Portfolio’s Failure

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the decline of print media these days. There were great speeches by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson at SXSW.  Recently there was news of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine shutting down after plowing through $100 million in two years.  Some people have used this as an indication of the flawed model of print, but reading this story from an ex-employee i think it’s more an issue of mismanagement and lack of execution.  Here are some exerpts:

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si’s hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read.

Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman’s meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Would the magazine succeeded if it was run currectly?  Who knows, but i do know from past experience at former companies that sometimes too much money is a bad thing as there is no urgency or common goal.  And when you have a leader making decisions that don’t make sense, you can’t help by become disillusioned and discouraged.  That seems to be what happened here.

Obama poster drama

I heard a great podcast yesterday on NPR about the iconic Obama poster (seen above). The poster is done by a fascinating artist named Shepherd Fairey.  It’s a little known fact that Fairey is also responsible for the Andre The Giant “OBEY” sketches that i remember from the 90’s.  He really gets around.

In this case, Fairey took a photo he found on Google and then altered the neck, the eyes and the colors (and cropped out George Clooney) to make a poster than came to symbolize the campaign.  Shepherd always claimed that he made the poster from an Associated Press photo and about a month ago, it was finally determined which photo he used and who the photographer was. It was a photo of Obama sitting at a press event in Darfur with George Clooney.

All this would be nice and peachy except that because the photo was an AP photo, the AP came to Fairey and threatened to sue if he didn’t dish out a percentage of revenue he made from the poster. Fairey acknowledged that he’s willing to pay the standard license fee and attribute the photo to the original photographer but he won’t be bullied into paying.  So, instead he sued the AP in an attempt to discourage companies from punishing artists for creating art.

While his argument stands on fair use, to me the real issue is about people making derivative works. It’s the 21st century and lots of people take lots of images and transforming them into art. If each is penalized into paying a bounty for the original source we’re limiting and hurting society.

In this day and age, users are both consumers and creators of content.  So many YouTube videos have copyrighted works in them.  Last week there was a huge fiasco around Facebook’s Terms of Service when they claimed they owned all user uploaded material.  Thankfully, they backed off.  But the backlash from the users illustrates that ownership of property, attribution, and sharing is really important to the web.

If anything this just leads me more and more into believing in Creative Commons. It’s truly the only mechanism that let’s people properly manage their rights

New Media – What Will It Look Like

Toby and i have been debating and discussing what new media will look like.  His post today inspired me to lay down some of my thoughts. A lot of my thinking stems from this article in The Atlantic and Fred’s Post about his reading habits.

The Atlantic post described how the NY Times is dead.  With $1 billion in debt, a $400 million dollar loan due in May and only $46 million in cash on hand, it is going down.  Even with the $250 million it got yesterday, it cannot continue to exist the way it is.  No newspaper can.  My beloved Star Tribune declared bankruptcy last too and that’s the beginning of the trend of all papers.

Why are they failing?  Because the business model is wrong.  They are trying to do too much.  They cover things that are commodities.  It’s as if every online music service tried to build an mp3 store to compete with iTunes and Amazon.  They don’t because those work great.  Newpapers try to cover every story: national and international news, sports, entertainment, etc. The local newspaper doesn’t need to cover most of they reports on today because their paper is not going to be the place where the public finds that information. When user’s get online, all of this news is available in other places, for free and in a better, deeper format.  For instance:

• National and International news: this is covered by AP, Reuters, and CNN.com
• Entertainment news: this can be found online (RottenTomatoes) or from national news and reviews from individual columnists (Ebert)
• Sports: ESPN.com and bloggers will cover this

If a paper is covering any of these on their own, it is a losing proposition.  What’s left? The only thing is see is local news. I think local papers should focus on local news because everything else is a commodity.  Even bloggers will be able to fill the gaps left by major journals.

Toby talks in his post about the Huffington Post which i think is a piece of the puzzle but it’s only interesting because they are trying to be a news portal.  And i agree.  In my mind, most “papers” will shift online and instead of reporting the news, they will be filtering it. And if they don’t, they will die.  They better hurry up too, becuase places like the HuffPo are trying to get there first. You can already see how this is happening.  Filters are already part of people everyday lives the same way a paper used to be.  Technology aggregation and filtering is done at Techmeme, sport aggregation and filtering at ESPN, and news filters like CNN can replace almost any newspaper’s news coverage.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way.  More evidence came yesterday when ESPN announced a partnership with TrueHoop to place NBA blogs in their site because they know that they can’t cover everything.  You can see how techmeme is the “paper” of choice for Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.  He writes:

Image via CrunchBase

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop.

Will papers become local news sources?  I think that’s all that’s left for them.  But they better hurry up because local blogs like LAist.com and DCist.com are already attacking this niche and doing a better job than they are.

Related articles:

• Slim to invest in New York Times
• Outsourcing the News
• Star Tribune Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
• Techmeme Adds a Human Touch to Tech News

Porsche Made a Killing on VW

Image by Michi1308 via Flickr

This is a great little post about how Porshe made over 7 billion Euros through it’s manangement (and manipulation) of VW’s stock.  It’s quite clever.

Related articles:

• Porsche Takes Majority Of Volkswagen
• German billionaire kills himself

Michael Lewis and the financial crisis

Michael Lewis who wrote Liar’s Poker revisits in an article his time on Wall Street and does some digging into what happened and interviews some people who actually predicted the crisis. In fact, reading this article you (a) wonder why more people didn’t see the financial collapse coming and (b) feel a sense of happiness that the firms got what they deserved.

It’s a good read – here it is

As a side note – on my path through Wikipedia: did you know that Michael Lewis is married to Tabatha Soren the old MTV veejay?  And did you know that Tabatha was in the music video “You’ve got to fight for your right to party” by The Beastie Boys? Interesting

Related articles:

• ● The end of Wall Street and Michael Lewis’ new “fucking book”
• Everybody Hates Merrill Lynch This Week
• Media | Media Talk: A Book of Big Names in Economics, and Only One Makes It to the Cover

Going from Movies to Music

Joaquin Phoenix, the star of the Johhny Cash film Walk The Line just announced that he’s leaving the movie business and going into music full-time.  Sounds like a bad idea to me. Russell Crowe, Keifer Sutherland, Keanu Reeves, Billy Bob Thorton, and others have tried this and failed spectucularly.

However, i also know that Jason Schwartzman (Max in Rushmore) has been in 2 successful bands (Phantom Planet and now Coconut Records).  Are there any others that have gone from movies to music that i’m missing?

Play this Coconut Records song – it’s one of my favorites (West Coast).

Related articles:

• Joaquin Phoenix Follows His Inner Dogstar [Career Changes]
• Breaking! Joaquin Phoenix Quits Acting Forever To Pursue Garage Band Dreams [Retirement]
• Joaquin Phoenix to quit Hollywood

World Peace? We’re Closer than we think

During my trip to Maui, i brought along the book “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria. It’s a good read (not done yet). One part i really liked at the begging was when he was talking about how war and organized violence have declined substantially over the past 60 years – and dramatically over the last two decades. This was news to me. He writes:

The general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over 60% [since the mid-1980's], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950’s. Violence increased steadily throughout the Cold War – increasing sixfold between the 1950’s and early 1990’s – but the trend peaked just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the Cold War.

To that Harvard’s professor Steven Pinker argues, “That today we are probably living int he most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”

This seems so contrary to what i feel everyday due to the constant news of terrorism, bombings, airline accidents, etc. Zakaria addresses this saying:

One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuiously…. Every weather disturbance is “the story of the century”. Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. It is difficult to put this all in context because the information revolution is so new. We didn’t get daily footage on the ~2 million who died in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970’s or the million who perished in teh sands of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1908’s

But now the deaths of ten, because they are seen up close, make the world seem more and more dangerous. When, in fact, the opposite is true.

Caffeine No Longer Required

Sell your stock in Starbucks everyone – here’s an article in Wired about a new drug that removes sleepiness. You snort a brain chemical and it removes the effects of lack of sleep.  It’s working in monkeys but may not be on the shelves in the US for another decade.    I can’t wait!

The article:

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep

In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.

The treatment is “a totally new route for increasing arousal, and the new study shows it to be relatively benign,” said Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a co-author of the paper. “It reduces sleepiness without causing edginess.”

The Week is a Great Magazine

I get way too many magazines sent to my place, but one that i read every week is The Week.   It’s a great mix of all news and i recommend it for anyone.  There was also a great little article in the New York Times about how it got started and why it is different than most publishers.   Read it here.  Some exerpts from the article:

“The Week is going to be a huge global brand. Cross my heart and hope to die, I have already been offered hundreds of millions of dollars for it,” Mr. Dennis (the founder) said this month.  Mr. Dennis recently sold the American version of Maxim, a juggernaut that was showing the strains of increasing competition. Given that he was pulling back in the United States, why not just add The Week to the sale?

“I will throw The Week onto no pile until it becomes a half a billion or billion-dollar franchise,” he said. “The Week is my baby.”

He also believes he can get a toehold in the newsweekly market because, he says, the established players Time, Newsweek and U. S. News & World Report have lost touch with the news.

“‘Golfing for Cats With Jesus Who Has Cancer’ is not something that people need to know about,” he said. The Week is all news, all the time, with editors who comb publications and republish annotated accounts from a disparate group of sources. Not only does it have the editorial reach of the Web, but it has the same significant cost benefits because most of the data and reporting are borrowed.

Amen.  It’s great.  You should get it

This would explain why i sleep so much

Ever since i started my triathlon training, i’ve been going to bed earlier and earlier. I thought it was because i’m just getting old (turning 30 in 2 weeks), but today the NY Times has informed me that it is because i’m now an “endurance athlete” and these athletes require much more sleep than regular people. There’s a scientific reason for this….

One possibility, Dr. Chediak said, is that cytokines — hormones that signal the immune system — are making these athletes sleep so much.

Exercise, Dr. Chediak said, prompts muscles to release two cytokines, interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha, that make people drowsy and prolong the time they remain sleeping. In fact, those cytokines also are released when people have a cold or infection, which is why people sleep so much when they are ill.

It turns out that the single most important factor for increasing the release of those two cytokines is increasing the duration and intensity of exercise, Dr. Chediak said. And, he noted, that’s what is happening when endurance athletes train. “A sprint will not get you as great an effect,” he said.

Go ahead and read the entire article HERE  if you’re interested.