Is it Olbermann vs. Matthews or Olbermann vs. Rupert Murdoch?

Gawker wants to know [but you'll need to click on the Gawker link to get the links embedded in this quote ---ed.]:

So the Post has posted the Page Six item Keith Olbermann was so worked up about yesterday, and it does indeed say Hardball host Chris Matthews “seemed” to be talking about a strategy for landing Tim Russert’s job at a memorial event for the NBC personality, and that Olbermann is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get Russert’s Meet The Press job. …

But the gossip item also quotes a source, ostensibly from the traditional broadcast side of NBC News, who claims that Russert himself wanted NBC News political director Chuck Todd as his own replacement, and that the network will never install someone from MSNBC on the show:

The insider said,

“They’re cable. They’re far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they’re about seven letters short.”

I last wrote about Olbermann and the absurd notion that one of the MSNBC cablers would get to sit in Russert’s chair here and here.

But I reserve the right to hedge by saying that in the brave new media world, anything is possible.

NBC is reeling in the wake of Tim Russert’s death, and now Keith Olbermann (of MSNBC) is on the ropes—the subject of a backlash set off by his response to a rebuke from Katie Couric.

Plus, Olbermann has got the New Yorker on his case, too.

“I fired him,” Rupert Murdoch said recently. “He’s crazy.”

You really don’t need to know more than that. Others quoted in the piece attest to K.O.’s repulsive insanity, too, including even his producer:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true.”

Then this asshole from MSNBC offers a revolting conclusion:

But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

If the NBC-MSNBC brass think that his female viewers will stick with the abusive Keith Olberman like battered wives who have “nowhere else to go,” I believe they are mistaken. He is loathsome—a rude boor, and a hack—and I’ve been saying it for a while.

Rounding out the sad state of affairs at NBC is this train wreck:

I mocked Matthews here.Another day, another media institution crumbles.

I’d be a total hypocrite if I said I was surprised by this (my blog is called Infotainment Rules, after all), but it seems that PBS’s NewsHour—one of the last remaining outposts of  in-depth, not-hysterical, and thoughtful daily coverage of current events— is not long for this world.

On May 1, salaries were frozen at the newscast, and company contributions to 401(k) retirement funds were suspended, cutbacks suggested by the staff. “NewsHour” still has two corporate sponsors — Chevron and the Pacific Life Insurance Company — and it receives support from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But only part of the Archer money has been replaced, leaving the budget several million dollars short.

“NewsHour,” along with other PBS mainstays, may have a longer-term problem. Not only are corporations cutting back on all forms of advertising during the current economic slowdown, but public television’s model — soliciting long-term commitments — is also increasingly out of step with the changing needs of corporations, which no longer sponsor public television programs for purely philanthropic reasons.

Indeed. Unless you’re “green” and can give Corporation Big Foot a nice reflecting green glow and the moral superiority that goes along with it, your outstretched hands will stay empty. Be gone! There’s no money in corporate coffers for philanthropy.

Not that providing the news to the public should be left to philanthropists. But nor is receiving “the news” an entitlement of the people. If we expect those who profit from the public airwaves to offer us the people a public service by telling us “the news,” then we the people must demand it (rather than shrug and accept the circus performances on offer at the “cable news” shows as “news”).

Of course if we are no longer the audience but are rather the people formerly known as the audience, then that has to be factored in, too.

Either way, those who want to know what’s going on in the world around them will need to do more than sit passively in front of a box—or a flat panel. They’ll have to interact, and look around, and read, and judge for themselves the veracity and reliability of what they’re reading. Critical-thinking skills will be more important than ever in this brave new world.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

It looks like the “try anything” ethos is indeed—finally—taking hold among book publishers. Following on news of HarperCollins’s new “studio” comes this report about a project from Crown that was disseminated over the Internet by its author before he landed his book deal:

By rising to prominence without the financial backing of a mega-publisher, Sigler has defied the industry’s modus operandi. He’s discovered how to assemble, retain and sell to a growing audience, all on a shoestring budget.

“We are always looking for authors who have a platform and a core fan base, and our goal is to grow their audience and find new readers,” said Tina Constable, Crown’s publisher. “Scott is no exception and his fan base is already formidable. The wave of the future is how we harness the Internet to find these new readers, and we are devoting an enormous amount of energy and resources into this effort. The traditional model for publishing our books is quickly becoming obsolete and we recognize that creative Internet strategies are necessary if we want to remain competitive.”

There is vast, wide open country for enterprising types looking to exploit the very Long Tail of book publishing.

Saddle up!

Every day brings grim news to every sector of the old media businesses. Rupert Murdoch, whose reputation for swimming with the pond scum tends to overshadow his extraordinary business acumen and long-term success (compare and contrast with, say, Ted Turner, who was long hailed as a genius), is always interesting to listen to on this topic.

Here’s the heart of a recent speech he gave on the future of media [e.a.]:

In his speech, he said technology’s effects have permeated every aspect of News Corp., from the social networking on MySpace to the type of articles printed in local newspapers.

Consumers, especially the younger generation, have a chance to shape the inevitable changes by demanding content based on personal preferences, he added.

“Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down,” Murdoch explained. “A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago … Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both.”

Murdoch foresees the end of traditional mass media with consumers receiving news and entertainment from limited sources. Media companies need to diversify to survive, which is one reason his company purchased MySpace in 2005, he said.

Perhaps that was the thinking (if indeed there was thinking involved—or maybe it’s a new “try anything!” ethos) behind a  new venture at NewsCorp’s HarperCollins book division, announced thus in the New York Times (and thus certain to have caused much agita in executive offices across New York City):

New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

Roger L. Simon was unimpressed, and he had a question:

[W]hat interests me here is the second part of ths strategy - that the publisher will pay little or no advance and go into partnership with the author on potential profits with sales focussed, evidently on the Internet.

My question then is - what’s the point of the publisher?

Well, there’s editing (which one can get elsewhere) and the fancy publishing house imprimatur, maybe a little help with production and publicity (again available elsewhere - many authors pay for their own publicists anyway). It this really enough? The author can do much better on percentages, I am sure, by self-publishing. And that same author may know his or her way around the Internet better than the publisher, when it comes to publicity. So I am skeptical of this model.

I don’t blame Simon for being skeptical. Nevertheless, the point of the publisher—for now, at least—is the brand.  Until other brands develop to rival what the traditional publishing houses bring to the equation (professional experience, connections, and judgment), authors still have something to gain from trying to collaborate with publishers in this brave new media world.

But Simon is right on the money about one thing [e.a.]:

But I’m not surprised that it is happening - it is another symptom of the huge shakeout in the arts and letters instigated largely by the online world.

A lot of people are still clueless about the changes rocking their world. They’re still “comfortably numb.”

Time to wake up,

Once upon a time in the late 1950s, there was a TV game show with that ungrammatical name, hosted by Johnny Carson.

These days, it’s a question we have to ask ourselves every time we open a newspaper. Howard Kurtz reports in the WaPo:

The Los Angeles Times has acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur.

The story’s author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, said in a statement late yesterday: “In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.” Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also apologized, saying in a separate statement: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

The embarrassing admission came hours after a report by the Smoking Gun. The Web site, which specializes in law-enforcement records, said the Times “appears to have been hoaxed” by “an accomplished document forger” in its story last week tying Combs’s associates to the non-fatal shooting of Shakur 12 years ago.

Once more, online triumphs over print. Increasingly, the Web is a check on the MSM.

Across the Pond, a more traditional check on the media brought judgment to bear last week. In a first for the British media, the tabs apologized to one of their victims:

The headline, splashed across the top of the front page of The Daily Express on Wednesday, could not have been clearer or more jarring: “Kate and Gerry McCann: Sorry.”

The paper indeed had something to be sorry about. In the ensuing article, it admitted that much of its coverage of the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared shortly before her fourth birthday during a family vacation in Portugal last May, was completely wrong. Especially the part where it had repeatedly accused Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry, of murdering her and then covering up their crime.

I don’t follow the British media to know what kind of effect this had, or is expected to have in the future. But at the very least it’s a kick in the pants for the outrageous British press … for now.

Meanwhile, we’re all left with the ungrammatical and nagging question: who do I trust?

First, Vanity Fair canceled its annual Oscar bash. Now one division of HarperCollins is asking its expense account owners to cut back on T&E:

When editors go out to lunch with an author or a literary agent, they’re expected to pick up the check. What to do, then, when your employer has told you that you’re not allowed to? That’s what’s happening this month over at the flagship imprint of HarperCollins, where Jonathan Burnham has instructed his staff to “halt all [travel and expenses spending, known as T&E] for the entire month of March.”

In a memo sent to the imprint’s editors a little over a month ago and obtained by The Observer, Mr. Burnham indicated that he had to implement the measure because the house’s T&E budget for fiscal year 2008 was “already dangerously overspent.”

It’s not that they’ll never eat lunch in this town again, though. Graciously, agents are coming to the “rescue.”

The trend in indies is:here today, gone tomorrow.

“The window is definitely shrinking,” the vice president and general manager of New York’s IFC Center, John Vanco, said. “Art house films that, in the past, would play for 40 or 50 or 70 weeks, [such as] ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ and ‘El Topo,’ are, if not a thing of the past, then at least an exceedingly rare phenomenon these days. The theatrical engagement is, by necessity, more of a pit stop for most films now on their way to ancillaries than it was back when theatrical was primary and unchallenged by so many other movie-viewing options.”

Today, Mr. Vanco said, films are zipping through New York screens at faster and faster speeds. In part, the congestion is due to a growing mountain of titles — many shot digitally with shorter production schedules — all vying for big-screen debuts.

The notorious “some observers” blame documentaries, of all things [e.a.]:

Some observers say the problem stems from theaters becoming saturated by movies, often low-budget documentaries, that have no business showing in a theater environment. “Quite simply, there are way too many documentaries being released in theaters for anybody’s good,” said Mark Urman, the head of theatrical at THINKFilm, noting that a considerable number of New York screens on a weekly basis are being occupied by nonfiction films. “The vast majority [of these films] don’t warrant it, and what’s happening is that documentaries that would be much better served by a premiere on cable are flooding and clogging the theaters and guaranteeing that those who deserve the space are getting crowded out. It results in every title getting mediocre business.”

There’s light at the end of the (long) tunnel, though:

Mr. Urman’s frustration, though, is tempered with a sense of confidence that we are already witnessing the opening, turbulent chapter of a major “market correction.” That is, many distributors and filmmakers are beginning to realize that there is more money to be made — and attention to be found — in pursuing alternative avenues of distribution.

Yep. And not just in the movie business but in all media businesses. People who have been used to raking it in are going to have to put on their thinking caps and then get to work.

I was talking to a wise and well-known figure in the old-media world the other day, and he made a really smart observation.

The future of book publishing (as just one example), he said, is glorious. It’s only the present that’s a disaster.

We should all live long enough to enjoy a little bit of that future. In the meantime, the people in the movie business should make better goddamn movies. And the folks picking them up from Sundance should acquire a better nose for hits.

Throughout last year, Sundance’s most prominent titles suffered cruel fates in a crowded marketplace. “Grace Is Gone” was purchased for $4 million and went on to earn just $37,000 in America. The documentary “My Kid Could Paint That,” bought for $1 million, brought in $230,000 domestically.

I’m neither a futurist nor an interested party (except as a book lover and casual observer of trends who looks forward to a bright future for books when their content will be offered through many channels and via many platforms), but Evan Schnittman’s scenario about the pedestrian future of e-books [bottom line: they should and will, he predicts, be free] seems plausible to me:

My thinking was somewhat influenced by the events of the last couple of weeks. First Steve Jobs is quoted about the Kindle saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” One week later, Don Katz sold Audible, his digital audio platform and online retail store that was to spoken word recording what iTunes is to digital music, to Amazon for $300mm. Audible licenses its platform to Apple for use on the iPod/iTunes.

In my mind a connection was made between these events as I started to wonder if Jobs, smarting over the loss of Audible’s platform, was lashing out at Amazon. Then I wondered if this was a classic Jobs line - deflecting any interest in something and then a year later releasing that very thing. However, this idle speculation ebbed and a more interesting connection took its place - a link established in my mind between ebooks and audiobooks.

I have evolved my thinking to see that a “thriving” ebook market will look much more like the audio book market than the print book market. (I should mention that I see the parallel only in size, scope, and type of audience, not in market factors, content delivery, cost of production, or experiential preference. Audio books are not about reading - ebooks are all about reading.)

If one looks closely at how people like me use ebooks, you will see that convenience and portability is what drives use. While ebooks have been around for nearly 10 years in fairly usable forms, the devices to read them have been terrible - until now with the recent generation of e-ink readers such as the Kindle. (Yes, there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy reading on their PDA, iphone, laptop, etc - but let’s be honest; they are a tiny and low revenue producing audience.)

The growth I see in ebooks mimics the audio book phenomenon- by connecting readers who commute or travel with the content they crave. Audiobooks have made a marketplace out of people getting book content when they cannot read and has taught people to enjoy being read to again. Similarly, Ebooks are a brilliant option when you can bring everything you are reading with you and an even better option when you can buy instantly wherever you happen to be - just as digital audio downloads onto an iPod have done for the folks who don’t want to schlep around CD’s or cassettes.

 Via Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace [subscription required]:

Returning to the Free eBook with Purchase Idea
Oxford’s Evan Schnittman has a two-part post on Oxford blog asking “Do I Believe in Ebooks?” Ultimately, what he does believe is that “an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book.”

He writes: “I have come to this somewhat radical idea, not because I am one of the folks who believe all digital content should be free for the benefit of mankind. Nor did I come to this conclusion because I don’t believe there will ever be a place for ebooks. I came to this conclusion after becoming a fairly heavy user of ebooks and learning first hand what is best and worst about ebooks.

“The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform and make them free with new book purchases.

“Making ebooks free with new print books will be an operational puzzle that most will scoff at. While there certainly are huge issues to overcome, there are already many initiatives and ventures in place that make such a notion feasible.

“In the end this could be a marketer and merchandiser dream. I believe moving to free ebooks with the purchase of a new print title would cost or lose the industry nothing in sales as ebooks would still be available for individual purchase for those who don’t want to spend on print. What we would gain is that books - print books - would increase in value and utility.”

Recent post
First post

I await the bright future of a world awash with the cumulative information—and wisdom—of all mankind.

And I wish for every person access to the information and wisdom that can set him/her free.

It was in that spirit that I once wrote:

If you love books, set them free.