Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Way back when, January of 1996 to be precise, I did a short phone interview with George Carlin for the Anchorage Press to preview one of his shows at the Atwood Concert Hall. It’s a nothing piece and now, after twelve years and a dead comic, I realize that I didn’t put the one true George Carlin personality detail I gleaned into the article.

The Jan 25-31 issue was my first as Managing Editor of the Press and I was making a one hour commute from Wasilla (some things haven’t changed). I was late, can’t remember why, and I missed Carlin’s call to the office.

I’m still embarrassed about it but the guy called me back (I did grovel to his publicist). So either he was a great guy, willing to give a not-at-all-together reporter/editor a second chance, or he really need to sell some more tickets.

Either way he was classy about it.

The spoken word as weapon

George Carlin has spent a lifetime in the stand-up comedy business. Since his radio days nearly 40 years ago, Carlin has evolved into one of the premier comics in the business with his combination of spoken word performance and social commentary.

Now, at age 59, the devilish comedian has claimed a new title, that of artist.

“It’s a reinterpretation of the world. It’s not high art, it’s not fine art. But I believe an artist needs to go from here to there,” Carlin said in a phone interview last week.

“I don’t know that all [comics] qualify. I am trying to set myself apart. Some people are entertainers. I have entered into another level. It qualifies more as art than entertainment.”

Initially Carlin didn’t plan on being a comic for very long. At age 11 he had his plan laid out: first disk jockey, then move to sit-coms, before graduating to movies in the tradition of Danny Kaye and Bob Hope.

“But fate in various forms conspired against that,” he said. “I had no technique for acting. I was forced to be a stand-up comic for far longer than I thought I would.”

Now Carlin has a new game plan, one that keeps the focus on his spoken word work. He still finds time for acting however, regularly playing the character Mister Conductor on “Shining Time Station,” a children’s show on PBS for which he was earned two Emmy Award nominations, as well as appearing in several films, including Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequel.

“My main line is stand-up comedy. Acting, of any kind, is an important sub-set,” he said.

Carlin discovered that his routine was shifting direction after his 1990 HBO special. By 1992 he had found a new voice to express his disassociation.

“I’m not doing jokes about my relationships, the mall, the guy at the 7-11.” Instead, Carlin said, he is doing more trenchant observation about the world. “Not having a stake in the outcome emotionally I can cut all this stuff loose and drift out by Jupiter” and provide a more coherent commentary on the circus Earth.

Though his Fox television show disturbed his cable-special-every-two-years schedule, Carlin has another HBO concert planned for March 30, his ninth broadcast special.

“I’m going to continue to do an HBO show as long as they’ll have me,” he said.

Carlin still enjoys taking his act on the road, determined to reach as many people as possible through touring and television. Live performance is still his main thing, he said. HBO merely takes the pictures and allows a larger audience to enter Carlin’s head.

“I’m in here. My filter is different. All I know is that I’m free of the society’s and the species’ ties. Ties that make you feel part of the local group. I never have identified with the local group,” said Carlin.

“I’m kind of a floating free agent. That aspect of my personality has been accentuated in the last eight to ten years. I don’t care what happens to this country or the species.”

Stephen Nowers, Anchorage Press, Vol 5 Ed 4 (January 25-31, 1996)

Twitter is one of those web 2.0 services that gets mentioned when technologically minded newspaper types talk about the future of the industry. I signed up a month ago and it’s both better and worse than I expected (let’s not get into Twitter’s chronic downtime issues). It’s essentially blogging in 140 characters or less but the real draw, at least for information publishers, is that an organization can push headlines to mobile devices thereby driving traffic to their main site.

The problem with this concept? Organizations are trying to push headlines to mobile devices thereby driving traffic to their main sites … burying the stuff I actually care about under a wave of inane links. I’ve stopped following the Seattle PI and the New York Times, which is painful because I need some journalism content to justify connecting at work, but the updates got to be too much (careful APRN, you might be next).

At any rate, even in a tech hub like Seattle, the PI can only manage 142 followers. A search on ‘Anchorage’ shows 155 total users listing the city as their location so Twitter is not likely to do much for us back at adn.com. It’s certainly not worth the effort, at least not yet.

But Twitter does work as a social network — I’ve ‘met’ local media professionals via the service and have been able to keep in touch with colleagues in other states — and it can work as a news service if there’s a strong voice delivering the tweets (unfortunate term, but what can you do?). I am completely hooked on NASA’s Mars Phoenix feed. Their Phoenix Twitter updates managed to capture the entry, descent and landing of the lander in something like real time (side note: my new dream job is making videos for NASA.

So my best friend turns out to be a robot. On another planet.

We’ve been having more than the usual number of meetings at the paper this week in an attempt to deal with the process of creating multimedia, and how it relates to our print product. My hope is that this period of reflection will help the Daily News transition away from a “ready, fire, aim” mentality (my #1 least favorite phrase ever), where reporters and photographers will post anything — phone interviews, shaky video — and call it multimedia to more thoughtful, professional story telling.

It’s not going to be easy.

Lack of training is a huge part of the problem, but I’m coming to believe we (read: hourly worker bees) are as much to blame as management. All the multimedia training in the world won’t make a journalist proficient if he or she doesn’t want to learn the stuff.

So here’s my short list of where to start:

The editors sent me to the Federal Courthouse in Anchorage to shoot video of former Wasilla representative Vic Kohring’s post-sentencing press conference. Media scrums are pretty rare in Alaska, there just aren’t that many outlets, but Thursday’s scene was as wild as any I’ve participated in (I take that back — the Linehan sentencing was crazier, but since it was in a courtroom it more contained).

“…The reporters initially flocked around Kohring…” said the Progressive Alaska blog. The media was three and four deep around Kohring but the MSM was nearly outnumbered by bloggers. In addition to Progressive Alaska, the Alaska Report commented on the proceedings, as did whatdoino-steve, and there should be a pro-Vic view posted to USAvsVicKohring at some point (plus I might be missing a few).

Everyone was shoving a mic in Kohring’s face, radio and TV for broadcast, multimedia types (including me) for the web, and print reporters for their notes. Two newspapers were shooting video, the Daily News and the Frontiersman. We were a mob, but I thought a well-mannered one for the most part.

Let’s not wring our hands over the decline of traditional journalism: something better is taking its place. I’m not interested in arguments about blog quality, or whether bloggers are journalists, because they clearly provide more context and more analysis at these events. Want to see more than what TV could broadcast? Don’t like that I chose to edit my video to Kohring’s first three minutes? Find a different clip on YouTube.

The MSM benefits from this new pressure as well. The Daily News sent two photographers, a videographer, a reporter and a blogger, which is good for job security and good for our readers.

Geeks of a certain age will fondly remember time spent in front monochrome monitors playing text-based adventure games from Infocom. Zork was king, but the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game was up there as well. Andy Baio over at waxy.org got his hands on an old Infocom hard drive and published what he describes as “the best parts.”

The Milliways post is great (Nerd alert!), but the 300+ comments are even better. A debate rages between the fan letters, over what it means to be a journalist, unnamed sources and questionably obtained material, and the ethics of publishing something without at least asking the author to provide context (private emails in this case).

The MSM is already wrestling with this stuff: can we quote a mySpace page in an article? At the Daily News we’ve used mySpace pictures to illustrate a couple of crime stories (the Talkeetna Halloween bandits most recently — after that lead up, no pictures).

The AP Stylebook won’t end this discussion.