Harvey Levin, the Champion Of Tabloid Tattle — And Free Speech

Harvey Levin

I wonder who will play Harvey Levin in the movie version of his life?

I wonder if any actor repeatedly dogged by TMZ.com, Levin’s celebrity gossip Web site/TV show, would want to?

Of course they would, it’s just too good of a role to turn down.

The biopic would lay out the now 58-year-old Levin’s rise as a law student then law school professor, as a legal reporter and analyst — he was a reporter during the O.J. Simpson trial and involved with the revival of “The People’s Court” TV show.

It’s all sounds like backstory gold to me.

Then, Levin develops and becomes managing editor of TMZ.com — which is now exclusively owned by Time Warner — and the Web site is followed by a spin-off TV show (the money-maker) with Levin as executive producer and the coffee mug-holding host.

Levin next to his trademark coffee cup.

Obviously, the film would delve into Levin’s background and personal life. And liberties, I’m sure, would be taken to embellish the fact that he’s gay.

But the real climax would be the July 2006, arrest of Mel Gibson. While L.A. County sheriff’s officials said it happened without incident, the next day TMZ broke the story about Gibson’s profanity and anti-Semitic comments during the arrest.

Posted July 28, 2006, on TMZ.com.

Before that, most legacy media outlets would have been loath to quote the tabloid Web site. But digging out the truth about Gibson’s arrest gave the paparazzi rag some real reporting cred.

As James Rainey, media writer for the Los Angeles Times points out, TMZ didn’t simply report on Gibson’s drinking and driving but — if its findings are correct, he qualifies — that there is a system of favoritism among L.A. law enforcement for the elite.

And that is something the public should know, Rainey notes during a phone conversation.

“It starts out light and fluffy, but has real substance,” he says.

Flash-forward to 2009 and Levin finds out, through a L.A. Times story, that the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — with a judge-approved warrant — is digging into his phone records in an attempt to discover who leaked the information about the Gibson arrest.

Levin is furious and Rainey, along with a few other columnists and media experts, comes to Levin’s somewhat tepid defense:

Old Thoughts (circa 1997) That Still Have Some Relevance

“Therefore, I say to the citizens of the Fourth Estate:

Be willing to set the agenda.

Be willing to break from the pack.

Be willing, when an important issue is at stake, to sacrifice financial gain.

Be willing to reach out to the politically or socially disenfranchised, including women as well as racial and sexual minorities.

Strive to harness — but also respect — the tremendous power of visual images.

Let compelling writers write compellingly.

Do not be so arrogant as to think that journalism is the country’s only institution of consequence.”

— Rodger Streitmatter, “Mightier than the Sword,” 1997.

Re-Tweet Royalty: @FakeAPStylebook Founders Talk About the Feed’s Popularity

Launched just three weeks ago, the satirical @FakeAPStylebook Twitter feed is well on its way to garnering twice as many followers as the real @APStylebook.

And the popularity is easy to understand. From the very first Tweet, each posting is a comical mashup of J-school basics with witty pop culture references that just beg to be re-Tweeted, such as:

• Use ’sick!’ in brackets as an editorial comment on something awesome. Ex: ‘Apes with flamethrowers [sick!] burned the police station.’

• Use quotation marks to express skepticism: Cher’s “Farewell Tour,” Creed’s “Best Album,” Jay Leno’s “comedy.”

• Use emoticons to let readers know exactly the type of person they are dealing with. \m/ O_O \m/

• @kingthor Yes, you should include “To Boldly Go…” in your Star Trek article’s headline if you want to be known as “That Guy.”

• Pluralizing colloquial references to the Internet is frowned upon and may adversely affect your credit rating.

So who the heck are the geniuses (disgruntled journalists, perhaps) behind the Tweets, as well as a forthcoming book?

Here’s an interview with the @FakeAPStylebook founders by MediaShift’s Mark Glaser.

Tweets from #140Conf

I’m beat after a long day of rapid-fire speaker panels at today’s 140 Character Conference at the Kodak Theatre, which is looking at the effects of the emerging real-time Internet on business, celebrity, the media, advertising, politics, poker, comedy, music, science and, you know, life in general.

Here are a few Tweets that hit on some of the major points I got out of today’s talks:

• heidimiller: Two things @jeffpulver discovered on Twitter: serendipity and humanity. 

• TressieLong: “Beauty of this medium is that its about people ” @davewiner

• staceyharmon: @davewiner says twitter may be the training wheels of real time communication. Much like aol was training wheels of the interent.

• davewiner: My talk is over. Here were my notes, of course I didn’t talk about any of it. http://r2.ly/n88h

• heidimiller: “The idea that there *was* a golden age when we always got it [journalism] right is a myth”–@ariannahuff

• twittermoms: RT: @techzulu Paraphrase @ariannahuff: Misinformation has been around a long time. It didn’t start w/ New Media.

• pamkulik: @ariannahuff Not every story has two sides – truth not always found by splitting the difference eg global warming

• sagnewmedia: When we overtook CNN on Twitter, we realized the voice of an individual can be as big and as loud as a huge corp. -@Sarah_Ross

• theKbuzz: Citizen paparazzi: @sarah_ross twitter has given celebrities a chance to create a connection with their fans and decrease paparazzi

• Jason_Pollock: “Media change is coming and we haven’t seen the revolution yet.” ~@sarah_ross rt @markfriedlander

• web20classroom: Google Wave Teams predicts 1mil users in 6 months…

• shellykramer: Google Wave – we don’t have to implement all the features, but rather will rely on the users to help us make it great

• kirkbiglione: Google Wave team gets best feedback from Twitter.

• zaneology: Omgah WHY-fi puhleeeeeeze have mercy on me…. been kicked off 140times!

• adventuregirl: RT @ajleon “http://twitpic.com/n6lga – Even though we are @ the Kodak Theatr, this is definitely still a geek event #140conf “– SO TRUE!

• webjournalist: #GoogleWave team loves the unintended ideas generated by users, like newsrooms wanting to use it to organize.

• jeffrago: It’s about breaking first with our brand. @BillyBush

• shellykramer: Twitter is a 360 opportunity. It is wit, depth, etc., and you get the most responses when you share real information via @billybush

• shellykramer: Impulse lives forever. No Twitter under the influence. via @billybush

• alanweinkrantz: at the #140Conf, @BillyBush said that while his content is not syndicated world wide, he is syndicated world wide via #Twitter

• kdando: wish every conference I attended had this feature: when a speaker hits his/her time limit, they play music, just like at the Oscars

• kirste: Who owns UGC (user generated content)? Good question. The answer is:it depends, or the answer is yet to be determined.

• heidimiller: Who owns what you post online? You, the site, your followers? Yes.

• heidimiller: Tweets live forever, and everyone can see them. This implies abandoning your claim to your content. legal panel #140conf

• serena: RT: @techzulu Paraphrase @ariannahuff: Misinformation has been around a long time. It didn’t start w/ New Media.

• ReneeAtShens: Publishers take note: indie musician says, What the hell can a major label do for me that I can’t do myself?

• Angeleenie: twitter is about truth-telling and self-correction @jeffreypollack

• ladylux: I like this statement: “Twitter is ultimately about presence.”–@Jeffrey Pollack

• DanaChinn: Twitter + poker = a completely different fan experience @realannieduke

• invisiblepeople: “RT @padschicago: Being @ the #140conf I really dont feel homeless. I feel like a normal successful person. #invppl” -@hardlynormal

• tanyaahedo: “connections will be more important than ranks” – @stoweboyd (via @hensel)

• mitchellsavage: @stoweboyd: On the social web, “…everything we know will be passed like head colds and happiness.” #twitterpoetry

Activision game tester calls controllable Cobain avatar ‘definitely not cool’

Last month, I wrote a blog post about how Courtney Love was taking to Twitter to defend herself — and, presumably, the memory of her dead husband, Kurt Cobain, who is a controllable avatar on Guitar Hero 5.

Kurt Cobain avatar on Guitar Hero 5

The ability to have Cobain sing any song on the game outraged Nirvana fans — and, as it turns out, even the game testers at Activision, which makes Guitar Hero.

I ran into a whole slew of former Activision employees on Saturday at a warehouse party/Street Fighter tournament in South L.A.

And I was really happy to hear Alfredo Barraza say he and other game testers there were dismayed by the feature and initially thought it was a “bug in the game that has to be fixed.”

Here’s what he had to say.

Faux Tauntaun sleeping bag not a joke anymore

Long before “Man vs. Wild,” there was a scene in “The Empire Strikes Back” where Han Solo saves a frozen Luke Skywalker’s life by cutting open a dead Tauntaun and nestling Luke in the beast’s still-warm innards.

It was a smart move.

Not a smart move is posting an ad for an adorable kid’s sleeping bag that creatively mimics this scene complete with “saddle, internal intestines and plush lightsaber zipper pull”  — which is exactly what the intergalactic pranksters over at www.thinkgeek.com did as an April Fools Day joke.

almost here!

Demand was soooooooo high for this product, that ThinkGeek issued this statement:

ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one of these, click the link below and we’ll try!

Well, I was one of those who clicked the link and signed up for an e-mail alert should this plush piece of memorabilia ever become a reality. And that day has come.

A MOCA Afternoon

Sometimes, you’ve got to take advantage of a free trip to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art because, sometimes, you’ve just got to go see some art you don’t really understand.

outside MOCA

irony

our tour leader Suzanne Isken in front of "Africa Banner" by Öyvind Fahlström

I love mixed-media pop culture stuff (that's a technical term: stuff)

I also love art that uses old newspapers ...

... and neon

watch out Stephen Colbert

photographer Robert Frank and writer/poet Jack Kerouac from the permanent collection: Robert Frank's "The Americans"

"Mark Thompson's Airplane Parts" by Nancy Rubins

city and steel

Can newspapers figure out a way to ‘fail like crazy’ in order to spur innovation?

“… Worse still, more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea. Given this asymmetry, you will be pushed to make safe choices, thus systematically undermining the rationale for trying to be more innovative in the first place.

The open source movement makes neither kind of mistake, because it doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t’ make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions. It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure. Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free. This reversal, where the cost of deciding what to try is higher than the cost of actually trying them, is true of open systems generally. As with the mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-then-filter” pattern. In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction. Even in a firm committed to experimentation, considerable work goes into reducing the likelihood of failure. This doesn’t mean that open source communities don’t discuss — on the contrary they have more discussions than in managed production, because no one is in a position to compel work on a particular project. Open systems, by reducing the cost of failure, enable their participants to fail like crazy, building on the successes as they go.”

— Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody”

#ONA09 — It’s like you don’t even need to be there

It’s been fun — and educational — following all the Tweets coming out of the ONA09 Career Summit & Job Fair going on right now in San Francisco. (You can tell when someone makes a really good point because it gets re-Tweeted a million times.)

The conference runs through Saturday and word on the Twitter (@ONA09 or #ONA09) is those of us not at the conference can watch, via live streaming, the three keynote talks and a majority of the sessions.

Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite Tweets from today:

kchavez Skills 4 modern journos: 1. Search 2. Social networking 3. Blogging 4. Biz 101 5. Learn you equipment. By @webbmedia #ona09

seamuscondron FYI – You can be a content curator, work at a news organization, and not be a traditional journalist. #ONA09

smussenden Good tip. When sending out news feed items from FB fan page, do at peak FB use hrs. Lunch, aftr wrk, before bed #ona09

ljthornton RT @Mediabistro: Online News Assoc offering free live streams of #ONA09 keynotes including Twitter’s @ev http://bit.ly/2IWZlD #bc9

agahran RT @tgdavidson: Lewis: “J’ists have to justify their existence.” Not enough to simply write down what others say. #ONA09

markbriggs Hot jobs at #ONA09: 1. Social producer 2. Content curator 3. MoJo 4. Real-time reporter 5. Hacker journo (@webbmedia via @SeamusCondron) **the most popular re-Tweet of the day**

tgdavidson Yup: ’twas @jayrosen_nyu RT @TimaMedia: Scott Lewis, paraphrasing Jay Rosen (he thinks): transparency is the new objectivity. #ONA09

DanaChinn Is “crappy reporter video” (new term according to Chet Rhodes) better than no video? I say yes #ONA09

DanaChinn It’s NOT either/or: Post raw video first THEN spend 2-3 wks crafting complete package. Chet Rhodes #ONA09

jenleereeves “You can’t ask them to fund journ, but rather what journalism does for the community.” #ONA09 Liveblog: http://bit.ly/1O5hwU (via @agahran)

markbriggs At Facebook API session. So is a woman who looks like she could be the speaker’s grandma. She’s taking notes on her iPhone. Awesome. #ona09

xdamman RT @kaylawebley: #ONA09: Think contract jobs, not full-time jobs. Think projects, not jobs. Careers are not hierarchical anymore

Reporters must be honest in online personas, but not blah and banausic

For years, the members of Generation-Text (that non-age specific group that embraces changing technology almost without question) have been warned about what they put out on the Web.

Job seekers were warned  against posting drunken, scantily clad photographs; tweens were warned of sexual predators; young professionals were warned about criticizing their boss. And each warning came with some horror story illustrating just what could, and in fact did, happen to those who ignored these warnings.

But as Gen-Text has matured, the idea of the digital footprint as something to carefully guard and even try to erase seems to be morphing into the idea of using your footprint as a way to form your own personal brand.

We sort-of already do it anyway: You meet a guy at a bar and the next day he’s sent you a Facebook friend request, or vice versa. And now that you have free reign of his profile — you can scrutinize every photo; you scan his status updates for hints of charming humor (or weirdness); you scoff at the fact he’s a “fan” of Kings of Leon; you wonder just what’s so “complicated” about his relationship status; you’re amused to find out you have 23 friends in common, including a girl from high school.

And, of course, he’s doing the same of your profile.

It’s the reason we spend so much time looking at our own profiles, making sure it’s the proper representation of us, of our personalities and our funny little quirks.

It’s also the reason a friend and fellow journalist of mine refuses to have a Facebook page. She hates the idea of anything personal about her being on the Internet. She’s even requested that people take down photos from their own pages that she happens to be in. And she begrudgingly puts up with her boyfriend’s Facebook page, in which he uses a false name, as long as he doesn’t mention her.

On one level I understand where she’s coming from. As journalists, it’s been ingrained into us that we not give any indication of our leanings. We are blank, objective slates. Sure, you may not have a political affiliation plastered on your Facebook page, but a list of your favorite books and movies speaks volumes about where you stand.

At least that’s how the Washington Post feels:

When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment.  We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.

Our online data trails reflect on our professional reputations and those of The Washington Post.  Be sure that your pattern of use does not suggest, for example, that you are interested only in people with one particular view of a topic or issue.

This is an excerpt of the Post’s new social media guidelines for reporters, which have come under a firestorm of criticism for its slippery slope of censorship.

And it clearly demonstrates why the old guard is failing, even unconsciously resisting, to reinvent itself for this brave new media world.

Pretty soon, newsrooms that do not engage in a dialogue with their readers will go silent. Newsrooms that don’t allow readers to talk back, and in turn allow reporters to respond, are in trouble. Newsrooms that do not allow reporters to use social networking for more than just linking to stories on the homepage will become irrelevant.

It seems so counter to every newsroom code-of-conduct, but right now everything is murky and unknown and scary and exciting … But there is one certain: newsrooms cannot go back to the way it was.

Ultimately what this change means — as so many argue — is a shift away from the falsity of objectivity into the reality of transparency.

But what does that really mean? I don’t really know, either.

Maybe it means that my digital footprint will cut a clear path to someone who’s a young(ish), smart, hip writer who indulges in a few vices and examines most everything with a self-deprecating tone. At least, that’s what I’m going for. That’s who I am. And ain’t that transparent.

I’m not scared of my digital footprint; hell, I’ll draw you a map to find it.

So, this … this is my main point: I think having and open online persona is a lot more honest. What is dishonest are reporters trying to lead some sort of public byline-life and a then a secret Facebook/Twitter-life. Or, perhaps worse, leading some banal online existence where they only talk about the weather and recipes.

Of course, there has to be some personal responsibility by journalists. Every journalist knows you’re never off the clock. And I don’t want to be. Whether I’m writing for the next day’s paper or on my Facebook, I know what I’m putting out there is for public consumption.

There has to be a middle ground. It can’t be all or nothing, but if more news orgs implement social networking restrictions similar to the Post (and the Associated Press), journalists are either going to be living these double lives, these boring lives no one will read, or are going to turn off to social networking altogether, to the detriment of the opportunities it presents.

Because the thing is — and this is something the old-guard just doesn’t seem to get — is that you absolutely cannot use social networking as a nine-to-five Rolodex that stays on your desk when you leave the office for the day. It has to be part of your life.

A news organization will not benefit from (fill in new social network) if you don’t understand the way people communicate on (social network) and you can’t do that without being an active part of the (social network) community … and that means making a few mistakes along the way.

But if the Washington Post’s way of thinking prevails, reporters in the mainstream media will only be able to lurk on the sidelines of social networks … that is until the powers that be realize their short-sighted mistake and then desperately try to play catch up.