These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Why Pro Sports Need Newspapers | blog maverick — n the technology business, when a company wants its retail products to get visibility and sales among shoppers, its not unusual for the vendor to pay for a salesrep to be on the retailers salesfloor exclusively selling and promoting their products. When a vendor wants to get shelf space in other retail environments, it buys endcaps. Often through softmoney which are in the form of rebates to the retailer. Its time for the pro sports leagues to take a page from that playbook and expand our newspaper shelfspace.
My suggestion to the powers that be in the leagues I have spoken to is to have the leagues work together and create a “beatwriter co-operative” . We need to create a company that funds, depending on the size of the market and number of teams, 2 or more writers per market, to cover our teams in depth.
- Confidential to Bono, ‘New York Times’ Columnist | Jeff Bercovici — Bono, you don’t see us getting on stage at the Meadowlands butchering “Where the Streets Have No Name,” do you? So please return the favor and stay off the op-ed page from now on.
- Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment | Fred Wilson — I make about $30k per year on this blog and it is read by 150,000 people per month (web and feed) and gets around 250,000 page views per month (web and feed). So that means I am still getting ten dollars per thousand on this blog running only one ad unit. If I was getting one dollar per thousand and running three or four ad units, I’d be making around $10,000 per year on this blog. And my numbers are pretty good for a one man band. And $10,000 to $30,000 per year isn’t enough for most reporters/journalists to live on. So even if the microjournalism approach works from a content production point of view, it doesn’t seem to work from an economic point of view.
- Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq | Middle East Quarterly — Perhaps the great obstacle to a successful psychological campaign in the Middle East has been the West’s reluctance to indulge in what many deride as propaganda. This reluctance, together with the tendency to equate psychological operations with psychological conditioning, dates back to the aftermath of World War II and the realization of the degree to which Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine brainwashed German society. If used irresponsibly and recklessly, psychological operations can conflict with Western values such as freedom of thought. But it would be equally irresponsible to cast aside the benefits of psychological measures, especially in times of war. Around the world, insurgents have found the combination of low-intensity military action and political maneuvers coupled with sophisticated psychological techniques to be a winning formula. Regrettably, the West either underrates or wields halfheartedly such psychological techniques.
- Anthony Cordesman: The War in Gaza | Center for Strategic and International Studies — If Israel has a credible ceasefire plan that could really secure Gaza, it is not apparent. If Israel has a plan that could credibly destroy and replace Hamas, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to help the Gazans and move them back towards peace, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to use US or other friendly influence productively, it not apparent.
As we have seen all too clearly from US mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved. The question is not whether the IDF learned the tactical lessons of the fighting in 2006. It is whether Israel’s top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them.
- Beware of Pity | The New Yorker — “No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she points out that the first step in the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews was to make them stateless, in the knowledge that people with no stake in a political community have no claim on the protection of its laws.”