Archive for May, 2007

Of course it’s considered bad form to speak ill of the dead. But what of someone like right-wing fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, who spent much of his life insulting and denigrating those who didn’t see the world in his extremely narrow (and bizarre) view? Someone like that I’m not sure can expect to get a neat and tidy send-off.

On CNN, Anderson Cooper interviewed Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great,” and Hitchens held nothing back in trashing Falwell. (From my perspective, it was a joy to watch — but I suppose that demonstrates bad form on my part. )

Bravo to Cooper for letting Hitchens have his say. Falwell was a divisive public figure, to say the least. I’m glad to see that CNN didn’t let Falwell off easy even in death.

Alan Mutter is right. The Newspaper Association of America’s advertising campaign is beyond lame — and shoots the industry in the foot. The only group that would think this bizarre mascot is futuristic or cool are probably over 60.

Then there’s the game that you use a gun to shoot newspapers at paper boxes as they float by. Hello! What year are you guys still in? Print newspapers?! Sidewalk newspaper boxes?! Could you possibly think of anything that better demonstrates how behind the times the industry is?

Geez, it’s way past time for NAA to fire the agency responsible for this.

My business partner noted an item in Keith Huang’s Blog Watch column of the Wall Street Journal on Monday that talked about one of my company’s bloggers, Katie Brown, and her blog on YourClimbing.com. He saw it in the print edition.

So I wanted to put a link to the column on YourClimbing.com, but of course I couldn’t, because Blog Watch is behind WSJ.com’s paid-subscription wall. That’s problem No. 1.

Problem No. 2: When I went to the WSJ.com version of the column, I discovered the full text of what Huang had written. The print edition had only about half of what he wrote. If I hadn’t looked it up online, I would have missed the main point of the short item. Print editors — no doubt trimming to fit Huang’s prose into the space available around the ads — trimmed the item about Katie so much that it reads like a teaser. Online, you get the full effect.

I’m old enough to remember working at newspapers and being in the “back shop” working with the compositors at fitting stories in the space available. Copy editors in those old days estimated the space needed for a story and scribbled instructions on a layout sheet. But estimates were often off, so you had to go out back and tell a compositor with an Xacto knife what to cut to make it fit.

That this is still being done (albeit, without the “cold type“) feels amazingly archaic to me. Why anyone still reads the print edition of the Journal instead of paying for a (cheaper and more complete) online subscription is beyond my comprehension. (Note: We only get the print edition because the previous tenant of our current office hasn’t cancelled his subscription, so we receive it every morning.)

For reference, here’s the online version of Huang’s column item:

Professional climber Katie Brown, 26, has been scaling rock faces since she was a teenager, making an early name for herself by winning titles in the U.S. and in Europe. She says her blog helps readers “get an idea of who I am as a person, rather than just an image.”

Along those lines, she discussed a recent vacation from climbing, writing that “realistically, climbing for a living, and all that comes with it, in addition to everything else that goes on in life, can be tiring, and I think it’s okay to want to get away from it for a bit, even something as fun as climbing.”

In addition to her writing, she posts video clips, perhaps the most notable a nail-biter in which she falls about 40 feet before an anchored rope stops her. In another post, she accentuates the positives despite failing to reach the summit of El Capitan, a famous 3,000-foot vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park: “When I got to the ground I had the immense pleasure of telling, essentially, the whole world about our lack of success.” Ms. Brown led the ascent most of the way, “something which, a year ago, I would have been far too intimidated to do,” she writes, adding: “best of all, I got to sleep on a wall.” Other entries by Ms. Brown include accounts of climbing trips to Chile and Greece.

And here’s the trimmed print version.:

Professional climber Katie Brown, 26, has been scaling rock faces since she was a teenager, making an early name for herself by winning titles in the U.S. and in Europe. She says her blog helps readers “get an idea of who I am as a person, rather than just an image.”

In addition to her writing, she posts video clips, perhaps the most notable a nail-biter in which she falls about 40 feet before an anchored rope stops her.

On one of my company’s websites, YourClimbing.com, a 15-year-old from Tennessee is our most avid member. She’s constantly posting photos and blog items, and chiming in on discussion threads. Not a day goes by that her presence isn’t obvious on the site. She’s won prizes on the site, and been our “Member of the Month.” She’s made lots of online buddies, who even do crazy things like make funny Photoshop montages of her. (Don’t worry, it’s innocuous stuff; we’d intervene if anything got disturbingly weird, and not just funny weird.)

I had to laugh the other day when she wrote in her blog that her dad had banned her, at least temporarily, from being on YourClimbing.com. She was probably spending too much time on the site and not enough on homework. Or perhaps he got nervous about all the YourClimbing.com friends she hangs out with online — some of whom are older men.

(It’s interesting how for people with a shared climbing addiction, age differences don’t seem to matter much online.)

Of course, being 15 years old, she apparently doesn’t listen to her dad. Her site appearances dwindled a bit for a while, but now she’s back on as often as ever. That makes her a pretty normal 15-year-old.

I had an odd (and I thought disturbing) phone call this week from the office of U.S. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma). One of his staff members called to invite me to be on some small business/entrepreneurial task force. Apparently the congressman is trying to put together a group of small-business owners from around the country to “advise” Congress on the needs of entrepreneurs.

After the assistant told me what this was about, he let me listen to a 60-second recorded pitch from Cole — in which the congressman basically ranted about how “liberal Democrats” are out to tax small businesses to death and must be stopped! He sounded more like Bill O’Reilly than a rational and thoughtful representative of the people of Oklahoma.

I told the assistant I thought Cole’s views were disturbing, and antithetical to my own, and declined the invitation. Cole didn’t sound like he had any interest in taking a reasonable view of small business’ needs; he’s obviously got a (right wing) axe to grind.

How sad that our elected representatives are so one-sided and dogmatic. The last thing we need in the U.S. is politicians who sound and act like O’Reilly.

This is from a new study called Never Ending Friending, sponsored in part by MySpace. … It’s yet another example of how today’s young media consumers are more and more about interacting (two-way, new media) than being passive (one-way, old media). … As usual, consumers are leading the way — and most media and marketers are a step behind, just starting to figure that out.