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.
Gov. Jim Doyle plans to sign the broadband bill passed by both the state Senate and Assembly on Tuesday, a top aide said Wednesday afternoon.
“The governor supports it,” said spokesman Matthew Canter. “In fact, he helped lead the way for it. It’s part of his Grow Wisconsin plan.”
The legislation will give telecommunications companies tax exemptions if they provide high-speed Internet service to parts of Wisconsin that lack it or are underserved – mostly in the rural and northern areas of the state.
I hope that Governor Doyle will insert some language into this bill that requires the recipients of this subsidy – local Telco’s – to provide symmetrical internet access, not the odd services they largely provide today where the downstream and upstream services run at different speeds. The internet is not TV. Our generally poor broadband service significantly limits the opportunities for emerging home based internet businesses and services. This is a trivial change and should be a no brainer for the Governor. Learn much more on these issues, including why the US is so far behind countries like Japan and Korea in true broadband (100mbps symmetrical speeds), here.
Om Malik tells us why this is important.
Thirteen-and-a-half million servings of organic romaine, radicchio and baby greens. That’s how much Earthbound Farm, the biggest organic produce company in the country, sends across America from its gigantic San Juan Bautista processing plant every single week.
That’s one big bowl of salad — way bigger than when Myra and Drew Goodman started Earthbound Farm in their Carmel Valley living room in 1984. They now farm 26,000 organic acres.
an a former copy machine repairman who happens to be friends with Bill Gates reinvigorate the general aviation industry by adopting the low-cost, mass production model used for personal computers? The world is about to find out.
Not long ago, it appeared the answer was a resounding “no.” Eclipse Aviation founder Vern Raburn gathered his team on a dismal Saturday morning in November 2002 to figure out whether the company had a future. Raburn, a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, was aiming to develop a six-seat jet that would sell for less than $1 million, bringing jet ownership within reach of thousands of new customers. But his penchant for risk had put Eclipse in big trouble.
The Albuquerque company, with funding support from NASA, had bet big on the development of an advanced, radically cheaper turbine engine. The technology wasn’t panning out in time, however, and there was no Plan B. Investors, lured by Raburn’s earlier successes at Microsoft, Lotus and Symantec, were running out of patience. Eclipse had two options: stick with the balky engine and pray for a miracle, or delay launch of the aircraft by several years and try to hang on while it found a new engine.
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.
When James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras wrote their hugely popular 1994 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, they began by stating clearly that they did not mean to write about visionary leaders. Their goal was to find visionary companies — the crown jewels of their industries — and discover what made them extraordinary. Then questions arose about the extent to which the principles of Built to Last might apply to individuals. That sparked another investigation that has now led to a follow-up book, Success Built to Last, which will be published by Wharton School Publishing later this year.
To the extent that’s possible, try to find foods that are locally produced, seasonal, fresh and flavorful! If they are organically grown—that’s even better! If it’s not local, that’s okay. It’s a chance to celebrate the farmers from other regions or countries. If your having a potluck dinner, remember to ask your guests to do their best to find out about the origins of food they bring to share and how it was grown.
via Kristian Knutsen.
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.
Okay, Google gamblers. This one’s going to be interesting.
On the one hand, Google’s modest deceleration last quarter suggests that the company is going to once again deliver (relatively) ho-hum results and disappoint investors conditioned to expect the astounding. It takes a long time for a supertanker to change speeds or course, and, last quarter, anyway, it did seem that the Google supertanker was finally beginning to slow down. This diagnosis seemed confirmed by possible canary-in-the-coalmine announcements from advertisers who were cutting back on search spending because prices had gotten out of hand. And then there was CFO George Reyes’ lucid mid-quarter explanation of why growth had slowed in Q4–because previous growth had been accelerated by a monetization program that had now run its course. This convincing explanation kneecapped the stock for the eight hours it took for the company to issue a press release that said, effectively, George was wrong.
For 90 minutes on Wednesday, the investor, Edward S. Lampert, the normally reclusive chairman of Sears Holding, spoke expansively about the need to change attitudes and work habits at the merged company.
One effort is already under way: assembling the company’s top 500 managers here for marathon training sessions, where a film clip from “Miracle on Ice,” about the United States hockey team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics, is used to promote team work and improve customer service.
“In the past, we had a situation where people worked here but could not get results,” Mr. Lampert said during the first shareholder meeting for the newly formed retailer. “We need to invest in those people.”
Sears owns nearby Lands End