Stuff Channel

it hasn’t been a very good week for Perez Hilton, the screen name for flamboyant “blogger” Mario Lavandeira. First off, he gets into a scuffle in Toronto with Members of the Black Eyed Peas, calls one of them a “f-ggot”, and get whacked upside the head and gets a black eye as a result. Then on Thursday, as news broke that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack, this guy has the balls to post the picture above with “heart attack or cold feet” written on it, and the text:

Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance from his Holmby Hills home to a nearby Los Angeles hospital on Thursday afternoon!! Supposedly, the singer went into cardiac arrest and the paramedics had to administer CPR!!!
His mother is even on the way to visit him!!!…
We are dubious!!
Jacko pulled a similar stunt when he was getting ready for his big HBO special in ‘95 when he “collapsed” at rehearsal! He was dragging his heels on that just like his upcoming 50 date London residency at the 02 Arena, of which he already postponed the first few dates!!! Either he’s lying or making himself sick, but we’re curious to see if he’s able to go on!!! Get your money back, ticket holders!!!!

The reaction has been swift. Perez’s own blog is packed full of comments calling him out and really giving it to him. Online petitions have started. Fox news ran the story, which apparently Perez declined to comment on when reached for a comment. Considering this guy seems to have something to say about everything, well.

There is a pretty big move out there for people to boycott or stay away from his blog, the anger is running deep as the senselessness of his comments are sinking in.

RIP Michael Jackson!

Quite simply, I am shocked and dismays. As many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I didn’t really like Michael Jackson’s music (rock guy here) but still had respect for this work. We all watched as he went through his creepy, reclusive stage, and deep down we cheered as he announced his 50 concert event for the UK, scheduled for later this year.

Well, some people, like annoying gossip blogger Perez Hilton, could only seem to joke and jibe about it. In his typical fashion, he made crude comments. The Perez style includes writing rude comments on images, adding genitalia, and other childish things. Anyway, when the news broke of Michael Jackson’s heart attack, this fool ran the picture above - “heart attack or cold feet”.

How crude. Perez, I know why you got slugged the other night. You are a creep. I hope every one of your advertisers drops your site like a rock, and I hope that every intelligent celeb in the world no longer wants anything to do with your rude, crude blog. Go away, your time is up.

RIP Michael Jackson!

Welcome to the third part of my look at the world of “FREE!” as proposed and pushed by a few pundits and online bloggers as the future of stuff. I am particularly focused on Chris Anderson’s new book “FREE!”, because it is leading the charge of misinformation, similar to his book The Long Tail.

Chris Anderson has the admirable position of having a sort of bully pulpit to work from. As the Editor of Wired magazine, he has been in the position to decide and report on what is wired, tired, and expired. He has also used the magazine as a place to float the first chapter of his book about free. The funny part is that this article is already more than a year old, which is an incredibly long time in the internet world. It is interesting to see how his suggested business models have worked out, and how they show that Anderson may be nothing more than a tourist taking a snapshot, not really understanding what all is going on under the hood.

His first free model is “Freemium”, that is where there is a free product and an upgraded, premium version for a price. This is one of the areas where Free doesn’t go far past traditional marketing methods, from the sample of soap to the bite size sample in the supermarket. However, the model has it’s problems, specifically that the free they are often giving away isn’t a restricted enough product to truly promote the premium product. He uses Flickr as an example, with their free model and “flickr Pro” setup. The problem is that Flickr in and of itself as a free service is good enough for almost everyone who uses it. While the pro options might have some interested additional features, the base product is a fully functional system. There is realistically very little on the table to encourage people to move to the pro product. Sample systems should be about encouraging users to move to the pay product, not satisfy their needs for free.

The second item is “Advertising”. You know, like the google ads on this site, banner ads, etc. This is all and well, Anderson has been editing a magazine that is entirely dependant on the ad model to make it go. Broadcast TV is another traditional ad supported model, and they tend to work. Yet, in the economic downturn, magazines and newspapers have seen significant downturns in ad revenue, and Anderson’s own magazine has lost more than 50% of it’s ad pages in less than a year (and has ended up a much slimmer monthly edition). While ad supported is a model most of us clearly understand, the market of “FREE!” really kicks at it and makes it difficult to use. Movies are some of the biggest advertisers on broadcast TVs and newspapers, but if movies are being pirated more often and sales decline, the ad dollars available to promote the movie drops as well. So many online sites which run advertising and give away significant amounts of product (especially torrent sites that encourage file trading and other forms of “infringement”) are shooting themselves in the foot by taking away the exact revenue stream they are trying to cash in on. Ad supported in the end requires that people buy something or do something that is of value to the advertisers. If you take away the public’s desire to do those things, then your ad sales disappear.

Next is “Cross-subsidies” - this thing is free, provided you do that. Typically we would see this in cheap cell phones, expensive monthly plans, the old razor and razorblade mentality. Anderson uses the example of WalMart running DVDs below their cost as a loss leader, knowing full well that you are likely to buy other more profitable stuff while you are in the store. This is an example though that proves that free doesn’t really work out, because the item is rarely free. $0 phones are often very out of date phone models, Wal-Mart isn’t giving away DVDs for free because there isn’t enough upside elsewhere to support it. This is actually a good indication that free just doesn’t apply here very much at all. Anderson stretches this example (to the limits) in mentioning the most popular “FREE!” supporter model, the free music, expensive concert ticket model. Basically, they attempt to say that by giving music away (or in Anderson example the band gives the masters to street vendors who can see the music and keep all the money), the band in theory makes tons of money on fuller concert venues. This model is very dangerous, because it leads down a finacial dark alley, let me explain:

One of the problems of this model is that a certain point, the bands involved cannot perform more concerts (there are only so many hours and so many days in a week) and there are only so many places they can play. There is a point where they can not longer easily grow the size of the concerts, so in order to increase income, the only choice is to raise ticket prices. Already for top acts, it isn’t unusual to see tickets selling in the $200-$500 range per seat. These higher prices are at least in part as a result of the artist (and mangement) looking to make up the income lost due to declining music sales.

Further, it creates a simple problem, where tickets are no longer priced where an average fan can afford to enjoy the band’s concerts. Wealth is not spread evenly in society, rather the vast majority of the wealth is concentrated in a very small group of people, with more people in each level as you drop down. The vast majority of potential fans may not have enough income to attend the shows. The well off people pay for the overprices concert tickets, and subsidize the lower income people. Another way to look at it is the rapid fan who will pay anything to see the band, pays for the big dollar front row tickets, and in the end pays for a number of casual and non-fans to get the music for free.

You end up with a model where very few people are paying to entertain the masses. If some of those affluent people decide not to support a bad (by not attending over priced shows) then they have too signficant a control over what would be considered popular. In the end, is it fair to collect $100 from one person and give out 99 free songs, or would it be better to collect $1 from each of them and sell some of them $20 concert tickets too?

The final item I will touch today is “Zero marginal cost”. This is perhaps the biggest lie of the “FREE!” movement, because it trivializes and ignores the costs associated with creating content. Example is music, which takes time, effort, and skill to create, often recorded in studios, or on home cmputers, edited by someone, polished, packages, and made ready for the public. All of those steps cost money, time, and effort, typical full length CD album takes between 1 and 3 years for a band to create, between the writing process, the recording, the finishing, and the preparing for distribution. So while the costs for distribution of the music (digitally) may be lower than the “shiny plastic disc” model, the bigger end of the costs are still there. This is where the Long Lie comes back to haunt Anderson again - marginal cost is never zero, but often those costs are hidden from the public. Costs of internet connections, computers, bandwidth, servers, and all those other things required to make the “virtual” downloads happen are still there, just not charged directly. While the number is often very small per unit (if you push enough units), it never reaches zero. That space above zero is a big enough market for the Long Tail, yet is something to ignore when dealing with “FREE!”.

Also, marginal costs on music cannot be calculated directly on the cost of adding one more unit of distribution, because the initial unit cost (for the 1st disc) is incredibly high. So if it cost $100,000 to produce a CD, and it costs you only 1 cent per unit total margin costs to distribute it, the actual per unit cost never actually reaches 1 cent, it is always above that cost due to the cost of creation. Sell 100,000 copies, and each copy cost you $1.01. Give it away for free and distribute 1 million free downloads, and each one still cost you 10 cents to do. Notice there is no free lunch.

So looking only at the margin costs of distribution and declaring a product free can only be done by people who aren’t paying to create the product to start with. Many of them point to the cross subsidies model as “this is where you make the money back”, which would be good if the example band wasn’t already performing concerts and wasn’t already making money from them. Further, the process removes the incentive to create new and interesting music, rather it encourages estalished acts to sit on their catalog and just tour, not taking the time to create new music because there isn’t any money in doing that.

Anderson makes the mistake of looking at the exceptional profitable ad supported websites, the exceptional free music artists, and the exception freemium purveyors and tries to claim it should apply widely. Exceptions tend to prove the rules, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Under all the “FREE!” there is cost, and without income, there is no functional business model and in the long run no business. Sites like Twitter and YouTube are massively popular with the public, and yet Twitter has made no move to try to make money on their product (venture money keeps them in the game), and You Tube losses have been reported to be in the neighborhood 1 million dollars a day (supported only by the bigger business of Google). All the free in the world gets you a crowd, but not always business.

If you believe the buzz, if you are foolish enough to fall for the gurus, then you probably think that “FREE!” is the next best thing in marketing. As I mentioned last time out, Chris Anderson of Wired is coming out with a new book about “FREE!”, which oddly has been very slow to come out and more oddly will be sold and not given away. The first exerts from the book were published in Anderson’s Wired magazine more than year ago, which with lead time means that the content was ready more than 18 months ago.

Why the long wait?

Well, Chris Anderson isn’t anything if he isn’t a man good at timing things. As I mentioned previously, Anderson is well known for his book The Long Tail, published at the height of the great back catalog releases from the movie and TV companies. His basic theory held water only because of timing. Released when the data matched the premise, it solidified his guru status. At the helm of Wired Magazine, he has done the same thing, with so much muck thrown at the wall that he is going to have enough places where he is right to look like a true prognosticator of great skill, rather that a guy who tries to jump in front of a parade and look like it’s leader.

You sort of know the whole “FREE!” thing is getting convoluted when you read this first chapter (as published in Wired). Anderson starts out looking at King Gillette (he of men’s razor fame) who developed the great business model of “cheap or free handles, charge for the blades” which is a model still in use today. The point Anderson tries to make is that by giving away the handles, he developed a great blade business. While this is true, it also required a couple of other important points to make it work out. Foremost is having a tied product. The handle is useless without blades. A million free handles does nothing, nothing is accomplished with just a handle. The handle is custom and accepts only your blades. So all the free handles in the world will not shave a man’s face, will not accomplish anything.

Anderson goes on to cite examples: “Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.” In each of these cases, there is a tied and required sale. A cell phone without service is useless (except as a paper weight), a videogame console without games is nothing, and a coffeemaker without coffee is a nice way to make hot water. In all of those cases, there is no completion of task, no satiation of a marketplace. There is creation of additional demand, not a pure giveaway.

The discussion moves to the internet: “In economics, the parallel is this: If the unitary cost of technology (”per megabyte” or “per megabit per second” or “per thousand floating-point operations per second”) is halving every 18 months, when does it come close enough to zero to say that you’ve arrived and can safely round down to nothing? The answer: almost always sooner than you think.” Again, a totally misleading discussion where Anderson attempts to quickly dismiss the costs of operating a website, distributing material of the net, and so on. What is truly funny is that when you pair this against his Long Tail theory, you start to see where it turns into the long lie instead.

Basically, costs of bandwidth and computer equipment has dropped rapidly, but will soon reach a point where the human and physical costs of providing it are key components, rather than the actual equipment to provide it. A good quadcore server might cost a couple of thousand dollars now, the bandwidth to run it maybe ten thousand a year, which is very low considering what costs were not 10 years ago. However, the cost of the person to maintain the equipment, the monitoring, the support, and all that stuff which is dependant on people, not machines, continues to cost. Even if the machines and the bandwidth were free, the costs to keep things online would still be there.

What Anderson is doing is looking at the steep part of a log scale curve, and assuming (incorrectly) that it will continue to fall in the same manner forever until it effectively hits zero. Yet, when it comes to selling books and videos, he says that same sort of curve NEVER hits zero. Is the glass half full or half empty? It all depends which “guru” theory you are trying to push this week.

One of the funniest things is how Anderson is pushing ad supported as one of the business models. This is a section of the book that will likely be quickly re-written because the current economic downturn has proven Anderson wrong. In fact, his own Wired Magazine (which is mostly ad supported), has lost more than 50% of it’s ad space, and has gone from a fat, double thickness magazine to a thin, lean, and almost empty wasteland in less than a year. The owner / publisher Conde Nast has already shut down other publications in their group because of a lack of advertising. How long before Wired goes down the same road?

It brings the simple point: If Anderson could be so wrong about the basics of his own business (magazines), how can we take his “Guru” statements seriously?

Next time out, I will look at each of the areas of “freeconomics” that Anderson pushes, and expose the realities behind them.

A few years ago, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine wrote a book called “The Long Tail”. In a nutshell, Anderson’s observations were based mostly around the book, video, and music business. With companies such as Amazon being able to stock a significantly larger collection of books than your local bookstore, example, they have created a market for older material. While it doesn’t sell as well as the new releases, most books / movies / music tend to continue to sell for a long time in the future. He called those back catalog sales “the long tail”, thus the name of his book.

But as with many pop culture writers, Chris Anderson made a few mistakes and a few broad assumptions in his book that in the end just don’t hold up. The Long Tail assumes that there is always some demand for almost any produced entertainment product, no matter how old it gets. But he failed to address the simple issue that during the late 90s and early 21st century, the western world became awash in “new” old product. TV shows were turned into box sets, the internet spread the word of old, out of date books, etc. In simple terms, there was a certain amount of pent up demand, a cross section of the population that would want to own the complete set of Hello Larry episodes has pretty much been satiated.

Quite simply, Anderson confused the pent up demand that lack of availablity created with a trend for things to sell forever. As that generation that remembers the A-Team and Sanford and Son either buy the DVDs or die off, the demand dies off as well. The long tail isn’t infinite, nor is it likely as pronounced as Anderson would suggest, because the data he looked at during that period was skewed by the pent up demand for this product. In many ways, it shows Anderson not as the grand discoverer of a great new thing, so much as a chronicler of current circumtance, attempting to stretch a fleeting observation into a long term trend.

Anderson’s new book and new mantra is “FREE!”. Called the “past and future of a radical price”, it is another attempt to take a fleeting observation and turn it into a trend, and in turn to improve Anderson’s brand as a tech guru. it would be a laughable concept, except that Anderson is so serious about it.

The idea? Well, part of it is as old as the hills: Give away a sample for free, and use that sample to upsell people to the full product. Samples have been a huge part of marketing for literally hundreds of years, something that isn’t going away any time soon. The difference here is that the “FREE!” movement suggests that you take a product with existing value (example music) and give it all away free as a method to sell something else of more value at a higher price. In the music world, the suggestion is give away the music, and sell more and higher priced concert tickets. The idea is predicated on the concept that music can be distributed at no cost on the internet, so why sell it? After all, if people like your music, they will buy your concert tickets, right? With enough demand, you can raise the price of those concert tickets and make more money, or you can do more concerts and make more money, right?

Where the “fleeting observation” part comes from is that Anderson appears to be mistaking the widespread use of torrents to make infringing copies (aka steal, take without paying, pirating) of music as a business model, and one that should be embraced. It’s akin to the public transit companies seeing more and more people jumping the turnstiles, and instead of stopping them, they install mini-trampolines and ladders to help them get over those pesky ticket machines. It is the virtual version of throwing up your hands and allowing a rioting mob to invade your store and destroy it.

“wait!” they say. “People aren’t stealing anything, they are only making copies! That isn’t like ransacking a store”. This stands between a little while lie and a huge fib, depending on who you ask. While it is true that you will still have the original CD, what widescale “infringing” of the music does is steal the value out of the original product. While each copy isn’t specifically a lost sale, it is lost potential. With enough lost potential, sales will be lost and as a result value disappears. Just ask U2, with their recent album widely pirated over the internet after an accidental pre-release, the sales of that album were up to 50% lower than their previous record in the first week.

There is the rub. A band like U2 can’t do more concert dates in a year (not easily, anyway), and with ticket prices for top acts often hitting the hundreds of dollars, there is little upside on the sale of tickets. The record industry represents (by 2007 number) a 10 billion dollar a year industry. The idea is to toss that business out the window and turn it free. Where will the money be made?

Check back next time for how the Long Tail and Free come together to make the Long Lie.

I will be the first person to admit that this is a story that could have been written in any of about the last 10 years. Formula 1 has become the largest sink hole of cash in the last few years, with teams routinely spending more than 300 million a season to run less than 20 events, and races being moved from country to country on the basis of which oil rich republic of the week is willing to shell out the big money for an event. With new tracks springing up cost around 250 million each to build, and yearly sanction fees rumored to be upwards to 30 million per event, it isn’t hard to see how F1 spins money like a mad thing.

The results have been there: Bernie Ecclestone, the rights holder, and his byzantine collection of companies, holding partnerships, and what not have pretty much profited through much of this. Bernie is now a very wealthy man. But as is often the case with wealthy men, they dream only about being slightly more wealthy. As a result, much of what made Formula 1 great has gone out the window, and as I mentioned above, races have been moved all over the place, in a chase for which country is willing to shell out the most cash.

However, this has brought a problem for Bernie. With more and more asian and middle eastern countries joining up with his circus and replacing races from Europe and the Americas, the problems of broadcast time in the home markets has come up. It just wouldn’t do to have races running at 7AM in the UK. Well, actually, it would cut down the amount of money collected for TV rights though Europe. This is truly a hug problem for Mr Ecclestone, and something he couldn’t just bear to live with.

F1 has always been strict when it comes to timing. Everything happens with precision, exact times that things start, end, and so on. This is right down to the minor elements of the weekend, from the start time of the first practice session to how many minutes before the start of a race that the teams must remove the tire warmers from the car. Races always started in the early afternoon, usually 1PM local time - no matter where there races were run.

Well, Bernie needs to fix his european TV problem. It just won’t do, you know! So Bernie goes out and asks the host countries to consider alternatives. So Australia ran their race at 5PM. Singapore actually installed lights on their new track to run at 8 PM at night, which puts the race right in the middle of Sunday afternoon UK time. This weekend’s race in Malaysia was also offset to a 5PM start (which gave a UK start time of about 11AM). This however is where the greed starts to show through.

Kuala Lumpar is notorious for heavy late afternoon rain. As a tropical country, it isn’t unusual for there to be fairly sudden and very dramatic rains at the end of the day. So what happens? The race starts very late in the day, not surprisingly it rains a ton, and the race is called at just passed half distance and that is that. Now, the rest of the day had been very nice, no issues. But in order to make a better TV time slot, Bernie moved the start time right into what is almost a given forecast of heavy rain. The man’s greed to make a few more dollars on the TV side basically cost the fans, the sponsors, the racers, and the crowd in attendance 50% of the event, which is truly disappointing.

The last few years F1 has made a number of financially “sound” decisions that are against the fans. With escalating costs to host events, races have been lost in the US, Canada, France, and so on. It isn’t about racing, it’s about making more money, nothing else. This moving of start times to meet home market TV is just another poor decision from Bernie, a man who appears to have stopped watching the racing a long time ago. Race results at F1

Okay, now, it isn’t very often that I do this sort of thing, but damn, I gotta let this one out because it’s driving me batty. It’s a little story of rims for my car, a really slower shipper, and some totally ridiculous non-service from the guys and gals that drive the big brown trucks for UPS - very slowly, I might add.

I ordered rims for my car from a place called Wheels and Caps - replica replacements for the Long Beach Rims on the VW GTI. The rims are pretty hard to find, and the originals from the dealer up here can run almost $600 canadian per wheel. They are are hard to find, harder to find straight ones, and used sets often trade on craiglist in the $1000 range with used tires on them. So when I found a set of 4 replicas for $541/US (shipping almost included), I was all over it. So I ordered the wheels from their North Carolina office by phone on March 19th. I got a confirmation number, but no UPS tracking numbers because the wheels are shipping from another warehouse, but they would have the tracking number soon.

Anyway, by the time they are finally shipped to me from Quincy IL, it’s the 11th day in the process. They ship it standard. Now, Quincy to Montreal isn’t really a long, long ride (other side of Chicago). What does UPS do? Well, first, the wheels go the wrong way and head to St Louis. Then the next day back into Illinois. Then they move down the highway (very slowly) to Syracuse NY. Now here is where the story gets weird. Standard service for UPS is a 4 day delivery. Shipped on Monday, I should get the wheels on Saturday (probabably more like the following Monday). But the distance and trip from the original to the destination is really about a 18 hour drive. Yet for UPS, the drive from the Chicago area to Syracuse, normally a 10 hour drive, takes them 31 hours from exit scan to the enter scan in the next warehouse.

So I call UPS to find out what is up. This is where I find out what brown is doing for me: Brown is slowing my boxes down to make sure that it takes 4 days, and it is costing them money to do it. Effectively, my boxes aren’t schedules to clear through customers until the 3rd, but on the 1st, they are ready to enter customs (not that far from Syracuse) - but they won’t send them to customers for another day and half, just to slow down the process. No matter how soon the boxes get to customs, they won’t accept them out until the 3rd, no matter what. The nice lady on the phone (a supervisor) explained to me that this is normal, standard service is 4 days and UPS will assume me it takes 4 days, even if they have to circle the block with the boxes for 2.5 days to prove it.

UPS, I have to say, you guys make me wonder. I order to justify your more expensive shipping options, you actually appear to hobble your standard service and specifically make what should be a two day delivery into a four day delivery. How is hecks name is this good service?

So I know what Brown did for me today - they made me wait.

Well, as I mentioned about a month ago, airlines had started to turn north korea into a no fly zone, as a result of Pyongyang suggesting that there might be trouble. Everyone in the west knew it was because North Korea was going to try launching another rocket (the last ones didn’t do so well). The North has repeated over and over again that this is a mission to put a satellite in orbit, not to launch an attack, but there has been plenty of concern that it would in fact be an attach, and Japan has even put their anti-missle defences at the ready.

Well, according to CNN, the rocket or missle is getting fueled up for it’s flight, which means the launch won’t be far away. Most of the world powers are going to be watching this one closely. Interestingly, the launch might even happen during the G20 meetings, which would lead to some interesting comments to the media, I am sure. Reuters is quoting US military officials that thing that the rocket will in fact try to launch a satellite.

it will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

NBC’s long time hit show ER is grinding to a finish this week, the end of it’s 15th a final season. It’s been a struggle the last couple of years for this “use to be really big” show, but they still pull a large and loyal audience, and still produce at least somewhat compelling TV.

For anyone under 30 years old, ER will have effectively been on almost as long as you can remember. Thursday night at 10PM is ER time on NBC, and has been for a long time. It gives way as the 10PM slot at NBC becomes home for the new “not the tonight show” with Jay Leno, which will take out much of NBC “adult hours” prime time shows next season.

For those of us old enough to remember (or to have seen it on rerun), I think that very first episode was so overwhelming, so intense, and so deeply humorous, that many of us were hooked for ages on that show. Watching Noah Wylie as the dazed intern John Carter stumbling around the ER like a lost puppy was scary, funny, and intense, all in one package. Over time, the original cast pretty much all fled, and the show shifted from a medical drama with soap opera overtones to a soap opera that happened in a hospital. The humor of the show sort of slipped away, and by season 8, all of the original cast was gone and the show turned much more into an ensemble drama with a rotating cast of characters. Some fans of CSI (on CBS Thursdays) have pointed out that CSI has gone through the same process, losing some focus on the crime and centering more on the personal drama of the main characters, and now as season 8 comes to a close, a significant number of original cast members are gone.

The passing of ER may also be a mark in the sand when it comes to the passing of big budget TV dramas, at least on network TV. Each season for a hit show gets more and more expensive to produce (as salaries for performers goes up, amongst other things), yet revenues rarely keep pace. The results are often networks choosing not to renew all the contracts for characters, and instead bringing in lower cost new talent to flesh out the shows. With NBC dumping all of their 10PM hour shows next season in favor of Leno’s new talker, leaving shows like Law and Order on the ropes for the 2009-2010 season.

This may be a start of a big move for Network TV. For NBC, it means that they trade 5 hours of weekly primetime (out of 21) from externally produced drama to talk format. If the talk format catches on at all at 10PM, don’t be surprised to see the other 2 networks give it a try. Fox runs local news at 10PM, so this will leave only ABC and CBS running with dramas at 10PM. The economics of this are truly huge, as an evening talker is much cheaper to produce, and depending on how it goes, could potentially bring reliable Monday to Friday ratings to NBC in this block, without anywhere near the headaches or expenses.

Read more about the end of ER here.

In the almost never ending saga of the embattled US auto makers, there have been a few odd twist and turns. This is probably the oddest one so far. According to the Associated Press, the Whitehouse has requested that GM CEO Rick Wagoner step down immediately, likely as a condition of an aid package that President Obama is set to reveal in the next few days. The sources is attributed as an Administration official, but is not named because not everything is public at this point.

This brings the month of March to an end for GM, which started the month suggesting that GM may not be viable anymore. This move to toss Wagoner out the door may be a move for the Obama administration to get a much firmer hand on the wheel at GM. The story says “A person familiar with Obama’s plans said last week they would go deeper than what the Bush administration demanded when it approved the initial loans last year.”.

It brings the questions: What happens next? Is this going to accelerate the shutting down of brands like Saturn and Hummer? Will Obama install a more friendly face to run the company? Read the story here, and see what you think.

An interesting report on the March viewership numbers from Nielsen Media Research. shows the CNN is slipping to third amoungst cable news viewship in prime time. “Through Wednesday, Fox was averaging 2.73 million prime-time viewers in March. MSNBC had 1.16 million and CNN had 1.14 million. The March ratings period ends Friday, and it’s doubtful CNN will be able to overcome MSNBC.”

But there are a few little asterisks to throw out there with this one. First off, MSNBC and Fox “news” both stradle the line between news and opinion, with a very heavy lean towards the opinion side. MSNBC runs Keith Olbermann’s countdown show in prime time, which is effectively talk radio with video. the Fox No News Channel is even worse, will a full night lineup that is heavy on entertainment and pretty much devoid of news (except for quickly breaks at the top of the hour). Sheppard, O’Reilly, and Hannity aren’t reading news from a teleprompter, they are doing conservative talk radio on TV. It’s fully about opinion.

Now, there is nothing wrong with opinion, but in the end, is it really news?

So with Fox and MSNBC running 3 hours of opinion programming in prime time, which is often more popular than straighter news, CNN seems to have headed off that was a bit as well. Lou Dobbs in particular has gone from solid reporter to more of an angry attack dog, not being afraid to show some serious bias. The “no bias no bull” show featuring Campbell Brown is a particularly ugly show. If you have to say you have “no bias”, it’s probably because you are going to have tons of bias. Larry King is the “king” of the dullest interviews ever (I can’t picture anyone under 50 having the patience to listen to him slowly wander up to a question). Only Anderson Cooper is left doing fairly serious news and in depth coverage, everyone else seems to have headed out to give an opinion instead. Even CNN Headline news blatherer Nancy Grace is pulling bigger numbers. What’s up with that?

I have a feeling that CNN is caught in a horrible place right now: There is no good news, and the bad news isn’t the type of bad news Americans like to hear about. With the stock market down and all that, people are looking to lay blame and call names. They are in a fighting mood, not in a mood to hear fair and balanced reporting. The US isn’t involved in a spectacular bomb dropping media event of a war, they are in an ugly, drawn out, deadly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. There isn’t a major hurricane or anything of that nature that is truly media worth, the floods in North Dakota are as close as they will get. So without compelling news to get people to watch, CNN is in a tough place.

My suggestion? Move Larry King later, maybe 10PM or even 11PM. Tell Lou Dobbs to report the news and keep his ghastly opinions to himself. Run an bring Nancy Grace over from Headline news. Let headline news run actual news again in prime time. Continue to give Anderson Cooper the space to operate. Make some space for actual news again!

Certainly CNN is ahead of MSNBC when it comes to news and full day programming. But when there is no news, it’s easy for the opinion fluffers to get ahead.

More and more calls are coming to shut down the Google Streetview service of UK locations, after serious privacy concerns have been raised and many complaints have been registered.

European privacy laws are very strict, as are UK laws in regards to things like security cams. Citizens can even have the windows of their houses blurred out automatically when law enforcement video cameras happen to pan towards their house. Google set up a system to handle complaints, and also had agreed to use a system to automatically blur faces, that would work with few misses, which is apparently not the case.

As I have discussed before, Google streetviews has captured some embarrassing pictures in the past. But US privacy laws and European laws are not the same. The US law pretty much is open to anything the eye can see from public lands. European law sort of works in reverse, almost requiring permission before an image can be used. It creates a problem where the good of Google’s service (being able to see where you are going on a nice visual map, example) runs into privacy concerns (such as the man walking out of the sex shop, or the married couple having a snog on a street corner). It is an interesting debate, where privacy meets the public eye, and if Google has the rights to be that public eye.

More of the story here from BBC.

Tough times in the economy have just made things worst for the newspaper world. Prior to the arrival of the current economic downturn, the newspapers were already suffering greatly. Increased costs from paper to delivery to fuel, combined with slipping readership and declining ad sales already had many just about on the ropes. With a solid push from the flailing economy, two long time papers have called it quits, but each in it’s own way.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (aka SeattlePI) has stopped publishing but has gone to a web only format. In this move, 160 out of 200 people lose their jobs right away. It is also not clear that they will have enough “reporter power” to actually cover the stories they use to, and if the audience will actually follow them to the online world.

The Rocky Mountain News is a bit of a different case. It had been suffering for years, and various moves from management had not helped the decline. No buyer was found for the paper, and so it was shut down entirely. Ex staff members are currently trying to come back as an online news site, but a subscription model is somewhat out of sync with that the internet community expects there days.

For the most part, things are not looking good for the newspaper business. Various reasons are cited, from the short attention span of younger people to environmental concerns to the papers being too slow in a video and internet world. What is clear is that many papers across the US are in trouble, and that the news business will never be the same again.

I am a net guy, I know the old “out with the old, in the with the new” mantra of progress that never seems to stop. I don’t mind getting my news online or from broadcast TV, the medium doesn’t bother me. What concerns me is the ongoing drop of journalistic standards. Newspapers by their nature often have the time to consider a story before releasing it. A story at noon can get written up and finished just before press time at 11 pm, and a full day’s worth of information, updates, and fact checking goes into the final product. TV and the web is often a transient thing, consider today’s case of the Natasha Richardson ski accident reporting. Various online sources have reported her as alive and doing well to brain dead to somewhere in between. The lack of fact checking and the fast and loose with the facts mentality of the net has led some news organizations to shoot first and ask questions later.

Internet news is in the same boat as 24 hour news channels. Live coverage of news events means that we often see hours and hours with few actual facts and many talking heads, speculating, yabbering, and generally raising the noise level without imparting information. In the first to be first, nobody appears to be worried about being right.

Worse are blog sites (even like mine). I make it clear that what I post here is my opinion, not fact, but many do not do so. It is hard to tell when they are telling the truth, and when they are telling you what they want you to believe. Misinformation is rampant (surveys pre-election showed that many people in Taxes though that Barrack Obama was a muslim, a rumor spread online and through some conservative talk radio shows). A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, and many opinion shapers use this to their advantage. Their perception, repeated and repeated, becomes their audience’s reality.

In losing newspapers, our biggest loss isn’t the paper, but the people and the standards they worked by.

The weird and wonderful life of Hollywood movie star and troubled soul Lindsay Lohan has taken a few more amusing twists. First her on again, off again lesbian romance with DJ Samantha Ronson has been the subject of much speculation, with apparently some pretty spectacular yelling matches and other odd things. It’s also a weird concept for someone who did rehab to spend their time trailing their girlfriend around in clubs.

Now comes word that a judge in Beverly Hills has issued an arrest warrant for Linds. Seems that she is still under probation following the DUI that sent her to rehab to start with. No word on the reasons why, but it has been more and more clear that her lifestyle has been getting out of hand. Perhaps the judge noticed that and decided to drag her back in for a talk. We will know more in the next few days.

In the mean time, this also brings up the issue of celebrity justice. Too often celebs get off easy, Lindsey Lohan only did 84 minutes of jail time for DUI, while lesser knowns might do months or years. It makes you wonder how the system works out.

You know all those history books that declared the cold war dead when the Berlin wall came down? Well, they may have been a little premature in their words. Russia, lead by the “not the leader, not a dictator” Vladamir Putin has been making a very strong military buildup in the last few years. Huge oil revenues gave Russia a pretty big boost in their coffers, and they have been spending like mad to rebuild their military. Actions in Georgia as well other moves (such as attempts to claim the North Pole area for it’s resources) show Russia flexing it’s newly returned muscles.

The most worrisome for Americans is the closer relations between Russia, Cuba, and now Venezuela, where near dictator Hugo Chavez pretty much does whatever he can to piss off Americans. So two stories that show that Russia is considering using Cuban airbases and that Chavez has offered the Russians space in Venezuela is enough to raise some concern in the west. The only good news is that all three of the countries involved are suffering greatly from the downturn in oil prices, they need prices nearer to $100 to support all their socialist and military aspirations, which means that oil in the mid $40 range isn’t enough to keep them at this level for long. Russia in particular has been flexing it’s muscles mostly because the US is current over engaged in Iraq, which makes it difficult for them to put up any major resistance to Russian moves. That will change as the US leaves Iraq, which is likely why the Russians are working so hard now to build up their bases. It also adds strength to the reasons why the US needs to work to bring Cuba back into the western influence, Read the stories here and here.