ISSUE #86 - September 20th, 2019

ONE

MEDIA - Over the last year I've built a friendship with the Chair of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at TCU and I spoke to his students on Thursday. Whatever field you're in, I think it's important to stay in touch with what the next generation is thinking/doing/planning.  A few students snapped photos of my talk here and here. This might be a little media-nerdy, but the big takeaway from our extended Q&A is journalism/media students crave authenticity from the publications and people they follow. They'll take a flawed "real" person over a corporate account any day. They desperately want to follow people/brands who speak to them, not at them. Case in point - in this particular class, randomly made up of men and women with a wide variety of concentrations (politics, meteorology, music, sports, etc...), the two most-mentioned media outlets were Barstool Sports and Joe Rogan's podcast. Not ESPN. Not CNN or Fox. Not ABC or NBC. I still don't think the legacy media companies have any idea how powerful these new media brands/people are.

TWO

FITNESS (SORT OF) - The single most fascinating piece I read this week was a feature on how grandmaster champions in chess have begun to train like NFL and NBA athletes, right down to having personal chefs, nutrition gurus and trainers. Why?  Because a grandmaster champion might burn as much as 6,000 CALORIES A DAY playing chess. Yes, that's 6k. During a tournament, elite chess players are known to lose anywhere from 15-20 pounds due to their increased heart rate, stress and mental fatigue. I knew absolutely none of this and Aishwarya Kumar did a phenomenal job here. Terrific story.

THREE

BOOKS - In my never-ending effort to balance out my reading between mostly non-fiction to a nice sprinkling of fiction, I picked up the novel Double Feature by Owen King for three reasons and it was awesome.  Reason #1: Bill Hader raved about it. Reason #2: Dave Barry wrote an extended review of how much he loved it. Reason #3: Karen Russell who wrote Swamplandia! has a cover blurb. And reason #s 4 & 5 are that it's about movies and filmmaking and also I picked it up at Barnes & Noble and started flipping through it and found myself standing there, 15 minutes later, well into the book. The writing and storytelling are whip smart and one of the main characters, Booth Dolan, a washed up B-movie actor is original and brilliant. Check it out here.

FOUR

MOVIES - Comedy writer Mike Camerlengo came up with this idea to edit his favorite movies down to 60 seconds and cover the story and plot with a fast, funny voice over.  So far he's done Jaws, Happy Gilmore and Rudy, which makes Rudy seem even more lame than in the actual full-length movie (yeah, I think Rudy mostly sucks, but we can discuss that another time.) He released the Karate Kid this week and amazingly it hits nearly every important scene and when the story is told that quickly...man...LaRusso really turned things around in record time from his first horrible week in LA, when he got beat up, embarrassed in front of a girl and was afraid to go to school, to reversing all those things and winning the All-Valley Tournament.

FIVE

AN EXCELLENT QUOTE ON WHAT JOURNALISM USED TO BE

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”*  — Arthur Miller

Thanks for reading! - Jon  Questions? Ideas? Comments? E-mail me (reply to this e-mail) or hit me on Twitter HERE.   And don't forget to FORWARD THE FF5 to a friend!   My last FF5 mug was sent! Thanks so much for sharing! New prize for my FF5 forwarders next week!