In that Orwellian L.A. Times sense of the word, of course.

Last night, when I was wading through background material about John Edwards for my interview today with Mickey Kaus for this week’s PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, I noticed something odd about Edwards’ Wikipedia profile–there’s no mention of a rather high-profile scandal that’s orbiting directly above him, which seems pretty odd; Wikipedia pages are rather notorious for often being the first to be updated when news or a scandal breaks. And they definitely have news of Bob Novak’s health scare, which broke earlier today. And today, instead of silence, there’s this at the top of Edwards’ profile there.

So why the Edwards embargo?

(Oh–did I mention I’m interviewing Kaus on Edwards this week? Tune in here on Wednesday; it will be more informative than this interview, I assure you.)

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans

Filed under: Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Future and its Enemies, The Long Tail, The New, New Journalism

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This is a riot:

“Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we’ve got 800 people in Chicago who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground!”

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, “Journalists as ‘Overhead’”. Which illustrates that the author can’t comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can’t force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren’t footing the bill:

“This is the first unit of Tribune that I’ve talked to that doesn’t generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead,” Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company’s Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don’t consider themselves overhead

Filed under: An Army Of Davids, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Future and its Enemies, The Long Tail, The New, New Journalism

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“IDC said in 2007, the digital universe equaled 281 billion gigabytes of data, or about 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth.”

45 gigs? Somebody’s clearly not trying. Between DIY music, podcasts, radio shows and lately video, I’ve gotten to the point where this looks nigh-essential.

(Via the Bettie Page fans–and consequently, note presence of NSFW photo–at Liberty Peak Lodge.)

…At the thought that the Tex & Edna Boil of the DIY video world can put you–yes, you!–into an online video!

(Via The B-Cast. This has to be what the British euphemistically refer to as a piss-take, and one of the commenters at Gawker also picked up on the Tex & Edna vibe. Otherwise, something tells me that I won’t be writing about these folks for Videomaker any time soon.)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here’s a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that’s being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there’s an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

This Washington Post columnist pines for the Good Ole Days, as he mournfully writes, “Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?”

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity — indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic — was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies — the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters — seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?

Yes, to the last rhetorical question, of course.

The news matters to many people–but unlike the 1920s through the 1970s, the Washington Post and the New York Times alone aren’t the news anymore. They’re merely two aggregators of news, with a particular tone that appeals to establishment liberal sorts of readers. The angrier far left have the Daily Kos and other Netroots sites, and conservatives and libertarians, long badly served by the Post have Instapundit, Drudge, NRO, Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Pajamas, etc. (And sports junkies have sites devoted exclusively to their interests, and the elderly still have television news, of course.)

For the most part, like the Post, all of these sites are packaging up AP, Reuters and UPI feeds, but like the Post, each group repackages that info with a tone and a slant that appeals to their particular demographic. The period in time that one big city newspaper was the source of news will be proven by history to have been a fairly brief one, roughly from the 1920s to about the early 1980s, when the first cable television news networks, and the first online news sources (such as CompuServe and The Source) arrived.

These days, to compete against an endlessly growing Long Tail of information, newspapers must be much leaner to survive than their monopoly period, as Alan D. Mutter writes:

The deteriorating economics of the industry were underscored for the third day in a row this week when publisher Brian Tierney told union representatives of the two Philadelphia dailies that their company will face

Filed under: Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Long Tail, The New, New Journalism

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Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters writes:

NewsBusters reported in December that Internet behemoth Google had a disclaimer cautioning readers that the website of conservative magazine the American Spectator “may harm your computer.”

For some reason, this warning no longer exists.

This raises a couple of important questions:

Did the American Spectator do anything to its website that made it “safer?”

If not, did Google change its “harmful site” parameters, and, if so, why?

It raises another question–which Websites get stuck with this tag?

I noticed the same warning on the libertarian Tech Central Station Website (where I’ve been an off and on contributer since 2002), when I did a Google search to find Arnold Kling’s “Folk Marxism” meme last May. Here’s a screen capture from back then displaying that same “This site my harm your computer” warning above two separate TCS links.

After seeing that warning pop-up, I immediately sent the above screen capture to Nick Schulz, TCS’s editor and publisher to let him know. The warning that Google slapped on TCS quickly went away, presumably after Nick or one of his associates got in touch with Google. And as Noel writes above, Google removed their warning on the American Spectator’s site, again, presumably after a friendly email or twenty from the folks at AmSpec.

This could be something that one or two mischievous coders in the bowels of the Google cubicles are doing to goof off in-between World of Warcraft sessions. Or it could be some sort of virus or malware installed by someone not associated at all with Google, but designed to trigger Google’s warning mechanisms, and thus steer traffic away from non-PC sites that might engender thoughtcrime. But the fact that it’s hit at least two prominent libertarian, conservative, free-market, non-leftwing, whatever you want to call them sites is quite a remarkable coincidence, it seems.

Err, don’t bet on it–at least in its current form:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free.

Filed under: All You Need Is Ears, The Long Tail

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Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that “I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn’t teach it in school.” In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that “Miami” Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He

Filed under: All You Need Is Ears, Bobos In Paradise, God And Man At Dupont University, The Long Tail, The Return of the Primitive

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As Michelle Malkin writes:

The deterioration of journalism

Filed under: Muggeridge's Law, Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Long Tail, The New, New Journalism

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Mickey Kaus has a must-read post that dovetails remarkably well with the Don Surber article I linked to earlier today. Don wrote that the Lewinsky scandal “turned journalism inside out“–and one of the eventual results has been the birth of two very divergent voter classes:

Room Eight’s Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts–people who follow politics and people who don’t–with the people who follow politics much better informed than the were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don’t follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling–e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there’s a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn’t anymore–its seriousness is suggested by the MSM’s impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). “Rielle Hunter”–the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards’ mistress–was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I’m told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, ‘Rielle Hunter” was mentioned only … well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don’t follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it’s been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the “undernews.” *** If you’re thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him–but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR’s Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( “urban, college-educated liberals”) of the Democratic party–which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector–is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn’t have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

As Mickey writes (and it’s well worth reading the rest of his post), “The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates.”

Last week, Jay Nordlinger wrote:

I was once at a Hillary press conference

Filed under: Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Long Tail, The Making of the President

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Austin Bay writes shares his adventures in attempting to watch the Cowboys-Packers game, which was only available on the NFL Network, a channel many cable companies have yet to include in their line-ups:

Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar

Filed under: Run To Daylight, The Future and its Enemies, The Long Tail

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Listening to his interview with Laura Ingraham and his fear of Rush Limbaugh, Tom Brokaw clearly has issues with the new media world:

This morning on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, she talked to former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw’s got a new book, and she says to him, “You mentioned Rush Limbaugh in the book, but you kind of throw away a line about Limbaugh, and it’s in the drug section. And without a doubt, Rush Limbaugh’s the most influential Boomer I think in the media today. There’s no person who has had more of a profound impact on the way people think about politics than Limbaugh, and he gets a line, you know, the drug thing, which I just don’t think that’s right, Tom.

BROKAW: My problem with the whole spectrum is that there is not — you know, you know what Rush is — what his whole drill is, he doesn’t want to hear another point of view, except his.

INGRAHAM: Oh, I disagree. He talks to all sorts of people. Well, he doesn’t interview people like I do. I mean, I have guests on–

BROKAW: He doesn’t — he doesn’t interview people, and he mocks people–

INGRAHAM: But he’s not an objective — he’s not an objective person, he doesn’t say he is, and that’s the difference between him and anchors on some of our networks who have political agenda but then pretend that they’re objective.

BROKAW: Well, Laura, we’re never going to resolve this. You know, you have your point of view, and I have mine.

(Audio here.)

And Tom does have his point of view, as does the nightly news. Post-9/11, the more perceptive members of the legacy media have gone on the record to discuss their biases (even Tom inadvertently triangulated himself earlier this month); and numerous journalists have written articles explaining why a completely unbiased media is an impossibility, but an arguably necessary fiction to maintain in the early days of radio and TV, back when broadcast frequencies were scarce. (Humbly submitted for your approval…) Someone should alert Tom that that’s no longer the case in the 21st century, as anybody who’s glanced at the channel line-up of his DirecTV or XM satellite radio receiver has seen–or simply surfed a handful of the 100 million-plus blogs tracked by Technorati.

More: Tim Graham of Newsbusters adds:

This is rich talk coming from a man whose network hired Bill Moyers as his newscast

Filed under: Oh, That Liberal Media!, The Long Tail

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While I was away at Blog World, books written by two of my favorite authors arrived in the mail, with topics as disparate as can possibly be imagined:

In Praise of Prejudice by Theodore Dalrymple

Gastroanomalies by James Lileks

Watch for more on these two books in the coming weeks.

Variety explores the prospect of “A dark latenight ahead” as “Writers strike reality sets in“:

While the networks have been repeating the mantra that “screens will not go black,” it won’t take long for TV viewers to see the impact of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The canaries in TV’s creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would “Saturday Night Live.” Comedy Central’s latenight stalwarts “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.

“Boom — our show just shuts down,” said “SNL” vet Amy Poehler. “It’s just done. There is no backlog of scripts.” (For more on latenight and the strike, log on to Variety.com)

Primetime comedy and drama series will feel the pinch immediately, though the on-air effect will be delayed at least a few weeks for most shows as they air completed segs. Cruelest blows will hit the frosh crop of shows that are just starting to get a toehold with viewers, including ABC’s “Private Practice,” “Pushing Daisies” and “Samantha Who” and CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory.”

The repercussions of scribes going out will surely be felt at Hollywood’s major talent agencies. It’s widely expected that a prolonged strike would result in serious layoffs; some agencies have already sketched out strike contingency plans involving salary deferments and other cost-cutting moves.

Fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You’ll only be speeding up the migration to here.

Err, “except those plastic discs“, writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Libertas’s “Dirty Harry” writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn’t in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows–or stops–Hollywood’s efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I’ll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It’s a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there’s no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it’s near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there’s complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It’s been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM’s request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There’s little doubt that as broadband speeds increase–and they will–video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don’t think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland’s new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984′s version of “The Future of Guitar.” (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you’re a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland’s latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

You certainly didn’t–I liked this video much better in its first iteration:

(Via Jonathan Garthwaite.)