Media Curmudgeon

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September 25, 2007

Rategate: Win Some, Lose Some

Blogging is an exhilarating and humbling experience. Getting it right is cool and feeds my overfed ego; getting it wrong is humbling, which pleases my wife and kids. In my September 17, blog titled “MoveOn.org’s Petraeus Ad,” I wrote:

“I don’t believe that the Times broke its rate card for MoveOn.org, that Mathis is being candid, and that Jeff Jarvis is wrong (about cutting rates because newspaper ad revenue is down). The rate is legit and has nothing to do with newspapers offering big discounts because of ad declines. The Times, which has a pretty good sales organization, understands that lowering prices doesn’t create demand. Where else but the Times would an advocacy ad like this have such a huge impact? There is still large demand for ads in the Times by many advertisers, especially those who want to try to influence the political discussion agenda. The reason overall demand for newspaper advertising is down is because major advertisers such as automotive and financial services are cutting back, not those who want to influence the national debate. In fact, the MoveOn.org ad created demand—the Giuliani campaign bought an ad in response a couple of days later.”

So my face was as red as Rudolph’s nose when I read the NY Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt’s, column this past Sunday (the 23rd) in which he wrote: “Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?
The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.”

Ooops. I thought the rate was “legit.” I couldn’t imagine the Times cutting its rates. It never occurred to me that one of its sales reps couldn’t read its Byzantine rate card. It seems that Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis doesn’t understand the rate card either. Here’s what she told BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, as reported in his blog: “I should note here that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed to me what MoveOn.org already said about said ad--that it cost $65,000, and that it was in keeping with the going rate for 'open' political advocacy ads--that is, ads for which the Times has discretion on when to run them.”

The rate MoveOn.org got was not an open rate—an open rate is the top rate an advertiser pays and for which the Times will place the ad in the section an advertiser prefers. The Times’ rate card in the Business section, under Causes and Appeal/Political, shows an open rate of $1,442 per column inch, or $181,692 for a 126-inch full page ad. The closest rate to get to the $142,083 Hoyt says MoveOn.org “should have” paid is the 20-page rate of $1,133 per column inch, or $142,758. But to earn that rate, the lowest Nationwide Weekday rate, it would have to have run or promise to run 20 pages. If you divide $142,083 by 126, you get $1,127.64 per column inch—a rate that appears nowhere on the Times rate card in that category.

This nitpicking points out several things: 1) No one, including the Times salesperson, its corporate spokesperson, or its Public Editor understands or can read the newspaper’s rate card. 2) That Catherine Mathis doesn’t know the difference between an open and a stand-by rate, which isn’t so bad because the rate card is so confusing, but it spotlights the fact the Times’ official spokesperson is probably knee-jerk defensive and can’t be trusted to be candid. This Rategate is no Jason Blair scandal, but it’s still embarrassing for the so-called journal of record—it can’t seem to keep its records or its stories straight—it looks like the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first” routine, or even “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

To me the rate MoveOn.org paid is not as important as the fact that the Times ran the ad with the offensive subhead. Here’s what the Times’ Public Editor Hoyt wrote: “The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, ‘We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.’ Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was ‘rough,’ he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.’”

Jespersen’s title is director of advertising acceptability and he didn’t do his job—he screwed up. He should have tried to get MoveOn.org to change the headline, as I suggested in my earlier blog. At a time when the Times is cutting newsroom jobs in response to lower ad revenue, it ought to consider cutting fat, not muscle. Pare down the bureaucracy, not reporters who create content for the paper and website. Stop paying bureaucrats to make bad decisions and utter defensive, inaccurate public announcements—it sounds like the government. Fire Jespersen and Mathis and get rid of the sales force. Google sells about five times as much advertising as the NY Times does and does it via the Internet. Computers don’t make rate-quoting mistakes and Google’s system is based on bidding—an auction—for ad space.

If MoveOn.org had been required to bid for the Monday ad it wanted, it would have paid a lot more than $65,000 for a full-page ad, as evidenced by the fact that it agreed to pay $77,000 more to correct the mistake, as reported by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. MoveOn.org probably would have paid more than $142,000 if it had to bid for it.

So I lost one—I was wrong about the Times’ “legit” rate—and I won one—I was right about not running the ad. I apologize for the error, but I’ll be glad to live with my batting average.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:45 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at September 27, 2007 06:21 PM writes:

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September 22, 2007

The Future of AOL

This past week CEO Randy Falco announced another reorganization of AOL, which sparked a lot of speculation about its future. On September 17, The Wall Street Journal ran a story titled “Overhaul at Time Warner?” that included speculation by a Wall Street analyst who wondered, "Would shareholders be better off if AOL were spun off?” On the same day MediaPost’s Wayne Friedman wrote in an article titled “Analysts To Time Warner: Sell AOL,” that “Time Warner's honeymoon with AOL seems to be over, as some analysts are strongly suggesting that the media company should make major moves concerning the online service.”

The reorg that fueled this speculation about the future of AOL was actually fairly well received in the media buying community. MediaPost writer Gavin O’Malley wrote in an article titled “Media Buyers Give Thumbs Up To New AOL Ad Network,” that “Media buyers were positive on the news, adding that AOL's recent spate of ad network acquisitions would have been pointless without their eventual integration.”

So, the reorganization of AOL’s sales effort was well received by its customers (media buyers) and not well received by its investors (Wall Street). Time Warner’s stock price didn’t move to any significant degree after the announcement; so, what was the reorg about and what does it mean for the future of AOL?

The new unit will be called Platform A and is the result of a carefully crafted strategy to leverage AOL’s assets, such as the AOL portal, Advertising.com (the country’s biggest ad network), Tacoda (behavioral targeting), Lightningcast (a video ad network), ThirdScreenMedia (a mobile ad network), and AdTech (an international ad-serving company) to address the current trends in online advertising—trends that don’t bode well for portals such as AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. Falco had to do something to demonstrate why Dick Parsons and Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner hired him to run the faltering AOL that didn’t meet its expected advertising revenue numbers for the second quarter of this year.

About the reorg, Falco said, "With the launch of Platform A, we are unleashing this powerful network to deliver unrivaled transparency and return on investment for our marketing partners.”

He could have said, but obviously didn’t, “I had to do something. Morale at AOL was lower than whale shit, we weren’t making our numbers, and portals are as a dead as Kelsey’s nuts.” But I give Falco credit for what seems to be the right moves and for waiting to make them until he had all the pieces together. If AOL is to grow, it has to aggregate inventory on many smaller sites out in the long tail (niche-market sites), serve relevant ads, preferably in a video environment, and grow internationally. So Falco and his COO Ron Grant, get an A for this move that will please advertisers. To hell with Wall Street—the PE bozos have a hard enough time managing their own firms, let alone telling other companies how to manage theirs. Wall Street only knows one strategy—buy low, sell high, and collect outrageous fees from both sides for lousy advice. As a good friend of mine said, “They couldn’t organize a two-car funeral parade.”

What is the future of AOL? First, Time Warner will not sell AOL because it’s seen as a no-grow or slow-grow business, and who is going to pay $20 billion (what it was valued at when Google paid $1 billion for five percent) or even $13 billion (what some analysts think it is worth today). Second, Jeff Bewkes, who will take over from Dick Parsons as Time Warner CEO, probably by the end of the year, didn’t fight and claw to get to be the top gun at the world’s biggest media conglomerate to dismantle it and reduce its (and his) clout and power. In the media, profits are important, but power is the most valuable currency—no mogul wants to lose even a scintilla of it.

Third, we on the outside don’t know what Parsons and Bewkes promised Falco when Time Warner hired him to run AOL. Don’t you think Falco asked if they were going to sell AOL? Don’t you think he wanted assurances that they wouldn’t sell it from under him and that to make sure they didn’t he got a huge, huge golden parachute from them. I’ll bet a venti latte that Falco got an enormous golden parachute—so big that if Bewkes sells AOL and Wall Street learnes what Falco's payoff is, that Wall Street and TW investors would be after Bewkes’ scalp. So, Bewkes won’t take that chance.

Fourth, Bewkes is currently the media Golden Boy—the savior under whose watch HBO developed “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.” He is supposed to have pushed AOL into its current (and correct) portal strategy, fired AOL’s CEO Jon Miller, and hired Randy Falco, all of which look now like good moves. However, I’ve heard that Bewkes is a suit—a glib, suck-up Yalie who is a cost cutter but not a brilliant strategic thinker.

Dick Parsons is a compromiser, a politician, a consensus builder, and a negotiator. He’s a very bright, charming, and, at least externally, calm guy who was right for Time Warner after the disastrous merger with AOL. But he’s an ex-banker, so he’s not a risk taker and he’s not a great media strategist. He’ll be throwing Bewkes to a wolf pack of brilliant strategic thinkers. Rupert Murdoch will have him as an appetizer, Summer Redstone will eat his lunch, and Bob Iger will have him for desert.

So, Bewkes won’t sell AOL, and during the first year of his reign he’ll look like a deer in the headlights, will be paralyzed with fear, and will make no major moves. If I had any Time Warner stock, I’d sell it immediately before it goes down further. When it goes down to under ten in a year-and-a-half, the TW board will fire Bewkes and hire Randy Falco. We’ll see then if Falco is tough enough to swim with the sharks.

Posted by Charles Warner at 09:59 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

September 18, 2007

Times Select Is Dead

The New York Times announced today that it was canceling the idea of charging online readers and subscribers to have access to its columnists, such as Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, and Bob Herbert. When the times instituted TimesSelect, I posted a blog saying that I thought it was a terrible idea and a bad strategy, as did blogger Jeff Jarvis.

Yesterday, I criticized Jarvis saying that I agreed with a lot he wrote and disagreed with a lot, but mostly I disliked the ad that day on his blog and thought it was in poor taste.

Today I'm not here to bury Jarvis but to praise him. He wrote the best analysis of the demise of TimesSelect that I read all day, and the media and blogesphere were overflowing with analysis and comments. Therefore, I'm posting his entire blog post below instead of linking to it so that you don't have to go to his site and see the butt-crack banner.

"TimesSelect is dead. It was a cynical act doomed from the start. With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.

No one with sufficient experience ever thought that TimesSelect made good business sense. Oh, they talked a good game: It was another revenue stream to balance dependence on advertising, said the spin, . . . It was a tribute to the great value of the Times brand and its unique content ,. . . It was an opportunity to create added value worth added revenue. . . . It was a way to give print subscribers new benefits. Yada-yada-ka-ching.

Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in. In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

The financial analyses of TimesSelect were always too simplistic — as if revenue were profit. The Times obituary for its service said that the service collected $49.95 per year or $7.95 per month from 227,000 paying customers at the end — 787,000 total customers, including print subscribers and, recently, academic readers given a free ride. The Times said it brought in $10 million revenue after two years, which sounds damned respectable. But no one ever mentioned the marketing cost to get that revenue. A magazine that costs $50 a year will spend almost that much acquiring subscribers. No one mentioned the extra editorial costs of creating more content to try to make the damned thing special enough to pay for. I never heard any calculation of the customer-service cost of maintaining that many customers, most of whom brought in no revenue. And then there was the question of how much revenue was lost in the Times archives, included in the deal. So though TimesSelect may have brought in revenue at a rate of $10 million at the end, it didn’t earn that much profit. I wonder whether it was profitable at all.

And TimesSelect cost the paper much more in the internet age: It took the Times columnists out of the conversation and reduced their influence in America and worldwide. Worse, it diluted the paper’s Googlejuice. Even as the Times acquired About.com, a grand demonstration of the economic power of search-engine optimization (where, full disclosure, I consulted for a year and a half), the company shut off some of its content from Google’s search and bloggers’ links. That was its greatest harm.

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.

I should add that this is apparently why the company just decided to make some of its archives free — great news for readers and for the paper, for it will bring in more traffic, more Googlejuice, and more revenue (and, besides, it’d be hard to charge for archives once they were perceived as free for most TimesSelect users). Oddly, the Times story says that archives from 1987 to present and from 1851 to 1922 will be free but there will be charges for reading articles from 1923 to 1986 (I smell a committee decision).

The bottom line is that the staff of the Times online did the best it could with TimesSelect, creating the richest service they could and probably garnering the largest paying clientèle possible — but still, it was a bad idea from the start. It turned out to be one expensive experiment, one bad investment.

But now everyone else in the content business can learn from the Times’ mistake. Rupert Murdoch has publicly toyed with the idea of taking down the pay wall around the Wall Street Journal online; I’d bet the odds of that just increased. If the Times and the Journal stop charging — and the Economist just took down its wall — then I’d have to imagine that the Financial Times will have to follow suit.

So much for the idea of charging for content — news content especially — online. Too much of it is commodified. There’s no end of free competition. The value is fleeting in time. The cost of charging is too high.

Whether or not content wants to be free, it is free.

Don’t let anyone tell you that this is bad for the content business. It’s only good sense. Having worked in the magazine business, I saw this even at the dawn of the internet: As I said above, a magazine has to pay up to $30-40 in marketing costs to acquire subscribers; it can pay up to $5-7 to print and distribute a copy of a glossy magazine; it has high editorial costs. Add that up, and a magazine can find itself in the hole $60 or more per subscriber in the first year of a subscription. And they get as little as $1 per issue in subscription revenue. Yet clearly, a magazine can make money because that subscriber’s value to advertisers is much greater.

It’s the relationship that is valuable. It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution. That is the essential media moral of the internet story. It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it. That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

: Here’s the Times’ announcement. Note that they sold American Express as a sponsor of the now-public opinion section. They are good at sales.

Here’s Staci Kramer’s report in PaidContent (hmmm, a name that has never been great but is now less-great than ever). She interviewed NYTimes.com GM Vivian Schiller:

The change is because of what’s happened in the internet in the past two years—particularly the power of search.” She added later: “Think about this recipe—millions and millions of new documents, all seo’d, double-digit advertising growth.” The Times expects “the scale and the power of the revenue that would come from that over time” to replace the subscriptions revenue and then some."

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

September 17, 2007

Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis, the former “creator and founding editor” of Entertainment Weekly and former Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, writes a fairly well-read blog, Buzz Machine, which has a lot of influence on media types, especially other bloggers. I read Buzz Machine and find that Jarvis has intelligent insights and does some good reporting and commentary on topics such as the importance of a free press, on citizen journalism, on the Internet and on blogs and blogging. I agree with his positions on some things and disagree strongly with others. He’s highly opinionated, and, to me that’s good, because you always know where he stands and he makes you think.

He’s been accused of being a pushy self-promoter, which I agree with, and his flogging his appearances in the media is annoying. But what I find most annoying is his pompous self-righteousness about blogging and the Intent. He writes and talks (oh, how he talks on radio and television) like he invented both. He used to be a Journalist with a big J. Now he’s a Blogger with a big B, and claims that Blogging is the new Journalism and has replaced it and become the main-stream media. Woe be to anyone who criticizes or denigrates bloggers (especially him). He seems to be promoting himself to be the conscience of all bloggers.

He’s pals with and a promoter of Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog. Rosen was one of the first bloggers on the press and journalism and still is the most thoughtful (if often highly theoretical). If you go to PressThink, you’ll see a pretty straightforward blog with no advertising. No buttons or banners, no Google AdSense links. Nothing that generates revenue. This gives me the message that he’s not out to make any money from blogging, not trying to be popular or controversial to generate traffic, that he’s an intelligent journalism professor who’s passionate about the press, the news, a free press, and journalism. I read his blog almost every time he posts and I’ve never read about Jay Rosen—he doesn’t promote himself, he promotes ideas—good ideas.

When I went to Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine site today (9/17) I was slapped with a large skyscraper banner ad for Washlet—the TOTO Washlet—which is a modern-day bidet in the shape of a toilet, and the bottom half of the ad was a large female nude butt with a smiley face painted on it. When I showed the ad to my wife, she said, “gross!” You know that if she’s married to me, she has high tolerance for gross, but that ad pushed her gross button. Mine, too. Inappropriate, in bad taste.

In my last blog, I wrote that I thought the New York Times should not have run the MoveOn.org ad that, in essence, accused General Petraeus of being a traitor with the line “Betray Us” because it was in bad taste. Or at least the Times should have tried to get MoveOn.org to take a different approach. Why does Jarvis, who professes to be a serious journalist allow his ad network to serve ads on his site showing big butt cracks? Is he that hard up for the few dollars he makes? Or maybe he really doesn’t have a conscience, or, certainly, a sense of good taste.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

MoveoOn.org’s Petraeus Ad

On Monday. September 10, MoveOn.org ran a now notorious full-page ad in the New York Times which suggested that General Petraeus, a respected four-star general, should be called “General Betray Us.” Republicans were furious and denounced the group as “an extreme left-wing organization.” Even some Democrats were not pleased with the “Betray Us” headline. Senator Joe Biden said, "I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth" about the suggestion that the general had betrayed the country. And Senator John Kerry called the MoveOn.org ad “over the top.”

There were also reports in blogs that Times went off rate card in selling the ad to MoveOn.org—that the Times sold the ad for $65,000 when its rate card indicated a price of $180,000 for a full page. The implication seems to be that the Times cut its rates because it was sympathetic to the left-wing organization’s anti-Bush, anti-Petraeus message. The flames of this accusation were probably fanned by a Times article by Katherine Seeley that ran on Saturday, September 15, titled “Anti-War Ad Prompts Dispute,” in which Seeley makes a fairly typical he-said, he-said attempt to balance the first part of the story with quotes from Republicans and Democrats, from presidential candidates from both sides, and from Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org. However, the last part of Seeley’s article reiterates three of MoveOn.org’s assertions in its ad, thus reinforcing MoveOn.org’s claims and with no balancing information from General Petraeus’s testimony to Congress, which was available to Seeley when she wrote the article.

The Times did not enhance its reputation for fairness, balance, and good taste by accepting the ad and for running stories that seem to reinforce an anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Petraeus bias. MoveOn.org did not enhance its reputation either.

As for the Times’ alleged rate cut, in this Reuters piece, Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog, Buzz Machine, suggests: "The quandary the Times gets stuck in is they don't want to admit you can buy an ad for that rate, no matter who you are," and he noted that with print advertising revenues in decline newspapers generally did offer big discounts.

Jon Fine in his reliable and smart blog “On Media,” for BuinessWeek Online wrote, “I should note here that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed to me what MoveOn.org already said about said ad--that it cost $65,000, and that it was in keeping with the going rate for 'open' political advocacy ads--that is, ads for which the Times has discretion on when to run them.”

I don’t believe that the Times broke its rate card for MoveOn.org, that Mathis is being candid, and that Jeff Jarvis is wrong. The rate is legit and has nothing to do with newspapers offering big discounts because of ad declines. The Times, which has a pretty good sales organization, understands that lowering prices doesn’t create demand. Where else but the Times would an advocacy ad like this have such a huge impact? There is still large demand for ads in the Times by many advertisers, especially those who want to try to influence the political discussion agenda. The reason overall demand for newspaper advertising is down is because major advertisers such as automotive and financial services are cutting back, not those who want to influence the national debate. In fact, the MoveOn.org ad created demand—the Giuliani campaign bought an ad in response a couple of days later.

Had I been publisher of the NY Times (and I’m thankful I’m not), I would have charged MoveOn.org the regular earned rate for ads in that category (the Times has a labyrinth of a rate card that has dozens of categories—see for yourself, if you’re interested, and you’ll see—if you can find it—that the rate is on the card somewhere). But I would have asked MoveOn.org to change the line “General Betray Us” because I think it was in bad taste. The Times doesn’t carry ads for X rated-movies or for penis enlargement operations because it feels they are in bad taste, not appropriate for its readers.

I would have made the argument to MoveOn.org that the ad would backfire on them (and it has) and that a more reasoned, less incendiary approach would appeal to Times readers. I would say that the Times knows its readers better than MoveOn.org and that it knows what appeals work with them. I would have done my best to persuade them to change that line and told them that unless they changed it, the Times would not run the ad. I believe in this situation, the New York Times had the leverage—MoveOn.og needed the Times more than the Times needed the $65,000. I believe that if the Times had held its ground, MoveOn.org would have hollered but would have run a less offensive ad.

I’m sorry the Times did not take this approach. I know MoveOn.org and other far-left, anti-war groups would cry “freedom of the press,” the same squeal you hear from penis-enlargement advertisers, but I would say, like Nathan Detroit, “So, sue me, sue me, what can you do me.” I think the Times was wrong and a little gutless to run the ad.

If I were the head of MoveOn.org (and I’m thankful I’m not), when the copywriters brought the ad mock up to me I would have said that I loved the message in the ad, but not the execution. I’d tell them to take out the “Betray Us” line because it was bad strategy, for many reasons. First, even though the line would be attention getting, it would not appeal to the readers of the NY Times, who tend to be relatively reasonable. It would piss off conservatives, who, in spite of popular perceptions, read the Times, just as many liberals read the Wall Street Journal. The ad would mobilize conservatives and the execution of the ad—the “Betray Us” line—would become an issue, not the facts, which has happened.

Second, I would tell them that several studies on advertising, including one form Harvard on anti-drug advertising, indicate that negative advertising doesn’t work. It tends to work in political advertising, one candidate versus another, because it creates doubts about a candidate, especially among undecideds. However, virtually no one is undecided about the war in Iraq--people either love or hate it (the vast majority). Bush as no credibility and polls show that the military now has more credibility than the White House or any of the presidential candidates on what’s going on in Iraq. So, inferring that the highly respected Petraeus is a traitor is really stupid strategy because it will only appeal to the far-left fringe and piss off the reasonable middle as well as the conservatives.

I would have advised the copywriters to take a Marc Anthony approach and, as Marc Anthony did in his “Friends, Romans, countrymen...” speech, say that Petraeus is an honorable man. The best strategic approach would have been to praise Petraeus for being the hero and leader he is, to honor our troops in Iraq, but hammer home the point that the war in Iraq is a failed war, a morally wrong war, and that we should bring the valiant soldiers (Patraeus included) home and honor them while they are alive rather than mourn for them when they are dead.

So, to the Times, I say, “bad call,” and to MoveOn.org, I say, “move on and away from me.”

Posted by Charles Warner at 03:27 PM | Comments (5) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at September 27, 2007 04:30 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at September 18, 2007 11:11 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at September 18, 2007 06:05 PM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at September 18, 2007 11:05 AM writes:

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Media Curmudgeon at September 18, 2007 11:02 AM writes:

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September 11, 2007

ESPN’s Ombudsman

ESPN’s ombudsman is a woman—Lee Anne Schreiber, former sports editor of the New York Times. Ms. Schreiber took over the ombudsman role in April from ESPN’s first ombudsman, George Solomon, at the end of his two-year term, and during her term Schreiber will write a column at least once a month on ESPN.com.

Schreiber’s job is to “…be the public representative to ESPN for a fixed two-year term. In her role, she will offer independent examination, critique and analysis of ESPN's programming and news coverage, both on television and in other media.”

Schreiber’s latest column is titled “Vick coverage shows ESPN at its best -- and less than best,” and she does a thorough job of detailing what ESPN did right and did wrong in its television coverage of Michael Vick’s indictment and subsequent guilty plea. The purpose of this post is not to critique or second guess Schreiber’s critique of ESPN’s Vick coverage but to examine the concept of major media outlets having an ombudsman.

First, I’m all for the idea, and ESPN should be praised for having the guts to have an ombudsman. ESPN is only one of two major broadcast or cable networks to employ a watchdog, the other being CBS’s Public Eye blog. I believe that ESPN’s two-year term ombudsman is a much better system that CBS’s, but at least CBS is trying.

Can you imagine the Fox News Channel or MSNBC publishing a critique of the fairness or accuracy of its news coverage and bloviators? By having an ombudsman, ESPN sends the signal that it cares about providing accurate, fair, and balanced coverage of sports. It gives this signal with action and behavior, not with Orwellian marketing slogans.

Fox News’s slogan is “fair and balanced…we report, you decide,” when the reality is just the opposite. It’s exactly like the situation in which someone begins a conversation with the phrase, “to tell you the truth…” You know that what follows is not the truth because that person is subconsciously aware that they need to convince you and themselves that the lie they are about to tell you is the truth. It’s a Freudian slip, which is what Fox News’ slogan is.

It’s also more difficult to be fair and balanced covering sports than to do so covering other types of news. ESPN has to cover news in sports that it pays huge rights fees to program—the NFL, for example, or, even more relevant, arena football. ESPN owns a minority interest in the Arena Football League and airs some of its games and its championship game. There has always been a cozy relationship between sports teams and media outlets that make it difficult to criticize a sport, a league, or stars. If a media outlet criticizes a sport and hurts its image, team owners can make it difficult for the medium to have access to its players. Owners want homers. If a media outlet consciously avoids criticism of a team or its stars and blathers nothing put praise, it can loose credibility with its audience. It’s a delicate balance.

ESPN’s ombudsman helps maintain that balance and keep its reporting journalistically sound. But, more important, it sends a message to its audience—on TV, on the Web, and on radio—that it is making an effort to be fair and balanced and that it is providing an open mechanism for getting feedback from its audience. Being open to feedback and to comments from an audience is important to younger, Web-savvy fans and to higher educated, upper income fans, which is good business because a credible medium provides a much better environment for advertising. There is a credibility rub-off factor from believable content to advertising.

For example, Monday’s Wall Street Journal’s lead story headline was “Petraeus Pledges Modest Pullout, But Little More.” The NY Post’s headline was “Gen. Dazzles Congress With Iraq Testimony.” Which newspaper is more credible? Which newspaper has more advertising? Can you imagine the NY Post or Fox News having an ombudsman whose job was to offer independent examination, critique and analysis of programming and news coverage? Of course not.

I’d like to see NBC, ABC, FOX, FOX News, CNN, and MSNBC all have an official ombudsman, and I’d like to see CBS strengthen its ombudsman function, Public Eye, to make it more journalistically serious and not so cute, and to promote it more heavily. ESPN’s ombudsman system is the best model for other media, especially TV. Who knows, if all of the major television news and sports media had a strong ombudsman, news coverage might improve. It might even spill over to local television news, but that really is too much to hope for.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

September 07, 2007

Coverage of Senator Craig—Why?

The big story in the media in the past week was Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig’s arrest, guilty plea, resignation from the Senate, and, now, un-resignation. How has the media covered this story? Too much.

It seems Craig was first outed by Mike Rogers, who, according to WasingtonPost.com, has “been a feared one-man machine, outing nearly three dozen senior political and congressional staffers, White House aides and, most damagingly, Congress members on his blog” Blogactive. Note I didn’t link to Rogers’ blog because I can’t imagine any of my readers wanting to read it.

Dan Popkey, a reporter and columnist at Craig’s hometown newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, spent eight months looking into long-whispered rumors that Senator Craig was a closet gay, but the paper didn’t publish anything because it could find no corroborating evidence. I suppose the paper undertook the investigation because Craig vehemently denied rumors he cruised rest rooms and was gay, and, more to the point, I think, he was anti-gay and pro family values, which made him look like a hypocrite. Craig had supported constitutional and state amendments banning same-sex marriage, and if he were gay, the thinking goes, voters should know of his hypocrisy, which "For journalists and for voters…is always a hanging crime," says Tobe Berkovitz, interim dean at Boston University's College of Communication, according to WashingtonPost.com.

If hypocrisy is a hanging crime, I want to invest ever penny I have in a company in Washington D.C. that makes hangman’s nooses. In a decade journalism schools don’t graduate enough reporters to make even a slight dent in investigating crimes of hypocrisy. So let’s narrow the search and have them go after something more titillating like Paris Hilton’s newest sex partner, Lindsay Lohan’s newest rehab adventure, runaway brides, or oversexed politicians. No; too much to cover, even for a million reporters. Narrow it to oversexed politicians.

OK, the media and Republicans hit the jackpot with Clinton. It seems as though reporters and editors were kicking themselves for not outing John F. Kennedy as having the most monumental sexual appetite since French Emperor Louis Napoleon, who was said to have had a different woman brought to his chambers every night. He even impregnated the 21-year-old daughter of Baron Haussmann, his friend, the Prefect of the Seine, and the architect of the rebuilding of Paris. All of which tended to upset his wife, Empress Eugenie. So, reporters went after Clinton with glee to make up for not publishing what they all knew about Kennedy. They stoned Bill in the press for years (and some Republicans still are). I guess they never got the message about being innocent themselves before they threw stones at anyone. I guess it proves that reporters don’t pay much attention to the Bible. But we all knew that.

The coverage of the Senator Craig story has been almost as much overkill as with Paris Hilton’s release from jail, but with much less interest on behalf of audiences and readers. Enough already. Stop. Also, the media usually wastes our time with horse-race coverage of politics and politicians—covering strategy instead of issues—but with the Craig story, the media has missed the strategy angle. So, let’s look at the story from a strategic point of view.

Below is a Payoff Matrix similar to ones used in game theory problems and in making strategic decisions. Note that there are three possible sexual orientations, not two as is widely and incorrectly assumed in the media.

Click to see Payoff Matrix

Examine the six options carefully making several unrealistic assumptions: 1) That personality, looks, or hair cuts make no difference, 2) that all elections are honest and all voters can vote, and 3) that “performance” means bringing pork to a state and voting the way the majority of constituents approve of, 4) that party preference has shifted in favor of the Democrats in most northern and some western states, and 5) that a state does not have a large faction of Mormon voters.

As you’ll see from the six options, if you’re a candidate in Republican state and the public knows your sexual orientation, your best strategy to appeal to the largest numbers of voters is show off your straightness and to admit your sexual orientation if you are bisexual or homosexual. If the public doesn’t know your sexual orientation, the best strategy is to bring home the bacon and vote as your constituents expect you to vote.

If you are a Democrat in a Democratic state, admit your sexual orientation no matter if the public knows or not, because it doesn’t matter—you can’t lose.

If you are a Republican in a state that is sick of the war in Iraq, Republican corruption, usurping of power, and invading privacy, and, thus, leaning Democratic, the best strategy is to admit your sexual orientation, bring home the bacon, and vote as your constituents expect you to vote.

But if you’re in a state with a large Mormon voting block, like in Idaho, under no circumstances admit you’re gay. Being a hypocrite is OK, admitting to a misdemeanor is OK, but being gay isn’t.

So Idaho’s Senator Craig’s best strategy is to hire good lawyer to fight the police entrapment, which he has, apologize for his behavior, admit to nothing but hypocrisy and a misdemeanor, and blame the police. The media will pursue the story, but his constituents in Idaho will overlook his transgressions as long as he bashes gays and votes the way the NRA, anti-gun control lobby wants him to. The Democrats won’t go after him because if they start investigating hypocrisy and large, loony sexual appetites, they know they’d open up such an enormous can of their own worms that the media birds of prey would go into another feeding frenzy that would never end. The Republicans will have to forgive Craig, swallow their pride, and take him back because if they don’t, they give up too much power to the disgusting outer-in-chief, Michael Rogers, who is, with superb irony, the modern-day Joseph McCarthy.

After this whole mess passes, the Republicans will come out looking like the bad guys for not sticking up for one of their family. Only Senator Arlen Specter has had the guts to do so. Good for him. But maybe he’s gay? That’ll be the next rumor worthy of close scrutiny by honest, objective, issue-oriented, self-righteous journalists—another feeding frenzy on a meaningless issue.

Finally, the best coverage of the Craig story I’ve seen was by the New York Times when it ran an op-ed piece on September 2, 2007, by Laura M. McDonald titled “America’s Toe-Tapping Menace” that provides some insight into the behavior of men who troll for sex. Here’s what McDonald writes: “What is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.”

Covering these arrests in the media accomplishes even less.

Posted by Charles Warner at 08:41 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at September 8, 2007 10:32 PM writes:

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September 03, 2007

Labor Day

Today, Monday, September 3, 2007, is Labor Day, but it has more significance to me as the day my daughter is predicted to go into labor with her second child (tenth grandchild) than as a tribute to the American labor movement, which has fizzled badly in recent years. The way things are going in the country today, I almost expect President Bush to rename the day of out-door barbeques as Private Equity Day or Celebrity Donor Day.

After all, Labor Day, which was originally celebrated in the 1880s as a day to honor the strength and esprit de corps of trade and labor organizations, was co-opted in the last half of the twentieth century by politicians who wanted to appeal to labor unions, which then controlled lots of votes and lots of money. But as union membership plummeted and, thus, available money dried up, politicians mined richer veins for potential donors—Wall Street and Hollywood. As political campaigns become more and more expensive because of ever higher costs associated with polling, consultants, travel, and, especially, television, political candidates go where the money is and egalitarian idealism is all but forgotten.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there were good reasons for unions—workers were exploited by management. A general strike by labor in 1886 eventually led to a standard eight-hour work day, which was a good thing. But by the 1960s labor unions had become the oppressors. The pendulum had swung too far the other way. Many unions bullied management into acquiescing to egregious, featherbedding work rules. Many unions were run by corrupt bullies who were more interested in their perks than their members.

Maintaining their perks, among other things, motivated illogical membership drives, like the one I was involved with at the New School, where teachers are now represented by the United Auto Workers—now go figure that. I did get a raise, but it was just enough to cover my mandatory union dues. The ones who benefited the most were the union organizers and the lawyers who did the negotiations. Guess who pays? Tuition will go up and taxpayers will pay for defaulted student loans. Who makes money when tuition goes up? Private firms who chase students to give them loans will make money—see the NY Times story yesterday on Daniel Meyers of First Marblehead.

So, what does another day off mean to someone like me who is retired, or, who, like about 60% of all IBM employees, work from home? Nothing. And why would I want to honor labor, which implies labor unions, when I hate unions? I hate unions even more when I call a support line to get my wireless router or some software to work and I get some unctuous Indian named “George,” who I can’t understand, on the other end of the phone. I get angrier and angrier as he reads his mechanical responses from his computer screen: “Have I answered all of your questions, Mistah Waaaaanah?”

A flash of self-loathing wafts over me for not having the guts to say, “shut the fuck up,” but it passes quickly as I steam in anger over the unions that forced companies to go to India rather than deal with spoiled, demanding, corrupt, bullying American unions.

So what am I thinking on Labor Day? I’m hoping my daughter has an easy time with her labor and that she and her new son are healthy—a happy thought for a day just like any other for someone who has every day off, no thanks to the labor movement or unions.

I think Labor Day is the perfect name for a holiday in which people get paid for doing nothing--the ultimate goal of unions.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:24 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at September 5, 2007 03:59 PM writes:

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