Half-hour dramas prove less is more
Until recently, it was as if a decree requiring all TV dramas to last an hour had been handed down from on high. “And it was said, that in order to evoke sadness, tenderness, tears, pathos, or anything that doesn’t involve laughter, man must taketh up 60 minutes (44 minutes on thy broadcast networks)” – something like that.
But while plenty of customs — two-year presidential campaigns anyone? — continue despite their inefficacy, irrelevance, or inappropriateness, let us be glad that more and more TV outlets are breaking rules, and the length rule in particular. They’re recognizing the value of the half-hour drama, the power of brevity that short-story writers have always known about. Unlike the Emmys, which still mostly categorize shows according to length, they’re giving audiences enough credit to understand that drama can come in many shapes and sizes.
The current batch of half-hour dramas includes some of the best series that TV has to offer. Amazon’s “Transparent,” which returns on Dec. 4, HBO’s “Togetherness” and “Girls,” both of which return on Feb. 21, and Pivot’s now-airing “Please Like Me” all refuse binary genre definitions. They include moments of humor, of course — so did “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” — but most often they’re steeped in the more problematic aspects of life and relationships, with searching characters who embody a lot more than one or two qualities.
The phenomenon took form in the 2000s, and Showtime was the pioneer. With “Nurse Jackie,” “United States of Tara,’’ “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,’’ “Weeds,’’ and “Californication,” the cable channel ushered the format into acceptance. In 2009, I wrote a story about the then-new phenomenon and chose, for reasons that I can no longer recall or that I am blocking because they were so very wrong, to employ the label “grimedy.” No, not a particularly catchy word, and anyway these shows aren’t always grim, even if they’re grounded in serious themes.
The popularity of the shorter Showtime dramas, driven by auteur-ish talents such as Jenji Kohan and Diablo Cody, meant we could no longer assume half-hour TV shows were automatically less prestigious or emotionally affecting than the list of Golden Era regulars. The shows were filmed very much like those groundbreaking dramas, with the same kinds of cinematic virtues, season-long plot arcs, and dimensional performances. “Nurse Jackie” was the most dramatic of the bunch, with Edie Falco’s central character locked into a relentless downward spiral of pill addiction. The show was consistently nominated in the Emmy and Golden Globe comedy categories, but anyone who watched it knew better.
“I always thought I was signed on for a drama,’’ Falco told the Globe when the show premiered. “And then I found out that Showtime bought a comedy. So there were times when I had no idea what the hell we were making!’’
The half-hour length added an intensity to “Nurse Jackie” that suited the subject matter. The writers did devise some amusing subplots for the side characters, but they were able to keep their focus trained on the subject of their character drama, to dig into the crannies of her problem, to consider ideas about substance abuse and our health system. They didn’t have to fill up the time juggling other plots; Jackie and her ups and downs were the point.
HBO’s two-season wonder “Enlightened” also benefited from the same kind of undiluted close focus. The show, created by Mike White, was a dark and intimate portrait of a woman — played with great passion by Laura Dern — negotiating her way from victimhood to empowerment in spite of the pressures to remain a dupe. Dern’s Amy, like the leads in most of these half-hour dramas, was neither strictly a heroine or an anti-heroine; she was something in between, like most people who walk this earth.The most creative show in the half-hour drama format may be “Louie,” Louis C.K.’s celebrated FX series. With “Louie,” C.K. has rid the half-hour format of any last vestiges of sitcom conventions, most notably the requisite ensemble of friends. He has shown that having only a half-hour can liberate a TV auteur, enable him or her to turn on a dime, to be thoroughly unpredictable from week to week. He has shown how — as with a short story — enigmatic and quiet material works most effectively in a shorter format. “Louie” has been influential — the wonderful new Aziz Ansari show on Netflix, “Master of None,” is a “Louie” baby, as is IFC’s “Maron” — but it remains unequaled.
It has proven once again that less can do a lot more than we ever knew.
Author: Brett
Amazon Killed the Bookstore. So It’s Opening a Bookstore
Bookstore owners already loathe Amazon for gutting the cost of books online and driving so many brick and mortar shops out of business. Now, the online retailer is both beating them and joining them, with the opening of its first physical bookstore today in Seattle.
Amazon Books, as the new store is called, will be like any other Main Street bookstore (remember those?), except that Amazon will use the troves of data it collects from its online customers to stock the shelves. That means its book displays will feature real Amazon book reviews, and the store will showcase books that have amassed the most pre-orders online. The books will also come with Amazon’s trademark low price tags.
It can afford those cut-rate prices, of course, because Amazon Books is as much a bookstore as it is a billboard. Amazon’s not suddenly betting big on the bookstore business, and it certainly doesn’t need the store to be a success in order for Amazon to succeed. It’s better to think of Amazon Books as a giant advertisement. If it makes a little extra money for a $294.7 billion company, all the better.
The one silver lining for the book enthusiasts forced to watch their industry turn into a gimmick is that, according to the Seattle Times, Amazon is hiring from other retail stores and libraries that may be struggling. Well, silver lining for those hoping for Seattle-area book store jobs. For Seattle-area book store employers, it’s probably not pleasant watching their employees get poached.
For now, Amazon says the store won’t be serving double duty as a warehouse or pickup center, and the vice president of Amazon Books, Jennifer Cast, tells the Seattle Times the company doesn’t yet have plans to open a second location. “We’re completely focused on this bookstore,” Cast said. “We hope this is not our only one. But we’ll see.”
The Not-Quite End of the Book Tour
For publishers, sending authors on tour is expensive—they have to cover transport, meals, and nice hotels. And perhaps more importantly, touring doesn’t necessarily translate into better book sales. It’s hard to tell, in fact, what effect they have at all, as sales records don’t show what prompted someone to buy the book, only where the book was purchased. With the publication of my two books, most recently The Art of Forgery in June, I’ve found myself part of a lucky group that still gets to partake in this somewhat fading institution. I’ve witnessed firsthand how publishers have adapted to a changing industry—by becoming more selective about which authors to send on tour, which promotional appearances to secure, and how to make the dollars stretch.
The editors and publicists I spoke to for this article explained that, back in the day, publishers would send authors out on tour fairly regularly—the more events and cities covered, the better. But in this new, more austere era, publishers only regularly pay to send authors who are compelling public speakers, authors with large established audiences who are guaranteed to sell well and therefore cover expenses (the James Pattersons, Gary Shteyngarts, J.K. Rowlings, and so on), or authors with a high profile that extends beyond books (such as actors, athletes, comedians). Publishers might send the odd debut writer, in hopes of more media coverage, but it’s no longer a given.
In order to swing sending authors out on tour, publishers today have to make compromises. Previously, authors would get a company credit card and sort out their own travel arrangements, accommodations, and meals without supervision—often a wasteful approach. Then publishers began to experiment with sending publicists out with authors to serve two functions: as a fixer (with a theoretically more measured use of the company credit card) and chaperone. But this meant double the expense: twice the plane and train tickets, twice the meals, twice the hotels. Then arrived another solution that I only learned about on my first tour, back in 2007 for my novel The Art Thief. It peeled back the veil over this quasi-legendary concept of authors on tour (I imagined groupies, whiskey, cigarette smoke, typewriters), and exposed me to a new, and completely fascinating, role that I never knew existed: that of the awkwardly named “escort.”
Escorts, for their part, make hectic book tours exponentially easier. On my first tour in 2007, I ping-ponged around 12 cities, and not in any order that made geographic sense (for some reason San Francisco was scheduled for the day between events in Austin and Houston). I’d get up each morning around 6, groggily pack up my bag at another hotel, and be driven to the airport for an early flight to the next city. There I’d be picked up by the next escort, who’d be smiling and brandishing my book. My escort would bring me to interviews, radio stations, TV studios, press junkets in hotel rooms, to meals (they always know the best places to eat), and then to the book event.
Escorts are often the most interesting person an author will meet on a book tour. In Chicago for The Art Thief, my escort was an aspiring writer planning to pen a memoir called Super Jew, while my San Francisco escort was a novelist who had a hit about Beat vampires back in the ’70s. Authors can go a bit stir crazy, repeating roughly the same presentation night after night, and answering the same questions interview after interview, so a bit of spontaneity and company can be refreshing.
By and large, book tours mostly entail maneuvering to get on radio shows or TV programs, and less glamorous elements, like attending bookstore readings where hardly anyone shows up. At one reading, I had only three people in the audience—including my escort for that city … and my dad. At the time, I didn’t understand why my publisher had flown me all the way out to play, essentially, to an empty house. But then the store manager wheeled out hundreds of books to sign for the first-edition mail club, and I understood: Book events are not just about selling to the people who attend them, which even for prominent authors can mean only a few dozen copies sold. They’re about getting authors local media attention, getting bookstore staffers face time with authors so they can promote the books, and signing copies. While signed books do sell better, they also can’t be returned to the publisher if they don’t sell—a win-win for publishers.
So many interviews these days are by phone or Skype or email that it’s not strictly necessary to have Author A in Location B in order to get media coverage, but Fresh Air is an exception, preferring guests who can appear in the flesh. And while I did major live events in Washington, D.C. and in New York, each event only reached a few hundred people, at most. My NPR appearance alone justified the considerable cost of paying my way to, and around the U.S. on this tour, because it was bound to offer a boost in sales. While touring alone may be expensive and rarely leads directly to better book sales, Fresh Air alone can launch a bestseller.
Programs like Fresh Air can take on an outsize influence given the tenuous state of book reviewing—the practice has been purportedly dying since at least 1959. On the TV end of things, this year marked the departure of two major promotional platforms for the book industry: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, where renowned public intellectuals and authors from small presses alike could get national attention. As Alex Shephard of the independent publisher Melville House noted, “an appearance [on those shows] couldn’t guarantee a book would become a bestseller, but it was about as close to a sure thing as you could get in an incredibly uncertain marketplace.” He added that the loss of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should serve as a reminder that the book industry has long relied on third parties such as critics for promotion and that it should think of new, better ways to market itself. It’s unclear whether publishers will see tours as part of the future of book-selling—but for the sake of readers and writers alike, they should.
With the exception of the recent movie about David Foster Wallace, The End of the Tour, there are few recent examples of book tours in popular culture, making the institution a hazy myth in most people’s minds. Which means few are aware of the unfortunate changes that have befallen the tradition. Book tours for the already-famous will always continue, but there’s a real danger that publishers will decide that the rest of us authors are no longer worth sending on tour at all, a trend that is well under way. This would be a great shame: Tours are often the only chance for writers to spend time with the actual people who read their books. There’s already a big disconnect between readers and authors, who often exist only as an abstraction, as a name on a book spine, or perhaps as a Facebook “friend” you’ve never seen in the flesh.
Tours bridge that gap. The TV appearances may be the shiniest of the trophies on publicists’ walls, but there’s no feeling as good for an author as shaking the hand of someone who genuinely loved something you wrote. And as a reader, I can say that I get a jolt of endorphins when I meet a favorite author in person; it’s a surreal event that all but guarantees I’ll remain a devoted reader for years to come. In a world this big, it’s a wonderful thing that encounters like these help keep people’s love of books alive. So it’s my sincere hope that the publishing industry won’t let the book tour die, not just as a writer, but as a reader. As flawed, fatiguing, and unreliable as it is, it is also undeniably special.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/the-modern-face-of-book-tours/407641/?utm_source=SFTwitter
Morgan Spurlock’s Warrior Poets Promotes Jeremy Chilnick To COO
EXCLUSIVE: Morgan Spurlock’s Gotham-based production label Warrior Poets has promoted Jeremy Chilnick to Chief Operating Officer. Chilnick has been with Warrior Poets since its creation in 2004, working his way up from assistant. He has produced numerous award-winning films, digital series and television programs. He also helped create and grow the company’s digital division. Chilnick had been a partner at Warrior Poets and its head of production. Now, he’ll have oversight of all aspects of film, television and digital development, all internal productions, and content delivery.
Said Spurlock: “This is an exciting time for the company. Jeremy is one of the most talented and multi-faceted producers in the industry. The company has benefited immensely by his leadership as a partner, and as Chief Operating Officer I believe he will be instrumental in continuing to shape the future growth of Warrior Poets. Jeremy’s passion, strategic thinking and creativity are unmatched. I can’t imagine a better person to help drive our rapidly expanding company.”
Chilnick’s production work began with the Shopocalypse-chronicling documentary What Would Jesus Buy? and the Cannes selection The Third Wave. He co-wrote and served as produce or exec producer of Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! on Ice!, the documentary adaptation of The New York Times best-selling book Freakonomics, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, Mansome, and the 3D concert documentary, One Direction: This Is Us.
Hulu Definitely Knows What They’re Doing
"Hulu definitely knows what they're doing." http://t.co/iWS4AeaU4L pic.twitter.com/WKph5TkMQh
— Indiewire (@indiewire) October 11, 2015
I Miss You
I miss your face. I miss tracing its contours with my finger while you slept or tried to eat. I miss your little feminine touches around our home—the candles, the food, the toilet paper. Everything reminds me of you, all the things you left behind—your photos, your books, your brother. I really thought he’d move out when you did, but he’s still here. On the couch. Constantly reminding me of you.
I miss that, no matter how much we’d argue, no matter who had their feelings hurt, or who felt belittled or emasculated, no matter whose penis was snickered at or whose vagina was mocked, whose money was stolen or who was told they smelled like an old wizard, no matter who put a dead mouse in whose gym bag or who brought whom back to life after suffocating them with a decorative pillow—no matter what, I always knew that the next morning we’d be lying by each other’s sides. Or I guess I should say, I thought I knew.
I miss having someone in my life with whom I was comfortable enough to just sit in silence for hours and hours without feeling pressure to say a single word. I remember our little “comfort silences” often lasting for days, even weeks; so that when we finally opened our mouths to speak all that came out was a series of stuttered dolphin yips. I miss that.
I miss your little quirks, like the way you’d cry while chopping onions and keep crying for hours afterward. Sometimes even for hours before. You always reacted so severely to onions.
You took our iPad. I miss it. I miss the apps and games. I miss checking my e-mail and surfing the Internet. I miss the crisp graphics and how surprisingly lightweight it was. I miss the mini easel that propped it up on tables. I loved that thing.
I miss being your partner on Pictionary nights with our friends, and the unspoken connection that we had. All you had to do was draw bunny ears for me to yell out, “You’re sleeping with Richard!” Not every couple can communicate without words like that. Not even our Pictionary friends, Amy and Richard.
I miss handing the phone to you when telemarketers would call asking for the lady of the house. Now I’m forced to say, “Just a second,” and then come back to the phone dressed like a woman because I’m ashamed to say you’re gone. That you gave up on us. That your brother won’t leave. All of it.
There’s a hollowness inside of me that was once filled by you. The kind of hollowness you feel when you tap on a secret wood panel in a rich old business tycoon’s library. But there’s no women’s underwear or Nazi memorabilia hidden behind my panel. Just emptiness. And sadness. Because you’re gone, and you took our freaking iPad.
Social Media Takes Television Back in Time
The actor Joshua Malina is one of those guys you know from TV. You may not recognize his name, but his boyish face would ring a bell.
Mr. Malina has worked in television for more than two decades, with recurring roles on a handful of hit shows, including “The West Wing” and “The Big Bang Theory.” Still, by his own unembarrassed estimation, Mr. Malina is hardly a star. “You know, I don’t have fans,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m a working man’s actor guy. I’m not one of those people who have fans.”
Well, not until recently. In 2012, Mr. Malina became a regular on “Scandal,” the high-drama ABC thriller that stars Kerry Washington as a political fixer. “Scandal,” whose fifth season began Sept. 24, is one of the most watched dramas on TV, but among observers of the industry it is best known as an exemplar of the power of social media to catch and hook an audience.
Every Thursday since the show’s premiere, most of the “Scandal” cast and crew have used Twitter to add live commentary that runs during the broadcast. The cast’s social media presence — which, according to the ratings firm Nielsen, inspires hundreds of thousands of tweets from viewers during every broadcast — has been credited with deepening the program’s relationship with its audience.
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO; PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICOLE WILDER / ABC (MALINA), ERIC MCCANDLESS / ABC (WASHINGTON), HELEN SLOAN / HBO (EMILIA CLARKE)
Television used to be a supremely solitary experience, for its creators and for its viewers. The writer David Foster Wallace called it “an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself.” For a time, digital technology seemed to be deepening the rift. TV has always been spatially isolating, with each of us cut off from everyone else who was watching. Then DVDs and DVRs and, later, on-demand services like Netflix added a temporal disconnection, too, making it increasingly unlikely that everyone else everywhere else was watching the same schlock at the same time.
But that’s beginning to change. The emergence of social TV hits like “Scandal” suggests how, over the next few years, technology could transform television into something more than a one-way, disconnected, time-shifted experience. It’s not just that today’s shows are better, that we are in a “golden age” — or what some critics have upgraded to a “platinum age” — of TV. Instead, largely because of social media, TV is becoming an interactive, communal experience. And in an unexpected throwback to the earliest days of television, the best stuff, rather than playing out whenever we like, is best experienced live, because that’s when everyone else is watching, too.
Mr. Malina, 49, is in some ways the unlikely embodiment of a new kind of TV star in a new age of television. “I’m 25-plus years into my career, and it’s only with ‘Scandal’ and Twitter that the concept of my having fans with a last name other than Malina has even entered into my consciousness,” he said. He doesn’t just tweet. He’s on Vine. He’s on Periscope. As social media experts say, Mr. Malina “engages,” and in talking about his newly altered relationship with those who know him from TV, he can sometimes slip into describing his online presence as his “brand,” though he quickly apologizes for “sounding mercenary.”
“I like the back-and-forth,” Mr. Malina added. “I miss doing live theater, where you actually can hear someone chuckle at something you just said, or a gasp because something suspenseful has happened. On TV, you didn’t get that — but now there is a sense of immediacy to the reaction. It’s like, ‘Oh, there are people watching the show and responding to it.’”
The community of viewers will probably become more important as technology continues to alter TV. Twitter has been the leading platform for such reactions. In a coming feature that has been code-named Project Lightning, the short-messaging network plans to add several improvements for following along with live television. But Twitter’s current influence may be just a peek at the communal future of TV. Several emerging digital experiences fit snugly into what might be considered the TV of tomorrow.
Last year, Snapchat, the picture-messaging app favored by teenagers and college students, began creating Live Stories, a series of daily video vignettes stitched from multiples users’ perspectives and covering a range of topics, including life in the West Bank and the celebrations of the marriage equality movement. What’s unusual about Live Stories is that they aren’t personalized across Snapchat’s audience. Every day, Snapchat presents the same handful of new stories to most of the app’s user base of more than a hundred million viewers. After a day, you get a slate of new videos, and the old ones disappear. For viewers, the experience of watching Snapchat’s stories is thus communal — everyone is watching pretty much the same thing at the same time.
Periscope, an app purchased by Twitter last year that lets users film and broadcast videos of their surroundings, also puts a premium on live, group experiences. You can watch a Periscope video of a concert or a party long after it was shot, but that’s a diminished experience. The app superimposes audience comments on the video, so if you watch live, you’re seeing not just the performance on-screen, but also how the audience is experiencing the performance.
This happens in a more complex way on Vine, a popular short-video service also owned by Twitter that is also mining a rich new vein in television’s possible future. Jason Mante, Vine’s head of user experience, said the biggest stars on Vine were engaged in a constant creative conversation with the audience and their fellow videographers.
Vine’s videos are just six seconds long, and each one plays in a never-ending loop. The format sounds constricted, but over the last couple of years Vine videographers have made wild leaps of creative possibilities — and each time someone crosses a new frontier, the visual breakthrough bounces across the service. “There’s an aesthetic language on Vine, an authenticity that focuses on creating stuff that is only for Vine,” Mr. Mante said. “The people that are most successful are the ones that can be part of the community. They can speak in that language and that aesthetic.”
At the moment, that aesthetic is awash in visual gags, like people performing superhuman feats or editing clips to make it look as if they are talking to themselves. But, in a way common on these networks, the avant-garde on Vine is always changing.
In different ways, these apps present an experience even more multilayered than that of watching performers in a theater. When you’re watching TV with Twitter, or you log on to Vine, Periscope, Snapchat or some other service, you don’t just hear others in the audience gasp. Now people react to one another’s gasps — and because the writers and producers of these shows are also looking at the audience reaction, the gasps can alter the show itself. For instance, the creators of the ABC Family teen thriller “Pretty Little Liars” regularly tweet and post on Instagram from the writers’ room — apparently in reaction to fans’ theories about the show — often stoking interest during the off-season. As a result, the collective experience may be more entertaining than the solitary one.
Indeed, that’s happening now: For some “Scandal” devotees, Twitter has become a vital part of the show; watching “Scandal” without following tweets about “Scandal” is a lesser experience, like watching it in black-and-white, or on mute.
The increasing importance of live, communal experiences seems certain to affect the business of television. The largest TV companies have lately been rocked by the fear that the dominant mode of enjoying television, through a cable subscription on a big screen in a living room, may be on the wane. Cable subscriptions are down, while on-demand services like Netflix are experiencing extraordinary growth. Even cable stalwarts like HBO have set themselves free of the cable guy; you can now subscribe to the network over the Internet, without first paying for basic cable.
A growing preference for cord cutting would suggest the inevitable dominance of time-shifting. If we all start to get our TV in different ways, if we’re no longer chained to a set in the living room, it might follow that in the future we’ll all watch different things at different times. That expectation explains why Netflix releases original programs like “House of Cards” in full-season bursts. The future, if Netflix has its way, looks to belong to binge watchers.
But it’s possible that bingeing isn’t for everyone — that the shared, week-upon-week thrill of experiencing a show over time, with a community, is preferable to housebound overindulgence. After all, even though we can all watch in different ways, most of us still prefer to watch big TV hits live.
Nielsen’s data shows that over the course of last season’s “Game of Thrones,” on HBO, most people watched each episode the day it came out. Three-quarters of the people who watched the season finale watched it on the Sunday it was broadcast.
“We’re still wired for that week-to-week cultural conversation,” said Fred Graver, a longtime television comedy writer and producer who is Twitter’s creative lead for TV. “It’s rewarding for the community, and it’s even rewarding for the creators.”
And for many there’s a reason to watch when it’s on. If you miss it, people will talk about it on Twitter and Facebook, and even if you manage to escape the spoilers, you’ll still find yourself left out of the cultural discussion. Miss something live and you’re racked with that pressing sensation of our wired times: FOMO, “fear of missing out.”
“I remember it happened with me for ‘Game of Thrones,’” Mr. Graver said. “This is a show with dragons. I don’t like dragons. Why would I watch this? But then the famous Red Wedding episode hit, and everyone was talking about it on Twitter. And you go, ‘Oh, my God, everybody’s talking about it. I have to go see what this thing is about.’ And I became a fan.”
Mr. Graver notes that not all shows make for great communal viewing. He says that slower, more contemplative dramas — think “Mad Men” rather than the more high-stakes “Scandal” — often fail to garner much notice on Twitter, possibly because it’s more difficult to take your eyes off the screen to tweet. Comedies also don’t inspire much communal viewing. On the other hand, high-emotion dramas like “Scandal” can earn a substantial audience online.
According to Twitter, the “Scandal” season premiere inspired about 423,000 tweets. And the second-season premiere of Fox’s smash hit “Empire,” about the passions surrounding a family-owned record label, generated a record 1.3 million tweets when it aired on Sept. 23. The large Twitter audience coincided with a huge live TV audience. About 16 million people saw the premiere, according to Nielsen, making it Fox’s highest-rated premiere for a scripted drama since 2009.
Indeed, Twitter and Nielsen have found that there is a connection between the volume of tweets and a show’s total audience size. In a study Twitter conducted with Fox, the network found that people who noticed tweets about “Empire” said they were far more likely than people who had seen no tweets to say they were interested in next watching the show in real time. Tweets about “Empire” also lifted interest in time-shifted viewing — a common reaction, according to another study by Nielsen. Perhaps because of FOMO, people who notice a conversation about a show decide to catch up by watching previous episodes online.
For HBO, which makes its money from subscription fees, the week-to-week online chatter feeds interest for new users. For networks that are funded by advertising, the case for live communal viewing is even stronger. Advertisers covet collective engagement; they want people to watch their ads at an appointed time, and they pay a premium for large masses of communal viewers. (That’s why sporting events like the Super Bowl do so well.) Marketers are even more pleased when they can serve ads that span a viewer’s screens — a TV ad that’s coupled with a Twitter ad, for example — and when they can participate in the discussion over the course of a show.
More than that, using neural imaging, Nielsen has found that activity on Twitter might also indicate how engaged, and thus receptive to ads, even nontweeting viewers might be. The numbers show a deep, perhaps unbreakable connection between viewing and reacting — between watching and sharing entertainment together.
“It’s surprising, but it really adds as much to the experience for us who are on the show as it does for those who are watching,” Mr. Malina said. “There’s this groupthink. People are arguing, there are great factions. It’s just a lot of fun.”
Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Though television has long been vilified for the way it supposedly transforms us into passive, shiftless voyeurs, it has just as easily been among the most powerful media forces pushing cultural unity. At big events, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11 to every Super Bowl and awards show, and cliffhangers like “Who shot J.R.?,” TV is the cultural baseline — the thing in the background that commands attention, that sets the conversation. Now, on our phones and our computers, the conversation continues.
The Library of Every Book Lover’s Dreams
The A.D. White Library, at Cornell University, might be the template from which all dream libraries are made. Three stories tall, it’s criss-crossed with walkways decorated with curling metal flourishes and filled with arched enclaves of books.
Andrew Dickson White was the co-founder and first president of Cornell, and he had a thing for books. When he donated his collection to the school, he had amassed about 30,000—the addition of which increased the school’s own collection of 90,000 books by a third. White’s collection included books on witchcraft, abolition, and revolution. There were 4,000 books just on architecture—at the time, it was the largest collection of architectural books in the country.
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Jal Mahal: More than half of this Indian palace is drowned but it looks all the more spectacular for it.
The task of creating a space to house this collection went to Cornell’s first architecture graduate, William Henry Miller (who designed a number of the campus’ other buildings). Originally, the soaring hall housed only White’s books, although eventually they were transferred to the campus’ other libraries. But the space retains its original fantasy library qualities—it even plays a key role in Fool on the Hill, a 1988 comic fantasy novel set at Cornell.
David Brock’s ‘Killing the Messenger’
I’ve always wondered about the details of the reconciliation between Hillary Clinton and David Brock. As an investigative reporter for The American Spectator in the 1990s, Brock published whatever the Arkansas state troopers told him about Bill Clinton and his women and put the rumor about Vince Foster and Hillary into print. His tone and loose reporting ethics arguably unleashed two decades of cheap tabloid right-wing best sellers that still dog Hillary and Bill today. Is that really something the Clintons ever got past?
Brock’s new book, “Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government,” provides the answer, which is yes, and without hesitation. In January 2003 Brock was alone in his Georgetown home when he got a call from Bill Clinton. Brock had recently published “Blinded by the Right,” his extravagant mea culpaclaiming that just as Hillary suspected, there had been a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to destroy the Clintons, and he was sorry to have been a part of it. Bill was very well versed in the book, according to Brock, and had purchased dozens of copies for friends. Bill suggested, nay, “insisted” that Brock see Clinton’s speaker’s agent right away, and start touring the country to expose the lies of the right; Brock countered them with a permanent organization, which eventually turned into Media Matters.
Hillary, meanwhile, “sprang into action,” inviting Brock to pitch her Senate fund-raising council and speak at a dinner for donors in her Chappaqua home. She even followed him down the driveway to list the dinner guests who had already expressed interest. Brock’s book had made him a pariah among his conservative friends. The Clintons gave him a new place to be a hero.
This must be a distinctly Clintonian trajectory of forgiveness: If you are no longer my enemy, then I must immediately weaponize you. (Bill has made up with several of his old Arkansas foes. He even gave a fond eulogy at the memorial service for Richard Mellon Scaife, the chief funder of the vast right-wing conspiracy.) Being savvy and experienced politicians, the Clintons probably intuited what was changing in the political landscape, and what Brock lays out in his latest book: The conservatives had built an extensive and very effective propaganda machine, and the Democrats were going to need all the help they could get.
On this last point, Brock’s book makes a convincing case. When he was part of the enemy team, he and his fellow conspirators were hatching their stories at bars in Little Rock and, if they were lucky, getting a little viral bump from Matt Drudge. Now the enemies have offices on K Street and the full power of Fox News, plus dozens of other conservative media outlets, PACs and opposition research groups. The conspiracy has matured into a formidable conglomerate, amply funded and thoroughly integrated with the Republican establishment. It’s an important historical shift, but I wish someone else were documenting it. So dogged is Brock’s devotion to Hillary that it often gets in the way of his being credible, not to mention interesting.
Sometimes reading the book feels like being trapped in a particularly dull town hall meeting — as on the pages that bullet-point Hillary’s accomplishments as secretary of state or the achievements of the Clinton Foundation: “More than 33,500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced annually,” etc., etc. Sometimes it reads like a generic ad designed to introduce a political newbie: Hillary is “a woman with a steadfast commitment to public service, a clear political vision and a deep well of personal integrity.” Or the version that might fit on a bumper sticker: “America is so ready for Hillary,” because “she is so ready to lead.”
In Brockworld no criticism of the Clintons has ever contained a shred of truth. Hillary was an “outstanding” secretary of state. Benghazi is a “pseudoscandal.” The Clinton Foundation does “pathbreaking global philanthropy.” Hillary’s use of nongovernmental email when she was secretary of state was totally legit. Clinton fatigue is a myth. And after Bill left office, the Clintons actually were pretty broke, because “at every opportunity, they chose to devote their time and energy to improving their community, their country and their world . . . rather than cash out.” It doesn’t even seem to matter to Brock if the criticism was made on Glenn Beck’s show or in The New York Times; it’s always “sloppy” and “innuendo-laden,” as Brock complained to The Times about an early article on the email scandal. Or contradictory. Or sexist.
Brock is right about some of these criticisms. Benghazi does seem at this point like a trumped-up scandal merely designed to remind voters of all the other scandals attached to the Clintons. He is half right about some of them. Hillary may not have technically broken any laws by using a private email server, for example, but does she really expect us to believe that she did it because it was inconvenient to carry two BlackBerrys? And some of his defenses are just laughable — for instance, arguing that “there’s never been any evidence that the country is tired of the Clintons,” as if weariness needed data.
In his chapter on sexism, Brock recycles some of the low points of her last run for president: the heckler who yelled “Iron my shirt!,” the voter who asked John McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?” and the dozens of negative columns by Maureen Dowd. There is an interesting conversation to have about sexism and Hillary hatred, but this isn’t it. Eight years after her first run, the Republicans — Trump excepted, of course — have gotten more nervous about appearing sexist, more sophisticated about hinting at ugly thoughts without outright saying them. They know better than to say Hillary is too old to be president, for example. Instead, they say that she has old ideas. But Brock, who’s in permanent combat mode, goes for the easy targets.
Brock could be the ideal anthropologist of Clintonia in all its glorious forms. He was there from the beginning and is intimately familiar with the mind-set and tactics of the right. He knows the Clintons well, and if he weren’t always fighting could probably do an excellent and sophisticated analysis of how the haters have morphed over time. He’s even constructed for Hillary her own personal media watchdog, Correct the Record, which tracks and instantly zaps any negative stories about her. He really hasn’t missed a moment.
But he just doesn’t have enough distance to piece together the history effectively. “I am,” Brock writes at one point, “much more of a practical person than I am an ideological one.” I’m not sure why he would tell us that. Ideologues are unreliable narrators, but at least there is passion in their prose. Mercenaries, by contrast, are skilled at writing what this book sometimes feels like, which is an extended press release.
The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.
E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.
The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.
“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.
Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.
“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.
The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.
Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.
Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.
“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.
At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.
“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.
Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.
“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”
Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.
The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.
But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.
As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.
On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.
The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).
It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.
At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.
Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.
“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”
Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print.
As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business.
Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy.
“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”
But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.
E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper.
The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.
“The fact that the digital side of the business has leveled off has worked to our advantage,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “It’s resulted in a far healthier independent bookstore market today than we have had in a long time.”
Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.
Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.
“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.
The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.
Other big publishers, including HarperCollins, have followed suit. The faster deliveries have allowed bookstores to place smaller initial orders and restock as needed, which has reduced returns of unsold books by about 10 percent.
Penguin Random House has also developed a data-driven approach to managing print inventory for some of its largest customers, a strategy modeled on the way manufacturers like Procter & Gamble automatically restock soap and other household goods. The company now tracks more than 10 million sales records a day, and sifts through them in order to make recommendations for how many copies of a given title a vendor should order based on previous sales.
“It’s a very simple thing; only books that are on the shelves can be sold,” Mr. Dohle said.
At BookPeople, a bookstore founded in 1970 in Austin, Tex., sales are up nearly 11 percent this year over last, making 2015 the store’s most profitable year ever, said Steve Bercu, the co-owner. He credits the growth of his business, in part, to the stabilization of print and new practices in the publishing industry, such as Penguin Random House’s so-called rapid replenishment program to restock books quickly.
“The e-book terror has kind of subsided,” he said.
Other independent booksellers agree that they are witnessing a reverse migration to print.
“We’ve seen people coming back,” said Arsen Kashkashian, a book buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “They were reading more on their Kindle and now they’re not, or they’re reading both ways.”
Digital books have been around for decades, ever since publishers began experimenting with CD-ROMs, but they did not catch on with consumers until 2008, shortly after Amazon released the Kindle.
The Kindle, which was joined by other devices like Kobo’s e-reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and the iPad, drew millions of book buyers to e-readers, which offered seamless, instant purchases. Publishers saw huge spikes in digital sales during and after the holidays, after people received e-readers as gifts.
But those double- and triple-digit growth rates plummeted as e-reading devices fell out of fashion with consumers, replaced by smartphones and tablets. Some 12 million e-readers were sold last year, a steep drop from the nearly 20 million sold in 2011, according to Forrester Research. The portion of people who read books primarily on e-readers fell to 32 percent in the first quarter of 2015, from 50 percent in 2012, a Nielsen survey showed.
Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper.
As publishers renegotiated new terms with Amazon in the past year and demanded the ability to set their own e-book prices, many have started charging more. With little difference in price between a $13 e-book and a paperback, some consumers may be opting for the print version.
On Amazon, the paperback editions of some popular titles, like “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, are several dollars cheaper than their digital counterparts. Paperback sales rose by 8.4 percent in the first five months of this year, the Association of American Publishers reported.
The tug of war between pixels and print almost certainly isn’t over. Industry analysts and publishing executives say it is too soon to declare the death of the digital publishing revolution. An appealing new device might come along. Already, a growing number of people are reading e-books on their cellphones. Amazon recently unveiled a new tablet for $50, which could draw a new wave of customers to e-books (the first-generation Kindle cost $400).
It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar.
At Amazon, digital book sales have maintained their upward trajectory, according to Russell Grandinetti, senior vice president of Kindle. Last year, Amazon, which controls some 65 percent of the e-book market, introduced an e-book subscription service that allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee of $10 for unlimited digital reading. It offers more than a million titles, many of them from self-published authors.
Some publishing executives say the world is changing too quickly to declare that the digital tide is waning.
“Maybe it’s just a pause here,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “Will the next generation want to read books on their smartphones, and will we see another burst come?”