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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

I am still reeling after watching the latest amazing “news” piece from Jon Stewart. I wrap “news” in inverted commas because this man is a comedian and a great one at that. So why is he more important than any of the talking heads on cable TV news and political shows?

Here’s why – In an era where newspapers are dying and mainstream TV and cable media are flailing around trying to increase viewers by using limp content, Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that “Great research trumps good access to the powerful.” In essence all Stewart’s team did was juxtapose past remarks on the economy from people like the CEO of Ford or blowhard and so called ’stocks wizard’ Jim Cramer and even bigger blowhard CNBC’s Rick Santelli [who in a magnificent performance gets traders on the floor to boo President Obama because "we shouldn't be paying for those folks who can't pay their mortgages, those losers!"] and compared them to more recent statements to show how hypocritical these people have been and continue to be. Great research all available at any journalist’s fingertips online. Stewart’s team just did the research and then they are not afraid to have Jon go out and skewer these people not lionize them.

You must watch the Stewart video.

And here’s an extract from Will Bunch’s very prescient article:

As briefly noted here earlier, the most talked-about journalism of the day wasn’t produced by the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart’s epic, eight-minute takedown on last night’s “Daily Show” of CNBC’s clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. You can quibble about Stewart’s motives in starting the piece — after he was spurned for an interview by CNBC’s faux populist ranter Rick Santelli — but you can’t argue with the results.

The piece wasn’t just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week (and this was a week in which NBC rebroadcast the SNL “more cowbell” sketch, so that’s saying a lot) but it was exquistely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America’s real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted earlier today, “it’s simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this.”

But that’s not all. The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age — planted atop many, many major political, media and business Web sites — and the kind of water-cooler chatter that journalists would crave in any age. In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren’t faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn’t be viewed as a stick in the eye — but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it’s not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game.

Read the rest of the Will Bunch article here. It’s a great read for anyone in media.

Story at Gizmodo.

The house slide above Terwilliger

Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.

I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.

I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..

From tragedy and despair to new thinking.

No vehicles, a blessing

My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.

The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.

First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.

Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.

Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.
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On Tuesday, hope for a bailout on behalf of the Big Three automakers faded even further. Democratic congressional leaders chastised the CEOs for failing to convince them that a $25 billion bailout would be well-spent and gave them a set timetable of 12 days to prove otherwise.

This point was made glaringly obvious when Sentator majority leader Harry Reid called attention to the three CEOs for each flying into Washington separately on private corporate jets.

“There’s a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands,” Democatic representative Gary L. Ackerman said. “It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high-hat and tuxedo. I mean, couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here?”

If any of these CEOs had any common sense, they would have chatted with Guy Kawasaki beforehand about proper etiquette in this sensitive situation.

In The Art of Laying People Off, rule #6 is Share the pain:

When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain, too. Cut your pay. In fact, the higher the employee, the bigger the percentage of pay reduction. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue-generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the boxseat tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.

In layman’s terms, flying to meetings (no matter how important) in a private jet to ask for billions of dollars just makes you look like a total ass. As Dana Milbank says, “There are 24 daily nonstop flights from Detroit to the Washington area. Richard Wagoner, Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli probably should have taken one of them.”

When Barack Obama becomes president in about two months, he will be expected to give up his trusty BlackBerry, which has been securely fastened to his belt for years. There are a multitude of reasons why he will have to surrender his portable email device including security concerns, the Presidential Records Act (all correspondence is fair game for public viewing) and the looming threat of subpoenas.

To balance out the depravation of some technologies, Obama plans to be the first U.S. president to have a laptop on his Oval Office desk.

Though some have argued that Obama might be able to break the rules and retain email access, Diana Owen disagrees. “They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” she said. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

While gaining many privileges, Obama will have function without a few of life’s little conveniences in return.