Hard News, Inc.

A Test of TypePad's E-mail Blogging Functionality

2009-10-18T16:44:01-07:00

It seems that more and more blogging services are turning on to the fact that most blogging input templates are pretty damn annoying. I say this as an advocate for the medium. I also speak as one who has seen hours of work evaporate as the interface crashed, or timed out, or whatever.

I'd like to hope that someday it will be as seamless as creating a page in Issuu is - that one day we'll just be able to create pages with custom designs, including Flash, video, audio, Silverlight, what have you, and be able to upload them into a CMS that will adjust on the fly to these new designs. Somehow I doubt that - at least as long as Microsoft is making code for their browsers that deliberately breaks all the previous rules of CSS, just to ensure that their latest Office suite sells (and yeah, I'm looking at you, IE 6).

Anyway, I'm gonna see if attaching a photo to this post in any way results in a photo appearing in the blog post.

This is me on the main plaza in Astana, aka "What the capitol city of Mars would look like if designed by Albert Speer & Walt Disney's offspring."

Interview with Joel Kramer of MinnPost.com about Real-Time Ads

2009-07-16T23:26:25-07:00

This is the bookend interview I did for the story on Real-Time Ads.

Joel Kramer explains how MinnPost.com is using Real-Time Ads to build up business with local advertisers by giving them a product that they can't find anywhere else.

However, he goes on to explain that the media business has irrevocably changed, and that the "gravy train of advertising" will never again support newspapers. His solution to the revenue crisis facing news organizations can be heard starting at about 7:10 into the interview.

Download Interview with Joel Kramer editor of MinnPost about Real-Time Ads

Interview with Brad Flora of WindyCitizen.com about Real-Time Ads

2009-07-16T18:16:10-07:00

The following is an interview with Brad Flora, editor of WindyCitizen.com, about the Real-Time Ad product they’ve launched.

Download Interview with Brad Flora of WindyCitizen re Real-Time Ads

Brad Flora explains in more detail how WindyCitizen.com came up with Real-Time Ads, how real-estate businesses were already coming to the site to try to promote themselves, and how they became determined to offer their clients something more useful than banner ads.

At about 8:05, we also have an interesting discussion about the future promise offered by doing more robust targeting of the ads, so better match the advertiser with the user by means of leveraging the personal user data that a quasi-social networking site like WindyCitizen.com can gather.

At about 13:30, we address how to strike the balance between too much control of the conversation on a site vs. allowing things to get out of hand. He talks about the “broken window” theory of policing the site of a niche aggregator.

At 18:00 we talk about how crucial it’s going to be for sites to have simple, self-service ways for your users to buy advertising and give you money. At about 26:10, we address the issue of whether or not Real-Time Ads could ever grow to the point where they would start replacing the revenues newspapers have lost to Craigslist.

OMMA Hollywood 2009: Mobile Advertising Case Study - Microsoft Bar Codes Mobile Ads

2009-03-25T22:59:55-07:00

This is the audio podcast of the Mobile Advertising session at the OMMA 2009 conference.

Download Mobile media session OMMA 2009

Doom or Negotiating Strategy: The San Francisco Chronicle Gets Its Two-Minute Warning

2009-02-25T12:06:28-08:00

The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom. A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle is facing yet another massive & painful round of layoffs came as both a surprise and not. The gut-clencher came a little bit down in the story:

The Hearst Corp. today announced an effort to reverse the deepening
operating losses of its San Francisco Chronicle by seeking near-term
cost savings that would include "significant" cuts to both union and
non-union staff.
In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be
accomplished "quickly" the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes
forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50
million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year,
Hearst said.

Downer cow dragged off to slaughter

This has led to a flurry of stories assuming that the End is Nigh for the Chronicle. The Wall Street Journal weighed in:

Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the
first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a
front-runner for the role.

Over at Content Bridges, Ken Doctor muses about the other struggling Bay Area newspapers, and wonders why a viable web-based alternative hasn't sprung up yet, in an area that's within a hurled semiconductor of Silicon Valley (hell, I can't figure that one out either). However, he gets close to what I think is the underlying story here:

Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don't expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has "visibility" in future revenue, which is a nice way to say no one likes what they see ahead.
Maybe, Hearst and MediaNews, once close, but now more distant partners, can figure out some new cost-sharing plans that will pass government review. If not, we can now imagine the Chronicle indeed closing, if it doesn't get the "significant" cost reductions it wants. My guess given our times, is that it will get reductions, and then reduce itself in product and people to some sense of immediate sustainability. It may keep publishing, though it may scrap days like Detroit or whole sections like many of its brethren.

My read on the threat of folding the paper is that they have run up against a wall of union contracts, and want to get around them without having to resort to Chapter 11. The "concessions" that Hearst wants are going to be ugly - over at Newsosaur, Mutter spitballs them at nearly 50%.

At that point, mere eliminations of staff positions will not hit that target. To eliminate half of the staff would mean that the paper quite simply would not get out. There wouldn't be enough people to run the presses, drive the trucks, or lay out the display ads from wackjob religious sects. Not to mention, report & edit news. That means the survivors of the cuts would have to take massive pay cuts. Maybe the newsroom staff would meekly submit to the replacement of a paycheck with a moldy roast-beef sandwich and a family pass to Hearst Castle, but those Teamsters, well, that's another story.

The other unsettling prospect is that Hearst would either sell the Chronicle to MediaNews, the Dean Singleton empire that has been similarly troubled, or perhaps even demand back all the money that Singleton owes the Hearsts (which I'm guessing he does not have), which would mean that Hearst would wind up taking MediaNews titles like the Merc-News or Contra Costa as a barter-type payoff. Both moves have significant anti-trust problems, not to mention less than rosy implications for journalism in the Bay Area.

Some interesting thinking from Daniel Singer at Huffington Post on this one - on why the solution to a revenue crisis at big newspapers IS NOT to get bigger.

The big record labels' entire business was built around moving little plastic discs around the world, similar to how a newspaper's business was built around moving paper through a printing plant and on to you. That's about 60-70% of the cost of producing a newspaper: getting the ink on it and moving the damn thing around. Moving things from place to place--be it plastic discs or bundles of paper--is very difficult and expensive. It's the kind of business that rewards economies of scale and, as a result, allows for huge concentrations of power and money. It's the kind of business that creates five major record labels and a dozen or so major news companies (that's a generous number, actually, once you get past the first five or six you're down to small town paper chains). It's the kind of business that comes crashing down the quickest once its central complication--moving things from here to there--disappears. With the efficiencies of digital distribution, the established order is not simply threatened, it is broken.

So if size is a disadvantage in the New Media world, the teetering newspaper empires' reflex to merge and merge again is perhaps the exact wrong move at this time. If the key to web success is that overused buzzword "community," then an amorphous conglomeration that exists mainly to cater to efficiencies in distributing an ad sales platform that grows daily less relevant, is not a move in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst, newspaper, new media, iTunes

Socks the Cat: Conspiracy Theories on the Rise

2009-02-23T12:19:43-08:00

Poor Socks the Cat, the puzzled feline who famously crouched on the sidewalk in front of the Clinton's house back in '93, providing the only photo op for frustrated news services in the weeks following the election ... is dead.

(h/t Tbogg)

After the euthanization, the body of Socks was deposited in Fort
Marcy Park, a federal park in Virginia where it was found by park
rangers. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) the ranking Republican on the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has vowed an
investigation into the death of Socks, coming as it has, on the eve of
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to China. According to
congressional aides, the timing of the Socks death just as his former
owner was leaving the country is "suspicious, to say the least.
Probably criminal. Yeah. Really really criminal looking."
In related news, Regnery Publishing Inc, A Division of Eagle
Publishing, has commissioned noted author Lilian Jackson Braun to write
a tell-all book on the late Socks: The Cat Who Knew Too Fucking Much
to be published on Wednesday, February 25th. The slim tome is expected
to reach number one on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller list
the following week due to massive bulk orders shipped to 214
Massachusetts Ave NE Washington DC 20002-4999, as well as a copy to be
delivered gratis to all seventy-three people who subscribe to the
Washington Times.

I look forward to the fund-raising posts on this subject, surely already in the works, from Chief Editor Korir, and the imminent promise of a mysterious "tape" showing that Socks was in possession of crucial documents proving that President Obama was actually grown in an eerie green-tinted vat in an abandoned warehouse by the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man, and George Soros. The documents were stashed beneath Socks' kitty box, and are now the subject of an international man ... er, cathunt.

Silliness aside, this photo actually fills me with a lot of nostalgia - look at how many photos there were just hanging around outside the Clinton's house, waiting for any kind of news to develop. Think of the resources that Big Media outlets had sixteen years ago ... how they had the money in their budgets to devote to paying people just to stand around in a location in the hopes that something might happen.

While this may still happen (there were a lot of reporters hanging around the neighborhood in Chicago, trying to come up with some new angle on Obama), I think that this is going to be seen as an artifact of a vanished age. Nobody can afford to pay a photog's salary, when all he comes up with is shots of a puzzled cat on a sidewalk.

...ask not for whom Socks the Cat meows, news industry; he meows for thee...

Ukrainian Drinks Menu

2009-02-13T21:56:30-08:00

...and this is where my problems really started...

Note that in Kiev, you can get sex on the beach. The drink, that is.

Actual sex on the beach is not recommended.

Ukrainian Version of Country & Western Tragic Love Songs

2009-02-13T21:54:02-08:00

I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev.

My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers. It's designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the winter. It had just started snowing when we got here, and looking out the window, I saw huge heavy flakes floating down to disappear into the dark, slow Dnieper River. Chunks of ice, broken free from the mass far upriver, kept floating by on their way to the Black Sea. With this music in the background, it felt somehow timeless...

So yeah, it's campy and melodramatic. But as the song goes on, you start to see the changes come over the faces of my dinner companions. I don't know what they were singing about, but it must've been heavy.

Eugen, the dean here at the Digital Future of Journalism school, explained to me that traditional Ukrainian songs are all tragedies, drawn from their long and heartbreaking history.

"The potato harvest fails, so to support his family, the man goes off to fight in the Tsar's wars," he said. "He knows that there is small chance of him ever coming back alive, and his wife knows this is probably the last time she sees him in this world. So they sing of their love for each other, and he embraces his children goodbye. It's like Ukrainian bluegrass, or country and western. Where the man has no money, no job, his pickup truck is broke, his wife left him and his dog just died. That kind of thing."

Anyway - enjoy.

Ukraine, music, country & western, tragic love, song

Defying Spacetime: Cheney's Former House Magically Reappears

2009-01-27T14:42:26-08:00

The Vice-President's mansion is once again visible on Google Maps.

View Larger Map

Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style "Revisionist History" here? I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela. It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubine Blanca Ibáñez (she was alleged to be de facto ruler of the country, while dipsomania President Jaime Lusinchi floated like a Manatee in the pool at Miraflores, surrounded by half-empty bottles of Pampero rum). It was called the John Paul II housing complex, situated in the slum of Montalban. It was supposed to be for the workers; they used the pension funds from some union workers to fund the construction. Then, once it was partially completed, it supposedlyl "ran out of money" - even though our digging found that millions more had been allocated to build the complex than would ever logically be needed to complete.

At about that time, we started noticing that the official documents and records had been tampered with. The photos of all the dignitaries on hand for the ground-breaking ceremonies had had several faces (known criminal acquaintances of Blanca) air-brushed out. The names disappeared and reappeared and then disappeared from the lists of Boards of Directors & Project Managers; all, we learned, because behind the scenes, the rats were fighting each other over who would get to feast on the mountains of cash.

In the end, the complex that was supposed to provide safe, secure and stable housing for the workers who had busted their asses for a lifetime, was condemned and then sold for pennies. To developers who quickly turned the whole thing around, finished it, and then sold it for a massive profit as high-end luxury housing.

Now THAT'S a political scandal. Thousands of workers robbed, their money stolen by corrupt politicians in league with criminals masquerading as bankers, and good hardworking people left homeless. Sounds familiar, eh?

Anyway - the disappearance/reappearance of entire structures reminds me of those dark days. Some of the comments over at Wonkette

A vague hologram of the mansion lingered aboveground while the actual
dwelling burrowed 666 fathoms below the earth’s crust, coming at last
to rest in a den of snakes. All you could see in aerial photos on
Google Earth was a bunch of squares and nothingness in the midst of a
normal neighborhood of houses and trees.

are beverage-on-monitor funny:

Can you still see the pentagram on the roof or did Jill have it painted over?

When mysterious doors start appearing out of nowhere, leading into
horrific hellscapes that defy the physical layout of the house,
Google’s gonna wish they kept that place hidden. You wait…

I wonder where he hid the horcruxes.

The larger issue here is, what happens when a malignant governmental entity manages to take control of "Teh Intertoobz" and sets about cleansing history & facts according to its whim? Under the Soviet regime, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky or others fell out of favor, to erase the embarassing love-letters contained in the history books, it was necessary to collect all the printed materials, burn them, and replace them with brand-new propaganda extolling the virtues of the new regime.

Obviously, if a Vice President of the United States can, by fiat, declare that a piece of the Earth's crust can no longer be seen from space - or at least, that it no longer show up on maps - what does that mean for the future? If, as the digital triumphalists hold, in the future all ink on paper volumes are replaced by the Exploding Silicon Inevitable, how fluid does reality become? And don't give me any of that "Wayback Machine" smack. All 1s and 0s are subject to either hacking or strong magnetic fields.

A Command of Invective

2009-01-22T17:55:19-08:00

I bow & grovel in the shadow of such lovely invective as this, which appeared just yesterday on Sadly, No!

In terms of art, it ought to be said that the greatness of a Pastor
Swank, of a Mark Noonan or a John Hinderaker — the quality which raises
them above the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite
retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of
nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based
saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of
millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos,
Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists,
Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of
purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable
Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn
Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not
intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater
idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans,
Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads,
shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at
James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and
beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens,
bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain
former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars
and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up
Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh — isn’t solely in making up things that aren’t true, but often in fact in forgetting things that are.

Like Bluto Blutarsky at the beginning of Act 3, it doesn't make any sense, but you don't want to stop them when they're on a roll...