Public Address - Hard News (Home)

More on Premium Content | Nov 04, 2005 09:54

Easily the most feedback from Public Address readers yesterday came in response to the statement from the 14 New Zealand Herald columnists unhappy about their work going behind the Herald website's "premium content" paywall.

It was universally supportive, although Matt Stevens declared that "I must lament the fact that 14(!) of the Herald's supposedly best columnists can't put together a post that is well written, free from typos, incomplete sentences or mangled grammar. I'm afraid it leaves me wishing that the aggrieved were 13 columnists and a copy editor instead."

You had to venture off to the I'll-say-anything wing of the local blogosphere to find an unsympathetic response: Cathy Odgers dismissed all the aggrieved columnists as spouting "outdated socialist garbage" (Jenny Ruth? Jim Hopkins? Brian Gaynor? Garth George?) and accused them of "crapping all over" their staff colleagues in "disclosing" a typical feature writer's salary. It's not exactly a secret, darling. Do try and keep up.

I think it's true to say that the primary objection of the columnists is that the paywall has taken them out of the conversation. They're missing the feedback from the readers. The bid for a share of the loot was subsequent to their being told that the paywall would not be reviewed. Colin James has responded by negotiating to have his columns removed from the Herald website altogether - you can read them on his own website.

But is there any loot to go around? Perhaps it would be useful to explore this from a business angle, as I did in my original Listener column on the new policy, which explains the background and sets out the issues.

APN management has privately told the columnists that it is "pleasantly surprised" at the uptake of premium content subscriptions. No, I don't know anyone who has paid up either, but I presume someone has. I might yet subscribe myself, but I really can't envisage a situation where I could link to an editorial or column and assume that any more than a tiny fraction of our readers would be able to view it.

So the Herald is missing out on link traffic from us. How's it doing overall? Not too well, to judge by the Nielsen NetRatings numbers. The paywall was introduced at the end of September, making it easy enough to gauge. Last month, the Herald had 1,206,854 unique readers, down from 1,235,777 in September - a fall of 2.34%. (Stuff's readership rose over the same period.) Total page impressions fell from 25,332,874 to 23,945,903 or 1,386,971. At an advertising rate of, say, $20 per 1000 impressions of a big-ass banner (although the Herald may fetch a premium over that for being the Herald) that's $27,739 of advertising revenue forgone for the month.

This assumes, of course, that the fall is a consequence of the premium content policy, which it may not be. And there's barely anyone in the local online publishing industry who hasn't grumped about the Nielsen numbers at some time (Nielsen actually had Public Address down last month, while our internal count was that we'd added nearly 4000 readers). But PA reader Daniel Kalderimis emailed yesterday to say that he believed the Herald site's Google performance had dropped in the last month. If that's so, it should be of concern for APN. The Herald site has long attracted a substantial amount of Google traffic, in part because of the way it's built (there are a lot of index pages).

The people who raised concerns before and after last year's US presidential election, regarding America's dangerously insecure voting infrastructure, have tended to be dismissed as either loonies or bad losers. A report from the US General Accounting Office (thanks to reader Sean O'Donnel for the tip) suggests otherwise.

Ignore, if you like, the contention in this Free Press story that the election was stolen and focus on the excerpts from the GAO report. Or, if you have time, read the report itself. It's hard not to conclude that if the election wasn't stolen, it damn well could have been. There were so many anomalies and failures to meet basic security standards. If it all hadn't been widely predicted in advance by computer scientists and activists, it would be unbelievable.

The report couches its findings by noting that "many of these concerns were based on specific system makes and models or a specific jurisdiction's election, and there is no consensus among election officials and other experts on their pervasiveness."

You'll note that there does not appear to be dispute that it happened, just how much it happened. And a lot of it happened in Ohio; the state on which the presidency turned.

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, wrote a a robust column for Vanity Fair on the troubling story of the Ohio election, in which he put the hypothetical: "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?"

This, he believed, had been the case in Ohio - and you can guess who the beneficiary candidate was.

Bush's Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is emerging as a more nuanced character than either the left or the right believes. In particular, the emergence of his writings in college, expressing support for gay rights and privacy (concern for privacy rights makes you a liberal ninny in today's America) is quite interesting.

With Scooter Libby up in court already, it's worth noting that apart from being an alleged perjurer, Libby is but one of a long line of prominent American conservatives who have at some time penned strange, semi-pornographic novels.

Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne, penned Sisters, a lesbian bonkfest set in "The American West - where men were men and women were property". You can enjoy that here.

Libby's effort, The Apprentice is really quite depraved. The New Yorker has a look at it the tradition of the conservative novels "that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast."

Finally, I went to the launch last night of the updated and revised version of John Dix's classic New Zealand music history Stranded in Paradise, at Real Groovy. It was good fun (and Emma Paki and Hello Sailor played) although a bigger bunch of reprobates you wouldn't find, etc, etc. It's a credit to Finlay Macdonald at Penguin that the book has re-emerged, smartened up and with many of its original errors corrected. Unfortunately there's an error on the first page of the new one: it wasn't the Labour government (which of course didn't have a Budget in 1999) that abolished the Broadcasting Fee, but National under Bill Birch. The book also has Chris Knox winning his Silver Scroll in the wrong year for the wrong song. Never mind. I've bought myself a copy to go with my hardback and softback editions of the original. Lovely.

PS: That Interview with Murray Cammick about Warner Music buying FMR is here

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Extraordinary | Nov 03, 2005 09:36

The Los Angeles Times column by Lawrence Wilkerson, headed The White House cabal somehow escaped my attention over the past week, but I think it's still worth drawing attention to, because it's extraordinary.

Wilkerson, a former Army colonel, was Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 until this year. His column follows a speech along similar lines, and it describes "a secretive, little-known cabal" including Cheney and Rumsfeld that made "some of the most important decisions about US national security - including vital decisions about postwar Iraq." He says:

I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

And concludes …

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Wow. Like Richard Clarke and the others, Wilkerson has already been character-assassinated by the faithful right-wing online clone army. Indeed, he will have known that would happen, which makes his decision to blow the whistle all the more notable.

Minneaopolis City Pages editor Steve Perry wonders whether the Fitzgerald inquiry might end up exposing more about the cabal.

No Right Turn looks sideways at John Howard's announcement of a "specific" terror threat just as he's trying to pass an anti-terror bill that rolls back the kind of civil rights good people spent many years getting into law.

NRT also points to David Mery's startling account of being identified behaving "suspiciously" while trying to catch the Tube in London to meet his girlfriend. It ought to be reassuring that the police are watching over the London transport network, but what happened to Mery is the opposite of reassuring, especially given the case of Jean de Menezes.

Although he is clearly innocent of any offence, Mery was arrested and detained, had his flat searched and belongings taken and, more importantly, has still not been cleared: just made subject to "no further action". This means that the police hold his DNA, prints, interviews and other material. Mery, a computer and telecommunications specialist, has acknowledged he is now likely to never be granted entry to the US.

I don't think this is what we're fighting for.

There's a new Fundy Post, in which Paul Litterick catches another Maxim employee on the borrow, in - priceless! - a passage intoning on the importance of "strong, readily enforceable intellectual property."

And Synthetic Thoughts looks at suggestions of BBC content on the Video iPod (looks like someone mangling their words), as well as the recently-revealed BBC archive catalogue project (an IMDB for the BBC as it is being widely described).

Andrew Ecclestone also drew my attention to the BBC's annotatable radio project.

Speaking of which, the Wellington Karajoz Great Blend with Ashley Highfield filled up inside of three hours yesterday, but there's still some room at the Auckland event.

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Let's do it again | Nov 02, 2005 10:33

Folks, it's Great Blend Time again. Public Address stages the fourth Karajoz Great Blend on Sunday November 13 at the Hopetoun Alpha in Auckland. And boy, do we have something for you. Our star guest is Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director of New Media and Technology.

Ashley was recently named third on this year's Silicon.com list of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in Technology, behind only Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. He is a member of the BBC's nine-member executive board and his responsibilities span the spectrum of media directions, from the BBC's Creative Archive project to its Integrated Media Player trial.

And, thanks to the British Council, he's coming especially for our event. Actually, make that events.

Yes, the Karajoz Great Blend is coming to Wellington. We'll be firing up the roadshow at the Film Archive from 6pm on Monday, November 14.

Both the Auckland and Wellington events will feature an illustrated onstage interview with Ashley Highfield, who will then join various well-informed locals for a panel discussion on new media, digital community and where TV is going. (In the context of this week's events, I must say I see it as a welcome chance to discuss TV, and public broadcasting, as being about something other than famous people's salaries.)

The Auckland panel is: Michael Carney (Mediacom's new media analyst), Idolblog co-founder Regan Cunliffe, Julie Christie (Touchdown) and David Murphy (interactive content manager, TVNZ).

The Wellington panel (with perhaps one to be added) is Jo Tyndall (who is charge of digital TV matters at the Ministry of Culture and Heriitage) and Richard Naylor of Citylink and R2 (who I think is doing amazing work).

The Auckland event will open with a performance from Ladi Six and conclude with a multimedia throwdown by Pitch Black. It will also feature Great Blend TV: a reel of stuff you can't - yet - see on TV in New Zealand. The Wellington event is slightly more compressed (and audience capacity is very limited), but will include the interview and the panel discussion and a performance by Ladi Six.

Both events will continue the Karajoz Great Blend tradition of free admission, friendly bar prices, a relaxed atmosphere and good vibes. The assistance of TVNZ and Microsoft Mac Office is much appreciated.

So go ahead, and RSVP for Auckland or for Wellington.

PS: If you miss out or can't come, I'll have both events recorded and we'll make them available online. You gotta love the Interweb.

PPS: On my bFM show today the main interview is with Murray Cammick at 12.30pm. We'll be discussing the development in the local music industry that no one seems to be able to talk about - the purchase of Festival Mushroom Records by Warner Music. The deal, done in Australia, has unknown implications for New Zealand. Not only does FMR own the Flying Nun copyrights, it's the home to the Phoenix Foundation, Dimmer and others, and distributor of Scribe's label, Dirty Records. So what happens next? Listen here.

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Rumour and fact | Nov 01, 2005 11:22

This rumour comes to you entirely without warranty, but from a fairly good source. There will be a New Zealand iTunes store very early next year - perhaps even on January 1, 2006. I'm not sure exactly what the hold-up is, but presumably negotiations are continuing.

In other media technology news at our house, Sky is sending someone around - anytime you like, folks - to install us a MySky PVR. I'll let you know how it goes. Synthetic Thoughts looks at a cool PVR-decoder-TV from the Freeview-terrestrial side of the digital TV fence.

Rob O'Neill at NZBC notes sundry right-wing bloggers going off half-cocked on local connections to the oil-for-food scandal. And then apologising.

Gay, disabled comedian (couldn't we get something about saving whales in there?) Phil Patston is demanding to be eradicated by Wayne Mapp. Meanwhile, in other anti-PC news, Alan Duff is such a cock.

Conor Roberts was in touch to ask whether Muriel Newman, who is continuing to use email addresses gathered under the auspices of the Act Party for her post-Parliamentary missives, should be considered a spammer ("Was she entitled to use it for something other than its original intended use? I should think not - my bet is she would get done if we had proper opt-in spam laws"). Dude, just be thankful she's stopped passing people's addresses onto her husband so he can spam them with ads for his stock tips and seminars.

I've written about it for print, so I won't say too much about Ian Fraser's departure from TVNZ, save to note that it's a little ironic that Don Brash is calling for an inquiry into political interference in the running of TVNZ, in this case on the matter of top salaries, given that his own spokespeople have been known to loudly demand political interference in the running of TVNZ, on the matter of top salaries.

When the news broke late last year of Judy Bailey's huge salary increase, Georgina Te Heuheu demanded Helen Clark "waste no time in calling for heads to roll at the TVNZ Board." On the same day, Katherine Rich demanded that Helen Clark publicly weigh in on the topic of Bailey's salary. Two days later, Murray McCully slated Helen Clark's comments on Bailey's salary - not for commenting, but for not really meaning it.

So, yeah. TVNZ salaries = political football. It's never been any different.

In the Actually More Serious file, No Right Turn notes that the Ombudsman's office has effectively accused several ministers and departments of subverting democracy in their handling of OIA requests.

Oh, and here's the form on Bush's new Supreme Court nominee.

Finally: I'm on the panel for another recording of National Radio's highly popular news quiz, Off the Wire, tomorrow. We've been recording lately at the Classic, but tomorrow night it's the new RNZ premises in Auckland, crowd to arrive at 6.15pm. If you'd like to be in the live studio audience you can call Linda on 367 9320 or send email to tickets@thedownlowconcept.com. It's good fun.

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