BEYOND PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

posted by James Reel

We had a staff meeting yesterday at which senior staffers outlined Arizona Public Media’s growing use of social networking media. It’s great that we’re going to make a bigger push with Twitter and blogging and Facebook and such, but I’m not sure that some of us completely understand its potential.

One of the major guidelines, at the PBS level, is don’t blog or tweet anything you wouldn’t say on the air; as the senior staffer said, we don’t want to alienate the core PBS audience. (I’ll leave aside the fact that I work in radio, which has nothing to do with PBS, but that’s common shorthand.) If we’re afraid of offending the average existing viewer/listener, we’re using social networking for the wrong reason.

OK, tweeting “The boss is a jackass” is a bad idea wherever you work, if you hope that the jackass will continue to employ you. And it’s poor form to overuse the Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television (although “piss” seems pretty commonplace today).

But the basic problem with worrying about putting off the core listener/viewer is that, first, the core listener/viewer—some nice 60-year-old who likes Mozart and British mysteries—probably isn’t that into Facebook, blogs and Twitter. And second, the whole point of using those media is to attract new followers to public broadcasting. Most of those people have a much looser attitude toward acceptable content, and they particularly need to see material that’s honest and witty and a little edgy if they’re going to trust is as honest or at least entertaining.

One of the arts organizations I help run, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, has a MySpace page simply because a teenager related to the board president took it upon himself to set it up one day. Somebody on the board is supposed to be supervising it, but a friend request I sent last spring still hasn’t been answered, and the page itself hasn’t been updated since January. Most of the board members just don’t understand that things like MySpace are not simply billboards in cyberspace; they’re interactive, and require a little bit of maintenance. Organizations that don’t get this end up looking clueless, and as foolish as a parent who tries to be “with it” to connect with his kids, without really grasping a single thing about the kids’ music and clothing style.

If you’re going to do this, do it right or not at all.

I HAVE RETURNED AGAIN

posted by James Reel

A long, long time ago I announced that I’d soon be resuming blogging. Obviously, I was being too optimistic. Since then, I’ve been doing my own job (announcing live from 6 a.m. to noon every weekday), plus half the work of each of two other employees who got laid off at the beginning of summer. I’ll tell you more about what I’m up to behind the scenes later, but for now you’ll just have to take my word that I’ve been too busy to blog.

But I did streamline my life at the beginning of September by giving up my arts-editor position at the Tucson Weekly, whereupon I promptly absconded to Greece and Rome for two and a half weeks. Now I’m back, and settling into a routine, and it looks like I’ll finally be returning to the blogosphere on a regular basis.

I may not post again until next week—I’m trying to catch up on a backlog of CD cataloguing—but for now, I’d like to point you in the direction of Jack Shafer’s denunciation of the Federal Trade Commission’s new disclosure rules for bloggers.

In short, the guidelines require bloggers who review or promote products or services to disclose any connections they may have to the manufacturers or service providers. There have clearly been abuses of celebrity bloggers promoting stuff in return for payment, but really, the FTC is over-reacting. Look: Every classical music magazine—those few that still exist, anyway—review CDs provided free of charge by the record labels or their publicists. Everybody knows this. Nobody worries about it. Negative reviews flow as freely as the positive. And even holier-than-thou newspapers thrive on freebies. They’d quickly go bankrupt if they had to pay for their sportswriters’ and arts critics’ admission to the events they cover.

Just for the record, every CD I’m likely to review in this space (most of the reviews are reprints of items I provide to magazines) came to me gratis directly from a manufacturer or a publicist, or from them via a magazine editor. That’s the only time I’m going to say it. If you want to know how I feel about the FTC’s power grab, read Shafer’s article, and see the graphic representation of my attitude to the FTC below.

MEN (AND WOMEN) IN TIGHTS

posted by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review the current Gaslight Theatre production:

Writer-director Peter Van Slyke assembled his latest Gaslight Theatre show as a prefabricated unit from his Spoofs 'R' Us factory. "The Adventures of the Freedom League of America, or Tights Make Right," follows Gaslight's 30-year format of taking the template of some pop-culture genre, twisting it to the point of ridiculousness, pockmarking it with terrible puns, and propelling it—or, sometimes, halting it—with adaptations of rock and R&B standards from the '50s through the '70s. There's nothing wrong with "Freedom League of America." The pacing moves nicely; there are no dead patches in the script; the performances are as carefree as ever. It's just that the material lacks those mad flashes of inspiration that sometimes spark from the Gaslight stage.

You’ll find the full review here.

NO TORTURE AT NPR

posted by James Reel

Alicia Shepard, National Public Radio’s apologist—er, ombudsman—wrote a column defending the news operation’s cowardly refusal to apply the word “torture” to the much-reviled interrogation practices authorized by the Bush administration. Salon.com contributor Glenn Greenwald wrote a column denouncing the NPR practice and Shepard’s defense of it, then invited her for an interview in which she could explain her position and NPR’s. Shepard cowers behind her desk, and refuses to participate in an interview—which is what usually happens when someone knows her position is indefensible. NPR continues to look like just another neocon mouthpiece, like most of the rest of the mainstream media, including the Washington Post and New York Times, let alone the usual suspects like the Wall Street Journal. The notion that NPR has a liberal bias is simply false, and this is further evidence. Start reading here, and follow the links.

SLABS OF COMEDY AND BEEF

posted by James Reel

Well, I’m sorry to get back into the blog with the sort of self-promoting post I hate to see from other bloggers, but at least this is really about things out in the community, not just me. I am referring to my contributions to the Tucson Weekly. This week, I review two new theater productions, beginning thus:

Summer is comedy season on Tucson stages, but comedy isn't necessarily frivolous. Well, sometimes it is, as in the entertaining Jewtopia, a send-up of all things Jewish, courtesy of Arizona Onstage Productions. (More information later.) But there are other kinds of comedy as well, including the fairy romance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, reviewed in this space last week, and an unavoidably serious comedy called Rum and Coke, presented by the UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre. I say unavoidably serious, because Keith Reddin's Rum and Coke is about the U.S.-masterminded invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the first in a series of American military failures over the past 50 years.

You can find the full review here. While you’re at the site, you might also check out a couple of earlier reviews of shows that are still playing: the Studio Connections production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Live Theatre Workshop’s mounting of The Mystery of Irma Vep.

Then, for something completely different, I review a steakhouse:

Outposts usually move farther and farther away from civilization, but The Steak Out Restaurant and Saloon has established a satellite location that's actually closer to Tucson than the original. A little. The Steak Out has been a fixture in Sonoita for about a half-century. Its second location is more convenient for Tucsonans, but it's not exactly embedded in the metropolis. It's out by Dove Mountain, smartly located for the denizens of Marana and Oro Valley, as well as Dove Mountain golfers. The décor is as rustic as you'd expect from a Western steakhouse, but the prices are certainly not primitive; the steaks aren't as expensive as what you find at, for example, McMahon's, but you're not going to get a decent cut for less than $20. So the question is: Is it worth it? According to a group of discerning friends who accompanied me to the Steak Out last week, it mostly is.

Full explanation follows here.

WATCH THIS SPACE

posted by James Reel

First I was waiting for the Web guys to contrive a way for me to re-establish the blogroll, which fell by the wayside when we switched to this "improved" system. Then I was busy with various projects related to KUAT and otherwise. Now I'm about ready to resume blogging, but not quite yet. I expect that tomorrow the stream of brilliant apercus will resume, complete with standing links to the outside world. Stand by.