“Everybody here is on a 24 hour news cycle.”

The above quote is from President Obama at a recent press conference where a reporter attempted to pressure the Commander-in-chief into speculating about how the United States would respond to violence against Iranian protesters. The president refused to be coaxed into making a statement for the sole use of being a soundbyte.

The press conference (and Obama’s response) both highlight the current collective mindset of the news industry. With the advent of widespread knowledge-sharing technologies such as the Internet and cell phones, news is now more a competition than ever before. News outlets battle to be the first to break a story. People no longer wait for 10 o’clock to find out what’s going on in the world. News websites have live feeds that automatically refresh, bringing people the latest headlines from around the world.

How far we’ve come! Of course, we’re the most knowledgeable generation that ever existed. We’re learning things at a far quicker rate. But competition and incompetency can sometimes be strange bedfellows.

Case 1: WWE + Donald Trump

For instance, consider Vince McMahon’s recent World Wrestling Entertainment debacle. In a storyline (read: fake) twist, McMahon sold a large portion of the company to billionaire rival Donald Trump. The Donald, a good friend of McMahon, made an appearance on WWE’s show Monday Night Raw to announce the ‘purchase.’ Fiction is fiction, right? Not according to major news organizations. USA Today and others reported the storyline as news, which in turn sent WWE stock plummeting 6.7 percent.

How could nobody have done their homework? Professional wrestling is known for living in a kayfabe world, meaning storylines aren’t real! (See also: Vince McMahon dies in a limo explosion) Are we to believe that news journalists are as susceptible to trickery as prepubescent kids? Sadly, yes.

Case 2: Michael Jackson’s Death + Twitter

The world lost a pop icon yesterday when Michael Jackson passed away. In what is probably the biggest story of the year so far, news spread like wildfire. The problem? The real and the fake travel hand-in-hand at lightspeed.

Twitter users were tweeting nonstop with status updates on Jackson. Users spread ‘news’ that he was in a coma, that he was still alive in the hospital, and even that he was dead (before it was even announced!). In fact, I’ve never seen so many people cite TMZ as a reputable source. TMZ?! Seriously? Harvey Levin’s paparazzi-driven gossip site is now where people get news? TMZ broke the ‘news’ that Jackson died before even CNN. That, to me, begs the question: does anybody know if TMZ even verified their information? How does anybody know whether or not they were just taking a shot in the dark? Lucky for them, they got it right. And if they were wrong, so what? It’s just TMZ is what people would say. So TMZ gets the spotlight of being the first to ‘break’ the story and they were only able to do so because they lack journalistic integrity more so than major organizations. Does this make sense to anyone?

And to even further the point, Twitterers were also spreading false rumors that Jeff Goldblum had died in New Zealand. It was based on a website with a fake death article generator that had been used before to dupe the masses. But this time, news outlets picked up on the story. Jeff Goldblum became a Twitter trend to the point where Kevin Spacey tweeted, “Jeff Goldblum is alive and well. I just spoke to his manager. Stop these stupid rumors.”

Who can we trust to bring us news? Strangely enough, this is related to the recent blog I wrote about crowdsourcing. I’m willing to speculate that at least 90 percent of the people who found out about Jackson’s death within the first six hours did so by means of person-to-person contact. That is, being told by a friend, reading about it on Twitter, Facebook statuses, text messages, etc. Isn’t this just a form of crowdsourcing the news? If this is how we spread information now, then realistically, news outlets like CNN only need a Twitter page and/or live feed. Everyone will be able to pool together stories from different sources and eventually they’ll all find out what they need to know. Is this how the news industry is going to work?

And finally, just because I think it’s such an awesome quote, here’s the full version:

“I know everybody here is on a 24 hour news cycle. I’m not.”

-President Barack Obama

Source: M.T.A. Sells Naming Rights to Subway Station

The MTA has finally been able to sell the naming rights to one of their subway stations. Atlantic Ave/Pacific Street (which is the connecting station for various trains and the LIRR) will be named after Barclays bank. The logic behind this change is that the new Brooklyn Nets stadium (set to open in 2012) will be called Barclays Center.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, let’s look at the facts.

The MTA has been in severe debt for many years now, and stories about budget deficits and cut service have been much too commonplace. If this $4 million deal will keep Metrocard prices steady (at least for another year or two), then there’s really no reason not to do it.

People may complain that the rebranding process dishonors pieces of Brooklyn history, but it’s just the subway station. Atlantic Ave/Pacific St is sure to become a historic landmark… when hovercars and public transit powered by positive thoughts become the norm. But for now, the subway system is going to remain as busy as ever. It’s not like they’re auctioning off the naming rights to historic streets.

And consider this. The area in question on Flatbush Ave is being completely restructured to become a downtown metropolis. They’ve already torn down old houses so that high-rise condos can be built. They’re going to be building a basketball stadium! Besides the obvious issues surrounding the gentrification of the area, how is any of that any less disrespectful to history? The bottom line is money. Why else would New York even bring the Nets over from New Jersey? Maybe they couldn’t find any companies who wanted to buy the branding rights of the New York Knicks.

Speaking as both a native of Brooklyn and an Advertising scholar, I say you gotta roll with the times.

Source: Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation

There’s an age-old story about a contest where villagers had to guess the weight of a cow just by looking. The town butchers were of course the most accurate. But a curious thing happened- after pooling together all of the guesses, their average was even closer to the actual weight. In short, the combined wisdom of the crowd was greater than that of any single individual.

Now then, that brings us to crowdsourcing. To summarize the concept glibly, crowdsourcing is when a company allows many different individuals to contribute their ideas in a contest-style format and the company then chooses a winner (or amalgamates the best aspects of several ideas). This can work for designing logos, programming scripts, deciding a color scheme for a product- pretty much anything in today’s technological age of connectedness.

Competition lights fires under creatives, right? It makes you put in that extra 10% so you can edge out the competition to gain recognition or a quick buck. So crowdsourcing is a good thing, right?

Well, think about it from the perspective of the creative. The company will no doubt be paying less to the contest winner than if they had hired a professional to do the work, so in this respect, it devalues your work. But it’s not just about the money. If companies just crowdsource the design of everything, then in theory wouldn’t that mean that the opinions of all those individuals would create a super-opinion that would be better than any individual designer? Only in theory. In practice, designers and creatives work in their own distinctive styles, which when done well, help a brand create their own trademark style. If a company just takes bits and pieces of all the best entries, then they’ll lose the subtleties and nuances behind each decision- why these two colors work together, how the curves of each part complement each other, the overall theme of the work, etc.

And of course, let’s not forget that Twitter paid $6 for the design of their logo.

We creatives have to eat too.

The sandwich chain Subway may be solely responsible for the NBC Show ‘Chuck’ staying on the air, speculates this article.

Subway has basically become the official sponsor of the show. Entering into a deal with Subway may deter the cancellation of the spy comedy despite less-than-stellar ratings. And the payoff? Prominently displaying Subway sandwiches within the scene settings and also shameless mentions within the dialogue itself.

Is this the future of product placement?

Well, that’s an inherently flawed question. This sort of hyperreal advertising is already happening in the present. Everyone’s aware that Simon, Paula and Randy (and Kara) all only drink one brand of carbonated beverage. The Transformers movie franchise is the perfect platform for GM’s highly transparent product placement campaign. Viewers of the CW hit ‘Smallville’ can tell you exactly which model of Toyota the show’s characters love to drive and their favorite brand of chewing gum. Even Terminator Salvation, set in a nigh-apocalyptic future, featured a particular SUV blown up by robots. In the scene immediately following the dust settling, viewers had to try hard to ignore the grill of the vehicle on the ground, still proudly displaying the JEEP logo. There was another scene where survivors gathered at a gas station/former convenience store. The camera deliberately panned upward to show a much weathered 7-ELEVEN logo.

Is this the future of product placement?

Will money soon influence art to the degree that the audience will not be able to ignore it? In the age of TiVo and online viewing, commercials have certainly lost their impact. Is the only solution to make TV shows into ads themselves? When do we reach the tipping point? Back when product placement wasn’t as common, it was easy to tell which companies paid to have their goods deliberately placed onto a set. And then it began happening more and it became harder to tell which were the result of natural dialogue (i.e. saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘mp3 player’) and which were being paid for (ironically, the makers of the Harold and Kumar series did not have a deal with White Castle). So what happens when it becomes too evident that product placement is happening? Will it just stop working altogether? Will viewers resent that brand? Or will they grow to love the product as if it were their own child?

Only time will tell.

Anybody wanna offer me a job?