Category Archives: Media

Media General Not Getting It

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One of my favorite blogs over the last couple of years has been bookofjoe.com.  It’s a compendium of interesting items, not the least of which are articles that the blogs owner/author has read in the New York Times or other newspapers and has reproduced on his site with full links and attributions to the source.  The fact that he doesn’t excerpt but instead provides the article in full has caused some consternation with some of the ink-stained wretches lawyers.

Case in point is the Charlottesville Daily Progress‘s (Joe lives in Charlottesville, VA) lawyer Andrew Carington.  He sent a lengthly cease and desist letter to Joe who promptly posted it on his blog for all to see.  Joe points out that he’s pretty sure that the authors of the articles probably wouldn’t agree with the lawyer’s move since getting a placement on his site vastly expands their audience.  I’d have to agree, and I’d go so far as to say that Media General is making a business mistake by going after him (I’m not going to argue the legality of Joe’s practice since I’m no copyright expert).

Here’s my thinking.  The Daily Progress is a local paper owned by the same company that owns my hometown paper The Winston-Salem Journal.  I’d say it’s safe to assume that both newspapers get the majority of their traffic from folks within their region. On the other hand Joe gets a lot of his traffic from all over the internet tubes so by getting a link from his site the newspaper is getting exposure to a much broader audience than they do on their own.  And guess what?  We’re talking major traffic.

BookofjoevsdailyprogressI went to Compete.com and ran a quick comparison between bookofjoe.com and dailyprogress.com. If you look at the screenshot on the left (click on it to see it at full size) you’ll see that while the Daily Progress does have a bit more traffic than Joe it ain’t by much (63,341 visitors vs. 55,262) and you’ll also see that Joe’s traffic is trending up much more quickly than the Daily Progress.  You’d think they’d love the opportunity to get their name and a link to their site out there to such a growing audience.  Heck, Joe’s offering them free syndication.

But I’m sure the honchos at Media General are thinking that Joe’s getting rich off their work…oh wait, he doesn’t take advertising.  So maybe he’s not getting rich off of their work, so maybe it’s the principle of the thing. But I’m a cynic so I’m thinking they’re just ticked because one guy writing in his bathrobe in his condo is pulling almost as much traffic as their newspaper with dozens of employees and they think they can push him around.  Whatever their motivation it’s a dumb move.

Should I Now Be Considered a ‘Professional’ Writer?

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A while back I signed up to be included in Pluck’s Blogburst network and then forgot all about it.  Well it ends up that Reuters ran some of my posts that they found on Blogburst.  Now even though I don’t get one red cent for this I’m wondering if this makes me a "professional" writer or just another kind of "letter to the editor" writer.

BTW, here’s the stories on Reuters with the number of readers Blogburst says each one had:

It Might Be 39 Cents, Give or Take Three Dollars (90)
Upgraded Time Warner (4)
I’ve Been Living in a Cave; Check Out Nickel Creek (2)
And You Thought the Traffic Rap Was Rough (1)
Debbie’s Blog (1)
US State Departments Official Blog (1)
Was Easley’s Plea More Effective Than Praying? (1)

Kids as Oracles

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Fred Wilson has a great post titled What My Kids Tell Me About the Future of Media in which he evaluates the current and future state of media based on the consumption habits of his kids.  Here’s an excerpt:

1) When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie.
It’s almost always the first season of a TV show they’ve heard is good.
They’ll go see a movie in the theater but don’t really enjoy watching
movies at home or on their computers. They feel that TV shows are
better written and more interesting.  And the entertainment value is
certainly more compelling. For roughly $40US, they got something like
25 episodes of Brothers and Sisters…

2) They will play games whenever given the opportunity. My oldest,
Jessica, favors brick breaker on her blackberry and admits to be close
to addicted. She claims to know kids who play it under the desk at
school…

4) The only time they listen to radio is when we have it on in the
car for short rides. If it’s a long ride, we almost always plug in the
iPod and they’ll take turns DJ’ing…

5) They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit…

6) They love magazines and read all the fashion, cooking, and gossip
magazines they can get their hands on. They read about the same topics
online and on TV (particularly food), but they show no signs of moving
away from the magazine. In fact, I detect a growing obsession with
magazines among my family. They literally fight over a new issue the
day it arrives.

7) They don’t seem particularly interested in newspapers. They get most
of their news on the Internet. Josh will read the sports pages over
breakfast and the girls will glance at the front page. Important
current events and politics will sometimes generate enough interest
that they’ll read the front page portion of a story and then launch
into a discussion over breakfast. But I don’t see a commitment to
newspapers like we have in my generation and my parents generation.

If you’re interested in the future of media I’d definitely read the rest of his post.  I’d say that my kids’ habits closely mirror his, and I’ve been struck by how my kids also enjoy books and magazines but only look at the newspaper when they have to cut out an article for a current events project at school. 

One thing that is intriguing to me is how much more fun my oldest finds gaming when it’s done online against lots of different players.  He’ll still play games offline if that’s his only choice, but he gets really charged up for the XBox Live games and it almost doesn’t matter which game it is.  And the thought that there are millions of kids (and adults) like him out there truly boggles my mind.  I think that’s a truly game-changing, culture-shifting phenomenon.

How the kids watch TV is also interesting.  If they’re
worn from a long week of school they might veg out for a couple of
hours in front of the tube, but really they just watch it in short
bursts and then head to the computer to fiddle around online, or read a
magazine or read a book.  They aren’t as likely to passively watch TV
as we were growing up back in the 70s and 80s, probably because they
have more choices but also I think because that they get interaction
when they go online.  Actually going outside and interacting with other
kids at quaint pastimes like, oh, football or basketball is another
story entirely.

As for music, in our house the kids seem to find their music via word of mouth, whether it’s online or offline.  I know this because I have a Rhapsody account set up and they have to come to me to purchase songs to download to their MP3 players.  When I ask them where they find the songs the answer is always "It was on some friends MySpace" or "So and so told me about it at school" or "my best friend let me listen to it on her iPod on the bus".  In my day we found most of our music from listening to the radio in addition to recommendations from friends and being bombarded with someone else’s music selections bellowing out of his boombox.  Also, if you wanted just one song from an artist you had to buy the album or get a friend to tape a song off of their album (and later CD) for you.  Now with services like Rhapsody the kids mix and match what they want: one Black Eyed Peas tune, a couple of Fergie tracks, etc.  I think they’d fall over if they had to spend $15 to buy a CD that has just three songs they like.  For that matter I’m right there with them.

I’d say it behooves all of us to watch how our kids operate because in a few years the media companies are going to change how they deliver their wares to meet those habits and we’ll be following their lead.

And You Thought the Traffic Rap Was Rough

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Those of us who live in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina have a lot of fun remembering WXII’s Jennie Stencel doing her traffic rap.  Heck, it was a YouTube sensation.  Well, the folks in San Antonio have a dude doing a Friday dance that makes Jennie’s rap seem, well, good by comparison.  For instance there’s his homage to Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5. And who could forget his "Don’t Tase Me" dance? You can see them all here. 

We here in the Triad need to learn to appreciate how good we have it.  Hat tip to Lenslinger for pointing to the lowlight in San Antone.

Conservative Authors Attack and Whine

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Ed Cone pointed to an article in the NY Times about a lawsuit brought by some conservative authors against conservative publisher Eagle Publishing. This caught my attention because Eagle was started by Tom Phillips who also founded Phillips Publishing (now Phillips International) back in 1973 and built it into a newsletter publishing powerhouse.  I spent over 10 years in the newsletter industry and so I often found myself competing with them in various markets. Heck, they offered me a job about 10 years ago.

The lawsuit claims that Eagle is ripping off the authors on royalties because they are selling books from their Regnery imprint to other Eagle-owned entities like book clubs and newsletter publishers at a deep discount.  Those entities are then selling the books at a discount to their members (book club) or using them as promotional bait for newsletter subscribers.  Here’s the rub according to the article:

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells
books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which
then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or
only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the
authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because
their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the
amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15
percent of the cover price — for the book.

Mr. Miniter said
that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books
sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about
10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club
or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and
$4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,”
Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making
collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.”
He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist
company?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Eagle newsletter publisher was using these books for promotional efforts.  In all my years marketing newsletters I never found a promotional item that could beat a well-targeted book at increasing subscription sales rates.  Believe me, we tried everything from baby boomboxes to handbags and none of them lifted rates like a good book title.  One newsletter I worked on that covered HR issues for small business owners got the best result from two little books our editors created called "Hired at Will" and "Fired at Will".  In years of trying those books couldn’t be beat.

Don’t you love the line, "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"  Personally I think these privileged few are finally getting a taste of the backhand that many average employees are getting from their companies on a daily basis.  The company is merely doing everything it can to maximize its bottom line and from what’s in the article they don’t appear to be doing anything that breaches the authors’ contracts.  It’s really no different than reducing company contributions to employee health plans (or negating them altogether), freezing wages at below cost of living increases, keeping minimum wage below poverty level, etc.  Yeah, the irony is delicious.

Offshore Outsourcing Hits the Winston-Salem Journal

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The Winston-Salem Journal reported that customer service calls for its circulation department will be outsourced to a company based in the Phillipines.  More interesting to me was a comment that the managing editor Ken Otterbourg left on his blog in response to another comment left by a reader on a post that had nothing to do with the outsourcing story (his post was about photography on the Blue Ridge Parkway):

Reader’s comment: I love great photographs.  Hopefully you guys won’t be outsourcing your photography to Manila any time soon.

Capitalism is alive and well in W-S (and the non-US areas we send our jobs to.)

Ken’s comment: Thanks for the comments. I’m not going to minimize the import or
symbolism of the movement of our customer-support operations. But I do
think that it speaks well of our newspaper that we reported this. For
job cuts at this level, many publications would not report them. We
thought it was important to do so, from a credibility standpoint and
also from a fairness standpoint, because we’ve reported extensively on
IT and back-office operations in this area moving offshore.

I think Ken makes a good point, and I’m glad to see that the Journal is engaging in a little transparency.  I do ask though that they order the company not to use fake American names for its representatives. Nothing more annoying than talking to another "Jack" who’s real name is Arjun or a "Mary" who’s real name is "Ashakiran".

This story reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to look into.  Does anyone have access to the total number of NC jobs lost to overseas companies in the last 10-20 years?  If so, how about a yearly breakdown and a breakdown by industry?  I’m thinking I can get it off the state’s website somewhere but if someone already has it I’d love to see it without duplicating the work.

German TV

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So I woke up last night at 2 a.m. Frankfurt time, and that was after sleeping five hours.  Unfortunately I knew right away that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon so I decided to call home and then do some reading.  After the call and an hour or two of reading I clicked on the TV and started surfing through the 40 or so channels of TV that the hotel carries.  In the process I discovered some interesting things:

  1. Girls doing things to girls, if you get my drift, is a staple of German late night television.  At first I thought this was an interesting departure from the infomercials that are a staple of late night TV in the states, but then I realized that they were all hawking SMS p-rn services and s-x lines.  As I surfed the channels I counted at least five that ran these things, which means that over 10% of the stations had them.

    I’m still trying to figure out what kind of guy would get worked up with some supposed woman sending him messages like "U R so hot U R mkg me…" Of course the wireless services here are so far ahead of ours in the US that it would be a good bet that they deliver high quality video to pervs’ phones and they’re just using "SMS" in the same way that some people call all sodas "Coke".  Either way, you don’t see the "commercials" or the wireless p-rn back in the states. 

  2. They carry Al Jazeera and I have to tell you that if it wasn’t for the little symbol in the corner I would have thought it was another version of CNN, except with real reporters.  All the reporters I saw were British and considering that they were running opposite Wolf Blitzer they came off looking like geniuses.  Only when you get a chance to watch BBC, Sky TV and, yes, Al Jazeera do you begin to appreciate what unmitigated crap we have for national TV news programming in the states.  I think what I like best about the non-US networks is that they don’t all assume that the average viewer is ADHD and on his sixth cup of coffee in the last hour.  Stories have depth, some running several minutes, and the reporters and commentators address the audience with a calm and reserve that we haven’t seen on US television in at least 20 years.  What’s interesting to me is that Sky and Fox are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, but Sky makes Fox look like a production of some local high school’s Young Republicans group. Shows you what he thinks of we Amerikaners.  Not that Sky comes across as particularly great, but in comparison to our junk it seems almost NPR-worthy.  FYI, one of the most viewed videos on Sky’s site is the manager at the KFC in Statesville NC (about 1/2 hour from my house) fighting off a shotgun-toting robber.  It really is a small world.
  3. EuroSport is the anti-ESPN.  Nary a studio full of retired players or coaches as panelists to be found and lets just say that the sports they carry are hard to come by on the west side of the Atlantic.  In the course of browsing I saw sumo wrestling, snooker and team handball.  The last is a hybrid of soccer and basketball that I’d love to give a try, but I doubt I’ll ever get the chance.  Note to ESPN execs: can you please dial back the BS and start just giving us the sports?  You’re beginning to remind me of MTV (what happened to the music?) and not in a good way.
  4. It’s a trip seeing movies with German voice-overs, especially the male voices.  The Germans all sound much more "manly" than the original actors, especially guys like Steven Seagall. 

Hopefully that will be the extent of my German television reviews since I’d like to get at least a little sleep over the next few days.

Bad News at the Winston-Salem Journal

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The Winston-Salem Journal announced that they’re laying off five people, including two from the news division, and that they’re folding the daily Business section into the Local section with the exception of Sunday.  They’re also combining the Living and Arts sections in the Sunday paper.

Folding the business section into the Local section is not a surprising development given that recently the biz section has often been a mere four pages and that on at least one occasion I noticed every article was a wire service piece.  I’m not sure if the dearth of local business stories is a result of a severely depressed local business climate, not enough business reporters at the paper or a bit of both, but it’s sure a downer for the local business scene. Of course it’s terrible that five people lost their jobs, but for
Winston-Salem and the surrounding area it’s really bad news that
there’s not enough going on around here to support a full business section.

As Ed Cone wrote: "Good news for the Business Journal, maybe, but bad news for just about everyone else."

No Letters to the Editor?

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I noticed today that the Winston-Salem Journal had zero letters to the editor in today’s (August 9, 2007) print edition.  They had five opinion columns and their own two editorial opinions but not one letter from the unwashed masses.  Honestly it kind of depressed me since the letters are usually as effective at getting my blood flowing in the morning as my 12 cups of coffee. (They did run Cal Thomas who also gets me riled up, but it’s not as fun because he’s not half as bright as the folks here in Winston-Salem and his English ain’t half as goodly either).  I’m wondering if the Journal’s just hit a summer lull in submissions.  I hope that’s the case because I fear that since 95% of the letters seem to come from the same seven people and all those people seem to be in the "AARP members for over years club", that maybe we’ve had a migration from op-ed to the best read page in every paper: the obits.  Like I said I hope it’s just a lull because I really enjoy reading those folks.

Of course if the WSJ runs out of commenters I can now go to Google News and get all the comments I want.  Google has started accepting comments by email, reviewing them and then attaching them to news stories if they’re deemed appropriate.  I expect it will get entertaining fast.