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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, June 29th, 2009 - 1 Comment »
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Eye Off The Prize

I am amazed that the drum keeps getting beaten for the idea that Google and aggregation in general is what is killing Old Media.
The formula for fixing this, as much as it can be fixed, is incredibly simple.
Syndication of content leads to an uncontrolled spread of page views on your copyrighted material. Want to read an AP story? Every paper they syndicate to has a website and as an aggregator, you have the choice of who you are going to give page views to every time you create a link. If the AP wants to stop that and wants to take advantage of views of their material, they need to stop syndicating… or at the very least, force the use of their copyrighted materials behind locals walls in each market and only offer a national link via a site of their own.
Now, the direct result may be that local news organizations place a lower financial value on the AP wire than before and they try to make deals for similar content with Reuters or other content providers. But that is business competition.
I am completely sympathetic to the fact that these businesses got to make money coming and going in recent years, facing no serious competition outside of one or two major competitors, with whom they split the giant pie. But that is over.
The second major step is to push a very specific set of rules that the Old Media companies feel constitutes Fair Use. But it needs to be a fair set of rules.
My suggestion is 500 characters that includes the original headline, a byline, and a date and time of publication, as well as a link to the original material. That would be something like:
Impressionist Fred Travalena dies at 66
BY ZACHARY R. DOWDY
zachary.dowdy@newsday.com
9:23 PM EDT, June 29, 2009
Travalena died Sunday at his Encino, Calif., home of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 66.
By some counts, he could mimic more than 150 famous people.
The Associated Press reported that Travalena, who also sang and acted, reached headliner status at the Stardust Resort and Casino in 2001, a year before the lymphoma first hit. He beat cancer twice but succumbed to the latest attack, which resurfaced about eight months ago, said his publicist, Roger Neal.
If you wanted to use a pull-quote without the rest, max 150 characters:
Travalena died Sunday at his Encino, Calif., home of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 66.
By some counts, he could mimic more than 150 famous people. (Newsday/AP)
Real simple.

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1 Comment »

One Response to “Eye Off The Prize”

  1. mysteryperfecta says:
    June 29, 2009 at 7:27 pm

    Sounds good.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon