Zero Percent Idle

Remember recently how Alan Mutter warned that the business of local TV news — supported primarily by expensive advertising on its flagship news programs — was about to be newspapered? That is, to have its very business model rendered, eventually, moot?

Well, here are two more signs that the other shoe is dangling by the merest nanometer of fingernail for local TV news. The first sign is about as concrete as you can get and the other is informed speculation about what Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) may be up to in the TV space, as soon as this coming Monday.

First, the news, which, here in Baltimore at least, is not good for the news. David Zurawik reports in The Sun that viewership for 11 p.m. newscasts at the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates has plunged over the past five years in the key demographic of viewers 25 to 54 years of age:

• WBAL (NBC) down 62%
• WMAR (ABC) down 56%
• WJZ (CBS) down 52%

That’s right: The winner of that horserace lost only about half of its 11 p.m. audience.

The usual suspects are cited in the article: The Internet (correct - how much of the late news is actually news for people who are interested in the news?); Our Changing Lifestyles (if this is another word for choosing how to spend a half hour and finding the local tv news wanting, then correct); The arrival of the dreaded Nielsen People Meter (whining and misdirection — if the more accurate and precise tool shows a drop in audience, what does that say about those figures you reported for years using the less precise tool of a hand-completed diary?).

But, to me, the key here is that all of this plunge happened before the onslaught of hyperlocal competition from Aol’s Patch, Yahoo, Fwix and others just now threatening to wash away the footing from under local tv and newspapers. If the past five years have been interesting, the next five are starting to look, well, Biblical.

…

And now, the speculation, comma, informed division.

Remember Steve Jobs “hobby,” Apple TV? It was a set-top box released in 2006 and, largely, un-updated in any compelling sense since then. You can rent movies through it, watch video podcasts, show off your photos and watch YouTube videos. Not bad, but you can do a whole lot more with a Boxee box.

There’s currently a growing groundswell of informed speculation (which, in the Apple community, is often 2/5 wish-fulfillment and 3/5 tea-reading) that as soon as this coming week’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple will reveal a new approach to Apple TV that could very well shift the paradigm for how we “watch tv” in the same way that they changed how we listen to music when iTunes went from a hobby to a full-blown business.

And no one has done a better job of channeling that combination of dreamy-thinking and clue-sifting than Adam Lisagor, in his post titled iPad TV:

I’ve owned and used an Apple TV box for two years. When I found out it could be “opened up” to allow for additional media, it started to overtake my usage of my DVD player and my cable box. So if Apple TV has been, up to now, a hobby, I have been right there with it, a tinkering geek.

But would Steve keep a hobby around for so long without any real plans for it? … Now I’m not one to get all drooley over rumors (yes I am) but when Engadget broke news last week about the next version of the Apple TV box being 1) cheap ($99), 2) run on iPhone OS and 3) streaming-only, without internal storage, I got excited. There are pieces of this hobby that are starting to fit together, and once they do, the hobby will have matured into something important.

For one, what of the massive $1 billion data center Apple’s building in North Carolina? I’ll just echo what others have speculated: this will be where our video originates when we pluck it out of the sky and siphon it through all our devices (including the cheap, tiny new box that sits by the TV).

… It could even be that the Apple TV is the lynchpin of the whole operation, the way that iTunes started as a “hobby” that organized our music collection, and revealed itself to be a hub upon which more than one industry was redefined.

It could be argued that this could be actually good for local stations — allowing them to get their news video in front of even more people in non-traditional channels — but if they don’t think of a way to monetize that video, it’s not. Would you pay 99 cents for access to a video of aftermath of a car crash or a house fire? I’m guessing no.

The reason local television stations (and, under the same model, newspapers) could previously rake in all that advertising cash isn’t so much about the content, but about the content-aggregation. For one discrete half-hour a day, they could guarantee advertisers that a sizable percentage of the local population would tune in for the news/sports/weather bundle and, likely, see the ad in the bargain.

See above for why that’s already no longer working. If Apple and Google get serious about TV, it probably just adds to the pain for local TV stations.

Alan Mutter has a message for local TV stations: What happened to newspapers is probably about to happen to you next.

Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch “Two and a Half Men,” audiences will fragment to the point that local broadcasters will not be able to attract large quantities of viewers for a particular program at a finite point in time.

This will shatter the mass-advertising model that has served local broadcasters so well since the advent of the medium that some stations in the best of times were able to pocket pre-tax profits as high as 50 cents for every dollar of advertising they sold. While profits nowadays are running at a more modest 20% to 30%, they are well ahead of the pre-tax earnings of such corporate behemoths as Wal-Mart and Exxon.

The challenge to the lucrative local broadcasting model will have a direct impact on the quality, such as it is, of local television news – the medium that approximately 70% of the population counts as its primary source for news. This is a matter of great concern, for which no clear solution is evident.

The quote comes from the first of two posts adapted from testimony Mutter is scheduled to present at a Media Ownership Workshop being conducted Friday by the Federal Communications Commission at Stanford University. Definitely worth reading.

Photo: Creative Commons licensed from flickr user Tjflex2.

In theory, I’m okay with Facebook being more open to the world. But that assumes that the people using it realize they’re likely talking in public, not just among their friends.

Thanks to openbook, you can now see how that’s working out, by searching Facebook statuses of lots of people - not just the people in your circle of friends.

The site defaults to a random-rotation of potentially embarrassing phrases (“don’t tell anyone,” “playing hooky,” “rectal exam”), but I’m sure you can come up with better on your own.

It’s hard to say what’s more mind-blowing: That they stream two billion videos a day, or that we got here in just five years.

Happy 5th Birthday to YouTube.

If I sneak into your yard and paint a picture on your wall, do you now own my painting? Or, as the artist, do I retain ownership of the painting and its context?

What if I paint the picture on seemingly abandoned property? Does the bank now own it? The municipality? What if you like it so much that you decide to cut the art out of the wall — to protect it, of course — and move it to your gallery? Have you just become an art thief? And, if so, did you steal from the property owner, or the original artist?

These questions, and more, are playing out in Detroit, where famed street artist Banksy recently splashed his overnight guerrilla art on the crumbling wall of a shuttered factory. The art was promptly rescued from the scene by a “feisty grassroots group” of artists connected with an art gallery, who preserved it by sawing it out of the wall and trucking it to their gallery where, presumably, it now stands preserved like a piece of that other Wall that once bisected Berlin.

I have to admit that Banksy has been, at best, a slow burn for me, and I have very real concerns about art that appears on private property without permission, but there’s no question that his current cross-country-America meanderings have been entertaining and have had the beneficial side effect of opening up discussions about art in the public sphere. For instance, in this case, if an artist creates a work specific to a place — ignoring its legality for the moment — isn’t it better to leave it there, where it speaks for itself, rather than move it to a room with hardwood floors and refrigerated air, where a small, tasteful card explains exactly what “all this” refers to?

As is often the case, the most astute commentary — from both sides — can be found on the inevitable Metafilter thread about the art heist:

“This can only legally be described as one thing: Theft of a wall on which an act of vandalism has been committed.

“I love Banksy’s stuff - it’s everything art should be. It’s interesting, relevant, controversial, and it’s highly visible. It’s accessible. Is it supposed to be permanent? Of course not.

“However, I also agree that it’s obviously vandalism. It’s part of the discomfort that makes his stuff so interesting. Is the act of vandalism more accepted because of the works? Is it more valuable because he’s famous? Is it more relevant because it’s discussed? When does it cross the line?

“There are no right and wrong answers to these questions - only legal ramifications. But when something is in the public realm, and it’s not your property, you have no right to take it. As soon as 555 did that, they ruined the piece.”

Why is it that the pundits making the most sense these days are either fake or puppets?

RE: The stolen iPhone prototype, Mosspuppet says:

“My question to you various idiots is: What the hell did you expect them to do? If someone steals your stuff, you call the cops.

“Imagine for a moment that someone broke into your house and stole your television. Would you be guilty of manipulating the system if you phoned the police and reported them? No, of course not, you’d be doing the only reasonable thing you could do. Would you be benevolent if you let it slide and didn’t file an official report? No, you’d be a colossal idiot!”

Sam Phillips is not just a singer-songwriter, she’s a mogul.

Well, okay. A mini-mogul. And she’d probably bristle at even that. But through her year-long “Longplay” experiment in making music in semi-public for a paying audience, she’s set herself up as a fascinating amalgam of record company exec and free-wheeling artist.

And what’s really neat about it, it’s allowed average fans to become patrons of her art. Well, mini-patrons. For a dollar a week, anyone can buy into the experiment, directly supporting her work and getting early access to the music as it is recorded and made available to paying members (if you come in late, you still get access to all the music already released).

I’m reminded of this because her latest EP, Old Tin Pan, just came out and, once again, I’m getting to enjoy new music and she and her band are able to (I’m assuming here) keep the food on the table. Or buy some nice shoes. Whatever. And it’s really not about the money, but about the support: I pay because I want her to keep at it. There are lots of other performers I’d gladly support similarly, if they’d only ask.

Think of this the next time someone says people won’t pay for anything online. They will. We will. We just won’t pay for crap or commodity. I’ll pay for Sam’s music, or Evernote’s service or great iPad apps like Appigo’s ToDo or the amazingly useful Digging Into WordPress e-book.

There’s a business model for you: Make things people want to pay for.

The New York Times, as expected, seems to have settled on a date for the paywall to go live: January, 2011.

There’s no point in hashing out, again, whether or not this is a good idea for the New York Times and the many other major metro papers considering such a move. The one good thing about paywalls going live is that the theoretical questions will finally be answered in the real world.

No, what’s interesting is whether this is a good idea for other sites serving those same markets. If, for instance, The Chicago Tribune eventually opts for a paywall of any kind, do the people in the newsroom of WLS and other local media bliss out over the potential for reaching more news consumers? What about the rapidly growing ecosystem of micro-local news and information sites serving communities and towns? If your local newspaper walls up, will you pay, or find other sources?

By stepping back from a 100% free model — no matter how carefully (and slowly - we’ve been talking about this for years) — the large news sites can’t help but create some amount of vacuum into which the smaller sites — and audience — will flow.

But that’s where this all gets very interesting. Because if we’ve learned nothing else in the past decade, it’s that gathering a large audience — “eyeballs,” as the ad guys used to say — is no longer enough. Large publishers and tiny publishers need to cover their costs and make a little profit in the bargain if they’re going to continue publishing. So flowing into the vacuum isn’t enough for the upstarts — they need real business plans.

Recently in the NY Times Magazine, there was a long look at the business models of the non-traditional publishers that have emerged in recent years. It strikes more of an elegiac tone than I think is entirely appropriate, implying that the task is Sisyphean, but it’s essential reading for anyone trying to understand the struggles the journalism business model is facing and will continue to face.

The overriding theme: The future is much, much leaner for journalism, and that business models will need to change, radically, to accommodate that fact:

…the new world could end up looking a lot like the old one, albeit with smaller newsrooms and new players. Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters. In cities like San Diego, New York and Washington, online start-ups are taking on metro news coverage, hoping to tap local ad markets. All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site.

I’m reminded of what Jim Halpert said:

“This is Parkour, the Internet sensation of 2004. The goal is to get from Point A to Point B as creatively as possible. So, technically, they are doing Parkour, as long as Point A is delusion and Point B is the hospital.”

A great ad guy knows his target audience better than they know themselves.

So, when copywriter Alec Brownstein went looking for a new gig, he bought Google ad keywords that were the names of prominent agency creative directors. Why? Because he knew Google-assisted narcissism would eventually come to his aid. Watch:



Total cost to Brownstein: $6.00

“It’s already a revolution. And it’s only just begun.”

And it’s also shards of glass and aluminum if that’s how you insist on carrying it around.

Great ad. Great product demo. Lousy example of how to protect your new precious.

(Interesting side note I hadn’t noticed before: iPad, like Pink Floyd and Google, takes no definite article, at least according to this ad.)

It feels like something big just happened with the launch of Square, the personal credit-card swiping system that’s integrated with iPhone and iPad. Suddenly, anybody can be a retailer that takes plastic.

Sure, you could sell your stuff previously on eBay, Etsy or any number of online marketplaces using the insufferable PayPal, but when it came to the real world, unless you had a merchant account with a credit card company, it was a cash-only experience.

That just changed with a little white cube with a magnetic strip reader that plugs into the iPhone or iPad. After a painless sign-up process, your iPhone now accepts VISA.

Micro-retailers will no doubt rejoice, but I’m thinking the interesting action just might occur in the private sphere. Did I loan you $20 last week? You can pay me back with plastic now. Do you have a side-business walking dogs? No need to collect (and worry about) checks from the customers — just swipe their card.

There’s a great commercial for the product here, with You Look Nice Today’s Adam Lisagor playing it about as straight as I imagine he can. And as long as you have an iPhone or an iPad, you can sign up for free and the company will mail you a scanner-dongle, just as soon as they get through the backlog.

Brilliant.

It’s still surprising in this inter-connected age that a company can get caught thinking they can pull one over on people. And yet, they do.

Case in point: The wildly-popular Angry Birds iPhone game just got upgraded to an iPad “HD” edition, and the price jumped 500%.

Which, at a mere five dollars, would still be a bargain, if it weren’t for the fact that, as many have noted on its iTunes page, it’s just an upsizing of the iPhone app, with no new features or functionality. As ttrygve says:

It also didn’t move or resize the buttons at all, they’re still laid out as though for an iPhone, meaning they’re not at all conveniently placed… I feel ripped off, though I still heartily recommend the iPhone version.

Given that I’ve always treated my Facebook account as if it were 100% public, the ever-creeping publicness of Facebook hasn’t concerned me much.

But if you think — or worse, act as if — Facebook is still the same private walled-garden you joined in 2006, you’d be well-advised to spend a few minutes with this excellent infographic from All Facebook which shows the steady march toward a much more open Facebook.

Do concept cars look like they do because that’s the natural progression of design, or because some Sci-Fi artists in the 1950s decided this is what the car of the future will look like?

Either way, if I have a spare $50k in 2015, I just might get one.