Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Friday, January 6, 2012
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
James Murdoch warned over phone hacking, e-mail shows
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/13/world/europe/uk-phone-hacking-scandal/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Correspondence released Tuesday shows that James Murdoch was warned in writing of the seriousness of a threat to sue his News of the World newspaper over phone hacking in 2008.
"Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared," the editor of the tabloid e-mailed proprietor Murdoch about the case, according to a copy of the correspondence published by Parliament Tuesday.
The e-mail from Colin Myler appears to undercut Murdoch's repeated testimony that he did not know details about phone-hacking by his employees.
Murdoch concedes in a letter to lawmakers, also published Tuesday, that he replied to the e-mail, but he does not admit having read it.
Correspondence released Tuesday shows that James Murdoch was warned in writing of the seriousness of a threat to sue his News of the World newspaper over phone hacking in 2008.
"Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared," the editor of the tabloid e-mailed proprietor Murdoch about the case, according to a copy of the correspondence published by Parliament Tuesday.
The e-mail from Colin Myler appears to undercut Murdoch's repeated testimony that he did not know details about phone-hacking by his employees.
Murdoch concedes in a letter to lawmakers, also published Tuesday, that he replied to the e-mail, but he does not admit having read it.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Poverty a problem for pay TV
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118037755
For years, execs at pay TV companies and telcos boasted about their growth as subscribers continued to pay more for new cable services, next-generation smartphones and faster broadband. Amid the euphoria, however, those execs didn't address what might happen to their bottom lines when consumers could no longer swallow those increasingly larger bills.
They may be facing that reality soon. In a foreboding new report, one analyst concludes that a major risk facing companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T is not heated competition from each other, or a fast growing outlier like Netflix, but rather poverty. "The poverty problem provides a new and sobering lens for any serious analysis of the telecom and media sectors," concluded Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. "At the low end, customers aren't just choosing between one provider and another. They're often choosing between these services and a third meal." His 96-page report, "U.S. Telecommunications and Cable & Satellite: The Poverty Problem," was released Friday and was certain to have ruined the long Memorial Day weekend for at least a few media execs.
To underscore his premise, Moffett offered some data that would make any sales force out pushing subscriptions cringe.
• About two-thirds of American families subsist on less than the average after-tax income of $62,000 a year. "We are, sadly, a country where most Americans are below average," Moffett wrote.
• Fifty million Americans are on food stamps.
• Forty-nine million are considered "food insecure," with no confidence where the next meal is coming from.
• Forty-four million Americans now live below the poverty line.
"The picture of an America where 40% of households are essentially bereft of discretionary spending power has incredibly important implications for companies in our coverage," Moffett wrote.
Average price of a pay TV subscription has risen 29% in the past five years, while real income growth has declined. Cable and satellite providers now reap on average $77.43 a month from each subscriber. This, of course, includes gains from new services like high-def and DVRs.
As worrisome as Moffett's report may be, pay TV execs could be lulled in to a false sense of security after seeing TV subscriptions rebound through 2010, ending the year with gains of 250,000 after seeing subs fall earlier in the year for the first time ever. Still, some companies like Time Warner Cable began offering lower-priced economy tiers of services to capture and retain customers on tight budgets.
While media consumption has not been affected historically by bad economies, Moffett points out that "the media industry has not a faced a macro environment like this before" or so many alternatives. "No one would argue that the entertainment choices offered by Netflix are better than what's available on cable," he wrote, "and neither of those offered by Hulu, or YouTube. But when faced with a choice of pay TV or a third meal, will some customers choose to make do with a back catalog or off-the-run TV shows and movies? Of course they will."
Telcos faces similar challenges. Moffett said the bulk of telco spending gains are concentrated in the top 40% of households in terms of income. Forty percent of smartphone owners come from the top 20% of the economy. Meanwhile, lower-income users are trading down to less-expensive, pre-paid plans. "Notably, despite the fact that we are on what is perhaps the very steepest part of the wireless data adoption curve, total (average revenues per user) growth in the United States is negative today. The trade-down for the bottom end is faster than the trade-up for the top," he wrote. "Excluding the nontraditional subscriptions, penetration of post-paid wireless has been falling in America for more than a year."
For years, execs at pay TV companies and telcos boasted about their growth as subscribers continued to pay more for new cable services, next-generation smartphones and faster broadband. Amid the euphoria, however, those execs didn't address what might happen to their bottom lines when consumers could no longer swallow those increasingly larger bills.
They may be facing that reality soon. In a foreboding new report, one analyst concludes that a major risk facing companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T is not heated competition from each other, or a fast growing outlier like Netflix, but rather poverty. "The poverty problem provides a new and sobering lens for any serious analysis of the telecom and media sectors," concluded Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. "At the low end, customers aren't just choosing between one provider and another. They're often choosing between these services and a third meal." His 96-page report, "U.S. Telecommunications and Cable & Satellite: The Poverty Problem," was released Friday and was certain to have ruined the long Memorial Day weekend for at least a few media execs.
To underscore his premise, Moffett offered some data that would make any sales force out pushing subscriptions cringe.
• About two-thirds of American families subsist on less than the average after-tax income of $62,000 a year. "We are, sadly, a country where most Americans are below average," Moffett wrote.
• Fifty million Americans are on food stamps.
• Forty-nine million are considered "food insecure," with no confidence where the next meal is coming from.
• Forty-four million Americans now live below the poverty line.
"The picture of an America where 40% of households are essentially bereft of discretionary spending power has incredibly important implications for companies in our coverage," Moffett wrote.
Average price of a pay TV subscription has risen 29% in the past five years, while real income growth has declined. Cable and satellite providers now reap on average $77.43 a month from each subscriber. This, of course, includes gains from new services like high-def and DVRs.
As worrisome as Moffett's report may be, pay TV execs could be lulled in to a false sense of security after seeing TV subscriptions rebound through 2010, ending the year with gains of 250,000 after seeing subs fall earlier in the year for the first time ever. Still, some companies like Time Warner Cable began offering lower-priced economy tiers of services to capture and retain customers on tight budgets.
While media consumption has not been affected historically by bad economies, Moffett points out that "the media industry has not a faced a macro environment like this before" or so many alternatives. "No one would argue that the entertainment choices offered by Netflix are better than what's available on cable," he wrote, "and neither of those offered by Hulu, or YouTube. But when faced with a choice of pay TV or a third meal, will some customers choose to make do with a back catalog or off-the-run TV shows and movies? Of course they will."
Telcos faces similar challenges. Moffett said the bulk of telco spending gains are concentrated in the top 40% of households in terms of income. Forty percent of smartphone owners come from the top 20% of the economy. Meanwhile, lower-income users are trading down to less-expensive, pre-paid plans. "Notably, despite the fact that we are on what is perhaps the very steepest part of the wireless data adoption curve, total (average revenues per user) growth in the United States is negative today. The trade-down for the bottom end is faster than the trade-up for the top," he wrote. "Excluding the nontraditional subscriptions, penetration of post-paid wireless has been falling in America for more than a year."
Sunday, July 18, 2010
We Still Like Libraries
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_dd619b5e-df48-589e-b033-dfdd91a4e01f.html
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Brooks On Political Polarization, and the Internet
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=opinion
Riders on the Storm
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 19, 2010
In 2001, Cass R. Sunstein wrote an essay in The Boston Review called “The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?” Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago who now serves in the Obama administration, raised the possibility that the Internet may be harming the public square.
In the mid-20th century, Americans got most of their news through a few big networks and mass-market magazines. People were forced to encounter political viewpoints different from their own. Moreover, the mass media gave Americans shared experiences. If you met strangers in a barbershop, you could be pretty sure you would have something in common to talk about from watching the same TV shows.
Sunstein wondered whether the Internet was undermining all this. The new media, he noted, allow you to personalize your newspapers so you only see the stories that already interest you. You can visit only those Web sites that confirm your prejudices. Instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons.
Sunstein was particularly concerned about this because he has done very important work over the years about our cognitive biases. We like hearing evidence that confirms our suppositions. We filter out evidence that challenges them.
Moreover, we have a natural tilt toward polarized views. People are prone to gather in like-minded groups. Once in them, they drive each other to even greater extremes. In his recent book “Going to Extremes,” Sunstein shows that liberal judges get more liberal when they are on panels with other liberals. Conservative judges get more conservative.
Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every day I seem to meet people who live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side.
Yet new research complicates this picture. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have measured ideological segregation on the Internet. They took methodologies that have been used to identify racial segregation, and they tracked how people of different political views move around the Web.
The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper, Wyo. If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you’d be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan. If you shook hands with other readers, you’d probably be shaking hands with liberals.
The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.
According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users.
But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.
But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.
It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.
Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.
This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.
If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.
Riders on the Storm
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 19, 2010
In 2001, Cass R. Sunstein wrote an essay in The Boston Review called “The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?” Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago who now serves in the Obama administration, raised the possibility that the Internet may be harming the public square.
In the mid-20th century, Americans got most of their news through a few big networks and mass-market magazines. People were forced to encounter political viewpoints different from their own. Moreover, the mass media gave Americans shared experiences. If you met strangers in a barbershop, you could be pretty sure you would have something in common to talk about from watching the same TV shows.
Sunstein wondered whether the Internet was undermining all this. The new media, he noted, allow you to personalize your newspapers so you only see the stories that already interest you. You can visit only those Web sites that confirm your prejudices. Instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons.
Sunstein was particularly concerned about this because he has done very important work over the years about our cognitive biases. We like hearing evidence that confirms our suppositions. We filter out evidence that challenges them.
Moreover, we have a natural tilt toward polarized views. People are prone to gather in like-minded groups. Once in them, they drive each other to even greater extremes. In his recent book “Going to Extremes,” Sunstein shows that liberal judges get more liberal when they are on panels with other liberals. Conservative judges get more conservative.
Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every day I seem to meet people who live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side.
Yet new research complicates this picture. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have measured ideological segregation on the Internet. They took methodologies that have been used to identify racial segregation, and they tracked how people of different political views move around the Web.
The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper, Wyo. If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you’d be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan. If you shook hands with other readers, you’d probably be shaking hands with liberals.
The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.
According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users.
But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.
But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.
It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.
Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.
This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.
If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Generational Movie Quotes
http://fandangogroovers.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/movie-quotes-that-define-their-generation/
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Copyright Payback
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/copyright-time-bomb-set-to-disrupt-music-publishing-industries/
Monday, November 9, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Jesus Kills Classic 99
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/stories.nsf/tvradio/story/7E33989A3E2B2A87862576470047C8E1?OpenDocument
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Brooks Notices Generational Turnings, Again
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/opinion/15brooks.html?em
Monday, May 11, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Seven Deadlies, Mapped For The US
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/
Notice how The South maps out for Lust, Pride, Wrath, and Envy... :)
Notice how The South maps out for Lust, Pride, Wrath, and Envy... :)
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Another Reason We Really Need Libraries
Max the Dog thinks Librarians Are Cool:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192764
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192764
Thursday, April 2, 2009
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