Ashley Milne-Tyte

Why I'm bored of TED talks

May 14, 2013

I am totally over TED talks. Here's how I got here.

Several weeks ago my friend and journalism colleague Manoush Zomorodi wrote a post about how to give 'TED-like talks' that capture an audience. Manoush is a longtime TV reporter and has written an e-book about how to be camera-ready, so she really knows her stuff. I like her advice for budding speakers, but as I read the post it reminded me that I'm less and less impressed with the TED talks I view online. I then forgot about the topic until this week when I came across this post by marketing professor Dr. Dawn Edmiston. It extolls the virtues of the TED talk as a teaching tool. As you can see, she and I interacted under her post. The problem is, TED talks are everywhere. They've become so common they're no longer special in any way. Their impact has been massively diluted due to the sheer number of ideas discussed - there just aren't that many 'ideas worth spreading'. Almost everything now seems worthy of a TED talk. Except it isn't. These talks fired people's collective imagination and curiosity for a while, but I can't believe I'm the only one who now finds them dull and formalaic. They come off as too rehearsed, too glacially paced, and with no element of surprise. Yet TED continues to roll them out.

Of course there have been TED talks I've enjoyed. Like Dr. Edmiston, I loved Harvard professor Amy Cuddy's talk on the the power of body language (I am desperate to book her on The Broad Experience - no luck so far). More recently I enjoyed Dan Pallotta's talk on why the way we think about charity is wrong. And I can't leave out Laura Overdeck's powerful TEDxWomen talk 'Allergic to Algebra' on little girls, women and math anxiety, which I watched live back in December. But too many TED speakers these days aren't compelling and the ideas discussed are so flimsy they don't merit the time allotted. I signed up for the weekly TED email several months ago, so each week I get an email from TED with links to recent talks. I'm usually disappointed. 

This 2012 piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry is a much more eloquent disquisition on the topic, and specifically focuses its criticism on TED for being exclusionary and out of touch. I love the second line:

"When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart?"

I think TED has stretched itself too thin. Does anyone else agree? 

The Law of Attraction

February 1, 2013

Read here. Appears in Phoenix Focus. I'm a professional cynic, so if you'd told me a few months ago I'd be filing a story on the Law of Attraction, I would have been skeptical. But the assignment came along and actually proved rather interesting to report. 

In case you're as ignorant as I was before I began my research for the piece, the Law of Attraction pretty much says that our experiences are a result of our thoughts. If we think negatively, we'll attract negativity. If we think positively, all sorts of good things will happen. Read on to hear various voices weigh in on the benefits of living by the Law of Attraction, and psychology professor Chris Chabris deride the whole idea as nonsense. 

I'm somewhere in between. Rather than thinking about life as being governed by a 'law' of attraction, though, I think more about having a good attitude, dwelling on the positive rather than wallowing in the awfulness. It does make a difference. (Photo: Phoenix Focus)

The Broad Experience 10: Selling Stereotypes

November 19, 2012

In this episode we look at the way women are represented in the media and how that affects the way we think about ourselves and what we do with our lives. A pioneering cable TV executive, activist, author and reality TV producer are a few of the interviewees who discuss the issues involved in bringing women to page and screen.

The dissing of daily news

October 17, 2012

I'll make one final point that came out of my time at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, which took place two weekends ago in Evanston.

I came away with the feeling that daily radio news has acquired a bit of a bad rap, and I think that's a shame. I didn't attend Ira Glass's session on the Friday night (insert gasp here). I was possibly the only person present who decided she was too tired to listen to Ira (first, I have heard him speak before and to be honest, I'm also a little tired of the audio cults that build up around hosts like him and Jad Abumrad, even though I admire their work). I heard afterwards that in one comment he was a little dismissive of daily news. If that's inaccurate, please correct me, because after all I did not hear this with my own ears. But daily news came up in other contexts at the conference as being something rather dull than we all have to plod through as part of our jobs, when we'd rather be making the next Radiolab or This American Life story. As at least one person pointed out in a comment on my previous post about public radio pay, the reason so many people are interested in working in public radio today is shows like TAL and Radiolab - shows that tell unusual stories often in surprising, creative ways. Long live such shows. But for many listeners, public raido is a place they come for reliable information - that is, local and international news. So I was rather surprised when on the way home from the conference I read this piece in Current in which Adam Ragusea of Radio Macon in Georgia is quoted as saying, "I hate daily news". 

[See Adam's note below - clearly I took this quote out of context and hating daily news means something entirely different than what I took it to mean. Thanks to Adam for this clarification. He does NOT hate daily news.]

Back to the conference. Daily news - what's going on in our towns, cities and the wider world - affects people's lives. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic because news spots were such a big part of life at Marketplace. I must have filed close to two thousand of them over the years I worked there. But spots and short features are great instruments through which to hone your writing, and you learn so much doing them. I'm no longer even in the business of daily news but I still listen and appreciate those spots, packed with information. It takes skill to pull those off.

I loved Robert Smith's Third Coast session on how to write creatively while on deadline. But daily news's increasing unfashionableness seems a little strange given the business many public radio reporters and producers are in. Not to mention the reason listeners tune in. The vast majority do so each day to get the news, and they'll grab at least some of that from the top-of-the hour newscasts with their dreaded 45 second spots. One reporter I met at Third Coast who corresponded with me afterwards told me that at her grad school, Berkeley, her class wasn't even taught to write a spot 'because it was assumed no one wanted to write spots'. But spots make up much of the work you'll do if you land a job, permanent or temporary, in a newsroom.

By all means let's keep listening to and admiring the stories the creative guys (and they are mostly guys) put out. Not that the rest of us can't be or aren't creative in what we do, of course. But the vast majority of people who listen to public radio each day are listening for news. When I worked the early shift at Marketplace I used to get quite a thrill out of being the person to bring that news to people first thing in the morning, even if I had to do so in a spot of less than a minute or a super-short two-way with the host. We should work as hard as we can to make our writing as sharp and pithy as possible in short news stories. But let's show a bit of respect for the very thing that brought many of us into public radio in the first place, and the reason most people listen.

Podcasting - why is it a guy thing?

September 16, 2012

Next weekend I'm going to be giving a talk at a radio festival at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. The topic is women in radio and podcasting (as subjects and hosts). In researching my talk, I've become even more aware of how relatively few podcasts are hosted by women. I already knew that the majority of podcast listeners are men (this from an unlinkable eMarketer report I accessed at Baruch College's library back in the spring, while doing my market research at CUNY) and that this is sometimes blamed on the 'geek factor'. But I honestly hadn't thought until recently about who was hosting the podcast. If you look at iTunes' list of its top 200 podcasts, you'll see only a handful have female hosts. The number depends on the day, but when I've checked it's been anywhere from five out of 200 to 15. Why? I know there are tens of thousands of English language podcasts out there, and I know there are women doing podcasts, because I stumble across new ones all the time. But they appear to be far outnumbered by men. Go to any article or comment section on podcasts and virtually every podcast under discussion is a man's.

Does this come down to a common woman problem - that we females are simply less likely to put ourselves out there, to take a risk and start a new project? Are we not 'geeky' enough to handle the (relatively simple) technology involved? When I look at the podcasts that do make it into the top 200, and sometimes the top 10, the female-hosted ones are usually public radio programs such as Fresh Air or On Being. Rachel Maddow makes it in there too from time to time. Since the most popular podcasts are often public radio shows, I began thinking about who hosts such shows. Usually men. Take my own local station, WNYC. Of all the shows they produce in-house, only one is hosted by a woman. That's the local All Things Considered with Amy Eddings. Actually, no, they have just started airing a new show called New Tech City with my friend Manoush Zomorodi as host. So that's two shows. But everything else the station produces (Radiolab, Brian Lehrer, Leonard Lopate, Sound Check and Money Talking to name a few) are hosted by guys, or a man and a woman, as in the case of On the Media. Fair Game, hosted by Faith Salie, was canceled in 2008 because the show couldn't land a big enough underwriter (which raises yet more questions).

Anyone have any theories about all this? 

Happiness examined

January 10, 2012

Read here. Appears in Phoenix Focus.

This piece looks at happiness from four angles: what makes people happy, what are the happiest countries in the world (and why those people are apparently so content), a short history of happiness and finally whether happiness is genetic or more of a choice. I admit that when I got this assignment I wasn't sure about it. I was a snob. It seemed too woolly at first glance, too pop-psychology-like, the kind of thing you're spoon-fed by women's magazines. But I ended up thoroughly enjoying the research and writing the piece. Everyone I spoke to is a serious scholar of happiness, a burgeoning area of research within the psychology field. Check out the section on the happiest countries and the comments of Robert Biswas-Diener, who's been all over the world studying people's attitudes. Homeless people in India are much happier than their American counterparts. Guess why.

On a related note I loved this NYT piece and the related videos on elderly people's advice to the rest of us about living - and dying with no regrets.