A few quick notes on the NYTimes Magazine Screens Issue, pt.1

If you want to borrow my copy of last week’s New York Times magazine, let me know, I think I’ve still got it over on the shelf.  This week’s edition, however, I probably won’t be keeping around.

Opening up the folded paper this morning to pull out the best sections—the ol’ Week in Review, the National and A sections, and of course the Magazine—I saw the sleek cover of the magazine and the title ‘Screens Issue’ and let slip a “fuck yeah”.  Unfortunately, I then made out the partially pixelated face as Jennifer Aniston and let out the kind of sound unusual or my age and more reserved for curmodgeonly old men.

It was a fortuitous pairing of expressions.  We’re friends, so let me give you the bad news first.  There’s nothing in the ‘Screens Issue’ that you’re going to find all that new or all that crazy.  There’s some uninspiring profiles, the outrightly silly Aniston interview, and a few brandy recipes that can’t hold a flambe to the churro recipe from a few weeks back.

Also in the bad column—comments on ‘Moments That Mattered’ by a few recognizable names like Andy Samberg, David Byrne and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, who wrote about being taken aback by once seeing a local TV story on an old dog that was going to be euthanized by its owner, and who also luckily provided a wonderful summary for the piece’s missed point.

(I’m sure the internet will find special insight into the fact that it was Emily Gould who edited the tepid collection.)

The highlights start with this diagram above that accompanied “ayo!” Scott’s piece on watching movies on his computer.  That’s a shit load of online consumption.  And guess what?  I’m very confident that the online category will surpass the broadcast hours in, at the most, 18 months and even fewer if the TV shows viewed online were switched into the online categories.

Perhaps the most worthwhile article was the interview with the ‘Multiscreen Mad Men’.  These gentlemen had a lot of great insight onto how the web works, and here are some key graphs—

on the “when” of consumption:

Bastholm: Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no prime time. There’s no such thing as must-see TV. Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back. You’re like, Why would I have somebody dictate to me what I watch when I’m used to programming for myself?

Rasmussen: So advertising is by necessity a fractured narrative. We have a story we want to tell, and we use different media channels and different touch points to tell it. We have to rely on the consumer to pull the story together.

on TV programming:

Rasmussen: I’m embarrassed to say that until last week, I had never watched Katie Couric in my life. So the other day I TiVoed the CBS news. And I gotta tell you, sitting in front of the TV for that long watching news was painful to me. I realized that I never get a half-hour’s worth of predigested content from one source anymore.

Palmer: I don’t even have a TV.

Bastholm: Most people no longer “watch the news.” Every morning I check the latest headlines on the BBC’s Web site. There’s a Danish newspaper that I check out every day, because that’s where I’m from, and then I look at The New York Times. I get a Twitter feed from CNN as well.

Rasmussen: I get some news online, some I grab through my phone, some through blogs. I get multiple feeds, I gather it all up. Katie Couric is an outdated product, an outdated model; it’s not really relevant to me.

Palmer: What Katie Couric is not giving us, as a mainstream evening-news anchor, is an invitation to participate. So what if we changed the format of her show? Every day she gives us a sneak preview of whom she will interview over the next week. And you can go online and post your own questions. Maybe two or three user questions end up on the evening news, and you’re like a big star if she uses your question. She says your name: “This is Robert Rasmussen’s question.” You’re totally psyched. You feel awesome. And then on the Internet we post the other 17 user questions and their answers. We put those on the Internet, so there’s actually like an hour of content. A half-hour is on TV, and the other half-hour is on the Internet. You start involving people in the conversation. You start using television as the theatrical component to the Internet. Because what TV offers that the Internet doesn’t offer is a guarantee of fame. You know that millions of people saw that bit of you on television.

on monetizing:

Rasmussen: You can make revenue off multiple streams of content. If you’re giving somebody two minutes or three minutes of content, they’re probably willing to accept a brief ad.

Hitt: So every tidbit of content flashing at me on a screen will come monetized by some version of advertising?

Bastholm: Yes. But you have to make sure people don’t stop watching your content because there are too many ads around it. They’ve always got the option of downloading it from a torrent somewhere, ad-free. There’s a happy medium somewhere, and Hulu, the online video service, actually seems to have found it. On Hulu, you get about seven minutes of advertising per hour, which is a quid pro quo that most people seem to be willing to accept.