Donning rented smoking jackets and ascots to pompously perform literary readings from the world's worst computer manuals, two rival tech columnists - Walter Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal and Stephen Manes of The New York Times - want to entertain viewers of their new Digital Duo public television program, and shame companies into providing information instead of painful confusion. There's a slight hitch in their plan, however.
While a four-show preview of Digital Duo begins airing Saturday on WNET in New York City, the fate of the next 22 episodes could be compromised by the uncompromising sponsorship ethics the columnists espouse - not to mention their penchant for calling a glamorized high-tech spade a spade.
Each 30-minute episode of Digital Duo is made up mainly of product reviews - with hands-on demos and hard-core opinions on hardware, software, and the Internet for the non-techie crowd - and the columnists are adamant that the show not be sponsored by companies that make those products.
In part because both Mossberg and Manes are bound by the ethics rules of their papers, they insisted on having complete editorial control of the show - plus the final say on marketing deals. They got that, from ZMedia, the Framingham, Massachusetts, production company that dreamed up the series, but so far they're missing the funding to keep the project alive.
The hope is that the preview episodes - which will air in the coming weeks in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, and other cities - will help win the duo some sponsors who take a liking to their non-reverential views on technology.
Hitting a Save or Delete button - complete with a corresponding charming jingle or raspberry noise - on stuff like high-priced digital cameras (which Manes argues can't compete with even disposable film cameras in picture quality) or Web-based sports scores (which Mossberg says take longer to get than those offered by free telephone services), the two aim to reach a smart, curious, high-income audience that is tired of industry-speak.
"Our presumption is that our audience doesn't give a rat's ass about the tech industry - they're not techies," Mossberg says.
But they do use computers and all sorts of electronics. The show's executive producer, Dennis Allen, compares it to National Public Radio’s Car Talk, whose listeners aren't necessarily auto-lovers, but find themselves forced to be curious about the four-wheelers that are part of their lives.
The two are promoting themselves as the Siskel and Ebert of technology. "You don't get the sense that, like Siskel and Ebert, we actually hate each other," laughs Manes. "But we are fierce competitors, and nothing irritates either of us more than finding something we hadn't thought of or written about in the other one's column."
Mossberg and Manes are even scripting their contradictory views into on-air arguments. And they're surely having fun. In an early episode, they take on a "ruggedized" laptop, which they jump on, douse with water, and even drive a car over, before conceding it could take a licking and keep on clicking (its mouse, that is).
Fun and games aside, these two columnists, who boast almost arrogantly of their plum jobs with two of the nation's most-respected papers, say they are eager to give the average PBS viewer some practical advice that cuts through the hoopla buffeted about by the tech industry. They want to point out when real-world solutions work better than their high-tech spin-offs - and they promise never to let a Microsoft marketing manager (or PR flacks from other companies, for that matter) dominate the show with a useless PowerPoint presentation.
Maybe such a tack will even find them a sponsor - one that can, as Manes and Mossberg claim about themselves, appreciate technology without living it. As Mossberg puts it: "We're two analog guys in a digital world."
