any information stolen but it was rendered useless. Guy Adams might as well have hired some hackers to stick a worm in Gary Zenkel’s email account. And as a result:

An executive partially in charge of a multibillion dollar investment suddenly had his major form of communication rendered useless.

If Guy Adams had thought about the implications of his actions in advance, would he still have published Zenkel’s address? I don’t know. He might have. But I hope not.

I hope that, instead, he would have found some other way to aggregate all of the people in the world who felt as truly pissed off about NBC’s Olympic coverage as he does and help them make an enormous splash—a truly loud bang—to which NBC and Comcast executives would have had to respond to, immediately and after the Games.

He could have picked up the phone or emailed any of a number of the NBC media executives and communications officers who are working around the clock in London and asked them for a comment—or to get an interview with Zenkel—and then he could have carped and crapped on all of them, whether or not they got back to him. (And from my long-time experience, they would have gotten back to him.)

The fact that, as Adams and others have said, Zenkel’s email address could be found doing a simple google search doesn’t make it fair game.

I’m sure I could find Guy Adams home address on the web, and his cell, and a lot of other information about him and his family. And as a journalist I could print it and claim First Amendment protection, and I could get any number of really great lawyers to defend me for free on those grounds. But that wouldn’t make it right.

And it wouldn’t make it smart.

And it wouldn’t make it insightful.

And it wouldn’t bring anything of value to my audience.

It would just be a malicious, thoughtless thing to do.

So. as I read the coverage by really smart and insightful, passionate observers of the media world like Jeff Jarvis and the folks who are writing about this for the NY Times, I just wish that somewhere in their defense of the First Amendment and their desire to call to account the folks at Twitter and NBC… I just wish somewhere in their posts and articles and opinion pieces they would find a couple of lines to say whether or not they would have done what Guy Adams did.

And I wish real hard that they would say that they would not have done what Guy Adams did.

I never would. And none of the great journalists I grew up with ever would. Dick Schaap never would. Jimmy Breslin never would. Tom Wolfe never would. Nora Ephron never would. Ted Kopell never would. Frank Deford never would. Armen Keteyian never would. (And before you go saying it’s a generational thing: Bill Simmons never would.)

Guy Adams did.

—

Full Disclosure: As many of you know, I’m a contributing writer for Fortune Magazine, and as such I recently wrote an article about NBC Sports… in my past life—in the late 80s and early 90s—I was a producer at NBC Sports and Olympics… and I’ve known most of the major players there for a couple of decades at least… and I’ve known Gary Zenkel for about 20 years.

My gut tells me that if I had never met Gary Zenkel or anyone else at NBC that I still would have written this post exactly the same way.

But that’s for you to decide.

Nora Ephron: the Far Right Side of the Curve

douglas — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:36:18 +0000

Just moments ago, Nora Ephron passed away. She was one of the truly great writers of the last part of the 20th century. And a hellova director.

Nora was incredibly kind to me a number of times when I asked her to take a look at my writing… She had been a “copy girl” for Dick Schaap, back when Dick was the City Editor of the Herald Tribune (and writing under him were Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Gail Sheehy—yup, you read that right)… and since she knew how close Dick and I were, she went more than out of her way… giving me wonderfully savage notes.

I remember one time she stopped and said, “I’m sorry to rip this apart.” And I replied, “Are you kidding me? Please, keep ripping!” (I really did say it with an exclamation point.) I mean, frickin’ Nora Ephron was giving me great advice. And—except for that one moment—she was not at all worried about my feelings, just deeply, honestly, involved in my writing.

Since then, I’ve thought about Nora every time I’ve sat down to write a long piece, wondering what she would say, not about the finished product but about the piece as it was being crafted. And I sent her every story after it was written.

I’m sure I’ll continue to think about Nora every time I attempt to craft a piece that really means something to me. Just as I always think about Dick.

I just can’t send the finished pieces to them any more.

* * *

Below is a copy of Nora’s AMAZING COMMENCEMENT speech that she gave to the graduating class at Wellesly in 1996. It ranks right up there with Steve Jobs commencement address. (Honest.) In fact, I think it should be assigned reading for every boy and girl entering High School. Especially the girls.

In many ways, she was Peggy Olsen.

Nora Ephron

Remarks to Wellesley College Class of 1996

President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble parents…and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you. Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. I had a wonderful time trying to imagine who had been ahead of me on the list and had said no; I was positive you’d have to have gone to Martha Stewart first. And I meant to call her to see what she would have said, but I forgot. She would probably be up here telling you how to turn your lovely black robes into tents. I will try to be at least as helpful, if not quite as specific as that.

I’m very conscious of how easy it is to let people down on a day like this, because I remember my own graduation from Wellesley very, very well, I am sorry to say. The speaker was Santha Rama Rau who was a woman writer, and I was going to be a woman writer. And in fact, I had spent four years at Wellesley going to lectures by women writers hoping that I would be the beneficiary of some terrific secret — which I never was. And now here I was at graduation, under these very trees, absolutely terrified. Something was over. Something safe and protected. And something else was about to begin. I was heading off to New York and I was sure that I would live there forever and never meet anyone and end up dying one of those New York deaths where no one even notices you’re missing until the smell drifts into the hallway weeks later. And I sat here thinking, “O.K., Santha, this is my last chance for a really terrific secret, lay it on me,” and she spoke about the need to place friendship over love of country, which I must tell you had never crossed my mind one way or the other.

I want to tell you a little bit about my class, the class of 1962. When we came to Wellesley in the fall of 1958, there was an article in the Harvard Crimson about the women’s colleges, one of those stupid mean little articles full of stereotypes, like girls at Bryn Mawr wear black. We were girls then, by the way, Wellesley girls. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that while I was here, Wellesley actually threw six young women out for lesbianism. It was so long ago that we had curfews. It was so long ago that if you had a boy in your room, you had to leave the door open six inches, and if you closed the door you had to put a sock on the doorknob. In my class of, I don’t know, maybe 375 young women, there were six Asians and 5 Blacks. There was a strict quota on the number of Jews. Tuition was $2,000 a year and in my junior year it was raised to $2,250 and my parents practically had a heart attack.

How long ago? If you needed an abortion, you drove to a gas station in Union, New Jersey with $500 in cash in an envelope and you were taken, blindfolded, to a motel room and operated on without an anesthetic. On the lighter side, and as you no doubt read in the New York Times magazine, and were flabbergasted to learn, there were the posture pictures. We not only took off most of our clothes to have our posture pictures taken, we took them off without ever even thinking, this is weird, why are we doing this? — not only that, we had also had speech therapy — I was told I had a New Jersey accent I really ought to do something about, which was a shock to me since I was from Beverly Hills, California and had never set foot in the state of New Jersey… not only that, we were required to take a course called Fundamentals, Fundies, where we actually were taught how to get in and out of the back seat of the car. Some of us were named things like Winkie. We all parted our hair in the middle. How long ago was it? It was so long ago that among the things that I honestly cannot conceive of life without, that had not yet been invented: panty hose, lattes, Advil, pasta (there was no pasta then, there was only spaghetti and macaroni) — I sit here writing this speech on a computer next to a touch tone phone with an answering machine and a Rolodex, there are several CD’s on my desk, a bottle of Snapple, there are felt-tip pens and an electric pencil sharpener… well, you get the point, it was a long time ago.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Crimson had this snippy article which said that Wellesley was a school for tunicata — tunicata apparently being small fish who spend the first part of their lives frantically swimming around the ocean floor exploring their environment, and the second part of their lives just lying there breeding. It was mean and snippy, but it had the horrible ring of truth, it was one of those do-not-ask-for-whom-the-bell-tolls things, and it burned itself into our brains. Years later, at my 25th reunion, one of my classmates mentioned it, and everyone remembered what tunacata were, word for word.

My class went to college in the era when you got a masters degrees in teaching because it was “something to fall back on” in the worst case scenario, the worst case scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion, “Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led.” Isn’t that the saddest line? We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t’ meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect. Non Ministrare sed Ministrari — you know the old joke, not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives.

I’ve written about my years at Wellesley, and I don’t want to repeat myself any more than is necessary. But I do want to retell one anecdote from the piece I did about my 10th Wellesley reunion. I’ll tell it a little differently for those of you who read it. Which was that, during my junior year, when I was engaged for a very short period of time, I thought I might transfer to Barnard my senior year. I went to see my class dean and she said to me, “Let me give you some advice. You’ve worked so hard at Wellesley, when you marry, take a year off. Devote yourself to your husband and your marriage.” Of course it was stunning piece of advice to give me because I’d always intended to work after college. My mother was a career women, and all of us, her four daughters, grew up understanding that the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was as valid for girls as for boys. Take a year off being a wife. I always wondered what I was supposed to do in that year. Iron? I repeated the story for years, as proof that Wellesley wanted its graduates to be merely housewives. But I turned out to be wrong, because years later I met another Wellesley graduate who had been as hell-bent on domesticity as I had been on a career. And she had gone to the same dean with the same problem, and the dean had said to her, “Don’t have children right away. Take a year to work.” And so I saw that what Wellesley wanted was for us to avoid the extremes. To be instead, that thing in the middle. A lady. We were to take the fabulous education we had received here and use it to preside at dinner table or at a committee meeting, and when two people disagreed we would be intelligent enough to step in and point out the remarkable similarities between their two opposing positions. We were to spend our lives making nice.

Many of my classmates did exactly what they were supposed to when they graduated from Wellesley, and some of them, by the way, lived happily ever after. But many of them didn’t. All sorts of things happened that no one expected. They needed money so they had to work. They got divorced so they had to work. They were bored witless so they had to work. The women’s movement came along and made harsh value judgments about their lives — judgments that caught them by surprise, because they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, weren’t they? The rules had changed, they were caught in some kind of strange time warp. They had never intended to be the heroines of their own lives, they’d intended to be — what? — First Ladies, I guess, first ladies in the lives of big men. They ended up feeling like victims. They ended up, and this is really sad, thinking that their years in college were the best years of their lives.

Why am I telling you this? It was a long time ago, right? Things have changed, haven’t they? Yes, they have. But I mention it because I want to remind you of the undertow, of the specific gravity. American society has a remarkable ability to resist change, or to take whatever change has taken place and attempt to make it go away. Things are different for you than they were for us. Just the fact that you chose to come to a single-sex college makes you smarter than we were — we came because it’s what you did in those days — and the college you are graduating from is a very different place. All sorts of things caused Wellesley to change, but it did change, and today it’s a place that understands its obligations to women in today’s world. The women’s movement has made a huge difference, too, particularly for young women like you. There are women doctors and women lawyers. There are anchorwomen, although most of them are blonde. But at the same time, the pay differential between men and women has barely changed. In my business, the movie business, there are many more women directors, but it’s just as hard to make a movie about women as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, and nun. It’s 1996, and you are graduating from Wellesley in the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.

What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you — there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the work force trick you — there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.

Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don’t have the alibi my class had — this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: unlike us, you can’t say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won’t have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won’t be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa.

So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women — who have it all — give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can’t have it all. Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn’t know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won’t make the list in ten years — not that you still won’t be some of those things, but they won’t be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It’s slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. “When you see a fork in the road,” he said, “take it.” Yes, it’s supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don’t laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It’s another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it’s also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option.

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.

OLYMPICS & THE LEFT SIDE OF THE CURVE

douglas — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:44:22 +0000

I recently spoke to Beth Carter of Wired about what we can expect this summer in terms of first-person communicaiton from the athletes at the Olympics, and how they will be connecting with—and growing—their global fan-base during the London Games. Here’s a bit of that conversation in Beth’s article about the IOC’s new first-person site….

“Olympic social network joins world’s athletes and their fans” By Beth Carter 19 April 12

The world’s foremost sporting event is embracing social media by creating its own social network.

With just 100 days until the start of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, the International Olympic Committee unveiled today the Olympic Athletes’ Hub, a website where fans can connect with athletes and enjoy photos, videos and live chats from the Olympic Village.

The Hub is a social media aggregation site for Olympians past and present, a way for athletes to expand their presence, increase their fanbase and, of course, build their brands. More than that, though, it is the committee’s response to the sweeping changes social media has brought since the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. The rise of Twitter and the ubiquity of Facebook and other social media has fundamentally changed how we communicate with each other and the world around us.

“The Olympic Athletes’ Hub was born out of our desire to connect Olympic athletes and their fans more intimately than ever before,” Alex Huot, the head of social media for the IOC, said in a statement. “With the launch of the Hub, we are creating a paradigm shift in the communication around the Olympic Games.”

The committee keeps calling this “the first social media Olympics,” and Olympic organisers clearly understand that people want, and expect, to communicate directly with athletes. Huot says the IOC wants the Hub to “amplify the voices of athletes” and “solidify deep and meaningful relationships” between athletes and fans that continue beyond the closing ceremony.

“These relationships could, in fact, last for lifetimes,” he said. “I feel that Olympians inspire and their engagement in social media at London 2012 will result in the biggest online conversation in Olympic history.”

That isn’t hyperbole. Social media will be huge, and the Hub is a harbinger of how coverage of the Games will change, said Douglas Alden Warshaw, co-founder of First-Person Communications and a digital strategist with an expertise in social media.

“Clearly we are past the point where people are drawn to the Olympics because of patriotism alone,” he said. “The ability of athletes to connect with fans and vice versa is critical. Now more than ever you have fans connecting to athletes that aren’t their country’s stars. Like everything else the web does, borders become less important and the Olympics are not immune.”

Embracing social media also is an effort to attract younger viewers, the people for whom tweets and status updates are an integral part of their day. This will provide an interesting real-time look at what people are watching and reacting to — and how TV statiions cover the Games, Warshaw said.

“I think social media will not only be interesting for real time, but also as the younger demographic programming guide,” he said.

The Hub will compile social media updates of Olympians in a comprehensive, searchable directory. Every account is verified by the IOC, so you’ll know you’re following, say, the real pentathlete Margaux Isaksen, not a parody.

Fans will be able to interact with the athletes, get live updates, watch videos and get training tips from the likes of Nadia Comaneci, Edwin Moses, Mark Spitz and others. Cooler still, fans will be able to engage in text chats with athletes live from the Olympic Village during the games.

This being social media, the idea is, of course, to build a community. To encourage that, fans can follow athletes. The more athletes you follow, the more points you earn, collecting virtual prizes like medals and real-world prizes that will be awarded in the weeks and days before the Games begin.

More than 1,000 Olympians have joined the hub, and the number is expected to grow as the Games approach. “The $64,000 question is, will the athletes be authentic or will they let their handlers take care of this,” Warshaw said.

Source: Wired.com

FORTUNE ARTICLES: COMCAST & NBC SPORTS

douglas — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 04:46:12 +0000

My piece on Comcast and NBC Sports—Comcast Bets Big on Sports—is in the new issue of Fortune Magazine. Also on Fortune’s website is a second, short piece—Life After Ebersol—about how Ebersol’s NBC Olympic team rallied just after he was forced out, and how influential (and inspirational) Ebersol remained in the weeks that followed his exit, as the NBC team prepared their multi-billion dollar Olympic bid presentation to the International Olympic Committee.

(The Comcast and NBC Sports folks gave me tremendous access, something I’ll be writing about in a bit.)

MORE CORD-CUTTING and MORE “A LA CARTE” VIEWING

douglas — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:42:26 +0000

Video technology continues to march inevitably forward to more cord-cutting and more a la carte viewing…with the latest disruptor being AEREO.

Want to watch any broadcast channel from your iPad? Or record any broadcast program and play it back whenever you want, wherever your are? (Think TiVo meets SlingBox)…well, that’s basically AEREO (formerly called “Bamboom”), a new video service that recently launched in New York City.

Richard Greenfield of BTIG posted a terrific write-up of the service along with a great video demo. Here’s his video:

Graphic of the Day

douglas — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:30:09 +0000

VenturBeat.com

Just a terrific graphic from VentureBeat.com’s MediaBeat on the evolution of TV Technology/Entertainment, that’s further pushing content to both ends of the Curve.

“THE AGE OF DISRUPTION”

douglas — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 04:28:00 +0000

Fortune Magazine published my story about Americans reinventing themselves last week. The genesis of the piece was my realizing that just about everyone I know is sitting in their office—if they even have an office—spending no small part of their day thinking: “How much longer is my job as I currently know it going to last?…And what the blank am I going to do next?”

Oh, and I’m not just talking about people in the media business. I’m talking about practically everyone except for tenured professors.

We’re living in the “Age of Disruption” — a time when technology has flattened the world, making it easier for new companies to be born, but more difficult for traditional companies to do anything but cut costs and cut jobs. In the Age of Disruption, change has become the only constant: business models are being torn up daily, and the skill-sets required of both workers and managers are in a constant state of redefinition.

I’m not a historian (and I don’t play one on TV) but I can’t recall reading about another period in history where everyone no matter their occupation, their education or their social status, seemed so uncertain and disconcerted about their job future…a time when everyone deep down was worried that they were, at most, a couple of years away from becoming obsolete.

Curious to know your thoughts. Feel free to comment here or toss me an email.

NAZIS & CONAN. (What’s Up With That?)

douglas — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:04:44 +0000

Lisa de Moraes‘ is the television columnist for the Washington Post. I don’t think she’s a very good writer. I actually think she’s a terrific writer, and a great read. And I’m on the record (if they record radio show’s that is) of saying so about her.

That said, yesterday she wrote a column, “Conan tells Fortune: NBC like an ‘Indiana Jones’ Nazi” about some of the stuff that Conan O’Brien had said to me, and I quoted in my recent Fortune Magazine piece, “Conan 2.0: How a late-night Luddite accidentally fought his way back into bedrooms (and computers, smartphones, and tablets) across America.” Her piece appears to be based solely on the Fortune PR release and not the full article, as her conclusions seem off-base and out of context.

Among other things, she insinuates that the powers that be at Time Inc. (Fortune’s parent company) published the piece to give Conan’s show (which airs on TBS, which is owned by Time Inc.) some badly needed publicity, and that Conan himself is consumed by bitterness towards NBC. Well, neither of those things strikes me as true, and I’ve just written as much in the “comments” section of the Washington Post page where her column lives.

Here in full is my “comment” back to Lisa:

Lisa —

I’m the author of the Fortune story…

I have the greatest respect for you—honest—in fact, you just may be my favorite newspaper read and have been for years (and you can ask our mutual friend Tony K. about that), but I think your take on the Conan article is way off the mark, and seems to have come from reading the press release (which I’ve actually not seen, myself), rather than from reading the article. First off, and most importantly:

Time Inc. had nothing to do with commissioning this article. I pitched Fortune—and I’m not a Time Inc. employee, nor have I ever been. (In full disclosure, I have done other freelance work for Time Inc. properties but not for close to a decade; oh, and I sold them a photo about five years ago. But I think that’s it.)

In short, I had no interest in writing this piece to promote Conan on behalf of Time Inc., and they didn’t publish it for that reason.

My only motivation for writing the piece—outside of getting paid—was that, as a digital strategist who for many years was a television journalist and producer, I find it fascinating that “traditional media” people still don’t understand the social media phenomenon…and I found Conan’s story particularly fascinating—and fun to tell—because of how he accidentally was thrown into the digital world, and how he and his team have now made a major investment in it.

.
* As for Conan’s bitterness:

Nobody on the show—from Conan to his writers, to his bookers, to his stage manager or the rest of the crew—pissed one drop of bitterness on NBC the entire time I was with them. And I had full access to everybody. (And since I’ve worked as a producer at NBC at various times since 1989, I’ve casually known a bunch of the Conan folks, from the producers to the crew, for a long time. So, trust me, they’d have no problem pissing to me, and none of them did, not even off the record.)
.

* As for Nazi bitterness:

Yeah, Conan made the Harrison Ford fighting the Nazi allusion, but it was far more about feeling like he was thrown through a windshield than it was about a Nazi doing it. That said, my guess is that Conan won’t be buying Jeff Zucker a Valentines day card on Monday—still, I don’t think Conan has dreams in which Jeff’s wearing a little box mustache, like the one Michael Jordan’s sporting these days. (What’s up with that, anyway?)
.

* As for Conan comparing himself to the Beatles and Elvis:

It happened while we were talking about the process of performers needing to evolve as technology evolves, and how they need to find their own voice —Conan was comparing the process more than the players. That said, no one gets to host their own late night show without having some ego.
.

While we may have differences of opinion about how to interpret the Conan quotes, I think most of the above is clear to anyone who has read the full article—whether or not they like Conan the person or the show. (The full article is at http://bit.ly/CONAN-Fortune )

— Douglas Warshaw

“CONAN O’BRIEN 2.0″ in Fortune Magazine

douglas — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:00:56 +0000

My article in Fortune Magazine on Conan O’Brien’s wonderfully accidental digital transformation — “Conan 2.0: How a late-night Luddite accidentally fought his way back into bedrooms (and onto computers, smartphones, and tablets) across America” — is now online, and will be on newsstands on Monday: http://bit.ly/CONAN-Fortune

GOOGLE TV’s COMING… WATCH THE CURVE HIT YOUR LIVING ROOM

douglas — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:43:51 +0000

Big ups to the developer from Channel Intel who posted the below video of the Google TV demo. (And please don’t ask me why it took me so long to post it here.) It’s a short video, so take a look and you will quickly see how Google TV, Yahoo TV, Boxee and the other disruptive IPTV technologies will change how you watch TV.

And then sit back and watch the networks try to deal with this new media equation:

CP + DT (O-DVFA) = NFN

Spelled out, thats:

Couch Potatoes + Disruptive Technology (On-Demand Video From Anywhere) = Nightmare for Networks

The result will be classic Curve: Lots more watching of High-End and Low-End content, with the middle dropping out even further. (Big time).

Second prediction:

The “lean-forward” experience of laptop viewing will become a “lean-back” experience of group selecting and sharing—in the same room—in real-time. Yup, I’m not talking about an over the web, social-network sharing with friends, TV viewing experience—which will be cool, and huge—I’m saying get ready for the return of the wonderful experience of watching something other than the Super Bowl with a group of friends in your living room.

It won’t be appointment TV (aka Ed Sullivan), it will be, “Hey, I gotta show you something!”—spontaneous and serendipitous TV watching. (SSTV?) And the over-40′s will be doing it, too.

(Okay, why am I showing you something shot from a hand-held camera? Well, unfortunately Google’s own video from their developer’s event doesn’t show their product at work. Why? Well, because Google is trying hard not to piss off the TV networks in the hopes of getting them to work with them, Google doesn’t want to post the full demo that includes clips of the network and cable TV shows. Ah, those of those pesky licensing and copyright issues. Insane, right).

And speaking of those pesky copyright issues and Ed Sullivan, let’s see how long this stays up:
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