Articles by Dan Beckmann
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
Louis Trichardt For those of you in New York, y0u will notice its FASHION WEEK! YAY! For Barack Obama its also, the most important week of his presidency — we keep hearing. He’s either NERF or he’s NOTHIN’. It’s the whole sha-bang, the real enchilado — the fat taco. His presidency — becomes either “a fart in the wind”, or “Gone with the wind” in the history books — all on this week. (more…)
Posted in Et Cetera | Comments Off on It’s Obama’s MAKE or BREAK WEEK again..
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
If you’ve been following the news NEWS this week — you may have heard something about Charlie Gibson retiring and Diane Sawyer taking over for him on the news program, ABC’s World News. In some ways there’s been a refreshing lack of gestation over this job announcement and I don’t intend to cause any more blotation. However, I do think there’s a component missing here that needs to be addressed. (more…)
Tags: abc News, Diane Sawyer, potential, The Evening News, Trying, World News
Posted in Creative Process, Industry, News | Comments Off on This Week in THE NEWS.. Trying Again.
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
Something that’s been bothering me about this whole Laura Ling Thing, is she’s been my liberator several times since we first met-the most recent occasion was one year ago today when she paroled me from the idea there was no place better than working with her so I could run off and join the Obama’s new media team. When I met Laura I was a corporate loyalist — now three years later I even find myself liberated from paying rent for one full year now and in many respects its all her fault. Five months into this whole fucked up thing-one in which I think we all sort of felt in March would just end quickly and then REALLY didn’t-I’ve been unable to come close to returning the favor even once. (more…)
Tags: Campaign 2008, Chicago, Collective Journalism, Current TV, Laura Ling, North Korea, Obama New Media, Prison, San Francisco, Vanguard Journalisn
Posted in Creative Process, Industry, Rebuilding Media, Story of Schmooru | Comments Off on Laura Ling Sprung Me From Prison at Least 3 Times
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
With the recent passing of Uncle Walter Cronkite–the “most trusted man in America”, some may wonder how his “news-like” descendants have tumbled down to the level of trust wedged somewhere between a used car salesman and a suit coat watch guy in Times Square. To answer this WONDER, we must explore ‘the way it was’ that got Uncle Walt where he did. (more…)
Tags: Caribou Coffe, Dan Rather, Death of Television, industry talk, legacy media, mainstream media, media hiring practice, media research, media revolution, RTNDA, schmooru essay, Sean Hannity Is a Douche, Walter Chronkite
Posted in Industry, Rebuilding Media | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
Lets start this thing off by asking the obvious question of: WHO’S COUSIN decided it was a good idea to bury the HOUSEHOLD brand name KINKOS at a charge of over $900 million??? I understand FedExKinkos was sort of choppy and you still wanted people to know you could FedEX things there–but dropping Kinkos and adding Office? What’s next, are you going to buy Kleenex and name it FedEx tissue?–that one might cost a cool Billion! (by the way, FEDEX bought Kinkos for $2.4 Billion in 2004 and lost $876 Million just last quarter) (more…)
Tags: fedex, fedex fail, fedexkinkos changes name to fedexoffice, hollywood, kinkos, sunset and vine
Posted in Creative Process, History of Schmooru, Rebuilding Media | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
If you begin to start asking yourself — is this guy Beckmann using SchmooNEWS to write some sort of PHD dissertation for egs.edu — and you answered YES — you’d be RIGHT! I’ve been talking about the “Programming of Robotic American Culture” for the last 5 years, driving away more chicks than ordering the garlic penne pasta on your date at your neighborhood Olive Garden® – issimo!
What does this mean in short (you don’t want the long version–I can already see the pigeons scattering)? I’m studying where the creative goo comes from, and I’m writing about in here in a concerted way to try to inspire it in all of the schmoos.
This week, we look at the ‘origination in name’ — through this Schmoo band o’ the week — the Grass Roots! (more…)
Tags: Origination of Creation, Schmoo Band o' the Week
Posted in Creative Process, Schmoo Band o' the Week | Comments Off on Schmoo Band o’ the Week: The Grass Roots
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
A lot of places have so-called “blogs” these days. Here’s a smattering of corporatey ones THEY thought you might find necessarily interesting: (more…)
Tags: blogs, corporate, Curators, delta, gm, mcdonalds, News, review, shirley temples, wal-mart
Posted in Curators, History of Schmooru, News, Story of Schmooru | Comments Off on What IS SchmooNEWS?
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
A lot of people ask me — why schmooru? How does this come together? Sometimes these stories can be complicated. Through using the imagery of the early 80s sit-com family genre, we hope to cut out a lot of the confusion while implanting solid imagery in everyone’s mind from day one on who we are. So lets start at the question that started it all for us — What’ll we Schmoo with our love?
- Our love is a great list of people we know who can get the shit done
- Our love is the people we know from all the places we worked and all the people they know and so on..
- Our love is the generational shift going on before us, both in media and government
- Our love is even a found in a crap economy, for within it we find opportunity
- And finally — our love is each other — as explained below the roles we play in our Sha-la-la-laaa…
(more…)
Tags: Curators, history, schmooru.com
Posted in Curators, Story of Schmooru | Comments Off on What WILL We Schmoo With Our Love?