• The new medium could rot people's brains and erode cultural standards: "What you'll be seeing: [Ventriloquist dummy] Charlie McCarthy or the [intellectual radio broadcast] Chicago Roundtable?"
  
• The government is making huge new media decisions with far-reaching implications for the future: "Battle in the spectrum... Uncle Sam Looks at Television."
  
• The new medium will impact this old medium: Title: "Movies and Television" Article: "Film companies are watching television development with a careful eye."
  
• The elite first adopters will be overrun by the masses: Title: "Is Television Ready for the Public?" Article "Before the war about 7,000 television sets had been sold... the purcahses were all in or near a handful of cities. among them New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and Los Angeles" Those big-city bastards of Schenectady were liberal elitists even back in the day!
  
• The new medium will usher in a new crop of media lords: "Who Are the Leaders in the Fight?"
  
• The new medium means fun new gadgets (which could get us loads of advertising): Title: "What Kind of Television? War improvements cut costs / Look before you buy / Network possibilities / Buy wisely / Color television"
  
  
  
  Article (emphasis added): "Before you start looking for a receiver, check up on the television station in your area and find out whether its programs interest you...Don't let the salesman double talk you into buying one before it is demonstrated in your home. Who knows, you may be living in a "dead spot" where it is not possible to pick up television pictures. [AT&T has apparently been in the wireless business a long time.]

Somehow we still have movie theaters, radio, books and newspapers decades later. And every one of those sectors is still fabulously profitable and growing. (*Cough*)

[via Brendan Koerner]

News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller (pictured) said at a Monaco media event that his conglomerate plans to block Google (at least partially) within "months and quarters — not weeks... The traffic which comes in from Google... is the least valuable of traffic to us." That's according to the Telegraph, and followed similar comments from Miller's boss Rupert Murdoch just days before.

So why all the noise? Blocking Google is a straightforward process involving simple text files, not a big act of war that requires lengthy preparation.

Maybe Microsoft has offered News Corp. a middle ground between charging for content and leaving search engines entirely. Bing might offer a cut of ad revenue to News Corp. and other content providers in return for exclusively appearing in the Microsoft search engine, former weblog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis recently suggested.

And that idea isn't far fetched. The Associated Press's CEO recently said Microsoft was offering AP many more favors than Google:

Curley said he was negotiating a new partnership with Microsoft under conditions more favorable to the AP and its members...



Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP's demands. "They have said very strongly that they would," Curley responded... "They know how to have a conversation." And what about Google? "I'm not talking about Google," he said. "We haven't talked."

So maybe in the end Rupert Murdoch, the doddering newspaper fetishist, will have the last laugh over Google, reclaiming "his" content revenue... and delivering it straight to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Oh, Rupert.

(Pic by Dave McClure)

UPDATE: This new TechCrunch story about Microsoft's meeting with European publishers confirms that Microsoft's strategy is to ally with the likes of News Corp. against Google: "Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google's flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News."

"Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity," managing editor Robert Thomson said. Uh, really? Yes! Since the font used to attribute quotes on this Google News page is too small for Thomson's taste, search chief Mayer is encouraging "digital disloyalty" among readers who are the actual legal property of the Wall Street Journal.

"Why isn't the font size bigger?" Thomson demands. Seriously, Marissa. What do you know about designing websites in comparison to the leering, name-calling newspaper lackey of digital media genius Rupert Murdoch?

And although its easy to sneer at the tabloid/celeb press as an acceptable target for the wrath of anyone, the fact is they are the last thriving arm of media in California, and through their dark corridors may lie the path to media's salvation.

The first major salvo came with that news that the LA Country Sheriff's Department, as part of their investigation into leaks around Mel Gibson's drunk driving arrest, had obtained the phone records of TMZ kingpin Harvey Levin.

Fighting back, Levin declared of the news while speaking to an audience in LA, "It breaks federal law, it breaks state law. "This is like Chinatown. It's disgusting they would do something like this. How do you protect sources? It goes to the core of freedom of the press."

That little completely obscene invasion of privacy is but one front in the war, however. As reported last week here on Defamer, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has all but shackled the paparazzi by passing limiting the ability of paparazzi to stalk at will across the state. The new law outlaws photographing celebrities involved in "personal or familial activity."

Celebrity journalists — the last minority in America acceptable to persecute.

In an interview with Wired's Steven Levy, Williams lashed back at two traditional media fogeys who pooh-poohed his company's potential at the Sun Valley schmoozefest in July. Barry Diller, of IAC, and John Malone, the satellite TV mogul, said the microblogging service would never make much cash.

"I didn't argue my case," Williams says. "But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there's obviously a huge business."

And, hey, that's coming from a guy who made four whole million dollars last year, old media people, so you better listen up. These guys have spreadsheets that would blow your minds.

McInnes and his two VICE co-founders, Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith, split due to "creative differences" last year in January; much of the speculation centered around McInnes' dislike of VBS.tv-Vice's video site-and their marketing/sales arm. Shortly after his departure, McInnes started Street Carnage, which features awesome things like their contributors getting punched in the face by ex-girlfriends and also, sincerely excellent insiders' takes on culture issues, like the death of "downtown" artist Dash Snow.

But now, the badasses at VICE have gone corporate, banning a photographer featured on Street Carnage from contributing to them as well. Writes Amy Kellner, VICE's managing editor, to "Vincent," the Street Carnage contributor:

"hiya, yes i got the cd, thank you.
unfortunately, if you do stuff for street carnage, then you can't contribute to vice at the same time.
those are my orders.
best,
amy kellner"

Ouch. VICE is still perfectly likable, often. They—plug—published Alex Pareene's great take on a trip to the museum, and there's plenty of great stuff on VBS.tv. But there's also a specific kind of cultural brand that's clearly—if at war with the only slightly less corporate Street Carnage, who're carrying a Nike ad on their site right now—at ridiculous odds with itself. And you'd think VICE would realize that this is the kind of thing that dilutes it.

Can't all the hipster media outlets just get along? Or at least: not be so much like the mainstream ones?

Even by New York Post standards—which is saying quite a bit!—making this the lede of your story is an indication of some seething, rapey anger:

That's one dirty girl we'd just love to get tackled by!

Erin Andrews, they mean! She is in a sexxxy GQ photo spread (actually not that sexy? And she posed for it months before her nude video incident. No matter!) and the Post finds that this is a great opportunity to clarify to you, the readers: Erin Andrews is one dirty, sexxxy broad:

After GQ's photos hit newsstands and GQ.com this week, Andrews admirers will have to hold their breath for two weeks before getting a fresh gander at her — and her lovely gams.

"Gams," they said. "Gams."
[Pic: GQ]

Sweetnam, who is still in the Army but enrolled a special training program, wrote that his head was "still spinning" after a month at Google. No drills! No schedules! And suddenly he's having to wrestle with lava lamps. And familiarize himself with the very un-Army concept of adult "recess:":

Our wonderful facilities manager teamed up with the Google chef (yes, we actually have a chef) and put on a "Recess at Work" event for the office. The afternoon included square pizzas, chicken nuggets, juice boxes, four square and dodgeball.

Not that it's all fun and games; Sweetnam helped launch a system allowing military families to send audio care packages to servicemen and women via Google Voice. He's also meeting with veteran's groups and pitching the media on charity-related stories. Take his call! Everyone begrudges some entitled Googlers their hot fudge sundaes, but who can resist a man in uniform, with a service record and a juice box?

While Olbermann used his "Worst Persons" segment to call out O'Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and Brian Stelter, the Times media reporter who broke the story about the truce, O'Reilly tonight returned to flogging NBC's parent company, General Electric, for corporate corruption, as has long been his proclivity.

Since news of the secret arrangement broke last Friday night, O'Reilly has made no direct mention of Stelter's story, instead choosing to flaunt his independence tonight by chastising GE for polluting the Hudson River, among other things, and implicating Barack Obama as an accomplice in the process. O'Reilly then brought out noted corruption expert Dick Morris to lament about how truly revolting NBC and GE are because of the GE's corporate influence on its news organization.

So yeah, it's looks as though things are returning to normal in the Olbermann vs. O'Reilly cable news death feud, and really, isn't the world better off for it?

Slate's Jack Shafer points out that a book published in 1995 by Gwenyth L. Jackaway, Media at War: Radio's Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924-1939, offers some fascinating insights into the striking parallels between the print vs. radio war of the 20s and 30s and the print vs. internet war going on today.

Like today's Web, radio harmed newspapers commercially by disrupting the institutional identity they had carved out, Jackaway writes. The upstart media forced journalists and readers to ask, "[W]ho is a journalist? What is news? How should the news be delivered? What are the rules regarding the form and content of an acceptable news message?" Radio also fractured the existing institutional structure that partnered newspapers and wire services to deliver national and regional news. Radio could easily bypass newspapers and funnel news directly from the wire services to audiences. And, last, radio battered the institutional function of newspapers with live broadcasts of everything from sporting events to political conventions, allowing listeners to hear the news as it happened instead of reading about it 24 hours later.

Newspapers had every right to carve out just and enforceable intellectual-property rights for their copy, but their crusade against radio often lapsed into full scale disparagement of the new media. Some print journalists and industry leaders claimed that radio content was inaccurate, skimpy, sensationalist, and trivial and that its practitioners were amateurs. When radio news was accurate, they asserted, it was either a bunch of headlines from a newspaper or a story directly pilfered from one. Does any of this sound familiar?

Shafer goes to note that the print media establishment claimed that their writings were "sacred rhetoric" and that the rogue gallery of thieves and buffoons in radio who were leeching off of them threatened to bring our sacred democracy to its knees. The print folk also did everything in their power to block radio journalist's ability to secure press credentials in order to gain access to the nation's power brokers.

To answer the "Does any of this sound familiar?" question posed by Shafer in the excerpt above, the answer is yes, it most certainly does. Obviously.

About seven-tenths of one percent of total 2008 newspaper ad revenue of $38 billion. And that's assuming the worrywarts are correct; the $250 million number was provided to the New York Times by the CEO of an anti-news piracy startup Attributor which has an interest in over-estimating the size of the problem.

So solving the piracy problem overnight would do basically nothing to fix the news industry's woes, financially speaking. Strategically, it wouldn't help much, either, since sites that illegally copy wire stories tend to be very low-stakes operations, usually Google spammers trying to make small change via AdSense (see Wired's explanatory chart). More dangerous to newspapers is the explosion in Web outlets that give news without infringing on copyrights (with the possible exception of the Huffington Post, which could stand to dial back its "excerpting" a notch).

UPDATE:Recently departed nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller, now at NPR, tells Newsweek that "news is a commodity:"

I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It's almost like there's mass delusion going on in the industry-They're saying we really really need it, that we didn't put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let's do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn't work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we're all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say.

(Disclaimer: Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow once headed Moreover, the syndication company co-founded by Gawker Media chief Nick Denton.)

(Pic via Ioan Sameli)

The AP has also invented an amazing new "microformat," a digital wrapper for its online stories. The format will magically unearth journalistic misconduct and prevent anyone from using news in a way not pre-authorized by AP.

For example, the format preemptively warns people not to steal content, in case they were thinking about it.

It also provides the AP with an automated way to tell people when its stories are plagiarized, when the quotes are made up, and when a direct conflict of interest has been added to the story. How convenient and pracical! Here's how this will look, according to a promotional slideshow:

Finally, someone has invented a technology that allows plagiarists and cheats to confess their crimes in an automatic fashion. We predict this will work brilliantly, with no unforseen complications to inhibit its inevitable widespread use and adoption.

We've criticized the AP for knowing fuck all about the internet, blogging, and just generally relating to sentient human beings, but we have to hand it to the wire service: After changing how the world uses social media, embeds YouTube videos and sees Google, AP has done it again. We'll never look at AP news quite the same way.

(Top pic via)

Perhaps "stable" isn't the right word for a collection of media personalities known for their trail of enemies. Finke has had more than her share of feuds and bloodsport.

While Finke tends to spar with competitors and subjects, Fuller is known more for her demanding and abusive treatment of underlings, distance from family and exorbitant pay. After making her name at Us Weekly, the editor flailed atop tabloid publisher American Media and was eventually pushed out.

Now she'll take over Penske's HollywoodLife.com, and adjunct to the failed HollywoodLife magazine shut down by his holding company, Mail.com Media Corporation, last year. It's hard to imagine how Fuller will differentiate the site on the Web, already teeming with celebrity news, hard and soft, from a wide variety of other, better known sources. Penske is surely spending a tidy sum to find out; maybe he can use some money from the same pot to buy some news.

(Pic: by Esther on Flickr)

It's no secret that YouTube needs to make money; its annual losses have been estimated at between $175 million and $471 million. Meanwhile, Hulu may have already matched the ad revenue of YouTube, which is twice Hulu's age, thanks to old-media-friendly content.

The more completely Google breaks with YouTube's past, the easier it will be for CEO Eric Schmidt to cozy up to the movie and TV studios from his new house in Southern California. Who knows, the Hollywood honchos might even forget they once sued the guy.

Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

The Thursday report Salon called into question found Taguba - who retired from his military career in 1997 - noting that the Abu Ghraib photos the ACLU's suing to have released show "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Last night, Taguba admitted that he hadn't seen the photos the ACLU is suing over:

"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

Taguba then went on to mention that he still thinks "no other photographs should be released" because he fears it could generate and incite more violence and retribution against American soldiers.

The Daily Telegraph, now embarrassed at getting the story wrong and trying to find cover, ran their own version of Salon's story earlier this afternoon: their spin is that despite their initial report implying that Taguba had seen the suppressed photos, he had CONFIRMED their story in CLARIFYING that the photos he had seen weren't the ones Obama was trying to suppress. Ohhhhh. Got it. Hate to admit it, but Robert Gibbs was right about one thing: the British Press - kinda stupid, sometimes.

They also cited The Daily Beast: Scott Horton, who wrote yesterday about some of the photos Obama was trying to suppress, also had sources confirming their contents! Exciting!

The photographs differ from those already officially released ... In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position ... In one withheld photograph, not previously described, Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr., an Abu Ghraib guard, is shown suturing the face of a prisoner, a reliable source tells The Daily Beast.

Well, guess who else looks stupid, here: yes, The Daily Beast. Salon published those two photos in 2006, and Salon's Alex Koppelman took to the streets (blog) about an hour ago to scream that those photos were so three years ago, they had already been there (First!!11!!) and that none of you morons claiming to actually have some kind of exclusive on these photos or their content do.

So Salon's playing their own horn really loudly - fine. But both The Daily Beast and the Telegraph both look fairly ridiculous, today: they bought a story without trying it on, took it home, and wore it out to the club. And then Salon pointed out the giant skidmark near their collective ass while they were in the middle of doing the "Soulja Boy." They did a great job sussing out what they smelled as a bullshit story, and called out two fairly large media outlets in the process.

Meanwhile, despite what're probably good intentions by Taguba, he definitely screwed this one up, too. Why didn't he just come out as an opponent of the photos' release rather than someone with new information to bring to the table in the first place?

Maybe the photos don't show any of the abuses Taguba noted. But they're definitely being suppressed, and as Salon's made very evident, some pretty bad shit's already out there. One thing's certain: the desire for revealing whatever's actually in those photos - be it motivated politically, emotionally, or just out of the public's sheer masochistic curiosity - keeps growing with each story furthering this news cycle. Hopefully, none of the reporting on it will continue to be as grandstanding, shoddy, and scoop-happy as some of this. It really doesn't help.

Taguba denies he's seen abuse photos suppressed by Obama [Salon]
Telegraph report over Abu Ghraib 'abuse' photos confirmed [Daily Telegraph]
The Bogus Torture Coverup [The Daily Beast]
"New" Abu Ghraib photos aren't new [Salon]

News Corp.'s social network is near the end of an advertising partnership with Google reportedly worth $300 million per year. Any sequel to the arrangement is expected to be worth considerably less.

Speaking at News Corp.'s D tech conference, which runs concurrent with Google's own I/O conference in San Francisco, MySpace executives insist they're not sweating. There's a year and a half left in the existing deal, CEO Owen Van Natta said, and it constitutes less than half MySpace's revenue.

Translation: MySpace has bigger problems to grapple with, like a recent poll showing 6 in 10 users are using the site less than they used to. And besides, there's plenty of time for the young and old generations of media moguls to patch things up with one another.

That, at least, is the premise of some of the PR people rounded up by the New York Observer and intent on egging the Times on toward the sort of retaliation that would make Rupert Murdoch proud.

Would Fox News chief Roger Ailes respond to an attack with a letter? Or notorious Fox flack Irena Briganti?

Prominent left-wing flack Ken Sunshine (pictured) was explicit in his advice for the paper: the Times should really consider, you know, cutting a bitch:

"Another idea would be really going after some of their detractors," he said. "Go after the Post! They go after you? You go after them! The Times shouldn't do a story, that's a little too on the nose. But there are other ways."

(Hyperlink from the original; Sunshine actually dictated the mailto OUT LOUD. Crazy, we know.)

Or maybe that's still not tough enough. Maybe it's time to let Times media columnist David Carr live out his longtime fantasy of going to war for his "posse" and lead a full-on tribal attack. The gang is already doing target practice on Twitter, after all.

It all started Wednesday, when the Journal's managing editor, full of the sort of swagger Rupert Murdoch encourages at News Corp., took a victory lap for gains in copies sold to individuals ("the truest measure of readership") and in what people pay to read the Journal. In the process, he insinuated that some Times subscribers have suffered "brain death."

The Times blasted back that the Journal's growth has been due to discounted bundles of print and online subscriptions ($10 for the paper with an $89 online sign-up) and due to online-only sales. So the Journal's braggadocio was "strange," said a Times spokeswoman.

Now the Journal has sent us an email response (below) effectively stating — quite correctly — that if it has convinced people to send in money to read Journal content, the breakdown between print and online is unimportant (in this day and age especially). Besides, the Times is trying to sell digital subscriptions too, it just hasn't been nearly as successful.

Newspaper wars are an old tradition; they are one of the few types of competition the present generation of publishers have experience with. So this sort of petty feuding must be comforting, on some level, to both the Times and the Journal.

But the real threat is still online, in various corners of the internet. Name calling doesn't work so well there. These salty old media companies had better focus their aggression on innovation. No more circ memos!

Dear Ryan [Tate],

Your piece on the WSJ editor's leaked memo was interesting (as were the comments that followed). The memo by WSJ's Robert Thomson,
however, contained some strange analysis.

He says the Wall Street Journal was one of the only newspapers to show growth. This statement misses a major point:

The increase (0.6%) was driven by a 31,000 increase in Electronic circulation and a 102,000-copy (+21%) increase in deeply-discounted subscriptions — in some cases selling print subscriptions as a $10. "add-on" to an $89. wsj.com subscription. In reality, the Wall Street Journal lost 6% of its full-price subscriptions.

While the WSJ was up overall in copies sold, it was down 1.1% in print.

In these latest circulation figures, as filed with Audit Bureau of Circulations, subject to audit, The New York Times performed significantly better than the industry, showing modest declines (-3.5% daily, -1.7% on Sunday) in total circulation, but demonstrating strength in our National circulation as well as newsstand copies, results that were boosted by the incredible excitement during and following the election cycle.

Two years ago The New York Times changed its circulation strategy to pursue more highly-profitable, high-retention circulation, with less emphasis on things such as outbound telemarketing or special promotions that were expensive and resulted in high churn rates. Instead we are focusing on building our core of loyal readers. For example we have more than 830,000 subscribers who have been with us for two years or more, up from 650,000 in 2000. Our focus is on attracting a high-quality audience of individually-paid subscribers.

The NYT remains the largest 7-day newspaper in the U.S. and has won 101 Pulitzer Prizes and citations— including the five Pulitzers it was awarded last week — more than any other news organization.

Diane

Diane McNulty
Executive Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations
THE NEW YORK TIMES