Schadenfreude Watch: Meanwhile, in Other Mediums...

EVER HAVE ONE of those days where everything you see and hear seems to be of a piece? Well, further to the bitchslap doled out by Salon to TV, here is a series of articles about other media in trouble, in transition, or both -- all gleaned from today's New York Times.

First, an intriguing article about what used to be called the "Sunday Funnies" are trying to survive the doom-and-gloom downward spiral of the modern newspaper. Leslie Berlin's article hits close to home for me. Not only was I one-time comics fanatic (I used to buy a paper I hated just to get their superior comics on the weekend) who's largely fallen out of the habit, but I also can identify with the wistful edge to Stephan Patsis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, as he describes getting into a medium that he's always loved when the party seems to be over:

IN many ways, Stephan Pastis is living his dream. In 2002, after years of frustration, he quit his job as a lawyer to pursue cartooning. Today his daily strip, “Pearls Before Swine,” appears in more than 500 newspapers. He says he answers his fan mail “in groups of 100.”

Nevertheless, he can’t help worrying.

“Newspapers are declining,” he says. “For a syndicated cartoonist, that’s like finally making it to the major leagues and being told the stadiums are all closing, so there’s no place to play.”

From Comics and their attempts to stay relevant in a post-Newspaper world, let's go to satellite radio, where Mel Karmazin is fighting a very different battle, and one that's unthinkable from the panicked strata of TV and Radio: subscribers are going up; so is revenue, but it still may not be enough:

“If you take a look around at all of the media space — I’m not trying to paint the rosy picture because we have challenges connected to our liquidity and certainly our stock price is dreadful,” Mr. Karmazin says. “But, you know, our revenues are growing double digits. We’re growing subscribers. We’re not losing subscribers.

“So if would be unfair to compare us to a newspaper business that’s losing circulation and losing revenue, traditional television, traditional radio,” he adds. “They have fundamental company flaws or industry flaws.”

But Sirius XM does have a serious flaw in its capital structure. Its costs, which include servicing its pile of debt, appear to be too high to make the business viable.

Mr. Cheen, the analyst, agrees with Mr. Karmazin that satellite radio is a delightful product and gives him credit for showing revenue growth amid the economic downturn. “But you don’t have any unlevered, free cash flow, dude,” he says of Mr. Karmazin and his company. “In this environment, how do you walk on water?

“This is the drama of it all,” Mr. Cheen continues. “No one is suggesting this media is not a viable media. It’s just poorly capitalized.”

The conversation in TV right now is all about alternative revenue models, and product placement, and sponsored programming -- anything to replace the current broken advertising model. Yet if we take a peek at the canary in a coalmine -- the music business -- Jon Pareles finds a world where the term "selling out" has lost its stigma. As the music becomes a marketing tool for product, rather than a product itself; are artists facing new pressures to tailor their output to be marketing-friendly -- putting their creative expression behind the imperatives of the marketing machine it's selling ou--sorry -- synergizing with?

With telling ambivalence, Brooklyn Vegan, the widely read, indie-loving music blog, recently started a column, “This Week in Music Licensing: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore,” but soon dropped the “selling out” half of the title. There’s no longer a clear dividing line for selling out, if there ever was.

And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.

It’s almost enough to make someone miss those former villains of philistinism, the recording companies. Labels had an interest in music that would hold listeners on its own terms; selling it was their meal ticket. Labels, and to some extent radio stations and music television, also had a stake in nurturing stars who would keep fans returning to find out what happened next, allowing their catalogs to be perennially rediscovered. By contrast, licensers have no interest beyond the immediate effect of a certain song, and can save money by dealing with unknowns.

I mean, hell yeah, I downloaded that Chairlift song cause I heard it on the Ipod Nano commercial. But I also got the Glasvegas song cause I heard it on SiriusXM. Oh Lord, what's an aging hipster to do?

Well, for one thing, you could mourn the death of the Polaroid.

Ugh.

Just as I'm reaching for the Advil, and saying to myself, "yes, but Box Office receipts are up!" comes Michael Cieply to tell me it aint necessarily so...

Looking back, in fact, 2008 may be remembered as the year when Hollywood succeeded in redefining the Big Event.

A “movie of the century” — something that made you want to dress up, get in line, and act silly just to see it — used to come along every year or two. The “Star Wars” films had that quality. So did “Titanic,” in a quieter, dreamier sort of way.

But heart-stopping film events like that have been popping up every few weeks this year.

Or at least it felt that way if you were willing to close your eyes and take a ride with Hollywood’s marketing mavens and those who help them along in the media, old and new.

It’s all great fun — and, in the heat of the moment, can seem tantalizingly real. Remember the high-heeled stampede toward “Sex and the City”? What a romp! Cosmopolitans. Bus tours. Girls’ nights out.

Eventually, about 22 million tickets were sold. That puts it on a par with “Steel Magnolias” in 1989 or “The First Wives Club” in 1996 — movies that played to about the same number of viewers, but did so with considerably less noise.

“It’s certainly easier to create a media event, if you have the right stars and get the right traction,” said Howard Bragman, a Hollywood publicist who, with Michael Levin, has made a study of contemporary publicity in a book, “Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?,” which was recently published by Portfolio Hardcover.

The problem, Mr. Bragman said, “is that there’s shockingly little relationship between the publicity, i.e., the hype, and butts in seats.”

Of course, to bring everything full circle, and back to my little corner of the mediasphere... let's point out that at a time when hype has become so efficient and effective that we think everything's a blockbuster even if it isn't, that the Canadian Film and TV industry still gets failing grades in the very basics of publicity: phoning people back, sending out screeners, mounting innovative events, coming up with a coherent marketing message for a movie, spending money on effective ads for a broadcast premiere, etc, etc, etc.

Hollywood is staying afloat on an oceanliner of hype. And we can't even figure out how to point our dinghy at the open sea.

Right. That's it. Daddy needs a lie down and three fingers of the quality.

And no more papers today!