Mosque... coming to the U.S.?

Well, I had the utmost respect for CBC's sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, but all that was lost when I visited their website and found it made heavy use of the Comic Sans font. Come on guys, Comic Sans? Let's get with the 21st Century...

Comic Sans loathing aside, this CBC sitcom is another example of how Canadians do an excellent job at creating television programming that contatins a clear message. In case you don't know exactly what I'm talking about here, Little Mosque follows a group of Muslims living in a small Saskatchewan town as they start their own mosque and struggle for acceptance. While the bigotry the group faces is used as a comedic device in each episode, the show's message of tolerance resonates soundly.

It's clear that Canadians are watching, too. The series premiere attracted more than 2 million viewers--in Canada, a show that draws in 1 million viewers is considered a huge success.

While 2 million viewers doesn't exactly spell success for shows on American television networks, its success north of the border has caused networks here to stand up and take notice. Fox, interestingly enough, has picked up the rights to develop a U.S. version of Little Mosque. When, or if, this show will ever make it to air here in the U.S. is pretty uncertain. If the Canadian version is any indication, Little Mosque will need to make a few improvements--namely in the acting and storyline--if it is to prove popular with American audiences.

But Little Mosque isn't the first "show with a message" that has proven popular in Canada. Over on CBC's rival network, CTV (who successfully wrestled the Canadian rights to air the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games from CBC), Degrassi: The Next Generation is one of Canada's highest-rated dramas that frequently addresses issues like coming out, teen pregnancy and more. Issues that, until recently, American shows didn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Degrassi has enjoyed moderate success south of the border in the United States, where it is the highest-rated show on The N cable network.

The Fox deal doesn't rule out the possibility of the orginal Canadian version of Little Mosque ending up on American cable TV, however, so it is completely possible that we might see an American version competing with the Canadian version for the attention of U.S. television viewers.

"The Magic of Satellite Radio"

Those words are frequently spoken by one of my favorite hosts, Frank DeCaro, during his weekday talk show on Sirius OutQ, one of over 100 channels available on Sirius Satellite Radio. I've been a Sirius subscriber for the better part of three years now, and I must say, it's been a great three years. I don't spend an extremely large amount of time in the car, but when I am in there, I'm grateful I have the selection of entertainment that Sirius offers.

In my opinion, I equate satellite radio with cable television in that satellite radio channels are more targeted toward a certain audience, much in the same vein that a channel like Lifetime is targeted towards women, aged 18-49. Just like you have to pay a monthly fee for cable TV, you have to pay for Sirius, which currently goes for $12.95 a month. On the flipside, however, while you pay for cable TV, you still have to wade through the same amount of commercials as there are on over-the-air, free TV; Sirius features around 100 music channels that are around 100 percent commercial-free.

Channels like Sirius OutQ are the reason why satellite radio, while it has yet to turn a profit, will eventually succeed. OutQ is the only radio station in the country that targets its programming to gays and lesbians, all the while bringing in a sizable straight audience as well. Besides OutQ, Sirius also has several channels targeted toward women (Lime and Martha Stewart Living Radio) and even has a channel for truckers. Over on the music side, there are four channels dedicated to dance/electronic music, and around eight channels for fans of rock. (I have the dance channel sitting right next to the alternative rock channel in my presets.) Satellite radio is perhaps the only place outside of the Internet where you can find niche programming like this, and as readily accessible on a mobile platform.

As far as the Sirius-XM merger is concerned, it's about time the Federal Communications Commission went ahead and gave its final seal of approval. While I am an ardent Sirius fan, there is some content currently available exclusively on XM that I wouldn't mind having access to--namely Major League Baseball broadcasts. Plus, I've found the sound quality is slightly better on XM's music channels than Sirius', so that would be a definite plus.

I still find myself listening to terrestrial radio, mostly KCBS for traffic information as I find Sirius' traffic/weather channel pretty worthless when it comes to reporting stuff I need to know. I also routinely listen to Gary Radnich over on KNBR, a show that will forever have a home on terrestrial AM radio.

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen's book Water for Elephants is on this summer's RTVF 110 required class reading list (it's also the San Jose State Campus Reading Program selection for 2008), and after reading it this past week, I must admit that it has earned itself on my list of highly recommended books. That's not easy for a selection that I've been required to read, as these are typically your standard-issue dry, unentertaining fare. Water for Elephants, on the other hand, is something that is engaging and hard to put down--I found myself reading it in increments of 70 pages or more.

The book is set in the early 1930s, when the Great Depression was at its height. The main character, Jacob Janikowski, was just about to graduate from the prestiguous Cornell University's veterinary school and join his father's veterinary practice in Connecticut. Just as Janikowski is about to start studying for his final examinations of his senior year, he gets the terrible news that not one, but both of his parents have been killed in an auto accident near their home.

News like this would naturally turn anyone's life upside down. Janikowski is excused from his final weeks of classes to return home to Connecticut to make sure all of his parents' affairs are in order. When he returns, Jacob is dismayed to find out that his parents had to mortgage their home in order to finance his Ivy League education, and a significant amount of money is still owed to the bank. Jacob inquires about using the money from his father's practice; but the county sheriff informs him there is none--his father had been performing his services in exchange for goods and other services because his clients did not have any money to pay him.

To put it simply, Jacob was seriously up a creek. Here he is, just a few weeks and exams away from a veterinary degree from Cornell, and now he has nothing. His room and board at the unversity is paid through the end of the semester, but after that, he will be joining the thousands of homeless people out on the streets. Returning to school but finding it impossible to study, Jacob simply walks out of his final exam and continues walking for miles, into the night until he stumbles on a train and hops aboard.

Jacob, who was days away from a veterinary degree from Cornell, has just hopped a circus train. Not knowing anything else to do, he joins the circus staff at its lowest position--cleaning up after the animals.

In setting this book during the Great Depression, Gruen casts a critical look at the area of social classes. The argument can be made that social classes in America were never more front and center at any time than they were during the economic disaster of the 1930s. All but the upper classes had any form of economic stability during this time, and even the relatively secure middle class fell upon extremely hard times following the boom of the Roaring Twenties. Reflecting that sort of fragile stability is our protagonist--Jacob Janikowski--who experiences what he percieves to be relative economic stability snatched away in the when his parents are killed in an auto wreck. In the blink of an eye, Jacob has gone from studying at a prestigious Ivy League university to working for the circus as a college educated pooper scooper.

Gruen shows that social classes are with us in every area, in society as a whole and even in different sectors of society, such as our jobs. The circus is an excellent example of this phenomenon, where the circus animals are on the lowest rung of the circus social ladder, followed by the circus hands, performers and managment. When it comes out that Jacob is in fact a college-educated veterinarian, even if he did not take his final exams, his status immediately rises up a rung. He is bunked with a performer, Walter, who is not so keen on the idea of rooming with someone he considers one of the circus hands. Jacob becomes a friend of the equestrian manager, August and his wife, Marlena, who rides a liberty horse during the circus' main event. He is frequently invited into their stateroom on the train to dine with them and experiences how the upper echelon of the circus lives.

When the circus is ultimately raided in its waning days, it's the circus animals who are first to go as the result of a mass stampede, followed by the circus hands, some of which are unceremoniously red-lighted, or tossed off the train. This harkens back to the society's feelings at the time that these people were disposable, wait long enough and another unskilled, unemployed worker will come along willing to be paid even less than the last.

Water for Elephants is an important book that should be read just to understand what role social classes play in our overall society. I highly encourage you to pick up a copy and make it part of your personal reading program.

New banner

Your surly author finally got around to dabbling around in Photoshop CS3 Extended long enough to churn out the promised flashy new header. Not bad for a little experimenting on my laptop in a Starbucks cafe, if I do say so myself... 

The birth of a television station

My journalistic background is in television news, and many of my friends know me as something of a "television geek." I tend to know a lot of things going on in the TV industry, and something very fascinating is happening down in San Diego. The Tribune-owned CW affiliate KSWB successfully wrestled the Fox network affiliation away from Televisa-owned XETV (yes, that's a Mexican station). The big swap is going to take place on August 1, and the KSWB creative services department has done a great job in creating some interesting promos to let people know about the switch. Thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, you can view some of the better ones after the jump.

Not fiction, not nonfiction...

For many Oprah Winfrey fans, James Frey may be the anti-Christ. He is, after all, one of the few people in the world who can say they have successfully, and very publicly, duped Oprah.

A Million Little Pieces is Frey's hybrid fiction/nonfiction memoir detailing his youth as an alcoholic and drug addict who had frequent brushes with the law. A 2006 Smoking Gun special report showed that Frey had indeed fabricated and embellished parts of his drug abuse and criminal convictions for the book. In 2005, Winfrey selected the book as an "Oprah's Book Club" book, which authors can fairly adequate to hitting the lottery. Millions of dedicated Oprah viewers flock to their local Borders, Barnes & Noble or other book warehouse to buy it the day after it's announced as a selection.

Combine Oprah's Book Club with a little controversy, and you have quite the recipe for success.

As an aspiring journalist, I personally believe that publications that claim to be nonfiction--as A Million Little Pieces was purported to be--should indeed be nonfiction. However, I freely admit that I had absolutely no interest in reading Frey's book until well after these allegations surfaced, after Doubleday, the book's publisher, included a disclaimer in the front of the book calling out the fact that the truthfulness of some of the book's details were in question.

Of course, the backlash that followed was warranted. After all, Frey did lie to millions of people and he should be held accountable. He came back to the Oprah Winfrey show for a public scolding from Winfrey herself, and the spectacle was repeated throughout the following days on cable news shows and national network newscasts. Not only was Frey a former alcoholic, drug addict and criminal, but he was also now known as a first-rate liar.

Is that punishment enough? Frey still gets to keep all of the money earned from the contract he signed with A Million Little Pieces' publisher, and here we are, two years later, still talking about him.

A Song Falls Flat

When Song, Delta Air Lines' experiment at operating an "airline-within-an-airline" failed in the latter part of 2005, it did not come as much of a surprise to many airline industry analysts or enthusiasts like me. Let's face it - these sorts of ventures don't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to success: someone only has to look at the failures of Shuttle by United, Continental Lite, US Airways' Metrojet, and, most recently Ted (the successor of Shuttle by United).

PBS's Frontline newsmagazine took an in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes workings of Song when the founding team was putting together the brand prior to the airline's launch in 2003. Hindsight may be 20/20 in these situations, but as self-described "marketing medic" John Moore wrote in his blog Brand Autopsy back in 2005, that time spent on developing the Song brand might have proven to be the airline's downfall.

To use a musical analogy (as Song was wont to do), Song was trying to sing too hard and outstretched its vocal cords to the point of permanent damage.

"Song was too busy creating a brand to think about being a business," Moore wrote. The by-product of that brand, he says, was the creation of a weak business. Companies like Starbucks, which let the way they did their business build their brand, succeeded because of this mentality. The central value that Starbucks instills in its partners (not employees; your surly editor knows this because he himself was a Starbucks partner for the better part of three years) is the creation of a "third place," a welcoming place between home and work.

Starbucks accomplished that not by putting big banners in Manhattan proclaiming that a neighborhood Starbucks is your "third place," but by instilling business practices that enabled their customers to perceive this for themselves. "The business creates the brand," wrote Moore, and few have followed that philosophy as well as Starbucks.

P.S. Through the research for this post, Brand Autopsy has won itself a place on my blogroll. There's lots of fascinating stuff on there for the branding enthusiast, I encourage you to check it out.

Media Blackout

I spent today roaming the fairways of Torrey Pines Golf Course here in a not-so-sunny San Diego, watching the world's best golfers compete in the 108th U.S. Open Championship. There was one little rule you had to follow in order to gain entry into the event, however:

No cell phones.

As an iPhone owner (and addict), my cell phone isn't just my primary means of communication, it's also my primary means of gathering information and staying connected to what's going on in the world when I'm away from home. Making it worse was the fact that I was attending today's golf tournament with my dad, a man for whom the term "CrackBerry" was invented. So here we were, seated in the grandstand flanking the 7th green, fidgeting because, U.S. Open be damned, we knew there was something else out there that we were missing.

This became even more apparent when someone seated next to me with one of these American Express Championship Vision devices said to his companion, "Tim Russert died today." They must have shown some bulletin on these U.S. Open-supplied devices, or the guy had some special sense or maybe he was able to smuggle in a cell phone.

Whenever I hear something like that, I automatically shift into what I call "breaking news mode." All of you news junkies out there know the feeling I'm talking about: you can sense a huge story is going down, and you need to do everything in your power to find out everything there is to know about it. Well, imagine my plight sitting in that grandstand with no connection to the outside world.

I didn't even know what time it was, because well... I don't wear a watch anymore. That's what I have my phone for. It's sad, but when I wasn't thinking about golf or how great Tiger Woods' tee shot was on that 7th Hole, I was sorely missing my iPhone.

As for Tim Russert, he was a great man and an outstanding journalist. I'll miss the whiteboard.

Good Night...

Good Night and Good Luck, which marked George Clooney's directorial debut (and for which he was nominated for an Academy Award that year), is an excellent film giving us a look inside the CBS newsroom at the time when Edward R. Murrow took on the controversial practices of Senator Joe McCarthy. Clooney told the story using actual footage of McCarthy in action--further emphasizing the truth of the entire situation.

Senator McCarthy made a name for himself by calling suspected members of the Communist Party in front of a special Senate subcommittee (not the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as many incorrectly believe). Some of these people had absolutely no ties to Communists, or they may have consisted of having a friend or distant family member in the party.

When Clooney's film was released in the fall of 2005, many reviewers at the time noted that the timing of the film was no coincidence. As Peter Travers wrote in his review of the film in Rolling Stone, "...Clooney has crafted a period piece that speaks potently to a here-and-now when constitutional rights are being threatened in the name of the Patriot Act, and the American media trade in truth for access." I would have to agree with his assessment.

In a twist of modern-day McCarthyism (simply replace the word "communist" with its 21st Century counterpart, "terrorist"), the Patriot Act restricts the privacy rights of Americans suspected of having terrorist ties. Warrantless wiretaps, access to personal records and more area all granted by this far-reaching piece of legislation that was gleefully signed into law by President Bush shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Releasing Good Night and Good Luck at this stage of the game was no accident--Clooney was making an important commentary on what he--and others--see as McCarthy reincarnated.

That stampede you hear...

...is the sound of thousands of Apple geeks making their way to San Francisco.

In case you don't know, I'd avoid the area surrounding the Moscone Center in the South of Market district of the City by the Bay for pretty much all of next week. Why, you ask? Four simple letters: WWDC.

More specifically, WWDC 2008. No, we're not talking about some television station located east of the Mississippi River, we're talking about the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, where thousands of tried-and-true Apple geeks converge on Moscone West to learn the latest things about developing applications for the Mac. This year's WWDC has become, as have nearly every Apple event since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, a media spectacle as journos from around the world gather to find out what's the latest and greatest product to come out of Cupertino. 

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver his keynote (or Stevenote as some bloggers have coined these presentations) address on Monday morning, and it's widely expected that a new, second-generation iPhone will debut. Let's face it: Apple is the maker of what are arguably America's hottest products (sorry, Chrysler, for borrowing the tagline from another one of your failed ad campaigns a few years ago). Millions of people who just last year spent upwards of $500 on the first iPhone are now going to be lining up in the middle of the night in front of Apple stores across the country to no doubt drop another $500 on the latest and greatest iPhone, that will surely be usurped by the third-generation iPhone in oh, say 2009. 

Even crazier: people are already lining up in New York to be the first to purchase the new iPhone that might debut next week. The new iPhone, while widely expected from Apple, hasn't even been officially announced yet, but dammit, these people are going to be the first to get their hands on it even if they don't know how much it costs or when it'll actually become available. 

I purchased my iPhone at the end of February this year, knowing full well that a new iPhone was probably mere months away. After months and months of waiting, I just went to the mall one night and bought it. I must say, it's been a life-changing device. At the time, I never thought about possibly spending another $400 (Apple graciously lowered the price by $100 before Christmas 2007) on a new iPhone a little over three months later, but Apple actually has me considering it. 

"The Millenials"

Every once in a while, CBS News' venerable 60 Minutes newsmagazine is good for a really interesting, a little less-than-serious news story. "The Millenials," airing on the May 25 edition of 60 Minutes. If you missed it, CBS's relatively powerful video archive has the story available for viewing on-demand.

As Morley Safer reports, the Millenials are those of us who were born between 1980 to 1995. Your surly author, born in 1986, is most definitely a part of this group. Safer's story characterizes us as a group of people who walk around with a sense of entitlement, because we had doting parents and were on soccer teams where we were awarded trophies even if we hadn't won a game that entire season.

Let it be known that the soccer team I was on during my kindergarten year, the Red Panthers, won two games that entire season and we were still rewarded with a trophy and a pizza party after it was all said and done. (As a five-year-old kid, that pretty much made it all worth it right there.) Does that make me feel entitled to getting my dream job immediately after my graduation from San Jose State?

Yes and no. As an only child, my parents told me I could do anything I wanted to do and be anyone I wanted to be, as long as I worked hard and put in maximum effort. I think my hard work and determination through high school and college has paid off, after all, I have a pretty awesome job doing something that I want to be doing. Do I think I'm entitled to this just because I happen to be a part of this "millenial" generation? 

Hell no. But I do proudly wear flip-flops to the office almost every day, and a T-shirt every Friday. This is Silicon Valley, after all. 

My company is headquartered here in Silicon Valley, but we also maintain a large office presence in San Francisco, thanks to a major acquisition in 2005. Many of that former company's staffers still work from there, and there's a decidedly different atmosphere there. I generally make any excuse to go to the San Francisco office, where people walk from cube to cube in their socks and take Nintendo Wii breaks. It feels more like home, I think.

If there's one workplace where a "millenial" can feel welcome, it's going to be here in the Silicon Valley.

First post

Welcome to my new blog, created as part of a class writing project for RTVF 110 - Electronic Media and Culture. We're going to be exploring some new things over the coming weeks, and this space will be a forum for me to share some of my thoughts and feelings about these topics. I am hoping that this blog will become more than just a class project--rather, it will be a place for discussion about my take on the issues facing today's media. Plus, since I'm turning into more and more of a tech geek, I'll probably be discussing some technology stuff here as well.

Now, for a little about your surly author, and this blog...

I'm a senior radio and television journalism student at San Jose State University, where I spent the last year working on Update News, SJSU's weekly television newscast. I have spent nearly two years working inside Bay Area television and radio stations, most recently for KNTV NBC 11 here in San Jose, where I still lend a helping hand from time to time. However, I recently started working in internal communications for a large Bay Area-based software company, a position that seems to offer a little more in terms of stability than today's news media.

Born in Dallas, Texas a little more than two decades ago, I've spent time in Arizona, southern California and eastern Oklahoma before returning to the Bay Area in 1998. I currently divide my time between my physical home in north San Diego County and in San Jose, however my time spent in San Diego is rapidly dwindling as school, work and other activities require me to spend more and more time here in the Bay Area.

As for this blog's title, Rant Seven, there really isn't much of a story behind it. Struggling for a "creative" title, I stumbled upon a random word generator on a Web site. Give it a few words, and it will spit out a new set of words loosely based on what you gave it. A few clicks after inputting my first and middle name, and out came "rant seven." Ranting is one of my favorite pastimes, so it seemed like a natural fit.

The overall look and feel will most certainly be changing relatively soon, as I haven't quite had the chance to design a banner quite yet and I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with the standard Blogger template.

I hope you'll pull up a chair, grab a drink and stay for a while.