Postcard of doom

Writing in haste again, taking a break between sessions at my annual geekfest, the Integrated Media Associates Conference, this year in Boston. Nice for me, because I get to bunk with friends in Medford and hang out a little with my daughter in her adopted town. Yesterday was the hard-core techie sessions, with a higher concentration of bluetooth ear phones and bitty foldout keyboards than anywhere outside freshman orientation at MIT. Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it, according to keynoter Michael Rosenblum, video journalism guru. The explosion of services like You Tube represent the tipping point from old media to new. That is, from centralized, cash-fat and exclusive media, to lean, inclusive, democratic media. "Adapt or Die!" is the cry. The difference this year is that CEOs and senior producers are joining the ranks of the believers and the terrified. The message is received, but what will be done with it is totally up for grabs.

Somewhere the mix of social networking, blogging, visitor submitted video, audio and text will intersect with professional curation, the necessary resources, and the deep storytelling expertise of old media to create a synthesis that doesn't have a name yet. At least that is the hope. The alternative looks like holding stock in buggy whips and Betamax. That expressionless psuedo-personality The Market, as always, shrugs and says "Tough noogies." Next up, a day of sessions at MIT, with the title (ominous to many in the room) of "Beyond Broadcasting."

Weighing in (on food)

The pathetically compelling photo of the late Anna Nicole Smith's refrigerator led a number of newsrooms to give their audiences a peek into various network kitchens. (The demands of a 24/7 schedule frequently lead to folly.) I had been noticing a decline in NCPR's collective refrigerator lately. Where's the peanut butter? Is milk supposed to be a solid? Slim pickings. But bring on a foot or so of snow and everything changes. Today Saint Kelly brought in enough venison stew to make all the carnivores sigh, and Saint June brought in her moveable birthday feast of chocolate fondue. Strong work! as my daughter says.

Our Ice Age instincts kick in when winter wallops, and we want mammoth--the whole mammoth. Snowed into the cave, nothing much to do--might as well eat some more just to keep up morale. And when you can't eat another bite, you can still talk recipes. What do you hanker for when there's nothing out the window but snow? Send in your favorite winter comfort food recipes and we'll put together a little page of big food for next week. Write dale@ncpr.org

No picnic

Even with a late start, such as this winter got, by February the cold gets old. The brutality of northern February drives up depression rates, drinking, random acts of violence, self-slaughter. Clearly, a preternatural blowout holiday is called for. But the selection available to us is frankly depressing. Groundhog Day? Unpromising. We wish there were only six weeks left. There’s Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday, both now rolled together into something called Presidents Day, but where’s the party in that? Everyone has at least one president they wouldn’t celebrate at gunpoint; some have many. Discussing one’s views on the topic, particularly over strong drink, is not recommended. And then there’s Valentine’s Day, which is basically a bummer for anyone not deranged by the throes of new-found passion.

China and Tibet have the good sense to postpone their New Year into February. Dragons and fireworks—now there is something to work with. And Ottawa, on seeing nothing taller than a fencepost between them and the North Pole, wisely invented Winterlude. If you’re going to be hanging around outside chipping ice, you might as well eat some deep-fried dough. But if we’re going to borrow a celebration from foreign parts, I vote to borrow from the Buddhists. On their calendar, today is Nirvana Day. The possibilities are breathtaking.

Close to the bone

So much of the news, particularly the headline variety, just flows by, lost in the background clutter of life. Another bombing, another storm, another debate, a new candidate, a famous passing, an expert head articulating a sage opinion. We are poorly equipped to absorb information via newscasts and sound bites. Our ears have been trained by a hundred thousand years around the campfire, and what we want is a story. The news is beamed to us from without, but a story is something we can climb into and experience, as if it had happened to us. This is the power of narrative, and when the right story comes along, it not only sweeps the news aside, it colors our hearing of all the news thereafter.

I think of the dry-as-dust debate now current on the costs and prospects of the war and the merits of this strategy or that for going forward--the carefully tuned language, the assembling of consensus around various resolutions--and then I think of the story this week about a horribly wounded soldier and his brother’s reassignment from the war zone to Walter Reed in order to care for him, and of his family’s move to DC to help out. I could put myself in the place of the soldier, or the place of the brother, or the displaced sister-in-law. I could not put myself in the place of the committee chair or the think-tank pundit. And so I hear the war news now with an ear borrowed from that family’s experience.

Closer to home is the story of a couple whose car went off the Northway, unseen on a bitter night. The husband froze while his wife tried to raise help in a cell phone dead zone. Anyone who has driven winter roads in the North Country long enough has been in that car, watching the windows frost up, listening to the silence. Years of debate on how and when and who and whether to build out phone coverage along the road has changed overnight. No one will be able to speak on this issue again, without reference to this story. And I doubt another winter will come without a network in place. The various stakeholders will work it out--because the story runs too close to the bone.