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The Digital Economy's Coming Subprime Crisis (And What You Can Learn From It)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

harvardbusiness.org - By Umair Haque - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Today's media players aren't investing in better ads. They're investing in more — and more toxic — ads. Uh oh: it's the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore. Here are eight time-worn steps to crisis that Wall Street took yesterday, and media's taking today. Toxicity. Wall Street's subprime crisis was built on toxic financial instruments. The mediascape's subprime crisis is being built on toxic communications. Social gaming — Facebook's Farmville, for example — is the hot growth area for VCs, advertisers, and publishers alike. But last week, TechCrunch blew the lid off it: much revenue in this nascent market is derived from scams masquerading as "ads." To me, there are striking echoes of CDOs — a hot new growth market for Wall Street, later revealed to be a house of cards.

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Google Computes News Quality

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

InformationWeek - By Thomas Claburn - Nov. 16 (News Report) - A recently filed patent application suggests that Google is taking steps to promote news produced by major media companies on Google News. Whenever a newspaper dies, Google turns up on the list of suspects. The evidence of Google's involvement tends to be sketchy. A close examination of the crime scene typically points to a different villain -- the classified revenue killer known as Craigslist, parasitic news sites that siphon potential visitors, declining subscription and ad revenue, management that can't adapt, or the hyper-competition created by the Internet's ability to collapse distance and divert attention. But Google nonetheless has been forced to defend itself. In May, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet that Google is the hand that feeds media companies, channeling over one billion clicks every month to online publishers through Google Search and Google News. She suggested that Wikipedia, with its constantly updated articles, might offer a better model for journalism in the Internet age than a series of separate articles. And she proposed that online publishers might be failing their readers by presenting them with Web pages that lack engaging social features.

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Josh Silver: Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Josh Silver - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity.

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Good Riddance To Mainstream Media?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Public Radio - By John Donvan - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - As newspapers go under, the network newscasts lose viewers and the mainstream media in general see more and more of their audience shift online, are we as a society better or worse off? Some argue that the diversity of voices available on the Internet to provide information and analysis makes for a better system. Others say a decline in traditional journalism means lower standards and fewer resources to investigate crucial stories. A panel of experts took on this topic Oct. 27 in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate: John Hockenberry, Michael Wolff, Phil Bronstein, David Carr, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Three panelists argued for the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media" and three against in an Oxford-style debate. Before the debate, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 25 percent in favor of the motion and 50 percent against. Twenty-five percent was undecided. After the debate, 24 percent supported the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media," while 68 percent opposed it and 8 percent remained undecided.

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Toward a Slow-News Movement

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mediactive - By Dan Gillmor - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news” — an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day. One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff.

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API's Partnership With Newsweek Raises Ad Cash and Ethics Questions

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Anne C. Mulkern - Nov. 05 (News Analysis) - Newsweek and API have teamed on four forums so far and are planning another -- "Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?" -- for Dec. 1, when the Senate could be holding a floor debate on climate legislation. An invitation sent yesterday to lawmakers' offices said Gerard again would be a panelist and that requests to speak were "currently pending confirmation with notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate." Lawmakers receiving invitations included Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

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Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Talking Points Memo - By Zachary Roth - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an event on climate-change and energy issues involving lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.

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Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Thomas Frank - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look. What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call." One of the specific answers Mr. Beck wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese Communist shared with Mother Teresa. Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government. What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck, to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come to pass.

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What's So Scary About Michael Pollan? Why Corporate Agriculture Tried to Censor His University Speech | Health and Wellness

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Martha Rosenberg - Oct. 28 (News) - "Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research," the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose "smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,"--"Cowschwitz." Ouch.

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The White House’s war with Fox News

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Louis Menand - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

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WH: We're Happy To Exclude Fox, But Didn't Yesterday

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Talking Points Memo - By Christina Bellantoni - Oct. 24 (News Report) - Adding to the Fox News v. White House feud today is a dust-up over an interview with pay czar Ken Feinberg. Feinberg did a pen and pad with reporters to brief them on cutting executive compensation. TV correspondents asked to get the comments on camera; Treasury agreed to one pool camera, giving the list of those who asked. (Fox was not among them)

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Communications arm? Fox & Friends recites misleading GOP press release on stimulus