Amy Eddings - Fly On the Wall: The Press Secretary

Intro:
Not every news story is Watergate. And not every story springs from the minds of an enterprising Woodward or Bernstein type. Press secretaries are the unacknowledged co-producers of many stories, the link between the media and the Very Important Person or Event in the news. They provide statistics, line up interviews, give off-the-record information that can help guide a story, and -- Ed Skyler's case -- help his boss navigate large machinery during a photo op. Skyler is the Chief of Public Information for New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation. As part of our on-going "fly-on-the-wall" series, On the Media's Amy Eddings tracked Skyler as he orchestrated the official opening of the Boardwalk on Coney Island.

SKYLER: "Hi, it's Ed Skyler from the Parks Department, Vern. How are you? Just wanted to remind you that we're opening up the Boardwalk at Coney Island today at eleven. Okay, cool You guys had an article about it in the Brooklyn section, so. Excellent, I'll talk to you later." For the most part, you wanna make it quick, keep it to 30 seconds. Let them know what your business is, and not chew off their ear, because if you irritate them every time you call, they're gonna be annoyed, and you don't want that. "Hey, Chris, Ed Skyler from Parks. Could you do me a favor? Could you put in a word to Kylie pitching our event for us? 'Cause I couldn't get her on the phone, didn't wanna bother her·" It takes a certain degree of a lack of self-awareness to pull it off because·it's an awkward call to make, especially when you don't know anybody.

Watching Ed Skyler work the phone, it's hard to think he doesn't know every reporter in New York. He's got phone numbers memorized, and he makes his pitch with a confidence that's astonishing for a guy who first took the job two years ago, at the age of 24.

SKYLER: "You guys gonna join us at Coney Island today? You are? Oh, packaging and everything? To what do we owe the pleasure? That's fantastic. So, we'll take good care of her. But if she wants to take a job at the freak show, I can't stop her. I just want you to know that."

So far, Skyler's snagged about four TV stations, two major daily newspapers, and a handful of local Brooklyn papers. That's pretty good, considering the event is at Coney Island, miles away from Manhattan, where the media are based. As an incentive, Skyler's packed the event with plenty of photo ops: clowns·a steel drum duo·school kids·and Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, riding a giant beach cleaning machine called a "beach rake."

SKYLER: And he can ride that, or sort of get on top of it and pilot it for a stretch·It sends the message that it's been cleaned. It shows him sort of in action in sort of a goofy way.

OTM REPORTER: He does that a lot. Is that him, or is that you?

SKYLER: No, that's him. You can't force people to dress up as a tree and plant them in Central Park. That just comes naturally.
Commissioner Stern's love of the wacky comes in handy for Skyler, because he's got a hard product to sell to the media. Beach openings, tree planting campaigns, new playground equipment: this is the typical news coming from the Parks Department. So Skyler and his boss have to spice it up·.like the time the Commissioner piloted a huge, hollowed-out pumpkin around a lake in Central Park to promote a Halloween event.

SKYLER: And so the scene that kept playing and playing -- 'cause it got picked up everywhere -- was this shot of, like, him taking this turn, and the pumpkin sorta like, dipping down, looking like he was gonna capsize. I thought, not only was he gonna drown -- and it was going to be my fault for putting him in this stunt -- but everyone was gonna witness it. A very public end. But Henry persevered, he always sorta gets through things, and he, you know, got outta the pumpkin and walked up and then did the press conference.

But hard news comes out of the press department, too,·like harsher penalties for dog owners who don't obey the city's leash law. Media coverage of the leash law had sympathized with dog owners up to this point, and Skyler came up with a strategy for turning that around. He leaked information about the coming crackdown to a reporter from "The New York Times" who was already doing an article about dog damage in the parks.

SKYLER: We got lucky, because it was an article that was very fair to us and gave both sides, but really went into details about what we were trying to do, and it really set the tone for the rest of the coverage.
Which was substantial. The story ran on the front page of "The New York Times," prompting media outlets from around the country to pick it up.
On the Boardwalk at Coney Island, the steel drum band is going through its paces. There's a stiff breeze off the Atlantic that plays havoc with a podium microphone. A couple of camera crews have already plugged into the press mult box to get an audio feed.

SKYLER: You know, you can tell when you had a good press event You look at the mult box. You have 20 things. The more that're filled, the better you did. You look at it, it's empty, you didn't do so well.

OTM REPORTER: How many are filled now?
SKYLER: Two are filled now, two are coming·that's solid.
Ed Skyler keeps one eye on his boss while he helps out a camera woman.

OTM REPORTER: I know that this is the last minute, but if you move that flag to the other side of the pole, it would help with the lighting situation. It will only take a second.
The flag is moved, the media are appeased, and Commissioner Stern steps up to a podium with a copy of the speech Skyler's brought for him.

STERN: The mystique of the beach and Boardwalk endures as we head into another century of fun in the sun. The Coney Island Boardwalk crew has been hard at work since Labor Day, inspecting every inch of the 2.7-mile walkway.

SKYLER: You know, you can choreograph these things all you want, but once it gets going, it's chaos. You know, you can only control it so much. Especially when you have heavy equipment.

STERN: We will now all repair to the giant beach-cleaning equipment as we put it through its paces, in a show unequalled since the tanks rolled through Red Square on May Day, 50 years ago."

SKYLER: "Commissioner, just·take one step and hold on to the ladder."

DRIVER: "All right. Step back, step back, step back!"

SKYLER: "Hey Commissioner, get out and wave! That way, look that way, Come. All right, that worked out."

COMMISSIONER: "Complete success, right Sky? It was dizzying up there!"

SKYLER: The one thing I enjoy the most is getting a really good story in the papers. You can hold on to it, you can put it in a clip file, you can give it to people. Something like that, you know, a nice story in the Sunday "Times" by a guy who knows parks is always satisfying. To me, you know, that's what it's all about.
Mission accomplished-until next time. Ed Skyler, Parks Department Press Secretary, will now turn his attention to promoting the launch of the Central Park Skate Patrol.

For On the Media, this is Amy Eddings, on the beach at Coney Island, in New York.
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Jon Kalish - Porn Provides a Business Model on the Web

Intro:
Pay TV, 900 numbers, VCR's and alternative news weeklies all have one thing in common: porn drove their development. Well, apparently a similar scenario is being played out on the Internet. Of the 1.4 billion dollars web surfers spent last year for content, 69% of that went-nearly a billion dollars-for content of a sexual or pornographic nature. On the Media's Jon Kalish has a report on how the rest of the Internet industry is learning from the people who run sex sites on the World Wide Web.

Report:
Jay Servideo: "Every single day 20,000 people in the United States log onto the Internet for the very first time in their lives and 15,000 of the 20 are going directly to the search engines and looking for adult content."

Jay Servideo runs a New York company called "Teleteria" that designs, hosts and maintains hundreds of sex sites on the web.

Jay Servideo: "Al Capone said that "I provide a service for people who want to drink during Prohibition." Well, these adult web site are providing a service for a majority of the people that want to look at this kind of stuff."

The biggest pay sex site, "Kara's Adult Playground," gets close to six million unique visitors each month. The pay sites charge subscriptions of $20 to $25 a month.

At a recent panel discussion on the cybersex industry Mark Tiarra, president of the industry trade group United Adult Sites, said the appeal of the sex sites is they allow people to consume sexual content anonymously.

Tiarra: "I think it's crucial, actually. How many friends do you have who would walk into a video store and rent a video, and this isn't just for men. Sometimes couples want to go rent a video and watch it together. A lot of them are embarrassed to go do that. There's such a taboo in the American culture. I think it's the single most important factor for why this business is booming on the Internet as it is."

The sex business may be booming on the Net but there' are a few bumps in the road. Tiarra and other industry execs do admit that there IS a high percentage of credit card fraud by sex site operators. But they complain that consumers often dispute credit card bills for sexual content that they actually did receive. Industry observers say it is too easy to dispute credit card charges for digital content that doesn't physically show up on someone's doorstep and that the credit card companies almost always side with the customer, not the merchant, in such bogus disputes. This difficulty in charging for content has major implications for all of e-commerce, not just the sex industry. But despite the billing difficulties, sex sites are way ahead of mainstream media when it comes to building a community of loyal customers, according to Mark Hardie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research who also spoke at the panel discussion.

Hardie: "The adult industry, I think, has a better sense of it, in terms of repeat visits, in terms of providing an experience that gives me a sense of "I belong here. I do things here." But the mainstream media needs to develop a much better understanding of what constitutes community because it's not click-throughs, it's not page views. It has allot more to do with return visits, length of stay and the degree of interactivity, as opposed to " I'm on the site, I look at a few things and I get out of there."

The adult sites have developed complex business relationships that Hardie says mainstream media can also learn from. A huge cottage industry that sustains tens of thousands of people exists because free sex sites, known as click-through farms, are paid between one and seven cents each time surfers click on an ad that takes them to a pay sex site. The result has been two or three thousand dollars a month in income for a home business that requires little hardware or overhead.

In the office of the webzine "Nerve" in Manhattan's Silicon Alley district associate editor Lorelei Sharkey sits in front of her iMac and reviews drawing for a new feature called sexual position of the day. It's based on a photocopied collection of line drawings that street peddlers in New York have been selling that illustrate 144 positions for lovemaking.

Sharkey: " A lot of these positions that we've been reviewing look very painful, if not physically and humanly impossible. One involving several pieces of furniture is called The Ikea Sale. You can use your imagination. We're contemplating putting difficulty ratings on them and whether props are involved and whether, actually, you really shouldn't try this at home."

"Nerve" doesn't consider itself to be a porn site. It describes itself as LITERATE SMUT and caters to a highbrow audience that likes to read about sex. After two years on the web growth there are a million readers checking in each month. There is already a "Nerve" in German and French, Spanish and Japanese editions are in the works.

Internet analyst Mark Hardie expects that in the coming years mainstream media will be watching the adult sites closely and he also believes that mainstream advertisers will begin to place ads on sites such as Nerve that don't offer hardcore sexual material but do specialize in erotica and nude photography.

Hardie: "There's a chasm between a Victoria's Secret catalogue and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and XXX adult content. And once that chasm starts to fill up with targeted properties that address women's issues and couples' issues, that get away from trying to appeal to 18-24 year-old men, you'll see mainstream advertisers begin to respect the fact that that audience exists and then come on board as advertisers."

That's already begun to happen in Germany where IBM and Mitsubishi now advertise on the German edition of "Nerve." Everyone involved in the on-line sex industry believes that the next technology that will be driven by porn is live televideo which will be made possible by high-speed broadband access to the web.

For On The Media, I'm Jon Kalish in New York.

Jon Kalish is a member of the Association of Independents in Radio and National Writers Union... visit kalish.com at http://www.jcn18.com/newstand/kalish