Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Resource: Iowa State Presidential Primary: Online Caucus Coverage (by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins at Mashable)
[F]or your political consumption, a short list of top notch New Media and social media sources for all the Iowa presidential politics you can handle.
Click through for links.

“You Don’t Understand Our Audience”: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC (by John Hockenberry, writing at the MIT Technology Review, thanks to Economist’s View)
Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.
Sadly, the prevalence of funding new media solely by advertising will simply ensure the continuation of seeking audience size at the expense of content.  I have called for user subscriptions to offset the dependence on advertising, but to no avail.. This is a long but important story for understanding the mindset of those in control of old media, and I hope you will take the time to read the whole piece.

Free WSJ.com Would Need 12x Traffic To Offset Loss; DJ Buy To Shave A Penny From NWS: Analyst (by Joseph Weisenthal at Paid Content)
Turning WSJ.com into a free site would require a 12x increase in traffic growth to offset the lost revenue, according to a new report from Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang. WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year. Including non-subscriber traffic, the company claims 122.4 million monthly page views. Based on an estimated CPM of $6 and a few other assumptions about sell-through rate and ad impressions per page, Wang arrives at the 12x conclusion. So that’s the math, but is it achievable? That’s where things get dicier.
Part of the difference between the WSJ and the NYT could be that WSJ subscriptions are more likely to be paid for by one’s company than by oneself.

Memories of oil futures past (by Paul Krugman)
Rupert Murdoch, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq:  “The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.”  Not so much.
Why do rich media moguls get to determine our future? See “Oil Hits $100 a Barrel for the First Time”.

Should Big Media Choose Our Candidates?
Why should ABC and Fox get to decide who is a viable candidate for president?

Toobin on Mukasey’s Criminal probe of the CIA’s destroyed tapes… (by John Amato at Crooks and Liars)
CNN’s Ed Henry talks about the Keane/Hamilton op-ed and Jeffrey Toobin discusses the new criminal probe of the destroyed CIA tapes led by John Durham.
Click through to watch the video.

Fox News guest: sex ed boosters want kids to get STDs.
During the Dec. 31 broadcast of Fox News’ Special Report, Concerned Women for America President Wendy Wright claimed that proponents of comprehensive sex education are trying to “encourage” sex because “they benefit when kids end up having sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancies and then they lead them into having abortions.” She then added, “You have to look at the financial motives behind those who are promoting comprehensive sex ed.”
Click through to watch the video.

Bhutto coverage emblematic of foreign policy coverage issues (by A.J. Rossmiller at Crooks and Liars)
From the American perspective, generally speaking, analysis of foreign leaders too often goes something like this: Speaks English? Sophisticated. Speaks language of country of origin? Backwater. Went to an Ivy League school? Moderate. Educated anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere? Extremist. Appreciates single malt? A partner for peace. Eschews the party circuit? Untrustworthy. And through these heuristics, you get things like people predicting electoral victories of, for example, Iraq’s Allawi and Chalabi the day before Sadr and Hakim sweep the polls. It’s very frustrating.

Carlisle: Conservatives should do more investigative reporting
John Carlisle notes that many newspapers are cutting their investigative reporting teams and relying on nonprofit organizations to fill the gap. “If conservative nonprofit organizations significantly increase their use of investigative reporting, then the movement will be able to partly offset the liberal bias of the mainstream media,” he writes. “Despite their political agenda, newspapers and TV networks like scandals simply because they make great headlines. Experience shows that they will cover scandals exposed by conservatives.”
Actually, experience shows that newspapers and TV networks cover almost exclusively scandals exposed by conservatives.  Scandals exposed by liberals are barely covered at all.

Drug Safety, Tainted Food Among Year’s Top Health Stories
A big stem cell advance and a jump in the number of uninsured also made the list.
But important aspects of health care have been very poorly covered.  See below.

Medicare Mystery (by Trudy Lieberman at Columbia Journalism Review)
A recent retirement column posted on businessweek.com/investing questioned the silence about Medicare and other retirement issues. The writer, Ellen Hoffman, scanned position papers, statements, and tried, sometimes without success, to get more information from campaign staffs. It’s a hopeful sign that she tried… Here’s a case where the press needs to lead rather than wait for the spinmeisters to decide what gets covered.

NYT Edit Board Gets Profits Wrong (by Dean Baker)
The NYT … correctly notes that wages have stagnated in this decade. However, it wrongly asserts that “corporate profits have soared.” That’s not what the numbers show… [A] careful examination of the data shows that profit shares have not risen from 1997 to 2006. So, if the money didn’t go to ordinary workers and didn’t go to profits, then where did it go? The answer is high-end workers, which include CEOs, the hedge fund boys, doctors, lawyers, and other highly educated professionals. One of the main reasons for this upward redistribution is trade policy — but the NYT likes current trade policy. Oh well, so much for designing an economic policy that will help typical workers.

Media Matters for America headlines

Luntz and NBC’s Gregory omitted context in dubbing Giuliani and McCain attacks among “the year’s best quotes”

Daniel Pipes relied on disputed LA Times article to revive Obama-Muslim falsehood

On Hannity & Colmes, Luntz misrepresented Edwards comment about campaign finances

CNN re-aired special in which Campbell Brown called MoveOn.org “American insurgents”

Market value of US newspapers has fallen 42% since 2004
Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of newspaper stocks came in 2007, when the shares lost a collective $11 billion, or 26%, of their value, reports Alan D. Mutter.

Halfway ’round the track (by Jeff Jarvis)
The Orlando Sentinel and Tribune Company went halfway around the track in the right direction — but not far enough — when they decided to stop devoting staff to national coverage of Nascar races, putting their priority and dwindling resources instead on local, which I believe is where they should be. As a result, they lost their Nascar writer, Ed Hinton, who they boast is the best in the nation. And they wish him well. What I think they should have done instead is set up Hinton in business. If Hinton’s the best — and I take them at their word on that, not being a Nascar kinda guy — then I’d have proposed creating a blog and site for him and selling ads into it and syndicating content onto my newspaper sites where I’d also sell ads and share revenue there, too… That’s the relationship I think that UK football writer Rick Waghorn should have with the paper that made him redundant. That’s the relationship the New York Daily News could have with David Bianculli, the TV critic they laid off who now has his own site (they may not want to pay for him as full-time headcount anymore but they could sell ads for him and he needs that help since I see none on his site).

Hiding “The Art of Conversation” (by Peter M. Zollman at Poynter Online)
Why on earth wouldn’t CBS News make the Sunday Morning packages available on its site, like NBC, ABC, and (for that matter) most of the material from its other news shows?
Instead, we rely on the kindness of Crooks and Liars and Think Progress.

Chain Said to Seek Bids for Weather Channel
The Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, is being put up for sale and could fetch $5 billion.

New Year’s with Kathy Griffin (by Patricia Nell Warren at The Bilerico Project)
For those who didn’t catch the politically incorrect moment on CNN [Monday] night — here’s what happened. CNN … invited [Kathy] Griffin to be a special guest with Anderson Cooper on the “New Year’s Live” coverage… [Griffin] asked. “What member of the Bush administration would you like to waterboard?”… I think she should take up political humor. Better yet, a political talk show with Griffin hosting and the high and mighties being her guest… if they dare. Move over, Bill Mahr.
What a great idea!  If anyone on this list is able to get a message to Kathy Griffin, please make sure she sees this suggestion.  Talk about pulling no punches!

Netflix, LG to offer movie set-top box
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - DVD rental company Netflix Inc on Wednesday said it was developing a set-top box with LG Electronics Inc to let subscribers watch movies streamed directly from the Web to their TVs.

Kenya: Do Not Doubt The Power Of The Internet In Africa
If anyone doubts the power of the internet in Africa, they need to look no further than what is happening in Kenya right now

Gawker: The relative value of a pageview (by Stephen Baker at Blogspotting, Business Week)
I’m imagining life in the the pay-for-pageview universe of Nick Denton. No doubt, journalists, like advertisers, are increasingly going to see pay tied to measurable performance… But how do you value a post that reaches a small but influential readership? For blog masters, they’re indistinguishable. But from the blogger’s perspective, a single pageview from the right person could lead to far more: a job offer, a book contract, or an idea for a start-up.

Marketers target cell phones
Your cell phone is a potential gold mine for marketers: It can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like.

Candidates Buy Iowa TV Space at ‘Unprecedented’ Levels
White House Hopefuls Snap Up Every Local Spot During Rose Bowl