Posts Tagged ‘media’

Data overload?

I’ve been spending some time on ESPN.com the past couple weeks (more than usual) checking out commentary about the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the NBA Finals, and MLB phenom Stephen Strasburg. I’m not sure it’s a great experience anymore and it makes me wonder: how much content is too much content? There is written, graphical, and video content on the average ESPN.com page. Each competes for attention and, invariably, only one can win out — at least in my brain.

Sometimes, depending on the article, I’m stopped dead by the auto-start video and then don’t read the article. Other times, as in the page at the top of this post, I jump to the article and start reading, realizing part way down that there is also a video feed — the audio of which I can hear, but for some reason, some way, completely missed the visual part. I became aware of this when something in the audio caught my ear and I switched from reading to listening, but my eyes continued to scan the words and I missed both what was said, and what I’d read. It was jarring because there was a distinct switch in my brain from reading to listening of which I was very aware.

I wonder if I should be able to both read and listen at the same time (I can’t and never have been able to — I did my homework in silence as a high-schooler). I either need to read or look/listen but I can’t do both, and I wonder if others find the same thing. One other thing that I’ve noticed on ESPN.com during this playoff season is that much of their content is strictly video, and I find that somewhat off-putting. I like to read, and consider myself a reader, and ingest much of my knowledge through words, more so than watching video.

I understand that ESPN is a broadcast outlet, and it has a wealth of ready-made, rights-controlled, content at its disposal. There is certainly something for every type of user on the site but at some point it gets too overwhelming and you’re left not quite sure what you just encountered because too much has been thrown at you at once. ESPN.com seems to me to be skirting the boundaries of what’s really possible for the human brain to process, or at least the human brain of a guy in his late-30s, who sits pretty squarely in the middle (well, OK, upper end) of ESPN’s demographic.

Am I just an aging anachronism, out of step with the evolution of the web, or are some sites over-stuffed and approaching some sort of content saturation point?

Gus Haynes, city editor of the fictionalized Baltimore Sun on HBO's "The Wire."

In the final season of HBO’s “The Wire” Gus Haynes, the city editor at the fictionalized Baltimore Sun is outside on a smoke break after an announcement of buyouts, talking about papers and why he went into the business. In essence he said he did so because his father, when Gus was young, was never to be disturbed until he’d read the paper and finished his coffee. Anything that could command such attention became a powerful force in Gus’s life and he knew that he wanted to be a part that world.

Written by newspaper-men, the final season of “The Wire” was a paean to the old school newspaper, as much as it was a gritty cop drama focused on the drug trade of Baltimore. Sadly the dramatization of the Sun is being played out ever more frequently in the real world.

Wither newspapers? I hope not. Though deeply steeped in digital media I still have some very strong attachments to certain analog artifacts of our world: Corked wine bottles, ink-printed and bound books, and newspapers

I still get two papers, each day,The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. While I don’t love the Globe, I enjoy its sports page and it does provide solid local news coverage. I love the Journal. I would be devastated to lose either, never mind both. I can only imagine how the 330,000 or so subscribers to the San Francisco Chronicle feel today with yesterday’s announcement by Hearst Publishing that they are either going to sell or shutter the paper.

Papers are the world delivered to the door, every day. The effort and skill that go into creating them and the ability to produce that world-recap each night and have it at the end of my driveway,or beneath my car (different story), every morning is amazing. The loss of each paper, some with long and illustrious histories, marks the death of a cultural artifact. From that perspective, news of the woes at the Chronicle, The Austin Statesman, the Rocky Mountain News, The LA Times and Chicago Tribune should upset anybody concerned with the material culture of our country.

This is not to say that some of the issues surrounding the pending demise of the newspaper industry are not to blame on the papers themselves. They were slow to adopt and adapt to the online space. They are embroiled in issues of fairness and impartiality. They were unable to match the ROI metrics of the web — the medium is the message. They were gobbled up by giant, publicly traded holding companies with much more emphasis on the bottom line than had been the norm in often, family-run, avocational-enterprises.

Now here we are.

I would say the potential death of the American newspaper is not good for the Internet, or the country. The papers provide a counterpoint to the information generated on the web and vice versa. Biased or not you know the political leanings and axes-to-be-ground of the paper’s staff and can process accordingly. This is not so evident when reading Larry-in-Wichita’s (and I’m not picking on Larry nor Wichita) coverage of the State of the Union. I’ll come back to, and close with another aspect of the materiality of the paper — there really is no replacement for the morning cup of coffee on top of the folded paper. As much as I love our laptops, it isn’t the same.