The American Society of Newspapers Editors have decided to cancel this years event. With papers in receivership or on the ropes travel budgets are toast. –

An annual convention of newspaper editors has been canceled for the first time since World War II, undone by the worst economic crisis since that harrowing era.

The American Society of Newspapers Editors’ decision to skip this year’s meeting was announced Friday, coinciding with the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News—the largest daily U.S. newspaper to shut down so far during a steep two-year slide in advertising revenue that’s draining the life out of the industry.

“The industry is in crisis,” said Charlotte Hall, president of the trade group and editor of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel. “This is a time when editors need to be in their own news rooms doing everything they can,” to help their publications survive.

Until now, 1945 had been the only year that the American Society of Newspaper Editors didn’t meet since the group’s first convention in 1923. The newspaper industry weathered through 10 U.S. recessions since the last cancellation.

If it hadn’t been canceled, this year’s convention—scheduled from April 26-29 in Chicago—probably would have attracted a sparse crowd because so many newspapers are pinching pennies to ease their financial pain.

Newspaper staffs have been gutted, stock dividends have been suspended and, in the most extreme circumstances, bankruptcy petitions have been filed as more readers get their news for free from the Internet and advertisers curtail their spending on the print medium amid the recession.

Other related industries like magazine publishers have decided to cancel. Others are scaling back in reaction to the economic realities. The fact is most of these confabs will never come back. Their underlying industries are whistling past the graveyard.

Linky.

The biggest problem for the music industry is that rather than attempting to understand its customers and cater to them (a vast majority of music lovers wanted to download single songs for portable playback), it fought them. If that wasn’t enough of an insult the industry even lobbied congress and  criminalized the fair use of content that a great many had paid for when they copied music from CD’s to portables. The internet has facilitated the free exchange of information like nothing that has come before it, and one of the forms of exchange has been some piracy. By lobbying to make what had been considered fair use into piracy by the DMCA act,  the industry lost it’s grip on reality and made most legitimate users into pirates.  Now even those who pay for music are in the lawsuit crosshairs when they copy to another device.

Details have been spilling out over the last few days that the RIAA has been making pretty massive cuts to staff. We already knew that EMI was cutting back on its support of the RIAA/IFPI, and it seems that with the rest of the RIAA’s major label supporters also having economic troubles, the writing is on the wall that the RIAA is about to go through a major transformation. I’m sure some will somehow “blame piracy” for this turn of events, but it’s hard to see how that’s even remotely the issue. The real issue is that the RIAA has basically managed to run one of the dumbest, most self-defeating strategies over the last decade. Rather than helping major record labels adjust to the changing market, it continually, repeatedly and publicly destroyed its own reputation and the reputation of the labels — each time shrinking their potential market by blaming the very people they should have been working to turn into customers. (Techdirt)

Yahoo is in the throes of a management shakeup having acquired a new CEO. One of the oddities is that the current CFO seems to have discovered his demise via an 8K SEC filing? –

Yahoo! has told the world that chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen is leaving the company. The struggling web portal announced the news this morning with an SEC filing.

The announcement comes less than a day after Jorgensen told an investor conference that Yahoo! had not ruled out the possibility of striking some sort of internet-search pact with Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.

“We want to do it for the right reasons and the right economics,” he said, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this week, reports indicated that new CEO Carol Bartz was preparing to reorganize the company’s management structure. And this morning, Bartz announced the reorg with a blog post this morning - though she did not mention Jorgensen’s departure.

But there is an even odder bit in my view –

Details were few, but she did announce the creation of a new Customer Advocacy group. “After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you. Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.

“We’re also leaning on this team to make sure we’re all hearing the voice of our customers (consumers and advertisers).”

Now in most cases that translates to ‘customer damage control’. I would find it a very un-novel way to reach out to the customer base and see where improvements need to be made. Generally that kind of fact finding is done by the CEO themselves their first year in tenure. Carol better hit the online video conferencing circuit NOW.

Linky.

If you are a news organization and insist on clinging to the idea that news is only news when it appear as as ink on paper, your days are numbered. There is still one daily paper in Denver, but with dead trees continuing to be its delivery medium of choice, it’s time will come too.  As for the reaming big city dailies, survival can come in the form of a tiny staff, and online interactive delivery.

“Today the Rocky Mountain News, long the leading voice in Denver, becomes a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges,” Scripps CEO Rich Boehne said.

Scripps said the paper lost $16 million last year.

Financial problems are widespread in the newspaper industry as the economy has deteriorated, ad revenue has tumbled, readers have gravitated toward the Internet and advertisers have followed them.

Four owners of 33 U.S. daily newspapers have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the past 2 1/2 months. A number of other papers are up for sale.

This past weekend, there were separate bankruptcy filings by New Haven (Connecticut) Register publisher Journal Register Co. and by the owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.

They followed a December filing by Tribune Co., whose media stable includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, and January’s filing by the owners of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Other publishers could seek bankruptcy protection in the coming months, too, as advertising prospects for 2009 remain bleak.

Hearst Corp. announced earlier this week it will close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle if it can’t reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks. Last month, Hearst laid out plans to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer isn’t found before April. And Gannett Co. is looking for a buyer for the Tucson Citizen in Arizona.

Boehne said the Rocky Mountain News’ 230 editorial employees would be paid through April 28.

(Yahoo)

[Dog] An introspective of sorts by the RMN of the RMN here.

The Third Pipe version of an old cliche: If you want to get a degree, go to college. If you want to learn, go online. As an ever increasing number of universities put their coursework, lectures and libraries on line, there is not much that the self directed student can’t learn from the screen and keyboard. While the “structure” of scheduled classes and exams may slow the less disciplined of us, the rest of us can learn more in less time. beyond learning, you’ll miss out on the socializing, condescending instructors and high costs if you go it alone. And then there’s the degree. Having one proves you paid your tuition, attended class and passed your exams, but does not prove you actually know anything.

If you’re eager to learn outside of university, there’s an excellent collection of links at the .EDU toolbox. The best time to learn something new is now!

In our continuing Death Watch Series for the Pulp Media the noose tightens on several other majors. –

San Fransisco

Hearst indicates that it may close down the San Fransisco Chronicle. –

If it can’t reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the Chronicle, northern California’s largest newspaper with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430.

Hearst didn’t specify a savings target nor a deadline for wringing out the expenses. A Hearst spokesman didn’t immediately respond to messages Tuesday.

But management made it clear that the cost-cutting will require a significant number of layoffs.

Link

Washington DC

Washington Post Co gets a 77% profit wedgie in the 4th qtr of ‘08. –

The Washington Post Co.’s reeling newspaper and magazine divisions stumbled again in the fourth quarter, extending an earnings slump that would have been even more disconcerting if not for the stability of the company’s education and cable TV businesses.

The publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine said Wednesday that it made $18.8 million, or $2.01 per share, during the final three months of last year. That represented a 77 percent drop from net income of $82.9 million, or $8.71 per share, in the same quarter a year earlier.

The results for the last quarter included after-tax charges of more than $82 million to account for the eroding value of the company’s newspaper holdings, the upcoming closure of a Maryland printing plant and restructuring costs.

It marked the Washington-based company’s ninth consecutive quarter of declining profit.

Revenue rose 3 percent to $1.16 billion.

Link

Hartford

The Hartford Courant kills off another 100 staff amid ad revenue dropoff –

The Hartford Courant, struggling with an industrywide decline in advertising, said Wednesday it will eliminate 100 jobs this week, primarily through layoffs.

The cuts will include about 30 newsroom employees, bringing the newsroom staff to 135, just more than half the number of people in the Courant’s newsroom last year.

At least some employees were told by telephone calls to their homes Tuesday night. The newspaper announced the cuts Wednesday on its Web site.

Publisher Stephen D. Carver said layoffs also include some workers at a chain of alternative weeklies in Connecticut and the company’s direct mail business, Valu Mail.

The Courant is owned by Tribune Co., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December as it seeks relief from $13 billion in debt, most of it from the company’s takeover in 2007 by Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell. Tribune also publishes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The (Baltimore) Sun.

Link

New York City

Not to be out done of course Cond’e Nast is awash in red ink. Always willing to push the envelope on anything of largess. Looks like they will attempt it in the financial realm as well. –

The publisher is reeling more than its rivals, as luxury-goods retailers hoard their ad dollars. While the industry is down 24 percent in ad pages so far in the first quarter, many of Condé’s venerable titles are down 30 percent. Start-up mag Portfolio is down a staggering 60 percent, while Wired is off 57 percent.

“They are having the worst year of any publisher,” said one rival executive who once worked at Condé Nast and said the company’s recent cuts of 5 percent each on expenses and staffing isn’t enough.

“They are overstaffed and overpaid. They should have cut back 20 percent when they cut back five,” this person said.

That kind of thinking is stirring fears inside that a new round of cuts could be coming. And for the first time in more than a decade, the privately run company led by Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. and CEO Charles Townsend could be awash in red ink.

Link

And so it goes….

For a little more than the last three quarters, GAE has been a free but constrained service. Well no more. Google has announced pricing finally and also some adjustments to the free band of service. –

• $0.10 per CPU core hour (This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage).
• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. (This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API).
• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

The affects on the free band —

With a Tuesday afternoon blog post, App Engine Googler Brett Slatkin said that developers can now set their own daily budgets for processing power, bandwidth, storage, and email spewing. Google will then give you as many resources as your app needs - up to those limits. But you’re only charged you for what you use beyond App Engine’s no-charge quotas.

The rub is that the free CPU and bandwidth quotas are going down. “Along with many performance improvements over the past ten months, we’ve learned that we overestimated our initial free quota values,” Slatkin said. In 90 days, free usage will top out at 6.5 hours of CPU time per day and a mere gigabyte of data transfers. But Slatkin and the App Engine team are confident these limits can still handle 5 million page views a month.

To lessen the blow, Google has increased the free storage limit a GB. And the free email limit remains at 2,000 recipients.

The pricing is a close match to AWS. However AWS has a slight advantage. Last quarter AWS announced a rate breakout that decouples the transport tier away from the supplier to the customer. There are advantages to this type of offering from a service billing perspective from the suppliers point of view.

Even with the decrease in the free band it is still quite a bit of service for zero cost. Is there a clear winner here in the cloud space. Well if you just consider the cloud service aspect I would still tip the hat to AWS. They have a longer track record and their offerings have developed some excellent tools both internal and third party through the community. That’s to GAE’s disadvantage. But if you look further out, if Google starts providing easy hooks into GAE from their other services (Sites, Alerts, Docs) then there might be a stronger tale to tell.

Linky

I once had AC theory instructor who liked to remind his class that many of  the greatest discoveries have been made by an obsessed tinkerer working in the basement or garage funded by his own wits and desire to learn. Look for many more discoveries to come from the basement scientist as instantly available, scale  pay as you go processing is accompanied by ever expanding selection of free public data sets.

In the Economics category, we have added a set of transportation databases from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics. In the Encyclopedic category, we have added access to the DBpedia Knowledge Base, the Freebase Data Dump, and the Wikipedia Extraction, or WEX. The DBpedia Knowledge Base currently describes more than 2.6 million things including 213,000 people, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, and 20,000 companies. There are 274 million RDF triples in the 67 GB data set. The 66 GB Freebase Data Dump is an open database of the world’s information, covering millions of topics in hundreds of categories.The Wikipedia Extraction (WEX) is a processed, machine-readable dump of the English-language section of the Wikipedia. At nearly 67 GB, this is a handly and formidable data set. The data is provided is the TSV format as exported by PostgreSQL. Finally, we have updated the NCBI’s Genbank data. Weighing in at a hefty quarter of a petabyte terabyte, this public data set contains information on over 85 billion bases and 82 million sequence records.  (AWS Blog)

Spread accross the globe is a growing army of lone researchers who are working on something big that will change our lives. The research is being done without a grant, a tenure, or sponsorship, just beause he or she wants to.  Is that cool or what?

Are services like DTV and Siris-XM not long for this world? I would say yes and for one reason. As a pay for play kind of service IPTV has it totally beat. IPTV with services like Hulu provide ala carte, on-demand viewing of content. It will do so in a metaphor the user is used to — ads — but fewer of them. The economies are there.

But does that mean all satellite is dead? Maybe not. Like go here. Free-To-Access satellite service is alive and well. Fact is even growing. And will probably do so for quite a while in the future. As commerical services move to an IP based transport, transponder space will be freed up and up for sale at lower prices.

Nor is the downlink Sat equipment static. CaptiveWorks has just come out with a new suite of Linux based Sat receiver/media center/internet radio/MP3 player all-in-one. The CW-4000HD can do all this and more.

Just when you think that orbital delivery systems are just about toast along come some surprises.

Linky.

If we haven’t said it before we will say it now/again. If your carrier provides detailed billing, get it. Keep it. Scrutinize it. Not that you would need to have detailed billing to realize that a $28,000 billing is a mistake. –

I am a savvy traveler, but was completely shocked when I received a $28,067.31 cell phone bill after a recent trip.

I was in Miami on Nov. 2 getting ready to go on a Caribbean cruise. I wanted to catch the Bears game before we left port. I have this wonderful Slingbox connected to my cable box, that feeds into my modem. It sends my cable signal through the Internet to my computer. I can then watch my cable package and DVR wherever I go. I just slide in my AT&T wireless card and click on Slingbox and up comes my cable TV.

So there I was at the Port of Miami. It was 1 p.m. Florida time. The Bears game was starting. The ship was not leaving Miami until 4 p.m., so I slid in my wireless card and brought up my Slingbox and watched the game on my computer.

I watched for about 2½ hours. Then I shut down my computer and cell phone, because it’s expensive to use your Internet or phone when you sail out of the country.

Anyway, I got home from our cruise, and about two weeks later I got my cell phone/wireless card bill, which is usually about $220, and it said I owe $28,067.31.

Interestingly, the Chicago Sun Times intervened and AT&T reversed the charges. That is after the subscriber had attempted to get the charges taken off. I find it less than disingenious that AT&T would not trust the customer yet would fold in an instant when a third party calls on their behalf.

Moral — Never believe what the carriers tell you the first time about a bill dispute.

Linky.