Hedge funds flex muscles with NY Times
Written on 1 March 2008 by Carl CarterAs if The New York Times didn’t have enough trouble resulting from the John McCain flap, it now has to deal with hedge funds that have bought big stakes in the company and now want to tell the Sulzbergers how to run the business.
Both Firebrand Partners and Harbinger Capital Partners want the chain to sell off more of its assets, and Harbinger is promoting its own slate of directors. It doesn’t help that classified revenues are in the tank. For the chain (which includes the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune), total ad revenue fell 11.4 percent mostly due to classified losses.
And those losses are huge — “help wanted” classifieds down 31.9 percent, while real estate ad sales were down 25.9 percent. Ouch.
Monster. Craigslist. Zillow. Younameit.com.
The advertisers are going elsewhere. It’s not all about money; some are paying more, and some are paying less. But whatever it is, they’re going, or maybe they’re gone. And that means pressures on the newsroom will only get worse.
Like it or not, advertising pays the bills. I’ve been whining for more than a year about the need to evolve to a new business model for mainstream media. We don’t have it yet, and time is running out faster than I had expected. Look at the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. Look almost anywhere. It’s hard to find a publicly held chain that isn’t circling the wagons (or already overrun by the barbarians).
Finally, (sort of) an opinion on the NYT-McCain flap
Written on 26 February 2008 by Carl CarterAs I mentioned last week, I had trouble getting my arms around the New York Times story on John McCain’s relationship (or whatever it was) with an attractive female lobbyist. Having worked with the Times numerous times over the years, I have to believe that they know more than they wrote. They always do. That’s how they work; only the most solid stuff is “fit to print” in their world.
To be candid, this was not the Times‘ finest moment. The implication of a sexual relationship was nothing more than hearsay based on a source with an ax to grind and others who were anonymous. The story did not reflect the Times standards I’ve seen over the years.
Anybody who has read past posts knows that I regard the Times as the gold standard of journalism, but this time it feels a bit copperish.
Obama picks Hillary’s pocket
Written on 21 February 2008 by Carl CarterIn coverage of primary results, a protocol of sorts has evolved regarding election night speeches. The loser goes on first, concedes graciously, and the winner stays offstage until the loser finishes. That way, each candidate gets the immensely important airtime on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. But after the Wisconsin caucuses, Obama broke the rules. About 10 minutes into Clinton’s speech, Obama moved to his own podium, knowing full well that the networks would shift from the loser to the winner. In doing so, he stole a solid half hour or more of prime time from Clinton.
As media strategies go, it was a stroke of genius, and you can believe it was no accident. My personal theory is that the maneuver was payback for Clinton’s refusal to acknowledge defeat in the Feb. 12 contests in Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland.
One thing it tells me is that the gloves are off from here on.
Meanwhile, I feel a need to opine on the New York Times story about John McCain’s relationship with Vicki Iseman, a willowy blond 40-year-old lobbyist. I just can’t figure this thing out yet.
Super Tuesday surprise: The Washington Post gets it
Written on 6 February 2008 by Carl CarterI spent most of Super Tuesday flipping between CNN and MSNBC to see which network would give me the best feel for the incredibly complex picture. As usual, MSNBC seemed to have better analysis (CNN spends too much time patting itself on the back), but the real surprise came when I started sneaking upstairs to visit the washingtonpostpolitics.com web site.
Graphically, CNN’s presentation of the raw numbers was far easier to follow, providing more information faster than MSNBC. But as is increasingly my gripe with CNN, they provided too little in the way of perspective. Even on Super Tuesday, we viewed the news not from the eye of an eagle, but rather from that of an earthworm.
But when I sneaked off to the computer and visited washingtonpostpolitics.com, I was blown away by the efficiency with which the editors provided up-to-date information in a way that made sense. There was a map on left (appropriately) showing the Democratic results, and one on the right showing the Republican returns. As each state was projected, it was color coded for the winning candidate. But best of all, you could simply hover your mouse over a state and immediately get the current results and the percentage of boxes counted. In seconds, I was able to get a better read on the elections than I could gain from a half hour of the news networks combined.
The key, of course, was the interactive nature of the web. By and large, you still can’t hover over a map to get information on TV. But it goes deeper than that. The stories written through the night also did a much better job of summarizing the returns and making sense of them.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess. For a while, I’ve been addicted to the Washington Post’s daily podcasts by Ed O’Keefe, who had taken a break from those to manage the Super Tuesday reporting on the web site. His podcasts are the best daily political fix anywhere — print or broadcast. Better than Hardball. Better than NPR Morning Edition or All Things Considered. Heck, even better than Jon Stewart’s Daily Show! So I shouldn’t be surprised that washingtonpostpolitics.com did the best job on Super Tuesday.
This also serves as a reminder that increasingly, podcasting is playing a major role in how we get our information. We download it with our daily sync and listen to it at our leisure, at the health club or in the car. Indeed, I’d say there are three or four podcasts that are more useful than anything on cable these days. I’ll make a point to give it more attention here going forward.
Microsoft never could figure out the Internet
Written on 2 February 2008 by Carl CarterI’ve said for decades that failure to understand media can make the difference between success and failure, and Microsoft’s $44.6 billion buyout offer for Yahoo! is a good reminder of that. No company in history has ever anticipated trends and stayed ahead of the curve better than Microsoft. But despite their remarkable success, they’ve never really understood the online world. In the very earliest days of the Web, around 1994 and 1995, they admitted as much. They tried to hang on to MSN as a subscriber-based network with proprietary content for too long. Meanwhile, the Web came out of nowhere with the introduction of Mosaic, the first browser. Netscape bolted ahead temporarily with a slightly better browser, and Microsoft was left sitting on the sidelines with a proprietary service while the real action was out on the public web.
The nice thing about being Microsoft is that you can foul up and still buy your way into the game. They acquired the rights to the old Mosaic code, updated it and rebranded it as Internet Explorer. By building it into Windows, they quickly passed Netscape, which users had to download on dial-up connections and install. Despite prolonged antitrust cases (abroad as well as in the United States), they made it stick. For a couple of years, their slogan became “Where do you want to go today?” as if they — not Al Gore — had invented the Internet. It worked. They were back on top.
But they’ve never encountered the likes of Google, which has rolled out one amazing web-based product after another with frightening speed. (Especially frightening if you’re Bill Gates.) Google has already announced its intention to make desktop operating systems irrelevant, and the company is well on its way to doing just that.
Like every monopoly, Microsoft has been gouging the market for years with overpriced products. On the desktop, there is no meaningful competition for Office. But we’re seeing cracks. Vista has been the biggest corporate flop since the Edsel, and nothing short of a total rewrite will make people want it. Apple gained major market share in December, because people don’t want to buy Windows machines loaded with Vista. Vista’s market share after more than a year is still below 12 percent. The new version of Office isn’t selling, because Microsoft changed the file formats without fully adopting the standard Open Document formats. Corporations aren’t buying it because they’re not willing to start worrying about whose computer can read which document.
Enter Google Apps, Google’s new web-based software. Combined with Microsoft’s clumsy handling of its desktop products, web-based software is beginning to make sense. Already, you can use Google’s word processor, spreadsheet and calendar online for free. (Or virtually free for enhanced services.) You can let associates anywhere in the world read or even edit your documents, without emailing them around. You could very well do it with no desktop software at all. Or with the free Openoffice suite, which is entirely good enough. And that scares Microsoft to death.
Here’s how today’s New York Times sees it:
“Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is thus a tacit, and difficult, admission that the company did not get its online business right…. The Google challenge to Microsoft extends beyond online search and advertising. Google is at the forefront of companies offering software as online services, including Web-based alternatives to Microsoft’s lucrative desktop products like word processing, spreadsheets and presentation programs.”
By making its bid for Yahoo!, Microsoft is once again trying to buy its way into a game. But I don’t see how it will work. Yahoo! doesn’t bring all that much to the party in terms of desktop or web applications — at least not in comparison to Google.
A train the size of Microsoft doesn’t stop on a dime, so Microsoft will dominate for years. But they still don’t really understand the Internet.
Investors increase pressure on news organizations
Written on 28 January 2008 by Carl CarterLos Angeles Times editor James O’Shea was forced out by the newspaper’s new owners — Tribune Company — after a dispute over budget cuts. He is the third editor to leave since 2005. In a parting shot emailed to the newspaper’s staff, O’Shea said, “They want to put you in a straitjacket. I think it is a sign of something that troubles the Tribune Company deeper. That is, they really don’t have any faith in journalists to make these decisions. They treat you like you are budgetary adolescents that can’t be trusted.”
Meanwhile, Alabama-based hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, which owns a stake of almost 5 percent in The New York Times, declared its intent to elect its own directors. A day later, the fund scrambled to point out that it did not seek to remove control from the Sulzberger family. The hedge fund sent a similar letter last week to Media General, of which it owns 18 percent.
Election night projections
Written on 27 January 2008 by Carl CarterWhen all the major media networks projected Barack Obama as the winner of the South Carolina races within seconds after the polls closed, I was all prepared to write a “did they learn nothing from New Hampshire?” diatribe, but the exit polls had served them well: Obama won, and won big.
Still, it’s still not clear to me whether they’ve learned their lesson. Most SC polls had Obama ahead, but only by 9 to 15 points. Yet, he won the primary by a whopping 28 percentage points. In other words, the South Carolina polls were farther off target than the ones in New Hampshire. But because they didn’t predict the wrong winner (only the margin), there hasn’t been a peep about it. But for the record, the pollsters missed it again. If they had been wrong in the other direction, they’d be wiping more egg off their chins.
That said, there’s just something fundamentally wrong with projecting a winner before the first actual vote is counted. Aside from bragging rights of being the first to make the projection, it seems to me that it’s bad for ratings. Once I know the winner, I’m tempted to switch off and watch something more stimulating, like maybe House or a M*A*S*H rerun. As long as there’s suspense, I’m glued to the TV, switching between MSNBC and CNN.
Loss of the 24-hour news cycle redux
Written on 24 January 2008 by Carl CarterHere’s another example of the point I made earlier this week about the loss of the 24-hour news cycle. If you missed it, the crux is that the pressure to get breaking news out in minutes makes it impossible for reporters to check their facts, question alternative sources and gain perspective.
Paradoxically, the constant flow of stuff on the Internet and cable news may actually be leaving us less informed. By the time our best media follow up and give us a meaningful context, it’s old news and nobody’s interested.
Heath Ledger Tragedy Reveals New World of ‘Speed Reporting’
Heath Ledger Tragedy Reveals New World of ‘Speed Reporting’By Editor & Publisher Staff
Published: January 22, 2008 9:30 PM ET
NEW YORK Already the media have found at least two dozen angles to approach the sudden death of actor Heath Ledger in New York City today. The Los Angeles Times entertainment blog, Web Scout, used the occasion to look at the way the news emerged, almost in “real time.”
The Times now reports on its site, pointing to the danger, “that preliminary reports that pills were found scattered around Ledger’s body” were “inaccurate.”
If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
Chief among the media’s switchbacks was the early non-fact that Ledger’s death had taken place at the New York apartment of Mary-Kate Olsen. Celebrity news site TMZ.com and even the New York Times’ City Room blog reported this piece of misinformation before they unreported it.
Importantly, however, neither the New York Times nor TMZ got it wrong. It was the NYPD spokesman who had the story mixed up — the media were simply parroting incorrect information.
When the spokesman later corrected himself, the sites rushed to update the story, but readers were critical of the changes.
“TMZ is in such a rush to break the news,” one commenter wrote, echoing dozens of others, “that they are usually wrong first.”
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
Study documents false war pretenses, media failures
Written on 23 January 2008 by Carl CarterThe Fund for Independence in Journalism has just published a comprehensive review of the Bush Administration’s false statements about Iraqi WMDs and links to Al Qaeda — and the media’s failure to correct them — in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Over the past two and a half years, researchers compiled a database of all public statements on the two topics by George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
The study found that Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld made at least 935 false statements in the two years following the 9/11 attacks. The authors conclude that “n exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
To those of us who depend on an independent “fourth estate” to guard against abuses of power (and that’s all of us, whether we know it or not!), this is troubling, to say the least. There are a lot of causes, including:
- Compression of news cycles. We’re seeing the impact of the disappearance of the daily and weekly news cycles. When the news came only once a day, media had hours to check the facts, contact sources, and gain some perspective. Now that the competition will have its story out in 10 minutes, reporters have to simply do a quick rewrite of the press release and move on to the next story.
- Depletion of newsroom sources. Draconian cuts forced by declining circulation have made it more difficult to assign teams of reporters to work for days or weeks on an issue.
- Misplaced priorities. Of course, with resources becoming more scarce every day, one has to wonder what the media could do if they focused less on the dramas of celebrity brats like Britney Spears and put more of that staff time to work on things that matter.
I know it makes me sound like an old fogey, but I’m convinced that if media in the 1970s had covered the news the way they do now, we’d have never heard of Watergate.
Second Life still doesn’t make sense
Written on 19 January 2008 by Carl CarterThe first time I tried to use Second Life, I didn’t get it. It required a bulky, buggy application that kept crashing every computer on which I loaded it. I finally got in and realized it would take hours of work before my “avatar” could do anything interesting, and I bailed. In all fairness, I felt I should give Second Life a second look to see how it’s maturing. So I did, but I still don’t get it.
It crashes less, but I still don’t see Second Life going anywhere. Don’t get me wrong. It will continue to grow for a while. It may evolve into something worthwhile. But the numbers are still unimpressive.
Second Life currently boasts more than 12 million “residents,” but a resident is defined as anybody who has registered. In other words, it’s anybody who’s even looked at the thing. I’m a resident, even though I barely made it through the front door. The number who have logged on in the last 30 days is currently 897,269. Now remember, that includes not just people returning, but everybody who’s downloaded the software and registered in the last 30 days.
So in the sense of people who actually hang around, do stuff and maybe spend a little money, how many true “Second Lifers” are there? Nobody seems to know for sure — in part, because there’s no clear definition. Second Life claims 519,000 “active” users, but that includes everybody who has been online a hour a month. That’s not a lot of time by online standards. In their official blog, the proprietors describe a paltry core group of 50,000 users: “We believe that many of these 50,000 users are creating the diverse creations and experiences that make Second Life such an interesting place to explore. This is the powerful engine fueling the steady long term growth of Second Life. ”
So for all the hype, only 1 in 240 “residents” actually hangs around and turns into an active participant in terms of “positive Linden dollar flow.” A Linden is the surrogate for a dollar in Second Life. At first, this seemed silly, but 75% of the users now come from outside the United States, so a single currency could make sense. Still, even CEO Philip Rosedale told Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick in December 2007 that fewer stores are being set up because “there still isn’t enough traffic or ability to attract attention to justify most of those expenditures.” Indeed, Kirkpatrick’s article notes that “virtual sex … remains probably the lion’s share of service usage (you can buy a virtual penis at in-world stores.)”
My reasons for being bearish on Second Life may differ from those of a lot of other people.
- It doesn’t solve any “real world” problems. If you want to do business on the web, the web does just fine. In fact, the web worked (to say the least) precisely because we needed it. It made sense from the start.
- The learning curve is far too steep, resulting in high levels of churn. People get on, look around, and draw the same conclusion I did: “Not worth the trouble.”
- The day is long gone when one company can own the online world, even one of its own creation. Before Mosaic (the first browser) appeared almost 15 years ago and ushered in the World Wide Web, we had a collection of online services, each more or less standing on its own — The Source, CompuServe, MSN and AOL. They had their own software, their own exclusive merchants, and their own subscribers. Eventually, all became gateways to the Web as they swallowed each other up. Today, only the AOL and MSN brands remain, and they have nothing to do with their origin.
Meanwhile, other online passions occupy the time of the users who, in a vacuum, might become Second Lifers. MySpace, Facebook and other social sites continue to explode, and there’s plenty of commerce, conversation, and sex on the Web.
In short, I don’t see it succeeding in the long run because it’s just a clumsy way to do stuff we can already do.
