MediaSavvy

It’s not enough to require spammers to disclose their identities. Spammers, legitmate direct emailers, direct mailers, and telemarketers must be required to disclose where they got your name and how to get your name off the original list.
As a former direct marketer who still believes in the medium, I am convinced it’s time for some common sense reform of the industry. There are four things that any direct marketer should be compelled to reveal to you.

• Seller: In many cases, marketers will have gotten your name from multiple sources and removed duplicate references. This means that they must tell you every list that your name appeared on.
• Select: You have a right ot know what the list seller is saying about you. Direct marketers often buy a subset of a list: e.g. recent buyers, people who spent more than $100 in the last year, people who bought certain types of products, or people who are in credit trouble.
• Source: You have a right to know how your name was acquired. Marketers must tell you the specific list you opted in to, whether your address was spidered off a web page, whether your on a list of buyers of a specific product, or if they got your name from public records.
• Removal information: You should be given the opportunity to remove your name from the original list at the point of contact. The original list compiler should be help accountable at the time the marketing takes place and should not be able to hide behind the marketer.

How would this work in practice?
Direct email: Every message should include a footer that discloses the seller, selection, source, and removal information.
Telemarketing: If you get a call from a telemarketer, at any time during the call you may ask, “Where did you get my name?” The caller will be required to give you seller, source, select, and removal information.
Direct mail: The address label must contain a source code (it probably already contains one that only the marketer can read). The direct mail piece must tell you a web site and a telephone number where you user that source code to get seller, source, select, and removal information.
It’s time for direct marketers to tell the truth about what they’re doing and tell you how to opt out.

The consensus of the newspaper executives is that “A newspaper has to be more than a newspaper to survive“, according to Peter M. Zollman’s report on the Newspaper Association of America’s Readership Conference and the Future of Newspapers Conference.
The next ten years will be a time of crisis for the newspaper industry, and delivering news to PDA’s–or Web browsers for that matter– isn’t going to save them if they don’t fix the core product.
When I was in the newspaper business, a lot of energy was expended and money wasted trying to come up revenue from “database marketing”. It turns out that newspapers are good at one thing–putting ink on paper and putting the paper on your doorstep.
If newspapers are going to survive, they’re going to have to be better newspapers. They’re going to have to meet the challenge of new media not by by “convergence, but by divergence. They need to put as much daylight between themselves and new media as possible if they’re going to meet the changing needs of their readers.

I love this mini-thread against heirarchical file systems and in favor of something more intuitive. It has implications for the way all sites are organized.
People don’t think heirarchically. For every anal-retentive who thinks in outlines and organizes his life and files that way, there are tens of thousands of average users, some of them quite sophisticated, who have all their files in big piles on their virtual desktop.
I spent a lot of time on my recent vacation trying to organize thousands of digital photos and I’m more confused than ever about where things are stored.
The current system was designed by programmers and engineers for people who think like they do.
Think about the way that Amazon.com works. Any reasonable user begins every session with a search, not by clicking on a hierarchical menu. What does this tell us about the way that content sites should be organized?

Media companies have become collections of random assets — worth less than the sums of their parts, says financial columnist James Flanigan in the Los Angeles Times. He argues that media companies must slim down and focus on a single medium and decide whether they’re in the business of production or distribution.

The average return on invested capital over the last five years of the four major media firms — AOL Time Warner Inc., Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and Viacom Inc. — is less than 4% annually. (Vivendi Universal is excluded because it has no profit.)
That is laughably far below the 13% average return on capital for all large U.S. companies in the same period, as measured by Forbes magazine.

William Safire goes further, saying that even if they decide to focus, media giants should not be permitted to dominate their industries. Safire’s libertarian brand of Republicanism is at odds with the current regime’s pro-corporate, anti-civil liberties Republicanism:

Does this make me (gasp!) pro-regulation? Michael Powell, appointed by Bush to be F.C.C. chairman, likes to say “the market is my religion.” My conservative economic religion is founded on the rock of competition, which — since Teddy Roosevelt’s day — has protected small business and consumers against predatory pricing leading to market monopolization.

Flanigan and Safire help make the case that in addition to being bad for democracy and for consumers (reason enough to break up the media giants), the current trend toward gigantism is bad for stockholders.
Now that Steve Case is an a mere (albeit big) stockholder and no longer a manager at AOL Time Warner, he should insist on breaking up the company.

While I was in Belize, I found time to read Fast Food Nation and Culture Jam, both of which got me thinking (or kept me thinking) about how out of control corporations have become and how complicit we all are in this situation.
The issue that Culture Jam raises–which is still pretty much limited to the left–is that it’s a big problem that corporations are regarded in US law as having the same rights as human beings. That leads to the perverse idea that they should be allowed to participate (spend money) in the political process, for example.
I’ve always believed that the US corporations should not be allowed to violate our constitutional rights any more than the government can–especially the first and fourth amendments. In any event, it occurred to me that corporations were humanlike, but not quite human, and that something like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics ought to apply to them.
Today I found this article on Nike’s claim that it has the right to lie, and the author’s suggestion that Asimov might have already thought this problem through. Some ideas are just in the air. (Thanks, WebWord!)
The chapters of Fast Food Nation on worker safety in the meatpacking industry broke my heart. I don’t know why, but I’m still stunned by the cruelty and indifference with which some people are able to treat others. But I am ashamed that as a nation we’re incapable of electing a Congress willing to do something about this.

I’m back from Belize.
Spending a couple of weeks off the grid made me realize how little access I need, but how much I hate having someone deny it to me.
My only Internet access was an Internet cafe that was a 15 minute boat ride from my resort on Ambergris Caye. Phone calls home were a couple of dollars a minute at the front desk of the resort or a dollar a minute at the Internet cafe in town.
In the ten days that I was in Belize, I didn’t miss the Net or NPR or TV at all, and I think the general lack of electronic and automotive background noise contributed to a sense of peace and well-being. The biggest disturbance was a couple of boneheads that kept cruising up and down the beach on motor scooters until one of the neighbors chewed them out.
I doubt I would have appreciated this isolation on September 11, but it probably would have been better for me than watching CNN.
I thoroughly enjoyed dropping off the grid. What I hated was that others were in control of my access. The resorts on the north coast of Ambergris Caye had apparently decided together not to bring in newspapers. Our hotel was using their control of their phone to jack up the price of a call to the US and keep me from using AT&T’s low-price service. And it seemed pretty clear that the price floor was kept pretty high by Belize Telecom Limited, which controls telephone and Net access in Belize.
What worries me is that if ILEC’s had their druthers, and the Republicans are inclined to let them, phone calls in the US would be be a dollar a minute and we’d all be sharing dial-up lines in Internet Cafes.