B:
Were we happy to be written up in Time magazine? You bet we were! That's the kind of major mainstream media attention that we never dreamed we'd get when we started producing ROX.
Seeing your efforts recognized in a magazine like Time is a major ego-boost. Even if you're suspect of corporate media, as we certainly were and continue to be, it's hard not to be pleased by the recognition. And there's the seductive possibility that this recognition could lead to bigger and brighter things.
So yes, I was pumped about the Time article. Yet when I actually read it, I kind of got pissed off. Can you guess why? Read it yourself.
Notice anything that seems to be missing? A minor thing like THE NAME OF OUR SHOW?
I mean, damn! Here's an article about how we're the first TV show on the Internet, and the article doesn't give our website. How are readers supposed to actually check it out? In fairness to the author, Josh “McDonalds.com” Quittner, I never saw a URL published in any Time magazine articles, so they probably had a policy against it.
But for God's sake, what about the name of the series? You know: ROX. It seems incredible, but the article fails to mention that little fact, meaning that readers couldn't even do a Web search for the show. At first this article seemed like it would expose us to a much wider audience than we'd ever reached before. But in reality very few readers probably ever figured out how to watch the show. Ah, well.
Rob Glaser got his picture in the article, with a big Web browser in the background. They didn't give the real.com URL either, but if you squinted, you could just make it out in the graphic.
Funny thing is, we were supposed to have our picture taken for this article. A photographer was set to come down to Bloomington on April 19, but as we all know something much bigger happened on that day. The photographer was dispatched to Oklahoma City instead.
