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Mr. Murdoch Goes to War

Murdoch speaks to the staffers at the Wall Street Journal in December last year.

Their audience was of roughly three minds, according to a Journal staffer who dissected the newsroom’s mood for me. There were those who were already making plans to leave, or knew they would jump ship at the first decent opportunity. He called this group “the Extremists”; it included reporters like the Pulitzer-winning Bandler, who recently left for Fortune magazine. Then there were those who knew that the takeover could spell disaster for the kind of journalism they loved, but who were reluctant to believe that Murdoch would really dismantle something so admirable and successful. He called this group “the Hopefuls.”

“And then there was the third portion of the room,” he said. “This is a big group. These are the people who see the tribulations of the industry, who felt sure that if nothing had changed there would be certain cutbacks and layoffs in TheJournal’s future, who were feeling the general dread that all newsrooms in America feel right now. And they thought, Here’s an owner who is going to invest! My job is secure! He’ll beef up the paper, and even if this means we may become more like Fox News, it’s worth it because we will still have the opportunity to do great work. These are the people who believed that Marcus Brauchli would save them. This is the group that I call ‘Naive.’”

At the end of that session, with his typical insouciance, Murdoch again took the mike, to conclude the show.

“Well, I think that’s all we have to say,” he said. “So you better get back to work and make sure you’re not scooped tomorrow.”

As for the industry, Mark Bowden sums it up rather nicely:

Newspapers are in a sad way in America. Readership continues to fall. Advertisers are deserting them for newer forms of media. Revenues are plummeting, as the costs of printing and distribution mount catastrophically. Faced with declining profit margins, investors are fleeing. Knight Ridder, once the largest newpaper chain in America, has gone out of business. Stalwart family owners such as Dow Jones’s Bancrofts are selling out. Reporters and editors are being bought out or laid off in droves, and not just at small regional papers. The once-fat Los Angeles Times has been dismantling itself. The New York Times and The Washington Post are trimming their staffs. In the eyes of many media experts, print journalism, that stubborn 15th-century technology, appears at long last to be on its deathbed.

Podcast stats

I have to admit surprise at the level of interest in my two test podcasts. I published the first 40min podcast on May 21, and it is now hitting 100 downloads/plays. The second was published June 15, and is hitting 70 downloads/plays. I’m not sure where all these listeners are coming from, but it certainly encourages me to do more of de podcastin’.

What's going on with Iran?

Mr Hersh is talking about Iran again. Kevin Drum points to a good Q&A by Laura Rozen over at Mother Jones.

Danny Postel points to this interesting piece in the Economist. It does not make for pleasant reading. After Israel’s recent practice run for bombing Iran, the newspaper concludes that they may not be bluffing.

It may well be true that Mr Bush is disinclined to bomb Iran now that he is a lame duck, but the possible advent of a President Obama might just make Israel more inclined to do so itself. As the hawkish John Bolton, a former Bush administration official, said this week, Israel may think the best time to attack would be during America’s presidential transition—too late to be accused of influencing the election and before needing a new president’s green light.

The Galaxy Zoo project

An amateur astronomer took this picture and asked: What’s the blue blob?

The Economist this week covers the story of Galaxy Zoo, the collaborative web project for astronomers that found the blob. Their blog is here.

Earlier projects in distributed computing, such as SETI@home, which searched for extraterrestrial life, have used the power of millions of home computers. But more recently, scientists have begun to realise that distributed human brain power itself can be a useful commodity, as in working out the shape of proteins. Dr Szalay says that the voorwerp episode has shown how immensely valuable the public can be.

When the data were put online Dr Szalay thought it was only a matter of time before someone made a big discovery. “It just happened much faster than we thought.” In the past year 40m classifications of galaxies have been submitted on 1m galactic objects in the Galaxy Zoo. Dr Lintott says that the project has proved that the public en masse is as good as professional astronomers at classifying galaxies.

The next step is to ask people to do more complicated things, such as keeping an eye out for weird objects, which is bound to appeal to armchair astronomers. Hanny’s object had been there for decades, unnoticed in the astronomical archives. The idea now is for the public to explore strange new galaxies; to seek out new voorwerps and to boldly go where no amateur has gone before.

I first installed the Seti software back in 2001, and managed to get it going on several PCs, getting a reasonable amount of workunits done. It lasted a few months and I eventually stopped. No particular reason either.

The Economist are right to point out that it is human power that may be even more rewarding than computing power, and astronomy seems like the perfect discipline to test the idea. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is another similar stab at crowd sourcing.

Irish Times goes free

The new Irish Times website is live. I rather like the layout. Popular stories has been given prominence. The choice to change background colour on a hover is … interesting. The hover on pic with text is similar to the Guardian and The Economist. They don’t seem to have included the option to comment on opinion pieces.

As for blogging it is a little cleaner, but Conor‘s categories are microscopic compared to his body text.

Overall it’s taken design ideas from all the recent newspaper website redesigns. And it’s free. Yay.

Hmm. I understand that Ireland.com would remain in existence as a separate entity, but it simply redirects to IrishTimes.com. As Damien pointed out, it would be a tad ridiculous to split the brand and traffic up between two websites. Maybe they have decided against it.

And don’t ask me why BreakingNews.ie is on a different website to my own paper‘s website. I don’t know.

Orange County Register outsources production to India

A salutary tale from the US.

Outsource to India, says the deputy editor of the Orange County Register, California’s fifth-largest newspaper. On a one-month trial basis, Mindworks Global Media, an India-based company, will copy-edit some of the Register’s stories and lay out pages for a community newspaper at the same company that owns the Register.

Similar moved were made at the Irish Independent last year, except they outsourced production to an Irish firm RE&D and to some based in France I think. As best I can tell, that particular outsourcing project may have not been as successful as IN&M painted, or wanted, it to be. I would imagine this is to do with the disconnect between the production teams at a different premises, and the journalists who write the stories. They could bring some production back in-house later this year.

Still though, I guess there’s no harm in testing it out, as in the case of the Orange County Register.

Why 20%?

Barry Ritholtz poses the question. It’s a good one.

What is the magic about 20%?

What makes this the “official” onset of a bear market? There isn’t any NBER-like group that declares an “official” bear market.

Best as I can figure, the 20% number is a not-quite-a-random number — more than a 10% correction, less than a full blown crash (which for all we know, could be “offically” 30%).

I have no idea who first started bandying about these nice round base ten numbers — but for whatever reason, they seem to have stuck in the public and the press’ imaginations. (Anyone have a better idea where these two figures came from?)

Forget the rather squishy terminology, and consider the following economic, fundamental and technical questions:

• Is the Economy expanding or contracting? Have recent data points been improving or worsening?

• Are corporate earnings getting stronger or weaker? Where are we in the earnings cycle?

• Are stock prices generally rising or falling?

• Are market advances narrow or broad? Is the volume expanding on up days, or on down days?

• Is investor Psychology greedy or fearful?

Rather than focus on terminology, investors should be considering their risk management strategies, what they are doing to preserve capital, and how they are psychologically prepared to deal with what could be an extended downturn.

That matters a whole lot more than whether something is called a bull or bear market…

Wise words indeed.


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