How About This?

In yet another permutation of the advertising/subscription/print/web business model, Variety is converting from a daily publication to a weekly and dropping the paywall from its website. Reduction in the number of printed editions is no surprise, but the switch back to free online content seems a bit strange. 

It's possible that this will ultimately be a bad idea, but it also suggests that there will be no one way for publications to succeed financially, and that the right model of payment and distribution will depend on each publication's audience and niche. The lack of a ready-made, one-size-fits-all model for success will mean a lot of experimentation and a lot of failure. 

Univision > NBC

A lot of people in the United States prefer Spanish to English -- or can only speak Spanish -- but it's hard to know whether that group will get larger or smaller in the coming decades. History shows that  immigrant populations have adopted English over time.

In the meantime, Univision is getting better ratings than NBC. Now, NBC is getting historically bad ratings, so that's not saying a whole lot, but it seems that NBC could have performed better during February if it had aired exclusively Spanish-language programming. Of course, its programming would likely need to be better too.

It could be that the major-network form is not long for this world anyway, but might a network adopt Spanish-language programming (as a wholesale change or for select shows or nights) as a way to stay viable? Partnerships seem a more likely way to reach Spanish-speaking audiences in the near future. After all, NBC and Telemundo are owned by the same corporate parent. And ABC News and Univision are partnering to launch an English-language network later this year. I'd expect to see more of this.

*Public* Research

On the subject of publicly funded research and the high-price journals that research is published in...

"In a 22 February memo, John Holdren, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), gave federal agencies until 22 August to produce plans for making the data and papers from the research they fund more accessible to the public."

Nature reports that federal agencies will be required to make research available for free one year after its initial publication. The year is a concession to journal publishers, who will have exclusive rights to distribute the work during that time. That to me seems an unnecessary delay and giveaway, but even if flawed, this expansion of access is a great thing.

The Power of Networked Communication

I'm more eager to write this post because this man didn't actually eat his wife. The point of the New York Times story about him, though, is that he's being prosecuted for plotting online to eat his wife along with doing other horrible things to her and to other women he knows.

Something that comes up in this article is that the internet offers a space for fellow cannibals to meet and express shared interests. An expert in internet crime is quoted as saying, "If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with [...] whereas online, it’s much easier to find those people," and perhaps be motivated to act on terrible desires.

The thing is, this is true for more than cannibalism. The ability to find validation, support, and common purpose online has helped political movements to build in a way that was impossible thirty years ago. Whether the aim is to overthrow a government, pick a candidate for office, or improve neighborhood schools, the internet allows what might have otherwise been members of a silent majority to find each other. 

This can happen with intent, as in joining a discussion forum, or it can happen more casually by reading Facebook comments or a favorite blog. The point is that top-down mass media (like a published opinion poll or talking heads on TV) now have a smaller role in people learning that widely shared opinions are actually widely shared -- or conversely, in keeping that concealed.

Popular Culture and 1942

A report on WBEZ's Sound Opinions from a few weeks ago taught me that the earliest tracks recorded by The Beatles and Bob Dylan are, in 2013, now old enough to land in the public domain under European copyright law. It turns out though, that the EU -- like the U.S. -- is perfectly willing to just extend the length of copyright protection (from 50 to 70 years) in order to protect the profits being made on such works.

As I've discussed before, copyright law with public welfare benefits in mind will extend enough protection to content producers to make their efforts worthwhile, thus encouraging cultural production. Extending copyright protections an additional 20 years so the corporate owners of music, book, or whatever rights can continue to sell them exclusively does not do that. Is limiting the production of "Love Me Do" recordings for the next 20 years going to ensure that The Beatles have been adequately compensated? Or will continue to make music?

More pernicious than the lack of cheap "Love Me Do" records is what happens to "orphaned" works under a 70-year copyright regime. In a good report from On The Media last month, James Boyle, head of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, explained that books, films, and audio recordings where the current copyright owner is unknown cannot be legally reproduced. No one is profiting from these works as it is, yet these pieces remain locked away as a casualty of our very generous copyright laws.

There is a real cost to our culture -- or at least some warping effects -- of keeping cultural products from the last 70 years more expensive than those which came before.

Late Night Audiences and Perspective

Simply for the sake of perspective/curiosity, here are the audience sizes for late night shows, via zap2it.com. These are the average number of viewers for the week of February 4th, ranked by audience size:

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: 3.5 million
The Late Show with David Letterman: 3.5 million
Jimmy Kimmel Live: 2.5 million
The Daily Show: 1.8 million
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: 1.6 million
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: 1.6 million
Nightline: 1.5 million
The Colbert Report 1.4 million
Last Call with Carson Daly: 0.9 million
Conan: 0.8 million

These shows air across the evening, but the total for viewers between 10:30 and 11:00 (central) is 11.8 million. Again, for perspective, Johnny Carson's average audience in 1992 was 12 million viewers. Looking at it this way, while the total audience size for late night comedy hasn't kept up with population growth over the past 20 years, it hasn't declined all that much either.

How to (Easily) Fix Our Electoral System

A segment on last week's Moyers & Company covered campaign finance law and looked specifically at New York City's system, which matches small donations with public money at a ratio of 6 to 1. One of the guests, an organizer and the executive director of New York's Working Families Party, Dan Cantor, argued that since money can't be kept out of politics, "(his) ambition isn't to keep private money out. It's to get enough public money in so that even when you have somebody who is not part of the system spending a lot, the other person gets to a threshold that makes it reasonable."

I agree with that sentiment, in part. Electoral competitiveness should not be determined primarily by access to lots of cash, but cash isn't going to be kept out of campaigns. There is plenty of evidence that campaign finance laws that limit spending, however nobly erected, will be circumvented, and the First Amendment creates a real and formidable barrier against limiting political speech, especially as it has been construed by the Roberts Court.

A strong pubic financing system is itself imperfect, though. Some of the strongest opposition to public financing comes from reasonable citizens who don't want to have their (tax) money given to politicians so that those politicians can air attack ads or otherwise advance their careers. Furthermore, public financing is, in effect, a public subsidy to broadcasters because the bulk of campaign money gets spent on broadcast ads.

All of this points to what I think is the best -- and also least discussed -- option for public support of campaigns: a requirement that broadcast licensees give airtime to qualified candidates. Television and radio broadcasters get their licenses from the federal government for free in exchange for serving the public interest. It's not hard to make the case that opening electoral competitiveness and reducing the need for endless fundraising by officeholders would serve the public interest.

The free airtime would not need to be used for droll infomercials or even given as part of news programming (though that could also serve as an improvement), but it could continue to be parceled out as thirty-second ads, with the only difference being that a better-financed candidate could not so easily overwhelm his or her opponent with them.

Just how the airtime would be distributed and how to qualify for it would need to be worked out, as with any other public financing system. Like other public financing systems, it would improve competitiveness in elections, but it would do it with no cost to taxpayers. Likewise, it would avoid the constitutional problems of limiting speech that other reform efforts can raise.

Broadcasters wouldn't like this plan because they make so much from selling campaign ads, but should we really sacrifice the integrity of our electoral system to safeguard the profits of broadcasters -- who get to use the airwaves for free?

So then, why not do this?

The Future of TV Ads

Intel is planning to release a video-streaming settop device later this year with a built in camera. Ad Age reports that the camera will be used to target content recommendations by recognizing its viewers. Beyond that, an Intel rep "was extremely hesitant to say that the camera on the device will be used to target TV ads more precisely."

But why, other than the (maybe only initial) feeling of creepiness, wouldn't it? I'm not sure that many people notice or care anymore that Google software scans their emails to serve up somewhat relevant ads. Matching viewing habits or other consumer data to a face is perhaps less intrusive. 

Now, it's possible that Intel plans to derive venue solely from subscription fees and hardware sales and won't run ads during streamed programming. Streamed ads can't be skipped as easily as with a DVR, though, and that in combination with ads targeted within a household could demand a premium -- as part of Intel's streaming service or some other in the near future. 

Why Bother with Journalism?

Broadcasting & Cable reports: "CNN Doubles Ratings With Cruise Ship Coverage".

Shutting Down the Used Game Market?

Sony has applied for a patent covering technology that could prevent video game discs from being played on multiple systems, thus potentially shutting down the used market for these games. Responding to that story and related rumors about Sony and Microsoft blocking used games on their next-generation consoles, this piece at Ars Technica offers both a Video Game Econ 101 and recommendations for how this change could work well for most parties. The recommendations start with cutting prices on new games to balance consumers' loss of resale value and to nurture demand among those unwilling to pay $60 for a new game.

If the console makers are indeed planning to limit game resale, it's interesting that they've only come to do so now. After all, used game sales become irrelevant with digital distribution, and I'd expect all-digital (or at least primarily digital) distribution of games has to be coming pretty soon.

It could be that the inability to share or resell downloaded games will impact consumer expectations enough that a block on sharing or reselling physical copies won't draw much ire. I remember some commentary on the limits of sharing Kindle books when that technology was new, but I think that limitation of e-books is pretty much taken as a given now.

A New Era

Just want to point out that the audience for last week's premiere of Zero Hour was the smallest for an in-season prime-time scripted series premiere in ABC's history. This closely follows NBC's cancellation of its Dr.-Jeckyl-and-Mr.-Hyde-themed medical drama, Do No Harm, after two episodes and the worst audience for a scripted series premiere in modern television history.

It's possible that these two shows were not just bad, but exceptionally bad. It is also possible that breaking these kinds of audience records is going to start happening with increasing frequency.

Next on Netflix...

Variety explores the lengthiness of this year's Oscar contending films (8 of 9 best picture nominees run over two hours). While television shows have less freedom to run long -- or short -- it's interesting to note that episodes of Netflix's first season of House of Cards each run about 50 minutes. While the show's head writer has discussed his freedom from writing to a regular broadcast schedule, a decision was made here to maintain the traditional hour-long structure of television drama. Of course, there's no need to do this on Netflix, where clocks don't exactly matter.

Perhaps future TV broadcast of the series was in mind, or a desire to accommodate normal TV viewing habits. Maybe most importantly, the hour-long TV drama is a longstanding form and people have had a lot of practice telling and receiving entertaining stories this way. For that reason, it might stick around even as programming moves off of a traditional schedule.

Talking About the Weather

People like to talk about the weather and nothing makes that easier than giving weather events human names. News media like to cover weather too, and naming winter storms, which The Weather Channel has begun doing, makes it easier to package storms as entertainment/news events.

The National Weather Service has instructed its employees not to use the names in their work, and so has the New York Times. The Times reports though, that the name Nemo is catching on for the present storm, citing that tag's popularity on Twitter and its appearance in a statement by Mayor Bloomberg. And a Google News search for Nemo shows that the name is being used by large and small news outlets across the country.

I'd say that drawing attention to our increasingly freakish weather is not a bad thing, especially if we might be able to start publicly considering its causes. Having begun as a marketing gambit though, there is nothing to stop The Weather Channel's next winter storm from being named by a corporate sponsor, except perhaps taste.

Cheers was Filmed in Front of a Live Studio Audience, After All

It seems obvious that the trend of network television comedy is toward single-camera shows (like 30 Rock and Modern Family) and away from multi-camera shows, where you only ever see three walls and there are always people laughing. That's why it seems so bizarre that NBC is converting its single-camera comedy Up All Night to a multi-camera show. That conversion seems to have inspired series-star Christina Applegate to leave the show.

I say the trend seems obvious in part because of critical reaction (the last multi-camera show to win an Emmy for best comedy was Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005) and in part because of what I like to watch. But what about what other people like to watch?

CBS dominates the primetime ratings, and last week the only comedies to break the top 20 were on CBS. These were The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, both multi-camera shows.

Lorne Michaels is executive producer of Up All Night. He build a career on comedy in front of a live audience and it was his idea to convert Up All Night, based on his enthusiasm for the format. I have to think, also, that NBC -- which has difficulty cracking the top 20 with any of its shows -- might be especially willing to get ahold of what is happening at CBS.

Hook, Line, Sinker

Karl Rove's American Crossroads Super PAC has a web ad up attacking Ashley Judd, a potential challenger to Senator Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Why does anyone know what American Crossroads has on its YouTube channel? Mostly because nearly every major national news outlet has reported on it, along with local media in Kentucky:



And its confidence in that happening is why American Crossroads didn't bother to spend any money airing the ad. The fact that the ad was never aired negates, I think, any news value in reporting on it -- much less airing it for free (and repeatedly) on a local news broadcast. It's not as if significant resources were spent on it or that any number of persuadable people would see it if not for this very news coverage. So what is there to talk about, other than the excitement of an early political attack on a celebrity, thus falling into a perfectly set trap that rewards a clever political operation with free airtime?