My Sunday Evening Rant
I was in my office this morning working on a project and before watching our church live stream I turned on some of the Sunday morning political pundits to see what they were talking about. I heard one of the hosts say that The Huffington Post was celebrating it’s 5th year online this weekend. They also went on to say that The Huffington Post was neck in neck w/ The New York Times in terms of traffic to their website. This got me to thinking. Arianna started 5 years ago, and The New York Times was founded when? Oh, 1851… hmm…
I am not a follower of The Huffington Post, I’m not a big fan of news outlets that lean too far in either direction when it comes to their political reporting. I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, just tell me what’s going on and I will form my own opinion. It’s for that very reason that I don’t watch Fox News. I don’t need Glen Beck to give me reasons as to why I should be mad about things, because honestly I figure myself to be a little sharper than his average viewer. I don’t mean that in a bad way, that’s just how it is.
Now, I do think Glen Beck has it going on, as long as people are buying into his show, he is going to continue to make a bundle from it. Isn’t that what it’s all about at the end of the day? You pay me what they pay him and I will go on television and convince people they can fly. haha. But, by getting on the level that Fox does w/ a lot of their programming, haven’t they left themselves wide open to have their market share consumed by other angry and opinionated bloggers like Arianna? It’s not just Fox either, it’s almost all of the news agencies today, print, television, radio, etc. Back in the day it didn’t used to be that way…
I bet the average person never really knew Walter Cronkite’s personal political leanings, he just did his job and reported the news. That’s why he was the most trusted man in America at one time, he didn’t try to put a spin on it, didn’t have to, he’d never heard of a blogger. It was what it was w/ Cronkite. We landed on the moon. Kennedy is dead. The Nation Mourns. Of course later in life, when he wasn’t behind the CBS news desk he did do some freelance work for outlets like The Huffington Post and a few others, but he used this outlet to express his views and not from behind the news desk!
Now, fast forward 40 years… News outlets complain about losses in revenue, market share, etc., but by injecting their agendas into their product (the news) haven’t they left themselves wide open for this the entire time. I have to think they sort of did. I think it’s great that anyone w/ an opinion can fire up a blog and become a media rock star overnight. Sort of evens out the playing field a little bit. Now, again for the record, I don’t follow Arianna Huffington, nor do I agree w/ many of her ideas, but kudos to her as a blogger for what she has been able to do.
The bottom line I guess, if I was trapped in a corn maze w/ Arianna Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, and I had to work with one of them to find my way out of the maze, Rupert is SOL…
Rupert Murdoch’s Latest Plan to Become Invisible
Okay, so I don’t usually bash people on here, unless of course their name is Rupert Murdoch. In the past I have bashed Murdoch for saying things like, The Internet is Going Away, and People Will Pay for News, but his latest plan might be just the thing Fox and all of his other News Corp entities need to become completely irrelevant.
Murdoch’s latest stroke of genius is to have all of his News Corp websites invisible to Google’s search engine. That’s right, you won’t be able to find Fox headlines in Google’s search engines anymore. That should do wonders for his web traffic (insert sarcasm here). I honestly can’t wait to see how this turns out for him…
It’s long been common knowledge, even to those who work alongside him in the industry that he has no clue as to how news is disseminated today, and has an even fuzzier grasp on the whole social media phenomenon that has taken root and forever changed the way we use the web today.
Here are just a few profound statements from Rupert recently that should make you wonder if this guy just woke up from being cryonically frozen alongside Ted Williams. When asked about removing his content from Search Engines, here was a few of his responses:
“I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.”
By the way Rupert, you are misinformed as to your own business model dude, The Wall Street Journal isn’t hidden from Google, you can easily find WSJ articles on Google, maybe not all of them, but a lot.
I think Mashable put it best when they said Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work. He’s got the manpower to announce a war, but I’m afraid his army will be fighting windmills.
In case you haven’t seen the Interview that Murdoch did recently with Sky News, pop some popcorn, grab a beverage of your choosing, invite some friends over, and enjoy this comedy:
For some more perspective on this story, Mashable did a great piece on it: http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-google/
Red Eye: Andrew WK is questioned.
This is hilarious! If I am ever interviewed by Fox News I am going to do the same thing. Wouldn’t it be funny if Politicians did this too?
Rupert Murdoch: “Internet Will Soon Be Over”
Honestly I don’t think that I have ever in my life seen someone as successful as Rupert Murdoch be as far off base as he is right now trying to get a grasp on what is happening with corporate media. It’s nothing new, and it’s been going on for longer than you think.
Rupert, it’s not hard to get on board and monetize your content, and please don’t think for a minute that people are going to start paying for your content at this late stage in the game, especially when there are other content providers out there providing a comparable or better service than you currently provide. I promise you some people out there will pay for your content, but the majority won’t. For the most part you will be left holding the bag, kind of like that time you bought that company, what was it called… oh yeah, MySpace.
Do yourself a favor, retire, and don’t ever do yourself the injustice of speaking about something you obviously know nothing about, the Internet. If I was you, I would be on a boat somewhere off the coast of Destin pulling in Dolphinfish right now… There comes a painful time in all of our lives when we just have to know when to hang up the spurs and ride into the sunset…
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.
The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.
This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.
“Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, (Murdoch) replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that,” reports the Guardian. “Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
Murdoch’s newspapers and TV networks, which include Fox News and the Asian Star Network, have seen profits plummet from $216m to just $7m year-on-year. MySpace.com is also floundering despite a recent move to replace the company’s entire management staff.
It was all but over for the Boston Globe this week, following a threat to close the 137-year-old publication after net losses of $85 million this year alone. Only a last minute cost-cutting agreement on behalf of its owner, The New York Times Company, and The Boston Newspaper Guild, saved the newspaper.
But it’s not just establishment newspapers that are struggling to survive – social networking websites like Twitter and corporate online video giant You Tube are also deep in the red. Apparently, paying out millions in server fees for half the population of the planet to watch clips of cute puppies isn’t a sustainable business model.
This is why You Tube is being forced to pursue lucrative partnerships with giant production studios and broadcasters, at the expense of user generated content which has been relegated to a sub-section of its website, taking the “You” out of You Tube altogether. Content that may be deemed harmful to You Tube’s corporate agenda and its multi-million dollar partnership deals, like The Alex Jones Channel, is being systematically erased from You Tube’s website under the pretext of flimsy copyright infringement claims.
The jig is up for the corporate media. If they continue to allow free access to their content they will go out of business because there’s not enough advertising revenue coming in, whereas if they charge for content they will lose a huge chunk of their audience and their influence in shaping the news agenda will wane completely.
This is the price the corporate media has paid for lying, spinning and obfuscating on behalf of the virulently corrupt power elite and expecting the population to eat it up without question.
The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power, which is why they are aggressively supporting moves to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.
This what Murdoch is really getting at when he assures us that, “The Internet will soon be over” and it’s down to us to stop that agenda from being realized.
Paul Harvey – Good Day!
One of my absolute favorite radio personalities of all time passed away this weekend and I wanted to take a moment to make mention of it. I was on my good friend, Bob Connell’s blog this morning and noticed he had posted some articles about Paul on his website.
I have always had a lot of respect for Paul Harvey throughout the years, he always produced a top-notch radio program that to this day has not been successfully duplicated by anyone else in the industry. He never lost touch w/ his strong Christian values and managed to have one of the longest runs in radio. He always tried products before he endorsed them, and believe it or not he always researched out his stories on his own and wrote all of his content throughout the years. It’s not going to be the same without Paul Harvey on the radio…
The headlines may have gone to more flamboyant radio personalities, the Howard Sterns and Rush Limbaughs of the world. But in raw popularity, Chicago’s Paul Harvey topped them all.
He was the most-listened-to broadcaster in America, whose shows originating from studios at Michigan and Wacker in Chicago were heard by 25 million people every day at the peak of his career.
Radio legend Paul Harvey died Saturday at the age of 90. Harvey was the most listened-to broadcaster in America and his shows were heard by 18 million people every day.
Mr. Harvey, 90, died Saturday at a hospital in Phoenix, where he had a winter home, less than a year after his wife, Lynne “Angel” Harvey, had passed away.
“He was devastated by her loss. It took him a great deal of time to get back on the air,” said Mr. Harvey’s close friend, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Bruce DuMont.
When Mr. Harvey returned, he shared his grief with his listeners.
“He was never the same Paul Harvey,” said DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. “She was the spark, he was the talent. That relationship is now gone forever. It’s tragic.”
“My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news,” said the couple’s only child, Paul Harvey Jr., who like his parents is in the Radio Hall of Fame. “So in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents, and today millions have lost a friend.”
Heard locally on KFFB 106.1 FM, Mr. Harvey would commute from his River Forest home to his Chicago office, arriving by 4:30 every morning. He wrote his news shows and his staunchly conservative commentary, “Paul Harvey News.”
Paul Harvey Jr. wrote “The Rest of the Story” — a program his father would broadcast.
“Hello, Americans,” Mr. Harvey would say when delivering the show his son wrote. “You know what the news is. In a minute, you’re going to hear the rest of the story.”
In 2000, at age 82, Mr. Harvey signed a 10-year pact worth a reported $100 million, “the biggest deal ever cut with a radio personality,” according to the president of ABC Radio.
Born in Oklahoma in 1918, Mr. Harvey was based in Chicago since the end of World War II. A stretch of Wacker Drive has been given the honorary name “Paul Harvey Drive,” as his studios are nearby.
His programs were carried by 1,200 radio stations, plus an additional 400 stations of American Forces Radio. His syndicated newspaper column was at one time carried in 300 newspapers.
With an audience like that, words that Harvey coined — such as “Reaganomics” and “guesstimate” — have entered into American English. His TV program, “Paul Harvey Comments,” ran from 1968 to 1988 and was syndicated to 100 stations.
Mr. Harvey was never reluctant to go out on a limb. He sent out his “Eisenhower Wins” column two weeks ahead of the election.
Not that he was always right: He predicted that Elvis Presley wouldn’t last a year.
That was a typical call for Mr. Harvey, who made a career of praising Midwestern virtues at the expense of pop culture and the coasts, particularly New York. Appearing before a congressional subcommittee on offensive radio and TV broadcasts in 1952, Mr. Harvey condemned comedians “steeped in the nightlife of bawdy Manhattan” and claimed that their “girdle gags” had forced him “to turn off the radio to keep from blushing in front of my wife.”
He once described his listeners as a “vast, decent, middle-income, middle-IQ audience,” and Mr. Harvey’s politics reflected the right-wing slant of mainstream America.
When Sen. Joseph McCarthy came to Chicago in 1954, he was a guest at Mr. Harvey’s home.
He was born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa, Okla., the descendent of five generations of Baptist ministers. He got his first job at age 15 on KVOO in Tulsa.
Mr. Harvey attended Tulsa University while continuing to work at KVOO. After graduating, he moved through a variety of stations, ending up at KXOK in St. Louis, where he met his future wife, Lynne Cooper, in 1939. Mr. Harvey proposed to her the day they met, and they married several months later.
Mr. Harvey went to Hawaii to broadcast for the Navy in 1940. He was on a ship, two days out of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Back in the States, Mr. Harvey was named director of news and information for the Office of War Information for Michigan and Indiana.
He enlisted in the Air Force and moved to Chicago after receiving a medical discharge in 1944, joining Chicago’s WENR-ABC newsroom.
After President Franklin Roosevelt died, he delivered a famous obituary beginning, “A great tree has fallen. . . .”
In 1955, Mr. Harvey began a syndicated newspaper column, “Paul Harvey News.” He also wrote three popular books in the 1950s: Remember These Things (1952), Autumn of Liberty (1954) and The Rest of the Story (1956).
While generally the voice of Middle America, something of a Reader’s Digest of the air, Mr. Harvey was not unwaveringly so. He voiced opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as early as 1966.
During his career, Mr. Harvey withstood pressure to dump radio for TV and move to New York or Washington, D.C., DuMont said.
“He wanted to be in Chicago to maintain his connection to Midwestern values,” DuMont said. “He never did a broadcast without a tie and white shirt.”
“The fact that he remained rooted in the Midwest gave him a unique sensibility. But his appeal crossed lines from rural to urban to suburban,” said former Chicago Sun-Times TV and radio columnist Robert Feder.
“The other thing is, he was personally a man of incredible graciousness who never failed to acknowledge a kind word from peers, young journalists and others.”
And, of course, there was that trademark radio voice.
“You’d better be right,” comedian Danny Thomas once told Mr. Harvey, “because you sound like God.”
When Newspapers are Gone…
There is a lot of debate these days about how much longer newspapers can hang on and stay in business. It seems they are a dying breed, and it’s for good reason in my opinion, you can access your news nowadays via the web or on your mobile device in about half the time it takes to even unfold a print newspaper, not to mention, it’s a lot neater.
Seth Godin has posted a good post asking, “What will you miss?” about print newspapers. For me not a whole lot. I haven’t subscribed to a print newspaper, or print magazine for that matter, in a long, long time.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate it that Newspapers are being phased out and people are going to lose their jobs, etc., but if the powers that be at these news agencies are smart, they will position themselves to be successful this century by monetizing their websites, and trying innovative ways to increase their online revenues. One thing about it, this is certainly a good thing if you enjoy trees…
When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
Years and years after some pundits began predicting the end of newspapers, the newspapers themselves are finally realizing that it’s over. Huge debt, high costs, declining subscription rates, plummeting ad base–will the last one out please turn off the lights.
On their way out, though, we’re hearing a lot of, "you’ll miss us when we’re gone…" laments. I got to thinking about this. It’s never good to watch people lose their livelihoods or have to move on to something new, even if it might be better. I respect and honor the hard work that so many people have put into newspapers along the way. If we make a list of newspaper attributes and features, which ones would you miss?
Woodpulp, printing presses, typesetting machines, delivery trucks, those stands on the street and the newsstand… I think we’re okay without them.
The sports section? No, that’s better online, and in no danger of going away, in fact, overwritten commentary by the masses is burgeoning.
The weather? Ditto. Comics are even better online, and I don’t think we’ll run out of those.
Book and theater and restaurant reviews? In fact, there are more of these online, often better, definitely more personal and relevant, and also in no danger of going away.
The full page ads for local department stores? The free standing inserts on Sunday? The supermarket coupons? Easily replaced.
How about the editorials and op eds? Again, I think we’re not going to see opinion go away, in fact, the web amplifies the good stuff.
What’s left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.
But then I see the in depth stories about the gowns to be worn to the inauguration or the selection of the White House dog and I wonder if newspapers are the most efficient way to do this anyway.
The web has excelled at breaking the world into the tiniest independent parts. We don’t use this to support that online. Things support themselves. The food blog isn’t a loss leader for the gardening blog. They’re separate, usually run by separate people or organizations.
Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.
The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.
I’m not worried about how muckrakers will make a living. Tree farmers, on the other hand, need to find a new use for newsprint.
CBS Website Hacked
That’s right, the television network CBS had their website hacked using the popular iframe method and was actually used for a period of time to distribute malware to it’s visitors. I am not for sure how many visitors CBS has on a daily basis but I am pretty sure it’s probably high volume.
One of the popular features on CBS’s website among visitors is the ability to view missed episodes of their favorite shows like The Unit, CSI: Miami, and NCIS. Below is a report I found on Techworld regarding the attack…
TV network CBS has become the latest big name to have it website used to host malware, a security company has reported.
It appears that Russian malware distributors were able to launch another iFrame attack on a sub-domain of the cbs.com site so that it was serving remote malware to any visitors. A user’s vulnerability to the malware attack launched by the site hack would depend on a number of factors, including the type of security used on a PC, the operating system, and possibly the browser version.
“This saga confirms our many previous warnings that obfuscated code posing a serious threat to Internet users’ PCs, said Finjan CTO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, who has devoted a fair amount of time in recent months to finding these hacks.
“Our Threats Reports have continued to identify the increasing use of code obfuscation as a means of bypassing traditional signature-based solutions in order to propagate malware,” Ben-Itzak continued, taking a pop at the anti-virus products against which his company in part competes.
“It also highlights the fact that no web portal, no matter how high ranking, can be totally secure against a system hack and consequent infection of its visitors. Web users need to exercise caution at all times,” he said.
Finjan has it had informed CBS of the issue, but that the Russian exploit server had in any case been taken offline, neutering the attack for the time being.
iFrame and SQL injection attacks on big-name websites have been one of the fashionable attacks of 2008, embarrassing a string of household names.
CNN Site Still Unstable
This kind of confirms some of what myself and my partner Greg were noticing last night. A lot of websites CNN included were acting very erradically, for instance, the site would load but there would be no stylesheet attached to it. Greg noticed that he couldn’t get into MSN either. While on the phone with Greg I connected our server administrator on the line and asked him to check these major websites from his location and about that time the sites started rendering correctly again. It was an oddity that to this point I haven’t really seen an explanation for posted online until now. Here’s a link to a post on WHIR about CNN’s reported issues, Web Host Industry News | CNN Site Still Unstable, says Netcraft, I think for the most part CNN’s biggest problem is that Jack Cafferty somehow managed to tick off the Chinese!
