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Eyeballs are attracted to bad news. Good news does not sell papers or attract viewers. This has been documented for a century, and modern psychology actually studies the "fear", "bad news", and "schadenfreude" centers in the brain. Perceived risks that you avoid releases dopamine. Talk radio manufactures doomsday stories every hour, on the hour.

The saddest thing is when CBS 60 Minutes gets it completely wrong - and wins a journalism Award. Ask CBS 60 Minutes anchor, Scott Pelley, about the state of journalism. http://www.mediabistro.com/tvn...

"Our house is on fire. Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.” - Scott Pelley

He should know. Pelley's won an journalism award for misreporting the "trail" of "e-waste" in 2008. But reporting that a past story was exaggerated doesn't sell many ads.

The reason your example works out like that is the channels have equal costs, which is unrealistic.

Let's say channel 1 costs $80/subscriber and channel 2 costs $20. So the total is still $100 with 2 subscribers.

Now they unbundle. A, which likes channel 1, now pays $160/month. B pays only $40/month.

My example is taking advantage of the difference between popularity (50% each) and cost (80% vs 20%). Perhaps in real life, the channel which costs $20 would only get 20% of the subscribers, in which case they'd still have to pay $100. However, I suspect in real life there are many channels that have broad appeal and lower than average costs. For instance there are many channels more popular than ESPN that cost a lot less. For instance, according to http://www.mediabistro.com/tvn... last month TNT, USA, TBS, History Channel, and Fox News were more popular than ESPN. But according to http://allthingsd.com/20100308... the costs are:
ESPN - $4.08
TNT - $0.99
Fox News - $0.58
USA - $0.55
TBS - $0.49
History - $0.22

HGTV, which is right after ESPN in April ratings, costs only $0.14.

So what would probably happen in the unbundled case is that enough people would subscribe to these channels that costs would approximately double. (I'm guessing this since I read that about 60% of the country watches ESPN, and these channels are about as popular). I would definitely pay $0.44/month for the History Channel because I like some of their shows (Pawn Stars, American Restoration, Vikings). At $1/month I might even pick up Fox News, and USA. I'm not sure about TNT and TBS. I would definitely not get ESPN.

Where the consumer gets screwed with a la carte pricing is the fixed costs of the cable company, into which I'm also categorizing current profit level (since cable companies aren't going to move to a la carte if it means less overall profit, regardless of margin).

Let's say today I pay $100/month for cable TV, of which $25 is fixed costs, $25 is profit, and $50 is content. The new model would be $25 for fixed costs, $25 for profit, and then whatever channels I want. So my minimum monthly bill is still $50 even for a single channel, which is ridiculous. Maybe I end up with 20 channels for $20/month, so my total bill is $70. I'm saving money, but only 30% for giving up 95% of the channels. And it would be sad because while I didn't pick up TNT, I would miss their showing of the Christmas Story or whatever in December. There would be a bunch of those lost opportunities, just to save $30. And the old system is no longer available to me, because buying all the channels would now cost $150 instead of $100.

But who knows, perhaps the cheap channels would be cheap enough that lots of people would subscribe even though they don't watch. When you're talking about channels costing $0.20/month or less, it's like "why not" except for channels you really, really don't have any interest in.

They don't really seem to know WHY they're protesting

;-)

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvspy/epic-ktvu-fail-anchor-reports-pilot-names-including-sum-ting-wong-and-wi-tu-lo_b97368
       

the station claimed it had just learned the names of the 4 pilots on board Asiana flight 214 which crashed last Saturday
       

Really?

Where did they admit it? Or are you just making up 'facts'?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57568377-93/macmillan-reaches-e-book-pricing-settlement-with-doj/
They settled because they couldn't live with the worst outcome.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/57204_b57204
"In April, those three publishers decided to settle (without admitting any wrongdoing) instead of fighting the DOJ suit in court."

Even the DOJ doesn't say they admitted to collusion:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/February/13-at-171.html

Here's the DOJ site for the case and the DOJ court filing.

The court doc has a dramatic graphic which shows you exactly what happened to ebook prices while this was going on. All the colored lines are publishers who conspired with Apple to switch to agency pricing the first week of April 2010, except for Penguin (beige) who switched the end of May. The two grey lines are publishers who stuck with wholesale pricing (Random House and other non-majors).

what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.

How soon we forget. Remember when we waited for the result for months, and then got a Supreme Court coin-toss, because marking and counting paper ballots is error-prone - some can be interpreted either way.

To this add long wait times at the polls, which effectively requires some people to pay a high price (waiting for hours) to vote, skewing the outcome.

Granted, it has not been demonstrated that computerized voting can solve these problems without creating bigger ones. But the status quo is certainly not ideal.

That is not entirely true.

Congress has the power to take works out of the public domain in the US.

The source is unhappy they were let go. The 'inefficiencies' terminology was not attributed in the original source article, which includes a copy of the memo; I'm surprised no one has posted a link to the source article yet, so here it is:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/washington-post-layoffs-valentines-day_b96626

According to the original source article, more people than just the mobile team were let go.

I can understand them doing this, particularly since they referenced Web 2.0 in their hiring of Rob Malda (cmdrtaco), HTML5 is enough along that it can be used to deliver the content in a reasonable way, using a centralized paywall, and trying to maintain 7 iOS apps and 100's of Android apps, due to minor variations in platform, makes a browser-based experience a no-brainer, in terms of the money they spend on development.

Overall, I think this does not bode well for non-game, non-vertical market app writers, so for all the people who are thinking that going to app writing is going to be a really lucrative payoff, this is probably the beginning of a trend, and they should consider some other line of work.

Yep sorry I should have been more specific, the Hobbit. You can add George Orwell to that list. Its not the only content that has been taken out of the public domain though. Its crazy what is and is not, its pretty hard to find out for sure for some works.

http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/supreme-court-rules-for-copyright-on-old-foreign-titles_b19551?red=en

Was removed bo a forgien rights holder in 1994. The most recent movie had to be liscened and royalties payed to I'm guessing Tolkien Enterprises

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Enterprises

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Middle-Earth_Enterprises

As near as I can tell thats who ultimately recieves the roylaties and liscences the work. Middle Earth Enterprises has held the rights to the books since it was sold to them (see details in the 2cnd link)

Let's just stick to facts then:
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/july-2012-ratings-cnn-continues-to-struggle_b139787

From Page 6, Bullet #7 (emphasis mine) "This lawsuit wrongly seeks to condemn Apple based on the Government’s apparent dissatisfaction with the impact of competitive entry, demand stimula- tion and innovation (ignoring significant indicia of consumer and market benefit), not based on any anticompetitive conduct by Apple. This is contrary to law and sound economic policy." "This is contrary to law and sound economic policy" means ( "This is contrary to law" ) AND ( "This is sound economic policy" ) When written correctly, with the Oxford Comma in place, it would have the intended meaning: This is contrary to law, and sound economic policy Yeah, parts of Oxford University don't use the serial comma any more, and some even actively recommend against it's use. Doesn't mean they are right though.

As part of the summary... "from the go-ask-louis-ck-how-to-do-things dept." http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/louis-ck-records-200k-profit-on-drm-free-show_b43927

Paulo Coelho would tend to agree with them, even taking it a step further. He's joined up with Pirate Bay as part of an arts promotion program.

> a crook will not post that he is a crook on facebook. You won't find that ANYWHERE.

Unless they're in London, of course.

Personally, I prefer human readable paper ballots. It's simply not as easy to fudge physical ballots as elecrontic ones.

Yeah...

Well judging from from this clip, I'd say there's some serious self-censorship going on: http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fox-news-watch-avoids-news-corp-scandal-almost_b75808

From TFA: "For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy"

Burson-Marsteller, Burson-Marsteller... Why does that name sound so familiar? Oh yeah. They were slinging anti-Google propaganda for ICOMP (Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace), which (scroll down to the very bottom) is a lobbying arm of Microsoft.

BM has claimed that the smear job for Facebook "was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies", but it seems to me that it's just business as usual for them. The last time they did this, pitching to business executives that time, they also didn't disclose who hired them ("Others suggested that by not disclosing who Burson-Marsteller was representing, the firm was breaking the spirit of political lobby firms' code of conduct.").

Not only that, but BM also hired Eric Schmidt's ex mistress/fiancée, presumably connected with their ongoing anti-Google efforts. And they were behind the National Smokers Alliance campaign back in the mid '90s. Plus, if this post is to be believed, they were also involved with a number of other very dubious organizations (I didn't have time to run them all down, but the ones I did check into seem true).


The whole "Facebook and Google are having a spat" thing isn't really news, but I find it interesting how such a scummy company can be considered "one of the top international PR firms out there". Also, I regret that I didn't find this Slate article until after typing this post. It backs up the list of clients in the forum post above (but in case you don't want to follow either link: the Argentine junta, the Nigerian junta, Union Carbide, Blackwater, and Nicolae Ceausescu are among the undeniably bad/evil ones).

From TFA: "For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy"

Burson-Marsteller, Burson-Marsteller... Why does that name sound so familiar? Oh yeah. They were slinging anti-Google propaganda for ICOMP (Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace), which (scroll down to the very bottom) is a lobbying arm of Microsoft.

BM has claimed that the smear job for Facebook "was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies", but it seems to me that it's just business as usual for them. The last time they did this, pitching to business executives that time, they also didn't disclose who hired them ("Others suggested that by not disclosing who Burson-Marsteller was representing, the firm was breaking the spirit of political lobby firms' code of conduct.").

Not only that, but BM also hired Eric Schmidt's ex mistress/fiancée, presumably connected with their ongoing anti-Google efforts. And they were behind the National Smokers Alliance campaign back in the mid '90s. Plus, if this post is to be believed, they were also involved with a number of other very dubious organizations (I didn't have time to run them all down, but the ones I did check into seem true).


The whole "Facebook and Google are having a spat" thing isn't really news, but I find it interesting how such a scummy company can be considered "one of the top international PR firms out there". Also, I regret that I didn't find this Slate article until after typing this post. It backs up the list of clients in the forum post above (but in case you don't want to follow either link: the Argentine junta, the Nigerian junta, Union Carbide, Blackwater, and Nicolae Ceausescu are among the undeniably bad/evil ones).

if he were going to gitmo it would probably have happened sometime in the last decade... this is old news. it's still cool, but it is old.

http://www.google.com/search?q=john+coster-mullen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf

How many people continue to carry something they never use? Maybe you see people who own one but leave it on the computer desk?

Good thing we have facts.....

http://www.mediabistro.com/thinkmobile/study-shows-ipad-usage-increases-over-time_b8613

You're full of shit, yet again. Obamaman was the worst, but far from the only. How's this for "facts"?

There.

In related news, the Guardian has in-depth coverage of his extradition hearing, including a list of legal arguments he's making and how the death threats he's received from US politicians are particularly worrying in light of the shooting in Arizona. Also, the right-wing blogger behind JulianAssangeMustDie.com has been exposed. The domain was registered by Melissa Clouthier.

You - FUCK YOU

Manning is sitting in a solitary cell for 23 hours a day for 200 days now even though he hasn't been found guilty of anything yet.

He is being tortured by the US gov't, who is interested in one thing: find a way to charge Julian Assange with some sort of conspiracy, so they can prosecute him.

The torture of solitary confinement will lead to Manning's psychological health being compromised, this is a human rights violation right there and WHO in the US 'real media' is challenging the US gov't?

MSNBC did an interview that's about the scope of it.

Manning is being tortured, he is not guilty of anything yet, he is being psychologically and also physically tortured, you can't hold a person hostage for 200 days in solitary confinement, deny them the right even to exercise in his own cell and expect him to be OK after that.

So

There are entire channels revolving around news.

And you don't have to look very far to see examples of precisely what I'm talking about. Quote from the article:

"Fox is an incredibly disciplined organization. CNN is much less disciplined. It's part of the reason why CNN's a better journalism organization. It doesn't have the kind of top-down discipline that Fox has. But in a competitive race, Fox knows exactly what its audience wants. It's been one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in television: no matter what the story is, no matter what the circumstances are, if it's not what the audience wants, they will walk away from the story." [Emphasis mine]

Everyone says newspapers are dying. If that's true, then the Web is what will replace them -- and if that's the case, we really, really don't need Web publishers following the example of TV news.

This is BP's Rules, Not Ours

Well there you go.. BP runs the American government..

Fashion is an interesting case because it's exempted from copyright laws

Actually, it's not completely exempt because there have been numerous cases of copyright in the fashion industry. For example, Van Halen suing Nike over a criss-cross pattern on a line of sneakers Nike produced. Anthropologie has sued Forever 21 (see below for a separate case) over copyright infringement for nine garments. We also have Diane von Furstenberg suing Target (see separate case below) for copyright infringement as well as other issues.

There is the case of jewelry company Merit Diamond Corp that sued Samuels Jewelers and Rogers Jewelers because their design of certain pieces of their jewelry was copies of Merit's. A similar case involved Tacori vs Beverly Jewelry Company Ltd for copyright infringement of ring designs.

Most lawsuits in the fashion industry revolve around trademark and patent infringement such as the case against Paris Hilton, Coach vs. Target and Trovata vs Forever 21.

However, to prove your point about the fashion industry and copyright, see this article from the NY Times from March which talks about this very subject.

I could not disagree with you more. The vast majority of these people who "can't pay for insurance" still manage to pay for an iPod or a Cell Phone or a form of reliable transportation (read: new car in most cases 2).

First, An iPod costs a couple hundred dollars, once. A cell phone plan costs an average of $635.85 annually, though you can easily find low-cost plans for about half that.. Health insurance, for an average family, will cost you and/or your employer a whopping $13,375 annually (Sources: USA Today, about.com). So even if they gave up all the things you mention, they still don't have the cash to get decent health insurance.

Second, not everyone really needs health insurance. I've looked at my health care costs and my insurance, and at my age, even with a fairly significant chunk of medical bills late last year, my insurance still didn't pay for what it cost me and my employer. And that's for the cheapest tier of health insurance I can get through my employer. For younger people with no family history of cancer, health insurance is basically subsidizing other people's care. So for many people in that age range, it just doesn't make financial sense. Fortunately, my employer basically pays the entire cost. Were it not for that, I probably would have pocketed the money until at least age 30.

As for your assertion that individual funding cannot be solved at a governmental level, that's a big part of what this plan does---the government gives tax credits to people who buy insurance for themselves, thus effectively covering the cost of the insurance. If people don't take that health insurance, they don't get the credit. Unlike money that they earn from their employers, the credit can't be used to pay for anything else, eliminating the incentive to skip it. And that was my point.

I believe this is the picture in question.

(applause) The only thing that could have made that post better is if "The More You Know" logo was attached to it.

You were talking about them, right? They ARE the most watched cable "news" around:

FNC had 9 of the top 10 shows in cable news in Total Viewers and ranks as the third most-watched basic cable channel behind USA and TNT.

Cable news' #1 show for 104 consecutive months, "The O'Reilly Factor", is up 37% over July '08. "Glenn Beck Program" is up the most, up 120% over last year's 5pmET show. "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" is up 60% and "Hannity" is up 41%.

What your are talking abstractly about is the Sean Hannity's, Glen Beck's and Bill O'Reily's, Mike Pappantonio's and Keith Olbermann's of the world. These people are called commentators and they make their living saying outrageous things.

This is yet another of fox's many fabrications. There is no boundary between these so-called "commentators" and the rest of the news staff.

Fox doesn't have to "manufacture support" the proof is in their ratings which they continue to dominate.

"It's not my fault that Fox News, while an out-and-out propaganda network, is also the ONLY network covering relevant issues rather than gossip."

The popularity of the network has nothing to do with its viewpoints and everything to do with the decay of the sector as a whole. Given the choice between a yugo and walking 40 miles to work, i'd choose the yugo too.

The Nintendo DS currently distributes games on Flash cards ;P

Ex: http://www.mediabistro.com/mobilecontenttoday/original/umd_gb_ds_carts.jpg

I know there's quite a bit of hate in the comments about the late submission, but here are my comments on the actual news bit:

[See comment subject]

Also, I hope Randall doesn't dick his reader fan-base by pullng a Scott Adams and pulling the content that's made its way into the book, OFF his site.

Dear Scott, I know you want to make bajillions of moneys through book deals, but you lost this reader when you sold out to your publisher and removed all the blog posts that went into your book. "Oops" just doesn't cut it.

p.s: Slash-CSS is seriously fucked. I really doubt paragraph line-spacing needs to be that massive.

Fox News isn't exactly profitable. The purpose of Fox News is not to make profit, but to make the political situation in the countries they operate in more favorable to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which can save costs elsewhere in the company with tax breaks, reduced regulations, and the like.

Are you kidding me!?!? Fox News revenues are one of the main things keeping News Corp. profitable!

See here: http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/news_corp_profit_falls_30_gains_at_fox_news_help_99799.asp

From the link:

News Corp. is reporting a 29.6% decline in first quarter net profit, saying all media companies are being tested and the year ahead will be difficult.

One highlight: cable network programming operating income is up 31%. According to the report, that growth is "led by affiliate and advertising revenue gains at the Fox News Channel, FX and the Big Ten Network, as well as continued expansion of the Fox International Channels."

Seems like Fox News Channel revenues are a major reason for News Corp. remaining in the black.

Love them or hate them, the Fox News Channel is a ratings giant...far outstripping all the other news channels combined for most demographics and prime timespots. Advertisers will pay for those eyes.

Strat

Rupert loves his Fox News and has plenty of assets to support this no matter what happens.

Fox News needs no such support, for it is gaining viewership and turning profit — unlike the other outfits, which have exposed themselves as liars last year.

Sesame Street is better WITHOUT McDonald's commercials in my humble opinion.

I don't appreciate NPR's constant begging for donations "from listeners like you" any more, than I like commercials.

But letting the government run TV or radio (and thus free us from all solicitations) is gravely dangerous and may lead to totalitarianism within a generation. After a short thaw, for example, Putin's Russia has retaken control of all TV stations — it is not a pleasant place. Similarly, Chavez will soon eliminate the last dissenting TV channel. Do you, seriously, want an "official" government channel to be controlled by the Executive?

Capitalism is great, but we needn't prostrate ourselves to it. Nor should we have blind allegiance to it.

For you, evidently, Capitalism exists to provide us with great things (and be discarded, if it fails — or appears to). In fact, its existence derives from Human Rights — those, with which we are endowed by our creator. It is my right to bake pizza, write software, issue stock and buy it. The society is not suposed to allow me to do it merely for fear of not having pizza — it must allow me to bake it, because it is my right as a free man to do so, or anything I please (which is not actively harming others).

Sadly, this view is getting eroded over the years, and we are worse off because of it. But that's why the US is Capitalist to begin with — it is not written anywhere in the Constitution, that we must be such, we just are. China, for a counter-example, became Capitalist deliberately, because they've decided (correctly), that it is the most efficient way of running an economy...

yet a smart government that is investing in our future is my dream.

The better term is "utopia". Whether it is nice or not, the Government, however smart, is simply not allowed by the Constitution to "invest in our future". There is a fairly limited number of things they are allowed to do, while all other power are left to States and the individuals. If you like the idea so much, push for a Constitutional Amendment — until then, you — and your President — are "shredding the Constitution"...

Many 'large' newspapers are part of media conglomerates that also control cable systems and radio stations. In order for the newspaper protion to survive they will have to cease providing 'free' service to non-subscribers. Cablevision, which controls the Long Island, New York-based Newsday, will be changing their website to a subscription only service starting in June of 2009. Long Island Cablevision subscribers will have access to the site as part of their cable service, while others will have to pay if they want more than 'limited' news. Apparently the S.F. Chronicle will be doing the same thing soon. This is probably the start of a trend that will continue as these companies struggle to make a profit.

Are you quite certain about that? Back in February, CNN won a National Headline Award in the Documentary Or Series Of Reports category for its special "On Deadly Ground: Women Of Iraq" produced by its Special Investigations Unit ... which, as you can see, has been working hard on a lot of things for a long time.

That link sort of proves the GP's point. That piece of "investigative journalism" is a series of interviews in Iraq which demonstrates that life is really hard there for women. Gosh. There's not an investigation, as such.

I respect that reporters take risks when going into war zones and other areas of unrest, but that doesn't turn a human interest piece into investigative journalism.

Considering how 24 hour news networks (aka CNN) have been around for almost 30 years, and they have never managed to have any sort of investigative reporting,

Are you quite certain about that? Back in February, CNN won a National Headline Award in the Documentary Or Series Of Reports category for its special "On Deadly Ground: Women Of Iraq" produced by its Special Investigations Unit ... which, as you can see, has been working hard on a lot of things for a long time.

hell, you can buy the whole company for a dollar

throughout the us and much fo the west, traditional newspaper and television news rooms are dying and laying off personnel left and right. the ad revenue just isn't there anymore

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/nbc/nbcu_to_cut_500_jobs_layoffs_begin_at_nbc_news_bureaus_102371.asp

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_11142071

pretty soon, all we will be left with are 10 reporters, the drudgereport and 10,000 bloviating bloggers

(shudder)

I don't know how many of you have noticed, but the current pope looks and acts like palpatine!!palpatine!!.

It won't work, but not because the left isn't trying to sabatoge Fox as hard as they can.

The story of TechTV began with the MSNBC show, The Site which starred Soledad O'Brien and a computer generated character, Dev Null, who was voiced and controlled by Leo Laporte. I never saw the Site, but TVNewser has a good overview of the show.

After the Site was cancelled, came ZDTV which was owned by Ziff Davis. When Ziff Davis sold the channel to Paul Allen, they changed the name to TechTV.

During that time G4 was started. Owned by Comcast, they bought TechTV and merged the channels calling it G4TechTV, closing down TechTV's San Francisco studio and cancelling Call For Help. From the start there were signs that buying TechTV was simply a way for Comcast to get G4 into more houses by canibalizing the audience of TechTV. They did not offer ScreenSavers host Patrick Norton a contract and while they initially were going to have Leo Laporte appear in pretaped segments, they never actually did that. They also cancelled Fresh Gear and all of TechTV's other shows except for the ScreenSavers and X-Play. Then several months later, G4 dropped the "TechTV" and any pretense that they were going to continue having any technology focus.

After a few months, the Canadian version of G4 offered to hire Laport and begin to tape new episodes of Call For Help, informally called Call For Help 2.0. In August of 2005 the US G4 began to air Call For Help 2.0, but early in the morning with little to no advertising. After several months it was taken off the air. It is still airing in Canada and on the How To channel in Australia. Recently, it has been made available for purchase from Google Video in the USA and is easilly found on torrent trackers.

Now G4 has begun airing Star Trek:TNG and the original Star Trek, as well as the Man Show and Fastlane and increasingly decreasing videogame coverage. Many people have begun to call G4 a SpikeTV clone.

In brighter news, many TechTV alumni have gone on to particiapte in online podcasts and vid casts such as This Week In Tech, dl.tv, Cranky Geeks, Hook Me Up and The Chris Pirillo Show which, when combined, probably produce more original weekly content than TechTV ever did.

http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/original/Times- New-Roman-A-.jpg :)

URGE will not be compatible with Macintosh computers or iPods.

Sorry, but URGE == DOA. Or, put another way, MSMTV will be about as successful as MSNBC.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/ratings/may_ra tings_yearoveryear_numbers_22122.asp

What with journalistic ethics taking a number of hits over the past few years (Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, "Jeff Gannon", et al) - and, Mac rumor "blogs" aside, the mainstream media is beginning to pay heed to bloggers at all levels of the news cycle. Just recently Garrett Graf, who runs the political blog FishbowlDC, was granted access to the White House Press Briefing - the same thing Guckert/Gannon was maligned for attending without any "real" credentials.

Graf is the former editor of the Harvard Crimson, but he's not a journalist in the traditional sense, and he represents the first "legit" blogger allowed into the press gaggle. I'd say that's a very positive sign.

Commercial radio has blown it. Instead of being a resource to initiate youth into various types of unreputable music it has become an icon as a commercial feed-bag. Even college radio is in decline (or declined, in San Diego it is just another corporately sponsored PBS station).

And public radio isn't free radio. Its well done, expensive radio that relies on corporate sponsorship (and viewers like you). It fills its niche, but it is very much like its other corporate brothers and sisters (and it doesn't play music!). Its also a member of the broadcaster lobbying group NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) which makes it a not so friendly neighbor in my book and is reason enough that I won't be sending in my dollar.