Media Curmudgeon

June 27, 2009

Bill Grimes Responds to Paul Talbot

Good thoughts, Paul. It seems to me that media both new and old are making a good contribution in the covering the Iran election uprising (not a "revolution" -- see Jacuqes Barzun From Dawn To Decadence, p.3) protesting the government's efforts to block information and to curtail new technology distribution as Paul points out.

Last night I watched PBS which turned its program into a computer screen -- video and cell phone pictures were being put on the screen live and Twitter texts were being typed on the screen in real time. PBS reporters and commentators added context and other video form foreign sources so that the experience was of having the best of all media on one screen at the same time.

I thought it was a powerful example of how traditional and new media can in concert provide a social good that exceeds in power and information what either could accomplish alone. Now think if NY Times and PBS teamed up in this effort or were one news gathering company. We would have seen everything we did on PBS but we would have had the added benefit of NY Times correspondents in the region (actually PBS did get an interview with a NY Times reportre) but we could have seen scrolling across the bottom of the screen comments from many other Times correspondents and even bloggers. We could have been directed by text to NY Times archives and it could have been, because of more content and more creatively packaged on- screen video, an even better information/news/commentary product.

Charles Warner at 11:36 AM | Post Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

June 25, 2009

Revolution: Repression Rocks the Media In The Early Innings

Guest blogger Paul Talbot, a former radio station news director, writes:

You’ve got to hand it to the old Ayatollah. He sure knows how to dam up the flow of information. His moves have been so elegant and effective that Dick Cheney has abruptly exited the lecture circuit to study these repressive chops.

So how long can the Ayatollah Ali Khamenai keep things corked up while all of technology’s tools keep prying at the lid of the regime’s repressive chest of horrors?

We know that Iranian voices are being muffled. And we suspect that if we listen carefully enough, we can hear something that will help us decipher these events.

But listening is always tough. Listening to Iran right now is tougher than hitting .400. And if you’re a news organization trying to cover the Iranian revolution, uprising, situation, affair, whatever it may be, the challenges are obviously beyond daunting.

Check out the New York Times of 6/24…

“It is impossible to confirm first-hand the extent of the new violence.”

And check out the BBC…

“Severe reporting restrictions placed on the BBC and other foreign media mean many reports from the country cannot be verified immediately.”

But don’t bother checking out Al Jazeera. It has squandered an opportunity to establish itself as a credible member of the world’s journalistic community by failing to report anything more substantive than western news organizations.

So in this morass is there a winner? Is it premature, or even meaningful, to anoint an organization with “Best Coverage” accolades?

Probably. More than likely the story has a long run ahead. Revolutions aren’t easily scripted. But right now NPR is the clubhouse leader.

And did you catch this “dissident” quoted by the regime? The poor sap who said “I think we were provoked by networks like the BBC and the VOA to take such immoral actions.”

The streets of Tehran are where the value of thoughtful, credible, sourced and substantiated reporting trump any other content card. As we watch, wait, and wonder in real time, as we struggle to put these events, which we are unable to define, into some kind of context, we are reminded of the enduring importance of great reporters and great editors.

We are also reminded that whatever inning of this brutal Iranian game we’re in, totalitarianism is scoring all the runs against citizen technology. The Ayatollah and his cronies cut deals with Siemens and Nokia for tools to monitor and control communications, an investment paying off in spades.

And we understand that each of us defines our own right and wrong sides of history. But what we don’t understand is how this revolution will ultimately be covered. We’re not quite sure about the role that technology and the shifting media landscape will play in both its bloodshed and its storytelling.

Charles Warner at 03:10 PM | Post Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

June 23, 2009

Can Jon Miller and Owen Van Natta Save My Space or Is It Toast?

Can Jon Miller and Owen Van Natta save MySpace by cutting 30 percent of its workforce? Probably not; MySpace is toast.

How do I know? Well, I don’t know, but I can guess based on the reaction to a question I posed about MySpace to my Media Management and Leadership graduate class last week. All of the students in the class but one are in their 20s and all are savvy Internet users. Half of the students had cancelled their MySpace accounts and all that had used MySpace said it “wasn’t cool anymore.” One male student defended MySpace as still “good for music.”

I’ve been around enough to know how unreliable small convenience samples are, but for the sake of discussion, let’s say MySpace isn’t cool anymore and its growth has peaked.

We know Facebook shot ahead of MySpace in unique visitors this spring and now has over 300 million users, that Twitter is catching up to MySpace, and MySpace’s growth line on the charts has flattened out. It’s traffic might well be in decline now.

Once a mature business starts going over the hump of the S-curve of the business cycle, virtually nothing can be done to reverse the aging process. In the new media economy the life of a business is often as short as the life of a gecko (7-9 years). For an insight into the new media economy, see Judy Sims’ brilliant New Media Economy presentation – it will also shed some light into why MySpace is doomed unless it changes dramatically.

Another reason MySpace’s will probably slide down the decline slope of the business cycle is because it doesn’t have the fire power to innovate technologically after letting go 30 percent of its head-count.

Google and Apple grow because they innovate – new products, new technologies, and new software. Apple’s strategy was not merely to try to sell more computers; it started a new business – a disruptive technology – the iPod. It didn’t merely try to sell more iPods, it started an new business – a disruptive technology – the iPhone.

What can MySpace do to grow? It has to start a new business, not merely tweak its tired old business. Or it can buy a disruptive technology. News Corp. has the money. If Rupert Murdoch can find $600 million to buy MySpace and $5 billion to buy a frigging newspaper, it can certainly invest $1.5 to 2 billion to buy Twitter.

And Murdoch, Miller, and Van Natta better get off their collective behinds, do it quick, and figure out how to integrate the social networking and communication power of the two platforms into a new killer app, or the soon-to-be announced, awesome Google Wave will put MySpace,, as it’s currently configured, deep into a grave – haunted by the ghosts of once-hip but departed friends who are now on thousands of long-tail, niche social networking sites.

Charles Warner at 11:20 AM | Post Comments (1) | Print | Mail this entry

Bruce Braun at June 24, 2009 11:52 AM writes:

Charlie, you are assuming Miller and Van Natta have the collective chops to pull this sort of change off. I believe this game is over before it begins with this dynamic duo.

Miller is a bafflement to me. He is a classic case of the corporate animal that continually fails upward. He claims credit for AOL's growth between 2002 and 2006 when he was the CEO "due to his restructuring of the company's core business lines focused the company on online advertising, including completing the highly successful 2004 acquisition of Advertising.com"

Sorry, but the Online ad business exploded between 2002 and 2006 (a rising tide floats all boats) and it was Linda Clarizio who did the Advertising.com deal. It was also well known internally that Miller never lead the charge to restructure. His staff fought with him to change.

Miller was asleep during the Google rise to dominance. He abandoned the "AOL Keyword" approach that was generating huge revenues for AOL and what was driving the response rates for AOL advertisers. What do you call it when you enter a word into the search box on Google...a "Keyword" perhaps? Duh!

No mention in Miller's bio about all the heads of sales AOL went through on his watch. A couple only lasted a year! And by the way, Advertisng.com has cratered in the past two years, while dragging down the value proposition and pricing of the display side of AOL. So if he wants the credit, he should take the responsibility as well for the failures.

Van Natta's major claim to fame is negotiating the Facebook-MSFT ad deal with Steve Ballmer. NIce! However, a billion to Ballmer is like $100 to us. Ballmer has been running around doing deals for years, acting like a drunk sailor on shore leave. Hell, he was willing to pay $40B for Yahoo. If Owen is so great, let's see how he pulls of the MS-Google ad deal renewal. The first deal was worth $900M. The talk is now Google is thinking $50M on a renewal! Good luck, Owen.

Firing hundreds of people is sometimes necessary to save a business. Miller could demonstrate he has real balls if he were to announce to his troops he is cutting his own pay and bonus plan by 50% (as well as Van Natta's) until such time as FIM and MS achieve a full year of profitability.

Leadership by example is what really motivates a company's employees, not the stock platitudes in Miller and Van Natta's recent press releases. Where is their commitment to the company other than collecting huge paychecks?

June 16, 2009

Star Trek: J.J. Abrams Is a Neuroscientist

“Start Trek: The Future Begins” conceived and stunningly directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman is an appropriate, much-needed myth for a new 21st century generation that brilliantly weaves the latest discoveries of neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics into the story.

For centuries Grimm’s fairy tales hid moral messages in simple stories that told children how to make decisions about life. Twentieth century children needed the more engaging medium of film to hold their ever more diverted attention, but the same messages were still being transmitted about how to make decisions – be kind to little people, don’t kill animals, don’t lie, don’t be mean to your step-siblings, don’t fall for a wolf’s sweet talking, etc.

Ever since Plato, the Greeks, the Romans, and Middle Age religious institutions, the prevailing wisdom was that the mind was divided in two – the rational mind and the emotional mind – and that children had to be taught to use their reason to overcome their baser emotional instincts. Stop and think before you act was the message. And, oh, by the way, we’ll tell you how to think.

Rational man was the ideal. Descartes articulated it best with, “I think, therefore I am.” The notion was that what made man superior to animals was his ability to reason. The poet William Blake romanticized this concept by writing that man was the only animal who had the ability to laugh because God gave man laughter as a consolation prize because man was the only animal with reason, and could thus figure out he was eventually going to die.

The theory of rational man gave birth to the theory of economic man – a person who makes considered, rational, and self-interested decisions. The theory also gave birth to the notion of rational markets. If people were rational, then their economic decisions must be rational and self-interested and, therefore, the markets they create must be rational.

However, over the last 30 years, the extensive and ground-breaking research of neuroscientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists have shown that people do not make purely rational decisions, that the theory of economic man is hogwash, and that the free-market system is totally irrational – influenced by randomness, not rationality.

What the body of neuroscientific, psychological, and behavioral economic research indicates is that people make decisions based on a highly complex interaction between the rational and emotional parts of the brain, as superbly chronicled by Jonah Lehrer in How We Decide” – a must read for anyone who liked Taleb’s The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness. -- and Lehrer’s dazzling Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

The message of J.J. Abrams, Robert Orci, and Alex Kurtzman’s “Star Trek” is in perfect harmony with Lehrer’s How We Decide. Near the beginning of the movie, a young 9-year-old James Kirk speeds down an Iowa dirt road in a vintage Mustang that he’s taken from his uncle and makes a miraculous recovery based on intuition before the car plummets into a deep canyon – he’s obviously a rash young risk taker who makes intuitive decisions. We know who Kirk is. We next see him as a handsome, angry, emotional, fearless, risk-taking teenager who rashly gets into a fight. We really know who Kirk is.

We see Spock being trained as a child in pure reason – no emotion, no risk taking – all math, science, and logic. He has a touch of emotion because his mother is human, not a Vulcan, but he is taught to repress unwanted emotion and depend on reason and logic.

Spock becomes the captain of the Enterprise and has to make a crucial decision. Kirk’s intuition tells him Spock’s decision is wrong and they fight, after which Kirk is banished. However, in a dramatic, whiz-bang, climatic rescue scene Kirk and Spock work and fight together, win the day, and win the battle against the evil, revenge-driven Nero.

The moral of the story? The risk-taking, emotional, intuitive Kirk and the logical, rational, conservative Spock need each other. They are two integral parts of a complex, effective decision-making system. In the end, the intuitive Kirk takes command of the Enterprise, with Spock his rational second in command at his side to advise him. The Enterprise and its crew boldly go off to fulfill man’s ultimate purpose – to explore.

What is the engine for our evolution? Curiosity (exploration), for without it we’d still be amoebas. But to explore, we need to take risks, use our intuition, and, when appropriate, think things out – use both sides of our brains.

J.J. Abrams along with Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman are neuroscientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists masquerading as filmmakers who make their point by telling a whopper of a story, or visa versa. But we learn an important lesson for the 21st century through their incredible magic box, as defined in this J.J. Abrams TED video.

Charles Warner at 09:23 PM | Post Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

June 10, 2009

Globe Writers Guild Punch Pinch

On Monday, June 8, members of the Newspaper Guild union at The Boston Globe rejected a package of wage and compensation cuts offered by The New York Times Company, the Globe’s owner, and whose CEO is Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger. As a result, Pinch and the Times Company might close the venerable Globe.
New York Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena wrote, “After a day of heavy voting, the guild said its members had rejected the package by a vote of 277 to 265 — meaning 542 of the guild’s 670 members had voted. The results were posted Monday evening on the union’s Web site.”

The first thing that struck me about this paragraph in the Monday, June 8, Times was how ironic it was that the union put the announcement of the vote that could well be the fatal blow to the Globe on a website on the Internet, the disruptive technology that is the primary cause of the death of newspapers, including the Globe.

To be logically consistent, the union should have printed a one-page release and hand-delivered it to everyone interested, but, of course, that would have been too expensive, too wasteful, reached too few people, and taken too long, just like the newspaper they are voting to kill.

What’s going on here? Why would only 81 percent of the eligible Guild members vote? Why would a majority of those who cast a ballot vote to reject an offer that would keep the paper from closing, as The Times Company and Pinch have threatened to do if they did not get the concessions they wanted – concessions other unions had voted to accept?

One Boston Globe reporter who voted for the package said with selfishly twisted logic, “I can’t afford to gamble with a quarter of my pay. How can I pay my mortgage?”

As is the case with too many American workers, especially union members, who often think they work for the union, not their organization, it is about them and their needs, not the needs of the organization or other workers. It’s the culture of me as an individual, not us as an organization. The “us” for these people is a tribe and the tribe is the union, not the organization, which is “them.”

In Perez-Pena’s Times story, he quoted Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who has closely followed the Globe talks. Kennedy “said the showdown had been badly mishandled on both sides, by a belligerent union leadership and a company that never adequately explained itself.”

Why is the union belligerent? And why did the company never adequately explain itself?

I believe the union was belligerent for a number of reasons, including stupid, cynical, greedy union leadership that is more interested in preserving their own jobs than the jobs of their members and that probably has a pathological hatred of management, no matter what the situation is (that’s why union management often get into leadership positions – to vent their rage).

But another reason the union was belligerent was because the members were pissed because, as I wrote in an April 29 blog, of the principles of equity theory. Equity theory “was first developed in 1962 by John Stacey Adams, a workplace and behavioral psychologist, who asserted that employees seek to maintain equity between the inputs that they bring to a job and the outcomes that they receive from it against the perceived inputs and outcomes of others.”

Earlier this year, in its Annual Report, The Times Company revealed that CEO Pinch Sulzberger had made (note I didn’t write “earned”) over $2 million and that the company’s president Janet Robinson made over $4 million. It was soon after this compensation was revealed that the Times Company asked Globe employees to take big cuts in pay, benefits, and life-time employment guarantees.

Did it ever occur to Pinch to take a big pay cut? He could have paid himself $1 a year and said, “Hey, we’re all in this together. The important thing is to preserve news organizations that serve the public interest.” He could have fired Robinson who isn’t needed to run a much pared down organization the revenues of which are tanking. He could have demonstrated that a bloated top management group was delayering and sharing the pain.

But Pinch is totally tone deaf. He has as much empathy and emotional intelligence as a buggy whip, as an inanimate sheet of paper made from dead trees and with smudgy ink on it.

If The Times Company management had any brains at all it would have known about the results of the ultimatum game and the dictator game that behavioral economics researchers conduct. This research provides “evidence against the Homo economicus model of individual decisions. Since an individual who rejects a positive offer is choosing to get nothing rather than something, that individual must not be acting solely to maximize his economic gain.”

Several attempts to explain this behavior are available. Some authors suggest that individuals get some psychological benefit from engaging in punishment of those perceived to be receiving an unfair share of the rewards. As I wrote in the previous blog post, “People will act against their own best interests when they think they are being treated unfairly. They may go down, but they’re going to take the greedy bastards down with them.”

I think this is what is happening with the Globe Writers Guild vote, and you can’t blame the Writers Guild members as much as belligerent union management and stupid, uncaring Times Company management – Pinch Sulzberger – who has been the problem all along, and should be punched out of the organization.

Charles Warner at 03:19 PM | Post Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

June 03, 2009

AOL Is Free Again

The day Time Warner announced it was spinning off AOL, a former colleague of mine at AOL (I was a VP there from 1998 to 2002) Twittered, “After nearly a decade of pain and confusion AOL is free again.” The tweet expressed the joy of many former and current AOLers over finally being free from the destructive corporate oversight of Time Warner.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, in an appearance at a Sanford Bernstein Conference in New York, was upbeat on AOL’s prospects under new CEO Tim Armstrong, who he hired to replace the inept Randy Falco. “Tim is really very good, and we think the team is going to be very successful. AOL’s working very well and has a renewed sense of optimism and energy. All of which doesn’t change the fact that Time Warner was crazy to do the merger with AOL back in 2001,” Bewkes reportedly said.

Bewkes’ statement about the “crazy” merger is a revealing insight into the dark underside of what most business observers consider to be the most disastrous corporate merger in history.

In an e-mail earlier this year, the same former colleague who Twittered about AOL being free again, pulled back the curtain on the dark underside of the merger. He wrote that Time Warner had destroyed AOL on purpose.

At the time it was almost impossible for me to contemplate the notion that Time Warner would purposely destroy AOL. Why on earth would rational executives do that?

But as I thought about it, I realized what a profound insight this was. We have learned from the research by behavioral economists, who have advanced the revelations of Tversky and Kahneman, and that shows people do not make rational decisions and that the notion of “economic man” – a rational, self-interested decision maker – is false. We make decisions based on emotions, or what John Maynard Keynes called animal spirits and without any understanding of the effects of randomness on events.

No rational executive would make the decisions Time Warner top management made in hiring Jon Miller and Randy Falco and allowing them to make a series of disastrous mistakes. These were not rational decisions; they were emotional.

The emotions involved were primarily rage and revenge. The emotions were probably under the surface – no one could consciously admit them. Nevertheless, the rage of the Time Warner people at being bought by AOL was barely controlled at the time – yes, AOL bought TW; it was not a merger. The rage came about because AOL was considered a lucky upstart and the AOL executives who came to Time Warner were inevitably seen as arrogant, brash carpetbaggers, even, over time, as terrorists.

When the AOL Time Warner stock plummeted after the merger, Time Warner people saw the value of their stock and, thus, their nest eggs tank, which added to their rage. They probably said to themselves, “I hate these people and I’m not as rich as I used to be. I’ll show them.” The first indication of this rage and revenge was the failure of Time Warner Cable to cooperate with AOL in putting together a meaningful broadband access package for AOL members. It was passive, vengeful resistance and the beginning of the long decline.

AOL bought Time Warner in January, 2000. We know what happened in September of 2001 and in March of 2003, which led to the moral lapses in Abu Ghraib. It was a time when torture was seen as a legitimate response to rage and a desire for revenge, and that mentality prevailed in the White House and in some executive suites.

Rage at Time Warner percolated under the surface and would bubble up as emotional but highly destructive decisions – firing the popular Mike Kelly, hiring Falco and Grant, and firing Curt Vibranz. Time Warner tortured AOL and destroyed morale, forced good people to leave, and rewarded and promoted people based on politics instead of performance, which is typical of Time Warner.

Time Warner executives, especially Jeff Bewkes, destroyed AOL on purpose because of rage and to get revenge. When they had wiped out over $150 billion in value, they finally said, “We showed them, didn’t we,” and hired the right person to clean up after the train wreck they caused.

Tim Armstrong has the clean-up job, but I’m confident that he took it only on the condition that AOL would be spun off and away from the Evil Empire that is ruled by the Dark Side of human nature – rage, revenge, fear, and political intrigue.

Yes, AOL is free again, but so, unfairly, are the people who tortured it.

Charles Warner at 01:58 PM | Post Comments (2) | Print | Mail this entry

Bruce Braun at June 8, 2009 02:25 PM writes:

Interesting take, Chris. One thing we can take to the bank is the expectation that the guys running these companies will and do hire senior people just like themselves with the same dearth of values, ethics and immoral business practices. What the majority of big company CEO's today have in common is no fear of failure, because there is no penalty for failing.

When CEO's and their senior executives (make that cronies) are hired with no-cut, play-me-or-play-me contracts, the only penalty is damage to their oversized egos. How can we expect them to act responsibly when they are showered with riches, hire "Chief's of Staff" with a fawning trade press that kisses their asses? These guys act like they are business heads of state.

Thinking of the best interests of the minions below deck, is only a consideration if it has the potential of diminishing the size of their bonuses.

How many people lost their jobs at AOL because of Colburn's scummy deals that cost the company hundreds of millions in fines and legal fees due to fraud investigations?

Miller and Falco never broke statutory laws. They did however, thru indifference and incompetence put thousands out of work and did inestimable damage to the lives of those impacted families.

When you bomb cites from 30,000 feet, destroying cities and lives is impersonal. For big company CEO's, they do the same thing while sipping expensive wine in their G-5's.

Media Curmudgeon at June 7, 2009 10:10 AM writes:

Chris Warner writes:

"You leave your flank exposed on this one. I am not a media expert, but as a layperson, see wide open lanes for retaliation in your one sided assault. AOL/Time Warner was a bad marriage, based on an enticing courtship. What looked so intoxicating to insiders in the emotionally charged, sky is the limit late nineties, made almost no sense to us outsiders. We sensed the relationship was a bad match and could not work for long.

AOL bought TimeWarner, then TimeWarner spun off AOL? Who was/is the stud dude and who was/is the trophy bride? Human emotion does not make sense. AOL was the biggest company in the history of the world, not based on bricks and mortar, but on the potential of the internet to generate revenue. Why? Because, more than anything else, we love to communicate. As we are finding out, the business model fails, because we want it for free.

Like any merger, it takes two to tango. You list name of people that I do not know, many of whom could have made better decisions. You make it sound as though they came in after the wedding. In 1998, Steve Case and Bob Pittman were the buzz. Where are they in your criticism? My sense is they are sitting on the sidelines, fat and happy they took advantage of the bubble of artificial exuberance, washed their hands clean of the mess, and left thousands of employees behind to live with their mess.

Part of me is jealous of people like them who pump up the hype, and in a cloud of dust, ride off into the sunset with a nest egg. However, what the rage of 9 11 and the awful hangover since shows us is that too much greed is not good. The free market model is unsustainable without adult supervision. Shame on all those who look at other peoples money as theirs for the taking. Conquest does not make sense unless it is followed by a lifetime of stewardship. I can only hope that the few greedy b@#$%&*s that are hoarding the trillions of dollars they skimmed off the top will find it in their hearts to open their wallets and start spending to restore hope in a global economy where companies can compete with confidence.

I don't know Bewkes or Armstrong, but hopefully whoever has their hand on the tiller is thinking of the best interest of the minions below deck as much as the pickle dish. Or is it a platinum parachute?"