Randy Rothenberg fields a question during the 1998 Johnston Lecture. (Photo by Jack Liu)

by Kate Conley '98, graduate Student

If Randall Rothenberg's lecture didn't scare everyone who heard it, they weren't paying attention.

The former Esquire contributing editor opened his thought-provoking 1998 Johnston Lecture with a joke about a recently deceased advertising copywriter choosing between heaven and hell. St. Peter takes the copywriter to hell first, where the copywriter sees a roomful of faceless hacks furiously pounding away at keyboards while red devils standing behind each one scream, "The meeting's in five minutes! The meeting's in five minutes!"

Horrified, the copywriter asks St. Peter to show him heaven, but when they arrive, the room for copywriters looks remarkably the same as it had down below. When the copywriter asks St. Peter what the difference is, he replies, "Ahh, up here, the work gets produced."

Rothenberg gave a lecture titled "Your Future on the Internet: Creative Pioneer or Sweatshop Slave?" on April 14, 1998, in Beall Hall.

Cautioning the students in the room, Rothenberg said, "As you embark on careers in television, newspapers, magazines, or the Internet, I want you to be aware of one truism that your professors may have kept secret: In the media world, there can be very little difference between heaven and hell."

Rothenberg used this theme of heaven and hell to illustrate how new media, the Internet in particular, have actually limited journalists' opportunities for creativity. He stressed that it is up to those entering the field to forge their own creative ways or fall into "media hell."

"In the media world, there can be very little difference between heaven and hell." --Randall Rothenberg

But what has contributed to this hellish situation? Rothenberg noted that with approximately 12 web pages per household in North America, competition among Internet news providers is fiercer than ever. Because the Internet operates outside of the traditional 9-to-5 work schedule and offers unlimited space to publish in, the work day has become 24 hours long and stories can be updated constantly.

No story is ever finished. What ran first on the on-line version of a news medium can show up later the same day on its cable TV channel, repackaged and "repurposed" for that particular audience. The emphasis has shifted from quality to quantity.

To compete, news providers have to be first on-line or on screen--that is, first to disperse news via computer or TV. But in a medium that allows 'round-the-clock updates, you can't always be first. So to distinguish yourself from the competition, you put your own spin on the day's events. We're caught in what Rothenberg called "the media spindustrial complex."

Rothenberg drew four conclusions from the growth of the Internet and the explosion of cable channels. First, people are spending more time with on-line communications. Second, this has changed what people want from conventional media. Third, there are more television channels to watch than ever, but audience size has not grown in comparison, so the actual number of viewers per channel has decreased. (Rothenberg noted Fox News and MSNBC have fewer than 10,000 viewers a day.)

And finally, because the competition for viewers is so fierce, producers and programmers are reluctant to take risks. Pressure from advertisers is pushing media toward mediocrity and away from creativity.

Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." Rothenberg said McLuhan was wrong. He told students, "The message is in you. You can be a drone. You can be a clerk, you can be a packager or a repurposer, or you can pursue your own dream, learn new skills, drink in new knowledge, chronicle new events. Take the first path, and go straight to hell. Take the second, and I promise, you'll get to heaven."

Dan Wieden, '67, of Wieden & Kennedy, Inc. teaches his annual creativity workshop starting with Pegasus pizza and conversation. (Photo by Jack Liu)

In his 20-year career, Rothenberg has had his share of heaven and hell. He recalled days when nine out of 10 of his stories werekilled, and he worked at a two-day-a-week, $50-a-day newspaper job that left him enough time and barely enough money to run to and from the post office "mailing query letters and picking up rejections."

One book agent loved his book proposal but wanted him to write a pornography book first. Another agent loved his book proposal but committed suicide before she could submit it to a publisher.

"My heaven wouldn't have been possible without an awful lot of learning and a helluva lot of hell," he said.

His heaven has taken him to the White House, Japan, Hollywood, and Area 51, the military testing facility surrounded by intrigue because some believe it was the site of UFO landings north of Las Vegas.

As editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, he worked with William Safire and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman.

Rothenberg has worked as a reporter, an advertising columnist, editor, and most recently as a writing and editorial consultant for such clients as Wired Magazine, Pentagram Design, Bloomberg Business News, and Andersen Consulting.

He has authored two books: Where the Suckers Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) and The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1984). Rothenberg co-authored Getting Angry Six Times A Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons with Alan F. Westin and Albert Robbins (Beacon Press, 1979).

The Johnston Lecture, presented at the University of Oregon since 1984, is an endowment of the Richard W. Johnston Memorial Project.

It honors the memory and work of a Depression-era UO journalism student who went on to a distinguished career as a World War II correspondent, a writer for Time and Life magazines, and later as the founding editor of Sports Illustrated. Johnston died in 1981 at age 66.