What the Hell indeed. And that’s exactly the question pondered–and, surprisingly, answered–by FORTUNE‘s Jessi Hempel who asks “What the Hell Is Going on With TV?” in the latest issue, on newsstands today.

The fascinating article digs into the myriad power struggles (cable companies, internet providers) underway, and how the winners will ultimately determine what TV looks like. Hempel describes it as a Wild West that promises to make somebody very, very rich:

The “web TV experience that feels a bit like the Internet circa 1998, before publishing companies embraced the Net and Google arrived to help us find and instantly consume the stuff we’re looking for.”

Hempel believes the end is near for Hulu, but she sees a potential giant in Apple’s iTunes, which–as it did for the music industry–could swallow up the market for web TV:

The potential payoffs for tech companies are huge: Google could serve up advertising next to search results on our TV, grabbing a chunk of the $56 billion a year spent on television ads. Apple’s iTunes could become the online merchant for all video content. Device makers can sell us even more gear. Cable operators and studios stand to gain viewers and ad dollars by making their shows available — with commercials — anytime, anywhere. And for time-starved folks like me, it’s TV nirvana. But Netflix, Google, and Apple can’t just swoop in and disrupt the $85 billion home entertainment industry. The challenge lies in navigating the entrenched interests that make up the television business.

One of the pioneers hoping to cash in is Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone who says he is building “the ultimate programming guide for internet television.” Watch Hempel’s interview with Lanzone here, from FORTUNE:

The mogul recently sat down with Fortune‘s Patricia Sellers to discuss the evolution of OWN and how exactly she’ll be making the transition from running her talk show in Chicago to running her network in Los Angeles. It’s going to be a big job—albeit one that’s, at least potentially, going to be incredibly lucrative:

By populating and evangelizing on OWN 24/7 — a daunting 1,200 hours of programming a year — Oprah realized that she had the opportunity to increase her impact on the world and make some nice money along the way. Bank of America Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen thinks that OWN will attract more than $145 million in ad revenue in its first year of operation. (That would put OWN in the league of such cable networks as The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, according to SNL Kagan.) Depending on ratings, it could turn a profit of $100 million in year three and grow significantly from there — making it one of the most successful media launches this past decade, rivaling the introduction of O, The Oprah Magazine, a partnership of Harpo and Hearst, in 2000.

Not that any of this matters to “authentic” Oprah, who insists she cares more than anything about being true to her viewers. “My fear about ‘Will the people really follow me?’ — I’m past that,” says Oprah. This past summer, she says, she was reading a magazine article about Michael Jackson and was riveted by a quote from a former colleague of the late superstar. The friend said that after Jackson released Thriller in 1982 and it became the all-time best-selling album, he was paralyzed by the notion that he could never top that. “All the bells went off,” says Oprah. “This is why I lived in fear about this network. I kept thinking I have to repeat the 25-year phenomenon of the Oprah show.” She adds: “I don’t want to be Michael Jackson.”

Later, Sellers writes that OWN might be worth a staggering $3 billion “in a few years,” which would make it a match for Winfrey’s own $3 billion net worth.

The interview isn’t all about money. Winfrey also reveals what sorts of programs will appear on OWN. Unsurprisingly, the slate is filled mostly with uplifting reality shows and showcases for Winfrey herself. It includes Kidnapped by the Kids, a series in which “the children of work addicts literally capture their parents and take away their e-mail access and office time until they change their ways;” a six-part docuseries starring Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, as she adjusts to life without her fortune; a new talk show hosted by Rosie O’Donnell; and Oprah’s Next Chapter, a follow-up to Winfrey’s talk show that will “show her running around the globe, exploring places she’s never been, like the Sahara desert, and interviewing locals.”

There will also be a reality competition series called Your Own Show, in which wannabe Winfreys will battle to win their own talk show on OWN.

You can read the Fortune cover story in full here.

Life magazine, October 17, 1969, featuring model Naomi Sims. “Black Models Take Center Stage.”

Jet, June 23, 1966, attempted assassination of civil rights leader James Meredith. During the 1960s, Jet’s covers rotated between black celebrities, attractive young women, and gritty coverage of the civil rights movement. Meredith was shot while leading a March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. This AP photo by Jack R. Thornell later won the Pulitzer Prize.

The New Yorker, April 29, 1996, Black in America special issue. Cover illustration by Michael Roberts.

Ebony magazine, February 1969, featuring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Photograph by Moneta Sleet Jr., longtime photographer for Jet and Ebony, and the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize (for a photograph of Coretta Scott King, in 1969). Read more on Moneta Sleet Jr. here.

Fortune, January 1968, illustration by Romare Bearden, for “A special issue on business and the urban crisis.”

For even more covers celebrating Black History, check out a more complete list here

Robert Newman has served as the design director of several magazines, including Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, and New York. His Facebook page can be found here.

As the face of media evolves, it’s important to honor the figures who helped define, shape and set the standards in their industries. These are some of the most prominent members of the media who passed away over the past 10 years.  Take a look back with some snippets from their respective New York Times obituaries.

2000

Who: Charles Schultz
Major Accomplishment: His ‘Peanuts” strip reached readers in 75 countries, 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. Schulz drew more than 18,250 strips in nearly 50 years.
Legacy: His saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus ”is arguably the longest story ever told by one human being,” Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, observed.

Who: Steve Allen
Major Accomplishment: In more than 50 years in show business, Allen demonstrated his talents in many areas. An accomplished pianist who never learned to read music, he composed more than 5,000 songs, some of them hits.
Legacy: Allen was keenly interested in social justice and wrote pamphlets on a variety of issues, including the problems facing migrant workers, as well as capital punishment and nuclear proliferation.

Editor’s Note: Mediaite has been rightly called out for a big, glaring error: On our list of 28 media leaders we’ve lost this decade there was not a single person of color. Not a one. Read Mediaite editor-at-large Rachel Sklar‘s entire mea culpa here and on page 11, we’ve added 5 of the deceased black media leaders that should have been mentioned initially.

>>>NEXT: In 2001 we lost William Hanna and Katharine Graham…

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/print/a-retrospective-28-media-leaders-who-died-this-decade/feed/ 7 http://www.mediaite.com/print/top-10-steve-jobs-magazine-covers-of-all-time/ http://www.mediaite.com/print/top-10-steve-jobs-magazine-covers-of-all-time/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:18:24 +0000 Robert Newman http://www.mediaite.com/?p=47100 Fortune magazine picked Apple's Steve Jobs as the CEO of the decade, and ran this cool cover. Jobs has been the go-to tech dude for business mags and newsweeklies for over 20 years, and it got us thinking about all the covers that he has appeared on. Feast your eyes on these beauties!]]> Last week Fortune magazine picked Apple’s Steve Jobs as the CEO of the decade, and ran this cool cover (design director: John Korpics; photograph by Albert Watson). Jobs has been the go-to tech dude for business mags and newsweeklies for over 20 years, and it got us thinking about all the covers that he has appeared on. Fortunately, art director Sam Kuo over at Kuo Design has created the Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers page, a compilation of 85 covers from 1981-2009. In collaboration with Steve, we have created this list of The 10 Greatest Steve Jobs Magazine Covers of All Time. Feast your eyes on these beauties, and then head over to Kuo’s page for the full, obsessive Steve Jobs experience.

October 1981. This is the first major business magazine cover to feature Jobs.

February 15, 1982. Art director: Rudolph Hoglund; illustrator: Alan Magee. From the very beginning, Jobs was controlling about his photographic imagery. He usually insisted on posing with his latest product (for one Fortune cover he held up cardboard cutouts of the Spotlight and Dashboard Mac icons). For that reason, many of the best covers of him are illustrations.

>>>NEXT: MacWorld and Wired!

Both titles ran full-length features about marijuana in their most recent issues, taking a look, in their respective ways, at the relationship between marijuana and American law. Both stories notice that marijuana is more legal these days than you might think. But both stories mention The Volcano, a $600 vaporizer. And both make passing jabs at the Reagan era, a backward slide after the pot-smoking progress of the ’70s.

The Volcano.

Fortune senior editor Roger Parloff, who wrote the article “How marijuana became legal” mentions Reagan:

But the [Carter's federal decriminalization bill] went nowhere, and soon the movement was all but obliterated by the return swing of the cultural pendulum, now known as the Reagan Revolution. There would be no new state or federal marijuana reforms for the next 16 years.

And New York‘s Mark Jacobson, in his feature “The Splitting Image of Pot“:

I pretty much stopped thinking about marijuana as a cosmologic/shamanic/political entity around 1980, that insufficiently repressed beginning of the somnambulant Reagan time tunnel, when grass came with seeds and stems and zombies still skulked Washington Square Park reciting their “loose joints” mantra: “Smoke, smoke … try before buy, never die … smoke, smoke … ”

And there you see the difference between the two articles: Fortune‘s is dry, measured and rigorous; New York‘s is personal, on-the-ground and more insightful than informative. Fortune‘s is the story of medical marijuana policy and businesses, with sub-heads like “Dispensaries – A legal gray area,” and “Taxing and regulating dispensaries”; New York‘s is the winding exploration of marijuana arrest statistics in New York City, which reveal that cops have a special set of rules for pot-smoking black and hispanic people and another set for pot-smoking white people. Guess which is more lenient.

And, yes, New York takes a NYC angle on the story, but that shouldn’t turn you off if you don’t live here because stories about pot are much better when they are full of rich anecdotes from drug-dealers.

Like Francis, the small business dealer based in New York, who makes over $150,000 selling marijuana to New Yorkers in their apartments, who comes off the page as surprisingly professional and pragmatic:

“I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me. The chances of a black guy getting stopped is about 50 times more than a white guy. I can’t afford that. Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.”

There are also plenty of good anecdotes in the Fortune story, too, but they are of a decidedly more sterile, less exotic variety. For example, Parloff interviewed Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, who authored “Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine” (1997). Grinspoon’s wife gave pot to their teenage son, who had Leukemia, because he suffered from miserable bouts of nausea after his chemotherapy:

Having heard that marijuana could help, Grinspoon’s wife proposed that the couple let their son try it, but Grinspoon refused because it was illegal. His wife then defied him, secretly smoking marijuana with the teenager before one of his treatments. This time there was no vomiting, and in fact, on the way home the child asked to stop for a submarine sandwich. “From then on he used marijuana before every treatment, and we were all much more comfortable during the remaining year of his life,” according to Grinspoon’s account.

Parloff talked to another Harvard professor, economist Jeffrey Miron, while reporting his piece. And while Harvard scholars might have bona fide academic cred, Francis, New York mag’s source, has cred of his own, too.

Which raises an important point from all of this marijuana reportage: When it comes to pot, everyone has something to say. Even Time and NPR (highly recommended) had pieces about weed this summer. There’s definitely something in the air these days. “Could it be that, at long last,” asks Jacobson, “the Great Pot Moment is upon us?” And the answer is a resounding yes — at least at the newsstand.