David Bankston, "Neighborhood America" chief technology officer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Today’s media newsmaker interview is a little different. I don’t expect many people will know either my guest, David Bankston, or the company he represents, Neighborhood America.

It’s very likely, though, that you may have already encountered a Neighborhood America program and not even realized it. The Naples, Florida, based company does enterprise-social networks for CBS, Fox, the Scripps Network, and HDTV, among others, and David Bankston is the co-founder and chief technology officer for Neighborhood America, a leading provider of solutions for online engagement and interaction via all forms of content.

Specializing in software integration and technical innovation, David has devoted much of his career to creating next-generation technologies specifically designed to solve real-world business problems.

Under his leadership, Neighborhood America’s solutions have been successfully adopted nationwide by various organizations, and media companies are turning to Neighborhood America in order to harness the power of the Web to effectively engage audiences. Prior to Neighborhood America, David’s technology career included fifteen years at Lexis/Nexis, where he was responsible for many innovations that are still in use today.

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BOB ANDELMAN: David, I suspect a lot of people are scratching their heads right now. Enterprise social networks? What the hell are you talking about?

DAVID BANKSTON: Basically, an enterprise social network is a network that is really focused to the enterprise. Now, let’s break that “social network” apart. I think people have pretty well got that figured out. It’s the MySpaces, it’s the YouTubes, even some of the photo-sharing sites, like Flickr and so forth. The term social network now has become, it’s almost ubiquitous. It’s almost anything that lets you get together and share content and start to meet others and have profiles and discuss your issues. It’s a way to bring together people who are interested in a specific community, and it’s a community of interest. We’ve really been working at this over seven years, we have taken that social network premise and focused it and built a platform, a net made of software as a service solution that tailors a social network to the enterprise, the enterprise being a business in the public sector, a government organization or an agency, and of course, in the media sector, a network. We have many networks, some of which you’ve mentioned, so these are communities that are purpose-built to create a new source of revenue for these individual businesses. Then specifically in the case of the public, it may be to be engage the public in a conversation, the equivalent of the old public comment ways. This is the new way to do public comment. So that is what an enterprise social network is.







ANDELMAN: So one example of what you’re doing might be Springboard, which you are doing for CBS, right?

BANKSTON: Yes.

ANDELMAN: The difference here, I want to point this out, because I have actually given this some thought, you tell me if I’m wrong here. MySpace is a social network, and people think of it as they are going in and they are having fun. It’s not enterprise-specific. However, it is certainly generating revenue for Rupert Murdoch and the Fox companies.

BANKSTON: Yes, but how could it generate revenue for CBS, for Johnson & Johnson, or some other brand? The problem with today’s social networks is that they are very much like the Wild West in that you really don’t know what you’re going to see from click to click or from page to page. There is no regulation, there is no moderation, very little, if any, and so when you are a business and you are looking for an ROI, you are looking a way to tap into your customer base, which then equals your social network, so you want to improve on things such as your R&D process, your product release process, your customer loyalty programs, etc., those are things that you want to have control over as you communicate with the social network or with your stakeholders in that social network.

ANDELMAN: It all sounds positive for the enterprise, for the company, but where does the independent user benefit from being part of an enterprise network as opposed to a social network?

BANKSTON: The consumer.

ANDELMAN: The consumer.

BANKSTON: Yes. Well, let’s take the example of like the Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler is looking to build or would love to have a social network built around their products and services, so what are the problems that they are trying to solve? Well, they are trying to improve their market share, they are trying to understand why they keep having so many misses in the market. Today, whatever they are doing isn’t quite working to tap into the new generation of car buyers. By using a social network, they can engage on a very personal level with these individuals who have bought their products in the past, who have an affinity for a Chrysler product, and who desperately want to provide that feedback to Chrysler in a way that it will be constructively listened to and acted upon, and then to have the full circle to actually see that that comment and that feedback was indeed incorporated into the next generation of product. So imagine you are a Chrysler 300 owner, and you are saying, “I really wish this armrest just was a little lower, because I keep bumping into it.” Well, you give that feedback and others like you then potentially give that feedback to Chrysler. The next generation car has a redesigned armrest because the people are then helping the corporation, who has done this in a vacuum in the past, to improve their products and services. Then I’m the consumer, I’m going to go buy another one because Chrysler heard me, and they did something about it, and they care about me, and that’s something I’ve gotten out of it. So that’s just one example.







ANDELMAN: I kind of sidetracked us there, but let’s talk about CBS and Springboard. First of all, what is Springboard?

BANKSTON: Springboard - it was actually a specific initiative. It was a contest, so in the case of CBS, they were looking to find an intern for Katie Couric this summer. They sent out a request to all of the main journalism schools saying, “Go to CBS.com, and you can submit a video of some of your work or a document, a white paper if that’s all you have, and you can have the chance of being considered for Katie Couric’s intern.” That may include on-air spots, that may include all sorts of really career-making opportunity for that individual. Using our social network and platform, they created this place where these journalism students then were able to create an account, submit their own media, and also comment, rate, and rank others’ content, and all of that feedback, then, is managed by our back-end solution again, which is software as a service. We were able to provide very comprehensive reports and actually, using the software you generate your own reports, and so from the data that they got, Katie was able to pick her intern, and they haven’t announced that yet, but they have picked an intern from that particular program.

ANDELMAN: And how many videos were contributed? How many people participated?

BANKSTON: You know, I can’t release that, because it’s CBS’s information.

ANDELMAN: All right, but was there advertising put on these pages?

BANKSTON: No.

ANDELMAN: No advertising?

BANKSTON: Well, there was advertising on the first login page, and then on some of the subsequent pages, there was less advertising until one of the upload pages had no advertising. So that’s a combo answer there.

ANDELMAN: This was not necessarily an effort to earn revenue as to maybe….

BANKSTON: No.

ANDELMAN: Were they more interested in testing it as a medium?

BANKSTON: They were testing it as a medium, number one. Number two, they were putting their toe in for just building social networks around the concept of journalism, and so it was a way to “Hey, can we just sort of put our toe in the water here and look at this concept?”






ANDELMAN: Interesting. Now, you guys did something else with Katie Couric, right?

BANKSTON: Yeah, we’ve done a couple things in the past. When she first took over the “CBS Evening News,” she actually sent out a request on the first evening of her program, she said to America, “I’m looking to figure out what my sign-off should be. Should it be, good night, good luck? Should it be, that’s all, folks?” Whatever it may be. And she played some famous sign-offs from other anchors, and so she asked America, “Well, what should it be?” Well, within really about, it was actually about twenty-four hours, we had over 50,000 responses on what your sign-off should be. Now, that’s one little simple question, and we had 50,000 people giving their comments on what that should be. And what was really interesting is all that was broken up by time zones, so you could see geographic locations of where people were listening and where they were commenting from or watching, and it was very interesting data that was obtained from that.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Peter Kuper, "Stop Forgetting to Remember," graphic novelist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

I think the reason that many people who never read comic books find themselves drawn to graphic novels isn’t because they come in hard cover or because they cost more or because they’re hip at the moment.

I think it’s because we’re more likely to find little pieces of ourselves in the stories, which are often more autobiographical than Spider-Man or Green Lantern could ever be.

At least that’s the thought I kept returning to as I read through Peter Kuper’s latest graphic novel, Stop Forgetting to Remember.

The youthful sexual frustration, the aimlessness, the side comments to no one in particular, the social doubts, the eagerness/anxiety over fatherhood, the pain of maintaining an adult friendship -- there were so many things that could have been ripped from my own life that I couldn’t put the book down.

Kuper, whose previous graphic novels include Sticks and Stones, The System, and an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, is perhaps most widely recognized as the artist behind Mad magazine’s legendary “Spy vs. Spy” these days. And his strip The Virgin was optioned by HBO as well as actor Forrest Whitaker’s production company.

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BOB ANDELMAN: Peter, your book is technically the autobiography of Walter Kurtz, but where does he end and you begin?

PETER KUPER: They sort of segway into one another. I think of it as being an auto-lie-ography. It gave me enough room to when I wanted to change the story and have whatever happen serve the story instead of being stuck with the facts if it were an absolute auto-memoir, but it gets very blurry, and I recognized much of myself in him, and we joined together in our coming of middle age story.

ANDELMAN: What would be an example of a Peter Kuper fact or a Walter exaggeration?

KUPER: Well, I have a friend in Missouri who I meet during the story, and he is another father, and in reality, it’s somebody I knew for a while, and I gave him all the lines that I would have wanted to say but then overlaid his personality on it. I keep the characters narrow so I wouldn’t keep adding on new characters. I might fuse two people together into one. Generally speaking, he and I share a great deal in common, including birthdays.







ANDELMAN: And what about on the family side? You have your parents there early on and then your wife and daughter.

KUPER: It’s all pretty much, all those things sort of line up, and at one point, I was having a fight with my wife, and I had just come back from at my studio working on that section of the book where I was drawing a fight with my wife -- it would be Walter’s wife -- and I thought, wow, the dialogue is perfect. I got it exactly right. I was having that dual thought while I felt like I was Walter and myself simultaneously with my stand-in wife, Sandra, and my real wife, Betty.

ANDELMAN: And what does your real wife think of being portrayed in the book?

KUPER: She gets final edit on her panels, so there were the occasions where she said, “You made me too fat here.” I said, “I’m trying to demonstrate that there’s a...” Okay, I’ll make you thinner. But overall, she gave me the big thumbs up, as did many of my friends, although I did find in the end I had friends who were angry with me for not putting them in the book and friends who were angry with me for putting them in the book, so I figured I must be doing something right.

ANDELMAN: Now, your wife also had the opportunity to put up a hand at one point when you are in the bedroom and said, “No, no.”

KUPER: That’s the edit on the panels.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Now, did you put that in, or did she suggest that you put that in?

KUPER: No. If it’s in there…. No, she didn’t pressure me per se. It was more like my general knowledge of what would pass with her, and I figured that was the line that she wouldn’t want me to cross, which is, demonstrating various sexual positions.

ANDELMAN: Monday through Sunday.

KUPER: That I can do with… Old girlfriends, it’s a different story, but the one I’m still married to, little different.







ANDELMAN: I see, I see. And what about your daughter? You have a daughter, I assume?

KUPER: I do. There was the difficulty of having what I could show her in the book because it does get into some territory I don’t want her to see. She was nine when I was working on the book, so I could show her sections that she appeared in. She had sort of a general idea of what’s going on there. But curiously, as I was working on the story, certain events took place that I was able to fold into the story, and it helped me figure out parts of it. For example, at one point, I went to kiss her, and she didn’t want me to kiss her goodbye. That was a perfect, emblematic moment in time, and it happened right when I was coming up on that part of the book where I would be looking for something that demonstrated how she’s growing up. That actually happened, also, when I was working on the wordless book, Sticks and Stones, because I was looking for something that would be a connector between a mother and son, and at that moment in time, my daughter was learning how to whistle. I was like, “Ah, there you go, that’ll work perfectly.” So occasionally, these things kind of line up and offer up the next step in the story that you’re trying to figure out.

ANDELMAN: How old is your daughter now?

KUPER: She’s ten.

ANDELMAN: Oh, okay, so this doesn’t go back that far.

KUPER: No, no, I was working on it right up until the time that we… Well, I was working on it even down here in Mexico, where I’m speaking to you from.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Well, this is where I was confused. How long did this book take you to produce?

KUPER: The earliest stories in there I did as far back as 13 years ago, and I had started on different parts of this at different points in time, but I certainly didn’t work on it non-stop for 13 years. I worked on it very, like my hard drive to finish the book took about a year and a half, but I had been working on sections of it over the years, and then as it came together, then I used parts of different stories that I had done before that all folded into a bigger picture.

ANDELMAN: I wanted to get a sense of that, because I finished reading the book, and I thought, this must have been done over a period of years. It seemed like early on that the narrator is more present than he is later in the book.

KUPER: Uh-huh. It’s a story within a story, so I’m working on the graphic novel itself, and these jump-backs in the past, a lot of them were actually about as I was coming up on parenthood. There’s kind of a line in the book where I go from not being a parent to having a kid, and in that first part of the book, there is a lot more of that memory and going back and looking at the past experiences trying to lose my virginity, various drug experiences, and bad old relationships. That slows down after I have the child. I’m not doing as much reflecting on my whole life there as dealing with having a child.

ANDELMAN: And it also seemed, in terms of the art, it seemed a little less frenetic as things wore on. It was fascinating in the early part of the book, that pre-marriage, pre-child part where there was so much going on. It seems like there was so much packed into all the panels, but part of that, of course, is the drug use relationship and…

KUPER: I was addled at the time.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. And the pursuit of sex because you’re saying one thing, you’re thinking another thing, and a third thing is happening. It was really interesting. Do you feel any hesitation at revealing so much of yourself?

KUPER: Absolutely. That’s part of why I have an alter-ego there. It’s for deniability purposes. Some of it is that once you kind of put your toe in the water, I mean at least in my experience, progressively it kind of started opening new doors, and that would lead to something else that was another step in being revealing. Once I kind of got far enough in there, then I felt less inhibited about doing that. I just find that I’m sort of trying to get at some kind of truth, whatever that is, and that the more I do something where I feel like, oh, this is so embarrassing and do I really want to go here, I think the odds are pretty good that I’m in the right territory for stumbling upon something that has some value to it.

And what’s also kind of curious is that when people have seen these stories, things that I think of as being most private and embarrassing and I was the only person this happened to, are the ones that invariably turn out to be universals, where many people say, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me. Yeah, I lied about saying I wasn’t a virgin any more,” or a million things. But that’s part of the idea, getting at this kind of truth that I feel there is so much covered up and not talked about that it’s a way that you can make stories like this have some actual import, be useful beyond just doing it for myself.







ANDELMAN: What can I say about it without giving it away, the section with Walter, your alter-ego, and Vickie and Keith? That came to a conclusion that I did not see coming. I don’t want to give that away, because I really think people should read that and not see that coming, but if that was even close to reality, that was an extremely close…

KUPER: Close encounter of the third kind.

ANDELMAN: Close encounter, yeah. I mean, that was different. Did that one give you any pause in terms of sharing that? You could have skipped over that part had you chosen to.

KUPER: Yeah, absolutely. Lots of pause, lots of shaking, nervousness, like what’s going to happen, why have I done this? I generally think that the artist has no idea, and you see explanations for why people do things and that they’re explanations, but they don’t necessarily cover it all. And there’s a lot of things that I’ve done with the stories or certain stories that I’m telling that I’m not wholly sure why I’m letting loose on something. On the other hand, there’s a lot of great guideposts and people who’ve been influences, like R. Crumb, who sort of represents the “let it all hang out and take your chances with that.” And you know, relative to some of the things that he talks about, I’m just putting my toe in the water. But it was this kind of, I have these stories that I’m interested in telling, and they have so many different facets to them that I just thought, “That would just make such a good story. Why would I not want to tell it?” And now when the book comes out, then I’ll see what the payoff actually is, as I'm chased down the street by a crowd.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Tamara Conniff, "Billboard" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Do you remember the first music you ever bought?

Whether it was a digital download, a compact disc, cassette, eight track, or a 33-1/3, 45, or even a 78 RPM wax record, I’ll bet you know that first song or album by heart.

Mine was way back in 1967, The Monkees’ Headquarters album. My parents bought it at the neighborhood pharmacy, believe it or not. I played it over and over and over again. I would have kept playing it, but my little brother, Ira, the future disc jockey, took a bite out of it, literally. I still have it though.

No matter what kind of music you like, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, Lawrence Welk, or Gwen Stefani, we all form attachments to our favorite songs. For example, the first song my wife and I danced to at our wedding was Springsteen’s "I Wanna Marry You,” and it still brings a smile to my face almost 20 years later.

The point of these anecdotal snapshots? Music matters in our lives.

But the music industry itself is undergoing a historic shift away from the sale of physical albums to downloads of music, one 99¢ song at a time.

Where is pop music going? That’s the topic of today’s interview with Tamara Conniff, executive editor and associate publisher of Billboard magazine, where she oversees all aspects of the Billboard brand, from editorial to face-to-face events. She is the youngest person and first woman to hold this post.

Prior to joining Billboard, Conniff served as the music editor for The Hollywood Reporter for five years and was senior editor in charge of music for Amusement Business. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Boston Globe, and the New York Post, among other places.

Born and raised in Hollywood, she is also the daughter of the late American music legend, Ray Conniff.

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ANDELMAN: Let me ask you: is “American Idol” the greatest thing to happen to the music industry since Ahmet Ertegün, or is it the worst development since Milli Vanilli?

CONNIFF: Ah, I think it’s a little bit of both, actually. What’s interesting is industry observers during the first season of “American Idol” -- when it first started -- we were convinced that it was going to be dead in the water. And here we are multiple seasons later and millions and millions of albums sold.

I think what “Idol” really does represent is the shift in the music industry, of a texting-oriented generation. “American Idol” really sort of ushered in the whole text voting, which translates to ring tones and purchasing music with your mobile phone. It also really showed the marketing power of television over traditional media, like radio. It showed that shift in music. I would say that out of all the Idols, there are three breakout stars -- Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and of course, Kelly Clarkson are actually really fantastic singers. Is it teen sugar-pop at its best or worst? Absolutely. Has it affected the ability for young artists who do not have that kind of exposure to get signed and be promoted? Yes.

ANDELMAN: In a positive or a negative way?

CONNIFF: Negative.

ANDELMAN: Really?

CONNIFF: Oh, yeah.

ANDELMAN: You think it’s closed doors?

CONNIFF: It has absolutely closed doors to a lot of artists in the business. The one question that record label executives ask themselves is, when they sign a young artist, “How do we break them if they don’t have a platform?” “American Idol” is a platform, you know. How they would normally do it would be to promote it radio, do a couple of radio shows, maybe do a mall tour depending on the age, But now, those avenues don’t hold the power, so unless you have television, either “American Idol” or maybe “Grey’s Anatomy” or one of the hit shows really championing your artist, it’s very hard to take an unknown artist and break them.






ANDELMAN: Wow. So would you say as those doors have closed, has the industry also gotten a little lazy?

CONNIFF: I don’t think it’s laziness as much as it is fear. In your introduction, you talked about the first album that you had in 1967. You look back at the ’60s and the ’70s, record companies were independent. A&M was an independent company. They weren’t owned by the conglomerates who are forcing record executives to meet quarterly numbers. The music industry isn’t like making cereal. You never know when you’re going to have a hit or not have a hit. EMI was late releasing the Coldplay album, and their stock plummeted. You know, back in the day, those issues weren’t a concern to music companies. They’d wait for years for the record to come out.

ANDELMAN: Right.

CONNIFF: So it’s not laziness as much as it is fear and trying to find something that’s going to help you meet those numbers.

ANDELMAN: Has the industry also come full circle in the last 40 years? In the ’50s and ’60s, even the ’40s, for that matter, it was really a singles industry. There were albums, but people were buying 45s and single songs, then we went through these years of the rock albums, the whole concept and the album, you’d be buying a whole album. There was album radio, and now we’re really at that point, aren’t we, with the 99¢ downloads, and some new artists aren’t recording a whole album, they record a song, and if they sell enough copies, maybe then they get an album.

CONNIFF: Well, the interesting thing is that it was really the record industry that kind of screwed themselves on this one.

The record companies actually took singles off the market about 15 years ago, and the reason why they did that is because singles were cannibalizing record sales. People weren’t buying the $12 album, they were buying a $2 single, so the record companies thought, “Hmmm, why should we offer singles and they are not buying the album? We’ll force them to buy the whole album for the single.” So they were releasing at that time a lot of albums that were a whole lot of fluff with one strong song, and the consumers had to pay $12 to get that album This was also during a time when soundtracks were very successful, because soundtracks are essentially a collection of singles.

So what happened with the advent of that technology and the peer-to-peer sharing technology is the consumer got really smart, and said, “I’m paying $15 for an album that sucks because I like one song. Here’s this new service; I can go get it for free.”






ANDELMAN: Well, I agree with that completely. I know the reason I stopped buying records was I was just sick of having to spend that much money, and really all I wanted was one song.

CONNIFF: Right. So you’re looking at a situation where it is a singles market, again. Absolutely, but that’s because of how record companies have been making albums and also because of technology.

ANDELMAN: How far can the “American Idol” approach go? It’s still drawing like crazy. As we’re talking, they are winding up what I guess is the sixth season, and I read where they’re talking about spinning off a show that is band-oriented, and of course, we have “RockStar,” the Mark Burnett show, and “Dancing with the Stars,” which is just kind of a variation, more focused on dance but heavy music. How far can all this go? Will we have more programs? Will we sell more records this way, or will it have to start to swing back at some point soon?

CONNIFF: At some point, everything swings back. Everything has a life cycle as pop music has a life cycle. I mean, you can go back to the real sugary, doo-wop of the ’50s, which is in no way dissimilar from 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys. I think that this phase will pass, and then another phase will begin, and then probably another 15, 20 years from now, we’ll go back to pop music, and we’ll have another “American Idol,” which in many ways is sort of like “American Bandstand” except for the voting aspect of it. It’s all cyclical, I think.

ANDELMAN: We’ve talked a little bit about what may be wrong with the industry at the moment. What’s right about the music industry? What can it brag about? What’s it doing right today?

CONNIFF: That’s a very good question.

ANDELMAN: I was afraid from your brief silence that there was no answer.

CONNIFF: I actually have to think about what they’re doing right. They are actively embracing new technologies, finally, even though they’re a little late. Some of the companies, EMI being the forerunner, have said goodbye to DRM.

ANDELMAN: Digital rights management.

CONNIFF: Digital rights management, which is a big plus for consumers.

ANDELMAN: Do you think other labels are going to follow it because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s their opportunity to get an extra 30 cents a song for downloads?

CONNIFF: I think you have to do it. I’m kind of opinionated about this, but DRM is sort of like Reagan’s Star Wars, you know. Like, what are you doing? Essentially, you are punishing consumers who want to buy music by making it impossible for them to use it on the devices they want to use it on, and the people who are going to steal it are going to steal it anyway. So I think that DRM was a huge waste of money, and it’s torture to consumers who seek to buy music legally. I think eventually all the labels are going to have to abandon it.






ANDELMAN: Does the fact that its EMI reached this deal with iTunes… iTunes was already standing high apart from everyone else. Does it now put someone standing on its shoulders making it that much harder that anyone will ever catch up to it?

CONNIFF: I don’t know. The irony about iTunes and their DRM strategy is that they were like the worst culprits of DRM with the rights management drowning iTunes.

Listen, I think that they had to do this in order because other media players were actually starting to chomp at their heels. I don’t know. I think that it’s a cultural phenomenon, Apple and iTunes, is, and at some point, it will swing again, but I don’t see it stopping any time soon.

ANDELMAN: This is a little broad of where we’re going, but has the Zune had any impact in the market at all?

CONNIFF: Zune is a really fantastic product. The only problem with Zune is that not enough people have it for it to work. Zune is a sharing system, and in order to share, you have to have someone who has a Zune, so the problem is that it’s not mass market yet.

ANDELMAN: Do you think it ever will be?

CONNIFF: I think if they stick to it and continue to adapt it and make it smaller and find a right promotion for it, I think that it could be a viable competitor. But it was a very advanced product to come into a market that wasn’t really ready for it.

ANDELMAN: As you were saying that, I was trying to remember the last time I saw an ad either on TV or in print for the Zune, and I honestly can’t remember.

CONNIFF: Yeah. I think that they’re going back to the drawing board a little bit for the next incarnation of it.

ANDELMAN: So we talked about “American Idol”’s impact on the industry. What about iTunes and Apple? Have they played a big role in revolutionizing the music industry?

CONNIFF: Well, yeah, absolutely. Good and bad, I suppose. They have made music portable. They have made downloads legal. They have become a huge marketer of music. They’ve definitely steered people away from peer-to-peer sites where it was free to pay for music. The only problem is that they have also set a price point that is 99¢, and that’s a pretty low price point to start from. It’s hard to lower that. I think it would have been better for the industry to start it a little higher.

ANDELMAN: Of course, there has always been this belief in retail that you want to be under the dollar, whether it’s $9.95 being under $10 or 99¢ being under $1.

CONNIFF: Absolutely. But as you see the value of music going down, the monetary value of music going down, you might have wanted to launch it at $2.99 to have negotiating room, to bring the price down.






ANDELMAN: How much impact has iTunes and iPods and for that matter, Zune and SanDisk, how much impact have they had on radio, because I know that Billboard covers radio, as well.

CONNIFF: Well, radio, it’s not only that so much, I think the Internet has had the biggest impact on radio.

ANDELMAN: How so?

CONNIFF: With web radio, with bloggers being able to do play lists with web casts. On the web is where you find the old-school DJs or what we remember as DJs, where you find a community and someone whose taste that you like, and you go, and you listen to their playlist. That’s what DJs used to do. So I actually think that Internet webcasting and Internet radio have been the biggest Achilles heel of terrestrial.

ANDELMAN: That as opposed to satellite radio.

CONNIFF: Satellite radio is a totally different demographic. Your average kid can’t afford satellite radio, nor do they care or are they going to buy it. Satellite radio is for an older consumer, and it certainly has been positive, but I don’t think it’s really taken that much away from terrestrial.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Trina Robbins, "GoGirl!" graphic novelist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

When my daughter was born a little over ten years ago, I was plunged into a world I never knew growing up as the oldest of three children. There was just enough difference in our ages, five years, that I never experienced much of my sister's interests as a child or teen.

So here I am, a decade later, finding my way through girl stuff that was beyond my radar when I was a kid. Fortunately, my daughter’s interests are broad. She’s an aggressive soccer and softball player, but she also likes pretty clothes and playing the piano, and -- like her dad -- she’s got the comic book gene.

Still, I was surprised this week when I asked her what she thought of Trina Robbins’ latest GoGirl book, Robots Gone Wild.

She eyed it suspiciously, not sure she wanted to read a comic book that wasn’t in color. There aren’t many comics titles specifically geared for girls, so the hesitation remained as she plumbed the pages, but pretty soon, she was deep into the book. In fact, it’s the first book for which she’s put aside re-reading the “Harry Potter” series for the umpteenth time. That alone ought to tell you how much she liked it.

Trina Robbins, the author of the GoGirl series of comics from Dark Horse, joins us today as our guest.

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BOB ANDELMAN: Trina, is the pre-teen and the teen girl, is that a new reader of comics? I just don’t remember any girls when I was that age being interested in comics.

TRINA ROBBINS: Well, you don’t remember because you are not old enough, but no, it is not a new reader of comics. There used to be tons of comics for pre-teens and teen girls all through the 1940s and ’50s and well into at least the middle to late ’60s, and then they all disappeared in favor of superheroes, which girls basically are not interested in. The average girl is not interested in superheroes, so suddenly, girls weren’t reading comics any more because there were no comics they wanted to read.

ANDELMAN: What were they reading in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s? What were some titles?

ROBBINS: They were reading comics about teenagers, usually about teenage girls, although they read Archie. You talk to a lot of women of a certain age and ask them what they read when they were a kid, and they read Archie comics, but they won’t call it that, they’ll say, "I read Betty & Veronica," because that’s who they related to. And there were other titles. Stan Lee, the editor of Marvel who has given us Spider-man and The X-Men and the Fantastic Four in the ’60s gave us so many teen titles in the ‘40s. The biggest two were Patsy Walker, which was about a teenage girl, and Millie the Model, which lasted a long time. You’ll find a lot of people who remember Millie the Model because it lasted through the mid-’70s. Archie Comics also gave us Katy Keene, who was a model, and the girls just loved Katy Keene and used to send in drawings and designs for her clothes, and again, you find women past a certain age, and they’ll all tell you they loved Katy Keene when they were little girls.

ANDELMAN: And didn’t Marvel eventually bring Patsy Walker back, but like as a superhero or something?

ROBBINS: No. The less said about that, the better.

ANDELMAN: I am actually old enough to remember the comics in the ’60s that you are talking about. There were those things, and there was another one I remember. I guess it was into the early ’70s. There was a Marvel comic, I think Night Nurse or something like that.

ROBBINS: Oh, Night Nurse! Yes, that was part of kind of their desperate attempt to regain the girl audience, but at that point, it was too little too late.

ANDELMAN: Why has it taken thirty years for comics publishers to rediscover women? Does it have something to do with the Japanese influence?

ROBBINS: It has everything to do with the Japanese influence.

Up until Manga arrived on our shores, American comic editors and publishers suffered from a kind of collective amnesia and used to say, well, girls don’t read comics. I mean, I have some unbelievable quotes from them. They actually said, “Girls’ brains are wired in a different way, so they just don’t get comics.” Somehow, it never, ever, occurred to them that girls weren’t reading comics because girls are not interested in overly muscled guys with square jaws punching each other out.

Somehow, they just didn’t see that at all, they just saw girls don’t read comics. But now we have all these incredible Manga, Shojo Manga, which is the Japanese term for girls Manga, and the girls are eating them up. You go into any chain bookstore like Borders or Barnes and Noble, you go to the graphic novel section, you see these teenage and pre-teen girls sitting on the floor surrounded by Manga, reading them.

ANDELMAN: I did not know that that’s what Shojo meant. See, I’ve learned something already today.

ROBBINS: And the boys’ are called Shonen Manga. And there is definitely crossover. Girls read Shonen and boys read Shoujo.

ANDELMAN: I feel like a giant light bulb just went on over my head now that I understand that. It’s the generation I’m in, I guess. I never stopped to understand what those two meant.

ROBBINS: Now you know!

ANDELMAN: I feel greatly enlightened. Now, let’s talk about GoGirl, which I mentioned before we actually started the interview that my daughter really, really enjoyed. For those who may be scratching their head who don’t know GoGirl like they know Betty and Veronica, could you tell us a little bit about who GoGirl is and a little about the adventures?

ROBBINS: Sure. I’ll start by saying that it’s published by Dark Horse so you can know where to look for it. GoGirl is a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother was a super heroine, and her mother’s name was GoGoGirl, and she wore a little white go-go mini-dress and white go-go boots, and she could fly. Then she stopped. She got divorced. She had to be a single mother and support her daughter. She had stopped even before that, because her husband felt threatened by being married to a woman who could fly, which will tell you why the marriage didn’t last. But anyway, she doesn’t know, in the beginning, anyway, she didn’t know that her daughter had inherited her ability to fly and was flying in secret because she kind of knew that her mother had bad feelings about it. Then our heroine had to put on her mom’s old costume, which fit her perfectly, and go out and rescue her best friend when her friend got kidnapped, and that was when the world finally learned that they had another super heroine, a flying girl. And her mother has been very supportive and sometimes jumps in on the action wearing the extra outfit because she had to have two costumes so that when one was at the cleaner’s, she could wear the other. But that’s all she can do. That’s all she can do; she can fly. Otherwise, she is a perfectly normal teenage girl. She doesn’t have X-ray vision, she doesn’t have fists of steel, she can fly.

ANDELMAN: And Trina, which parts of this are autobiographical?

ROBBINS: None, except for the fact, of course, that I’m a mother, and I have a daughter, and I love my daughter. And we have a good relationship as do GoGirl and her mother.

ANDELMAN: I see. All right, so there’s no flying going on in your house?

ROBBINS: Oh, how I wish.

ANDELMAN: Why did you start this series? Is it because there was all this Japanese Manga that was going on, or did you…

ROBBINS: No. We did this pre-Manga. This goes back to 1999. Anne Timmons is the artist, by the way, and she is just such a fabulous artist, and we work together as a writer/artist team so well that I have called us the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of girls’ comics. We first met at a convention in the late ’90s and kind of became email pen pals, and then one day, she said, “Let’s do a comic together. You write, and I draw.” And I thought, “Fat chance we’ll have of selling this,” because in those days, Manga had not really gotten its hold on the United States yet, and there was really very little out there for girls, but I thought, what do I have to lose? I have a file cabinet in my head of all these comics ideas that I want to do, and I pulled out of the file cabinet the file on the flying teenager and created GoGirl! In the beginning, Image was publishing us in comic book form, but you may or may not know that the problem of comic books if you’re aimed at girls, not so much any more, because of Manga, but in those days, if you were aiming your comic book at girls, you had a terrible time getting it distributed. There were comic book stores that simply didn’t want to carry girls’ comics, and all they had was superhero comics for boys.

ANDELMAN: Well, they probably didn’t see many girls in their stores, so why would they think to carry them?

ROBBINS: Well, you see, it’s this vicious cycle. The girls didn’t go in the stores because there was nothing there for them. Plus, the stores were wall-to-wall teenage boys, which is very intimidating if you are a young girl. So, of course, the girls didn’t go into stores. So then everybody could say, “Oh, girls don’t read comics,” right? But anyway, we had five issues of the comic book, and then we went over to Dark Horse, and Dark Horse published the first five issues as a collection, a graphic novel collection, and it was about that time that Manga started hitting, especially Shojo Manga started hitting. Girls who had been starved for comics for twenty years finally found comics they liked, and we could get graphic novels in bookstores, so we have since then done two more graphic novels, and we hope to produce another one next year.

ANDELMAN: Trina -- and I say this with all due respect -- you have been around comics for quite a while now…

ROBBINS: Too long.

ANDELMAN: How did you get interested in the field?

ROBBINS:

I’m one of those people who’s old enough to have read those comics when she was a kid. I read Millie the Model, and I read Katy Keene, and I loved them, and so then when I grew up and I heard all these editors saying, "Girls don’t read comics," I knew it wasn’t true.

Simple as that, I knew it wasn’t true because I had read them, and my girlfriends had read them, and we used to read them and trade comics, just like kids do today.

ANDELMAN: But I mean, what would make you think, since there were not many women in the field, because you’ve done cartoons, you’ve done comics, you’ve done histories, I can’t imagine it was a very welcoming field as a professional.

ROBBINS: No. Absolutely not, and that was a shock, because it had somehow never occurred to me that comics was a boys’ club. I mean, it didn’t occur to me that people would think, “Oh, you are a girl, you can’t do comics,” and so it was really a shock when I discovered that. But by then, this other thing had kicked in, which is the “I’ll show them” syndrome.

ANDELMAN: Were there any women that did mentor you at all or that encouraged you that were in the field?

ROBBINS: Well, actually, when I saw my first underground comic in 1966 in a New York underground newspaper called The East Village Other, it was this very, very psychedelic full-page comic called “Gentle Trip Out,” and it was signed “Panzica.” I had no idea who Panzica was, but I looked at it, and I said, I want to do this. Not literally that comic, but I want to do comics, and two years later, at that point, I was living in New York, and I was contributing comics to the East Village Other, I found out that Panzica was a woman, so you could say that my first inspiration was a woman, and I didn’t even know it.

ANDELMAN: I’m glad you mentioned the East Village Other, which this will be the second time it’s mentioned in Mr. Media. What other kinds of things did you do in the ’70s, because you’ve had a very diverse career, I know?

ROBBINS: Well, I did lots of comics, because I still had that ‘I’ll show them’ syndrome. I did lots of comics. Actually in 1970, I produced the first all-woman comic book ever that was called It Ain’t Me, Babe, and it was named from the feminist newspaper I was working on, It Ain’t Me, Babe. Actually, in those days, we called it “Women’s Liberation.” It was the first women’s liberation newspaper on the west coast, and I was kind of the unofficial artist and art director, but everybody was very egalitarian, so we didn’t have titles.

ANDELMAN: It’s hard to believe that that term has in some ways become an antique. You don’t hear it very much any more.

ROBBINS: Women’s liberation?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

ROBBINS: Of course not. It really dates you, doesn’t it?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, it really does.

ROBBINS: If some old guy says, oh, yes, I’m on the side of you women’s libbers, you know how old he is.

ANDELMAN: Oh you know, I’m hearing you say that, and I’m thinking of Archie Bunker making cracks about it.

ROBBINS: Exactly. He used to use that term, didn’t he?

ANDELMAN: Oh yeah, and kind of the way Rush Limbaugh would refer to….

ROBBINS: Feminazis.

ANDELMAN: Feminazis, thank you. Yeah. Generation apart, but same basic attitude. So were there any women over the years that helped you or that mentored you along?

ROBBINS: Not really. There weren’t any around to help me or mentor me, but I’ve been inspired by a lot of early women cartoonists whose work I’ve researched and whose stories I’ve looked up and researched. I’ve just been inspired by what they did. I’ve published really three books on women who worked in comics, two of them simply on the history of women cartoonists. Because the other thing that all those editors used to say besides “Girls don’t read comics,” is they used to say, “Women have never written or drawn comics.” Again, I knew this wasn’t true. So I researched, and I found hundreds of women over the 20th century who had done comics.

Back in the very early days of the 20th century, there were lots of women drawing comics for the newspapers, and nobody thought it was unusual.

They didn’t have to take male names, contrary to strange public belief that women had to take male names to get published. It wasn’t true, and nobody said, “Oh, this is weird. You can’t do a comic because you’re a woman.”

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.