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March 19, 2009

The Daily Schizo

Reading today’s New York Times was a bit of a head spinner. There were two pieces that I felt fit together, not necessarily in a good way.

First, there was a Nick Kristof op-ed piece called “The Daily Me.” Unexpectedly, the piece was not an ad hominem attack on the internet, as we read in so many Traditional Media papers these days. Instead, Kristof offers perspective, some personal and some more reported, about how we all use the internet for news. It is our nature at issue, not the medium itself… the medium facilitates our freedom to select poorly, it does not choose poorly for us.

“When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.”

What a breath of fresh air! And some real honesty… Kristof admits that he reads what he agrees with more than he reads what may or may not more accurate factually.

“The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.”

Of course, this has been completely true of the Traditional Media for a long time, as the social status of people in cities like New York and Chicago can be read instantly by noticing who is reading what on the trains. Newspapers like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the tabs in NY and Chicago are not published as Fox News-like political arms where every idea is filtered through the prism of finding the other political side guilty. There is some spillover into editorial choices. But mostly, they save it for the op-ed pages, give or take a token writer from the “opposite” side.

Still… the piece understands the glory and the danger of the democracy/tyranny of the web.

Then, with a turn to the Arts section, a piece by Michael Cieply that does everything wrong that Kristof was writing about. A “news” story created out of an idea that simply does not hold water when it is tested, but is not a lie. “States Underwrite Films, Some in Narrowest Release,” it’s called. And it is a kind of bizarre gotcha piece about states offering tax breaks for movies… many of which don’t get sold for theatrical distribution… OH MY GOD!

Cieply does a nice job of gathering indie examples of tax broken films. But that’s one problem. He doesn’t quite acknowledge that this “funding” is a rebate on money spent in the state. It’s in there… but it’s spun towards some kind of idea that states are paying people to shoot in their states.

The simple fact is, states create film shooting incentives in order to build production business in their state. This notion that there is a tourism benefit is sometimes said out loud without laughing… but it really, really, really not the point. The point is to build and then to keep supporting high-paying jobs in the states, making the states not only good locations, but places where crew can be picked up easily.

But most egregiously, Cieply skips reporting on the states where this strategy has worked pretty well; North Carolina, Florida, some cities in Texas, and from a year or two before Katrina and since, Louisiana. Other states have recently increased tax incentives – kick backs – to bring more production into their states. This is the same strategy used by Canada to create “runaway production” issues in the first place.

The downside is very much worth reporting. It may be a waste of taxpayer money in some states. The discussion of what the cost and benefit may be is worth having. But this piece is defined – and probably initiated – on the real-life story that closes the piece…

Several filmmakers said they might soon return to Michigan for another picture, even while waiting for the first round to land.

“There are a couple we’re looking at,” said Gary Gilbert, a producer whose “Miss January,” also known as “Meet Monica Velour,” features Kim Cattrall in a story about an aging adult film star — and is still in search of a distributor.

Still, Mr. Gilbert said, it would not hurt to see some commercial validation for the first wave before anyone gets too deep in the next.

“If a ton of movies get made in Michigan, and the vast majority aren’t getting distributed, somebody’s not doing the right thing,” he said.

Uh… no.

If a ton of movies get made in Michigan and none of them ever make a dime, much less get distributed, and this creates work for hundreds of people and brings money into the states, the producers of those films may not be doing something right… but the people of Michigan would be very well served indeed.

And that is where the news story is. Do incentives work for states… not do movies made with incentives make money and if they don’t is that okay? The latter completely misses the point of these incentives.

On this day, it was The Daily Gary Gilbert in the New York Times. And that, I submit, is more dangerous than any crazy thing you might read on the web.

Posted by dpoland at March 19, 2009 01:51 PM

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Posted by: doug r at March 19, 2009 04:22 PM

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