« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »

February 22, 2005

The New York Times Buys About.com. Why?

The New York Times announced last week that it was buying About.com for $410 million. Martin Nisenholtz, Senior Vice President for Digital Operations at the New York Times, in a conference call with stock analysts, said the Times purchased About.com because there were "some very useful synergies such as cross marketing and search optimization expertise." That sounds nice and reasonable, but it wasn’t why the Times wanted About.com.

Jay Rosen, in his Press Think blog, wrote at length (great length) about the Times purchase of About.com. Rosen quoted Nisenholtz as saying about About.com that, "Frankly, they bring a lot of competencies to us. They're the leaders in search-engine optimization." Rosen seems to believe that the Times wants to learn how to optimize search results (primarily in Google) for NYT articles. Rosen also believes that there is something untoward about the respected, stuffy NYT wanting to game search results.

I don’t believe it’s as complex and nefarious as Rosen suggests. I think it’s pretty straightforward: With the big increase in demand for online advertising space, in order to make more money, the NYT needed more inventory. The Times Web site is sold out and it could sell more ads if it had more inventory. If there is one thing ad salespeople can’t stand, it’s leaving money on the table, thus the purchase of About.com.

It’s the reason The Wall Street Journal bought MarketWatch from CBS—it needed more inventory. But the WSJ bought inventory that made sense—a leading online financial information site—the right kind of inventory, and inventory it can sell.

About.com is not the right kind of inventory for the NYT. It may add page views to the Times Web site, but not as many as it hopes. People read The New York Times online because they want information—lots of good solid information—in fact, too much information. About.com provides much of the same type of info, so I believe the NYT’s readers would rather get information and news from NYT reporters, not the “experts” that About.com features, and, therefore, readers won’t use About.com much. The Times will find that it will have to provide make-goods to advertisers who buy About.com in hopes of reaching a large new audience.

I think the purchase of About.com will turn out as badly as the Times purchase of 46 percent of the Boston Metro paper, which is being held up in court. It’s clear with that purchase, the NYT was trying to reach younger readers with the Metro and it’s pursing the same strategy in buying About.com. But these strategies won’t work because nothing will bring younger readers back to newspapers. The barn door is being closed after the horse has left. About.com will not provide enough additional income to offset the loss of income from declining circulation of the mother paper.

Arthur Sulzberger is doing his best to diversify and create growth for the New York Times, Co., but his best isn’t enough to stem the steady decline of young readers—their departure from print is inexorable.

Posted by Charles Warner at 02:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

February 20, 2005

Bloggers Blogging About Blogging

Bloggers are blogging about bloggers who blog about blogging and the impacts of blogs. Enough already! As Jon Stewart said when he went on CNN “Crossfire,” “Stop it!”

Even bloggers I normally respect are going overboard on the Eason Jordan resignation from CNN. Jeff Jarvis on his BuzzMachine blog wrote too much about it. Jarvis does all he can to boost the importance of blogs and, thus, of Jarvis as a blogger. There is little doubt if you read him regularly that he thinks he’s very IMPORTANT, as evidenced by all his media appearances he blogs about so he’ll get more media appearances.

Let’s see, you blog about how blogs are making the mainstream media (MSM) irrelevant and in order to promote this point of view, you genuflect to the MSM to get interviewed by them. If they are irrelevant, why is being on them so important?

Jay Rosen who writes the Press Think blog, the most thoughtful of all the bloggers who write about the media, in my view, thought that Eason Jordan should not have resigned because a lot of conservative bloggers got on him for apparently saying in Davos that he though the military were targeting journalists. I rarely disagree with Rosen, but I do in this case, plus he wrote too much about it—no need to go on an on about Jordan resignation (or firing).

I love Jack Shafer’s column on the media in Slate, and I agree with his column titled “I Would Have Fired Eason Jordan.” Shafer writes that Jordan “uncorked” a provocative comment and then backed off when asked to back up his claim so he should have been fired for saying something so dumb.

The bloggers didn’t get Jordan, he got himself. CNN is under new management and Jordan was under scrutiny, I’m sure. He’d made similar comments about the military targeting reporters before apparently, and that’s dumb. Even it you believe that it might be true and want desperately to try to protect reporters from more harm, you don’t want to piss off the only protection they have, the military.

It reminds me of the great film “Twelve O’clock High” in which Gregory Peck plays an Air Force general, Frank Savage, who has to shape up a sloppy B-24 bomber unit stationed in England that is making dangerous daylight bombing raids on Nazi Germany in World War II. The casualty rate among the pilots is high and Peck finally breaks temporarily under the strain of having to send brave young airmen to their deaths. The same thing might have happened to Jordan, the head of news coverage at CNN. He had been at CNN for 23 years and probably identified with the reporters who were in harm’s way in Iraq, just as General Savage did in the movie, and Jordan may have cracked temporarily.

If that was the case, and Jordan actually believed the military was targeting reporters, then he should have been removed from being in charge of coverage. It was the right management decision regardless of what the bloggers were writing. Jordan probably wasn’t being disloyal to America or disparaging the military, he was identifying with reporters and in doing so said some stupid things. Enough said. Stop blogging into the ground. You’ll give blogging a bad name.

Posted by Charles Warner at 02:05 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Gary Goldhammer at February 21, 2005 06:43 PM writes:

I agree, thanks for saying what a lot of us have been thinking :-) A blogger who only blogs about blogging is ultimately as interesting as a writer who only writes about writing (in other words, not very).

In a recent post I said that "the pursuit of truth is not the only motivator within the new journalism commune, or even the most prevalent. Too many seek recognition or celebrity status as a reward for their participation."

Jordan indeed "got" himself -- he didn't need any help from bloggers.


Jesse Kornbluth at February 21, 2005 03:39 PM writes:

I'd like to respond, but wouldn't that be the snake swallowing its tail?


February 17, 2005

You Can Learn a Lot From Art

As I walked through the billowing saffron panels of The Gates at dusk last evening, I began looking for lessons in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s environmental art in Central Park. I recalled a time about 18 years ago when Bob Pittman was head of MTV and, at my request, he came to talk to students at Menlo College where I was teaching at the time. A student asked Bob where he got his creative ideas for MTV. Bob replied that he often visited galleries and museums to look at art—mostly paintings—to inspire him and teach him practical lessons about life and how to solve problems. "What a brilliant insight," I thought at the time.
I thought of Bob’s insightful remark as I walked through The Gates as a brisk wind blew the fluttering orangish panels parallel to the ground. A few of the panels had wrapped around some of the uprights and were no longer waving. I knew the monitors who Christo hired to keep the panels flowing and to protect them from vandalism would unfurl the wrapped panels in their assigned areas in the morning. They would use their long, boat-hook-like tools with a thin, bent mental hook at the end that was used to rip off a Velcro strip that opened the cloth boot that wrapped the nylon saffron panels up before they were unfurled. But after the crews and monitors used the tool to unfurl the panels, a chartreuse tennis ball was cut and placed over the hooks so they could be used to free panels that might be wrapped around uprights without hurting the nylon panel material. The light green tennis balls were the complementary color to the saffron of the panels.
As I looked at The Gates, the lesson that came to me was that they were not only a monumental creative idea, but an immensely complicated project that could never have been pulled off without flawless execution. It took 26 years of planning and paying attention to the minute details of execution on the part of Christo’s brilliant engineer, Vince Davenport, which made the idea of The Gates a beautiful reality.
Over the weekend The Gates opened, Carly Fiorina, the CEO of HP was fired by the HP board of directors. I read stories throughout the week in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, business magazines, and on the Internet in Marketplace and other business-oriented sites about why one of the highest-ranking and most visible female corporate executives lost her job. Some of the business pundits thought it was her imperious style that did her in—spotlight-seeking, increasing the number of corporate jets, eating lunch alone in her office and not practicing management by walking around, which David Packard had made famous. Others opined that Fiorina, with a sales and marketing background, was never accepted in the engineering-dominated and family-like culture of HP. Other thought she was toast the moment she changed the name from Hewlett-Packard to HP.
However, the HP board approved the merger with Compaq, it approved the name change to HP, it backed her strategy for growth, and it praised her marketing efforts. What undid Fiorina was not her style or her strategy or the HP culture, it was her inability to execute on her grand plans or to get enough people to cooperate in helping her execute. The board recommended that Fiorina hire a chief operating officer and restructure to give herself more operating help. She refused; she didn’t want to give up any power (sound like some big media companies?).
Perhaps Fiorina should have read Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. The book is required reading in my online graduate course, Media Management and Leadership, for the University of Missouri School of Journalism because just as execution was the key to the success of The Gates, execution is the key to success in business.
You can learn a lot about business and life from reading a book or from art.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

February 14, 2005

The Gates

I am obsessed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's saffron gates in Central Park. Last Thursday I walked through Central Park from the West Side, entering at 64th Street and Central Park West and exiting at 96th Street and Fifth Avenue. The 16-foot high gates were not unfurled yet, but I was awestruck and overwhelmed with the monumental engineering feat of erecting over 7,500 gates. I went by the Boat House and bought two of every item that was being sold--T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, maps, and black baseball hats with "The Gates" emblazoned on them (as were the T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts). I stopped and watched as a crew put together one of the gates and raised it--the onlookers and all the crew had smiles on their faces. New York was grinning in anticipation.

Friday I took a brief walk among the skeleton gates to try to absorb the images of how the park looked before the unfurling. Again, I was exhilarated by the massive project, the pre-natal beauty. When I got home I e-mailed several close friends and my daughter, Megan, that my wife, Julia, and I would be walking the park on Saturday morning beginning at 8:00 a.m. and invited everyone to come by our house on 95th Street for coffee and bagels to celebrate the most important art event so far in the 21st century.

Saturday morning was bitter cold, but Julia and I arose early (only such a momentous event could get us up at 6:30 a.m.), dressed, and eagerly headed toward the park. I was incredibly excited, just as I would be if I were going to see one of my grandchildren's birth. This was going to a birth of a magnificent gift to New Yorkers that would live only sixteen days. I knew I couldn't miss one day of experiencing The Gates.

We walked with some friends and their three-year-old daughter in a pram up to the Great Hill and watched as a happy, competent crew began unfurling the billowing saffron-colored panels. Applause. Joy. Gasps of appreciation and awe. We then walked with my daughter, son-in-law, and almost two-year old granddaughter around the Harlem Meer. Spectacular, monumental, gorgeous, breathtaking.

The Gates are a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, a miracle of art, a joyous gift to New York and the world. You must come to New York to experience The Gates. You can't get a sense of them in pictures, you have to experience them. My step-daughter, Helen, said they were tranquil, like watching the saffron sails on a land-bound sailboat. My friend Chuck Wooldridge (my step-niece, Anjali's, fiancé), who is Chinese history scholar said he felt like he walking in an ancient, triumphant parade and was waiting for the trumpets heralding the arrival of the emperor. Each person will have his or her own, individual, and unique reaction. But a reaction that will last a lifetime, like the entire experience will. Come.

Posted by Charles Warner at 06:38 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Charles Warner at February 16, 2005 12:25 AM writes:

And I thought I was a curmudgeon! Bill Grimes has just become the 21st Century's most acid art curmudgeon. It's a good thing he didn't come to our Saturday morning party, he would have been mugged. Ex-Park commissioner Henry Stern had an article in the New York Sun today that gave The Gates a luke-warm--no, cold--review, so at least Bill Grimes has curmudgeonly company.


Bill Grimes at February 16, 2005 12:18 AM writes:

This unimaginative display of Orange Red metal and cloth is an ugly assault on Manhattan's bastion of Nature and visual tranquility.

In a cityscape captivated by sky-blocking structures of steel and glass Central Park refreshingly maintains its unspoiled innocence and beauty. Each of the four seasons produces within this visitor different feelings of mood, color, surprise and discovery. The Park's Winter exhibits to the eye the ebony limbs of leafless trees straining above like lonely stick figures, the barren black rocks seemingly doubled in size since summer, the evergreens more visible but lacking their vibrant hues, the earth abounding in muddy brown pools of soil, and, occasionally, new-fallen or senescent snow tracts reluctantly revealing captive shards of napping grass. A sense of subdued peace consumes one. A respite from our creature comforts of soothing housing and comforting offices rewards Central Park's Winter visitor in Manhattan's only santuary from itself.

No more.

Today, and for two more agonizing weeks, our Park is plunderd by 7500 artless Orange Red steel intruders signifying what? I am reminded of childhood mornings after Halloween when sighting the telephone wires and trees on our street strewn with countless rolls of toliet paper administered by mindless adolescents like myself. Only the "Gates" is so much worse because it denudes a Great City's oasis of Nature and it does so with its hideous redundancy of color and shape.

At the very least the two creators of this hallucination could have inserted on the cloth sheath of each of the 7500 stanchions a famous quotation from the world's great thinkers and leaders. A line from Plato, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Karl Marx or whomever would have possibly triggered in the minds of one or two and, maybe many more, of the Park's present unfortunate visitors a thought, an idea, a memory of meaning that might provoke some modest positive change in their lives. Wishfil thinking? Maybe but Gates is a nihilistic invasion of Nature with no intellectual return.


Chuck Wooldridge at February 15, 2005 10:43 AM writes:

Thanks for the shout-out Charlie. I was walking through again this morning. I think your post captures a lot of the atmosphere. When I'm in the park, it also feels kind of carnival: I'm giddy. I say hello to random people. I want to chat with any and all. Part of The Gates is the aesthetics of the thing, but part of it is also the sheer foolhardy absurdity; The Gates is a grand gesture, like sending a too-large bouquet for Valentine's Day, or proposing in Madison Square Garden. I remember when I was five or so, I saw my first hot air balloon. What a beautiful thing it was, all that color floating in the air. That's how I feel when I see The Gates.

Once in a while, I also get a contemplative moment. Last night when it was rainy and very, very windy, or this morning as I returned from moving my car. I read somewhere that the Gates just make you want to record whatever you are thinking about at the time, so all your ideas get recording as saphron banners. I think that's right, too. In this way, the walking through The Gates is like internal blogging.


February 06, 2005

On the Media

Sometimes I miss NPR's program "On the Media" with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield on WNYC, New York's public radio station, on Saturday. "On the Media" is the most intelligent, insightful, and unbiased look at the media in the media, at least that I know of. Therefore, I was delighted when it was announced on a recent program that "On the Media" was being podcast.

I have a 20 GB iPod that my perfect wife, Julia, gave me for Christmas (she's perfect for other reasons in addition to giving me great gifts), so when I heard that "On the Media" was available via podcast, I immediately went to the iPodder Web site and downloaded (free) the iPodder V 1.1 software. I then Googled "on the media, NPR," found the "On the Media" Web site, and went there. There was a little button reading "POD" on the top right of the page, so I knew it was set up for podcasting. I then double clicked on the iPodder icon on my desktop to open iPodder, then in the "Add" box at the top of the iPodder menu, where it reads "Add feed manually," I typed in the "On the Media" URL, http://onthemedia.org (I could have cut and pasted it from the Web site), and then I clicked on "Add."

"On the Media" was then added to my iPodder list. I plugged in my iPod to my computer and opened up iTunes on my PC. When "On the Media" was available for a podcast sometime on Saturday, it was automatically downloaded into my iTunes list and onto my iPod. When I went for my daily walk in the park Saturday evening, I listened to the "On the Media" program I had missed that morning. The next Saturday, the program was again downloaded into my iPod and it replaced the previous week's program. How cool is that?

To listen to "On the Media" on my iPod, I turn on my iPod, wheel down to "Playlists," wheel down to On the Media, punch, and listen to the latest program.

I am explaining all of this because I want all of my readers to know about an excellent program about the media and about a cool way to listen to it. So get an iPod if you don't have one and start listening to podcasts--it's the latest fad--an extension of blogging. So, you can listen to audio blogging while jogging.

Posted by Charles Warner at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

AOL, Five Years Late Again

Last week AOL and Time Warner Cable announced that they were joining forces to provide a customized broadband offering. The two companies will offer existing AOL dial-up and Time Warner Cable Road Runner subscribers "attractive pricing" that would allow current Road Runner broadband subscribers to have AOL as their primary portal to the Internet and have access to AOL's rich content.

In the joint press release, Don Logan, Chairman of Time Warner's Media and Communication Group, said, "This new agreement aligns the strategies of America Online and Time Warner Cable in the fast-expanding broadband sector, and it will enable each business to focus on its key areas of growth. Time Warner Cable should accelerate its acquisition of high-speed data subscribers, while AOL should enhance the lifetime value of its member base and maximize its revenues from online advertising, search commerce and select premium services."

What total bullshit. This announcement is exactly five years too late. It should have been made by Steve Case as soon as the AOL/Time Warner merger was announced. The horse is out of the barn now and two states away.

First, AOL has a much-touted strategy of increasing the content of its free portal to attract more traffic and, thus, advertising revenue. Well, if you can get AOL's content free, without subscribing to AOL for $23.90 a month, then why would you need to pay for AOL content? Second, when you have always-connected Road Runner, you don't need AOL, which is primarily an ISP--a connecting device-- so people who have Road Runner are cancelling AOL by the hordes, of course. AOL's left hand is arm wrestling with its right hand--some strategy.

What has been the effect of the announcement on AOL morale? It is rumored that inside AOL the mood is glum because many AOLers see the announcement as a move to make AOL more attractive to a potential buyer.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Phil Frank at March 28, 2005 01:25 PM writes:

Charlie, was thinking about this entry the other day and recalled a "hurdle" the government put in front of AOL and Road Runner when this merger was first approved. I may not have exactly right, but it was something like this...Road Runner can only offer AOL on it's service to any given market, once it has begun to offer two competitive internet offers. I believe that Case, Pittman and anyone else at the time would have brought these two entities together much sooner if they had been allowed. Feel free to check me on this, but I believe the above is correct.


Charles Warner at February 9, 2005 11:34 PM writes:

A friend sent me the following e-mail (anonymously, obiviously):

"Well, I can't reply to this one less I find myself out of a job, but "What total bullshit" has to be my favorite Media Curmudgeon quote so far! And by the way...the rumor mill has it that AOL lost another 400K subs last quarter. So much for the strategy brain trust."


Country Music

"Country Tops the Billboard Crop" was the headline in the "Arts, Briefly" column of The New York Times Thursday, February 3, The Arts section. The item read "Even without a supporting single, the introspective collection of beach tunes 'Be as You Are (Songs From an Old Blue Chair),' written and sung by country star Kenney Chesney...was the top selling pop album last week. With opening-week sales of 311,000, Mr. Chesney's album, on the BNA label, surpassed 'The Documentary' (Interscope) by the Los Angeles rapper, The Game, which finished No. 2 after dominating the previous week."

Could this be trend? Could Country Music be gaining in popularity and rap decreasing in popularity? Unfortunately, I don't think rap is declining much, but I do hope Country Music is increasing in popularity. Country Music is the music of the heartland and of Bush's Texas, and you have to wonder if Country Music's popularity has anything to do with a shift in musical taste that follows America's expression of more traditional, heartland values in its voting in the last election.

At any rate, good for Kenny Chesney. Falling on the heels of two monster albums by Norah Jones, perhaps the success of Chesney's pop-country album and Norah Jones's pop-jazz-country albums reflect a shift away from hard rock to softer, more listenable, less angry music. Again, let's hope.

But I think that Jones's and Chesney's success (Chesney's might be a lot briefer than Jones's) is as much a matter of rock's decline as of the excellence of Jones's and Chesney's music. Angry, rebellious, male teenagers, who are the main fans of hard rock, are switching to video games to relieve their testosterone rushes and are downloading their heavy metal to iPods and MP3 players, which is hurting both rock album sales and listening to rock radio stations. When Howard Stern switches to Sirius saltellite radio at the beginning of next year, terrestrial radio listening will decline further, especially if the big radio conglomerates such as Clear Channel can't come up with more innovative and intriguing formats than the cookie-cutter ones they have now.

Teenage girls are also downloading music, which is hurting listening to pop radio stations--better to buy and download from iTunes a Norah Jones album and listen to it on an iPod or MP3 player than listen to overcommercialized, boring, silly, rap-dominated radio.

About every decade Country Music seems to make a comeback--remember John Travolta's Urban Cowboy and the ensuing surge in Country Music's popularity? Maybe it's happening again; so dust off your Stetson hat and cowboy boots (the newest New York fashion trend for women). Wouldn't it be an ironic hoot if hip, liberal, fashion-conscious New Yorkers started listening to Country Music and wearing cowboy boots--a trend started by George Bush, a square, conservative, unfashionable Texan?

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Aron Levinson at February 10, 2005 09:03 PM writes:

Charlie,

I knew you were the coolest when you mentioned "Urban Cowboy" in your County music blog!

"Get me a beer, Sissy"- John Travolta


February 05, 2005

Bob Schieffer?

This last week CBS News announced that Bob Schieffer, the host of "Face the Nation" would become the interim anchorman of "The CBS Evening News" after current anchor Dan Rather retires in March.

The New York Times put the story on the first page of its Business Day section below the fold with headline "'Face the Nation' Host Is Interim Anchor at CBS." I found it a little strange that the Times didn't mention either Schieffer or Rather in the headline, but did mention "Face the Nation," a show that no one watches--among the four major networks that have Sunday morning talk shows, "Face..." is the lowest rated. If CBS News took it off the air, no one would know, let alone complain.

And Bob Schieffer? He's five-and-ahalf years younger than Rather, but looks older (at least Rather colors his hair in an attempt to look younger), so Schieffer won't appeal to anyone under 65. I think the reason the Times didn't put his name in the headline is because it couldn't spell his hame, let alone pronounce it. Besides, it's too long to put in a headline; therefore, for the three or four months that he's the interim anchor, he'll get no headlines, no promotion (unless he screws up like Rather did), which should tank the CBS Evening News even more and set it up for the cutsey-poo team of anchors that Moonves will make CBS News hire--anyone it hires will look good compared to...who?...Bob Schieffer?

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Neil Derrough at February 5, 2005 01:56 PM writes:

The comments about Bob Schieffer miss the mark for me. First CBS News has to do something to feel better about who they are. Schieffer may not be the long term fix but he does represent the best they have left of their former good reputation. For now this should give the in house people something to feel better about. It's not a ratings game right now. It's regaining the self respect CBS News once had that will provide the only chance for their survival. This is just one step. Removing Heyward is the next. One step at a time they can try to deal with the future.


February 01, 2005

Blogging Over and Underkill

I kept up on the Harvard Law School conference on "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility" and some of the aftermath. I read Jack Shafer’s “Blog Overkill” column on Slate and Jay Rosen (on Press Think) and Jeff Jarvis’s (on Buzz Machine) reactions to it.

I think the Harvard conference was an excellent idea—it was time that the issue of blogging’s relationship to journalism was addressed. I thought that having the usual suspects—Rosen, Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, and David Weinberger (JOHO)—who were also bloggers and, thus, had a definite agenda and point of view diminished the conference somewhat. It would have been better to have included more non-blogging academics such as Dean Mills, the dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, or Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia, to add a more balanced view ( Orville Schell, University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, was a participant).

Even though I read Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine blog regularly and I think it is a useful blog and that he's a good journalist, I believe he’s too often a self-promoting, self-absorbed egotist who gets into silly blogging fights, such as the one he got into with Eric Alterman, and too often becomes unnecessarily bitchy, snide, and insulting. He can’t tolerate anyone’s opinion that doesn’t agree with his sometimes skewed, typically liberal, or rabid positions and he often gets too defensive. Therefore, I ignore what Jarvis writes when he’s being bitchy and defensive.

I also read and admire Jay Rosen’s Press Think blog; it is required reading for the students in the Media Ethics class I teach this semester at The New School University. I think Rosen is right on target on most issues, but I thought he was unnecessarily sensitive and defensive to Shafer’s “Blog Overkill” article.

Shafer had some well-reasoned, objective, and intelligent comments about blogs and his comments should be taken seriously—no need to be defensive, just get on with blogging. Shafer’s points that blogging is unlikely to put newspapers and magazines and the television news networks out of business as some blogging fanatics are predicting and that blogging might eventually end up in a different space because it’s too early to tell exactly where blogging is going to be in the future were good points. Some of what Shafer wrote reminded me of a study that was done in the late ‘90s by the University of Minnesota center for innovation and entrepreneurship (I think that was the name of the center) that showed the trajectory of innovation. A graph showed how a company would begin to develop a new idea or product and for a while the trajectory was a straight line from the bottom left toward the upper right of a graph. But then the innovation trajectory line would shoot off at an angle (often a 45-degree angle) and wind up in the middle of the top line, not the far upper right. In other words, most innovations ended up in a different place than they started out. The lesson was that new ideas and technology lead us to places we can’t dream of or foresee, often in better, more useful places that respond to the way that people actually use and adapt the technology to their needs and not to the places in the dreams of the original innovators.

It’s too early to know where the blogging movement might wind up; the crystal ball, as always, is cloudy. It would be reasonable for Jarvis, Rosen, and other dedicated bloggers to admit that the future is not as certain as they think it is. Blogging is exciting and is growing faster than Moore’s law would predict, so let’s sit back, relax, welcome all views and dreams, and see where it takes us.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Gary Goldhammer at February 5, 2005 05:21 PM writes:

Professor Warner, I just recently came across your blog and I'm glad I did -- Jack Schafer's article and your commentary on the Harvard conference were a breath of fresh air in what has degraded, at least in some circles, into a childish pillow fight over who should get the top bunk.

By the way, as Missouri J-School graduate, I agree that not only Dean Mills but also others at Mizzou should become more involved in blogging and new media discussions. Or giving a Missouri Medal to Oh Yeon Ho, Founder of OhMyNews, might not be a bad idea! Thanks again for a great post and an interesting blog.


Charles Warner at February 1, 2005 02:33 PM writes:

Jesse Kornbluth has the most insightful comment of any of the Harvard conference's participants or Shafer, Rosen, or Jarvis...that the main-stream media (MSM) will bear hug blogging, thus smothering some of it, and find a way to make money on it. With MSM's ability to mass promote their blogs, they will take traffic away from many blogs. HOwever, in order to sell advertising the MSM's blogs will become as bland as their other products and, thus won't attract an audience that wants the edgy, in-depth, contrarian opinion and insight that blogs have.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine is president and creative director of Advance.net, MSM's Conde Nast's Interactive division and Web site. So does he get a salary for blogging? Maybe he's the first of the new MSM's paid bloggers.

At any rate, both types of blogs have a future--MSM-salaried bloggers and poor, opinionated bloggers.


Jesse Kornbluth at February 1, 2005 02:12 PM writes:

I hate to sound like Marcuse, but....at the end of the day, Big Media --- like capitalism itself --- renews itself by swallowing its critics. That is, Big Media will soon spawn its own blogs (this is already happening). This will give the best of the bloggers something important they currently lack --- a SALARY, an bigger audience, and did I say a SALARY? --- and they won't even have to trade much, if any, independence for it. But something WILL be different.


Some Coolware

If vaporware is software that is announced but doesn't really exist yet, then coolware is really cool software that is not only announced but that also works great. Last Friday I installed Answers.com and it's so neat I had to share my excitement.

Go to www.answers.com and donwload the free software. Once it's installed on a PC, when you are typing something in Word or Powerpoint, for example, or when you are on a Web page and you want to chedk the meaning of a word or get more information about the word, you merely push down the Alt key and left click your mouse on the word and instantly an Answers.com Web site appears with the definition of the word or more information.

For example, when I was writing the blog about Dolan and Roberts, I Alt clicked on "Rothschilds." The Answers.com Web page came up on my screen with an entry on the history of the European banking family.

On a Mac, you have to hit the Apple, Alt, and G keys, but otherwise Answers.com works the same. You've got to try it, especially if you're a horrible speller or have a terrible memory like I do.

I'd rather have Answers.com that answers all my spelling and definition questions than have videos on my iPod or cell phone.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry

Some New Vaporware

My last blog was about the differences between James Dolan, chief executive of Cablevision, and Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, as contrasted by two front-page Wall Street Journal articles last week (January 24-28). In the blog I didn’t dig into Comcast’s video-on-demand (VOD) service in much detail or its implications.

In the same week that the WSJ story dealt with how Comcast was putting pressure on the big-four networks to allow it to offer VOD of prime-time programming, both Google and Yahoo announced that their search services “…Are Extending Search Ability to TV Programs,” a headline in a January 25 article in The New York Times read. According to the NYT story by Saul Hansell, Google’s new Google Video service will allow users to search for key words in closed-captioned transcripts of some television programs and to view still images of the programs, which Google vice president Jonathan Rosenberg said was somewhat limited but was the first step toward a broader service that would allow users to watch longer video clips of a TV program.

Hansell also wrote: “Yahoo introduced a test version of a different sort of video search last year, available from a section of its site, that lets users comb through video clips from various Web sites.

Today, Yahoo will move the video search to its home page. In the next few weeks, it will introduce the ability to search for closed-captioning text for programs from some networks, including Bloomberg and the BBC. Unlike the Google service, Yahoo’s offering will let users watch 60-second video clips.

David Ives, the chief executive of TV Eyes, which is providing that part of Yahoo’s service, said some broadcasters were paying to have their programs included in the search. In other cases, he said, the broadcaster and TV eyes will split revenue from advertisements placed next to video clips.”

So, unlike Comcast’s VOD, which sends subscribers the full version of a program to their television screens, Google will initially offer stills of TV shows and Yahoo will offer short video clips on computer screens. But, we know from Moore’s law that technology will change fast and the full video on or computer, iPod, and cell phone displays are coming. In fact, on Friday, January 28, Verizon announced it plans to use Microsoft’s “new TV platform for the commercial rollout of its ViOS TV service which will provide high-definition TV, digital video recording, on-demand video services, and ultimately video over Internet and to wireless hand-held and cell phone devices,” according to a January 31 story on MediaPost.

Also on January 32, Saul Hansell, who wrote the January 25 New York Times article about Google and Yahoo extending their search capabilities to TV programs, wrote an article titled “Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up.” In essence, Hansell admits he was snookered by Yahoo’s story by writing in the lead paragraph: “Last Monday, Google representatives called analysts and reporters to trumpet a new service that searches the transcripts of television broadcasts. Yahoo, Google’s rival, got wind of the announcement and within hours, its publicity machine had bolted into action to say it had a similar service in the works.” In other words, Yahoo was promoting vaporware and Hansell fell for it. He should have known better and so should his New York Times editors.

Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semel, came from the movie business where hyping and publicity wars are legion—they’re in the DNA of Hollywood executives. Semel not only brought disciplined management to Yahoo but he also brought a creative flair for innovation, publicity, and marketing. Google is incredibly innovative, too, and continually comes up with the goods—Blogger, Desktop Search, Google Scholar, e.g.—but it can’t match Yahoo’s hype. Let’s hope it doesn’t try.

There are a few things I want on my iPod and cell phone screen, but TV shows aren’t one of them—news clips maybe, but TV shows or movies, no thanks. My wife Julia and I went to see “Million Dollar Baby” last night and the experience of seeing it on the big screen was over two hours of compelling magic. I can’t imagine enjoying (or getting emotionally involved in) the movie on my iPod or cell phone screen.

What this all means is, I think, that VOD and ViOS TV won’t replace anything, but will be another small shard in an ever more fragmented media landscape. Consumer acceptance of new technological distribution and display systems will be determined by their usefulness and functionality, not by hype or publicity.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Print | Mail this entry