Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Turn the newroom on its head

The Nashville Scene:

Nashville’s third-rated local news station, WKRN-Channel 2, is the first newsroom in the country to move to a comprehensive “VJ” model, wherein the TV news staff is told, as Rosenblum puts it, “to forget everything you know or think you know about television because everything you know is wrong.” Videographers who were once responsible only for shooting film are now charged with reporting stories, often even nuanced public policy news that they’ve never before needed to understand in any sophisticated way. Conversely, reporters who have never shot film in their lives are given cameras and laptops and trained to shoot as well as report, edit their own packages, etc. It turns conventional TV newscasting on its head.

Via Romenesko.

Still more on Target

Today in Slate:

Target has long viewed itself as floating above the rabble. It was founded in 1962 by the Dayton brothers, a family of Minnesota department-store magnates, who feared that upstart discounters would move into the Twin Cities and undercut them. Douglas Dayton scoffed at those who would “trumpet democratic price cuts on cheap merchandise"-i.e., Sam Walton, who was founding his Wal-Mart empire down the road in Arkansas. The Target chain, the Daytons decided, would exude the mild pretension of a low-end department store rather than the folksiness of a high-end dime store. (The now-famous “Tar-zhay” pun, emphasizing Target’s exalted place in the discount world, dates back to the store’s founding in 1962.) By the mid-1980s, Target executives had begun describing their market niche in the press as “upscale discount.”

Target was a financial marvel, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that it began to amass cultural capital. At the behest of marketing head John Pellegrene, Target courted high-end designers to class up the stock. Of the dozens that would enlist (Isaac Mizrahi, Mossimo Giannulli, etc.), the biggest “get” was the postmodern architect Michael Graves, who consented to design a line of furnishings and kitchen gadgets in 1999.

The article talks about Target’s appeal to New Yorkers. Last December I noted Target’s lack of appeal in my town.

My favorite

By: Me Company. Their website is cool too.

Target’s New Yorker

My New Yorker arrived today. WOW!

FOR the first time in the 80-year history of The New Yorker magazine, a single advertiser will sponsor an entire issue… The Target ads, in the form of illustrations by more than two dozen artists like Milton Glaser, Robert Risko and Ruben Toledo, are to run only the one time in the issue. They are intended to salute New York City and the people who live - and shop - there.

[...]

The drawings in the Target ads will feature subway motifs, street and park scenes, a dog walker, a cocktail party, even a bridge rendered as a shoe. All the ads, not surprisingly, feature the Target bull’s-eye logo in one way or another, like a giant game of ring toss with the Target targets circling a skyscraper.

“We had a list of New York icons” that might appear in the ads, Ms. Gralnek said, but in the end “these were the rules we gave the artists: the ads had to use the Target bull’s-eye and had to have New York themes.”

The artists were also asked to draw using only three colors to help the ads stand out: red and white, for the Target logo, and black.

The ads are way cool! So much so that I’ve yet to even look at the table of contents.

Update: My favorite.

Worth remembering

My previous post sent me back to look at Eliot Cohen’s Washington Post column, A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War and the transcript of his appearance on Q&A, from which, these excerpts:

I would like to see a call for some sort of sacrifice. Not a draft. A draft is not workable. But I wish I saw more senior administration officials out there trying to persuade young people to enlist.

I wish we had a tax increase to help pay for this. Even if, you know, you could construct and economic theory that says you don’t need a tax increase to pay for this, some sort of sense that when you go to war you’re asking people to give.

[...]

And I also cannot explain to you why it is that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian decoration that we’ve got, went to Tommy Franks, who was a civilian for about a year or so after before he got it. So it wasn’t clearly for his civilian achievements. To George Tenet, who, again, a wonderful guy and patriotic and smart and all that, but who presided over two major intelligence disasters. Or Ambassador Bremer, who, again, you know, dedicated, patriotic fellow, but who was not a success in his job.

Those three guys got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s just wrong.

Very wrong.

Like father like son

Maureen Dowd:

“I’m determined that life goes on,” Mr. Bush said stubbornly.

That wasn’t the son, believe it or not. It was the father - 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush’s frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a month to play around when he had started sending American troops to the Persian Gulf only three days before.

On Saturday, the current President Bush was pressed about how he could be taking five weeks to ride bikes and nap and fish and clear brush even though his occupation of Iraq had become a fiasco. “I think it’s also important for me to go on with my life,” W. said, “to keep a balanced life.”

The Presidency is a bully pulpit; the signal he sends is precisely as he’s said, and all of us must be forgiven for following his lead.

“It’s also important for me to go on with my life.” Me, me, me. My, my, my.

So we have a war with no sacrifice. Tax cuts. Failed officials given the Medal of Freedom. And we’re surprised by the result?