Dan Rosenbaum / Center Ring Media

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GOP is Rushing toward disaster

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Excellent analysis — by the NYTimes Timothy Egan– of the damage Rush Limbaugh is doing to the Republican Party. (Kudos, too, to the home page editors at the Times for putting a link to it at the top of the page for so long today.)

Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet, to be nearly as unpopular as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who damned America in the way that Limbaugh has now damned the nation’s newly elected leader. But Republicans just can’t quit him. So even poor Michael Steele, the nominal head of the Republican Party who dared to criticize him, had to grovel and crawl back to the feet of Limbaugh.

Where Democrats have gotten smarter is in their ability to push the whacko fringe off-stage when they start getting too much attention. That’s going to be a problem with Limbaugh, whose livelihood and lifeblood is tied into getting as big an audience is possible. Rev. Wright will be able to feed his family if he doesn’t have a mass audience; not so Limbaugh. That will make Rush exceptionally difficult to shut up, even if he were willing to in the name of party unity. Which he isn’t.
Which is a pity. What this country needs is principled dialog and problem-solving, not demagoguery. The more Limbaugh drives the Republican agenda and dialog, the less likely bipartisanship becomes, which weakens the nation at a time when it requires the best effort from all available smart people.

Why musicians do what we do

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I’d never heard of the guy, but Karl Paulnack is apparently director of the music division at the Boston Conservatory. This talk is his welcome address to parents of new students. Bulls-eye.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind… I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do…”

Is the flexible touch screen here?

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The folks at E-Ink — who make the clear high-contrast screen for the Amazon Kindle — appear to be prototyping the first flexible computer touch-screen. You know: the digital paper that’s been hyped since forever.
This article from Technology Review gives a neat overview of portable flat-screen technology, and why it’s so hard to combine both flex and touch. First applications will be, unsurprisingly, military. God only knows how much it’ll cost.

Wanna buy a car? Please?

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Here’s a compilation of aerial pictures of unsold cars piling up around the world.
I’d imagine that a lot of similar pics could be made to illustrate robust commerce. But the telling ones for me are the cars parked around test tracks — because that means development work has stopped, too. The sudden pileup of inventory plus extended layoffs plus no development activity equals a pretty grim picture….

Computer Shopper Goes Online-Only

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You could have seen this one coming a mile away. Computer Shopper, once the biggest and one of the most profitable magazines in the United States, announced today that it’s going online-only.
The days of 1000-page tabloid-sized issues are long past; Shopper went to a slick paper and normal trim years ago. Back in The Day, I was a senior editor there, responsible for about 100 of those pages a month. That’s a lot. And while Shopper may not have been the best thing I’d ever done professionally or the most fun or the most formative, it was undoubtedly in the Top 3 for all of them. It’s surely where I learned the magazine business and where I started to learn how to be a manager. It’s where I met my best man. It’s why I moved into New York City.
And it’s where I forged personal and professional relationships that have lasted decades. I’m sad to see it go. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a friend and once one of my writers, wrote a tribute in Computerworld. Read to the bottom.
There are too many Shopper stories than can be told here; you’ll have to buy me a beer or two — and I know that my short time at Shopper is only a thin slice of a very long story.
There’s an old poster that shows a genealogy of British blues bands. Every band that’s worth a damn could trace its way back to the Yardbirds, for one member or another at one point or another. In the tech press, Shopper was the Yardbirds. Glad I got to play

RIP, Rocky Mountain News

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It’s not news anymore when a newspaper closes. But it’s especially sad that Scripps has killed the Rocky Mountain News. Today was its last edition.
(I’m not going to link to the RMN, because God only knows how long the links would be live.)
For many years, it was the strongest newspaper between the Mississippi River and California. It was the scrappier and more fun of the two papers in Denver, an energetic voice of the Rockies. It was 156 years old, and Scripps — the one-time owner of UPI that did so poorly by its crown jewel — decided it wasn’t worth the financial drain. The thing is, the RMN wasn’t even the weaker of the two papers.
After the jump, there’ll be two pieces from RMN writers. Full text, because the links will probably expire sooner rather than later. The first is from a sportswriter. The second is an awfully good obit, explaining why newspapers are important — and how a great paper gets that way.

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Newspapers are fine. Their owners, however…

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Fascinating piece in AdAge this week. It turns out that newspapers, as a business, are doing quite well — kicking out 10 to 20 percent returns, which ain’t chopped liver.
On the other hand, the companies that own newspapers are debt-laden swine. They took on too much debt in fat times, as national chains swept up local owners. If you can keep using cash flow to pay off debt service, you’re cool. But anyone who’s played Hot Potato knows what happens when the buzzer goes off.
Compare and contrast Hearst and Philadelphia Newspapers. The latter went Chapter 11 recently — too much debt — while saying operations are fine. But Hearst’s apparently imminent closings of the San Fransisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times, shows that media companies will have a choice: kill the papers or restructure their overall operations. Since the latter runs the risk of wiping out equity, expect far-flung media companies to impose pain on their newspapers. But smaller companies, focused on their own papers, may turn out just fine.

MPA cans annual magazine conference

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One of the more glittery events in the consumer magazine business has its plug pulled for this year. The Magazine Publishers Association has canceled its annual American Magazine Conference.
Given that Hachette, AMI and New York all pulled out of the MPA recently, and given that tens of thousands of people got axed in the magazine business last year, this might be a bad time to be planning a big-ticket shindig. Maybe by the time the AMC season comes around this fall, all the remaining publishers can just have lunch in a phone booth somewhere in midtown…

Public propriety

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This may be one for the etiquette mavens among us. Or maybe it’s just a matter of common courtesy. Or cluefulness.
The other day, I was flying with my family — myself, my wife, and two 7-year-old boys — from JFK to SFO. I was sitting with one kid, my wife a few rows back with the other. The plane was a 767, in a 2-3-2 configuration. I was on the aisle, a kid in the middle, a stranger on the other side of him.
About an hour into the flight, said stranger pulls out a laptop and fires up a movie: “Slumdog Millionaire.” My immediate thoughts, in rough order:

  1. That’s not on DVD yet; the SOB is watching an illegal download.
  2. He’s watching an R-rated movie — one that features graphic scenes of little kids getting maimed — in full view of a 7-year-old.

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