Society Matters

The Enabler

by Alan Mairson on May 3, 2012

Chris Johns

To: Chris Johns, Editor of National Geographic
Re: Responsibility

It’s wonderful to hear that Cory Richards is healthy and is walking away from this Everest expedition. I hope he has a joyous reunion with his family.

But when you say “we completely support his decision to put safety first,” it’s worth remembering: Putting safety first should be your first decision, not just Cory’s. You’re the Editor. You have real responsibilities here. You approved this “story” and you’re financing it. None of this would be happening without a green light from you.

And you still have skin in the game, even though it’s not your skin.

In fact, if safety is your primary concern, why don’t you tell the remaining members of the NG team to return home immediately? Why subsidize “the brotherhood of the rope” at all?

You clearly don’t think there’s any compelling scientific excuse for this expedition, or you would have mentioned it here. Your writer, Mark Jenkins, has admitted there’s nothing noble about these climbs. And you know what Bruce Barcott says: “Unlike any other sport, mountaineering demands that its players die.”

Lives are still at stake here.

Which is why, Chris, it’s imperative to remember this: You’re not a curious bystander with a camera. You’re The Enabler.

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Tips for drug smugglers

by Alan Mairson on May 3, 2012

Read the whole thing here.

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“Dude, Where’s My Common Sense?”

by Alan Mairson on May 2, 2012

By TV critic Kevin McDonough:

‘Locked Up’ explores limits of dumb dude routine

April 25, 2012 12:55 PM

Is tonight’s “celebrity” edition of “Locked Up Abroad” (10 p.m. on National Geographic) a cautionary tale? Or a comedy? It’s hard to turn a series all but based on “Midnight Express” into a sitcom. But it’s not impossible.

Erik Aude

Tonight’s tale is narrated and re-enacted by its subject, actor Erik Aude, best known for his supporting role in “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

This “Locked Up” arrives at a grim Pakistani prison, where Aude is beaten and brutalized. His path to prison is like something out of a stoner comedy called “Dude, Where’s My Common Sense?”

According to Aude, he was on the brink of post-”Dude” stardom when an acquaintance asked him to fly to Pakistan on his behalf and bring back some “leather goods.” Sure, dude, why not? What could go wrong?

Aude’s gullibility would be off the charts at any given time, but his friend asked him to fly to Pakistan in the teeth of post-9/11 tensions. American forces had just invaded Afghanistan, and extremists had recently executed journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Any “tourist” with half a brain would avoid the region. But Aude didn’t seem to have that problem.

Armed with a blind ignorance and gung-ho spirit befitting a slapstick comedy fall guy, Aude also goes jogging in the heart of a Pakistani city teeming with anti-American hatred. And then he proceeds to hit on veiled women, because, he explains, he could still see their eyes. And they were hot!

After this absurd setup, the rest of “Locked Up” is a bit of an anticlimax. After police inform Aude that he is carrying opium and not leather goods, we settle down to the usual grim tale of arrest, incarceration, torture and painful extraction that allows him to live to relate his incredible and completely avoidable tale of misfortune.

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Rot at the top

by Alan Mairson on May 1, 2012

Read the whole thing here.

_____

Read the whole thing here.

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Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is the majority owner of the National Geographic Channel.

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“I can’t breathe.”

by Alan Mairson on May 1, 2012

Update: National Geographic has disabled embedding of this video.
But you can watch the whole thing here.

Will Cory Richards be okay? Will he survive what appears to be a small pulmonary embolism, or maybe a spontaneous pneumothorax? If so, will he return to Everest and continue his assault of the West Ridge as part of this groundbreaking iPad publishing stunt?

Cory Richards

What about breakout star Andy Bardon, who captured the video you see above? How does Andy maintain his focus while Cory Richards is suffocating right in front of him? Does Andy ever think: This “expedition” is a case study in collective insanity?

And what about Chris Johns — Editor of National Geographic, and, effectively, the Executive Producer of this reality show. Will he spin off Andy Bardon, Everest Videographer into a separate mountaineering series / iPad app / lecture tour / Emerging Explorer grant? Will Chris put Cory Richards back on Everest to continue this death waltz? Has Chris asked the Everest story team to generate some cool data visualizations — pulse; respiration; blood pressure — that would show us precisely how close Cory has come to Death’s doorstep? Or have those graphics already been produced, but are only available to iPad subscribers?

Most of all: What exactly must happen during this publishing stunt to make Chris Johns wake up and say: Bring Cory home — immediately. Our Society will not underwrite and thereby enable a sadistic “adventure” where the only real questions are (a) do the characters — all of whom I’ve intentionally placed in harm’s way for this iPad reality show — make it out alive? and (b) how many paid subscribers did I lure to The Yellow Rectangle?

Put another way: How many people would have to die on this Everest trip before Chris said: Gee… that was a senseless waste of human life. Ten people? Five? Three? … One?

“I can’t breathe.”
— Cory Richards

Chris Johns, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic magazine

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The secret to National Geographic’s success

by Alan Mairson on April 30, 2012

To: John Fahey, Chairman & CEO of the National Geographic Society
Re: The problem with your Green strategy

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, you said:

Precisely. But this isn’t news, John. What is news is your decision to adopt a mission statement — to inspire people to care about the planet — that focuses on a subject that isn’t of interest to many readers of National Geographic.

You’ve built an international media strategy around a subject that’s politically palatable to, say, the gatekeepers in China (who love cheetahs). Unfortunately, the current members of the Society — the people who are already paying to receive the Magazine — are bored by what you’re publishing. In fact, many of them hate it.

What’s the option? Here’s a lesson from our Society’s history, which rings as true today as it did in the 1960s:

With Vosburgh and Mel Payne running National Geographic, the semi-retired Melville Grosvenor had time to enjoy his second family. He and Anne bundled their teenage son, Eddie, and their young daughter, Sara, on marathon voyages of the White Mist, a yawl that became a familiar fixture in National Geographic. Readers were treated to Chairman Melville’s lengthy articles in the Greek isles, the Canadian coast, and other vacation spots, thoroughly and ably documented with photographs by Eddie, the clan’s newest photographic talent. Vosburgh rearranged whole issues to accommodate these sea stories, but he balked at delaying an article on the solar system to make room for a White Mist voyage up the Hudson to the St. Lawrence River.

“I’ll need at least 55 pages,” Melville told Vosburgh.

“But Melville, that’s more than we’re giving the whole solar system,” said Vosburgh.

“Yes,” said Melville, “but there are no people out there.”

- from Explorers House, by Robert M. Poole, p. 256

People. Not “the planet[s].”

Which means our Society should be doing much less of this:

And much more of this:

Goddess democracy China Tiananmen Square NGM July 1991

From "China's Youth Wait for Tomorrow," National Geographic magazine, July 1991

The downside to focusing on freedom and democracy: The gatekeepers in China will probably revoke our license to publish there.

The upside: Millions of other people will (re) discover the Society — and (re) join the adventure.

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Stop the insanity (part 2)

by Alan Mairson on April 29, 2012

Our Society is attempting to build a digital publishing business
around manufactured “dramas” such as this:

Meanwhile, our Society remains silent
about an actual life-and-death drama such as this:

From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

Over the years, the extraordinary journey of Chen Guangcheng has been an inspiration, a protest, and, at times, a dark farce. Now, through his own sheer will, his life has come to symbolize, for China and the United States, an opportunity.

Sometime in the last few days, Chen slipped out of the stone farmhouse on the rural plains of Shandong province where he has been held under house arrest, with his family, off and on since 2005. … He is now believed to be under the protection of U.S. diplomats. …

To the United States, he has presented a related question. What do a blind peasant lawyer and the privileged senior Party police boss Wang Lijun—who fled to the U.S. consulate in February—have in common? When their system failed them, each man, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, sought protection from the Americans. We should be proud of that.

Yet our Society isn’t proud. It is silent.
Why?
Because Chen Guangcheng is living a story
that no longer interests our Society’s executives:

Chris Johns & Terry Adamson celebrate NGM's new publishing partnership in the People's Republic of China. (2007)

Our Society — and our society — deserve far better than this.

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Stop the insanity

by Alan Mairson on April 29, 2012

Blog everest thumbnails National Geographic

via ngm.com

To: Chris Johns, Editor of National Geographic magazine
Re: Cory Richards

You’re watching The Magazine die a slow death. Or, if you believe John Fahey, not-so-slow.

You want to sell iPad apps.

And you think sending Cory Richards up the West Ridge of Mt. Everest might be a good way to demonstrate that, as Editor, you’re still alive & kicking.

Chris Johns, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic magazine

But you need to bring Cory Richards home. Now. Because there’s no good reason for him to be up there, and no reason for our Society to be underwriting what is a pointless and very dangerous stunt.

This whole Mt. Everest trip is a ghoulish game in which Cory and others go to the brink of death — or over it — while you put on your Serious Editor Face and blather about “the brotherhood of the rope.”

You need to stop this insanity. Because this isn’t a “story” you’re covering. It’s a circus which you (and The North Face) dreamed up, and funded, and promoted — and from which you’re trying to earn some cash. (How are the page views doing now that Cory is in critical condition?)

You’ve choreographed what is, in effect, a reality TV show where the only suspense is whether the characters return home alive or dead.

This so-called “drama” is a stage show of your own making.

It’s also the modern equivalent of offering a human sacrifice to slake the thirst of the Angry Gods of Publishing.

In Cliffhangers: The fatal descent of the mountain-climbing memoir, Bruce Barcott writes:

… For all the trauma, mountaineers are astonishingly casual about death. Photographs of fellow climbers are labeled “before he was killed in the Verdon Gorge” or “before they died . . . near Kathmandu.” The longer you linger in this library of death the more natural the captions seem. If done properly (during an ascent, descent, or bivouac), erasure from the list of the quick confers glory all ’round: on the dead for proving their will to climb, on the mountain for the new respect it demands, and on the survivors for their courage to continue in the face of disaster. Unlike any other sport, mountaineering demands that its players die. …

If Cory Richards (or anyone else) dies during this publishing stunt, you’ll need to explain why you believe it was worth someone else’s life.

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Turning our back on people we once embraced

by Alan Mairson on April 27, 2012

Stories like this….

…once mattered to our Society:

Sadly, National Geographic has moved on:

Chris Johns & Terry Adamson celebrate NGM's new publishing partnership in the People's Republic of China. (2007)

But even John Fahey knows
there’s something wrong with the Green picture
he’s been trying to render at NGS —
the picture that helped us get into China in the first place.

From a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal:

Exactly right.
National Geographic, at its best,
is not about air or water or cheetahs.
It’s about people.

_____

Dear John:
Didn’t you used to be a U2 fan?

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“Society” will matter, says new strategic plan

by Alan Mairson on April 24, 2012

What is Mission 2015? During a Society-wide staff meeting on April 10th in Grosvenor Auditorium, CEO John Fahey shared a slide that summarized the initiative:

Mission 2015 is an organization-wide effort to transform NGS so we’re better positioned to respond successfully to the digital revolution. If we all do our part, to embrace these changes together, we can ensure that our organization has a bright future and the ability to coalesce large numbers of people worldwide behind our mission.

It’s a noble goal. And while John presented slides with lots of self-congratulatory copy — “NG is vibrant, popular, top of mind… We are fun, entertaining, and enriching… National Geographic is a leader…” — he also shared one idea that’s worth publicizing and celebrating. It was on the final line of the final slide, and it said what I’ve been hoping to hear from John ever since Society Matters launched in 2009:

Wow. That’s incredible, especially given (a) John’s retail mindset (the world is a market; people are customers), and (b) what he told me about the word “Society” back in 2006. (John considered the word to be a vestige from Geographic’s olden daze that just got in the way of growing the business. Nobody wants to belong to anything, he told me.)

So, kudos to John Fahey. I applaud his flexibility and adaptability, which reflect National Geographic’s core values: “We actively embrace change and create an atmosphere where new ideas are given room to breathe,” says another slide from the Mission 2015 presentation.” This “re-embrace” of Society — and of membership — is precisely the direction that National Geographic has long needed to go.

Question is: How does John plan to get us there? What will be the glue that will help our Society cohere? What sort of rallying cry can John deliver that might “coalesce large numbers of people worldwide behind our mission”? Most of all:

While pursuing a global audience,
how does John plan to resolve a tension
that Aesop identified long ago:
“Please all, and you will please none.”

Coming soon: More about Mission 2015, including some specific, actionable ideas for the road ahead….

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How the National Geographic Society could create a new blueprint for journalism

The Enabler

Tips for drug smugglers

“Dude, Where’s My Common Sense?”

‘Locked Up’ explores limits of dumb dude routine

Rot at the top