Coming in a little late — due to lingering surgery-blahs, and general malaise over my life - but as many have seen, the Free Press is taking an apparently unconventional step and opening a News Cafe.
But is it really so unconventional? I’ve known of the idea for months now, though I was privy to few details other than dreams. The first time I heard of it was on an early episode of John White’s and my now-defunct radio show, when Bob Cox phoned in live from Ink and Beyond. I think the shape of it eluded me then. I’m a muller. I need to mull things.
Now that I’ve mulled, I have concluded that the real shape of the thing won’t be known until some time after it opens. A Connecticut paper also has a News Cafe that is useful for broad brushstrokes of what the Free Press cafe could become. But if the space is to be shaped by a community, a Winnipeg version will necessarily be unique.
For now, what strikes me most about the News Cafe idea is that, if it works — and part of the adventure is that this will remain to be seen — it may end up looking more like the past than the future. And as we’ve recently learned, I do love the past.
Almost every day, my love for the past takes me to a certain spot in the Free Press lobby, where a certain picture hangs on the wall. It’s a photo of an election day in turn-of-the-century Manitoba. Outside the Free Press office, newspapermen stand atop scaffolds, scrawling vote totals as they come in. Below them, a crowd of men in dour dark coats gazes up intently. They are mingling, talking, watching.
Election time in old Winnipeg.
A caption below the photo explains that before television, and with only a few radios in the province, Manitobans gathered round newspaper offices to get — and discuss — breaking news. And when we talk about what’s missing from the media, this picture always looms large in my mind.
See, things don’t happen like that anymore. Google knows almost everything. Election results stream in on live-updating websites. When we suspect that Big News is happening, our first instinct isn’t to gather together in a physical space, but to get the hell on Twitter. After all, if it truly matters, Twitter will be tittering. It ain’t chalkboards stretched over dirt roads anymore, folks.
But is this exclusively where we want to go?
Social media’s marriage to mainstream media isn’t an experiment anymore; it’s a rigorous science, painstakingly developed by a million diligent web-heads theorizing about online community-building. Driven by these orchestrations, mainstream media outlets have slowly but surely pulled out of the meatspace and buried themselves in distant offices and increasingly dense websites.
The advantages of this are obvious. But it cannot be good for a media outlet, a community, and even a society to cede so much of its community-building to the online world, and the online world alone. We still yearn for faces, voices and touch; what fascinates me the most about the techosphere is just how much of its energy is devoted to making the digital world a less imperfect simulacrum of the real one.
With that in mind, if the News Cafe works, it could marry the urgency of the present with the flesh-and-blood news community-building of the past. I could pull not just the Free Press, but actual news off the Internet, and put it back onto the street. It could carve out a real flesh-and-blood space for the intersection of information, the people who inform, and the people who are informed.
I dig that idea, a lot. I’m no technophobe — I am, like many of you, something closer to a human-Blackberry cyborg — but the further we get from that picture in the Free Press lobby, the more I wonder if we haven’t turned social technology into a social trap. I want to get back into the street again.
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In other media news, tonight I sat through my first full episode of Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN’s new post-Larry King interview flagship.
The experience reminded me of another interview show I saw once. It was just past midnight in a Minneapolis hotel room, and a friend and I landed on the public-access television channel. The host of the show was an exuberant, portly man in his early 40s, who used a marker to draw thought-balloon diagrams on sheets of wrinkled looseleaf to explain his plans for a peaceful overthrow of American society, or something, it was really hard to follow.
Then he took calls from viewers. All of which turned out to be his friends.
“Shawna!” he squealed at his first caller. “How are you? I saw your cousin at the supermarket, did he tell you he saw me at the supermarket? Hey, you’re married to a strong black man. How is he doing? How are the kids? What do you want to say to all the sisters out there, who are also looking for a strong black man?”
It was a very strange show.
But I am reminded of him tonight, because that guy would have been a better hire for CNN than Piers Morgan. He was a better interviewer. Actually, everyone’s a better interviewer than Piers Morgan. Rick Campanelli was a better interviewer on MuchMusic when he was still Rick The Temp. Bill O’Reilly is a better interviewer, even when he’s flaming sheer lunacy at some squishy liberal pincushion. Paris Hilton was a better interviewer on My New BFF. Perez Hilton is a better interviewer on anywhere and all he does in interviews is squeal and act titillated.
Lest I’m not entirely clear here: Piers Morgan is the worst, the absolute worst, interviewer I have ever seen on television, heard on radio, or eavesdropped while out on an awkward first date. A computer program reading questions from MySpace surveys would have delivered a more insightful performance.
What baffles me most is that the Twitter advance for tonight’s show promised that Morgan would “grill” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the men who did not become accidental billionaires. That got my attention. ”Grilling” the Winklevoss twins implies a thumbing-of-the-nose at the current cultural narrative of the twins as ”gentlemen of Harvard” standing firm against the evil Zuck, and I like devil’s advocates. Count me in for a grillin’!
Sadly, I didn’t get one. See, I thought that a “grilling” meant tough questioning. What I didn’t know is that it actually means continually interrupting your subjects, posing disastrously leading and closed questions, putting belligerent words in their mouth, and spending most of the endgame sneering at the sources’ good looks, family connections, money and athletic prowess, then cutting off any rational discussion of their new lawsuit by asking ”how sorry should we feel” for “you poor boys” that they were so blessed.
But don’t take my word for how awkward it was. See for yourself.
I just don’t get it. Morgan’s approach wasn’t just bad, it was downright bizarre. What was he trying to accomplish with this interview? I sure hope it was “make self look like a puerile, clueless chump, and the Winklevoss twins like pillars of patience,” ’cause otherwise I got nothin’ to explain this trainwreck.
I did get one huge laugh out of this show, though, right as Morgan tossed from the Winklevoss brothers to his first commercial break.
Morgan: “Coming up next… I’m going to ask you if you’re on Facebook.”
(Awkward silence.)
Winklevoss twin: “… … Oh… kay…”
That may not be the exact wording, but it’s damn close and come on Piers. I realize you used to be a newspaperman but really, you’ve been on TV long enough to know that that was the least suspenseful teaser perhaps ever uttered on CNN. “Coming up: you won’t believe what this man has accomplished… with his beard trimmings” would be more likely to keep me glued to the channel.
The more worrisome part of that toss, though, was that the only reason he asked if they were on Facebook was so he could point out that by doing that, they’re “making Mark Zuckerberg richer.”
I just… I don’t even… whatever. This show is freaking awful.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but tonight I started to really miss Ol’ Nipplestraps.
Come back to us, o' great saviour.
Come tweeter with me 