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Old July 16th, 2012 #21
Alex Linder
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The End of TV and the Death of the Cable Bundle
By Derek Thompson

Jul 12 2012

People have been predicting the demise of cable television for years. After this week, they might be right.

Two small pieces of news yesterday could make for a big headache for TV.

First, Viacom yanked its 19 channels -- including Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central -- from DirecTV after the two companies failed to agree on subscriber fees. Second a federal judge cleared the way for Aereo, an exciting new startup that could bring local TV (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS) to any device you wish, from a smart phone to an actual TV.

Big deal, you might say, so DirecTV people can't watch "South Park" and techies can get a crappy stream of "The View" on their iPad. That's not a wrong interpretation of the news, but it's too narrow. The bigger story here is the death of the bundle.

Every year, 100 million homes pay for a bundle of cable channels. Like any bundle, it's hard to see exactly what they are paying for. That is somewhat the point of bundling -- to disguise the true cost of the constituent items. If you watch ESPN and 17 other channels regularly for four hours a day, you are probably getting a good deal. And that means that millions of other people are getting a "bad deal" on their cable and are subsidizing your TV experience. For these millions of households -- who don't watch live sports; or only want HBO; or only need their Law & Order, ANTM, and Daily Show fix; etc -- an à la carte option for television would almost certainly be cheaper.

But à la carte would blow up television, which has been the most dependable and lucrative business model in modern entertainment history. The Internet gutted the music industry. Print journalism has been forced to innovate or die -- or, sometimes, both simultaneously -- in response to the Web. The American movie industry has survived fundamentally because it learned to diversify away from the terms "American" and "movie industry" -- most of their revenue now comes from overseas and "merchandise-able" franchises. But the cable bundle is still basically the cable bundle, and it is still growing by hundreds of thousands of subscribers a year. Innovation is an answer to a problem. As long as cable providers don't have a revenue problem, they have less need to innovate.

The debate between DirecTV (a provider) and Viacom (a "content" creator) is about finding the right price that providers should pay for content that most people don't watch. That's where bundles are useful. They disguise the price of things we don't use. But with pay TV growth slowing, we're at the edge of a revolution. "DirecTV thinks video streaming is eating away at the ratings of channels like MTV and Comedy Central," Jeff Bercovici writes at Forbes, and the company has "demanded that Viacom give consumers the right to select channels a la carte."

The Aereo story is different. It's not about cable. But it is about distributing broadcast networks online. Once sports fans can get the Olympics and NBA and other shows without a cable package, whenever they want it, it could serve alongside Netflix, Hulu and other services to replace the cable bundle.

The Internet is ruthlessly efficient at stripping cross-subsidies and allowing content to shine on its own. (As Jim Fallows has pointed out, newspapers once paid for international coverage with classifieds and cars. Now, if you want classifieds and cars, you go to a classifieds site or a cars site. Bye-bye, cross-subsidy.) Devices like Aereo combined with cases like Viacom's could be leading to an a la carte model for television. The question isn't really if the Internet's unbundling revolution will visit the television industry but when.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...undle/259753/#
 
Old August 3rd, 2012 #22
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Murdoch's Online Newpaper Lays Off Nearly 30 Percent of Staff
Posted by Ryan W. McMaken on August 2, 2012 10:13 AM

When it was launched a few years ago, The Daily was seen as the the harbinger of a new era of pay-to-read online newspapers that was going to finally put an end to our time of "free" news content. Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily in an attempt to somehow replicate what the Wall Street Journal has done — maintain a large number of paying customers for online content. Only the New York Times has come close to doing this, and the future of that looks shaky. No other newspaper has been able to make much money from online subscribers.

So, when it was launched, all of the social media and PR world was watching The Daily to see if newspapers will actually be able to look forward to a future full of people paying to view news content on tablets and other mobile gadgets.

Today, The Daily announced that it is laying off nearly 30 percent of its staff. And not surprisingly, getting rid of sports and commentary altogether. Seriously, why would anyone pay for sports and commentary when the world is brimming with people willing to write that stuff for free? You don't have to hack people's voicemail to figure out that was a pretty weak idea.

It looks like the WSJ remains an anomaly and newspapers are still waiting for that magic bullet that will make people pay to read all the essential earth-shattering news about Justin Bieber, et al.
 
Old August 3rd, 2012 #23
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I told a local used record\cd store owner in 1997 that the mp3 was going to put him out of business. He didn't know what I was talking about but around 2003 he got a clue real fast. He transitioned his record\cd store into a coffee house and small venue for live performances. College kids hang out there mostly.

I haven't owned a television in at least three years. Don't miss it at all and am annoyed when I am assaulted by one while sitting in various waiting rooms or other public areas that have the blasted things installed and on for the idiots to gaze at in their trance.

The local paper fired almost all of its staff and reduced its publication to 2-3 times a week. It only has 20 employees and has been forced to move out of its almost brand new monstrosity of a building that it moved into less than a decade ago. My comment on local news websites that "it couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people" kept getting deleted.
 
Old August 6th, 2012 #24
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Top ten video games... VG make more than movies.

http://digitalbattle.com/2012/02/21/...eo-games-ever/
 
Old August 8th, 2012 #25
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400k cut cable tv in one quarter

http://live.wsj.com/video/more-peopl...9-8379604EF9FB
 
Old August 8th, 2012 #26
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Re: 400,000 Cut Cable Cord
This article is very true. I work at a call center taking calls on behalf of a couple of major cable companies.

Three years ago, maybe 1 person a month would tell you they don't watch or own a televitz. Now, about 30% of the people I speak to every day tell me they do not watch tv. This is a major trend that has been growing. And believe me, those of us in sales know this and have seen it develop over time.
 
Old August 11th, 2012 #27
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Tech Snobs Are Throwing Their Money At a New Indie Social Network
Adrian Chen

Social media has gone mainstream, and jaded geeks are totally over it. Facebook? It's turned into "sludge for the brain now, filled with fluffy rabbits and gibberish." Twitter? Just a mess of "mass-market spoonfed 'trending topics.'" Instagram? What was once the epitome of geek chic has been overrun with filthy Android smartphone users, not to mention Iran's Supreme Leader.

So trendsetting geeks are pinning their hopes on a new, geekier-than-thou social network called App.net. For just $50, you, too can become part of this exclusive club of early adopters, free to sniff at the riffraff on Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has reached the crucial "alt" phase.

App.net, the brainchild of long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell (above), sprung from an anti-Twitter rant he penned last month. The rant is full of technical jargon but boils down to the same argument that might be spewed by an indie rock fan upon hearing their favorite band's music in an Exxon commercial: Sell outs! Twitter went commercial. Now, Caldwell argues, they'd rather please their advertisers than their users.

App.net sells itself with the same socially conscious self-satisfaction as a fair trade organic chocolate bar at Whole Foods: "Our product is the service that we sell, not our users," is one promise. Cruelty-free social networking.

And just like hipsters obsessing over the retro-cool of a vinyl record, App.net is taking the decidedly antiquated approach of charging for its service. It currently costs $50 to "join the movement" i.e. open an account. Caldwell is introducing App.net with a crowdsourcing stunt borrowed from Kickstarter: It will only launch if enough people chip in $50 (or more), to reach a $500,000 fundraising target. (It's currently at $355,450, with three days left.)

Whitney Boesel at BuzzFeed suggests people are flocking to App.net because of digital "white flight," with App.net being the gated suburbs where white users are trying to shut out the minorities and poor people who are increasingly using social media. But App.net's emphasis on its geek cred—"We're building a real-time social service where users and developers come first," they say—seems to be more about a nostalgia for the early days of social networking, when the only people tweeting and Facebook-ing were super tech savvy early adopters.

The $50 paywall, they hope, will mean only serious geeks will join up.

"The mere fact of it being PAID FOR reducing the risk of morons and spammers," wrote the illustrator Lucy Pepper.

Will App.net really be able to convince enough geeks to pay $50 for admission to its organic Farmville? I wouldn't underestimate the geek hipster. We do live in a world where the mason jar cocktail shaker raised ten times its goal on Kickstarter.

http://gawker.com/5933779/tech-snobs...social-network
 
Old August 13th, 2012 #28
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[prime mover in celebrating single woman as whore]

Helen Gurley Brown | 1922 - 2012
Gave ‘Single Girl’ a Life in Full (Sex, Sex, Sex)


Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997.

By MARGALIT FOX

August 13, 2012

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

The Hearst Corporation, Cosmopolitan’s publisher, said in a news release that she died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital after a brief stay there. She lived in Manhattan.

As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Ms. Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. The look of women’s magazines today — a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines — is due in no small part to her influence.

Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Ms. Brown had already shaken the collective consciousness with her best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Published in 1962, the year before Betty Friedan ignited the modern women’s movement with “The Feminine Mystique,” it taught unmarried women how to look their best, have delicious affairs and ultimately bag a man for keeps, all in breathless, aphoristic prose. (Ms. Brown was a former advertising copywriter.)

By turns celebrated and castigated, Ms. Brown was for decades a highly visible, though barely visible, public presence. A tiny, fragile-looking woman who favored big jewelry, fishnet stockings and minidresses till she was well into her 80s, she was a regular guest at society soirees and appeared often on television. At 5 feet 4, she remained a wraithlike hundred pounds throughout her adult life. That weight, she often said, was five pounds above her ideal.

Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles.

Few magazines have been identified so closely with a single editor as Cosmopolitan was with Ms. Brown. Before she took over, Cosmopolitan, like its competitors, was every inch a postwar product. Its target reader was a married suburbanite, preoccupied with maintaining the perfect figure, raising the perfect child and making the perfect Jell-O salad.

Ms. Brown tossed the children and the Jell-O, though she kept the diet advice with a vengeance. Yes, readers would need to land Mr. Right someday — the magazine left little doubt that he was still every woman’s grail. But in an era in which an unmarried woman was called an old maid at 23, the new Cosmopolitan gave readers license not to settle for settling down with just anyone, and to enjoy the search with blissful abandon for however long it took. Sex as an end in itself was perfectly fine, the magazine assured them. As a means to an end — the right husband, the right career, the right designer labels — it was better still.

In Ms. Brown’s hands, Cosmopolitan anticipated “Sex and the City” by three decades.

Gone was the housewife, apron in tow. In her place was That Cosmopolitan Girl, the idealized reader on whom Ms. Brown and her advertisers firmly trained their sights. Unencumbered by husband and children, the Cosmo Girl was self-made, sexual and supremely ambitious, a potent amalgam of Ragged Dick, Sammy Glick and Holly Golightly. She looked great, wore fabulous clothes and had an unabashedly good time when those clothes came off.

Forty-three when she took the magazine’s helm, Ms. Brown often described the Cosmo Girl as the young woman she had been — or dreamed of being — 20 years before.

A child of the Ozarks, Helen Marie Gurley was born on Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Ark., the younger of two daughters of a family of modest means. Her father, Ira, was a schoolteacher, as her mother, the former Cleo Sisco, had been before her marriage.

“I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor — and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old,” Ms. Brown wrote in her book “Having It All” (1982).

When Helen was a baby, Ira Gurley was elected to the state legislature, and the family moved to Little Rock. In 1932, when she was 10, Ira was killed in an elevator accident, leaving her mother depressed and impoverished. In 1937, Mrs. Gurley moved with her daughters to Los Angeles. There, Helen’s older sister, Mary, contracted polio; she spent the rest of her life paralyzed from the waist down and in later years battled alcoholism.

Though Helen was valedictorian of her high school class, she feared she could never transcend her family circumstances. At a time when a young woman’s main chance was to marry well, she felt ill equipped. She did not consider herself pretty, she wrote years afterward, and had rampant, intractable acne. In “Having It All,” she coined the word “mouseburger” to describe young women like her. [mouseburger, n., pejorative, < mouse + -burger. A physically unprepossessing woman with little money and few prospects. Cf. milquetoast, said of men].

Helen Gurley persevered. She studied briefly at Texas State College for Women (it is now Texas Women’s University), but with no money to continue, she returned to Los Angeles and enrolled in secretarial school, from which she graduated in 1941.

Around this time she had a short, inadvertent career as an escort. At 19, as Ms. Brown recounted in her memoir “I’m Wild Again” (2000), she answered a newspaper advertisement seeking young women for “social evenings.” She needed to support her mother and sister: What could be simpler, she reasoned, than earning $5 for going on a date? On her first outing, she and her gentleman caller parked and kissed a bit before the full extent of her responsibilities dawned on her. She fled with her $5 and her virtue.

She went on to hold a string of secretarial jobs — 17 by her own count — and discovered the measure of security that sex could bring. At every office, or so it seemed, there were bosses eager to fondle and dandle. In exchange, there might be a fur or an apartment or the wherewithal to keep her family going.

Helen Gurley eventually became an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles, first with Foote, Cone & Belding and later with Kenyon & Eckhardt. In 1959 she married David Brown, a former managing editor of Cosmopolitan who had become a Hollywood producer. “I look after him like a geisha girl,” she told The New York Times in 1970.

Mr. Brown, who produced “Jaws” and other well-known films, died in 2010; the couple had no children. Ms. Brown’s sister, Mary Gurley Alford, died before her.

This year Ms. Brown gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities, both of which Mr. Brown had attended, to create the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Brown found herself at loose ends and cast about for a project. Her husband, who had recently stumbled on a cache of letters she had written in her 20s to a married man who was smitten with her, persuaded her to write “Sex and the Single Girl.”

Though the book seems almost quaint today (“An affair can last from one night to forever”), it caused a sensation when it was published in 1962 by Bernard Geis Associates. It sold millions of copies, turned Ms. Brown into a household name and inspired a movie of the same title starring Natalie Wood, released in 1964.

In 1963, the Browns moved to New York. Two years later, the Hearst Corporation asked Ms. Brown to take over Cosmopolitan, one of its less prepossessing magazines. Becalmed in the doldrums, Cosmopolitan favored articles on home and hearth, along with uplifting discussions of current affairs (“The Lyndon Johnson Only His Family Knows”).

Ms. Brown had never held an editing job, but her influence on Cosmopolitan was swift and certain: she did not so much revamp the magazine as vamp it.

Where just months earlier Cosmo’s covers had featured photos of demure, high-collared girl-next-door types like Mary Tyler Moore, Ms. Brown’s first issue, July 1965, showed a voluptuous blond model whose deep cleavage was barely contained by her plunging neckline.

What Cosmopolitan’s previous cover lines had lacked in pith and punch (“Diabetes: Will Your Children Inherit It?”), Ms. Brown’s more than made up for. “World’s Greatest Lover — What it was like to be wooed by him!” her inaugural cover proclaimed. Ms. Brown was not shy about disclosing the fact that in her 32 years with the magazine, her husband wrote all the cover lines.

Readers and advertisers flocked to the new Cosmo. When Ms. Brown took over, the magazine had a circulation of less than 800,000; at its height, in the 1980s, circulation approached three million.

Ms. Brown’s magazine did not find favor with everyone. In 1970, a group of feminists led by Kate Millett staged a sit-in at Ms. Brown’s office, protesting what they saw as her retrograde vision of womanhood. Even several nude male centerfolds (Burt Reynolds, April 1972; Arnold Schwarzenegger, August 1977) were for many critics insufficient counterweights.

But in retrospect, Ms. Brown’s work seems strikingly apolitical, beholden mostly to the politics of personal advancement. (In “Having It All,” she compares herself, favorably, to Eva Peron.) The advice she offered Cosmopolitan’s readers on winning the right friends and influencing the right people was squarely in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, if less vertically inclined.

Ms. Brown was declared a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995. Like many landmarks, she had much restoration work done, which she spoke of candidly: a nose job, breast augmentation, face-lifts, eye lifts and injections of silicone and fat into her face to keep wrinkles at bay, among other procedures.

But while she could offset the physical tolls of aging, Ms. Brown could not always keep pace with changing times. She drew wide criticism for publishing an article in the January 1988 issue of Cosmopolitan that played down the risk of AIDS for heterosexual women. In the 1990s, when prominent men like Justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Robert Packwood were facing accusations of sexual harassment, Ms. Brown publicly disdained the charges, arguing that sexual attention from men is almost always flattering. Her remarks angered many feminists.

In 1996, with circulation declining and the perception that Ms. Brown had lost touch with her readers growing, Hearst announced that she would step down the next year as editor in chief. Ms. Brown’s last issue was February 1997; she was succeeded by Bonnie Fuller, the founding editor of the American edition of Marie Claire magazine.

Ms. Brown stayed on as the editor of Cosmopolitan’s international editions, continuing to work from an office appointed with pink silk walls, leopard-print carpet and a cushion embroidered with the maxim “Good Girls Go to Heaven/Bad Girls Go Everywhere.”

A biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” by Jennifer Scanlon, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

Ms. Brown’s other books include “Sex and the Office” (1964), “Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook” (1969) and “Sex and the New Single Girl” (1970), all published by Bernard Geis. In 1993, William Morrow published “The Late Show,” Ms. Brown’s advice book for women over 50, in which she suggests that as women age and the supply of available men dwindles, they should simply appropriate their friends’ husbands for jaunty recreational sex.

Perhaps none of these things — not the books, not the unabashed look of Cosmopolitan and its legion of imitators, not the giddy pleasure with which American women embraced sex without shame — would have happened quite as soon if Ms. Brown had heeded a single piece of advice. In 1962, just before “Sex and the Single Girl” was due to be published, she received a telegram from her mother. In an interview with CNN in 1998, Ms. Brown recalled its contents.

“dear helen,” it read. “if you move very quickly, i think we can stop publication of the book.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/bu...pagewanted=all
 
Old August 13th, 2012 #29
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Back in the mid 1990s I knew the Internet would be big but I never imagined it putting traditional Jewish media out of business. Glad to see the death of the newspapers and now cable.

If I want to watch first run television there is a website I use that has an almost unlimited amount of classic television and movies from the 1920s onward in addition to current television programming. It's not real time but close enough for me. I occasionally watch an old movie from the 40s or 50s. Hardly ever see a nigger in them, but some of the "white" actors are Jews.
 
Old September 23rd, 2012 #31
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Gary North on the internet now vs the way it was done back then

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north1203.html
 
Old October 18th, 2012 #32
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Newsweek ceases print publication
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...media-vanities
 
Old December 10th, 2012 #33
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Online Paywalls and the Future of Media: A Few Hard Truths

Hamilton Nolan

Yesterday, both The Daily Beast (or, more accurately, whatever Tina Brown can toss together after they've absorbed the corpse of Newsweek and laid a bunch of people off) and the Washington Post announced that they may be instituting online paywalls in the near future, making readers pay to read more than a handful of articles. In many ways, online paywalls are the future of online media. But that doesn't mean they're going to work for everyone. A few unavoidable facts that media executives should consider:

1. For many large legacy media outlets, paywalls are inevitable, the whining of readers notwithstanding. It's very simple: producing journalism requires money. As readers flocked away from print and onto the web, newspapers and magazines found that the money coming in from online ad sales was not nearly enough to replace the money being lost in print ad sales and subscriptions. Revenue must come from somewhere to fill in this gap. If readers want to read the same content online, they will have to pay. They will whine at first, but they will get used to it.

2. If readers don't want to pay for content online that they happily paid for in print, that content will eventually go away, due to the fact that it costs money to produce real journalism. The most realistic outcome—and one that has already been happening in many legacy newsrooms—is that online paywalls will make up some, but not all, of the revenue that's been lost on the print side. Therefore these huge media outlets will shrink somewhat, and probably demand more from each employee, but they will not disappear. In the long run, the overall number of professional journalists will probably shrink, at least until online media figures out how to monetize itself as well as print did. (Since print newspapers were for many decades small monopolies virtually capable of printing money, this is unlikely.)

3. This does not mean that paywalls will work for everyone. Paywalls will work for content that is worth paying for. An easy way to determine whether content is worth paying for is to ask: is content that is more or less the same freely available at a million other places online? If so, you should not put your content behind a paywall, because people will just click somewhere else for it. When a media outlet evaluates itself in this way, it is necessary for its editors and executives to momentarily suspend their egos.

4. Examples of media outlets that can support paywalls: high quality national newspapers (NYT, WSJ, probably the WaPo, and... ?), sites that offer quality financial news to an audience for whom a paywall's cost is negligible (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg), sites that cater to very specific niche audiences with highly specific news that can't be easily found elsewhere (Politico, trade publications of all types, small local newspapers), sites offering very high quality proprietary longform journalism published on a frequent basis. Additionally, magazines that maintain their quality should be able to offer online subscriptions to their loyal subscriber base.

5. Examples of media outlets than cannot support paywalls: mediocre or shitty newspapers that have decimated their newsrooms, shitty magazines with little quality content, sites full of mostly opinions and listicles and other entertaining but easily reproduced things of that nature, most blogs. For example, Gawker Media—a fine, fine company that entertains millions of readers online every month—would not be a good candidate for a paywall, simply because no matter how good our content is, a paywall would immediately cause readers to go and seek out similar (lower quality, of course) content elsewhere online, where it is freely available. The situation is different for, say, Jane's Defence Weekly. The fact that readers like you is not enough to support an online paywall; readers must need you.

6. Guess which of these categories The Daily Beast falls into?

7. For media outlets that grew up online, this dynamic should not be a huge problem. Those outlets have always supported themselves with online ad revenue; they grow in response to the money they make. The problem comes for media outlets that either A) matured in print form, and swelled to huge and bloated proportions, and then, when print collapsed, found themselves trying to somehow stuff that huge, bloated operation into a sleek online casing; or B) media outlets that were founded with a big pile of money from investors, and grew bloated on that, rather than on revenue they actually earned; and when that money dried up, they found that they had all these people they needed to pay, but no real revenue.

8. Guess which of these categories The Daily Beast falls into?

9. This will all work itself out in the space of a generation. Which is no comfort to all the journalists who found themselves laid off before it got worked out.

http://gawker.com/5966560/online-pay...ew-hard-truths
 
Old August 5th, 2013 #34
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Jew-jew transfer, but it will be interesting to see what the Amazon guy tries to do with one of the nation's top two anti-white newspapers.

http://gawker.com/uhhhhhh-jeff-bezos...ost-1033049827

The Wall Street Journal sold six years ago for $5 billion; the WaPo is selling for 1/20th of that. That's the direction the newspaper business is headed. It is becoming a boutique business for extremely rich people— a way for them to luxuriate in the prestige, and cultural respect, and political influence that newspapers still command, to some extent.
 
Old August 5th, 2013 #35
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NYT sells Boston Globe to John Henry

Why Didn't the Boston Globe Sell to the Highest Bidder?

This weekend, The New York Times Co. sold the Boston Globe to John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox. Henry paid $70 million. (Or negative $40 million, by more realistic calculations.) Oddly, several other bidders made higher bids than Henry. Why did the NYT Co. leave that money on the table?

http://gawker.com/why-didnt-the-bost...der-1032049882
 
Old August 13th, 2013 #36
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Analyst: End of Bundled Cable Will Kill Over 80 Channels

by John Nolte
12 Aug 2013

With streaming television becoming more and more popular, and providers like Aereo making an end-run around cable and satellite providers, a lot of attention is being paid to the future of bundled cable. In a world of growing choices and a weak, jobless economy, how long can something last that charges customers a ton of money for dozens of channels they never watch?

Bundled cable is, in my opinion, one of the greatest hustles ever perpetuated against the American people. The worst part is how it works as a kind of affirmative-action program for left-wing programming that likely wouldn’t survive in a world where we weren't forced to pay for channels we never watch. Chief among them, CNN, and MSNBC.

As this discussion heats up, analysts and experts are fessing up that in a world without bundled cable, only 20 television networks would survive (that means that around 80 would not). Presumably, the survivors would be the twenty most-watched channels throughout the cable world. This would be terrible news for CNN, MSNBC, and HLN -- networks that usually rank in the thirties and forties.

Fox News is usually in the top 5.

Network executives -- whose bottom lines are boosted by as much as 50% from cable subscriber fees that have little to do with merit and everything to do with being able to muscle a cable provider into carrying a low-rated channel -- are, for obvious reasons, opposed to the idea of unbundling bundled cable. Some even claim that the profit loss would hurt the viewer the most because there would be less money to conduct the experimentation that produces the television shows we love so much.

Nobody is really buying that.

What really terrifies the big media conglomerates is how the end of bundled cable would financially devastate their companies and along with it the cultural stranglehold they enjoy that is propagated through artificial means. The end of bundled cable means the end of tens of billions of dollars per year earned only by forcing consumers to pay for something they don't use, and the end of dozens of channels -- like MSNBC, CNN, MTV, etc. -- that affect our culture and politics in the worst ways.

When you remove merit from television, what we are seeing now is what we get -- cultural, left-wing rot.

Something CNN and MSNBC might want to consider as the existential threat of cord-cutting looms over them (people who cancel cable television) is that one reason this might be happening is Obama's failed economy -- you know, the economy they keep telling us is acceptable--the one created by the president and the policies he champions…

If the economy actually was something close to acceptable, people wouldn't care about the size of their cable bills, which means we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journal...er-80-channels

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Old August 23rd, 2013 #37
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Kochs won't purchase LAT - not a profitable investment

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...medium=twitter
 
Old August 23rd, 2013 #38
Alex Linder
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Kochs won't purchase LAT - not a profitable investment

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...medium=twitter
 
Old October 17th, 2013 #39
Alex Linder
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[two interesting pieces going to go into later, mostly under searches of Top Ten USA Newspaper Chains]

Rieder: Rich guys replace chains as newspaper owners
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...apers/2623293/

top ten lists, global newspapers, online papers, USA chains
http://www.cybercollege.com/frtv/newsp3.htm
 
Old November 7th, 2013 #40
Alex Linder
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Bechdel (feminist) test applied to ratings in Sweden, not by government.

http://jezebel.com/sweden-introduces...the-1459696241
 
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