Category: Media

105.5 MMM Payola ?

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Rich Albertoni follows the money at Entercomm’s local station, 105.5 (NY AG Spitzer filed suit against Entercomm recently). I rarely listen to it – how often must we hear the Police or Sting for that matter?

We’re fortunate to have WORT and WSUM along with our public radio stations. Those interested in the nuts and bolts of the music business would likely find the Lefsetz Letter useful “First in Music Analysis“.

I also very much enjoy listening to KCRW [LA], WFUV [NYC] and WXPN [PHL] online.

Kristian Knutsen has more.

I wonder if any other local media outlets will pick this up?

TBL on Net Neutrality

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Tim Berners-Lee:

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.

Modern Joint Operating Agreements

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Dan Gillmor looks at Hearst’s deal with MediaNews Group to acquire four newspapers. Madison has had one of these for years – a $120M annual arrangement that has kept the Cap Times going despite its very small circulation. Joint operating agreements were protected by congress years ago, as a way to “preserve daily newspapers”. The time has long since arrived to eliminate this relic.

Dave Zweifel passes along his experience at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention recently.

What if Media 2.0 is Less Profitable than Media 1.0?

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Scott Karp:

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.

Zyprexa for the Phone Companies

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Ben McConnell states the obvious with respect to the yellow pages and monopoly telcos:

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 responsibility

Which 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…

Steal this Newspaper

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David Carr:

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.

Gillmor on McClatchy’s Knight Ridder Deal

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Former SJ Merc (a Knight Ridder paper) writer Dan Gillmor:

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.

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.

Terry Heaton has more in a related post.

Requiem for Don Knotts

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donknottsrip.jpg
Scott Collins:

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.

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.

Much more on Don Knotts.

Podcasts, blogs and Dave Barry

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C.W. Nevius:

“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.

Koppel on the Decline of TV News

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Ted Koppel:

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.