Tag Archives: Huffington Post

Top 10 Unconventional Recession Indicators

Economics, , , , , , , , , , ,

I found this on the Huffington Post over the weekend: Top Ten Unconventional Indicators Of The Recession. It’s a slide show, more fun there than here, but in case you’re interested:

  1. Home movie rentals: up during recession. Netflix, Redbox and others are way up over last year. From The Atlantic.

    Flickr by Jeff Gunn
    Flickr by Jeff Gunn
  2. Urban farming: More people grow their own food during recession. “The National Gardening Association has found that 19 percent more people will grow their own fruit, berries, vegetables and herbs this year than last, and 54 percent say they are motivated by the prospect of saving money on groceries.” From Kiplingers.
  3. McDonald’s sales: apparently cheap meals do better during recession. McDonald’s same-store sales are up 7.1%. From the Washington Post.

    Flickr by pointnshoot
    Flickr by pointnshoot
  4. Going to the movies: normally up during recession. Up 9% for the first quarter of this year, compared to 2008. Kiplinger.
  5. The underwear index: sales of men’s underwear go down during recession. Economizing? They’re down 2.3% for 2009. Huffington Post, quoting Alan Greenspan.
  6. Dating increases during a recession: Match.com is way up. Kiplinger.
  7. The necktie index: sales go up during recession. Job interviews? They’re up 50% this year. From The Telegraph.
  8. (Ugh, I don’t like this one) New York Magazine proposed the hot waitress index: “the worse the economy, the hotter the waitresses.” That’s dumb. It shouldn’t have been included.
  9. Lipstick index: supposedly lipstick sales go up in recession. Affordable luxury? But they’re down this year. The Economist.
  10. The Bed Bath and Beyond Barometer. Proposed by Time Magazine. The explanation is that consumers who can’t go out or away upgrade their home. Ho-hum.

Who Should Decide What News Matters?

Journalism, , , , ,

Back in the old days editors decided what was news. Not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called “news values.” Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence.

This was a long time ago. Back in the 1970s.

Which is not to say that media don’t play to audiences. The original Yellow Journalism was Pulitzer vs. Hearst in the 1890s. And when I was a mainstream journalist, in the 1970s, playing to readers’ baser instincts was already commonplace. Some words in headlines—naked, violent, brutal, for example–produced better results than others.

Still, the idea was that editors protected news values. They were gatekeepers. So the front page had important news, that people should be reading, rather than sensational news. The idea was embattled, but treasured. Image by B.K. Dewey on Flickr

Today, however: not so much. Nicholas Carlson posting on Silicon Valley Insider proclaims NYT.com Front Page Editors Ignore Reader Clicks, and he’s not writing about how the editors are intrepidly holding out for news values. I’d like to imagine the crusty old editor saying no, resisting the temptation to appeal to audiences’ taste for gossip and sensationalism, insisting on highlighting important news and analysis. But no, this is criticism. He quotes a New York Observer story:

“In terms of minute-to-minute news decisions, I think that would pretty much drive me crazy,” NYTimes.com’s digital news editor Jim Roberts told the Observer.

“I don’t want people to call up NYTimes.com and feel like that they’ve just landed in an environment that is alien to them,” he said. “It isn’t necessarily The New York Times in print, but it needs to reflect the same attitudes and standards.”

He thinks they’re sadly out of date, and, in the background, doomed. He cites the Huffington Post as the example of the right way to do it, by following the clicks. He says editors have to watch the clicks for two reasons:

  1. It’s the main way readers can show what kinds of stories they care about.
  2. The New York Times is a deeply-in-debt, for-profit enterprise that needs to grow its traffic online in order to survive. Web editors should not pretend that it doesn’t matter how many ad impressions the Times serves each day.

I can argue with that first point. Call me old fashioned, elitist maybe, but I’m okay with Jim Roberts’ comment above. I don’t want the National Enquirer to replace the New York Times. I’m happy to think that humans are still guarding news values. Somebody has to. Right?

But how do you argue about that second point there, in the quote above: the money? What if doing news right is an obsolete business model? It could happen. Could? No, it is happening.

Irony: I’m glad to see that the New York Times made a profit in the second quarter of the year,   but I read that news on the Huffington Post. And I don’t subscribe to the New York Times, either; I get it free online.

(Image by B.K. Dewey on Flickr)

Investigative Journalism Under Siege

Entrepreneurship, Journalism, , , ,

Do you want to make meaning? Solve a problem? Disrupt the status quo? Then solve this problem: figure out a way to monetize investigative journalism. In the new media world.

No, not just journalism, thanks, but investigative journalism. By that I mean the product of professional journalists paid to dig for (relatively) objective truth, like facts. To uncover the hidden scandals, expose the corruption, clear up the misconceptions, and look beyond the spin.

Don’t confuse investigative journalism with breaking news, gossip, politics, expertise, and opinion. Maybe — just maybe — citizen news and crowd sourcing will compete with straight news media. We’ve got Twitter, news blogs, political blogs, and self-styled expert and personal blogs, among other new media, supplying breaking news and opinion. You’ve probably read the arguments along those lines. I’ve posted about it on this blog here.

Watergate: Flickr image by dbking

The problem is that investigative journalism is real work. It takes digging, research, interviews, and more digging, and more work. Volunteers don’t do it; professionals do it. And the organizations that pay those professionals depend, traditionally, on advertising revenues. And we’re in the midst of a rapidly changing media landscape, in which big audiences seeking impartiality are growing harder to find. The audiences are splintering, dividing into finer groups, getting lost in the long tail.

Breaking news? We get that in the new media world. In-depth reporting? Not so much. New York Times online? Washington Post online? Maybe. But your local town government? Who covers that? And are a few online sites of former great newspapers enough? Will the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report generate budgets and credibility for proactive in-depth reporting? What do you think?

So, in this new world, is somebody going to sponsor true investigative journalism? Will the Watergates of the future  be uncovered? For that matter, who’s going to go to those town council meetings?

So there’s a problem; a need. Do you have a solution?

Blogging: 10 Things To Do with A Bad Headline

Weblogs, Writing, , , ,

I thought it was one of my better posts ever on Huffington, A Great Debate About Ideas, because it covered something really important — the battle of free vs. not — and tied Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Ellen Goodman together.

But it wasn’t, it turns out, because of a dull deadline. Maybe I should have called it “The Battle of Free vs. Not.” Hmm, no, see, I’m not that good at headlines. “Naked idea orgy?”

  1. Delete it
  2. Start over
  3. Make it a list of 10
  4. Make it a list of 5
  5. Insult somebody famous
  6. Find a way to add one or more of the words “naked, brutal, violent, sexy, stripped, revealed, angry, face-off” … or something like that.
  7. Blame it on the readers, the editors, or anybody else you can think of.
  8. Take a walk, and think about a single sentence that would make you want to read the rest of the post.
  9. Go browse a blog reader like Google reader set to show just headlines.
  10. Go back to point 1 and go right down this list again.

True story: when I was young, working with UPI in Mexico City — we’re talking about early 1970s, so seriously, a long time ago — the system we used to report Mexico news to New York Editors showed them the first sentence only; from that, they had to decide whether or not they wanted to see the whole first paragraph. And, with that, they had to decide again (push a button) whether they wanted to see the rest of the story. So I should be able to do this.

And something else, that I’ve learned, in a lot of years writing: there are many different varieties of writing. Being good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at another. I used to think I was a good writer, but copy writers amaze me. And in newspapers, reporters don’t write the headlines. And writing and creative fiction plots are totally different skills.

Damn headlines.

Twitter Pitter Patter Twop: Hating Twitter.

Current Affairs, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing,

I like Twitter and I use it a lot, but really, I don’t care if you do, or if anybody else does. And I don’t get why people seem offended by it, but they do, a lot. What’s up with that? Is it politics or religion? Defensiveness maybe?

For example, this rant appeared as a comment underneath my loving and hating Twitter post on Huffington Post:

Why should Twitter and tweets replace perfectly good ways to send the same information, or even more/better info? It seems to be like saying “the telephone is not good enough, we need to return to telegraph.” Why can’t we just send an email saying the same thing as a tweet, and the email recipient gets a “inbox from __” alert email? Why can’t the tweet be posted to FB’s “what I’m doing” box, or why can’t a blogger’s blog be where the post is posted, with a service that sends an email to followers that tells them a new post is available or repeats the post?

This new tech is redundant and does not improve the old model; instead it hamstrings it by limiting the text. Twitter just doesn’t make sense. Half the people who sign up for it right now are doing so because they want to see why all the comedy shows are mocking it.

In the end Twitter will become a national joke and then recede until it fails like so many other net companies. (Unless they change their business model and then they won’t be Twitter so much anymore but Facebook with less benefits.) However there is a new tech better than Twitter: it is called the telephone. You’ll never have to type a teletype again to communicate– save time, leave tweets on people’s phonemail… viola! I’ve heard this telephone thing saves time and trouble, why not try it?

What interests me is the apparent overreaction. That commenter doesn’t see the difference between publishing 140-character pieces to as many people as choose to get them, all at once, and a telephone call or an email. Obviously he or she doesn’t get Twitter. So why comment at all? The post doesn’t accuse non-Twitter-users of anything.

And another commenter wrote:

So it’s sort of like IMs. Which are an obnoxious, invasive interruption. I check my email compulsively, but IMs are like the person next to you on the plane who won’t shut up.

There again, since that person obviously doesn’t get it, why so much anxiety? I’m still shocked with this one. There’s somebody who should not have the instant messenger running on his or her computer, right?

Last week I took my Twitter etiquette list, which I put here on this blog first, and put it onto the Huffington Post. And somebody took the time to comment:

The mundane details of people’s lives are all Twitter is. That and spamming.

There again, somebody who obviously doesn’t get it, but cares a great deal about it nonetheless.

Not that any of this matters, but I’m just curious … is there some moral issue related to Twitter? Or political, maybe, or religious? What’s up with that?

Money is Binary: Enough or Not Enough

Advice, Reflections,

I caught this post on Huffington Post: Who’s Happy And Why?

One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:

For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.

What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough.

“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. In my case, for years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”

A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.

The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 Rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.

Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.

I liked this, from the same post:

Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”

So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.

Ken Dychtwald Ph.D.: Who’s Happy And Why?

Big Brother vs. Social Media vs. Basil Fawlty

Social media, , , , , ,

(Note: I posted this first on Huffington Post, and I’m reposting here because this is my main blog. Tim)

Secret cameras, secret Web utilities tracking employees’ Web use, secret phone recording and IM monitoring: that’s creepy. That’s BIG BROTHER: the Orwellian 1984 nightmare. But bosses reading your tweets and Facebook? What’s creepy about that isn’t that bosses might do it, it’s the rest of us complaining about it.

Frankly, my dear, stop complaining. Look up the definition of the verb “publish.” Because social media is publishing. Don’t be unclear on the concept.

Last week Deloitte LLP announced survey results: more than half the employees asked said employers should stay out of their Twitter and Facebook posts. And more than half the employers said exactly the opposite, that they have the right to read your stuff. Apparently few do — who has the time? — but they can.

Kudos to Deloitte LLP for doing the survey. It’s a growing issue. I noticed about a month ago, posting on SmartBlog, Drew McClellan asked: Is your social media presence really yours? She added:

A high-level ad exec puts a multimillion-dollar account at risk because of his tweet.  A long-time Eagles football team employee gets fired because of a Facebook update.  A student teacher is denied her teaching certificate for posting a picture of herself titled “drunk pirate” to her MySpace page.

Don’t tell me that your employer has no right to access, judge or discipline you based on your social media activities. It’s happening. And I suspect it’s only the beginning.

And I agree with Drew, and with the employers, and I kind of like this new development. I think it’s about authenticity. And transparency. And it’s not a bad thing. The world might need it.

I get privacy. I was a teenager in the 1960s, so of course I understand why we want protection from surveillance and rights to privacy. We grew up fearing the 1984 Big Brother nightmare. I don’t want the government or an employer listening into my conversations, putting me on hidden video, or even knowing what library books I read. That’s all the quintessential none of their business.

But privacy has absolutely nothing to do with publishing. It makes me angry. It reminds me of people complaining about caller ID on my phone — you’re intruding into my world when you call me, so don’t block your number. If you do, I won’t answer. What’s next, blocking the peephole in the hotel door because it violates the privacy of the person outside knocking?

We — we users, email addicts, Twitter lovers, website browsers, et al. — should have figured this out 10 or 15 years ago when we got immersed in email. Email was the ground breaker. It feels private, but isn’t. You think your email is private? Somebody minding your mail server can read it. And courts can demand it as evidence.

My favorite answer to this question is authenticity. Authenticity is being the same person most of the time, not different people in different contexts. For example, in his intriguing Me 2.0 book, Generation Y personal branding expert Dan Schawbel recommends using the same picture and same bio for every place you present yourself in the Twitter-Facebook-LinkedIn world.

I love the John Cleese character Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers. There’s great comedy as Basil tries to keep track of which lies he’s told to which characters. Isn’t that the direct opposite of authenticity? And is that who you want to be?

Samuel Johnson who once said we are all just acting out our favorite character in fiction. I like that idea. I think I see it in action a lot. And to follow it along into this new context, perhaps it’s like suggesting that you should choose which character that is, and stick with that one.

Or, to make it really simple, be yourself.  One person, the same person, everywhere. Novel idea.

Deep Irony Award: I Can’t Resist.

Business Stories, Current Affairs, ,

Wow, this is fun. ‘CSI’ Writer Sued For Revenge Naming Show Characters After Real People, which I saw on Huffington Post.

How ironic is this:

LOS ANGELES — A couple sued a writer for the CBS show ‘CSI,’ claiming two shady characters on the show were named after them in revenge for a real estate deal gone bad.

Real estate agents Melinda and Scott Tamkin on Friday sued writer and producer Sarah Goldfinger for defamation and invasion-of-privacy. They are seeking $6 million in damages, alleging the show hurt their real estate business.”

This reminds me of a mirror facing a mirror, reflecting infinite images. How would you associate a fictional character with yourself? You’d identify traits. But if those are negative traits, why would you claim, in court, that they have similarity with you. Why not just satisfy yourself with coincidence of name, coincidence of appearance, and not identify with the fictional character at all? As it turns out, it went to production without even the name similarity:

The characters had the last name Tamkin in an original screenplay and Goldfinger helped cast actors who looked like the Tamkins, according to the lawsuit. The Tamkins claim the characters’ last name was changed to Tucker at the last minute, which they said was evidence Goldfinger borrowed details from their lives.

Why would the Tamkins, concerned with the possible parallel with these fictional villainous characters, proactively claim similarity? Shouldn’t they say, quietly and to themselves, “that’s not us”? But in this case, they filed suit to say that is us. That’s deep irony that I can’t resist. Aren’t they identifying themselves by what these fictional villains do? Aren’t they claiming those traits from fictional characters?

They say that it’s hurting their business. But they’re the ones doing the identifying with fictional characters. And now they’re on the news everywhere, and I’m even writing about them here. Does that hurt their business?

It’s a looking glass thing: curiouser and curiouser. Interesting irony.

(Image here from Flickr by Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan in Iraq)

Is Journalism Dead, Dying, or Just Faking It?

Journalism, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

I feel like I’m watching Journalism fall apart; watching with interest, horror, and dismay … but just watching, like watching a fire from far away, powerless.

Photo by mphotos on Flickr

Like you do, I read about the newspapers folding, falling like trees in a rotting forest. Even the New York Times is in trouble. Many of the newspapers I grew up with are either dead or dying.

News flash: this isn’t new. It’s been going on since I can remember. It was already a big deal in the 1960s. (News at 11!)

We blame it on different things: blogs, 24-hour news networks, mainstream network television news, declining education, apathy, the Web, Fox News, Huffington Post, the new president, the old president, whatever.

I got a grad degree (MA) in Journalism, with honors in fact, in the early 1970s. That was so long ago we actually called it Journalism, not communications.

Back then newspapers were already dying because television network news was killing them. People liked their news in 30-second bite-size pieces. Professors wrung their hands about the loss of analysis and in-depth reporting.

And we all worried a lot, back then, about the impact of television violence in general. And sensationalism. Like that would turn the news business into show business. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen, right? (Show of hands, please).

Not that it was ever just academic for me. Before I reached my 30s, grew up and sold out (I became an entrepreneur, got the MBA), I spent eight years as a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent, based in Latin America. I worked for UPI, freelanced for Business Week, Financial Times, etc. Even after business school I wrote columns in several magazines, although mostly computer magazines.

It’s also a bit of the present for me as well, because of my new job blogging and writing. You can see that here on the right column: I’m on the Huffington Post, USNews.com, plus several business blogs.

So where does that leave us? With this:

Accident of history: journalism and business

We tend to forget that journalism grew up to fill pages between ads. It wasn’t about the the sanctimonious needs of society, or the fourth estate, or fundamentals of democracy.

They needed readers to sell ads. And in the old days, before Fox News or Huffington Post, when freedom of the press was limited to those who owned presses, the best way to get and keep readers was to do real news; to pay Journalists to investigate and report.

In the heyday of great journalism, bias was bad business. So the owners paid the reporters and, with many very well known exceptions, tried not to meddle. Good journalism was also good for business.

And we got professional news reporting because that was good business. They paid somebody to attend town hall meetings, and somebody else to travel the globe covering wars and revolutions, because that kept the readers happy and, because of that, the advertisers happy.

Journalism wasn’t about the public good. It was about making money.

Fast forward to the Internet, the Web, and the collapse of the printing press and big owners as the oligarchy of the “media.” Suddenly the media is splintered up into hundreds of millions of websites, in infinite variety of degrees of professionalism or lack of it. And even on the television, far less free, it’s six hundred channels instead of three, so we have the Fox News people talking to their tribe, and the Jon Stewart-Bill Maher people talking to their tribe, and CNN talking to whomever has 24 hours a day to listen, and NBC and CBS and ABC news trying vainly to compete with Joan Rivers and Entertainment Tonight. All bets are off.

And there’s this other trend mixed in: Even before the Web, while few people noticed, newspapers spent the last generation or two cutting costs by cutting news staff and using AP and UPI, and lately, Reuters.

So what happens next? Who’s going to pay whom to sit through those boring town council meetings, or risk their lives in wars and revolutions, or report politics and democracy fairly?

I don’t know. But, in the time-honored tradition of the back side of journalism, I’m going to tell you anyhow. Later. Not now. News at 11.

(Photo by mphotos on flickr)

Does the News Business Die Along with Newspapers?

Current Affairs, Journalism, Reflections, , , , , ,

In the olden days, when I was a grad student in Journalism, for instance, or a night editor for UPI, the business model of the news business was fairly clear:

  1. News organizations sold advertisements.
  2. They needed news to get readers to be able to sell the ads.
  3. News needed credibility to get the readers.

So we had a news business.

We tend to forget the factor of volume, as related to credibility. Newspapers, and later, television news, had to appeal to a mass audience in order to make a living. That helped us generate a news ethic, such as objectivity — covering the news, trying to keep opinion out of it.

News was never really objective, of course. But there was the goal of objectivity. As journalists, most of us tried to be objective. And when we weren’t being objective and we knew it, we tried to make our bias clear, and label the content something different from news.

“Yellow journalism” was about sensationalizing the news. And it was always a problem, back in those olden days. Some media did it more than others.

News values changed with the growth of television news. The business of selling ads got better with more audience, and the audience liked celebrities, violence, puppies, and things that could fit into 30-second spots.

What we didn’t imagine, back then, was the splintering of the audience into different interest groups; the impact of having 600 channels on the television, and millions of websites. That changed the business entirely, and we — not just the journalists, but the world at large — haven’t figured that out yet.

Specifically, what does that mean? Well, to start with, now you can make a good business being the blatantly conservative television cable news channel, for example. You don’t have to appeal to a cross section; you appeal to a segment. And you can do the same as the blatantly liberal blog/news source.

So what does this mean for news?