Chopping Up Truth In Media Since 2009
Thanks Shakespeare, you gave the proper weight to what President Trump has done to his country.
High treason is not a joke!
Not something to be ignored because some will get tax cuts.
We sugar coat it.
Who cares if someone running for office undermines our democracy?
Who cares – as long as he secures our borders and keeps Mexicans out?
No.
Please watch:
2019 is going to be my “Year of Blogging Dangerously” – because America is in a bad place right now.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
I’m back. Thank God.
I didn’t blog most of the past year because I was writing a book that I got actual money for (just so you know, blogs don’t really pay) and because I just didn’t have an angle. Not sure I do now but I have to get back at it. It’s a discipline and I need to retrain those muscles.
So… I’m back.
But I’m back in a time when the American media is stuck. Absolutely stuck in the mud with no mule or Ford F-150 to pull us out.
To paraphrase the great film “All The President’s Men” – We haven’t got it.
Just not enough to bring President Trump down.
Don’t get me wrong – of course there is overwhelming evidence to bring down President Trump. Just not enough that sixty percent of Americas will get behind.
We are living in a country that elected a President ONLY because he said he would keep Mexicans out. REPEAT – ONLY BECAUSE HE WOULD KEEP MEXICANS OUT.
It wasn’t about jobs. It was about tax cuts. It wasn’t about NATO or the war on terror.
It was because he said he would build a wall to keep people out of America.
Even the Pope knows this is the only reason he is President. Look at that face.
Many of these same Americans that voted for him will lose their health insurance, will not get any tax break, will not get jobs… they will just get the Mexicans out. And that STILL seems to be okay with them.
We are living in a country that tolerated their ancestors when they came in the country – but have no tolerance for anything else.
But the journalists still need to be smarter.
We all want to have THE SCOOP – THE SMOKING GUN that finally brings him down – but we have to be careful.
Our challenge is – we have to be completely honest. There is no wiggle room for speculation. No wiggle room for unnamed sources.
The Trump White House is using every vague reference as leverage.
But it won’t work forever.
We must only be honest and, based on the absolute truthful facts, this President will be brought to his knees and he will resign.
Not impeached because there are no real “give me liberty or give me death” Americans on the Republican side – but he will be forced to resign because… there will be no other choice.
But right now, in a world where a candidate for congress can assault a reporter and still win, when most in the media are so horrified by this President’s lack of ability or respect for the job and only wants to get one of these overwhelmingly impeachable charges to stick… we haven’t got it.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
Even when it’s good news!
Even when it’s a “liberal” pro-Hillary-slanting site – photo editors cannot resist putting up the “crazy Hillary Clinton” photos (e.g. CNN below).
She freakin’ clinched the nomination – THE FIRST WOMAN EVER IN A MAJOR PARTY – and CNN made her look crazy.
You can imagine just what Fox News did:
I mean, for Christ’s sake, this is New York Magazine’s pic:
And another NY Magazine:
All crazy. Nothing Presidential.
Mother Jones at least had the decency not to put up a picture at all.
I admit, a good, natural, happy picture of Hillary Clinton is very hard to find.
This is the best I could do:
But, damn, that was a long time ago. She hasn’t been happy in a long time.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
GO PRIVATE.
There will never – ever – be enough growth and margin improvement to satisfy Wall Street.
Maybe short-term the studios will get a bump by telling investors they are going to make 100 comic book movies over the next 5 years – but after that flattens out – there’s nothing left to grow on top of that.
And it’s all Wall Street’s fault. You can’t blame studio executives. They have to appease Wall Street or they’re out.
I mean, my company, Manka Bros. just announced a trilogy of films based on the board game CHECKERS!
Wall Street’s insistence for high margin growth in such a mature business is destroying creativity (again, note all the sequels and re-makes and re-hashes and re-dos) and in it, ruining any realist opportunity for growth.
To grow the way Wall Street would like, 21st Century Fox (for instance) would need to have an “Avatar” one year (and double the amount of TV production); two “Avatars” the next year (and double again the doubled amount of TV shows); four “Avatars” the following year – and so on and so on. And they would all have to preform as good or better than the first!
And the market is saturated already.
There are too many choices and studios don’t have the monopoly on content creation that they once did.
And the moguls long for those days.
Sorry, fellas, they are not coming back.
It won’t be cheap to go private – billions and billions – but there is plenty of private equity out there that would love an asset that consistently pumps out up to $1 billion in pure profit.
Without the need to top profits year after year, the content produced can be more experimental, and thus, much more interesting and exciting for the consumer.
It would even allow for the occasional down year when things just didn’t work out. Hollywood IS a cyclical business, after all.
Hollywood Studios are sacred treasures in this country (and around the world) and should not be allowed to just fade away because Wall Street wasn’t happy with the growth prospects.
We must do what we can to save these institutions and going private is the best way.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
The internet is blowing up today on the news that “Community” will be exhumed and given a 15 episode Season 6 on Yahoo!’s video streaming service called Yahoo! Screen.
This, I suppose, is a big get for Yahoo! because now people have heard of Yahoo! Screen.
It’s also, obviously, a real life saver for many “Community” fans who, apparently, have been walking around the Earth like the cast of “The Leftovers” after the Rapture.
Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself a dork for many television shows and would be upset if they were cancelled but this spontaneous ejaculation of joy today is on par with the Brazilians reaction to winning the shoot-out against Chile in the World Cup.
This news also creates an interesting scenario in that most of the rabid fans that love “Community” so much hate Yahoo! equally as much.
It should be a fun experiment for Yahoo! (they have nothing to lose and a boatload of cash coming from the Alibaba IPO). And it could just be another nail in the coffin of Broadcast TV.
I just hope Dan Harmon and company are up to the task. It’s one thing to make an announcement on Twitter – it’s another thing to sit in a writer’s room and realize – “Ah, shit, we’re doing this on fucking Yahoo!”
There are insanely high expectations going into this streaming video show (it’s no longer a TV show).
Sucking could result in a mass suicide.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
It’s going to be a long summer for Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks Animation. It may just be the last summer those two names are associated with each other.
Sure, they’ve got “How To Train Your Dragon 2” coming out. And, sure, it’ll do $500 million worldwide and make a decent profit.
But not enough to convince anyone that DWA isn’t a dead-company-walking.
By early next year, something will have to happen – maybe a sale, maybe a shutdown – but business as usual is not an option.
This failure seemed to happen in slow motion – nearly 10 years with a terrible, unsustainable business model.
I seriously doubt the Company Mission was this: “We’re going to produce two animated movies a year – and one of them will fail. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.”
In baseball, getting a hit fifty percent of the time would be superhuman.
In Hollywood, fifty percent sucks.
When your job is to produce animated feature films, and over half of your movies bomb, there is something wrong with you. It means, you are incompetent and, deep down, you really don’t know what you’re doing.
Big Hollywood animated feature films is the ultimate fish-in-a-barrel/low-hanging-fruit type entertainment. Kids of a certain age will see almost anything. And parents need these diversions to pass the time on a hot summer afternoon or a miserable cold winter day.
But I suppose over the half time, parents would rather be miserable than go see a DreamWorks Animation film.
I’m not saying everything has to be “Frozen” – but nothing should ever be “Turbo” or “Mr. Peabody & Sherman.”
From the beginning, I never understood the Animation unit IPO.
If the reason was just to get enough cash to pay-off Paul Allen at the expense of giving up your dream of building a giant entertainment conglomerate on par with the other majors, then that was truly short-sighted and weak.
Taking the whole company public was really the only option – a piece of it was just too small. I’m sure there was a reason – but it was mistake nonetheless.
Seriously, you went from producing content like this:
To content like this:
AwesomenessTV and OTT, in general, is not going to be enough to save the company – though it will be a nice asset for someone to pick up on the cheap – after the whole OTT bubble bursts (any moment now).
So, I’m sorry, Jeffrey, it’s time for you to just enjoy your money and your philanthropic work (cocktail parties, clambakes at Geffen’s house, etc.). You do many great things for the world – producing movies isn’t one of those things.
Sorry.
It is very possible that Khan Manka, Jr. – as he wrote himself – is the Last Hollywood Mogul.
Good luck to you.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
5/12/14 UPDATE: AT&T to acquire DirecTV! Lock the doors – it’s scary out there.
2/12/14 UPDATE: Holy Crap, 2014 just got a whole lot uglier (and it was already hideous) with the announcement of Comcast acquiring Time Warner Cable!
ORIGINAL POST:
It’s coming.
Holy shit is it coming.
Millions are getting pummeled with a horrible winter but brace yourselves further, because you are in for a shitstorm of job cuts in 2014.
It will not be pretty.
It seems that media company CEOs are hell bent on proving to Wall Street that their companies can be growth companies.
Unless they fire every employee and start a new company by themselves in a garage, they cannot be growth companies the way Wall Street would like.
20% margins just will never happen again in the movie, TV, print, or music industries – so deal with it.
But these CEOs are guys (all guys) who think they can do anything.
But they will fail.
And then they’ll CUT.
And… it will not be pretty.
Tribune got things started.
My company’s CEO has called 2014 “The Year of the Hammer.”
No one will make it through unscathed.
First to go will be the packaged media folks. Those who support the production and distribution of DVDs and CDs and magazines, etc.
Gone.
Next will be the slow growth businesses – like movies and Broadcast TV production (serious like a heart attack).
Slates will be slashed, storytelling risk-taking will cease to exist.
Since no one can seem to do comedy anymore on Broadcast, they will be relegated to the epic mini-series format like “Under The Dome” and live Sports to stay afloat.
Then, finally, the low margin businesses will be hit – like console games. With the exception of a few huge titles, it’s a tough business and it certainly doesn’t help these overly-ambitious / delusional CEOs hit their targets.
So what’s going to be left? TV production for cable and Over-The-Top (OTT).
Why TV gets ownership of Internet content production is baffling to me. But they do.
By the end of 2014, giant media companies with their film studios, broadcast networks and massive real estate leases will be much MUCH leaner and the quality of the product will be much MUCH worse.
Hey, but a point of margin here and a point of margin there adds up to… 2 points.
But lighten up, Spring is coming.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
If other blogs didn’t steal my stuff years ago, I would have said R.I.P. Journalism – but “R.I.P.” as a way of saying a something is dead is also dead.
So, what do I mean by “Journalism Is Dead?”
Very simple. Journalism is dead. I’ll prove it.
The online media “information” space has been taken over by the Press Release. Companies issue press releases or send emails to blogs like Deadline.com or TechCrunch and that becomes the news of the day. No one is actually out in the field unless you consider a guy with a camera in the face of a drunken celebrity at TMZ real journalism.
Very few – VERY FEW – are actually digging up stories, creating news – trying to right the wrongs. It’s all controlled by someone other than journalists.
So here’s my experiment…
I didn’t really write over the summer because I was working on a book – so my numbers were pretty terrible on this blog. I was doing pretty well when I was constantly writing about how Facebook sucks. But now it’s terrible.
Last month I had very few eyeballs on this site because I really wasn’t around and only posted one time. Pretty sad.
In September 2013 – OnMedea had 1,167 hits. A real low for the site – but my own fault. In October, I am at 574 hits for the month – mostly because of the old Sean Hannity story – but really terrible.
Now I’m mostly going to do what others “media” blogs do for the rest of the month (Press Releases, hearsay, etc. – with my own little comments here and there) – whatever takes the LEAST amount of time – and give updates on how my numbers change.
Should be an interesting experiment.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
The first draft of my book is finished (more on that in the coming weeks) and I am back on the job here at OnMedea.
It was an excellent summer with lots of quiet and lots of work.
Other than the entire media spectrum going to Hell in a handbasket, there really is nothing much going on.
Movie studios are imploding and on their current tract will produce fewer and fewer quality films while continuing to bore audiences around the world with sequel after sequel after sequel. Don’t the studio bosses know that the Tentpole Is Dead?!
My parent company, Manka Bros., is apparently abandoning original films altogether.
That’s one sure-fire way to kill your business (with all due respect).
Broadcast networks continue on their painfully slow journey to complete irrelevance. (Thank God for football, huh?)
I declared them dead a couple of years ago but they are still on life support – though brain dead.
Oh, yeah, and we’re about to go to war. The world is, frankly, in chaos. My colleague Lester Aldrich wrote a thoughtful piece on the prospect of going to war from his own perspective as an 88-year-old man who has been through two wars.
But I digress… happy to be back. Have a great weekend.
Jill Kennedy – OnMedea
If there's one thing we strive to offer at Manka Bros it's entertainment for all. Of course we have our specialities which lie in things like short films, feature films and comics, but even we aren't so biased to believe that these are the only forms of entertainment which could appeal to our fans. That's why we have also branched out into things like publishing, broadway and music, but again we know these aren't the limits of entertainment.
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