The Economist. Democrat convention illustrations can be found here.
Great stuff.
The move away from traditional, or mainstream media is currently accelerating as more and more people switch to the internet for their information and entertainment. Sales of newspapers are declining, radio advertising is down, and television viewers are switching off in record numbers.It's popular in the blogopshere to argue that newspapers will eventually fall, and radio is hardly popular. However, given the current marketplace, television will be the first traditional media medium to completely fail, where as radio has some life left in it yet. Newspapers will survive, but the newspaper of tomorrow will be markedly different.
The great Television switch off
The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.
The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with "Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web." The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.
Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of _______," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
The 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press was conducted by telephone - including both landline phones and cell phones - from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612 adults nationwide. It finds four distinct segments in today's news audience: Integrators, who comprise 23% of the public; the less populous Net-Newsers (13%); Traditionalists - the oldest (median age: 52) and largest news segment (46% of the public); and the Disengaged (14%) who stand out for their low levels of interest in the news and news consumption.Net-Newsers are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They are affluent and even better educated than the News Integrators: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).
This web-oriented news segment, perhaps more than the others, underscores the challenges facing traditional news outlets. Fewer than half (47%) watch television news on a typical day. Twice as many read an online newspaper than a printed newspaper on a typical day (17% vs. 8%), while 10% read both.
However, Net-Newsers do rely on some well known traditional media outlets. They are at least as likely as Integrators and Traditionalists to read magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and somewhat more likely to get news from the BBC.
Jason Shepard, speaking on UW-Madison graduate Greta Van Susteren's program mentioned that a "crisis of confidence exists in Dane County and Madison Leadership". Jason discussed the growing controversy over murder victim Brittanny Zimmerman's botched 911 call.
Fox News link (will disappear at some point)
40MB MPEG4 download for ipod/iphone/playstion and others. CTRL Click here.
Grad student and former NYC teacher Jason Shepard has set the standard for investigative reporting over the past few years. His Isthmus expose of the 911 problems in Zimmerman's recent murder is just the latest in a string of substantive works on the local scene.
Shepard has done an exemplary job diving deep into a number of subjects, particularly our $367,806,712 school district.
A link to many of Jason's articles.
Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate? It depends on the typeface and the candidate. John McCain’s printed material relies on Optima, a modernistic sans serif designed by the German type designer Hermann Zapf in 1958 that was popular among book and magazine designers during the 1970s.While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.
So, I asked various designers, design curators and critics, who get rather heated when it comes to analyzing type design, to weigh in on two questions regarding Senator McCain’s campaign logo set in a bold version of Optima: What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb:
If there’s one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it’s that great ideas come from unexpected places. Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the US Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?Senior executives looking for ideas about how to make their companies more innovative can also seek inspiration in surprising sources. Exhibit One: Brad Bird, Pixar’s two-time Oscar-winning director. Bird’s hands-on approach to fostering creativity among animators holds powerful lessons for any executive hoping to nurture innovation in teams and organizations.
Bird joined Pixar in 2000, when the company was riding high following its release of the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and the subsequent hits A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Concerned about complacency, senior executives Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter asked Bird, whose body of work included The Iron Giant and The Simpsons, to join the company and shake things up. The veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and FOX delivered—winning Academy Awards (best animated feature) for two groundbreaking movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Ten days before Ratatouille won its Oscar, we sat down with Bird at the Emeryville, California, campus of Pixar, which is now a subsidiary of Disney.1 Bird discussed the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. Although stimulating the creativity of animators might seem very different from developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs, Bird’s anecdotes should stir the imagination of innovation-minded executives in any industry.
James Snyder & David Stromberg:
In this paper we estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and policy. We find that a poor fit between newspaper markets and political districts reduces press coverage of politics. We use variation in this fit due to redistricting to identify the effects of reduced coverage. Exploring the links in the causal chain of media effects -- voter information, politicians' actions and policy -- we find statistically significant and substantively important effects. Voters living in areas with less coverage of their U.S. House representative are less likely to recall their representative's name, and less able to describe and rate them. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency-oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, this congressional behavior affects policy. Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress.This is an interesting subject. Locally, I've seen very little traditional media coverage of our elected officials actual voting record. Via Tyler Cowen.
The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.
The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.
If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:
The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.
Tell me your favorite newspaper as a source for independent, objective news. The Wall St. Journal? Not even close. The NY Times? These days, the joke in NYC is seeing how long it will take the Sulzbergers to lose their flagship paper, just as the Bancrofts did with the WSJ. All it takes is a few years of mismanagement, and suddenly - ye gods! - Rupert Murdoch owns you.This sentence is not proof that the words Murdoch and News can sit comfortably in the same sentence.
It turns out that over half of Americans now turn to foreign newspapers for their news, specifically to the BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph. I would add the FT to the mix, although it has a US version now, so may be out of the running.
The term media has many different definitions. Published media is any media made available to the public. Mass media refers to all means of mass communication. Broadcast media refers to communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks.News media refers to mass media focused on communicating news. Media meshing refers to the act of combining multiple independent pieces of communication media to enrich an information consumer’s experience. New media refers to media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing power.
The history of “media” has been designed, developed and pushed from a few at the top to the masses at the bottom. This model has been used to influence public opinion about anything, everything and everywhere. The old model was an important factor in driving historical economies.
Unless you’ve been avoiding television, newspapers, and all other forms of mass media for the past few months, you’ve probably seen Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” banners. The typophiles among you have realized that the “change” font Obama’s campaign uses is Gotham, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, originally as a commission for GQ Magazine.The film Helvetica is well worth watching.
The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.When the backpack exploded on a clear, crisp afternoon at the Media Lab, handfuls of confetti shot out of the cardboard tubes into the air, then fell slowly to earth. On each streamer of paper was written the name of an Iraqi civilian casualty. I had reported on the war (although not from Baghdad) since 2003 and was aware of persistent controversy over the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead as reported by the U.S. government and by other sources. But it wasn't until the moment of this fake explosion that the scale and horrible suddenness of the slaughter in Baghdad became vivid and tangible to me. Alyssa described her project as an upgrade to traditional journalism. "The upgrade is empathy," she said, with the severe humility that comes when you suspect you are on to something but are still uncertain you aren't being ridiculous in some way.
I don’t subscribe to the newspaper my family sold to a chain in the mid-1990s. While I miss the New York Times crossword puzzle, I finally stopped my subscription, because I really wasn’t interested in reading the generic news that has replaced the community coverage we used to provide.In more than 30 years of newspaper management, I experienced the transformation described in your white paper on Media 3.0, as we faced increasing competition from direct mail, segmented cable and the myriad of other choices served to advertisers.
But there is one underlying reason why newspapers will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities so well presented in your paper: They simply lack the intellectual capacity...
The "Truth About Cars" folks let 'er rip on Car and Driver's objectivity vs their essential advertising sales cash flow requirements:
When I first picked up Car and Driver’s (C&D) fateful December 2006 issue, I was convinced that the splashy, graphics-heavy revamp sounded the death knell for my favorite buff book. But the resulting reader backlash was so loud I felt sure Ann Arbor’s finest would be scared straight. A plaintive apology followed the editor’s arrogant dismissal of the reader revolt. C&D seemed poised for a revival. Nope. The October 2007 issue isn’t just the lowest point in the mag’s inexorable descent; it’s a dive below the limits of acceptability.Auto magazines are not the only print vertical dealing with decline.The buff books’ decline is inversely proportionate to digital media’s rise. Why fork over good money for a magazine subscription, endure two-month old editorials and wade through dozens of ads when the web provides fresh, instant and less ad-intrusive content for free? For the mags, there's an obvious answer: an upmarket re-imagining of the paper-based genre, like the UK’s elegant, ballsy evo magazine.
Car:
It's a collection of some of the best, funniest and cheesiest UK car adverts out there. However, it is by no means a definitive list - and this is where you come in. We want to hear about your favourite and we'll update the list below accordingly.
It's been 10 years since the blog was born. Love them or hate them, they've roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox. Twelve commentators -- including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, the SEC's Christopher Cox and actress-turned-blogger Mia Farrow -- on what blogs mean to them.Notwithstanding the words of Tom Wolfe, who puts an elegant boot, below, into the corpus of bloggers, there are many more people today who would read blogs than disparage them.
The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one's way through the morning's newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 -- and a fair few folk over that age -- now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today's bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion.
We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word "weblog."
As Zell deals go, this hardly ranks among his biggest; he’s putting up a “mere” $250 million to gain control of a company with $5.5 billion in revenue last year. But what it lacks in economic heft, it more than makes up for in complexity. When the deal closes, probably at the end of the year, the Tribune Company will go from being a public company to a private S corporation, meaning it will pay no corporate taxes. Its sole owner will be an employee stock ownership plan, which is essentially a fund, owned by employees, which owns the company’s stock. ESOPs also pay no taxes, meaning that both the company and its owner will no longer be taxpayers. Mr. Zell, who will become chairman of the company, will immediately recoup his $250 million and then reinvest an additional $315 million (don’t ask). He’ll have an option to buy 40% of the company for another $500 million to $600 million. (If he does so, he will become the one taxpayer in the deal.)The Tribune Company will be laden with debt, $13 billion in all, which it plans to pay down in part with the extra cash flow that is generated from not having to pay taxes. If the company does well — or even just decently — everyone will make out, starting with the employees whose stock in the ESOP will be worth a lot more than $28 a share, the discounted price the ESOP paid for it. But if it continues to sink — and just this week, the Tribune Company announced that May revenue fell 11.1% — then the company could wind up in default, which would hurt everyone, starting, again, with the employees, who would lose the value of their ESOP shares. ...
What most seemed to excite him was the ESOP itself. And why not? As the Lehman Brothers tax expert Robert Willens said, “He is using it in a way that no one has ever done before.” Mostly, ESOPs are set up when family owners want to cash out of privately held companies and turn them over to their employees. Mr. Zell, by contrast, is using it to buy out the shareholders of a large public corporation —and turn it into a tax-free private company.
Internet blogs are taking on big corporations and winning. As the bloggerati continue to set the agenda Times Online provides the first full list of the 50 top blogs, corporate and anti-corporate alike. This list is a work in progress - scroll down to let us know your suggestions.
D5:
Stephen Colbert’s terrific intro for Viacom President and CEO, Philippe “Dough Man” Dauman.Earlier, we posted this video, then took it down and then put it back up. Confused?
Our fault and not Viacom’s at all.
Walt Mossberg asked CBS CEO Les Moonves about Al Gore’s critique of television culture in his new book, The Assault on Reason. “Gore said that TV in general has basically destroyed American democracy. He says the Internet is the hope –”
Moonves interrupted: “That’s because he created it.”Mossberg grimaced. There was not a single laugh in the room.
It is one sign of hope for the world today that this dead old line — discredited eons ago — now evokes only contempt.
Meanwhile, here is Moonves’s stirring defense of his medium against the complaint that TV caters to too much of our love for celebrity news at the expense of more pressing issues: “I think there are other things that may have hurt the fabric of democracy more than the media.”
For Gerald Sylvester Joseph Cassidy, creator and proprietor of the most lucrative lobbying firm in Washington, May 17, 2005, was a day to exult. That bright, clear spring Tuesday marked the 30th birthday of Cassidy & Associates, and an impressive crowd had come to pay tribute to a godfather of the influence business.Great series by the Post.
Hundreds of guests gathered on the rooftop terrace of a handsome new office building at the foot of Capitol Hill, 13 stories above Constitution Avenue. A vivid orange sun descended gently behind the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial at the western end of the Mall, casting angular beams of light across the assembled throng. The guests' view from the roof was filled by the United States Capitol, which from this startling vantage point could be seen, from end to end, in a single field of vision. The Capitol looked contained and compact, almost a plaything within easy reach.
We're a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. We already have some ideas, of course. But as champions of free markets, we abhor the concept of a closed system. This is why we would like you to submit your idea (or ideas). Just think big - and we'll do the rest.
When the inspector general of the US Department of Justice issues a special report, it tends to make news. The latest report, a dissection of the FBI’s use of “national security letters” under the Patriot Act, is no exception. References to this report are everywhere in the news today. But links to the report are less plentiful.
If there's any good news about the businesses of newspapering these days, it can be found at the industry's littlest papers, which are doing well even as their bigger brothers founder.
Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, for example, owns 56 daily papers and more than 300 small weeklies and other publications. Three of its papers have a circulation of more than 100,000 -- including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- but the rest of its dailies are much smaller, averaging about 26,000 each.
Over the past five years, the circulation gains at Lee papers have outpaced the industry average; some of the gains came from acquisitions, but much came from the growth of the group's existing papers. Over the past two decades, the company's stock price has likewise gone in the opposite direction of large-newspaper stock, climbing steadily from less than $10 a share in 1988 to more than $30 a share today.
"We're largely in markets . . . that have pretty good local economies, a strong sense of place and strong newspaper readership," said Mary E. Junck, Lee's chairman and chief executive. Another advantage: "Many of our markets are pretty homogenous and tightknit," she said, making it easier to pin down and target readership.
But then, that’s not news. I’ve been trying to get Joost working at home and was cursing it, but I was cursing the wrong party. Joost works fine at work. I can’t wait until Verizon finishes laying fibre on my street so I can get FIOS. Except Verizon hired the worst contractor imaginable to get the job done. They have been at it for more than two months on a street with fewer than 20 homes; they’ve managed to cut our cable and gas line and a neighbor’s electric line and they’re not nearly done. I’m about to go out with a shovel myself just so I can get rid of Cablevision sooner.At least Jarvis can look forward to fiber to the home, via Verizon. Locally, AT&T is content to spend money on advertising and resell us the copper lines we've paid for over and over and over.
First, let's agree that "media" is anything that people want to read, watch or listen to, amateur or professional. The difference between the "old" media and the "new" is that old media packages content and new media atomizes it. Old media is all about building businesses around content. New media is about the content, period. Old media is about platforms. New media is about individual people. (Note: "old" does not mean bad and "new" good--I do, after all, run a very nicely growing magazine/old media business.)
The problem with most of the companies Skrenta lists is that they were/are trying to be a "news aggregators". Just as one size of news doesn't fit all, one size of news aggregator doesn't either.
When he started, the Big Three completely controlled car sales in the United States. The only foreign company of any prominence was Volkswagen, and as Press recalled, Toyota’s modest sales were lumped with various tiny carmakers as “Other.” Still, soon after he arrived, Press realized he liked the company’s intimacy: he could meet face to face with top managers and exert some influence over marketing decisions. And he liked Toyota’s obsession with customer satisfaction. When he told me about his first trip to Japan, he seemed to be recounting a religious experience. “As a young person, you are searching for this level of comfort, you don’t know what it is, but you’re sort of uncomfortable,” he said. In Japan, as he put it, he found a home, a place where everything from the politeness of the people to the organization of the factories made sense. On that first trip, at a restaurant one evening, he tried a rich corn soup and asked the waitress for the recipe. She checked with the chef, who explained that there was no recipe; it had been handed down from his mother. The next morning, the waitress came to Press’s hotel room: she had found a cookbook with a recipe for the soup. Press, apparently, was still her customer. “That blew me away,” he said.Fascinating and timely.
It can be simplistic, and often a distortion, to accept a corporate executive as the personification of a corporation, especially one as large and varied as Toyota. Yet Press serves as an apt representative, and not merely because his career arc mirrors the company’s ascendancy. Like Toyota, he expresses himself in private with modesty and care, yet in public his speeches are bold, declarative and effervescent. In his office, he has an informal, relaxed presence and exhibits just a hint of an avuncular stoop; yet he loves to race cars and sometimes swims 5,000 meters a day. Press also has a fluency in the company’s arcane systems and history. Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.” This phrase should be cause for skepticism, especially coming from a company so adept at marketing and public relations. I lost count of how many times Toyota executives, during the course of my reporting, repeated it and how often I had to keep from recoiling at its hollow peculiarity. And yet, the catch phrase — to enrich and serve society — was not intended, at least originally, to function as a P.R. motto. Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement. Finally, the phrase carries with it the responsibility to plan for the long term — financially, technically, imaginatively. “The company thinks in years and decades,” Michael Robinet, a vice president at CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that focuses on the global auto industry, told me. “They don’t think in months or quarters.”
With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.I hope the Hollywood types listen. Music should be very inexpensive ($0.05/track) and widely, widely used.
The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.
Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store - they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
TiVo revealed the other day that it's offering TV networks and ad agencies a chance to receive second-by- second data about which programs the company's 4.5 million subscribers are watching and, more importantly, which commercials people are skipping.
This raises a pair of troubling questions: Is TiVo, which revolutionized TV viewing with its digital video recording technology, now watching what people watch? And is it selling that sensitive info to advertisers and others?
The answers, apparently, are no and no.
"I promise with my hand on a Bible that your data is not being archived and sold," said Todd Juenger, TiVo's vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement.
IMAGINE a time before alternative country. Before Americana and roots rock. Picture a corner office, sometime in the early ’80s, with record executives scratching their heads over how to market a talented singer, songwriter and guitarist from Louisiana named Lucinda Williams. Was she country? Folk? Blues? The answer of course was (and is) all of the above. A three-time Grammy winner, Ms. Williams will release “West,” her eighth studio album, on Feb. 13. A tour is scheduled to begin soon after, including a stop at Radio City Music Hall on March 23. Ms. Williams, 54, shows no signs of getting any less sexy with her lyrics or her taste in music. She recently spoke by phone with Winter Miller about what she’s listening to now.
In choosing the Internet to announce she intends to run for the presidency in 2008, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton bowed to the burgeoning political power of the medium and offered a preview of how she hopes to harness it to her purposes.Hilary's video is here. Take a look through the window - I wonder when it was shot? Sam Brownback announced on the web as well.
In declaring "I'm in" the White House race in a video clip on her new campaign website, HillaryClinton.com, the New York Democrat did considerably more than simply appear before the cameras; she invited supporters to join an almost Oprah Winfrey-like session of give and take.
"Let's talk. Let's chat. Let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.... " she told viewers."With a little help from modern technology, I'll be holding live online video chats ... starting Monday."
By doing this, Clinton signaled her intention of using the Internet to shore up one of her chief political weak points, what independent analyst Charlie Cook called the caricature of her as "this shrill, raving, partisan, liberal lunatic."
Of course, there are those who would argue that in a society that seems to have no general interest (other than, say, Paris Hilton and the Super Bowl) there is no room or need for a general interest magazine. But Mr. Stengel said he will not be imprisoned by the tyranny of big numbers in making changes at Time.
“I think it is a false choice to say that something that is mass has to be dumbed-down.” he said. “We want to be accessible, but we want our readers to know that we understand they are smart.”
I also have a minor challenge for aficionados of the Enron case.
Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, one of my colleagues on the science desk—Bill Booth—called up a dozen or so Nobel Laureates in physics and asked them to explain, in plain language, the nature and significance of the Higgs Boson atomic particle. None of them could. This was at a time, mind you, when the physics community was arguing passionately for the construction of a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to look for things like the Higgs Boson. So it wasn’t for lack of interest. They were gung-ho for nailing the Higgs Boson. They just couldn’t explain the Higgs Boson.
Can anyone explain—in plain language—what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is launching a one-year pilot programme to allow companies to place advertisements in bins at passenger screening checkpoints at “select” US airports in return for equipment donations.Not a bad idea, actually. How about a free bottle of water with the ad?
The effort follows a 3-month test programme at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) security checkpoints that started in July.
TSA is looking for commercial advertising companies who will team with an airport to provide divestiture bins (the plastic bins used to transport passenger carry-on items through the X-ray machine); divestiture and composure tables; and bin return carts free-of-charge to the TSA. In return, the companies will be allowed to place airport-approved ads “on the bottom of the inside of the bins,” says a TSA spokeswoman. Airports partnered with ad companies will ultimately be required to screen the materials for “offensive, obtrusive, political or controversial” content, she adds.
Welcome to Wired News' 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards program. You, the readers, have sent us your picks for the lamest quotes from or about the world of technology during this eventful year. We have selected the "best" of those and present them to you now.
ith the 1960 Presidential election approaching, Dr. Stanton persuaded Congress to suspend the “equal time” provision in the Federal Communications Act. That made it possible for the networks to televise debates between the Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kennedy, and his Republican rival, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, without including candidates of smaller parties. The debates signaled the arrival of television as a dominant force in presidential politics.
Dr. Stanton bore much of the criticism when Washington objected to CBS News’s coverage of the war in Vietnam, though he denied a frequently told tale that President Johnson had telephoned him at home to curse him for broadcasting a report by Morley Safer showing Marines burning down peasant huts in Cam Ne.
As VHS tapes and VCRs head the way of Betamax and phonographs, commentator Bill Hammack warns that the right to fair use is in danger of disappearing right along with them.
Back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled VCR makers couldn't be held liable for copyright infringement.
That gave consumers the right to make personal copies of TV shows and movies using a VCR.
The new digital media that are erasing the VHS format are also erasing our rights.
A few years ago, a Judge issued a catch-22 ruling: Yes, she said, we can copy commercial DVDs too. But no one can sell the software to do that.
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This is a very interesting sight. It depicts flights across the U.S. in time-lapse over a couple of 24 hour periods.
It has already garnered nine awards: #49 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Arts & Animation - All #39 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Arts & Animation - English #87 - Top Rated (All Time) - Arts & Animation - All #37 - Most Discussed (All Time) - Arts & Animation - All #27 - Most Discussed (All Time) - Arts & Animation - English #46 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Arts & Animation - All #39 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Arts & Animation - English #79 - Recently Featured - All #16 - Recently Featured - Arts & Animation - All
It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story” and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”I've long enjoyed short films. Clusty has more.
Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.
Are books in danger?
The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media--the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames--compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.
But surprise--the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression--wikis, networked books--are blossoming in a digital hothouse.
It will be interesting to see how Terry Semel reacts to Brad Garlinghouse's "peanut butter manifesto," which was essentially open letter accusing Terry of incompetence. Garlinghouse took pains to note that Yahoo's problems come "straight from the top." He also obviously either leaked the memo himself or knew that it would be leaked (little difference). Regardless of what happens, Yahoo shareholders should thank him.
As was widely reported, the six-month circulation numbers for U.S. newspapers released earlier this week carried plenty of bad news: an industry-wide tumble year-to-year of 2.8% daily and 3.4% on Sunday. There were much deeper losses in big metro markets like Boston, Los Angeles and Miami.
As grim as those numbers are, a deeper look into the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reports and into some online data released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), makes the overall economic picture even a little bleaker.
True to their word, most companies and individual papers continue to burn so-called “junk” circulation, such as the category called “other paid” as well as third-party or bulk sales, all of it of little value to advertisers. That would support the idea that the business is pruning numbers, but improving the quality of its circulation.
...
Take the six largest papers of Lee Enterprises (Lee owns half of Capitol Newspapers), the best circulation performer among public companies. Together they achieved a highly respectable daily loss of just 0.3%. However those same papers lost 25,000 circulation among those paying 50 percent or greater of the full price of the paper, a drop of 4.1%. At the same time, it added 13,500 in the 25 to 50 percent category, a 43.9% increase. That means the papers had significant losses among subscribers paying a higher percentage of the full price while adding readers who paid more steeply discounted rate
The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.
The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.
A mini-mill is traditionally a secondary steel producer; however, Nucor (one of the world's largest steel producers) uses mini-mills exclusively. Usually it obtains most of its iron from scrap steel, recycled from used automobiles and equipment or byproducts of manufacturing. Direct reduced iron (DRI) is sometimes used with scrap, to help maintain desired chemistry of the steel, though usually DRI is too expensive to use as the primary raw steelmaking material. A typical mini-mill will have an electric arc furnace for scrap melting, a ladle furnace or vacuum furnace for precision control of chemistry, a strip or billet continuous caster for converting molten steel to solid form, a reheat furnace and a rolling mill.
Originally the mini-mill concept was adapted to production of bar products only, such as concrete reinforcing bar, flats, angles, channels, pipe, and light rails. Since the late 1980s, successful introduction of the direct strip casting process has made mini-mill production of strip feasible. Often a mini-mill will be constructed in an area with no other steel production, to take advantage of local resources and lower-cost labour. Mini-mill plants may specialize, for example, making coils of rod for wire-drawing use, or pipe, or in special sections for transportation and agriculture.
Reading Paul Boutin's coverage of Apple's video announcements today, There are several questions that come to mind (and I know Jobs prefers not to answer questions).
[..]
In other words, will it play HD content made by independents cleanly, or will it require broadcast flag handshakes?
Facebook implemented a new feature called "News Feeds" that displays every action you take on the site to your friends. You see who added who, who commented where, who removed their relationship status, who joined what group, etc. This is on your front page when you login to Facebook. This upset many Facebook members who responded with outrage. Groups emerged out of protest. Students Against Facebook News Feeds is the largest with over 700,000 members. Facebook issued various press statements that nothing was going to change. On September 5, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder) told everyone to calm down. They didn't. On September 8, he apologized and offered privacy options as an olive branch. Zuckerberg invited everyone to join him live on the Free Flow of Information on the Internet group where hundreds of messages wizzed by in the hour making it hard to follow any thread; the goal was for Facebook to explain its decision. In short, they explained that this is to help people keep tabs on their friends but only their friends and all of this information is public anyhow.
What happens if Koren Robinson kills somebody in Wisconsin driving drunk or fleeing the police?More on Robinson
Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson wore a smile late Monday afternoon as he prepared to meet the media in the Lambeau Field atrium to announce the signing of wide receiver and kick returner Koren Robinson. When that was the first question fired at Thompson following his brief introductory remarks, he turned ashen and somber as he tried to collect himself and provide an answer.
"Oh, I can't answer anything like that," Thompson said after a two-second pause. "There's issues in his past that obviously he's made some mistakes, but most of those issues are covered under the confidentiality of the NFL and the NFLPA. There's programs set up and that sort of thing, and that's where that lies."
I only asked because no one else did. When Kathleen Falk announced her candidacy for attorney general against fellow Democrat Peg Lautenschlager at the City-County Building on Monday, I thought it would be one of first things that came up. But while several reporters quizzed Falk about Lautenschlager's 2004 arrest for drunk driving (Falk deftly evaded the question, saying voters would have to reach their own conclusions), none asked her directly about her own record in this area. And so I raised my hand, waited until Falk called on me, and popped the question.
Whether or not Falk choose to make an issue of it, I prefaced, the key reason Lautenschlager was seen as vulnerable was this drunk driving arrest, even though this is conduct that most people in Wisconsin have engaged in. And so I asked Falk point-blank: "Can you say whether you have ever in your life gotten behind the wheel of an automobile after consuming alcohol? Have you never done that yourself?"
The State Journal points to studies that suggest its readership is at sky-high levels. “The numbers for Capital Newspapers are absolutely stellar,” boasts an internal memo from the company’s marketing director, Jon Friesch. “In Dane County, 83% of adults read the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal, and 79% read the daily or Saturday edition of The Capital Times or Wisconsin State Journal.”
But while these numbers come from an independent company, Scarborough Research, they may be misleading, since they include even casual readers. The 83% number, clarifies Friesch, measures respondents who have read the Sunday paper “in the last month”; the 79% number is respondents who have read either of the two dailies “in the past five days.”
Ellen Foley missed the afternoon news meeting where her deputy editors debated story selection for the next day’s front page. But later, the Wisconsin State Journal editor saw the planned lead story and blurted out, “Who cares?”Jason dug up some interesting data on daily newspaper readership:
The story, which ran earlier this summer, reported that several Madison high schools failed to meet new federal standards. Foley feared her paper’s readers -- starved for time and wanting relevant and engaging writing -- wouldn’t be pulled into the piece. So she directed an assistant editor to repackage it.
“I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Oh boy, the last thing I need tonight is the editor giving me tips on how to do my job,’” recalls Foley, who advised him anyway. She hammered home the importance of “creating context” in the story’s first six paragraphs. She also wanted breakout boxes to list the failing schools and explain the standards.
One is to shift emphasis from circulation data to readership stats.
“We know people are reading our paper,” says Phil Stoddard, Capital Newspapers’ circulation director. “They’re just not buying it.”
The State Journal points to studies that suggest its readership is at sky-high levels. “The numbers for Capital Newspapers are absolutely stellar,” boasts an internal memo from the company’s marketing director, Jon Friesch. “In Dane County, 83% of adults read the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal, and 79% read the daily or Saturday edition of The Capital Times or Wisconsin State Journal.”
But while these numbers come from an independent company, Scarborough Research, they may be misleading, since they include even casual readers. The 83% number, clarifies Friesch, measures respondents who have read the Sunday paper “in the last month”; the 79% number is respondents who have read either of the two dailies “in the past five days.” bold added
From 1985 to 2005, the State Journal’s daily circulation saw a 20% increase, from 76,903 to 92,081. Sunday circulation also rose, from 138,086 in 1985 to 150,616 last year. But over the last decade, the number has trended downward, from a 1994 high of 166,205. Single-copy Sunday sales have taken the biggest hit, says Stoddard, who calls the Sunday paper the company’s “bread and butter.”
One strategy employed by newspapers is to hike so-called soft circulation. For instance, residents of more than a dozen Madison apartment complexes are eligible for free and discounted subscriptions, with billing included in their monthly rent. Sunday shoppers at Sentry Hilldale are given a free State Journal. Oil-change customers at Valvoline can read a complimentary Cap Times or State Journal while their car is serviced. (Elsewhere in the country, advertisers have filed class-action lawsuits alleging that circulation numbers have been improperly inflated.)
Pollster.com is the new home of Mystery Pollster, the blog that has labored to demystify the art and science of political polling for the last two years, but it is also much more. Our Polls feature will take you to pages with complete listings of all the public polls available for the most competitive races for Senate and Governor with an important bonus: Interactive charts that show you how the poll results compare to each other as well as trends over time.RSS Feed.
Before you dive into the data pages, let me tell you about the incredible team behind Pollster.com. Regular MP readers will notice a similarity between our charts and the stellar graphics produced by our friend Charles Franklin, professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin and creator of the blog PoliticalArithmetik. Franklin is a central part of the Pollster team and will also provide frequent commentary here on the Pollster blog as well as lead in the development of new ways to visualize results graphically.
By the way, today also marks the debut of our strategic partnership with Slate Magazine. We have worked with Slate to create an Election Scorecard that will track the daily trends in the race to control the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and key Governorships in 2006. With the help of Charles Franklin, I will write a daily update for Slate through Election Day on where those races stand. Links to that update will also appear here daily.
Charles Franklin is the co-developer of Pollster.com. He will provide frequent commentary and lead in the development of new ways to visualze polling results graphically. Franklin is the creator of PoliticalArithmetik ("Where numbers and politics meet") and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in the statistical analysis of polling and election results.
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article). Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.Related: Warren Buffet: "Newspapers are a business in permanent decline." I think the roots of the problem can be found in this post by Brenda Konkel. Daily newspapers, despite generating tremendous margins and cash flow, have in my view, shied away - in general from the more challenging issues. A friend refers to this as "not wanting to offend anyone". At some point, this desire will be fatal to their business models.
Edward Tufte has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. That might sound like a dry subject, but with Tufte, information becomes art.audio
Tufte's most recent book, Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there's an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird's wing works and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing.
IT'S taken me this long to recognize what I love about a Porsche 911 Turbo. And no, it's not the internal-combustion volcanism — now up to 480 hp in the 2007 model — or the claws-in-the-carpet grip, the carbide-steel stiffness, the perfect steering or land-anchor ceramic brakes.
It's this: The 911 Turbo is the only ultra-performance sports car that's in good taste.
Circulation for the nation’s daily newspapers has been declining steadily since 1990. In 2004 and 2005, daily circulation dropped 3.5% and the Sunday circulation declined by 4.6%. In the six months period ending in March, 2006, daily circulation fell 2.5% and the Sunday editions fell 3.1%. Readership declined in almost every demographic group and among people with all levels of education, even those with postgraduate degrees. One study found that baby boomers read newspapers a third less than their parents, and generation Xers read them a third less than the boomers.
Speaking of Liz's Boyz, prominently displayed in their new "Life. Liberty. And the pursuit." ad campaign for Cadillac is the famous, "The Penalty of Leadership" ad written by Theodore MacManus, which was done for Cadillac back in 1915. Gee, we wonder where they got the idea to use that?
A study is about to give Madison Avenue a fresh pummeling: McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.
That shocking statistic, delivered to the company's Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.
"You've also got pronounced changes in consumer behavior while they're consuming media," said Tom French, director at McKinsey. "And ad spending is decreasingly reflecting consumer behavior."
- TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
- Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms.
- Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
- DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
- Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
Wow, they're going to do it. Or at least they're going to think about doing it. That's the first thing that came into my mind on a recent Friday morning when The New York Times reported that the parent company of The Wall Street Journal had created a committee "to reassess the ways it delivers news across all its print and online properties."
At the same time that Nielsen announces that the TV networks had their lowest ratings in recorded history — averaging 20 million viewers at a time — YouTube announces that it’s serving 100 million videos a day. Insert apocalyptic punchline here.
The WSJ reports that AOL is considering making online access to its service--including, importantly, email--free. (AOL email users currently have to pay for one of the company's subscription plans, although much of the rest of the company's content is already free.) Per the WSJ, this move would vaporize about one-quarter of the company's revenue, or $2 billion. The company estimates that it would also result in the loss of 8 million paying subscribers.Blodget also notes that Vonage's recent IPO continues to be black comedy (public at 17, now 8.25 after just a month....
As Racine has changed, so have its politics. Once, a ritual antagonism for business was a sure vote-getter among Democrats. But Mr. Becker was elected three years ago with a pro-development message, pledging to trim jobs from the public payroll to free resources to attract new residents and businesses.
Racine's future, Mr. Becker believes, lies in forging stronger links with the regional economy and global markets. Reinvention can be unnerving, he acknowledges, but he says it is his hometown's best shot at prosperity and progress. "In the past, Racine was a self-contained economy," he said. "But that is not an option anymore."
No local economy truly mirrors the nation. But for Racine and its surrounding suburbs, the last few years have been marked by gradually rising prosperity, in step with the national trend. And the recent history of Racine, like that of the nation as a whole, is also the story of how a community comes to grips with the larger forces of globalization and technological change.
I’ve seen a lot of WiFi models lately but this appears to be the first from a local newspaper. (You’ll let me know if I’m wrong, I’m sure.) The Pilot, which covers Pinehurst and several other communities in North Carolina, will provide free WiFi across Moore County. Publisher David Woronoff explains: “The Pilot’s mission is to serve Moore County and we think the technology has advanced to the point that we can help bind the community together in a dynamic and compelling way with The Pilot’s products and Internet service.” They’ve acquired WiFi equipment, hired a GM and will start the rollout with a transmitter on their own building in Southern Pines. This isn’t a value add for print subscribers — it will be accessible to readers and non-readers. The Pilot plans to launch a fee-based WiMax network later this year.
>Consumers now have the ability to buy digital versions of music and movies from a vast (and growing) online catalog. But that convenience has come at a price: Most of the digital content is packaged with technology called digital rights management, or DRM, a sort of copy protection that limits what users can do with the material.
The music and movie industries defend DRM as a means of protecting artists and publishers -- without it, they say, it would be too easy for users to abuse copyrights by illegally swapping files over the Internet. They also argue that without DRM technologies, publishers wouldn't have been willing to distribute their content in online music and video stores, such as Apple's iTunes.
But some consumer advocates argue that DRM often goes too far, treating customers as would-be criminals and putting burdensome restrictions on what they can do with music and movies that were legally purchased. (ITunes, for instance, allows users to burn music to an unlimited number of CDs, but limits the number of computers on which users can play purchased music.)
It was a blast across GM’s bow that was unparalleled in its ferocity and malicious intent. For here was Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times decreeing that, for the benefit of our nation and society, General Motors should fold. Friedman argues that GM is almost solely responsible for our country’s extreme gasoline demand, which in turn is why our troops are in the Middle East fighting the War on Terrorism.GM's Brian Akre has much more:
Then again, few realize that only 40% of the oil America uses today goes into producing gasoline for the 200 plus million automobiles we drive. What Friedman did not rail against was our airline industry, which accounts for 7% of our petroleum use, or the 24% used by business and industry. I’m surprised he didn’t call out New Englanders, because of their inconsiderate use of heating oil in winter, the reason our troops are in Iraq securing crude supplies.
I’ve spent much of the past week trying to get a letter to the editor published in The New York Times in response to the recent Tom Friedman rant (subscription required) against GM (see “Hyperbole and Defamation at The New York Times,” June 1).
I failed. This is my story.
For those of you who haven’t read it already, Mr. Friedman spent 800 words on the Times op/ed page to accuse GM of supporting terrorists, buying votes in Congress and being a corporate “crack dealer” that posed a serious threat to America’s future. He suggested the nation would be better off if Japan’s Toyota took over GM.
That’s a picture of the latest brilliant marketing idea – showing television commercials to people pumping gas. Gas Station TV has been testing this marketing idea in Dallas and is expanding the test to more markets with eye towards having 1,000 gas stations in 21 states by next year. Airing on GSTV will be 15-second commercials as well as news/entertainment content from the ABC television network.
For the week of the broadcast network upfront presentations, Bolt Media hopes this stat delivers a bullet to TV: Only one in four 12- to 34-year-olds can name all four major broadcast networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.There certainly are some questions about this, given the source of the poll, however, the media fragmentation trend cannot be denied.
The finding comes via an online poll conducted by Bolt Media, a 10-year-old Web site that six weeks ago relaunched itself as a place for users to upload videos and photos. About 400 members responded to the questions, including one that asked how respondents spent their free time.
This is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.
Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.
But what if there’s a fatal flaw in this assumption? What if the transfer of marketing and advertising dollars online is not 1-to-1? What if the Internet has fundamentally lowered the marketing and advertising costs for big companies as it has for small companies? What if large companies can achieve the same sales objectives for a fraction of the cost of traditional mass media advertising?
All marketers know intuitively that mass media advertising is wildly inefficient — there’s the obsessively repeated Wanamaker quote about knowing that half of all advertising is wasted but not knowing which half. But the Internet may be doing more than make advertising more efficient and measureable, i.e. reducing wasted dollars — it may be fundamentally lowering its unit costs.
insanity:unsoundness of mind or lack of understanding as prevents one from having the mental capacity required by law to enter into a particular relationship, status, or transaction or as removes one from criminal or civil responsibilityWhich leads me to the phone companies.
Here's an update to last week's post about AT&T's practice of leaving unwanted 8-pound phone directories scattered in doorways around the nation...
ABOUT a month ago, The Star Tribune in Minneapolis let it be known that, as a cost-cutting effort, free copies of the newspaper would no longer be broadly available around the newsroom.
Instead, the staff was offered an electronic edition of the paper — "an exact digital reproduction of the printed version," no less — that they could access online. Those who insisted on seeing the fruits of the their labors in its physical form were told that they could purchase copies for 25 cents, half the retail cost, from boxes around the office. (This change in policy was first reported by City Pages in Minneapolis.)
So far, so weird. Journalism is not jammed with perks — well, not at most newspapers, anyway — but it was always assumed that you could grab a gratis sports section on the way to lunch.
I hope McClatchy's obviously sound instincts, in business and journalism, continue with the enlarged company. Having met and chatted with some of their senior folks, and admiring the journalists I know there, I'm fairly confident that McClatchy will do well. But it faces the same economic pressures that forced Knight Ridder to cave in to speculators and other investors for whom journalism is an abstraction -- an unfortunate cost of being in business -- and certainly not a priority.Terry Heaton has more in a related post.
I'm not nostalgic for what many newspapers have become: empty journalistic vessels working mostly for the advertisers and shareholders, only vaguely interested in serving the people of their communities. But when newspapers do their best, they are vital parts of those communities, and we need quality journalism more than ever.
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album titled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.Much more on Don Knotts.
During the mid- to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
"Newspapers," he said right off the bat, "are dead."
Uh, to be honest, I was hoping for something a little funnier. But, the more he talked about it, the clearer it became that it is a worthwhile topic for discussion. And Barry may even be right.
Everyone has heard about cutbacks in the newspaper business, from the big names on the East Coast to the papers in your driveway. And if there is anyone who typifies the rapid pace of change in the business and its effect on how you get your news, it is Barry.
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Our analysis indicates that market evolution hinges on two key market drivers: openness of access channels and levels of consumer involvement with media. For the next 5-7 years, there will be change on both fronts — but not uniformly. The industry instead will be stamped by consumer bimodality, a coexistence of two types of users with disparate channel requirements. While one consumer segment remains passive in the living room, the other will force radical change in business models in a search for anytime, anywhere content through multiple channels.Via Terry Heaton.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Spencer Wang says the earliest signs of this fundamental value shift is the sharp contrast between the languishing stock price of traditional media companies (representing an estimated loss of $31 billion in collective market capitalization) and the meteoric rise of so-called new-media stocks (reflecting an aggregate $69 billion gain in market cap).
More directly, evolving new business models are gradually redefining the value of content in the digital age: what distributors and consumers are willing to pay, what it costs to produce and how much revenue and profit is generated as compared to traditional ways of doing business.
Developed by Bram Cohen as a solution to large-file download bottlenecks—not to mention the problem of "leeches," people who download files but then don't share them as uploads—BitTorrent is a very effective tool for distributing big files online. And with good reason: BitTorrent works amazingly well to spread out the burden of creating thousands of copies of a file across the clients, or peers, that are downloading the file. That means there's no large central server to keep running, or massive bandwidth bills to pay for. It also means we can download, say, a 600MB Linux distro in a few short minutes.
Reuters has published a look at the presence of bloggers at Sundance, the popular independent film festival held each year in Park City, Utah.
For our latest podcast, we spent some time with Maker's Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr., who described how one rather influential person helped launched the bourbon manufacturer into the stratosphere of recognition.
He also discusses the rationale and practice of "marketing
