Jeff Beckham

New at Austinist: Big 12 Head (Coach) Cases

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:12:25 -0700

My latest sports column just went up over at the Austinist, looking at the questions: Who's wackier? Does Mike Leach's "Rain Man" demeanor outdo Mike Gundy's "I'm a Man!" aggressiveness?

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Former coach and ESPN analyst Lou Holtz considering a run for Congress in Florida.

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:03:19 -0700

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/orl-holtz-considers-congress-080309,0,1852438.story

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Filmmakers Turn a Blind Eye to "The Blind Side"

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:09:00 -0700

Michael Lewis' book "The Blind Side" crackled with a pair of riveting storylines: One about how the faceless position of offensive tackle became the most important in football, and a more personal look at how one of the best young tackles in the game was saved through an unlikely combination of love, family, and education. Now a movie, it appears from the trailer that filmmakers have turned a blind eye to "The Blind Side".

The trailer focuses on Sandra Bullock's character, Leigh Anne Tuohy, the mother of the upscale white family who takes in Michael Oher, a often-homeless hulking black teen who turns out to have an amazing football talent. Leigh Anne is a powerful force in the family, but the book isn't about her. Her husband, Sean, and the Tuohy kids, who played just as big a role in Michael's life, appear to have been marginalized in the movie version. What's left is another Michelle Pfeiffer / Hilary Swank / white woman saves a poor black kid movie.

A blonde Bullock looks out of place and out of touch with the the heart of the Southern female powerhouse that Tuohy conveyed in the book. Writer/director John Lee Hancock, a Texas boy, should have known better than to sweep all the other elements of the story aside in favor of the "save the poor children" cliche.

In a way, it follows a similar path that took "Friday Night Lights" off course after its brilliant first season. "It's not a show about football" went the call to bring in more viewers. But it was about football. Football is what taught the Dillon Panthers about commitment, effort, loyalty, and loss. It's what built their character. In the same way, "The Blind Side" should have been about football. Not about Sandra Bullock playing angel to an underprivileged kid.

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Quick Review of "Free"

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:56:00 -0700

I just finished Chris Anderson's book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price". Fittingly, I listened to the free audiobook. While it doesn't contain as groundbreaking an idea as Anderson's previous book, "The Long Tail", it's still a fascinating look at a key piece of 21-century economics. There are so many different ways to make free a part of your business model. In fact, you may be doing it right now and now even realize it.

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Two Architectural Icons For Sale in California

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:09:13 -0700

A pair of architectural gems are for sale in California. NPR reports on Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. The Mayan temple-style structure is on the market for $15 million. For a bit less ($12 million) you can have the iconic Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs.

Ennis House photo by ikkoskinen on flickr.

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New column at Austinist: The Silly Season of Football Predictions

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:16:11 -0700

My latest sports column for the Austinist just went live. It's about how preseason all-conference teams and predictions are a bunch of hooey.

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Haque, Searls deliver one-two punch for new journalism thinking

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:58:00 -0700

There's been a terrific one-two punch over the last two days about new models for newspapers. First, from Umair Haque, was his essay "The Nichepaper Manifesto", which coined a new term for publications that focus tightly on one area and offer up deep, unwavering knowledge. Doc Searls took Haque's idea and rolled with it, offering up that even these nichepapers may not be the final answer, but a beginning step (a larva) to the eventual butterfly.

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Mad Men Yourself

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:54:00 -0700

To promote the upcoming third season of Mad Men, the folks behind the show have created Mad Men Yourself, which lets you create a 1960s-style avatar. The illustrations were created by the super-talented Dyna Moe, who also created our wedding invitations.

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Pat Coyle: ESPN.com/Chicago: there goes the neighborhood!

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:35:00 -0700

Via Pat Coyle at Sports Marketing 2.0 comes this warning shot to local newspaper sports sections.

ESPN.com/Chicago: there goes the neighborhood!

via Sports Marketing 2.0 by Pat on 7/25/09

ESPN.com could do to the newspaper’s online sports section what Monster.com did to newspaper classifieds. Eek!

How will local sports media compete with ESPN?
If you are a sports team, or a newspaper, TV or radio station with sports content online in the City of Chicago, you ought be very concerned about the future of your digital revenue.

I just visited ESPN.com/chicago. The page loads, and video is served showing me highlights of Mark Buehrle’s no-hitter along with behind the scenes video of the pitcher’s phone call with Obama…and even a snippet of Obama’s press conference where he alludes to the no-hitter. In one minute, everything I’ve always hated about ESPN TV (having to sit through a bunch of crap until they start talking about my teams) is eliminated. I could get used to that.

I predict local sports media and sports teams will have a tough time matching ESPN’s level of quality on the content front, which means they’ll probably struggle to grow their traffic figures…which will ultimately threaten revenue potential.

Add to this the fact that ESPN will likely hit the streets harder and faster to sell its digital channel. And it will be bundling its Website with TV, print, radio and (perhaps events at ESPNzone). As ESPN’s peddlers pitch market buyers, they will be selling CPM advertising rather than sponsorships. In so doing, they will effectively set the market for local online ad prices. CPM advertising is typically sold for a lot less than impressions inside sponsorships.

Unless teams get out there quickly to talk about “sponsorships” rather than “media,” teams are likely to a harder time selling digital at the same premium they’ve enjoyed in other media.

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Spotted at the bookstore

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:59:47 -0700

No less than 3 books about Twitter; and "Free" displayed next to "Cheap"

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Ricky Williams Hopes to Heal Others Along With His Image

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:58:02 -0700

Former Longhorn star Ricky Williams is taking extra courses in massage therapy and other alternative treatments in hopes of becoming a holistic healer when his days of carrying the football for a living come to an end. Ricky's always been a quirky dude, but this seems like a sincere attempt at putting his reputation as a pothead behind him in favor of a healthier future. [New York Times]

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Burglars Hit A&M Locker Room

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:13:00 -0700

Texas A&M is reporting that someone broke in and stole equipment from the Aggie football locker room, leaving the message "The Eyes Of Texas Are Upon You" written in athletic tape. Sounds like frame job to me. No one from Longhorn land is going to spend more time than necessary in the Bryan/College Station metroplex, and history aside, the rivalry is not near what it used to be to spur this type of prank.

UPDATE: My suspicions were right. Here's what I wrote in today's Austinist: Aggie Plan to Rob Own Locker Room and Blame Longhorns Backfires

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Roddick's Mental Game

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:54:32 -0700

Over the past few months, Andy Roddick has begun to put together mental toughness to go with his remarkable physical abilities. So it's not surprising that he's turned in some of the best tennis of his career.

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Rebooting the News Podcast with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:59:47 -0700

I've been enjoying a weekly podcast with blogging pioneer Dave Winer and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discussing the future of news. This week, Dave and Jay talked about the difficulty that journalists face in creating a new foundation for news as their old foundation is struggling. ("Journalism's responsibility is to keep its own downfall in perspective," says Winer.) Thought for the week: How to jump into the new news system without being weighed down by "how is going to make the transition?".

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Statesman Offers Discounted Print Subscribtions to Twitter Users

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:31:10 -0700

The Austin American-Statesman has come up with a clever way of tying online and print readers together by offering a pair of discounted subscriptions to Twitter users who follow the @statesman account. Readers can choose from a four-day subscription to the paper (Friday through Monday) for $5 a month or a seven-day subscription for $6 a month, a savings of 70 percent from the regular price. Internet editor Rob Quigley and publisher Michael Vivio teamed up on the idea and shared their brainstorming through their individual Twitter accounts. Nearly 7,000 people follow updates from @statesman, and it will be interesting to see the impact of this special offer.

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Can Design Save Newspapers?

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:41:52 -0700

Could good design save the newspaper -- at least for now? Polish designer Jacek Utko thinks so -- and his lively, engaging designs for European papers prove that it works. (via Daring Fireball)

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No Substantial Offers for the Statesman. Now What?

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:54:05 -0700

Four groups have made bids to buy the Austin American-Statesman, but none offered more than $50 million, Nicholas Carlson reported yesterday at Silicon Alley Insider. To illustrate what a poor situation that is, let's go back to September, where media analyst John Morton told the Statesman's Dan Zehr that "a rule of thumb for valuing a newspaper is $2,000 multiplied by the average daily circulation over a week. For the Statesman, that comes out to roughly $350 million." In that same September story, Zehr writes that "Five years ago, a newspaper typically sold at 12 or 13 times its earnings before taking out taxes, interest and other accounting-related items. That's down in the 5- to 7-times range now. The Statesman likely would go at the upper end of that range." The Statesman is owned by a private company, Cox Enterprises, so we don't know what its earnings before taxes are, but I would bet it's a lot more than $8-10 million. And Morton's rule of thumb would now be $300 per average daily circulation, down from $2000. If that much has changed in the past six months, then the market for a profitable newspaper, with no other daily competition and a growing web presence, has bottomed out. The land that the Statesman sits on is worth $32 million on its own, according to Travis Central Appraisal District records. So what does Cox do now? The company said it wouldn't rule out selling the paper and the land separately. They can either sell one of their well-performing papers for one of these low-ball offers, or hold on to it and see what's around the corner. It's a depressing situation to be in for the newspaper's owners, and for those who work there.

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SXSW Scorecard

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:03:34 -0700

I'm back in the swing of things after this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival and now that it's had a chance to sink in, I wanted to take a look back at the 19 panels and talks I attended. Here's how I rank them:

New Think for Old Publishers The setup: Book publishing executives want to hear from what their loyal audience wants. The execution: More than half an hour of introductions and preamble before the crowd grew restless. Clay Shirky did the best he could to pull the most important points out of the clamor, but his talent was generally wasted here. An hour of Shirky on his own would have been much better

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New York Times Local Blog Network Provides Good News Among the Bad

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:26:53 -0800

Among the unfortunate missteps (Newsday wants to charge for content; Hearst wants to build its own e-reader) and genuine misfortunes (Rocky Mountain News closes) in the publishing industry this week, there was this late-breaking glimmer of promise: the New York Times is expected to launch a local blog network on Monday. As Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, confirmed in the comments of the TechCrunch story, the two pilot sites will be staffed initially with full-time Times reporters and the paper will sell ads to local businesses. The neighborhood blogs will cover “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’” The good news is that this could be the beginning of a local collaboration network that online news organizations can provide the platform for. It's one of the rules that Jeff Jarvis lays out for newspapers in his excellent book, What Would Google Do? Newspapers can provide the tools and raw material for neighbors to gather and share news, and then sell ads to local merchants to support those efforts. The bad news is that it's still primarily an advertising-supported model, and in these harsh economic times, that's a hard way to make a living. At BusinessWeek, Sarah Lacy reports that local interactive advertising is headed for a big slowdown this year, according to Borrell Associates, an online advertising researcher. UPDATE: Schachter provides some more details in the comments below: "Our Brooklyn site will be collaborating with Jeff Jarvis and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. CUNY students will do outreach to residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, extending them the tools and skills of journalism so they can cover their own community." Very promising stuff -- I look forward to watching this grow -- jb

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Twitter, Facebook: How Many People Can You Follow?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:56:51 -0800

Twitter and Facebook make it easy to rack up a huge stable of friends and followers, but the number of people who really matter to you may be limited by the size of our brains. Facebook's "in-house sociologist", Dr. Cameron Marlow, recently shared some data with The Economist on how the site's users interact. Marlow says the average number of "friends" in a Facebook network is 120. The range is large, as you might imagine (234 for me), and women tend to have somewhat more Facebook friends than men. What's interesting is that that number of 120 is close to "the Dunbar number" of 150. The Dunbar number is named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who has suggested that the human brain can handle a stable network of about 150 people. Groups larger than that number need more restricted rules and laws to maintain a stable group. The Dunbar number is also mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, as a suggested ideal size for a working group. But Facebook's Marlow also looked as the number of people who someone frequently interacts with, and found that number to be small and stable: seven for the average male user and 10 for the average female. So although you may have built up a huge number of friends or followers, your core network -- the people you interact with and are close to -- remains as small as ever.

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