Tag: nyt

Islands in the stream

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has put out an analysis of MSM’s business model and its prospects. A few grim highlights:

We estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30 percent, which leaves an extra $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves, we predict more cuts in 2010.

$141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.

[~79% of internet users never click on an ad, so:] Advertising during the year declined for the first time since 2002, according to data from eMarketer. Updated August projections put the declines at 4.6 percent, to $22.4 billion in total revenues.

Under the heading “Thrilling news for the New York Times’ upcoming paywall model,” you have:

Only about one third of Americans (35 percent) have a news destination they would call a favorite and even among these users, only 19 percent said they would continue to visit if the site put up a paywall.

But it seems the peeps do like opinion television, day night or otherwise:

At night, when cable is dominated by ideological talk shows, Fox grew by nearly a quarter to an average of 2.13 million viewers at any given moment. MSNBC rose 3 percent to 786,000, while CNN fell 15 percent to 891,000 viewers….

In daytime, CNN was up 9 percent over 2008 to an average of 621,000 viewers. But Fox daytime viewership grew again by almost a quarter, to roughly twice CNN’s audience (1.2 million viewers). MSNBC, relying on NBC news people more than talk show hosts, fell 8 percent to 325,000 viewers.

So, MSM, I guess this is it. You’re going to die. Before anyone start dancing on their grave, though, consider a future in which the Glenn Becks and Bill O’Reillys of the world (and their left of center counterparts) are all that’s left on cable news stations…and in which 80% of the content the blogosphere, notably including (in a roundabout way) this very post, is:

ongoing analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites finds that 80 percent of the links are to U.S. legacy media.

So, in five years or so, we’ll all just be reblogging some crap O’Reilly said last night. And calling that news.

Jiminy. In the finest tradition of the blogosphere: I proclaim that I don’t know what it is, but something’s got to be did. Doubtless there will be an app for that…

Color me gruntled

Turns out Ben Zimmer is taking over the “On Language” column for the NYT. I am stunned. Amongst the various pinch-hitters that have been filling that space since Safire shuffled off his mortal coil, I rated Zimmer’s as superior. Vastly superior, even. This led me to assume that the NYT would either

a) eliminate “On Language”

-or-

ii) hire someone to collect celebrity-themed tweets into a weekly piece in that space.

They have done neither. There is hope.

(via bobulate)

Color me gruntled

Most of the credit [for the Health Summit discussions, such as they were] goes to President Obama. The man really knows how to lead a discussion. He stuck to specifics and tried to rein in people who were flying off into generalities. He picked out the core point in any comment. He tried to keep things going in a coherent direction.

David Brooks.
Remarkable that the teleprompter was both completely concealed and updated with detailed information in a screamingly fast, near real-time way. Must be an NSA project.

Equivalency of Everything

Ashlee Vance is mystified by HP’s poor performance in the mobile phone market:

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s most successful makers of desktop computers, laptops, servers and printers. It owns a powerful consumer brand, and it is a growing provider of services for businesses. In the first quarter, the company’s sales rose 8 percent.

But in smartphones, H.P. has been on a steady slide into irrelevance.

[…]

Sales of HP’s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.

HP’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed.

Indeed, most analysts tend to use this construction:

  1. Apple is a large computer company
  2. HP is a very large computer company
  3. Apple is making billions selling a mobile phone that doesn’t even have FM radio built in
  4. Q.E.D.: HP should be making even-more-billions selling a mobile phone with FM radio built right in; any other outcome is either an aberration or a mirage, but is clearly not the result of consumer opinion re: HP’s product offerings

The experience of the phones in question just doesn’t enter into it. Ever. That no customer has yet successfully activated that all-important FM radio without being directed step-by-step just isn’t even worth considering. Those are just user errors. Customers want a robust feature check-list at the expense of all other considerations, don’t they? Overall customer satisfaction isn’t something worth wondering after.
HP sells a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows, so they automatically should sell a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows Mobile. That that OS is a well documented train wreck of an operating system, again, just isn’t worth wondering after. It’s got “Windows” in the name, thus people will buy it just as they do the various desktop OSes with “Windows” in the name. Any other outcome is attributed to Apple’s marketing expertise. What else could be responsible? It must be those damned catchy ads. How else do you explain the largest purveyor of Windows Mobile phones, HTC, seeing that segment collapse as Android phone sales on their platforms grow? Again, just Apple and their catchy ads misleading the consumer. After all, it’s called Windows,

Remember, these are professional analysts we’re talking about here.

The article closes with this priceless quote from Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer in H.P.’s personal systems group:

“There is clearly a gap that has opened up for a device that has north of a 3.5-inch screen and less than a 9-inch screen.”

And, unfortunately for HP, that gap’s name is vastly more likely to be iPad than it is to be HP Commodity Doodad, now! with Windows Mobile Classic and a built in FM radio. You know: for kids!

Based not on a subjective assessment of the Tea Party’s viability or [NYT reporter David Barstow’s] opinion of its desirability but only on facts he knows about the state of politics and government since Obama’s election, is there any substantial likelihood of a tyranny replacing the American republic in the near future?

Jay Rosen
asking an excellent question about the editorial content (or lack thereof) in this piece. The ongoing and steadfast refusal to reflect objective reality, even when uncomfortable, is a major problem.

Is the world round? Opinions differ.

Starve the Beast

Paul Krugman notes that the GOP has collectively been working for around three decades to bring on the catastrophic nexus, “preparing the ground” for the moment at which they can cut wildly popular programs like Medicare and Social Security in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” Unfortunately, with that day all but at hand, the GOP finds itself unwilling to pull the trigger and say these long-held beliefs publicly:

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

Absolutely right. And but Krugman goes on to note in today’s column that the state of the California health insurance system generally and the recent Anthem move to raise rates by ~30% specifically put to lie everything the GOP is saying about national health insurance reforms:

some claim that health costs would fall dramatically if only insurance companies were allowed to sell policies across state lines. But California is already a huge market, with much more insurance competition than in other states; unfortunately, insurers compete mainly by trying to excel in the art of denying coverage to those who need it most. And competition hasn’t averted a death spiral. So why would creating a national market make things better?

More broadly, conservatives would have you believe that health insurance suffers from too much government interference. In fact, the real point of the push to allow interstate sales is that it would set off a race to the bottom, effectively eliminating state regulation. But California’s individual insurance market is already notable for its lack of regulation, certainly as compared with states like New York — yet the market is collapsing anyway.

Finally, there have been calls for minimalist health reform that would ban discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions and stop there. It’s a popular idea, but as every health economist knows, it’s also nonsense. For a ban on medical discrimination would lead to higher premiums for the healthy, and would, therefore, cause more and bigger death spirals.

So California’s woes show that conservative prescriptions for health reform just won’t work.

To which we say: yep, even though Krugman starts with a straw-man in there. Some? How about “GOP leaders in the House and Senate say” or any other construction there? Some? That’s Bush league usage.

But, I think the synthesis of these two articles is what actually provides the way forward. We’ve said it before: Democrats can’t bring themselves to move good policy and the GOP categorically can’t resist bad policy, so combine the two. Spend a few years “preparing the ground” just as the GOP did on forcing government into the present fiscal situation in hopes of eviscerating the New Deal once and for all. Make it such that, when the inevitable happens, the end result will require the desired policy solution.
This means that you just pass into law the super-popular and death-spiral inducing community rating and tack on whatever meaningless and ineffective tort and state-lines “reform” the GOP wants to make that poison pill pass. Both sides celebrate. Then wait five years. Even conservatives agree that:

the country will face a choice: allow the numbers of uninsured to continue shooting up, or enroll more and more people directly in taxpayer-funded government insurance plans.

At the collapse of health insurance in this country, the GOP will be forced to roll out Medicare for all; after all, there will be no functional private insurance industry left to protect. Even the very rich will be priced out. Nothing gets the GOP’s attention more quickly than a situation like that.
Just think of the day that Single Payer is finally signed into law by President Palin. Likewise, the new Democratic majority will return to a Senate free from the filibuster as, everyone knows, that will be the first thing to go once the GOP is back in charge over there.

Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog barked.

[What often goes unmentioned is] the extent to which the deficit hysterics are also deficit peacocks. They’re full of bombast, and eager to shoot down anything that might reduce unemployment. But when it comes to serious proposals to bring the long-run fiscal outlook under control — which means, above all, doing something about health care costs — all we get is the sound of crickets chirping.

Paul Krugman

All during that health care debate, whenever things got impossible you could always say: “What I think they should do is pass the Wyden-Bennett Reform Plan,” and everybody would shut up and slink home to look it up on Google.

It’s a more elegant version of the Bipartisan Study Commission. Which, by the way, the Republicans recently filibustered.

Actually, I think we just need one simple change that will get us back to the good old days when Congress was capable of passing standard legislation and could occasionally summon the will to make large, imperfect fixes of urgent national problems.

Get rid of the Senate filibuster. It wouldn’t make things tidy. It wouldn’t be utopia. The Democrats will miss it next time they’re in the minority. But when people elected a government, it would get to govern again. And probably, it could keep the lights on.

Gail Collins, apparently summoning this material
from some long forgotten font of agreement between us.

Manna

Sweet, sweet research proves what I’ve been shouting about for a while now; this study took a look at what people react to (and email), essentially hoping to quantify why some articles go viral while others just sit there:

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” […]

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” […] “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

Wait, wait, wait. I thought the answer to today’s problems in media were to shorten the article, dumb it down, and pack as much advertising (preferably blinking or animated) into the entirely theoretical “above the fold” space while also requiring innumerable “next page” clicks such that any still-sufficiently-interested reader would be so challenged to identify actual content that he or she would drop into a rage-seizure of some kind. Huh. Consider me gobsmacked. They continue:

To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.

[…]

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)

Emphasis added by me to highlight the thing I want most: variably dimensioned articles. Got 15 seconds on the subway and just want the USAToday bullet? Here it is. Need an explainer that goes long on the various competing pieces of the legislation. Here it is. Want 10,000 words on the complete history of this movement in the United States. Here it is. Want a slideshow about the effects of doing/not doing this? Here it is. Want a video depicting those most affected? Here it is.

This sort of thing is not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not free. But they’re doing a chunk of it already; they just don’t tie it together very well because they universally see themselves as, first and foremost, being in the dead-tree distribution business. The first newsroom with a national imprimatur that successfully enacts this can charge whatever they want. Eventually. The first hit is always, and must always be free. Wonder why the NYT paywall is going to work that way. Fascinating.

the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future

Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, who seems to think that Microsoft at one time did “bring us the future” as opposed to bring us lightly re-warmed ideas stolen from somebody else and grafted onto a vertical monopoly made possible through ruthless, anti-competitive techniques found to be illegal time and time again. Honestly, where would Microsoft be without an Apple or VisiCalc out there to crib ideas from and a IBM-derived business equipment monopoly to inhabit, corrode, and ultimately seize from the software flank (IBM’s maginot line being hardware, natch)? Not where it is today, I can tell you that much.