Virginia Couple Crashes White House Dinner in Media Scheme

Michaele and Tareq Salahi, on Tuesday in Washington, say they did not "party crash" the state dinner and will explain.
 


Unfortunately everyone is a journalist in the news media. Or is at the very least pretending to be something they shouldn't. Here's another example of someone that believes they can exploit the power of  "new media" to their own advantage - to get on a reality TV show. - MT

The New York Times - WASHINGTON — The Virginia couple accused of crashing President Obama’s first state dinner broke their weeklong silence Tuesday with an appearance on network television to make their case that they had indeed been invited to the most exclusive party on the calendar.

By the end of the day, however, a chain of e-mail messages between a Pentagon official and the couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, showed that they knew they had not been given invitations to the dinner, but they went to the White House anyway.

The messages showed that Michele S. Jones, the Pentagon’s liaison to the White House, had offered to try to get invitations for the Salahis, who are aspiring reality television stars. But on the afternoon of the dinner, White House officials said, Ms. Jones left a message on the Salahis’ answering machine, saying she had not been able to put them on the guest list and advising them not to come.

The White House said the Salahis came anyway.

“As the White House has stated,” one administration spokesman said, “as the United States Secret Service has stated, and as Ms. Jones has stated, the Salahis were not invited. Nowhere in the e-mails do they receive an invitation. In fact, the e-mails confirm they came knowing they didn’t have an invite.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/us/politics/02party.html

Parents in Balloon Hoax Sentenced

Richard and Mayumi Heene, foreground, the Colorado parents who perpetuated the "balloon boy" hoax in October, were sentenced to jail time on Wednesday.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) -- The parents who pulled the balloon boy hoax in hopes of landing a reality TV show were sentenced to jail Wednesday -- 90 days for him, 20 days for her -- and barred from profiting from their newfound celebrity status for the next four years.

Choking back tears, Richard Heene apologized in court for the frenzy he caused when he claimed his 6-year-old son Falcon had floated away in a giant helium balloon shaped like a flying saucer.
''I'm very, very sorry. And I want to apologize to all the rescue workers out there, and the people that got involved in the community,'' said the 48-year-old Heene, a UFO-obsessed backyard scientist who turned to storm-chasing and reality TV after his Hollywood acting career bombed.

The sentencing was the culmination of a saga that transfixed the nation in October with the sight of the silvery balloon hurtling through the sky on live television. In the end, it was all a publicity stunt by a family broke and desperate for attention and money after networks kept rejecting their reality TV show pitches.

The case -- along with the White House party-crashing by a Virginia couple last month -- illustrated vividly the lengths people are willing to go to become TV stars in this 15-minutes-of-fame world.

Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row

Another sign of the influence of bloggers - they have invaded the fashion press and are developing a following. - MT

TRUCE The bloggers Bryan Boy, third from left, and Tommy Ton, right, in Milan.

The New York Times - NOT everyone thought it was adorable in September when a 13-year-old wunderkind blogger named Tavi was given a front-row seat at the fashion shows of Marc Jacobs, Rodarte and others.

Oh now, don’t misunderstand. She was totally adorable. You could have gobbled her up, with her goofy spark plug style — a Peggy Guggenheim for the Tweeting tween set. Her feet, in designer stockings, did not quite touch the ground. Within a matter of months, Tavi Gevinson, the author of a blog called Style Rookie, was feted by designers, filming promotions for Target, flown to Tokyo for a party with the label Comme des Garçons and writing a review of the collections for no less than Harper’s Bazaar. Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers of Rodarte, described her in the pages of Teen Vogue as “curious and discerning.”

Rather, it was what the arrival of Ms. Gevinson, as a blogger, represented that ruffled feathers among the fashion elite. Anne Slowey, who has spent decades climbing the editorial ladder to a senior position at Elle, dismissed the teenager’s column as “a bit gimmicky” in an interview with New York magazine. And in an instant, the subtext in her complaint was read by dozens of Ms. Gevinson’s fans as an example of the tension between old media and new, when one leapfrogs ahead of the other.

As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated. After all, what is one to think — besides publicity stunt — when Bryan Boy, a pseudonymous, style-obsessed blogger from the Philippines, is seated at the D & G show in Milan between the august front-row fixtures of Vogue and Vanity Fair, a mere two positions to the right of Anna Wintour?

Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites - Will it Work ?

Until now - most media has been advertising supported. What fees consumers paid were minimal. Most consumers got hooked on this model. It had its benefits, but media has long been partial to advertisers since they pay the bills. The current ad depression has forced media companies to re-examine this model. Many companies are looking at a fee-per-view or subscription model. This would be very good for media since it would give it more independence from the advertisers who have become much too powerful in dictating placement, and in some cases, even media content. But will consumers pay for content? This NYT story examines the push on the part of media organizations to erect pay-per-view fences for content.

New York Times - Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free. Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/media/28paywall.html

The Facebook backlash - Teens begin unfriending Facebook

America seems obsessed with Facebook - especially journalism school as they fight to stay relevant in the changing media world. No matter that traditional writing and reporting skills are being crowded out by the flash of social media products like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Much of what is uploaded or tweeted is not journalism in the traditional sense - but who cares? Students like it. Scholars gain attention writing about it. And j-schools love the attention the new social media instruments bring.  But for some, Facebook is not all that it is cracked up to be. This NYT story talks about how teens are turning off to Facebook - finding it to be an enormous time drain.

The New York Times  - Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.

Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.” 

Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/technology/internet/21facebook.html

Dallas News Publisher Jim Moroney Really Wants to Stress, "Our Content Isn't For Sale"

The Dallas Observer - Late this evening, Dallas Morning News publisher and chief executive officer Jim Moroney called to discuss editor Bob Mong's memo concerning the paper's new "business/news integration," which has some of the paper's section editors reporting directly to newly assigned advertising-side higher-ups. Moroney said he'd been on the phone all afternoon with Bloomberg News and The New York Times having to explain the arrangement. It wasn't till late today, Moroney said, that he saw our original item, and he took exception to a single line contained therein: "In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo's products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo's products."

"That one line got to me a little bit: 'They will dictate content,'" he said. "I think people will read that as, 'Whatever sells the most will be the content that'll get put online and in the paper.' But it's about the audience first. If we don't have a loyal, engaged audience, advertisers will fade away. Our content isn't for sale. If it is, we're out of business."

As I explained to Moroney, Mong's tortuously written memo -- which he explained to Unfair Park in a follow-up interview this morning -- certainly suggested at the very least a demolition of the wall that keeps a paper's sales-siders out of the newsroom. Said the memo, executive sports editor Bob Yates and Lifestyles deputy managing editor Lisa Kresl, among others, will report to so-called "general managers" now, thereby creating "a new business segment structure as the next step toward becoming the most comprehensive and trusted partner for local businesses." Sure sounds like dogs and cats living together.

Moroney said he understood how outsiders could get that perception from the memo, which has since made the virtual rounds on Gawker, The Huffington Post, Editor & Publisher, The Chicago Tribune and Jim Romenesko's Poynter blog. Fact is, Moroney acknowledged, even those on the inside read it that way.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/12/now_its_the_newss_publishers_t.php

Hearst Plans Digital Magazine, Newspaper Service

The Wall Street Journal - Publisher Hearst Corp. plans to launch next year a service called Skiff to sell digital versions of newspapers and magazines on electronic readers and other devices, in a system it believes will be more visually appealing to readers and more lucrative for media companies.

Skiff would give publishers an alternative to Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle store, which currently dominates the burgeoning field of digital reading. Through Skiff, Hearst said consumers will be able to buy digital publications that have better graphics and look more like their print counterparts, including the inclusion of advertising, than versions offered elsewhere.

The service will include a digital storefront as well as a back-end system that publishers can use to render their publications for a range of electronic devices, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone and small laptops called netbooks. Skiff, which Hearst has been developing for more than two years as a separate company called First Paper LLC, also is developing its own e-reading device with a consumer-electronics firm.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735004574574290782602228.html?mg=com-wsj