He and I have been working hard on the album for the past few months (he more than I), and I’m proud to say six of the ten songs on Seth’s second effort were recorded by none other than me.

Seth has a folky, lo-fi vibe (lo-fi mostly due to my meagre recording setup). You can probably catch him performing somewhere around Reston if you keep your eyes out.

Here are the mp3s for the new album (right click and “Save As” to keep). Those asterisked are the ones not recorded in my luxurious home studio. They’re collaborations with Micah Nagel. On the rest Seth plays all the instruments. I mostly clicked buttons and fondled knobs.

To start with, I suggest ‘When I Get Home,’ which is my favorite (I’m also liking ‘Yes, I Know’ a lot right now).

1. Green Eyed Gal*
2. Yes, I Know*
3. Brandywine
4. Occam’s Razor
5. Ten Foot Tall Blues
6. Lazarus, Rise*
7. Speed of Sound
8. Damsel With a Dulcimer
9. When I Get Home
10. Got a Mind to Go Out Walkin’*

I also recorded much of Seth’s first album back in 2007. I also highly recommend it.

All the focus on the campaign led to record numbers of viewers/readers for print and television news, with websites seeing some of the largest gains.

Which is to say the larger media outlets loved the election. It got people to read, to watch, to debate and to be involved with their news sources.

Also, though, the election showed the weaknesses of the mainstream media. As they got hooked, news consumers looked first to the large media for their news. There they found slow, tentative coverage with little of the analysis they craved. So they branched out, found political blogs, rumor sites, and even to a greater degree began watching the speeches and debates first hand in order to form their own opinions.

We’ve been told that new media is weakening the old guard, but during this election cycle we saw just how new media would finally break the press.

From early in the primaries, the candidates saw this happening to differing degrees, and responded in kind. From the WSJ:

“This year’s campaign…has marked a change in the role the press plays. The prominence, readership and influence of online political sites has mushroomed, taking away some of the prominence of the mainstream media — traditional television networks, newspapers and news services. Campaigns have taken to getting out word of pending shifts in strategy by leaking them to political websites, and both parties catered to bloggers at their conventions.

“For example, when word first circulated that the McCain campaign was about to launch its first TV ad linking Sen. Obama with former Weathermen radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign promptly told the political website Politico.com…that it intended to counter with an ad calling Sen. McCain ‘erratic in a crisis.’ … [W]ord of the Obama team’s planned countermove was circulating among politicians and journalists before they had even seen the McCain ad that prompted it.”

After years of getting scooped by the Internet, large media outlets now found themselves being routinely scooped in political coverage, a market they were supposed to have cornered. How did this happen? After all, it was the big guys who had the credentials, who were there on the campaign planes flying from stump to stump with the candidates.

In the Internet, candidates saw something hard to control and impossible to predict, but something where the plurality of voices lead to stories rising to the top based on the strength of the message. The candidates also saw a place that, if they hit first and well, might be won over.

Mainstream news outlets began to respond. From Time:

“As politics has expanded to more platforms–blogs, YouTube, comedy shows–the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

“This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people’s appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered.

…

“The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media — all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy — learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn’t snark, you didn’t exist.”

From the Washington Post:

“Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online…the wire service is evolving into the world’s largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it.”

Later:

“‘It’s enough that we’re expected to always be first, this incredible pressure to break the news,’ one AP political reporter told me. ‘But now we also have to magically find a brilliant and nifty lead, the unique angle, while still beating everyone else. I feel like I’m competing with Politico, the New York Times and Reuters simultaneously.’ And, indeed, they are.”

The media splintered. Analysis came quicker and reporters found their voices; instead of pretending reporters are robots transcribing events verbatim, we read them knowing they may be wrong (sometimes expecting them to be so). The robot work we’ve passed on to the video streams, the transcripts, we can compare. And in this election many did.

The media became less about trust, and more about depth. It was great.

Was great, as it turned out. TV networks pulled back on election night. For all the streamlining and sharpening they mustered in the months leading up to the election, they pussyfooted at the last second.

The NYT admits:

“It was clear long before 11 p.m. that Mr. Obama had won, but anchors were skittish about saying too much too soon.”

In fact, “Barack Obama’s victory was told tentatively, elliptically, less with numbers than with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy. Throughout the night, the obvious was hinted at with gauzy video clips filling the screen. As states toppled in Mr. Obama’s favor, news programs ran lyrical pictures of the Obama family that looked as iconic as a Kennedy scrapbook.”

But they wouldn’t say it. After Ohio came in they wouldn’t just say that Obama was the winner, was pretty much the winner, that it the chances of McCain winning Virginia, Florida, and California (one of the only ways he could have won after that) were between slim and none.

Watching CNN, I remember two anchors coloring in states, showing how many electoral votes McCain would have if he won various remaining states.

“I’m not going to be dishonest and say it’s possible McCain could win California, Washington, or Oregon,” one anchor said, leaving McCain woefully under 270 votes. “So?…” the other anchor led. “Yeah,” he replied.

Obama’s victory was only a formality of tallying votes and closing polls, but no one on the networks would go so far to even say Obama had a pretty good chance of winning at that point.

This pulling back is going to continue. Newspapers will take a break and a deep breath before bemoaning the inevitable decline of print again, and cable news will begin throwing scandal after scandal up on the screen, seeing which kinda sticks before beating it to the ground.

But the next time something captures the culture’s interest and imagination like this election did, those news agencies that took the lessons of the last two years to heart and those that change the way they cater to the journalistic needs of their audience will have the advantage.

The blogs and rumormills and social media sites aren’t going to go away, but the news sources that can provide the most timely analysis, with updates and changes and refinements, they’re the ones that’ll get through this alright.

The way journalism is made changed in this long election cycle, and people loved it. As we pared the candidates to one, they became real people with flaws just like us. Their supporters also became real people, as we saw beyond them as symbols and discovered they had motives, morals, insecurities, and virtues. But best of all, reporters began showing us their sense of humor, their opinions, and at times their fallibility, and they began to become people to.

Let’s keep that going.

I went straight to the meat, though, and read three of the cover stories. Here’s how it played out.

The issue has Alexander Ovechkin on the cover, the ugliest man in sports. I say that because he’s lost one tooth that we know of, also because at least two girls I know have huge crushes on him, and I don’t get it.

In any case, he’s the Caps’ saving grace, and therefore mine. (He’s amazing! I love him.) And the article is pretty fun, lots of play with comparisons to the presidential campaign. Some of them are pretty stupid though:

“Ovechkin could carry himself like some hockier-than-thou arugula-eater, but when he was asked for an autograph by a fan named Phil, he signed it ‘To Fill.’”

So there’s that. The photo spread is especially good, with Laich, Backstrom, and Green (I think, I don’t have it in front of me) as secret service guys, and Boudreau stepping on to Marine 1.

Here’s my favorite part of the piece:

Every leader needs a climactic story point that illustrates his character. For John McCain, it’s his time in a POW camp; for Barack Obama, it’s his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. For Ovechkin, it’s a game in Pittsburgh last season when he took a skate to the leg and left the Igloo with a six-inch gash. None of the Caps would have blamed him for returning to DC to heal, but Ovechkin traveled with the team to Ottawa and played two nights later, scoring four goals and an assist in an 8-6 win. “Every time he moved, the stitches opened,” says Boudreau. “And he played through it.” Fans may remember the ass-over-teakettle goal he netted in a 6-1 win over Phoenix in 2006, but Caps officials cherish that cold night in Ottawa when their leader proved he could be counted on when needed most.

We’re taking the Cup this season.

Other stories I had time to read were less successful.

One writer followed USF pass-rusher George Selvie around for the day, going bite for bite with his 7,000 calorie-a-day diet. It was an OK read, but the profile lacked heart and could have been funnier. Still, it had some good parts.

“I’ll go get you a burger,” Twana offers, smiling. Then she corrects herself. “I’ll go get y’all burgers.” Oh, that ain’t right. Sweating again, I burp, bend over and cough. “You all right?” Selvie asks. I make a noise of affirmation. He’s not so sure. “You look like one of those offensive linemen right before they throw up.”

Gluttony can be pretty funny (like when Kenny vs. Spenny does it), but I feel like the writer never bought in on this piece. He could have taken it further.

I only read one more article. It answered a question I’ve been asking everyone within earshot: “Why isn’t world’s strongest man the most popular thing ever?”

From Steve MacDonald, America’s strongest man:

“They didn’t even print a line in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when I won,” he says. Figures, since the 80 or so professional strongmen walking America’s streets disguise themselves as something else. Derek Poundstone, America’s Strongest Man of 2007, is a Connecticut cop. Jason Kristal, 2008’s titleholder, works at a California nutritional-supplement company. “Strongmen in Eastern Europe are national celebrities,” MacDonald says. “Here…”

Strong man competitions have small cash prizes, and steroids are an unspoken rule. When not competing, MacDonald owns a bar in Pittsburgh, where he’s just a regular, if strong, guy.

This article had a lot more heart, it’s a good read.

Overall, though, the magazine was just OK. I didn’t have a lot of time to get deep into it, but from flipping through it and reading those articles, I’m not rushing out to buy a subscription, either. Unless they keep putting Ovie on the cover.

A few weeks ago I got a few emails for a Phillip Herndon up in the midwest detailing a flight itinerary. I’m sure there was something nefarious I could have done with the information, but I know (better than firsthand) not to anger Phillip Herndons.

Today, I got some emails from Details magazine about a Phillip Herndon, this time living in LA, renewing their subscription.  This was double confusing because I used to have a subscription to Details (it came free with my Wired subscription, I swear!) and right about now would be the time they should be coming at me to try and resubscribe.

In any case, to all you other Phillip Herndons out there, know this: I worked hard to own this name on the Internet, and if you want to go toe-to-toe with me to claim your position at the top, I welcome the challenge.

But you have ways to go with your SEO. In between us are at least two dead Phillips and the best economics teacher in Cook County, Ga.

Though, I doubt anyone is reading this from RSS.  I think I broke it when I moved the site to the root directory. So! For those looking for the feed, follow this.

Another group that recently redesigned its page (last night it was revealed) is the Wall Street Journal. I only had a few hours to use it last night, but I haven’t found anything I dislike about it so far. It’s sharp.

And last night they had a cool interactive graphic right at the top showing the decline of the bank stocks. Good use of interactive media.

No interactive flash graphics for me (yet). Some innovations in my new design include the news feed in the middle of the mainpage. Here I don’t pressure myself to write gold all the time (the features still have that). Also there’s an expanded twitter feed on the side, and more pictures/flashyness in general.

Tech-wise, I used the Mimbo 2.2 Wordpress Theme by Darren Hoyt as a basis for the design. I also tweaked some of the SEO problems after I found I was not the first google hit for my name (since corrected (hopefully)).

There are still a few SEO things I need to get to (meta tags, for instance), but that will be done.

Let’s begin the adventure anew!

They all turned out to be good choices! All were interesting, all deserve remark:

Psychology Today

Psychology Today Oct. 08

After I bought my magazines Friday I sat down in the book store and read Psychology Today cover to cover. Granted, I couldn’t exactly go home for about an hour, but when I’ve just bought three magazines, it’s rare for me to stick with one without flipping around or picking up another of my purchases.

The cover story, “Accounting for Taste,” looked at how “your choices in art, music, everything else speak volumes about you.” It’s almost in the vein of this study, about how music preferences predict personality, but the Psych Today article focuses more on how the range of your tastes communicates your personality.

The Insights section includes an interview with typographer Matthew Carter (not online, from what I can tell), and directions on how to tell a good story ( I forget to breathe and to listen, apparently).

The other standout articles were selections from George Carlin’s final interview (full interview here), and an interview with a panel of comics about what’s funny.  Carlin’s interview was insightful, funny, and sad, as expected, and the panel interview was pretty good, except for the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, who dominated the panel with references to the New Yorker.

MAD

MAD Sept. 08

MAD magazine has Alfred E. Obama all dolled up like he’s at a rally this month. The sign he’s holding sports the “Yes We Can’t” campaign logo. It’s just the opposite of Barack Obama!

I bought it for the charming cover, hoping to find some party-pooping political commentary, or at least a joke about John McCain’s age. I got the latter at least.

Two fake movie posters, advertising The 46-Year-Old Political Virgin and No Country For Old Man, were all that I got covering the election.

But! I got to read Planet Tad! again. Planet Tad is a fake blog written by a teenaged kid, always a few laughs.

Also, Amy, by Amy Winehouse (from the Crack is AACK! Dept.). Series of strips in the style of Cathy, only with Amy Winehouse as the hero.

I never really enjoyed the MAD Movie Satires, so I skipped “Inadiaper Jones and the Kingdom of the Creative Dry Spell” and “The Chronic-ills of Yawnia — Prince of Thespian.”

Esquire

Esquire Oct. 08

I picked up the new Esquire with the e-ink cover people’ve been talking about. It does have e-ink in it and it really does blink, and it is kinda annoying sitting on you’re desk if you’re trying to write.

This issue is Esquire’s 75th anniversary edition, featuring “The 75 Most Important People of the 21st Century.”

The issue is conceptually odd, it’s not quite about the future, definitely not about the past, and works really hard not to be about the present. The essay justifying the issue argues that the 21st century is beginning now, as the “Bush/Clinton/Bush dynamic has petered out” and Bill Gates leaves Microsoft. Now is the time the people who will define the 21st Century are getting into place.

Yet it all has a retro-vibe to it. The profiles of the most influential include behemoths who are already at the top of their fields. Even admitting that most of the picks are going to be wrong, they’re not going much out on a limb. Also, the “World’s First E-Ink Cover” evokes a 80’s LCD clock incessantly flashing 12:00. But this time it’s on a magazine, I guess.

So I’m unconvinced so far. But it’s a big magazine and I haven’t gotten through it all yet.

One thing that did stand out, though, was the interview with Rupert Murdoch. As I try to work out in my head what newspapers should be doing, Murdoch is beginning to make more and more sense. He’s a smart guy, I’m going to read more about him.

I had been into videogames for a few years, after I got my first Game Players, my love for videogames would quickly become second to my love for videogame magazines.

And I found it! That first one had been sitting in my basement in a box for years and years. And then I scanned it.

All these pictures link to large image files so you can enjoy the scans as much as I can enjoy the mag in real life. Sorry for the size.

Anyway, July, 1995, Issue 73 was a pretty great issue in general, right at the dawn of a new generation of consoles. Unveiling the PlayStation, first look at Nintendo’s Ultra 64, Diddy Kong and Fulgore down there in the corner representing SNES, and who I think is Mondo from Toshinden blasting the PlayStation. And Earthworm Jim 2!

Contents

The crowd-sourced encyclopedia of record, Wikipedia, calls Game Players zany, wacky, and crazy. The magazine’s page layout was a mix of MTV and a strobe light made of knives, the Grunge was palpable, the humor juvenile, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

E3 had just wrapped up when this issue came out, and without blogs there was not much other way to get gaming news until the magazines came out (imagine!). Game Players wouldn’t have a website to call its own for another six months.

Letters

Letters were always my favorite part of Game Players. I didn’t quite understand the STD jokes, but they said damn! And hey, jokes about monkeys and violence! Actually, in the Game Ideas section of this issue (page four below), the guy’s idea for a game called Violence is pretty close to what GTA III turned out to be.

What I never got, even back then, was the Connections section, where kids write in to ask for pen pals.  Why would I want to write a letter to someone about Sonic? Plus, printing the names and addresses of eleven-year-olds would not fly nowadays.

And some of these just sound creepy:

I’m 11 years old and love animals. I own a Sega and a SNES. Any age will do.

-Sam

Thanks Sam.

These pages were usually the most enjoyable read of the magazine. Sorry for the missing top part on page two, I must have cut something out for a poster I made at some point.

Hit Lists

Top X lists are always fun snapshots of history. They’d usually drew the first gasp of my reading of Game Players, as some Nintendo game would be at or too close to the top for my taste. They never had the Genesis or PlayStation games I was playing where I wanted them to be. Also, I hated Nintendo (though we’re cool now).

Info Trak

Info Trak I didn’t pay too much attention to, I wanted to get to the reviews! But this is a gem: after E3 ‘05, Game Players reports the delay of Nintendo’s Ultra 64 (later to become the Nintendo 64) and the early release of the Sega Saturn.

The extra development time they refer to in the article turns out to be a good move by Nintendo, as Mario 64 becomes one of the most lauded games ever. Also, Nintendo at this point has a fanbase so rabid and loyal that they’ll easily wait a few more months for the new Nintendo console. Back then things were serious, it was a battle.

Sega, on the other hand, pushes the Saturn out more than three months early, leaving many developers behind. They never really get the game makers back on track, and everyone jumps ship to Nintendo or Sony.

So here, on one page, the disappointment that turns out to be a big boost for Nintendo, and the beginning of the end of Sega as a console maker.

Next time, (in Memories of Game Players, 2), I’ll have the cover story, the unveiling of the PlayStation! Also reviews, previews, and codes. It’s pretty funny in hindsight reading reviews raving about PlayStation graphics. But they were good! They were..

Each Thursday, Pelosi stands in front of a phalanx of flags in the cramped but ornate office just off the House floor. About 30 reporters and a bank of cameras cram in front of her. But her staff says that the reporters and their mass — media audiences aren’t the only ones they’re trying to reach.

Pelosi also uses the press conferences to keep her crew in order.

“She sees it as a way to communicate, not only with the press, but with members as well,” a Pelosi aide explained.

An aide to another Democratic leader put it more bluntly.

“Things that go over the heads of reporters can still get to the right people,” the aide said. “It’s a ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ style of leadership.”

Watching the Presidential election evolve, it’s strange watching how the candidates manipulate and are manipulated by the media. Each of the candidates are well versed in press appearances, releases, speeches and whatnot, but with such intense pressure in every word they say, they’re bound to slip up sometimes.

Rep. Pelosi, on the other hand, has been a representative since 1987, and has had pretty much the same job since she became Minority Leader in 2002. While there have been times of intense pressure focus on her, she’s become so comfortable with the reporters during her weekly press conferences that she can insert hidden — and not so hidden — messages to her rank and file.

Makes me wonder what other politicians, and companies, institutions, anything that has press conferences regularly, are really communicating through their comments to the media. What they know will go un- or under-reported, but will get to the people that need to hear it.

Anyway,

You may remember when I began this blog, well I reached the next milestone last week when I was without Internet.

In other news, back in March I wrote on an Atlantic article covering the paparazzi following Britney Spears.  The numbers have come in, and it looks like the issue bombed on the stands.  From Folio Mag:

“The Britney cover tanked, according to figures submitted by the Atlantic to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Rapid Report filing system late last month. The magazine sold approximately 24,000 copies at the newsstand, some 21,000 less than March and nearly 30,000 less than its January/February issue.”

So does this answer my question, are paparazzi the future of newsgathering? You could say that Atlantic readers aren’t interested in the sensationalism surrounding the Britney Spears media and are looking for something a little more in-depth and thoughtful, but look at these other recent covers (from the May and March issues):

Maybe Atlantic readers are just drawn by other kinds of sensationalism.

While recent controversy over the Miley Cyrus photos has been palpable, how’d it do for the magazine’s bottom line? Silicon Alley Insider has the details:

“The floodgates opened on Monday, when the site also threw up a photo shoot video it had been planning on saving for later in the week. By the end of the day the VF.com had racked up 1.8 million unique visitors (it normally gets between 20,000 and 40,000) and a staggering 17 million page views.”

Somewhere in between the 34 million pageviews of the Lohan photos and the 2.3 million pageviews of the Cruise video I talked about here, the Cyrus photos seem to have made an impression. But I wonder how much money that means?

Anyway, SAI has a pretty funny photo from the shoot. I like the dour dude doing Miley’s hair.

Also, Portfolio’s Mixed Media has a neat post today on a related subject: as a magazine editor, should you be trying to find the next big thing, or just reinforce the major celebrity? The post also touches on the Cyrus photoshoot.