The FCC is “considering” changing broadcast ownership rules. In addition to covering how many radio and TV stations a company can own in a particular market or nationwide, these rules currently limit ownership of broadcast licenses and newpapers in the same city to a few grandfathered cases.
This is already a done deal (after decent interval of sham public comment). Newspaper publishers would love to buy broadcast licenses in their home markets, but are more likely to be targets of acquisition by broadcast companies with acquisition-oriented cultures.s
The resulting companies will have to pay huge amounts for newspapers, which have lots of capital and vast cash flows. The resulting “synergies” will have to be significant to justify the prices paid for these slow-growing and potentially-troubled enterprises.
After the inevitable advertising price hike, about the only synergies left are (a) cutting “unnecessary” newsgathering expenses (b) merging news operations and (c) using the newspaper to promote the broadcast properties. Remember, big radio companies have already made a core competence of presenting canned content as a local product and ruthlessly (perhaps illegally) using their dominant positions to muscle advertisers and listeners.
UPDATE: Bill Densmore posted an excellent report on this and other issues from a family newspaper conference that was happening as this announcement was made.
NYT struggles with premium products
The New York Times is having a difficult time selling premium, edited, archival content, according to ContentBiz.
NYTimes.com created two editors’ Picks collections (‘Glory Days of Baseball, 1947-1957’ and ‘Best Pictures: Oscar Winners in the Times’); classic article collections of up to nine archived articles on a particular topic (e.g. column collections and recipes) for $4.95; and recordings of celebrity interviews.
Deputy General Manager & Director of Operations Stephen Newman says, “We’re not convinced – the jury’s still out.” and ContentBiz concludes, “Newman admits Premium Products have not been the easy
”
You have to give them credit for trying, but clearly newspapers still haven’t learned much about how to create ancillary products (online, print, or TV) that consumers are interested in. It’s especially discouraging because it’s the New York Times, with its brand, huge online audience, and outstanding content.
The most-educated readers prefer the Internet to newspapers
According to the Edison-Arbitron study, 20% of the population rates the Internet as the “most essential” medium in their lives, and only 11% say that about newspapers. Among people with a college education, the percentage soars to 30%, but for newspapers it rises only slightly to 13%.
The numbers are probably even more dismal for newspapers if you look at younger people.
We’ve been chasing penetration at the expense of quality for decades, and it shows in the editorial product and readers’ response to it.
The Internet will almost certainly take both advertising and content from newspapers: classifieds, stock price listings, syndicated news, features, and columnists. As newspapers begin the inevitable process of shrinking themselves, they will have to choose whether to become focused products for the most educated consumers in their communities; or dumb the product down to keep it in circulation and satisfy the de mands of their current advertisers and keep their presses humming.
The fruits of synergy
Disney and AOL/Time Warner are not having a good year.
The conventional wisdom is that Disney took its eye off the ball with ABC (and got greedy with “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”), and that AOL is just another screwed-up dot-com.
In fact, both these institutions are suffering from an overdose of synergy. Because their constellations of media properties are generally so excellent and familiar, Disney and AOL/TW have been able to get away with this longer than was probably good for them.
ABC has been run as a shill for their corporate parent’s movies, networks, and theme parks — and a channel for its production companies — ever since Disney bought it. You never got the sense that Disney was trying to make it the best network on TV.
Meanwhile, AOL has been hyping TW’s content propertie for a couple of years now. These properties are very high quality, but for that reason didn’t need AOL’s marginal boost. Meanwhile, AOL has become as compelling as an infomercial.
ABC and AOL are incredibly valuable properties that are being milked dry by their owners in the name of synergy.
The Internet is more essential than TV, radio or newspapers…
The Internet is more essential than TV, radio or newspapers — at least for 20% of Americans, according to a study by Edison Media Research for Arbitron.
That’s pretty amazing for a medium that has been a mass medium for about seven years. Clearly, the quantity and quality of the information on the Internet is better than all of TV and radio, and any reasonable selection of newspapers. Of course, a lot of it comes from newspapers, which post it for free on the net.
Combine the information with communication, and it’s not too surprising that the Internet is more essential than these passive media. I’m sure that more than one in five would rate the telephone as more essential than TV, radio, or newspapers — or the Internet.
However, I wonder whether the Internet has reached its natural market size. Will many more Americans will find this (ultimately pretty cerebral) medium essential?
Can Google answer this question?
China is blocking Google and the issues could be bigger than they appear at first glance.
Yahoo has already capitulated to pressure from China to censor the database it presents to Chinese citizens. NewsCorp has suppressed books it planned to publish in the US in order to do business in satellites with China. Has China already asked Google to join the team?
This goes beyond French and German objections to Nazi paraphernalia, and Scientology tracking down every reference to its sacred nonsense. This is about participation in tyranny.
Ultimately, every online publisher, web host, backbone operator, isp, and software company will have to come to terms with the moral dimension of its business.
This is not an issue of cultural sensitivity, or loyalty to shareholders. Eventually, Google may have to ask itself the questions that Yahoo has already answered for itself: What value do you place on your humanity? How can you demand the protections of democracy while conspiring to deprive a billion people of their human rights?
Learning from RSS
NetNewsWire has changed my thinking about RSS aggregation. Until now, I’ve been using HTML-based aggregators: Radio Userland, Amphetadesk, and Newsisfree. Although, I liked each of them, they seemed difficult, slow and clumsy; no better than visiting the original sites themselves.
NetNewsWire is stand-alone application, and it makes it far faster and easier to review news sites, looking for interesting stories. It’s so fast, it’s guaranteed to increase the amount of news I’m going to be able to review.
RSS still overwhelms me with the amount of available information, and I still prefer to visit some sites (Slashdot, News.com) to see stories in context. But it’s beginning to feel useful to me in a way that it didn’t before.
NetNewsWire also shows that HTML is not always the best way to deliver information, especially if speed and interaction are important.
Disintermediating journal publishers
Pat Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University, is looking for $20 million in foundation money to publish scientific papers on the web for free., instead of in print journals.
For those who aren’t familiar with the issue, most academic journals are owned by big media conglomerates, take articles and editorial labor for free, and charge tons of money for the result. This structure makes converts public information into a private resource, retards access to scientific information, and impoverishes university libraries. It’s a classic case of plundering the commons by creating artifical scarcity.
Creating the database and the peer review process is the easy part of this project. The hard part is changing human behavior when the stakes are so high.
It’s really difficult to disintermediate existing relationships. The prestige of being in certain journals has a direct impact on the careers of the authors. There is no advantage to an author to being in some big database.
Nothing will change without collective action on the part of academics.
It would help if the heavy-hitters in specific fields would agree to publish only in journals that allowed them to contribute their information to a public database, or if academics bargained collectively for a contracts that permitted online republication, or if academic departments based career evaluations on citations and not publications.
Probably, all this (and more) must happen. Until it does, the shame lies with academics and not with journal publishers who exploit them. [via Slashdot]
Wanted: a cheap and simple CMS
Using Moveable Type has given me a lot more insight into what I’m looking for in a content management system
I used to think that it ought to run on the Mac and be built into FileMaker, or even AppleWorks. While I still think Apple should bundle a good, simple CMS with Mac OS X; it seems a lot smarter to make it server-based and give it a web interface so that it can be installed on Macs, Unix hosts, or even Windows.
The idea CMS will be easy to install and users shouldn’t have to worry about a the Unix command line.
The ideal CMS should make it as easy to manage tables as it is in FileMaker. I don’t care what database it uses underneath, as long as it’s free, relational, and common.
The ideal CMS’s templates should be easy to create, and sets of default templates should be included for multiple applications (Weblog, database, magazine, and so on). The templates should be designed from the bottom up to use Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.
The ideal CMS should make entries as easy to create and maintain as they are in Moveable Type.
And it ought to be cheap. OK, free.
Drugs. Gambling. Terrorism. Child Pornography. … more accessible than ever!
Business Week agrees with NewsCorp executive Peter Chernin that the Internet is a “moral-free (sic) zone”. In a too-long story, they let us in on a secret: the Internet makes “Drugs. Gambling. Terrorism. Child Pornography. ” more accessible than ever!
What’s weird is that they start with a gut-wrenching anecdote that has nothing to do with these issues, and for which they propose no solution:
It’s the kind of call everyone dreads. For Kristen Bonnett, the daughter of NASCAR race driver Neil Bonnett, it came on Feb. 11, 1994–the day her father crashed during a practice run at the Daytona International Speedway. A few hours later, he died. Bonnett was devastated, but she got on with her life. Then, seven years later, came a second call. This time, it was a reporter asking for comment on autopsy photos of her father that were posted on the Internet. Shocked, she quickly got online. “Forty-eight thumbnail pictures, basically of my Dad on the table, butt-naked, gutted like a deer, were staring me directly in the face,” says Bonnett. Now, when she thinks of her father, she pictures him lying atop an autopsy table.
Warning: You are about to enter the dark side of the Internet. It’s a place where crime is rampant and every twisted urge can be satisfied. Thousands of virtual streets are lined with casinos, porn shops, and drug dealers. Scam artists and terrorists skulk behind seemingly lawful Web sites. And cops wander through once in a while, mostly looking lost.
I’m not saying that terrorism and child pornography aren’t bad. But this story is the latest manifestation of the long tradition of Internet alarmism among print and TV journalists. The long-term effect is to create an atmosphere of anxiety in which citizens are willing to trade their rights in exchange for security from…what?