Good piece in DM News today about the economics of online news publishing.

The WSJ says its revenues are split 60:40 between circulation and advertising. The obvious quote:

“The key to building a sustainable [online news] business is the diversity of revenue,” said Michael Zimbalist, president of the Online Publishers Association, New York.

Kinda like the real publishing business, y’know?

Less obvious but more encouraging was this:

Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, the online arm of the Washington Post Co., this year aims to get advertisers to measure washingtonpost.com and newsweek.msnbc.com not merely on clickthroughs, but on the same terms they would radio, television and print.

If it works — and we all should hope it does — the WAPost will have successfully weaned clients off the direct marketing world view, where building brand has no value. If you think return on investment is the only way to measure ad effectiveness, try to imagine a world where every TV ad looked like an infomercial.

One nugget at the bottom: USA Today plans to charge $4/month to stream headlines to your screen saver. A company called Pointcast did that starting in 1996, and IT managers did their best to yank Pointcast from their networks before it sucked up every last bit of available bandwidth. Pointcast once turned down a buyout offer of $450 million from News Corp. Bad idea: Pointcast tanked shortly thereafter. making it perhaps the only bad Net idea that News Corp. didn’t manage to invest it.

It’s safe to go back to Saratoga Springs.

If you live near Albany, NY (as I used to), you quickly learn to stay away from the charming town of Saratoga Springs while the track is open in August. Way too many tourists wearing clothes you can see from 50 miles away.

If your weirdness tolerance is low, this would have been a good reason to have avoided the town this past weekend.

Getting on the same page

It’s not quite a bulletin that large companies frequently have trouble making sure that one division doesn’t step on another. (This is a major plot point in the movie “The Solid Gold Cadillac.”) I saw a particularly egregious example the other day.

On the side of a Manhattan payphone kiosk was an ad for Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner cable modem service. Prominent was this piece of benefit-oriented copy: “Download music up to 50x faster!”

It’s true, and that’s one of the big selling points of broadband Net access. But one does rather wonder how other parts of Time Warner feels about it, parts like Atlantic, Electra, Rhino, and Warner Bros. records. AOLTW is, after all, one of the world’s largest record companies, and they can’t be thrilled that the cable part of the company is urging people to steal its product.

Jayson Stark, of espn.com, is one of my favorite sports writers. Here’s one reason why. The first two items are particularly good, but the rest of the piece ain’t bad, neither.

You Are Number Six.

Channel 13 in New York is showing The Prisoner right now. What a trippy show; hard to imagine that it ever got on the air to begin with.

The coming of civil rights to Alabama was one of the most physically dangerous stories that a reporter could cover. We sometimes forget that the right to vote in the United States in the middle of the 20th century was pursued at the cost of lives. A writer who went down to Selma or Montgomery literally took his life into his hands.

The most consistently excellent coverage of those times came from UPI. The AP, which because of its structure as a cooperative, was largely beholden to the local newspapers in the area; its coverage all too often was a step behind. When Rosa Parks wouldn’t move, UPI wrote the story. When churches were bombed in Montgomery, UPI was there. When James Meredith went through the doors at Ole Miss, not only was UPI there, but a future UPI reporter was a National Guardsman standing in the door making sure that Meredith got in safely.

Forty years is a long time ago. This past weekend, 13 UPI reporters were guests at a symposium at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, talking about how they got that story.

The local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, had extensive and excellent coverage of the day. So did the AP. So did UPI.

I’m frequently proud to have started my career at UPI. This is one reason why.

The much-maligned and anemic UPI has this scoop, if that’s what it is. de Borchgrave doesn’t have the greatest reputation these days, but he’s got significant and long-standing contacts in that part of the world. Hope Rumsfeld is reading.

What’s all this then, amen?

(–Monty Python, “The Dead Bishop Sketch“)

Twice or thrice upon a time, I had a column. I liked having a column. I like writing them. I liked that people read them, and I loved that complete strangers would cite them in the oddest places. Lots of people read the columns. Some, if my mail was any indication, liked what I wrote. Others, if my mail was any indication, didn’t — and, frankly, their e-mails tended to be the more entertaining.

Nominally, the columns were about technology. But in the waning years of the last century, technology and politics became inextricably intertwined. (Actually, they always have been; people just began rediscovering it within the last decade.) More than once, editors would return manuscripts saying, “Well, Dan, this is really interesting. Do you think you could mention a product or two somewhere along the way?”

When the various columns ended, along with the publications in which they appeared, I launched an occasional e-mail newsletter called “Over the Edge.” (The name was a spinoff of my late publishing consultancy 3Ships Communications, Inc.) For a variety of excellent and other reasons, the thing was more occassional than not.

This weblog is better. It’s vastly closer to real time. Each item is short, so each doesn’t take all that much time to produce. (The length of a weekly e-mail was often too high a hurdle to surmount. You’ll get lots more content this way, anyhow.) A blog doesn’t assault your e-mail box, which means I won’t have to deal with the invetiable stacks of bounces that come from any mail blast. It’s much prettier than I could design on my own. And as part of the network of weblogs, there’s a chance that the stuff here will gain a wider distribution than I would be able to manage on my own.

The log allows you to comment about each item. Please do so. The best thing about online communication is its interactivity. I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say about what I have to say.

There are (or will be) various ways to provide feedback. One is to comment on a particular entry. Another is to send me a private e-mail directly. You will also be able to ask to be automatically notified when this weblog is updated. And you can subscribe to an XML or Atom newsfeed if you like getting your information through a news aggregator.

If you like something you read here, please let me know — and let others know. Spread the word; readership and feedback is the only pay here. Give people my home URL, www.danrosenbaum.com, the direct URL for the weblog (www.winletter.com), or just direct people to specific items — each one has its own unique URL, accessible at the little pound sign at the bottom of each item.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you here soon.

Come and get it!!!

On April 22, Ben & Jerry’s will feed you for free. Show up at any of their stores anywhere in the world between noon and 8pm, and you get a free ice cream cone. No catch — except you’re likely to confront a looooong line.

(And no, this isn’t another of those web hoaxes. This is the 24th year they’ve done it.)

New Yorkers are used to feeling things rumble underground. It’s not usually the ground itself.

At about a quarter to 7 this morning, a 5.1-Richter earthquake hit about 15 miles south of Plattsburgh — near the Canadian border and roughly 400 miles north of here. Even at that distance, many around here claim to have felt it. Not us, even though we were (mostly) awake.

Low-grade earthquakes in the high 1s are not all that rare in the East; there’s even a noted seismological research center — the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in a geologically significant location just across the Hudson River from New York City. But as Californians know, 5.1 is a serious quake, and this one caused some significant road damage, though no apparent serious injury or loss of life.

I’ve been through an earthquake. One morning some years ago, I was standing in the office of the Editor-in-Chief of MacUser magazine, on the 17th floor of an office building in Foster City, California, a southern suburb of San Francisco built on landfill. He’d just offered me a job, and as we shook hands, the building did a darling little mambo. “Just the wind,” the editor said. Ummm, I don’t think so. I’ve been in office buildings in the wind, and that’s not what it felt like. When other editors started running around, it was plain that something untoward had just happened. Someone in the art department, yelled, “The scanner says 5.4!” (Why do art departments always have police scanners?) I caught the 2:10 flight home — the airport apparently didn’t even miss a beat — and didn’t take the job.

As it happens, New York is badly prepared for a significant quake. A seismic building code went into effect in 1995, but the report cited in the previous link notes that a 5.0 quake under Manhattan would cause about $660 million dollars worth of damage to property and business interruption. A 6.0 quake (10 times larger) would cause $8.8 billion of damage; a 7.0 quake — catastrophic by any measure — would cause $48 billion in property damage. From a Princeton University study titled Earthquake Loss Estimation Study for the New York City Area: