Category: Analysis

It seems like every weblog goes through a stage where the blogger’s personal focus changes and the site goes dead for a while…or forever.

I’ve just realized I’ve been absent from MediaSavvy for a couple of weeks. I have been working on a new site that will be in beta in couple of weeks and I lost track of how long it has been since I last posted.

My new site is a community site for the place I live — a distinct community in the San Francisco Bay Area that is poorly served by the local media. I’ve chosen Scoop as the platform because I wanted a site that was focused on discussion and personal experience. A community site for my community.

This should be good for MediaSavvy. The sites I find most useful are those that are about the writer’s real world experience and not simply blogging about what the other bloggers are blogging about.

I’m going to continue to focus on what the current Internet media research is telling us and spouting off about the news, but I’m going to spend more time my personal experience running a community site. It should be good for me and for MediaSavvy.

Responding to uber-libertarian William Safire’s condemnation of media concentration, Arnold Kling says that big media are failing because they have too much competition. I wouldn’t disagree with that. He goes on to say that they should be allowed to fail if they can’t make it in the marketplace. He’s right. And then he says that therefore we shouldn’t stand in the way of media mergers. And he’s dead wrong about that.

Given my view of the causes of the decline of newspapers, broadcast TV, and radio, trying to save those media by preventing mergers is pointless. Big media is failing, not succeeding. As an economist, I say let it fail.

People’s use of media is changing. Newspapers are in a steady decline before they drop off the cliff of an inflection point. The networks are living on borrowed time. The recording industry is circling the wagons. And radio is in chaos.

Yet, none of these media are going away. They’re going to be savagely restructured, find new audiences, dramatically alter their value chains, and generally change into something we can’t even anticipate.

No one is trying to prevent the “failure” of existing media businesses. On the contrary, the fight against media concentration is a fight to preserve a competitive market from becoming an oligopoly of protected franchises.

I’d rather have thousands of individual media outlets desperately seeking new markets and ideas, rather than six big companies struggling to find synergy where none exists by stripping the media of assets and talent, using “convergence” as an excuse for eliminating local production, using the media they own to subsidize their other failing businesses, and generally managing our media as a dying cash cow.

I received a call from my wife’s credit card company (MBNA) yesterday while she was out. The caller wouldn’t say why he was calling because of “confidentiality”.

In the past, the only time a credit card company cites “confidentiality” is if there a problem with the account or the card may be stolen, so I gave her the message. Once she called them back, she discovered that they wanted to sell her a loan.

Not only is MBNA decreasing the likelihood that their customers will respond to legitimate calls about security and account problems, they’re projecting that same problem onto the rest of the industry.

This is an extraordinarily deceptive and self-destructive practice.

Jay Small has written a great newsletter on why you should learn HTML if you don’t know it already and should create your sites using “raw” HTML instead of a WYSIWYG editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver.

I created an early version of MediaSavvy using GoLive and it just made me miserable. Not only was the code it to created too complex, but the program itself was way too hard to use.

Now that I’ve gone back to hand-coding my pages using BBEdit, I know what’s going on under the hood, my pages are smaller and lighter, and it’s actually easier to tweak them when I need to.

Now that more users and designers are using templates and style sheets, it makes even more sense to use HTML. Once you start working with style sheets, you’ll find there’s a logic and flow to working in HTML that you didn’t have when you were doing your layouts with tables.

There’s something about editing raw HTML templates that requires you to keep things simple. I think that the result is better-looking pages that are actually less complex for the reader to understand.

I love the idea of micropayments, but they never caught on. Andrew Odlyzko’s The Case Against Micropayments summarizes the obstacles to micropayments. [PDF]

Clay Shirky also wrote an article called “The case against micropayments” about two years ago, which is what finally convinced me that micropayments are going nowhere.

If you’re fighting micropayments in your organization, these articles provide great ammunition. If you’re considering, or waiting for, micropayments, you might want to consider moving on.

CMS Watch has a great editorial about the proliferation of open-source content management systems.

I’m thinking about getting an open-source CMS, and I am indeed overwhelmed by the variety of choices. My guess is that it won’t be too long before the Darwinian process of adoption and abandonment selects the fittest of the projects and narrows it down to a few choices. In the meantime, we’re going to have to spend a little extra time sorting through this mess.

However, I don’t think this chaos gives a huge advantage to commercial CMS vendors, who haven’t addressed the rampant dissatisfaction with their “solutions”.

Shortly after i posted by rant about the lack of simplicity and quality in cell phones, I saw that T-Mobile has decided not to release a Microsoft “powered” phone.

That’s good news. But even if this phone was bug-free, the last thing I’d want in my cell phone would be Windows. We’ve become so used to used to the complexity of Microsoft’s products and so obsessed with compatibility with Windows that we’ve forgotten what we wanted them for in the first place.

Jupiter says that consumers spend $1.5 billion a year worldwide on ring-tones for their cell phones, exactly the same size as Jupiter’s (optimistic) estimate for online content, and three times what they’re spending on news and information online.

Meanwhile, AOL is charging $1.95 a month, or $9.95 a year, for its “AIM Expressions,” a product that lets AIM users skin their IM windows with art from movies or rock bands.

A few years ago the WSJ ran a story that said NASCAR jackets were becoming popular in the inner city, not because of any interest in the sport, but because they were covered with logos.

it’s old news that we beginning to define our identities by the corporations we choose to affiliate with. What’s new is that they’re starting to charge us for the privilege of wearing their colors.

Jason Kottke’s pretty happy with his recently lobotomized cell phone. It lost its display, but it’s actually still useful as a phone and he doesn’t have to buy a new one.

When my Startac died last year, I bought another, used one from somebody on Craigslist for $50. Now, the Startac is a modern marvel of boneheaded UI design, but it works pretty well and I can find the buttons without trying too hard. The last couple of times I visited my local cell phone store I couldn’t find one that didn’t just plain suck. They all seemed to be designed for Japanese schoolgirls or Norwegian Starbucks clerks. And even the expensive ones feel cheap.

Simplicity and quality enhance our experience more than features. They’re why I bought an iPod. Simplicity and quality are also a lot more expensive than they need to be, probably because they’re not what most buyers are looking for. But sometimes you can get them for practically nothing, which is why I love my $10 cast-iron frying pan.

Cross-media advertising hasn’t been a big success in the markets where it has been tried already. There are a few markets where TV stations and newspapers are owned by the same company, but this doesn’t confer much advantage in selling advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Tribune has been a firm believer in owning and integrating media properties in the same market. The call sign WGN is a nod to the days when Tribune’s Chicago paper billed itself as the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Aside from its Chicago and New York interests, Tribune owns newspapers or stations in Los Angeles, Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Hartford, Conn.

After acquiring Times Mirror Co. in 2000, Tribune set up a special division, Tribune Media Net, to sell ad packages for its stations and publications. At Tribune’s annual meeting in Chicago last week, Chief Executive Dennis FitzSimons gave a progress report for the cross-media division. Its grand total of revenue for 2002: more than $60 million. While that was about double the division’s revenue for the year before, it is still a tiny sum compared with Tribune’s overall revenue for 2002 of $5.4 billion.

The punch line? It turns out that if you want to reach an audience with multiple media, it makes a lot more sense just to buy advertising from more than one company. D’oh!

Or maybe the real advantage is that it will allow you to cut the size of your newsroom. The story concludes with an ominous quote from cheapskate Dean Singleton: “It is a big plus. It gives a newspaper company, which has a very high cost of gathering news, another platform to distribute news and information.”