Last week in Los Angeles, I had the disorienting experience of shuttling between opposite ends of the cultural media spectrum - from the old to the new, the large to the small, from the Olympian culture of celebrity to down-home interactive conversation.
Late Friday night, I was a guest on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder. Early the following morning, I was a guest on KPFK-FM (Pacifica's) Digital Village, hosted by Ric Allan and Doran Barons. The two appearances were a case study on how issues are presented to the public, at what cost, and in what form. The experience also made me think about the ways that real, as opposed to suggested, interactivity is redefining what media is.
Tom Snyder is perhaps the smartest, most original, and interesting host on commercial television. He's wise, literate, and often bitingly funny. Although his program is on late and draws a much smaller audience than Letterman or Leno, it is very much a network operation, located in CBS' massive West Los Angeles studio complex, a giant white, floodlit monument to the disintegrating top-down model of broadcasting.
Although Snyder is anything but conventional, he looks the part of the network host and star - tanned, handsome, distinguished. Because of his show's time slot, he is freer to tell off-color jokes and mention words like "masturbation," which he does with glee.
Digital Village, on the other hand, is a listener-funded broadcast hour - on a Pacifica station - devoted to nondoctrinaire but decidedly leftish news and discussion about the digital world. It broadcasts from a small studio on the ground floor of a multi-use gray adobe building stuck off the side of a Studio City neighborhood street.
If you're a guest on Tom Snyder's program, your transportation to Los Angeles is paid for (Random House was sending me there anyway). A car picks you up at the airport and drives you to and from the studio. Your luxury hotel is also paid for, and you are offered a small fee - US$250 - for appearing (I turned mine over to charity).
For the show, you are pre-interviewed in detail by a producer the day before the program. She raises issues to gauge how wide-ranging your opinions are, how strongly you feel about issues, whether you'll say anything unexpected or controversial. And how well you talk. Bad talkers are not seen on network TV. If you say something provocative (I, for example, said the networks were correct to curtail the State Of The Union address in favor of O. J. Simpson coverage, since the outdated ritual no longer fulfilled its original purpose of communicating fresh information in a pre-electronic age to a newly-arriving Congress, and had morphed into a ritualized presidential propaganda opportunity), the producer will perk up and note that and pass it along to Snyder, who will review the possible questions and select the two or three he likes and wants to talk about.
If you're a guest on Digital Village, conversely, you get an email invitation to come on the show if you get to town. Ric and Doran don't pre-interview. You make your way to the station, park if you can find a spot, and walk into KPFK, where one or the other host will come out and find you. They themselves only arrive a few minutes before airtime.
If you're on the Snyder program, the car picks you up at the hotel. Once you're at the studio, star-struck teenagers and tourists gawk to see who you are. The car goes through a special gate and into a special parking space by the door. A page in a red CBS jacket is waiting for you. He takes you down a long hall, up an elevator, down another hall and into your private waiting room. The door is closed. There are sofas, tables, and a TV. The wall is lined with famous autographs - Anne Rice, Bill Cosby - all messages to Tom. I was not invited to sign.
A producer knocks on the door after a few minutes, thanks you for coming, and subtly scans you for any potential problems - nerves, drink, bad clothes, etc. He kicks around possible topics, tells you how the program works, discusses Snyder's interviewing style.
After a few minutes, you're led into a larger "Green Room," where there are trays of coffee, sodas, vegetables, and cookies and brownies. Other guests are there, as are friends of Tom dropping by to say hello. Snyder popped up in the monitor in the room with the TV actor Orson Bean (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman), who was appearing along with his wife to mark Valentine's Day. There was no sign of anybody from Baywatch.
Bean looked at my book, then smiled. He asked me what it was about it. I told him. I asked him if he'd ever been online. He looked at me as if I had just fallen out of the belly of a spaceship.
Things started to tense up. I was called into a makeup room where a makeup artists painstakingly colored my face, eyebrows, eyelids, and chin.
Soon, a producer came in and walked me onto the set. Snyder had time to ask me four or five rapid-fire questions, all of them smart. One was about ABC and Food Lion, another about the controversy over pornography on the Net, another about the networks' decision to cover the Simpson trial as well as the State of the Union speech. Snyder had obviously been online, used and received email, but kept the conversation focused on mainstream media issues, especially those relating to the networks.
His producer had told me there wasn't much interest in new media among Snyder's audience, so much of the discussion focused on the old. Personalities like Snyder came of age in broadcasting's Golden Age and are obsessed with network news. To be a network news anchor was the ultimate aspiration of every broadcaster, and nothing on the Net could possibly compare to that kind of position.
There was one caller, but he was incoherent and he was cut off in mid-sentence. The interviewed seemed over in a second. Snyder shook hands and vanished.
For a couple of years in the late '80s, I was the executive producer of the CBS Morning News. This was the first time I'd been back to a network studio since, and the first time I'd ever been a network guest on that side of a camera. I was struck by the formality, cost, bureaucracy, and ritual of a format that was meant to be conversational. My six years on the Net and the Web had conditioned me to a completely different ethos and environment. I was reminded that in broadcasting, things sometimes are meant to appear spontaneous and interactive, but never really are.
The next morning, I walked into Ric and Doran's studio. I shook hands with the tech, sat down in the guest chair. The three of us put on earphones and started gassing. It seemed as if we'd known each other for years. They read 10 minutes of digital news, and I was invited to jump in at anytime and add to or comment on the stories they were reading, an intrusion that would be considered heinous at any commercial news operation.
The switchboard lit up right away and stayed lit. There are a lot of people in LA, Ric said smiling. Teachers, academics, and webheads called in to talk about education and the Net, values and the young, Microsoft and media.
Ric and Doran's show was intrinsically interactive. Callers were not a grace note or amusement, they were the fundamental ethic of Digital Village, around which we were accommodated. The show's name seemed more appropriately by the second.
It never crossed Ric or Doran's mind to incorporate the "heat" and "sizzle" that most public-affairs TV and radio producers struggle for. Heat and sizzle are intrinsic parts of interactive broadcasts. They don't need to be produced. Callers line up to challenge the opinions they're hearing.
Digital Village conveyed information about Net access, phone rates and other digital stories. It had the intimate nature of a spirited conversation. It was great fun. There were so many interesting and thoughtful calls and unresolved issues we agreed on the spot to tape another hour. One man reviewing Virtuous Reality for a newspaper called in to ask me why parts of the book weren't longer and more detailed. A teacher described her struggle to get technology into her classroom. Another pressed hard about who was going to teach the young users of technology how to write clearly and well.
After the program, Ric had to go upstairs for a journalism class and Doran had to find the person whose car was blocking the one I arrived in. A yellow Lab wandered around the studio.
The Snyder program was great for my book. It was on the high end of broadcasting experience. But it was striking how much money, how many people, and how much preparation and formality went into it. And how starkly its model of discussion contrasted to that on Digital Village.
One was so expensively and carefully choreographed, the other so casually interesting. Each step towards the Late Late Show - the pre-interviews, the limo, the makeup, the guest rooms, the makeup, the time pressure, seemed from within to formalize and distance the people on the program from the people watching it.
Digital Village will never have a fraction of the viewers Snyder or other commercial TV broadcasts reach just by appearing on a network's airwaves. But there was the nagging sense that Digital Village was the bigger show, both as publicity for my book and as a significant media phenomenon. In the same way The Connection on Boston's WBUR had, there was a vitality and engagement about broadcasts like this - maybe because the subject matter is so fresh and new - that stand out in sharp contrast to the tired format of traditional journalism, electronic and print, especially when you're running from one to the other.
Moira Gunn's Tech Nation on KQED-FM in San Francisco, on which I appeared earlier in the tour, struck me in the same way - a new kind of broadcast for a new kind of culture. A format whose time has come.
