Dana Blankenhorn

If the newspaper business is gonna drown put a hose in their mouth

Newspapers have reached the desperate stage of their death spiral, the point where they're looking for government bail-outs.

In the case of the financial industry there was a case to be made that letting AIG and Citigroup fail would cost more than propping them up. In the case of the auto industry there's a case to be made that we'll at least get the money back.

There is no such case to be made for newspapers.

What they're looking for is a "tweak" to the copyright laws that would bar linking to copyrighted material without consent.  What they're seeking is the destruction of the Internet.

The same argument holds for the idea that content should be exclusive to its source for 24 hours. If you can't link to it, content does not exist. I'm amazed people like Connie Schultz manage to breathe they're so stupid.  

The Internet is based on links. Content you can't Google does not exist. We have learned this before with the news industry when it tried to hide its content behind paid firewalls and registration systems. 

It didn't work.

The industry now knows it needs links. It just wants to extract monopoly rents  for them. Hey, I want a pony. 

Any Senator or Congressman who stands up for this nonsense needs to be slapped down, hard. Can you imagine the cost of this to schools, to libraries, to universities? Can you imagine the bureaucratic cost of tracking this free money? And I guarantee it will go only to a few politically-connected news barons, people like Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim. 

The Lies of the Peachtree Road Race

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

One of the most interesting aspects of running the Peachtree Road Race is the politics.

Traditionally these are conservative politics. You have your preachers by the side of the road, one this year with a big sign reading "God Loves -- God Hates." You have your "pro-life" shirts. And this year I even saw one woman with an Obama hat.

But mainly it's anti-government stuff. "Government is taxing us to death," was the message of one onlooker in Buckhead. "Government or freedom" was the message of another.

These are assumptions deeply ingrained in Southern history. They have resonated since before the Civil War. They are the majority view throughout the region.

And they are wrong. Dead wrong.

The Chengdu Boom

I have become a student of booms.

I grew up in the boom of New York's Long Island during the 1960s. I moved to the Houston boom of the 1970s, joined the PC boom of the 1980s, covered the Internet boom of the 1990s, and watched the housing bubble of this decade.

I know what booms look like.

Chengdu is a boom town. (To the right, an image of Brazilian soccer star Kaka hawking Chinese-made throat lozenges in Chengdu's Airport.)

The War Against Oil is a War for the Economy

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Want to get the economy out of the ditch? 

Make something. Make something new, something valuable, something real, something with a ready market. 

Despite what critics felt there was something real about the Internet, which defined the 1990s. The Internet accelerates the transfer of knowledge, and of any knowledge-based value store. It's the most powerful economic accelerant since the creation of the telegraph.

By contrast there was nothing ever real about the economic drivers of this decade, financial services and homes. Not that homes aren't real. But the value of a home has nothing to do with its cost or even its location. It is a measure of the economic value left out there to buy homes. A home sucks money, it only creates money for those who build, assuming someone buys. Thus homes became a natural sinkhole for the confederate money of this decade, soaking up as much as the banksters could create from thin air.

Now that the economy has stopped falling this question becomes vital. On what will we base the next boom? 

The answer is obvious. Energy. 

Big, Rich and Ignorant

Frank Rich of The New York Times has offered a thoughtful, provocative piece about The American Press on Suicide Watch. 

There's only one thing wrong with it. 

Mr. Rich still  doesn't know how his employer's business works.

I, on the other hand, actually took a publishing course at Medill, so let me state this as clearly as I can. No one pays for their newspaper. They pay for its delivery, for the infrastructure of trucks and men who get that paper from the printing press to your door. 

Newsgathering costs have always come from advertising. Always. That's how it was in Joe Medill's day, and that's how it is a century later. 

Where newspapers screwed up was in forgetting the purpose of advertising and their business role. The purpose of advertising is to sell stuff. A publisher's job is to help the businesses he is advocating for and organizing to sell stuff. 

The ad space on any page, whether real or virtual, is just the last piece in this puzzle. The ad space is a billboard which the advertiser fills. 

Why does he fill your empty billboard? This is the question newspapers used to be very good at answering. He fills it because the medium can prove that an ad placed with it will reach his target market, and that some of the people in that market will act on the ad. 

Print newspapers, and magazines, long answered this question with surveys. Not just surveys of their readers or their advertisers, but surveys of the target market. These surveys would show, for instance, that "46% of the people who will buy a new car next year in New York read The Times," or that "you can reach 50,000 millionaires for less with The Times than with any other medium."

Ad agencies used these kinds of surveys in planning campaigns. They would say, "we have to reach X number of people who have Y characteristics Z number of times," and if their creative was right it would result in $ worth of sales. 

Newspapers, in the print era, were never just at the billboard end of the sales funnel. They actually went deeper down the funnel than that. 

The Media Civil War

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Out of sight of readers there is a true Civil War going on within the world of  journalism.

Part of it is the old shrinking water hole problem. Some people actually fear that advertising is disappearing, that it will soon cease to exist. That's how scarce advertisers are on the ground these days.

The evidence is all around them. Newspapers have disappeared from many cities and will disappear from many more. Magazines have gone under without telling anyone. Even giant TV companies are fading fast. 

One place to watch the fun is at CNBC. Right-wing talent has become increasingly strident. At the same time management has brought in Obama supporters like Dr. Howard Dean to add balance. This is supposed to be a business channel but it has become more like a non-stop Crossfire show from the 1990s. 

What this is providing is opportunity. Advertisers who step up to the plate now can get enormous concessions from any media property they talk with. Entrepreneurs who launch now can get traffic, attention, and positioning for the next recovery -- which will happen.

Question is, what do you invest in?

You invest in people like Emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler (above). 

The Technology on Which Space Depends

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 16of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Why have so few of us reached space? Why is even the International Space Station a fraction of the size most sci-fi writers predicted a half century ago?

Cost. Specifically the energy cost of getting out of Earth's gravity well.

It's not that people have lost interest. When a company called Solaren announced a deal to install solar panels in space and sell the resulting power to PG&E early this week, so many people rushed to the rail that Solaren's site quickly exceeded its bandwidth limit and was taken down. 

The deal is pie-in-the-sky. It was the utility's presence in the story that made it newsworthy, but in fact that company risked nothing. If Solaren gets its system working PG&E will buy its power. If.

The market hits paradise

Having watched a number of recessions during my journalism career one constant remained. Those journalists who most  sucked up to the hierarchy, who served their owners, were insulated and isolated from the marketplace.

They became the journalism "profession" equivalent of tenured professors. They were pundits, with high salaries for the Washington cocktail circuit, and with no responsibility other than tell the rest of us what to think.

In 2009 those days are over. Suck on this, Maureen Dowd. You too, Tom Friedman (and your wife).

Journalism's Real Problem

You may (or may not) know that newspapers are once again threatening the Internet, claiming once again that links are theft (so don't expect me to link to any AP copy in the future). 

Lauren Weinstein writes (correctly) that a well-written Robots.Txt can stop any links you don't like and that in any case Google (which seems to be the target) already has a valid business agreement with AP to host stories. 

But that's not the problem. European newspapers are, in fact, doing quite well. American publishers have plundered their assets, first demanding enormous profit margins (by cutting jobs), then overloading the assets with debt, and now blaming the workers for all their faults.

Which brings me to the clip above. You'll note how six-figure salaried Ali Velshi, in his $1,000 vests, is calling an 84-year old waitress "lucky" because she has such low expectations.

That's the problem. The journalism industry, like the rest of America, has spent the last decades hollowing-out its middle class. There are a few at the top (and all on-air talent like Velshi counts), there are some people struggling at the bottom (like yours truly), and there is no longer anything in the middle.

Tweet (cha-ching)

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Let's return to the original beat of this newsletter and talk about Twitter.

Twitter is a bridge between the Web that was and the mobile Web that will be. It is simply SMS message which is visible on the Web and can be broadcast as a channel. My Twitter feed is a channel. Your Twitter feed is a channel.

What makes it a big deal is mobility. People Tweet from what we used to call their phones. But with more and more people carrying iPhones and other devices with keyboard-like functionality, it means you can broadcast your thoughts from literally anywhere. This thrills some people, and it scares other people. It also makes fools of lots and lots of people.

When I say Twitter is a bridge from the Web that was, I also mean that it's a product of Google sensibility -- build it first and monetize it later. SMS is the cheapest form of cellular messaging, and was a vital form of communication for years before Twitter arrived. But it is not cost-free.

So there are lots of possible revenue streams for Twitter. Twitter, in fact, provides an enormous revenue stream for the nation's cellular duopoly. It is to their credit that they haven't tried to scarf up more, that they have let well enough alone. That's an important industry turning point. They have made more money with regular SMS revenues to Twitter than they would have by instantly defining it a premium service.

The Google-like scaling success of Twitter has a lot of people who should be worrying about other things worrying about finding Twitter a business model. The ExecTweets idea has already been panned, but my kids came up with one today without even knowing they were doing it.

Contests.