How to save the fourth estate.

Saw this article today on a report on how to save journalism. Of course the solution that the politically moderate and fiscally responsible folk over at Columbia University suggest is to tax and spend other people's money to solve the problem. Because that solution has worked so well in so many other areas, like failing public schools, they are doing fine now because of all the money thrown at them. The premise behind all this is that journalism serves an important role to society and society should pay to preserve this institution. That premise however fails on two levels the first level is that journalism has failed to keep up with technology and almost everything they once provided is now available to everyone around the world for free on the internet. The second level on which it fails is journalists have been neglecting their duty and not providing a decent product that people will put their faith in and pay for. Research and fact checking is almost non existent, unless the party you are fact checking disagrees with your worldview. That's right, CNN fact checked Saturday Night Live making fun of Obama. This only shortly followed the White House's communications director calling Fox News a wing of the republican party on CNN of all places. Did she not see the campaign? Did she not see the entire media establishment hurl Obama into office without taking time to wipe the drool from their mouths or responsibly investigate him? The point is there is a template in the establishment media, republicans bad - democrats good. I would rather they treat them all as bad, because they are, but you have sitting democratic congressmen who hid bribe money in their fridge or belonged to the KKK. Democrat scandals get ignored and anything against the republicans gets amplified and repeated, even if it's proved untrue later. There are still people who claim that Bush lied because all of the inelegance services of the world were wrong and Sadam didn't have WMD's.

Journalism is dead, and journalism killed it. I don't know why reporters believe that everyone has to share their worldview or that journalism is about opinions and scandal with absolutely no research. It could be argued that the "opinions" of journalists are just them trying to promote what is good or morally right, but a good journalist would realize that things that are decided in the arena of politics and elections are not for them to decide. Also from a marketing point of view, going political alienates %50 of the country. Why does Fox News do so well? Because they appeal to the %50 that have been alienated and they have no competition. Why do MSNBC and CNN do so poorly? Because they have lots of competition saying the exact same thing.

How do you save journalism? Here's my multistep plan. Step 1: Take journalism out of the archaic (liberal infested)  liberal arts system and put it into business schools or communication schools. Journalism isn't about writing, it's about communicating what's going on and selling it. Make at least a year if not two about just research. You need to know about what you write about and people stop trusting you if your work is constantly in opposition to the facts, see the New York times. (I'm also for everyone at every level of education having to take economics every year. Just like history, science and math. Maybe that will destroy this notion that the way to solve a problem is to tax rich people and spend their money to give stuff away for free.) Step 2: Disavow the establishment. News outlets need to start fresh and start over. Divorce your ideology and start producing an objective product people can trust. That means take the editorials off the front page and leave them in the back with the crosswords. Step 3: Change. Just change, it's time to change the way you do business. I think this internet thing is going to be a big deal, and it's time to start acting like it. Stop trying to save newspapers and local news.

In short, tell the truth, not your truth, and stop being old.

Monday Writer's Block

Been brain dead for 5 or 6 days as what to write here or on anything else I'm working on. I might lock myself in the library for the rest of the day just to make myself work on stuff that I need to get done. Had a pretty good weekend, I saw Couples Retreat and watched a bunch of Sopranos and Criminal Minds. Couples Retreat was pretty good, if just a little bit long. Not the typical Vince Vaughn movie. He was a lot funnier and not as annoying.

Went to the airport yesterday to pick up the girlfriend. I was really glad she was back, but going to the airport made me miss traveling and living out of a suitcase. Oh well, I chalk it up to "the grass is always greener."

I've also been moderating spam comments on my article on whowritesthisstuff.net, that's been kinda annoying. I wish people weren't such shit heads on the internet. People who write spam bots should be put in prison.

Best part of this weekend of relaxing: no football.  

University of Cincinnati: Where did our money go?

I'm a bit frustrated with the University of Cincinnati right now. Tuition was steadily rising before the governor capped it, enrollment has been growing to new record numbers every year, and I just read about UC's research programs getting a new record high of funding. With all of this money coming in Arts and Sciences has been suffering, along with the business college and libraries. Huge budget cuts, scaling back of programs, not replacing tenured professors who leave, and this all leads to less classes students need to graduate. The only colleges that seem to get to keep their huge budgets and get to continue taking space away from others are the colleges that bring money and prestige to the university, like engineering, DAAP, CCM, and Medicine. This seems logical, but most of those students creating the record enrollments are not in those colleges, they are in the two that are the most neglected. Granted most of the freshmen that create those numbers drop out, but the ones who don't won't realize for two to three years that they aren't getting what they pay for until they want to take classes they need to graduate. The department that seems to typify this the best is English, pretty much all of the upper level classes are full every quarter. You think this would be a sign to create more classes for majors to take, but the main function and concern of the department is to have 100+ sections of english 101 (which everyone in the university has to take.) Which brings me to my point, it seems pretty evident where our money goes, and that is not towards the education we pay for. Remember this when they call you begging for money for the rest of your life.

My frustration with the university is two fold today as I have already mentioned on facebook and twitter. This morning the first thing I got to witness at work was a UC police officer chewing out a professor for not having a key. Again, this is what we pay for?

Ohio has the second highest public college education cost in the nation next to California. I would venture to call UC the second best thing run by a state government since California. Is libertarianism the only answer when even federalism fails? How do you hold a university accountable when it has no regard for the students it services and the tax payers who fund it?    

Books

Came up with a plan for what order to read my books in. After The Greatest Show on Earth I'm going to read the rest of my biology books, then other science books. After I finish my war hammer books including  Heroes of the Space Marines I'm going to start knocking a chunk out of my political books, probably starting with Culture of Corruption and Arguing With Idiots.


I renamed the blog as you may have noticed. I came up with the idea while reading about carbon 14, even though Nitrogen is really 14 the hard way since it has 7 protons and 7 neutrons. I figure carbon 14 is really the hard way since it's a radioactive isotope created by cosmic rays. Carbon 14 isn't lazy like nitrogen.

Going to Rehab.

That's right folks, after doing some cleaning I've decided to go into rehab, book rehab. I consolidated all the piles and baskets of books from around my room and filled an entire empty bookshelf with books I bought and have yet to read. Along with two shelves on my other book case already filled with books I need to read that adds up to about one hundred books that are just taking up space.  In order to remedy this and add a bit of discipline to my life I have decided to put myself in a self prescribed, hyperspeed, book rehab program.  My goal is to read at least one hundred pages from two different books everyday. This should allow me to finish around two and a half books a week, allowing me to read all the books I haven't in a little under a year.

That means once a week or so I should be writing an update here with reviews and thoughts about the books I have finished. The books that I bought this weekend and started today are Richard Dawkins' Greatest Show on Earth and the Warhammer 40k pulpy collection of stories Heroes of the Space Marines. I met my goal for the first book and need to read one more story out of the other to meet that goal.

Hi my name is Nate and I have an Amazon.com and Barnes and Nobel problem.

On a side note about reviews, I saw Invention of Lying this weekend and it was pretty good. I didn't realize it was supposed to be an atheist jab at religion till I saw this review over at Big Hollywood. If anything I thought it did the opposite, even though the religion part of the movie just came off like any of the other jokes. In the end I thought it was a funny movie that made a statement about right and wrong and the influence of lying on our social fabric. I don't think it's great enough to write a longer stand alone review of, but I did think it was funny enough to recommend to other people. Leon went to see it with Kresso and Bobby after I recommended it, and they all hated it. So I wouldn't expect a glowing review of it on whowritesthisstuff.net.

Movies that we need more of (Draft)

Recently in a review of Zombieland by Mike Leon he compared Zombieland to Ghostbusters and said, "we need more movies like Ghostbusters." I agree. I have seen many movies in the past 10 years and I feel like we have lost something. There have been movies that I liked because they were good, movies that I loved because they were bad, but there haven't been any movies as great as great movies of the past. We need more movies like Ghostbusters and Jurrasic Park, we don't need a Ghostbusters remake or a Jurrasic Park 8. If I had to classify the two thousands in film it would be the ten years that Hollywood ran out of ideas and just remade old movies and TV shows.  Oh and sequels, a shit ton of sequels. That's nothing new though, hollywood has been ruining movies with bad sequels for a long time, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, Chinatown, Police Academy, Revenge of the Nerds.

The Bottom has fallen out of the DVD market, and blockbusters aren't making back their huge budgets. I blame this trend on Hollywood forgetting how to make movies.  Over ten years all they have done is increase ticket prices and decrease quality. Movie ticket prices have almost doubled and DVD prices haven't. People stopped going to movies a long time ago because of the price, now they've also stopped buying DVDs because the movies are so bad.

Another problem with modern movies is a formula that is typified by Toy Story and Oceans Eleven, you don't need every damn star in your movie to make it successful.  Even the Coen brothers fell into this trap with Burn After Reading. It was a mildly entertaining movie that would have been much more successful with lesser known actors.  The latest victim of this problem was Funny People. The movie with almost no overhead cost $70 million to make because of all the star power. Needless to say the dark understated comedy did not make it's money back, even though it was well written and a good story.  The reason all of these people who make $15 million dollars a film make that much is because people liked them in better movies fifteen years ago that they got paid a lot less to be in. Good movies have fresh stars that can make roles their own.  Having Tom Cruise play a factory worker, average joe in War of the Worlds or a Nazi general in Valkyrie doesn't work, it's not believable.

Failed formula number two when it comes to wasting all your studio's money are special effects orgies, see Peal Harbor, Day After Tomorrow, AI, War of the Worlds and the upcoming abortion-on-screen 2012. Paying hundreds of millions of dollars isn't really going to make your effects more believable and it's not really the draw that it used to be.  The effects made movies like Independence Day and Jurassic Park because people had never seen it done before, now it's been done, stop it.

You have to spend money to make money, it's true, but you have to spend less money and make more. Hollywood has taken on the Sony Playstation 3 attitude of the more money you spend the more money you will make. Coincidently, or not, this change in Hollywood has coincided with Sony buying up most of the studios and consolidating the movie industry. Stop spending money Sony, you suck at business. And other studios should stop spending money like Sony. I guess this ended up being more about what kind of movies we need less of, but the bottom line is we need more movies that are worth the money it costs to make them, think Ghostbusters, think Jurassic Park, fuck even think X Men. Follow these two rules 1. Make your movie cheap 2. If you can't follow rule #1 give people something new.