40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
NOTE FROM LB: I have no idea what this infographic means, but it’s about that thing we do called storytelling and sure looks well-researched and beautiful.
5 Megatrends Fueling the Rise of Data Storytelling (visualcapitalist.com)
Showrunners with shows on streaming sites vent about a problem they all share. (And you thought they had it made!?)
For decades, television creators had a pretty good way of finding out if their show was a hit: They could look at the Nielsen ratings, an imperfect, universal system for measuring viewership. Now that question is a lot more difficult to answer because, according to showrunners and producers, the platforms streaming their work share almost no data with them. Third-party measurement companies are springing up to fill the void, but without input from the platforms, they can’t tell the whole story. This means the people who made a show may have little idea how big its audience is and even less of an idea about whether the streamer is happy — right up until the moment the show is renewed or canceled.
Over the past few months, the biggest story in TV has been the sharp downturn of Netflix, with its plummeting stock price, significant layoffs, and whispers of shrinking subscriber numbers. It’s unclear if the company is a bellwether for other platforms and, in this climate, a lack of transparency only makes things tougher for creators. Some do get more info than others — this business runs on relationships, after all. But even if you see a little data, what does any of it mean? How many views is considered enough? Does it matter what kind of viewers you get? What is the goal here?
The headline above reads like clickbait, but it’s not an exaggeration. Authors are banding together to remind readers – and Amazon – that, in the words of author Lisa Kessler, “Amazon is NOT a library. When you read and return a book it COSTS the author….”
Read on…for free.
…When articles like these are available on our beloved interwebs?
And these are only some of the informative-as-hell articles I found at FilmmakingLifestyle.Com in the last couple of weeks.
UPDATE FROM LB: In the last few days, the number of articles on Filmmaking Lifestyle has doubled, covering every topic I can think of. Well, actually more than I have been able to think of. These folks are busy!
Another infographic from one of my favorite sources, Grammarcheck.Net boss lady Jennifer Frost. This time around it’s all about my high school English teacher’s favorite subject – literary devices.
Who knows? Maybe I might have understood what he was talking about if he’d illustrated it like this.
