LAWRENCE, Kansas – During the time that I’ve been preoccupied with other projects to devote my full energies to keeping up with IPW, I’ve made the first major effort of my life to get into better shape. I’ve lost two grandfathers, a great uncle and others to heart disease, so sooner or later I was either going to need to do something about it or suffer irreversible consequences

Filed under:
Opinion/Editorial by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. – After putting forth my arbitrary list of the best in live television for the past year, I have seen that the Sports Emmy Awards were given out last night. I’ve decided that, since I have yet to look at the winners, I might as well give my picks to a slightly less arbitrary selection.

Here’s a quick digression: I’m sitting in the Kansas Union on the KU campus in Lawrence with ESPN’s newsmagazine attempt, E:60, on a television to my left. I can’t really hear what’s being said. What I can tell is that the film noir pitch meeting footage is horribly over the top, and the camerawork for the interviews in this Stephon Marbury piece is basically what I’d expect from ESPN trying to do break into this genre. Could someone please watch Real Sports or 60 Minutes?! They do it right.

Filed under:
Opinion/Editorial, Sports TV by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. – I’ve never really loved editing. Something about it always seemed anticlimactic to me, which is largely why I prefer live television over film. There is just something about the adrenaline rush of doing anything live in the moment that you can’t match in an edit room. But it’s a necessary evil and one that is becoming more and more a part of live broadcasting.

For the last six years I’ve been living in college towns: four years in Lawrence and two years in Syracuse. The University of Kansas offers the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications; Syracuse University boasts the prominent S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Whether students in those schools intend to be reporters, producers, directors, writers, announcers, anchors or something entirely different, nearly all of them will take at least one or two classes that require them to edit video.

(Both universities also have separate film departments, KU’s in its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and SU’s in its College of Visual and Performing Arts. In most cases, students do more work with video than actual film, and editing is often required.)

Filed under:
College, Opinion/Editorial by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. — This morning, as I was driving from Kansas City to Lawrence in my car “Black Beauty,” who will travel her 222,000th mile this week, listening to D.H.T.’s remake of the Roxette song “Listen To Your Heart” on the radio, I began to get nostalgic. Reflecting on the good old days before “pop” and MTV came in and practically decimated music and my beloved medium of television.

I wonder if most teens even realize that the MTV is an abbreviation for Music Television. What music?! It has instead become a brand that seeks to capitalize off of all that is “pop,” more recently accepting the responsibility of defining “pop” – music and culture – in the first place. With the notable exceptions of Beth McCarthy Miller, Carson Daly and Jon Stewart, MTV has produced mediocrity in massive quantities, people with no hope for survival in broadcast television. The network has become far too big, no longer emphasizing music as it was intended to when it launched in the early 1980′s.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television by Scott A. Winer