Fired for funny

A TV reporter this week paid with his job for altering a video (he says to make it funny) and posting it to YouTube.
What do you think of this? What is the line in cyberspace between your job and you life? Could I get in the same trouble? Would this have been different if he had been a journalism professor instead of a journalist? What if he were a basketball player? What, if any, professional standards were violated? What do you think of the result?
In other vein, what was the Huffington Post's responsibility here? Revisit my exchange this week with Jay Rosen and others about accuracy in citizen journalism. How did accuracy matter here? Could this case be an argument for the participatory nature of online media? A spoof made it to a larger audience as a reality, but ultimately the audience verified that it was inaccurate. How did the pressures of speed and competition play into this case?

Mom Song

have gotten a bunch of requests for the youtube video i mentioned yesterday during the viral marketing discussion.

here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxT5NwQUtVM

how many times have you heard these lines from your mom???

tnx,
kc

Kid Creates Apple Ad

Lots of buzz in the marketing world these days regarding consumer-generated content. The theory is something like open-source in the computer world: the more people you let in on the creative process, the more likely you are to get new ideas and great advertising.
The problem is that you also get lots of dreck. Katy and the Culver kids tried creating an ad for Dove and while my 4-year-old looks darned cute, it isn't exactly something that would move a lot of soap.
So this week, Apple went live with a revamped version of an idea generated by an English student. I'm a fan. What about you? Think this is the future of advertising, consumers creating messages?
Note that this is also an "old media" story. The kid stuck his original on YouTube in mid-September and by mid-October, he had 2,000 hits. The New York Times put it in Stuart Elliott's column (on an inside page, mind you) and in less than 12 hours, the spot went to 20,000 hits. It's now at about 340,000.
Pieces like this often need the support of the (gasp) the "mainstream media." Now, if entities like the NYT can just figure out a way to make money off that hit-generating...

Insurgent Recruiting

Here's a great blog addition from a 202er:

Hey Katy,

I didn't know exactly where to send a news clip I just watched, which I believe would be a good blog topic, so I thought e-mail would do. In the following link to a video clip, an interviewee discusses how insurgent groups use video to market themselves, gaining supporters and money. I thought the topic was fascinating although the movie itself was a little on the dull side. I found it on the online Washington Post web site.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/09/28/VI2007092800608.html?hpid=topnews

My questions: How powerful is video in attracting people to the insurgent cause? Why kind of tactics can be used to counter this kind of mass communication? Should everyone have the freedom to produce these kinds of materials or should governments try to choke them off? Should these "statement videos" or "hostage videos" be hosted on YouTube or should organizations like that ban them?

George Will and Miss Teen

Newsweek columnist George Will has a pretty good piece this week on declining standards of decency. He manages to tie together Larry Craig and Alberto Gonzales, drawing in a Ken Burns documentary for kicks.
But he closes by bringing in Miss Teen South Carolina's rambling (posted to YouTube if you missed it last week).
Will writes:

• Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction.

(Confession: I cringed for her mother but I laughed out loud when I watched it. And then I forwarded it to friends.)
Do you agree with Will? Does it lack news value? Is it OK to watch it but not OK for FoxNews and CNN to cover everyone watching it? (Can you find the United States on a map?)
We'll talk about communication values Monday. What makes a story a story? Why do people connect with advertising? Research gives us some clues ...