Media | Idle Musings

Posts Categorized Media

Seems putting content behind a pay wall might kill your readership.

The Times (of London) has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Facebook Most Popular Online Destination

In Culture, Media on May-27-2010 with
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These are just staggering numbers.

According to Google’s AdPlanner stats, Facebook is the number one most-visited destination on the web. Weighing in at an unfathomably heavy 570 billion page views and 540 million users, the ubiquitous social network outranks every other non-Google site, taking more than 35% of all web traffic measured.

Meet The Press Gets Fancy New Set

In Media on May-2-2010 with
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Still no word on if they will fact-check their guests. But hey, the set looks nice in HD.

New Site: Longform Journalism

In Media on Apr-24-2010 with
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Longform.org is a site that focuses on collecting some of the best long-form journalism available on the Internet in a very clean user interface. This site is going to suck a lot of time out of my life.

Oh Sure, Our Media Is So Darn Liberal

In Media, Opinion on Feb-11-2010 with
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As a progressive I get so sick of hearing from the right about our liberal “mainstream” media, cause I sure don’t see it often via the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, or the Washington Post. Lets take the Washington Post op-ed page today.

Washington Press Corps Dean David Broder starts us off by penning a love letter to Sarah Palin telling me and my fellow liberals we need to take her seriously, even as a poll in the same paper highlights more than seven in 10 Americans now say she is unqualified to be President (including a majority of Republicans). But it doesn’t stop there, not even close.

The Post‘s CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, writes a column arguing that Europe is in desperate need of a “tea party movement,” which would do all the great things for Europeans that it is doing for the U.S. The pro-war Post Editorial Page excitedly announces a “Showdown in Tehran,” calling—yet again—on the Obama administration to do more to confront and subvert Iran’s government. George Will touts a GOP resurgence in California. And earlier this week, it was revealed that Post editors actively solicited someone to write an Op-Ed complaining that liberals—unlike conservatives—are arrogant, condescending, and smug.

The power of myth and propaganda is well-documented. Still, even with that in mind, how could any conservative look at the messages sent from the Post Op-Ed page just in the last few days alone—Palin is awesome!; Europe needs a tea party movement! Confront Iran! Liberals are patronizing losers! —and still go on chattering about The Liberal Media, of which, in their minds (and in the mind of that paper’s “media critic”), the Post is a charter member? And it’s far from unusual for the Post to deliver an almost uniformly right-wing (particularly neoconservative) message; in fact, it happens quite frequently. “Liberal media” has basically come to mean: ”anyone who doesn’t sound like Rush Limbaugh,” but even using that definition, the Post Op-Ed page comes very close and often, as today, meets it. That’s not news, but the persistence of the Liberal Media myth—not just among the Right but among media figures themselves—is quite remarkable. Not even the complaint by George Bush’s own Press Secretary that the media was “too deferential” to the Bush administration undermined it at all; if that didn’t, what could?

Gosh I can barely even handle all these liberal voices all at once. Long live the “liberal” media.

I Just Don’t Understand, I Just Don’t

In Media, Politics on Jan-2-2010 with
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For days just about everybody that can get in front of a TV camera have been attacking Janet Napolitano about the interview she gave on Meeting the Press. Here is Napolitano’s exact quote:

Once this incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork, not only sharing throughout the air industry, but also sharing with state and local law enforcement. Products were going out on Christmas Day, they went out yesterday, and also to the industry to make sure that the traveling public remains safe. I would leave you with that message. The traveling public is safe. We have instituted some additional screening and security measures, in light of this incident, but, again, everyone reacted as they should. The system, once the incident occurred, the system worked.

Could somebody tell me how anything she said is controversial, wrong, idiotic, or something where she needs to resign. Last I check she isn’t in charge of the CIA. Or the FBI. Or Schiphol Airport. Or the State Department. Or even the Nigerian Embassy.

Google, News Corp, Bing And Access To News

In Media on Nov-25-2009 with
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Rupert Murdoch is literally pointing a loaded gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft appears more than happy to help pull the trigger. It is that simple. Murdoch and various executives at News Corp. have been very vocal about their disdain for Google linking to their content (without paying them) and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of all things Google.

Basically the back story is Murdoch keeps threatening to stop (via a simple line of code) letting Google index the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and his many other media outlets. In fact they have taken it to another level and are now actively courting other media outlets to join him in this self-imposed ban. The Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press (AP) are the two largest news organizations to voice support for Microsoft’s idea (and yes I know we can live without News Corp. and the AP).

Well the folks at Microsoft’s Bing, a distant third (behind Google and second place Yahoo!) in search market share at 12.8%, think this is the greatest idea since sliced bread. Such a good idea in fact, that the Financial Times has reported that Microsoft is in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. $15M is the amount being thrown around Bing is offering News Corp. The payment is supposed to help off-set the lost ad revenue News Corp. online media properties would loose if almost all Google traffic stopped.

Lets me be very clear, Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is exactly what it’s doing with the Yahoo! search deal. But with these latest talks, Microsoft appears to be literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news.

So what does this mean?

Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy exclusive indexing access (how a news article shows up in a keyword search you enter) to certain media outlets. However, at least to me $15M sounds like a small price to pay to basically “own” all of Murdoch’s content when Microsoft has around $40B in cash on hand.

Therefore, is it possible Bing could throw around $15M here and $15 there and somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times? Would that be a reason for a lot of folks to switch from Google to Bing? From a geeky search engine analysis site, Searchblog:

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing would certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

Agreed. But this is an analysis from a search engine market share point-of-view. Not the point-of-view of a news consumer. Our “major” media outlets are all owned by a handful of companies. If Bing would strike a deal with say News Corp (they’re only talking $15M/year), a wire service like AP, MSNBC (the MS in MSNBC actually stands for Microsoft), the Washington Post Company, and Hearst, or heaven forbid somebody like Time Warner you are talking about a vast amount of news being gone from Google.

Just follow those links above, that go directly to all the company’s various media holdings and you can see with just a half dozen companies following Murdoch’s lead and you are talking about a massive amount of “popular” news content.

I can’t stress this is a huge issue that should be getting a lot more coverage. I mean do we really want an online world where if you are looking for a Time article heard referenced on the NBC Nightly News, you have to stop and pause and think, “Is their stuff on Google or Bing?”

Now I have some faith cause of the nature of the Internet this won’t work. I think the flaw in Murdoch’s and Microsoft’s logic is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. Any information “hidden” from Google will quickly end up on a site that is indexed by Google.

Plus exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness at dozens of different levels. But then again I am not usually in the habit of betting against either Microsoft or News Corp.

New Way To Discover Magazine Content

In Media on Nov-3-2009 with
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Maggwire is a site that is like a Digg for magazine articles. It is actually a pretty cool idea, a magazine article aggregation service. Only been able to play with it for a few minutes here or there, but it has potential.

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