Archives for 2010

The Wednesday, December 15, 2010, edition of the New York Times featured a story titled “Bloomberg to Publish Editorials,” and read in part: “The mayor’s company, Bloomberg L.P., said on Wednesday that it would begin publishing editorials across its vast media enterprise in an effort to broaden the company’s influence on national affairs.”

Bravo for Bloomberg News and its publications such as Bloomberg BusinessWeek.  The nation needs a sane discussion of important issues to reinforce the sensibleness of Jon Stewart and to counteract the insane and senseless extremism screamed by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh on far right and Keith Olbermann on the left.

The Times story indicated that:<blockquote>… the endeavor, called Bloomberg View, is intended to channel his [Mayor Bloomberg’s] personal philosophy and worldview.

“I think it’s very important that everyone understands that our editorial page is going to be, for sure, consistent with the values and beliefs of the founder — even if he happens to be mayor of New York City,” said Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News. “I fully expect us in our Bloomberg View always to reflect those values. In fact, I want people to come away from reading the Bloomberg View infused with those beliefs and values.” </blockquote>

And we know what those values are, because on December 13, Mayor Bloomberg gave a speech announcing his commitment to the No Labels movement that is the reasonable, middle-ground, independent antithesis to the virulent, rage-driven partisan politics from the right and left that is crippling our government and our country.  These extremists are throwing stupid partisan tantrums while our infrastructure, educational systems, climate, and a basic sense of decency deteriorate.

The current political tantrums are thrown mainly by narcissists who are good at manipulating public opinion to gain fame and wealth – entertainers who are not in the least bit interested (and rarely understand) the complex issues they rant about, but merely care about getting what they want: approval and money.  The last thing they want is to change the world; they like it the way it is – a celebrity obsessed (not idea obsessed) world more interested in fiddling than putting out the fires of hate that are burning down a social order of reasonableness.

Michael Bloomberg has proven that he is a reasonable, pragmatic, yet idealistic Mayor, who will fight for social justice and fiscal responsibility.  He’s the rare politician who does what he thinks is right and is best for the city, and he doesn’t need approval or, certainly, money.

He praised the No Labels approach when he spoke at the organization’s inaugural convention.  Here’s what Matt Bai wrote in the New York Times: <blockquote> Mr. Bloomberg brought some star power to the inaugural No Labels convention at Columbia University, which also featured speakers like Joe Scarborough, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and a smattering of congressmen and senators. No Labels aspires to become a counterweight to ideological groups like MoveOn.org and the Tea Party movement — a network of activists devoted to pushing politicians from both parties toward a nonpartisan consensus on vital issues.</blockquote>

I suspect hissoner’s appearance was orchestrated to coincide with the announcement that Bloomberg News would be publishing editorials.   He’s no dummy.  But whether he’s launching a third-party presidential bid or merely trying to inject some sanity and respect into the political dialogue, the Bloomberg Views editorials are a welcome addition to the national dialogue, which has become way too strident.

Also, the editorials fill a gap in the national dialogue as newspapers close and as radio and television stations abandon serving the public interest for increasing ratings and shareholder value (and moguls’ income).

Bloomberg Views, count me in.

The trade press was pleasantly surprised by the announcement by Clear Channel Communications that Bob Pittman had made a personal investment in the company and would be head of its Media and Entertainment Group, which includes its digital and radio operations.

Media stories of the announcement have cited Bob’s successes at MTV, Six Flags, AOL, and Time Warner, but have under-reported his successes in radio, which is typical of media coverage of radio, the Rodney Dangerfield of media.

Bob will change that perception and get radio some respect — and it already has gained some traction in the respect category just by the fact that a media icon, who Advertising Age honored as one of “Ten Marketers Who Transformed American Culture,” has come back to radio.

Interestingly, the initial media coverage had Pittman coming to Clear Channel to oversee digital – radio didn’t get any respect – because that was Pittman’s perceived expertise due to his AOL success.  Media memories are short; they forget that Pittman was one of the greatest programmers in the history of radio.  And I can make a reasonable case for claiming he was best radio programmer ever.  He won big and quickly in a variety of formats.

Most of the great radio programmers, such as Todd Storz, Bill Drake, Paul Drew, Rick Sklar, Tom Donahue, and Buzz Bennett were one-trick ponies who won in a single format.  But Pittman won in many formats: Hot Hits (WPEZ-FM), Country (WMAQ-AM, the biggest and fastest turnaround in major market radio history), Album Rock (WKQX-FM), and Top 40 (WNBC-AM in some demos).  He programmed WKQX-FM while he was also Program Director of sister station WMAQ-AM and he also recorded his mid-day shift (the station was automated, which was unheard of for a winning station at that time), and, furthermore, he starred in the TV commercials for WKQX.  He did it all — he knows how to win in radio, just like he knew how to win in TV and on the Internet.

The Pilot Group investment fund, of which he is the founding partner, purchased a relatively small radio group, Double O Radio.  So what did Pittman do to try to increase profits for the group?  He didn’t cut expenses drastically, he didn’t try to program the stations himself, he didn’t cut rates in order to try to get a higher share of market revenue for his stations; instead he did the smarter and much harder thing – he tried to increase the size of the radio revenue pie.

Bob gave speeches around the country about the value of radio advertising – high reach, high frequency, and low CPMs – an incredible media bargain.  It was the same sort of hard-hitting, fact-filled, persuasive, brilliantly delivered presentation he did for the under-appreciated online medium in 1996-2000.  Yes, he sold AOL, but he first sold the value of the medium in order to increase the size of the online pie.   More than anyone else, it was Bob Pittman who sold the Internet as a viable, effective advertising medium in those nascent years.

So, radio is lucky to have him back where his heart, and now his money, is.   He will increase the size of the radio revenue pie and the rising tide will lift all radio boats.

Comedians John Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s rally of reasonable people was hugely successful, drawing massive crowds to the Mall in Washington.  Billed as a Rally to Restore Sanity, it was, in fact, a rally meant to boost the ratings for Stewart and Colbert’s programs on Comedy Central and to diss Fox Cable News’s and MSNBC’s credibility and, hopefully, lower their ratings.

Jon Stewart’s closing speech was a modern masterpiece of reasonableness, sanity, and news-media bashing destined to become a classic, along with Neil Postman’s <i>Amusing Ourselves to Death.</i>

Long-time blogger and CUNY Journalism School professor Jeff Jarvis went to the rally and posted an excellent account, as did The Huffington Post’s Jeff Linkins, where you can see a video of Stewart’s stirring speech.  Both blogs are worth reading to get a flavor of the excitement, sanity, and reasonableness, and don’t miss watching Stewart’s speech.

One of my favorite quotes from his speech is: <blockquote>“The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker–and, perhaps, eczema. And yet… I feel good. Strangely, calmly, good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us, through a funhouse mirror–and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist, and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead, and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin, and one eyeball.”</blockquote>

But don’t forget that wingnuts are seething.  Nothing could piss them off more than sanity and reasonableness and decency, to say nothing of dissing their insane, unreasonable, and indecent idols on Fox News.  They are waiting to celebrate their gains in Congress after Election Day, and will mistakenly believe that the outcome will confirm their obsessive hatred of Obama, big government, and taxes.

So, thank you, Jon and Stephen, for pointing out the stupidity of the bloviating pundits on cable news and asking for sanity, even if it was basically a promotion to boost your ratings.

NEW YORK, NY, October 25, 2010– Nick Ehrmann, CEO and Founder of Blue Engine, a transformative urban education startup, announced today the addition of veteran educator and consultant Charles Warner as Senior Advisor.

In making the announcement, Ehrmann said, “We are delighted to have Charlie Warner as a member of our team to help us craft our strategies for responsible growth.  His deep experience in management, education, community service, and online marketing will invaluable as we work towards proving our model and expanding our reach.

In accepting Blue Engine’s appointment Warner said, “The film ‘Waiting for Superman’ brilliantly portrayed the crisis in urban education in America.  It depicted some effective solutions, including the Harlem Children’s Zone and the successful KIPP charter schools.  I believe that Blue Engine’s unique approach that utilizes one-year fellowships similar to Teach for America and works with experienced public-school union teachers in their classrooms holds exceptional promise.  I’m excited to be part of this dynamic organization and to be able to help evangelize its measurement-based teaching system.”

About Blue Engine

Blue Engine is America’s next-generation educational service project.  Beginning in New York City in 2010, Blue Engine offers one-year urban education fellowships to recent college graduates, who, after extensive training, deliver high-dose tutoring in small, in-classroom, homogenous groups that are evaluated daily – a method that accelerates academic achievement and prepares students to transition into higher education with the skills they need to avoid remediation and complete their degrees on time.

Contact

For Blue Engine: Nick Ehrmann –  nick@blueengine.org

Silicon Alley Insider wrote on October 18: “Speaking at Y-combinator event over the weekend, the real Mark Zuckerberg said that the biggest difference between the movie and real life stems from the fact that movie-makers ‘can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.’”

Zuckerberg’s comment reflects a few of the points made by Daniel Pink in his brilliant book Drive: The Surprising Truth About Motivates Us that most normal people are not motivated primarily by money except when they do repetitious, routine tasks, but they are motivated by autonomy (self-direction), mastery (getting really good at something), and purpose (doing something worthwhile).

For those who can’t take the time to read Drive, check out this excellent summary of the main points in the book on YouTube by RSAnimate.

Of course, Hollywood and Wall Street types aren’t normal people.  In these arenas of twisted values, fueled by the most addictive drugs of all – power and money – winning isn’t everything, greedy lust for the two-headed devil of power and money is everything.

In “Social Network” Mark Zuckerberg is depicted as a computer programming nerd who is vindictive and greedy – he wants Facebook all for himself and tries to cut out his friend Eduardo Saverin of  the vast majority of rightful ownership of Facebook.  Zuckerberg is portrayed as duplicitous and greedy by the Hollywood producers, director, and writer of the movie.

This story line is certainly to be expected from Hollywood.  In psychology, it isn’t called a story line, it’s called projection, the tendency of people to project their own negative characteristics on everyone else.   The thief thinks everyone is trying to steal from him because that’s what he does.   Politicians accuse other politicians of lying all the time.  Ummm?

So Hollywood can’t understand a story of a young software genius (the movie does depict Zuckerberg as a genius) who builds Facebook because he wants to do something cool that will help young people connect and enhance society.  Like Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in “The Princess Bride,” I can hear the Hollywood types screaming, “inconceivable!”, or repeating yet again Jack Warner’s line, “if you want to give a message, send a telegram.”

These greedy, self-absorbed types think the purpose of a making a movie is to make them rich, just like most Wall Street types and media moguls think the purpose of a business is to make a profit.  They never read “the father of modern management,” Peter Drucker’s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker piece of wisdom that “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.”

“Social Network” is based mostly on a sensationalist book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,  by Ben Mezrich in which the author takes the side of Eduardo Saverin and makes up a good story.

Respected journalist and FORTUNE magazine senior editor David Kirkpatrick’s well-researched book The Facebook Effect portrays Zuckerberg as an idealistic software genius and Saverin as a pampered son of a Brazilian businessman bully of a father.  Kirkpatrick’s Saverin is not a sympathetic character because he is more interested in making money on Facebook than creating a cool product that has an easy-to-navigate user experience like Zuckerberg wants.

Kirkpatrick’s Zuckerberg seems to take a concept from the movies, the iconic “build it and they will come” from “Field of Dreams” (appropriately), while Saverin seem to take the opposite concept from the movies, that “greed is good” from “Wall Street” (appropriately).

Those, like Joe Nocera of the New York Times in his “Talking Business” column,  who think that Ben Mezrich’s view of human nature is more accurate than David Kirkpatrick’s and that Zuckerberg and most human beings can’t be motivated by a meaningful purpose and are greedy, should probably look very carefully in the mirror – or perhaps in the eye of a projector.

Last week Sirius XM Radio shock jock Howard Stern warned his listeners that he might not return to the satellite radio service after his current five-year, $500-million contract is up at the end of the year.  But hardly anyone noticed or cared, especially Sirius XM stockholders because their stock was up 74 percent so far this year on a steady uptick in subscribers, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

What a difference five years makes.  In 2006 the foul-mouthed Stern, who is most heavily fined broadcast personality by the FCC ever, vowed to leave the public airwaves because he couldn’t be filthy enough to please his listeners, and joined Mel Karmazin’s Sirius Satellite Radio, which at the time was locked in a mano-e-mano battle with XM Radio.

Stern’s move to Sirius saved the company’s bacon and brought an estimated two million new subscribers to the money-losing satellite radio service, making Karmazin’s $500-million bet on Stern appear to pay off.

However, tastes and technology changes – you might say grows up – and with the introduction of internet radio into cars, more and more young listeners turned from the 56-year-old Stern’s stale potty humor to internet radio, which provides virtually an infinite variety of programming.

Thus, Stern has become expendable and almost irrelevant except to a shrinking audience of aging slobs.  So, what is such a rich has-been going to do?  He should join another irrelevant, trash-talking, rich has-been, Don Imus, on the Fox Business Network.

The 70-year-old Imus airs mornings on the Citadel Network, which includes WABC-AM in New York, and is simulcast on the Fox Business Network (FBN).  If Howard Stern were to join FBN, he would be reunited with Imus, and the two could renew their spat with each other, which began at WNBC-AM in New York in 1982, as dramatized amusingly in Stern’s movie “Private Parts.”

Both Imus and Stern belong on FBN because both personalities, like FBN, are conservative (Imus voted for McCain and Stern backed Republican George Pataki for governor of New York) and create entertainment that is intended to rile up anti-authoritarian, anti-government, anti-intellectual know-nothing television addicts.

The Fox Business Network makes no attempt to be a business news outlet (note that its name does not include the word “news”), and by hiring Imus to do its morning program, it reaffirmed that it presents TV vaudeville, not news.  FBN is an outlet for right-wing, Republican, Tea Party propaganda, as evidenced by its programming after Imus on Tuesday, September 21, in which its overweight anchor kept repeating the headline and storyline for the morning, “Biggest Tax Hike in American History,” and trashing Obama (a constant theme), MSNBC, and Keith Olbermann.

An Imus-Stern trash-talking on-air food fight would fit in perfectly in the FBN public-interest-be-damned, truth-be-damned environment.  FBN and Fox News president Roger Ailes, who resembles and thinks like Jabba the Hut, would love such a food-fight – he could pick up the leftovers.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann delivered an emotional special commentary on August 17 about the mislabeled “Ground Zero Mosque” in which he was on the right side of issue, wrong to inject too much emotion into his comments, and delusional – thinking he was Edward R. Murrow.

See for yourself:

Keith Olbermann\’s Special Commentary

Olbermann ends his intelligently crafted, emotional diatribe with Edward R. Murrow’s legendary sign-off, “Good night and good luck.”  Was this a reverential attempt to evoke the memory of Murrow or a delusion that he had transmogrified into Murrow?

Having a sense of Olberman’s gigantic self-absorption, I suspect the latter, which creates an equally gigantic dilemma.  I want to despise Olbermann for being so egotistical as to compare himself to the rational journalistic icon and crusader Murrow, but I also want to love him for his brilliantly crafted and argued commentary in which he correctly debunks the simplistic, stupid, polarizing, intolerant, repressive wing-nut label and position on the Lower East Side community center.

As a New Yorker, it’s so offensive to have wing-nuts from Alaska and Georgia trying to tell us who can worship where in our city.  Their position is so blatantly anti-Obama, anti-religious freedom, anti-American partisan and political as to be ridiculous.  But of course, calling wing-nuts’ positions ridiculous is an oxymoron.

Olbermann’s commentary would have been more effective and persuasive if it had been delivered in Murrow’s calm, rational, authoritative style.  When you watched Murrow, you didn’t know he was angry by the tone of his delivery but by the force and logic of his argument.

On the other hand, Olberman’s most obvious and visible message is rage – raw emotion that becomes the message and which means, unintentionally, that he is playing the O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity, wing-nut game.  Therefore, when a viewer looks at Olbermann’s commentary, the first reaction is to the anger, to the emotion (after all, it’s TV) and not to the rational argument.

And that’s the problem with TV, the medium and, thus, the emotion is the message.  The wing-nuts have mastered the medium with their simplistic, stupid, polarizing, intolerant, repressive messages, and when Olbermann plays their emotional, angry game, the logic of his words is lost.

Too bad, because he’s absolutely right on the issue.

J. Craig Venters’s seriously overreached when he claimed last week that his lab was the first to create synthetic life. Television has been creating synthetic life on a massive scale for decades and video games have been doing it for years.

What could possibly be more synthetic than family life in “The Honeymooners,” “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Leave It To Beaver,” or “The Waltons?” That’s easy – the longest running sitcom in television history is also the most synthetic (it does even use live actors, it’s animated) and the most injurious to the image of fatherhood – “The Simpsons.”

Because television has always been in the advertising-delivery business and interested only peripherally in its effect on culture and society, it pitches the appeal of the majority of its entertainment content to the largest segment of mass consumers, lower- and middle-income women 18-49.

Is it no wonder that the heroes of this entertainment eye candy are savvy, long-suffering, loving, and sometimes funny women who show up their clueless, often childish, self-centered husbands? And as the years go by, it seems like the men get dumber and more helpless until we finally get to the ultimate stupid loser, Homer Simpson.

Network television entertainment programming doesn’t attempt to mirror or even define real life; it tries to embody in a video format the dreams of its primary target audience in order to sell this audience soap. Dreams are not reality, they are a synthetic, fuzzy, exaggerated replays of real-life problems in which our minds attempt a subconscious workout of our daily challenges.

And are television reality programs not synthetic? “Survivor,” “Bridezilla,” and their clones are as synthetic as the sitcoms mentioned above. The ultimate of being synthetic, or, more appropriately, of lying (the two words are have essentially the same meaning at their core) is television claiming that their programs are “reality” programs – it is the same newspeak (words the opposite of truth, as in Orwell’s 1984) as Fox News constantly claiming it is “fair and balanced.”

So J. Craig Venters and his brilliant colleagues in his lab might have created synthetic life, which brings up a few ethical issues, but it isn’t even close to being as synthetic or unethical as most television entertainment programming.

Guest blogger Darryl Smith of the University of Western Florida responds intelligently to my satiric blog post about the FCC reviewing buggy-whip rules:

I think broadcast TV will be with us for a number of years. While there are always concerns that newer technologies will make heritage technologies obsolete, the heritage technologies seem to evolve to maintain their existence and relevance.
Dead tree newspapers are indeed a dying industry. Newspapers will evolve to take advantage of new technologies such as digital paper, e-readers, etc. The industry will remain the same with only a change in the method of distribution and frequency of content delivery.
Over the air TV will have a longer run to obsolescence. Given the current economy, a lot of people are reducing their discretionary spending on cable and satellite services. They are able to receive high definition programming over the air via antenna. Some that maintain subscription based services, still receive over the air signals for high definition programming simply because of quality issues. The over the air signal looks better due to the amount of compression used by cable and satellite systems.
Residents of areas prone to weather emergencies such as hurricanes will maintain antennas for reception of TV signals. During these periods, power is often restored long before cable service.
Over the air broadcast is essential for the safety and security of the country as well as to ensure that all Americans, no matter what their economic circumstances, have access to news, information and entertainment.
While not as prevalent, buggy whips are still needed and used for varied purposes.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced this week that it was going to look into its rules on media ownership, primarily how many radio and television stations and newspapers and cable systems one company can own in a market.

This announcement came five days after Google announced the introduction of Google TV, a platform that would allow people who had the latest generation of TV sets that connect directly to the internet to surf the web and use Facebook and Twitter as they watched video programming, including TV network programming.

TV sets that connect directly to the web will eventually disintermediate local TV and radio stations and cable systems, just like craigslist.com and the web has ruined the dead-tree newspaper business.

TV station signals that don’t travel through coaxial or fiber optic cables are received via rabbit ears and roof antennae, which are as up-to-date technologies as buggy whips, and are headed for the same scrap piles that are also filled with typewriters and dial telephones.

Passing regulations about how many radio and TV stations a legal entity can own is like passing regulations about how much leather can be used in making buggy whips or how many typewriters someone can own.

I guess the bureaucrats need to have something to do. If they can’t prevent oil spills, then maybe they can regulate buggy whips.

Yesterday I bought $20 worth of lottery tickets because, according to my rules about buying lottery tickets, the jackpots for Mega Millions and Power Ball were both over $20 million. I don’t buy tickets when the jackpots are under this arbitrary amount because it’s no fun to fantasize about a net take of under $5 million (if you take a lump-sum pay-out instead of a 26-year payout, you divide the stated jackpot by four to adjust for taxes and the estimated lump-sum discount to be on the safe side).
Of course I could use a couple of million dollars, but any amount under $5 million is not enough to really lust for; it doesn’t get my greed juice flowing. The current Power Ball jackpot is $142, so dreaming about $35.5 million gets my dopamine gushing – all my grandchildren will be able to go to Ivy League colleges and I can buy without feeling guilty that Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar watch I lust for.
I suspect that something similar happens in the media and, especially, with internet media startup companies. When people start working in media organizations, many of them are motivated by the idea of serving the public with news, information, and ways to connect, communicate, and build community.
That’s the way was it was when many media companies were privately owned by families or controlled by a founder, such as when the Bingham family owned the Louisville Courier Journal or when founder William S. Paley ran CBS.
A study in Journalism Quarterly showed that rates for advertising were lower in family-owned newspapers than in publicly owned companies such as Gannett. Family-owned newspapers were apparently more interested in serving the community than in maximizing profits, the goal of public companies.
Before Larry Tisch, a non-broadcaster and bottom-feeding investor bought controlling interest in CBS in 1986, the notion of the CBS News Division making a profit was anathema to Paley – news was a public service supported by the Entertainment Division. It wasn’t until CBS was bought by Tisch and, for that matter, until GE bought NBC also in 1986, that the news divisions were considered profit centers.
When they became profit centers, as necessitated by the culture of maximizing profit in publicly owned companies, the news divisions stopped providing balanced news and became entertainment.
Similarly, when profit pressure enters the picture, newspapers and magazines often tear down the walls between marketing and editorial in order to produce more popular, more saleable inventory.
Fast forward to 2003. Mark Zuckerberg was dumped by his girlfriend at Harvard and had a few brews. He was alone and brooding in his dorm room, so to do something to take his mind off his pain, he wrote on his blog, “Let the hacking begin,” and created a program that eventually became Facebook.
Mark got lucky and Facebook caught on; by 2006 it was the right platform at the right time. In that year legend has it that Zuckerberg turned down $750 million for Facebook, headquartered in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto, because he felt it was worth $1 billion.
In 2008 Zuckerberg proudly announced in an annual meeting (referred to as f8) that Facebook’s mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” (Click here to see him say it on You Tube).
This statement was around the time Mark hired a Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, as chief operating officer. According to the New York Times:

Ms. Sandberg, currently vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, joined the search giant in 2001 and helped develop its immensely lucrative online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense. She will join Facebook later this month to work closely with Mr. Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, the company said Tuesday.
“A big theme of this hire is that there are parts of our operations that, to use a pretty trite phrase, need to be taken to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview. Ms. Sandberg will help Facebook expand overseas and develop an advertising network that will help justify its carbonated $15 billion valuation, set last year when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of the company. She will also oversee Facebook’s marketing, human resources and privacy departments — essentially guiding how Facebook presents itself and its intentions to the outside world.

Clearly Ms. Sandberg was hired to maximize revenue and profits.
When Facebook was worth $1 billion, Zuckerberg didn’t seem to feel he needed an experienced revenue and profit maximizing COO. The amount wasn’t enough to get his greed juices flowing; the mission was to connect people, not make him and his colleagues filthy rich.
But it seems that when Microsoft and Russian investment firm DST invested in Facebook and shot its valuation past $15 billion that Zuckerberg’s dopamine started gushing. And according to Silicon Alley Insider, Facebook is now worth between $22- 33 billion, so Mark must be fantasizing about joining the ranks of Slim, Gates, and Buffett.
Which might well explain Sheryl Sanberg’s entrance on the scene as COO, a job in which she will control Facebook’s “marketing, human resources and privacy departments.” It doesn’t look like a coincidence that soon after her oversight of both marketing (maximizing revenue) and privacy that Facebook’s problems with privacy issues began to accelerate.
Putting marketing and privacy under the oversight of a single executive is like tearing down the wall between the sales and editorial divisions in a newspaper or magazine – it undermines credibility and consumer trust.
More money for Facebook equals less privacy for its members. When Zuckerberg had a mission of connecting people, privacy was virtually sacrosanct, but when greed and Sandberg crept in, priorities, missions, and ethics became compromised.
Palo Alto, meet Wall Street – anything for a buck.

The New York Times featured a story in its Tuesday, May 11, Technology section titled “Missouri’s Newsy Changes Journalism on the iPad” that claims the “new startup Newsy.com has combined an innovative journalistic model, a low-cost Midwest business strategy and a beautiful touch-screen design to rocket to the Top 10 of News apps for the iPad in iTunes. Remember how the iPad was supposed to change journalism? Newsy could be an example of how it’s actually working…”
Quoting from The Times story, here’s how Newsy.com works:

Newsy doesn’t cover breaking news and it probably never will. Instead, the team waits until a topic is buzzing, then grabs video clips from multiple sources across the political perspective to combine into a short video segment. The resulting content is very clearly incorporating, with extensive attribution, the work of diverse news production teams from around the world. The breadth of editorial vision seems genuinely diverse, too. Clips from Fox News and Democracy Now! will both appear in the same stories at times.

The Newsy.com NY Times story appeared less than a week after Donald Graham, CEO, of the Washington Post Co. told employees of the Post-owned Newsweek magazine that the company was putting the venerable weekly news magazine up for sale.
And the day before the Newsy.com NY Times story, Time Magazine, in a grasping-at-straws maneuver, announced a new advertising guarantee.
Here’s what Advertising Age wrote about the Time offer:

One of the industry’s biggest publishers, Time Inc., and one of its biggest ad buyers, the Starcom MediaVest Group, are collaborating to develop promises that certain numbers of people will remember ads or take action on them. If a participating marketer’s campaign doesn’t achieve the promised result, Time Inc. will run free additional ads until it does.

The Time Inc. announcement reminded me that a revival of Neil Simon’s only musical, “Promises, Promises,” is now running on Broadway, or of the old advertising line, “promise her anything, but give her Arpege.” Time Inc. is desperately trying to promise results, engagement, more ads – anything – to put off the inevitable announcement that Time Warner is putting it up for sale.
Time magazine probably delayed that announcement a few years by going digital sooner than Newsweek did. It has a popular iPhone and iPad app. The well-established Time’s iPad app is currently ranked number six, two places higher than the unheralded startup Newsy.com’s app.
Time is trying, but its app is based on name recognition and soon the innovative Newsy.com that’s all video and that compares coverage of the same story from diverse news sources will stomp the single-sourced Time coverage.
Young people know Fox News and MSNBC are biased, that CNN is numbingly boring, and want to make their minds up themselves and on their mobile devices. Within five years more people will surf and watch video on the web on their mobile devices than on their computers.
While Newsy.com is fulfilling the mobile video news dreams of its consumers, Time is making promises to advertisers, not to its readers. That’s the reality of the new media (the consumer is in charge) and the self-imposed tragedy of the old media (the advertisers are in charge).
Is it any wonder Newsy.com is the future of mobile news?

On May 3, Media Daily News’s David Goetzl wrote: “No surprise here: the Tribune Co. has tapped an insider to take over its broadcasting division. Jerry Kersting replaces Ed Wilson, who departed last week.”
Why was it no surprise? Because Kersting is an old radio crony of controversial Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, the former shock jock who clueless media mogul Sam Zell hired to run the Tribune Co., which, of course, is now in bankruptcy.
What does a beleaguered mainstream media company executive trying desperately to emerge from bankruptcy do? Innovate? Find new sources of revenue? Inspire the troops? No, he does what he’s always done, surround himself with cronies.
Cronies are loyal; no matter how many stupid mistakes you make, how many employees you harass, or how you completely demotivate associates with top-down, silly directives, such as Michael’s banning of 119 words in newscasts on Tribune-owned WGN-AM, cronies will tell you how brilliant, funny, and absolutely right you are.
And Kersting isn’t the only crony hired by CEO Michaels. In 2008 Broadcasting and Cable reported that:

Tribune made the announcement in an off-beat press release, headed, “Surely You Can’t Be Serious?,” and then went on to make light of the hire because Chase doesn’t have experience typically required of the head of an Internet division. In response to follow-up questions, a Tribune spokesman said the release was meant to demonstrate a “‘new’ Tribune and a new way of thinking about things.”
Chase joins Sean Compton, who was brought on last week as Tribune’s senior VP of programming, leaving his position as VP of programming at Clear Channel/Premiere Radio Networks.
Michaels also hired Lee Abrams away from XM Satellite Radio, where he was chief creative officer for the past 10 years. At Tribune, Abrams is chief innovation officer.

There may not be any correlation between cronyism and bankruptcy, but then again, there could be. But there does seem to be a correlation between Michael’s hiring decisions and the hiring practices and outmoded management practices and beliefs of many mainstream media executives.
It’s as though all they read is their own press releases slopped out by PR flacks and their own blogs. God forbid they keep up on the latest management and leadership trends and ideas — they’d call them fads. Their attitude is, “I know best because I’ve done it.”
Yes, they did do it – they did it in an era when you had to be a moron not to make a living in the newspaper or, especially, the broadcasting business, with its FCC licensed oligopoly in which all managers knew how to do was price and sell their inventory based on scarcity.
However, radio and TV station and broadcast group executives today are virtually unemployable (unless via cronyism) because they have no idea how to compete in the disruptive internet age in which inventory is not scarce, attention is.
Instead of reading their press releases, they should be reading Drive by Daniel Pink that aggregates the latest research on motivation, and that clearly indicates that you can’t motivate people with just money and that straight-commission compensation systems are the worst way to pay people.
Ex-broadcast executives looking for work should read The Game-Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan that reveals “how you can drive revenue and profit growth with innovation” (the book’s subtitle). Lafley, the former CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, details how to manage for innovations that lead to profit growth, and not how to do the same old things over and over again and expect different results.
They should read Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta that details how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page not only invented a brilliant new way to search for information but also invented new management structures in the internet age in which engineers rule, not self-absorbed, all-about-me moguls.
Broadcast dinosaurs should read Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely that uses examples from behavioral economics research to show that the theory of economic man – a rational decision maker – is flawed. According to behavioral economics, people make decisions based on emotions (irrational) and try to rationalize them post hoc.
Broadcast executives (squadrons of whom are now seeking work) will probably never consider reading The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies by Columbia Business School professors Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald, and Ava Seave because the book points out that “content is not king” and the current problems in the media business are caused largely by the egomaniacal moguls that head the big, old-fashioned media conglomerates (Iger of Disney is an exception).
And reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer that pulls together some radical ideas about advances in neuroscience, and rmakes the argument that science and art are about the same thing…fuggetaboutit.
But expecting intellectual curiosity and openness to workable ideas from me-first broadcast and former broadcast executives is probably too much to ask. They will probably continue to have silly ideas like the one Randy Michaels had of measuring the Tribune’s reporters’ productivity by column-inches of words. The management of the paper would assume that the more words a reporter writes, the more productive he or she is.
Ideas like this one are what you’d expect from an old-line mainstream media executive: predictably irrational.

The second segment on John King’s April 22, hour-long CNN news show was about the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day and showed “some of the devastation” to the earth’s environment. The handsome, graying King (no relation to the senile Larry) showed pictures taken from a satellite on his “Magic Wall,” a high-tech, oversized iPad, of deforestation in Brazil and glacier melt-downs in the Mt. Everest region of Nepal as clear evidence of global warming.
But then he blew it and brought up an image of a post card that touted an “Environmental Bounce Back” in Yellowstone Park. King showed a picture of burned-down trees after the fires of 1988 and a picture of a “thriving area now” in the park. King added that the bald eagle, which was once an endangered species, was also thriving, so, he said, “not all the news is bad.”
Then, in a in a cynical have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife statement, he intoned dismissively, “We’ll leave it up to you on whether Al Gore is right or he’s wrong, but an interesting perspective from up above” ( the satellite photos).
What John King reaffirmed was that news on television is all about interesting and arresting images, which tend to be uncomplicated pictures of what appears on the surface and not about any underlying, complicated truths or messy realities.
King’s “USA” show debuted in March after the immigrant-bashing, right-wing bloviator Lou Dobbs mercifully left CNN, but King, flashed his conservative credentials with the pejorative Gore remark and revealed, perhaps unintentionally, that CNN (owned by Time Warner) must have reserved the 7:00 p.m. time period for a wing-nut. King probably kept Dobb’s producers, who must be in harmony with Dobb’s ideology and climate change denial. And CNN’s strategy must be to reserve the time period for a right-wing tilt in a desperate attempt to appeal to Fox News’s right-wing audience.
But no one does wing-nut, tea party, birther, climate-change denier pandering better than Fox News, and an attempt to entice its audience to change channels is bound to fail – it’s an awful strategy.
If CNN wants to turn around its plummeting ratings, trying to pander to Fox News’s conservative audience or to MSNBC’s liberal viewers with high-tech gimmicks and flashy sets won’t work. CNN is caught in the middle between the polarizing opinions of Fox News and MSNBC, which is clearly a losing position, and there is nothing it or John King, or Anderson Cooper, or Wolf Blitzer, or, can you believe it, Larry King can do about it.
And certainly pandering to climate-change deniers won’t work, either.