May 2009 Archives
05/25/09 11:29 AM
Blame the Customer. It Always Works.
NEW YORK--In the early years of this decade, we saw a wonderful business planl play itself out....literally. The record business, lulled by twenty years of selling new copies (on CD) of music people already owned and loved (on LP), found itself up against an odd problem of its own devising: having decided to focus its business on teens and early 20s, it found that those people, having more time than money at their disposal, were helping themselves to the music via Napster, Grokster, and every other -ster the geek mind could summon. The industry's response: Sue the customer. We can see how well that worked.
I'm writing from a hotel room in Manhattan. Just outside my door, the management has thoughtfully provided a copy of today's New York Times...free of charge. Downstairs in the breakfast room, the Times and other papers are available, equally gratis. When I get to LaGuardia Airport later this week, free copies of all the papers will be available in the shuttle lounges (if you're flying to Boston or D.C.). When I made a practice of attending political conventions, the papers (and newsmagazines) fell over themselves trying to get me and other attendees to read their product, flogging it gratis at us from every place they could stand a cardboard kiosk.
My point? The news industry has long trained many of us to regard its product as something of at least negotiable value. You pay for it if you have to, but if you're in the right place at the right time it's free. The industry's business model regarded us, the readers and viewers, as packages of eyeballs to be sold to the real customers, advertisers. Many news-industry pundits say readers were trained to regard papers as objects with a price, and the Internet interrupted that relationship. Any USA Today reader knows that's not true; that paper is as freely available in hotels as soap or plastic laundry bags.
The problem is that the customer hasn't changed; the business model has. Advertisers have decided our eyeballs can be targeted more precisely and efficiently elsewhere, and the news industry is frantically trying to shift the financial burden to us, the consumers. Maybe it will work.
The music industry could have returned to its earlier practice, of offering product lines to people with more money than time--i.e., non-kids. It chose rather to spend a decade attacking its dwindling customer base. The news industry, having trained many of us to be dutifully packaged for sale to advertisers, now views us--at least, those of us who read our news online--as the parasitic enemy, to be suddenly retrained to pay for what we consume.
Had publishers had any foresight, they might, in the past, have regarded the freewheeling mergers of, let's say, the department-store industry with slightly less equanimity, since a multilplicity of such stores was the bedrock of their advertising business. Perhaps they were blinded by their own affection for monopoly status. But lamenting the short-sightedness of newspaper publishers is a job best left to out-of-work journalists.
I won't pretend I know what will save the news industry, although a less credulous, less trivial product wouldn't hurt. But the example of the record industry suggests that the customer should be wooed, not punished.
05/23/09 3:01 PM
What to Remember on Memorial Day
First, like Dick Cheney, I had other priorities during the Vietnam War. So, when Memorial Day rolls around, I'm extra careful to remember certain facts about those in our military service. Like our government's eagerness to send them into the Iraq War without the armor, on their vehicles and their bodies, to protect them. Or like the ability of their command structure to ignore the eerie similarity in their "individual abuses" at Abu Ghraib to the legally sanctioned behavior by interrogators at Guantanamo, and to punish only those at or below the rank of sergeant for those activities. Major General Jeffrey Miller, who was sent from Cuba to Iraq to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib, is doing just fine now.
When I was a kid, RJR Tobacco used to brag about sending free cartons of Camels to our troops overseas. Support takes many forms.
If our troops ever figure out just what these kinds of support really mean, anybody without a basement better tie a yellow ribbon to their butt and kiss it farewell..
05/14/09 6:00 PM
Dumbing Us Down
This is not about Pakistan. There's plenty being written and said these days about Pakistan. But back in 2002, as it was selling the Iraq war "product", the Bush administration advanced three criteria for invading a country like Iraq: it had harbored terrorists, it had WMD, and it had threatened or invaded its neighbors. Even then, it was possible (thanks to the published statements of intelligence analysts Greg Thielmann in the US, Dr. Brian Jones in the UK and Andrew Willkie in Australia) to know that the WMD part wasn't true.
So, I began to wonder, to what country did all three criteria actually apply? Bingo. Pakistan. Had nukes, had cross-border wars with its neighbor India and--most chillingly--its ISI intelligence service had long nurtured the Taliban, long after we stopped funding the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Except, by declaration of President Bush, Pakistan was our friend in the GWOT, and so wouldn't be subjected to the dire consequences of the Three Criteria.
Yet, in the ongoing argument about the Iraq War, now almost sure to outlast the war itself, both supporters and opponents have been complicit in one great illusion: the insistence on discussing Iraq in isolation. No comparison to other countries, like Pakistan, no discussion of consequences for neighboring countries, like Iran (except late in the game). The only hint in the whole discussion that other countries mattered in this matter was the airy assurance of the neo-cons that "victory" in Iraq would "democratize" the Middle East. Presto, vote-o.
Highly complicit in this compartmentalization of Iraq was the Washington-New York press corps. They bought the Administration's focus on Iraq as the center of the known universe, and fought--when they did fight--the rhetorical battle on that constricted field. Critics allowed onto the air or the op-ed pages struggled to downplay Iraq as the center of the GWOT with occasional glancing references to forgotten old Afghanistan, but none to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or, for that matter, Hamburg---areas far more central to the history of 9/11.
Pakistan, when it was mentioned at all, was our hardy, if momentarily undemocratic, ally in the war.
A few newspapers have long since apologized for the addled credulity almost all the media displayed over the Administration's kabuki intel. None have apologized, and none will, for buying into the Administration's world view, because that narrow focus played to journalism's own tunnel vision. They overcompensate for that error now with hyperventilating over the sudden discovery that Pakistan has no intention of moving a large part of its huge army away from the Indian border to fight against a Taliban that large parts of its intelligence and military apparatus still support.
At the same time, back in Iraq, the former Sunni insurgents--with their American paychecks running out and the promised melding into the army and police forces not forthcoming--are increasingly reverting to insurgency. The place is de-surging.
One way the modern American media dumb us down is by their insistence on being able to focus on only one story, one country at a time. Pakistan is this week's missing white girl.
Have you seen Zardari?
Harry Shearer
