Internal documents obtained by WW show that a quota system is being put in place that calls for steep increases in posting to Oregonlive.com, and promises compensation for those employees who post most often.
The new policy, shown to the editorial staff in a PowerPoint presentation in late February, provides that as much as 75 percent of reporters’ job performance will be based on measurable web-based metrics, including how often they post to Oregonlive.com.
Beat reporters will be expected to post at least three times a day, and all reporters are expected to increase their average number of posts by 40 percent over the next year.
In addition, reporters have been told to stir up online conversations among readers.
“On any post of substance, reporter will post the first comment,” the policy says. “Beat reporters [are to] solicit ideas and feedback through posts, polls and comments on a daily basis.”
The Oregonian will hand out yearly bonuses—if the finances of the company allows it—to reporters who exceed these goals. The policy says “final performance ratings will determine merit pay.”
In other words, the Oregonian is becoming Gawker. Sad, but sadly not surprising, news.
(Seriously, between the insistence on writers getting involved with comments/commenters and the metric-based performance pay, that’s pretty much the world that was in place when I was at io9.)
(From here.)
Is Mad Men The Ghost of Television Past?
Another oldie, from May last year, written for WIRED.
On the slowly-unfolding AMC period drama Mad Men, character arcs and plots can take several episodes or even seasons to come into focus. As the show’s sixth season slowly unfolds, it’s tempting to suggest that the show is at risk of becoming as much a part of the past as the era it portrays. Is television even interested in this kind of programming anymore?
When Mad Men debuted in 2007 — setting a new ratings record for AMC in the process with 900,000 viewers — the landscape of television was different. The Sopranos had just finished on HBO, and The Wire was still on the air; Lost was still in the middle of its run, and the idea of television as the home of long-form, complex, quality drama was something still on the minds of many. Mad Men was simply more evidence of the future of the format.
Cut to 2013, and it’s a very different story. The first episode of the new season had 3.4 million viewers tuning in – down from last year’s season premiere high of 3.54 million – and successive episodes have dropped to around the mid 2 million mark, under the level for the same time last season. More importantly, the show’s importance to AMC has shifted, if not outright shrunk, in light of the phenomenonal success of the channel’s The Walking Dead.
It’s not just that the most recent episode of that comic book adaptation brought in almost four times as many viewers as Mad Men‘s peak, with 12.42 million people watching (It was, after all, a season finale); consider, as well, that the accompanying episode of The Talking Dead –Chris Hardwick’s talk-show companion to the zombie drama — had a series high of 4.3 million viewers; almost a million more viewers than Mad Men for a show that is far cheaper, and far simpler, to produce. No wonder that the channel has announced plans for Talking Bad, a similar show to accompany the final season of Breaking Bad this August.
It’s not only AMC where attention and focus has shifted from quality drama to genre fare. Instead of The Sopranos or The Wire, HBO’s most-discussed series these days is George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and its most-watched show is trashy vampire soap True Blood. Attempts at more low-key fare like Luck and Treme meet considerably more muted response and, as a result, have shorter lifespans. The audience clearly knows what it wants, and what it wants is apparently sexy genre fare over the chance to see middle-aged men struggle with the complexities of life as we know it.
A similar thing is happening in broadcast television; a cursory glance at the shows networks are developing for the 2013/2014 television season reveals that the hour-long drama format continues to be dominated by unchallenging procedurals, crime dramas or fantasy fare, for the most part. For all the excitement offered by Lost‘s ambitious scope or complicated narrative structure, the post-Lost television landscape has suggested that the show succeeded despite those elements, not because of them. Instead of demonstrating that broadcast dramas can challenge the viewer without scaring them off, the lesson Lost taught broadcast television was apparently that flashbacks can be a legitimate form of long-form exposition (See: Once Upon a Time, The Following).
The slowly shrinking Mad Men audience makes the fact that AMC reportedly cut budgets for both Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead in order to pay for Mad Men‘s most recent seasons somewhat confusing. Admittedly, for Breaking Bad, there is some level of logic from a purely business perspective — The show brings in fewer viewers, and therefore less advertising revenue than Mad Men — but the idea that AMC would undercut its most visible, valuable show for something that is watched by a fraction of its audience is counter-intuitive at best.
Or is it? While the show brings in fewer viewers and less advertising revenue per dollar spent than The Walking Dead (and definitely considerably cheaper The Talking Dead), Mad Men arguably brings AMC far more critical prestige than Robert Kirkman’s horror series.
The same is true of Breaking Bad; even though ratings for both shows may be a fraction of The Walking Dead‘s audience, having two of — if not the two — most highly-regarded television dramas today on its network gives AMC an overall reputation that makes the network brand more attractive to program-makers and advertisers alike. “AMC,” it suggests, “is where the forward thinkers, the early adopters, the smart buyers go for shows. Sure, less people might watch overall, but the ones that do watch are the tastemakers you want.” Add that prestige and attention to the middling ratings, and Mad Men earns its keep.
We’ve seen this before, with NBC Universal’s Syfy and Battlestar Galactica; Ron Moore and David Eick’s series was never the highest-rated show on the cable network, but unlike the more popular Stargate: Atlantis or Warehouse 13, it did snag the network a Peabody Award and prompt a discussion of human rights at the United Nations. To be blunt, you genuinely can’t buy publicity — or affirmation — like that. When a show starts connecting with people in such a way, you keep that show on the air as long as you can before it starts to really hurt financially.
The problem is that, eventually, it will start to hurt financially, and at that point you have to start to say goodbye. Television is a business, after all, and there comes a point where leaving money on the table in the name of critical plaudits starts to seem foolish; you can’t use acclaim to put food on the table, after all. Goodwill only goes so far, and with every single episode, more people are leaving Don Draper for other shows.
Battlestar Galactica lasted four seasons (Five, if you include the original mini-series that launched the reboot); Breaking Bad will last five. Mad Men, by the time it’s finished, will have lasted seven seasons. All things considered, that’s an impressively long run, especially considering the alternative programming AMC could have opted for at any point that would have brought more people watching. It may simply be that Mad Men the show has a parallel existence to Don Draper himself: Slowly becoming outdated without anyone realizing it at the time.
This doesn’t bode well for the future of television drama, though. If broadcast networks are going to play it safe in terms of selecting new shows, and the previously-reliable cable and premium cable channels have discovered that genre is far more successful than “straight” drama when it comes to return on investment and eyeballs-on-shows, that’s a problem for any new show that wants to play things slow, subtle and lavishly enough that its budgets may make executives nervous. Given the choice between something with the potential to become a breakout hit and something with the potential to break even but maybe garner critical acclaim, it’s more of a risk to go with the latter option, and with the television industry in seeming flux (Ad spending was down in 2011, back up in 2012, an election year), now might be the time to play it safe. So where will we see the next Mad Men?
The answer may be online. We don’t yet know — and may never know, considering just how closely guarded viewing numbers at Netflix tend to be — how many people have streamed House of Cards so far, but let’s do some creative math for a second: Mad Men averages between 2.5 and 3 million viewers an episode, as does Breaking Bad, so let’s say that that means there’s a three million-strong audience for those shows in the U.S. at least (Bear in mind, DVRs, DVD and streaming audiences alike aren’t factored into those numbers; Sunday’s Mad Men often tops Apple’s iTunes TV chart on Monday, so there’s a second audience right there that’s already digital to consider).
Admittedly, a new drama in that vein wouldn’t have the name recognition nor the critical acclaim that would drive people to tune in, so the math may be somewhat skewed upwards. Perhaps not, once you factor in the audience that wanted the show in another format than live-viewing and the additional audience who might be interested in the show but stays away because it’s already five years in (Or, for that matter, the audience who might watch just for the novelty of something new).
Nonetheless, it’s safe to assume that the metrics for “success” for a streaming-first show are somewhat different than that for a traditional television show, if only due to the newness of the format and the smaller scale of the audience. Is it possible that a Mad Men-style 3 million people audience would be enough to be considered a smash hit for streaming? Could the future of prestige television drama be somewhere that isn’t technically television at all?
I don’t think the world as a whole has changed that much. The other thing to bare in mind is that while it may have been four calendar years for the reader, but if one accepts the hypothesis that it’s only been seven or eight years since Charlie brought the team together, Nightcrawler hasn’t been gone an excessive length of physical time.
You know you’re reading a Chris Claremont interview when he calls Professor Xavier “Charlie.”
Who is the Doctor?
From the never-published final installment of the on-again, off-again recaps on WIRED’s Underwire for the last season of Doctor Who. Funny to revisit in light of subsequent episodes.
With “The Name of The Doctor,” this latest season of Doctor Who came to an end with something that was neither a bang nor a whimper — in large part because the final few moments of the episode turned it from a revelatory finale into confusing, frustrating glimpse of things to come.
Ignoring for a second the final scene of the episode, “The Name of The Doctor” oddly crystalized a lot of the problems this seventh season has suffered through. Like so many episodes this run, Saturday’s final episode was good enough as opposed to particularly strong, and found itself relying on familiar characters, ideas and audience goodwill to distract from writing that was surprisingly messy given the series’ recent history, and filled with plot holes and unexplored ideas that could upset the story’s movement with just a minute’s exploration.
And what distractions the episode provided! We saw Clara with each of the previous Doctors in scenes that demonstrated seeming lack of convincing green screen technology (The second and fifth Doctors, in particular, appeared in scenes with a Clara obviously shot elsewhere and elsewhen. By comparison, the scenes with the first and third Doctors seemed to give her a graininess that matched the original shots), as well as henchmen that were reminiscent of both the popular Silence from the show’s sixth season and also Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s Gentlemen, from way back when, and a third appearance this year from the increasingly popular Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax, the alien detectives from the Victorian era. Underneath all of this, however, was a script that ultimately failed to convince.
The basic plot of “The Name of The Doctor” was, at heart, very straightforward. Our heroes were lured into a trap by a former enemy out for revenge, which they only survived due to self-sacrifice on both of their parts. It was the meat on those bones where things got somewhat convoluted: The Doctor and Clara found themselves on Trenzalore, the site of the Doctor’s grave at some unspecified time in the character’s future in order to save Vastra, Strax and Jenny from the Great Intelligence — the villain from a storyline from the series’ original run, as well as the most recent Christmas Special and the first episode from this most recent run. After death, all that remained of the Doctor in the tomb wasn’t a body, but his personal timestream, which was less an abstract concept than a quasi-physical lightshow that could be “entered” by first the Great Intelligence seeking to undo all of the Doctor’s good works, and then Clara — attempting to stop the Great Intelligence — and the Doctor himself.
That Clara was successful was hardly a surprise; the show could hardly let the Doctor die with episodes left on the clock (and anyway, we dealt with the faux threat of the Doctor dying last year). Instead, the interest in Clara’s attempt came from the fact that, by entering the Doctor’s timestream, she became scattered across his life as multiple people with no recollection of who she had been — the multiple Clara’s we’d encountered up to this point, and the “impossible girl” who had captured the Doctor’s attention in the first place, leading to his meeting the “main” Clara for the first time. Well, that and the other character Clara and the Doctor met inside the Doctor’s timestream, but we’ll get to him soon enough.
For every smart idea in the episode — The explanation for what made Clara the “impossible girl” after all, her remembering events that had been wiped from history because the Tardis was leaking time, the post-Doctor’s death slow revision of the universe’s history, and how that altered character relationships — there were moments that just seemed unfinished or needlessly rushed. The Doctor warned about crossing over with his own timeline and later collapses from having done so, but just two season finales ago, “The Big Bang” relied entirely on his doing just that without any ill-effects, for example; similarly, the surprisingly speedy and easy discovery of Clara within the Doctor’s timestream felt unearned, and undercutting the drama of her having seemingly sacrificed herself doing so just minutes earlier.
But see, we’re already at the final sequence I mentioned earlier. Up until that point, “The Name of The Doctor,” for all its flaws, felt like an ending (albeit a disappointing one). Then, in the midst of the Doctor’s personal timestream, Clara and the Doctor met a shadowy figure with his back to the camera; he was someone the Doctor was seemingly afraid of — or afraid of Clara discovering, perhaps — describing the figure as, essentially, the incarnation he’d like to forget, the Doctor who doesn’t save the day.
That this new Doctor — A future incarnation that “our” Doctor knows about because he, too, has entered his timestream? A past one? — is played by John Hurt is important only for the BBC, who’ll doubtlessly like to boast of an actor of such popularity and credibility taking on the role (How else to explain the hilarious “Introducing JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR” credit once he turned around?); for fans of the show’s larger mythology, what is more important is that this brings the number of incarnations of the Doctor to twelve, leaving the character with just one more regeneration to go before his death, according to rules set up in the original run of the show. In recent years, it’s been teased that the rule no longer applies, but never definitively stated within the series itself.
With just one scene at the end of the episode, “The Name of The Doctor” went from disappointing closure to a shameless tease for November’s 50th anniversary episode: What has this new Doctor done that is so terrible (Being responsible for the death of every other Time Lord, an established part of the character’s backstory since the show’s 2005 revival, would be the most obvious guess)? Does the thirteen incarnation rule still exist, and if so, is the Doctor close to his final life or is there another incarnation that we don’t know about? And, more subtly, but arguable more importantly, will the Doctor be able to reconcile his actions in that incarnation with his self-image, and stop repressing an entire period of his life?
The scale of the final scene of the episode ultimately overwhelmed what had come before; it left the audience feeling energized and excited, but it was a cheap thrill in many ways. Despite the title of the episode, the name of the Doctor wasn’t revealed on Saturday, and the slight of hand that managed to make that disappointment (or relief, perhaps) disappear from fans’ minds was a sign that — perhaps, if we’re lucky — the Who that lies ahead will be as bold and fun as the one they fell in love with. It may have been a sign of better things ahead, but that doesn’t change the fact that what came before was underwhelming at best, and a sign that, when it comes to this series, familiarity may be breeding contempt after all. In more ways than originally intended, perhaps, a lot depends on the 50th anniversary episode coming up in November.
