70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Equally fascinating is the last video of the German band Tocotronic. I have to admit that musically I am much more into their singer’s other project, Phantom Ghost. Very much so (and the tracks I love most are of Phantom Ghost/Efdemin). However, this video is amazingly beautiful. The lyrics diss the fluffy tinkering project culture that came up with the internet, and asks instead for professionalism. Fair enough. While Holm Friebe’s book “Marke Eigenbau” (->”by do it yourself”) mentioned in the beginning of the song might propose something right (uprising of the masses against the mass market), it really didn’t chose the right title. The fluffy crafting of digital project culture sucks. People should not say yes to be parked somewhere on their own by capitalism.

However that wasn’t what I wanted to draw your attention to. I am stunned by visual concept of the video. Already in “Wir sind hier nicht in Seattle, Dirk” did Dirk von Lotzow and the band play a role, now uncovered totally by his switch of performance. Yes, Brian Ferry, and perfectly so. And super cool dance movements, Dirk. :)

And last but not least my weak side, “Eyes of Mars” of Marion Cotillard and Franz Ferdinand. This video attracts my attention not so much because of the visual style (which is ok). It’s the mingeling of fashion advertisment, acting and music that fascinate me here, and the fact that the sell out is sung about. As always with Franz Ferdinand, I love the lyrics, their cold, sharp, obtruding presence, the tweaking of words, their precision. Thank you, pop!

So what is your favorite?

Male nudity becomes what female nudity was about a few years ago? Come on, men have been an object for a long time. The question is rather: How, Bruce, is the masculine object different today?

Meanwhile on the official YSL side, amazing Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin maybe don’t provide an answer but an interesting approach. Their radical transparency is deconstructing sexyness while holding on to it at the same time.

Anyhow, isn’t the 10 to 50 second YouTube film becoming something the new picture? (If you have any more examples, please let me know).

Award for the best type setting goes to Bruce, award for the best conceptual approach goes to L/M. Agreed?

“The strongest examples of blurring we have seen are; ASOS with its own print magazine, News International and Bauer Media entering the world of retail, with Brand Alley and Cocosa respectively, and Grazia which launched a collection of accessories through a range of fashion stores.”

I don’t even have to look that far. Back in Berlin where I just flew in from this morning, some of my best friends make a living of that, and we had discussed the issue already over different Sunday brunches.

Fashion shootings have been paid for a long time by product placement, and the line has been blurred for quite a while. No, you can’t blame this shift on the retailers. I remember very well the Sunday I flipped with my photographer friend Gene through ID magazine and he taught me to spot the product placements. There wasn’t one photo shooting without it. Yes, the mixing of editorial content and promotion has a not so much talked about history in journalism, too.

Here you can say we shouldn’t worry so much about fashion, as it is only the softer side of journalism. However, every morning when I get up fashion is at least partly about who I choose to be instead of being told who I am, so it is as much a personal as a political matter. Me at least, I take what it is very serious, and not only in terms of brands.

Anyway, I am very sure that the blurring of editorial content and promotion is something that will pretty soon move beyond fashion and affect journalism in general. It will happen to all editorial content, and maybe it will happen to all PR, too.

So a couple of questions woke me up as they started to talk lively across each other.

Isn’t public relations becoming smarter and smarter? Isn’t there a reason to prefer charismatic, good paid PR content to sloppily done, uninformed badly paid journalism? Mad Men, anyone? However, if you give into that, don’t you give in to the power of money streams and economy, an economy who is the new politics?

This is exactly why I would say with blurring the lines between promotion and editorial content, fashion is doing much more. Its change is a trace of a deeper transformation of society.

I was thinking about it this morning while taking the red eye morning flight back from Berlin to London, when I denied the horrible Lufthansa sandwich and bit instead in their wonderful richness of papers. The Financial Times, the German FAZ, and the International Herald Tribune, which I always appreciate most. Suddenly I it hit me like a blitz, and I knew that we needed to bring back the economical perspective that my most beloved economist Walter Eucken was focussing on: Economy needs to be discussed again as a political issue, and not as fate like we did with the actual financial crisis. We know that economy is never simply there but made; we do need so much more reporting on economical relations, so much more reporting about how political decisions shape or fail to shape economical opportunities.

I quickly wrote it down in my black small notebook, and thanks to the plane flying very calmly above the clouds the Stabilo I used nearly didn’t wobble. When I read the eConsultancy blog, I decided that the fact that superb editorial content is financed by retailers, is telling us a bigger story. It is telling us about an economical shift. It is re-formulating what alternative projects are about, and alternative projects were always badly needed by all creative industries as they live from new creations.

So here is the thing. Up till now, independent production always had one problem. It couldn’t became successful without tearing itself apart asking: Is this a sell out? And are we being bought? A lot of time it was. Sometimes it was just tearing itself apart.

However, now I am not sure anymore if this is still the right question. Maybe the problem of today’s projects isn’t about being sold out. What if the question that has to be asked today is different? What if we have to ask: How can we afford to realise that? How can we make it happen? And if we make it happen, is the line not blurred in a wonderful way?

To be continued…

PS: If you want an example what doesn’t work out, have a look here. Google shows how the lines are not blurred but stabbing each other as fashion gets killed by a horrible presentation/appropriation.

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As we all know there is a lot of change going on. In the lecture, Alan takes all this into account uncovering that there are new chances, too. This isn’t the downturn of journalism. The industry of journalism is changing, however journalism won’t just survive. There are new fields waiting to be discovered out there. To put it with the German journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, we need a new “poetry of curiosity” in journalism. And on the way, we are going to take this along…

“… journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers.”

Yes.

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