85 people own half the world

conservatives in the u.s. constantly point to the 99% movement and say that they are trying to start a class war. but when the 85 wealthiest people literally own as much as the 3.5 billion poorest people (yes, that's billion with a 'b'), it's clear that the war is already well under way. the real question is, how do you turn it around so that the deck isn't stacked against those who don't have access to drafting their own legislation, health care, lawyers, members of the supreme court, members of congress, the media, and on and on?

especially when you have 1 percenters like this fellow who think it's just great?

some suggestions:
1. update the tax code for individuals and corporations to better reflect their ability to pay.
2. don't let companies sell products in the u.s. if they don't pay taxes here for those sales.
3. don't let companies bid for government contracts if they don't pay taxes for income earned as a result of that work.
4. bar all lobbyists from making contributions to members of congress, judges on the supreme court, or any regulatory agency members, including meals, trips, fund-raisers, etc., directly or through pacs or tax-exempt fronts.
5. do not allow any member of congress to take a job with any company that they regulated while in congress for a period of at least 15 years.
6. evenly distribute public education funds across the country, including locally collected taxes.
7. institute a national curriculum and national testing for all public schools.
8. fire any teachers whose students do not meet minimum standards.
9. increase individual teacher pay based on student outcomes.
10. set national standards for executive pay based on a company's size and earnings.
11. make every media outlet and journalist cite their sources for every story. especially television personalities.
12. raise the minimum wage. the wealthiest people on the planet complaining about making sure that their employees can eat is monstrous.

it's not everything, but it's a start. what would you change?

20 funniest newspaper headlines

actually, the funniest thing is that so many newspapers still think they have any relevancy in the age of twitter and facebook... but that's another story.

how to tell pr spew from news

frankly, these days it's getting hard to tell the difference. with layoffs across all media and our apparent indifference to political and fourth estate news, it's getting harder & harder for the remaining journalists to resist the siren call of using wikipedia entries as source material and disguising press releases as legitimate news.

luckily, the center for media and democracy publishes pr watch, which can teach you to tell original footage from repurposed b-roll.

how the web changed media economics

after the jump: an insightful (if grammarless) examination of what the web has done to all media from an economic standpoint.

what amazes us, sportsfans, is that newspapers (in particular) continue to live in a state of denial about the fact that they've been pushing up daisies for years, and are now beginning to stink up the joint. no amount of layoffs is going to change that. their business model has come and gone, and the world has moved on without them.

c'est la vie.

(meanwhile, their stock falls like the public's expectations of obama. sidebar: we think we might finally have a nickname for the prez. how does 'the brown bomber' grab ya? apt? racist? misnomer? magically delicious? at least he's better than tricky dickless. so far.)

speaking of horse & buggy media

newspapers are apparently miffed at google and other news aggregators for redistributing their content.

(actually, that's probably not quite true - truth to be told, they're probably just glad no one has turned out the lights yet - but they are ticked that no one is paying them.)

excuse me? isn't this a conversation that should have happened 15 years ago?

now, of course, it's too late: there are countless sources of free news, and newspapers everywhere are trying to fit dutch boys into dikes long after the levees have failed. they could have jumped on the kindle and other ebooks sooner (the cost of paper being one part of the lossy equation), they might have partnered with e-ink to create digital newspapers, they might have addressed their ridiculously overcalc'd circulations and ad rates long before the web showed us all that the emperor has no clothes, and and and...

ah, well. think of all the trees their demise will spare. which probably means it's a good time to get out of the logging business.

fcc fire sale continues

as the administration's fire sale on everything of value continues, fcc chairman kevin martin tries one more time to rig the auction of wireless spectrum to vc john doerr, cheating the treasury out of billions at a time when the old dear desperately needs the cash.

remind us: what do we do with horse thieves again?

surprise! tv addicts are all depressed

in what we're sure is a surprise to absolutely no one (and despite our come-on to the contrary), it has been discovered that people that watch a lot of television tend to suffer from depression.

well, duh. friends is off the air. who wouldn't be depressed?

(pathetic attempt at humor aside, we hardly ever watch tv: none of the shows seem to be targeted at us, or anyone else with an iq above that of a raisin. plus watching all of you monkey minds has much higher entertainment value than anything the boob tube has, is, or will ever broadcast.)

7 stages of the death of print: denial

esquire seems to think that embedding a small e-ink screen on the cover of an upcoming issue will reclaim the going-going-gone print audience. in reality, where the rest of us live, that's kind of like cramming a chirping greeting card chip between the pages & calling it multimedia.

print guys, listen up, 'cause we're only going to say this 3 or 4 thousand more times:

1. it's a paradigm shift, stupid.
2. the future of print is a museum.

we now return you to your regularly scheduled internet access.

(don't get us wrong - elsewhen has supported e-ink since mit, and we think they're the bees knees for animated t-shirts, billboards, and whatnot. but if esquire really wanted to join the rest of us in this purple cow century, they'd be thinking of things like an iphone/ipod/kindle subscription model, using audio instead of text, video instead of static photos, and supporting the hardware manufacturers that are working to create digital paper.

and, since we're feeling generous today, here's an idea for newspapers: you print wedding announcements and photos, right? well, in case you've forgotten, bad news sells better than good news. why not print pictures of couples that are splitting up? maybe even include video profiles of each party to help them find someone new. and - of course - charge for it, plus charge interested parties that want the former bride or groom's contact information.

we know, we know. you're welcome.)

gawker scoffs at puny traditional media

you know that the traditional media - new media war is heating up when the l.a. times brags about their record 127 million page views in july and gawker laughs at them.

why did gawker laugh? because they had twice that number of pageviews. they also accomplished it with 80 people, while the times' newsroom staff alone numbers 700.

newspapers, that sound you hear is the fat lady singing roxanne. please remember to turn off the lights on your way out.

the fark food chain - part 1

we are big fans of fark, the website, but we're not so crazy about the reason that it exists. which brings us to an explanation of the corporation-traditional media food chain. (we'll discuss the government-traditional media food chain, the celebrity-traditional media food chain, and web 2.0 a bit later. having just come from a stint in 'the biz', we've got plenty to rant about.)

in the age of traditional media, if you're a pr person at a company, your job is to try to get said media interested in your company and its products/services. to do this, you send out press releases. well-written releases sound just like news and - in a time when traditional media is laying off as fast as it can print pink slips and the remaining journalists are wearing umpteen hats - the temptation to reprint press releases as if they were news is high, and increasing daily.

of course, it helps the medicine go down if you soft-sell your company or cause a bit. and if you can somehow associate your product or service with a current hot topic, no matter how remote that association is, and you're even closer to the prize. get a couple of 'experts' to support your cause - at least marginally - and you're practically guaranteed to get at least some media pickup.

and that, in a nutshell, is fark: not-news pretending to be news. and here's a fine example: watermelon has viagra-like effects. or how about the secret to a better golf game?

is google news the devil?

certainly not to us, but some news outlets - particularly in europe, apparently - seem to feel that way.

the real issue, of course, is that google wants to take us right to the information that we're looking for - in the case of google news, a single article, and then possibly to another source for their take on the same story - while mainstream media is still hung up on the idea of capturing & keeping visitors on their sites. in fact, we suspect that - in their heart of hearts - most mainstream media outlets would imprison visitors by force, if they could, to shore up their crashing ad rates.

google is obviously not going to go away, nor is its model, but the old media model obviously is. so what will replace it?

at first, it looked like everyone would go the subscription route, where visitors had to pay to access content. the problem with that was, you were paying for all of the content - not just the content that you used - and the cost was equivalent to the cut-down-trees-and-put-ink-on-them print publications - and if even one other source didn't charge for their content, visitors went there instead.

if we really want a workable model, how about this: make the cost to access the content equivalent to the volume of content that you actually access (that is, pennies or less per clip), make the transaction happen automatically in the background, a la mobile phone micropayments, and make sure that your content is original and interactive (ie, bloggish) enough to draw a large share of visitors. shore that up with ads, and give your ad purchasers the skinny on the traffic that the ad generates, including demographics.

then thank google news for all of the traffic that they send your way.

ny times finally catches up with elsewhen

back when the afghan war was just getting into full swing and iraq was on the horizon, elsewhen (then hosted by manila) brought up some interesting information about oil pipelines, oil companies, money, bushies, and how all those things fit together. now - several years later - the ny tmes mentions that the 4 oil giants kicked out in '91 are again back in iraq & set to reap a fortune.

so we were right? it really was (and is and will be) about oil?

(does this mean that dennis miller has to wash his mouth out with soap? and will the mainstream media be 5 years behind us when we start to report on the upcoming water wars?)

spot.us

who can tell us, in 100 words or less, the problem with spot.us, which promotes 'community-funded reporting'? (aside from the fact that it's another 'we wouldn't get it if you hit us over the head with it' attempt by traditional media at saving its ass in an age when everyone is the news, that is.)