Er, I'm not an expert by any means, but does it work this way?
Is every penny you spend in a business counted towards customer aquistion? Like if Charles Schwab buys pens for its brokers, then that counts towards the total cost of customer acquisition?
Also, note that the $80M figure is total over a 7 year period, and for a large chunk of that time, they had no subscription model, the thing was purely ad driven.
Best guess? If you're doing journalism, then you need to be where the news is. Salon put out a lot of tech (SF), culture (NYC) and political (DC) based articles back in their heydey of 1998-2000. You need to have correspondents + a staff in each of those places. That costs $$$.
Now, I'm not saying that they went about in the right way -- the followed the same spend-insane-dollars-to-get-big-marketshare-quickl y scheme that a lot of other dot-coms followed, and I think it's just catching up with them now.
Also, as previously noted, Salon has behaved like a badly run print magazine (see Tina Browns "Talk") from the beginning, not a web-based venture. Remember at one time they even start publishing their own series of books a la Wired/Hotwired?
Yes, theoretically you're right. And I agree with the other poster's comments on the function of an editor.
I don't think Salon editors and writers understood the medium as well as they could have in a Jakob-Nielson-people-dont-read-they-scan-micro-con tent-chunks sort of way. I find the idea of reading a seven to nine page story on the web ridiculous and exhausting.
Who has the time and the patience to sit in front of a computer screen for that long to read a magazine article? (and yeah, I know, laptops, pdas, cells, etc etc blah blah but I think for the majority of people those methods aren't practical.)
For reference, compare the length of the stories on Slate to the stories on Salon. Slate gets the idea of writing + editing content specifically for the web. Salon always seemed to wish it were a print magazine, and never came to terms with the fact that it wasn't.
See the WSJ article. They've spent $80 mil since 1995. For a company that used to have a large staff of writers, plus name brand columnists, plus field offices in NY and Wash DC, that doesn't seem so much. Before the bust, they used to generate _a lot_ of free content.
I stopped reading them about 2-3 years ago. I couldn't stand the overly-long-desperately-needs-to-be-edited articles (which would have been fine for print, but jesus, not on the web).
In the end, it's a shame they couldn't find a sugar daddy to pay the bills like Slate.
In what possible society are hookers considered upper class?
Ancient Greece. They were called the haegera. More like geishas (who aren't prostitutes either), but better educated. They were like intellectual companions + friends, paid (afaik) and sex wasn't out of the question either.
I think you can read about them somewhere in Herodotus's Histories
Science fiction is "a whore" prostituting itself "with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes."
Before I get started, I should say I have seen almost every one of the episodes. The show is entertaining, funny, and surprising at times, but not enough to get over a host of other problems.
Firefly has too many needless characters that don't really contribute to most of the overall story arcs (the preacher, the doctor, that godawful crazy chick, the pilot, etc). But somehow, these characters seem to be in almost every scene. (And before you say that the original Star Trek had a lot of characters that didn't contribute to the story arcs, well, it wasn't like Uhura or Chekov were in _every_ scene, standing in the background + doing literally nothing.)
I heard once that good science fiction should have some aspect of the future or science integral to the plot/story/setting. If you take away the science fiction elements to this show, it doesn't radically change it. Most of the stories + characters stand fine -- in fact, I think the show would have been more successful as an out and out western. (Think a edgier, updated Rawhide or The Rifleman).
It's also highly deriviative. The melding of western and sci-fi goes waaaay back to the pulp magazine days (it wasn't always about sci-fi/horror, kids). It's not derivative in a fresh, new, interesting way (see original Star Wars, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc etc).
As one poster noted, it rips off old spaghetti westerns (and does it badly) but it also rips off bad sci-fi. The whole evil Republic/Empire/Dominion or whatever is tired, tired, tired. Look at the characters.They almost all fit very neatly into staid archtypes. (On a production note, I couldn't get over those lame ass uniforms the republican guys wore, black 30s era flight uniforms with jackboots and those hats. They looked like rejects from Star Wars and countless low-budget British sci-fi series).
Most of the stories, outside one or two, are simply dull + have that "I've seen this kind of thing before" if you're a sci-fi fan. There's not a helluva lot of tension in any of the stories. I' m not that hardcore, but shoot, I could predict what would happen in 90% of the episodes, minute by minute (kicking that guy into the ship's engine was a nice surprise. Too bad they didn't do more of that kind of thing).
To end on a snarky comment: if the lead guy is supposed to be sort of a greedy lowlife I-only-care-about-money type, then why is half his crew utterly useless to his making money? He doesn't, afaik, get a cut off the companion character's earnings (which would make him a pimp, ha!), the preacher, the doctor's crazy sister, really the doctor himself contribute nothing to the bottom line. All they do is take up space + consume resources. That doesn't jibe too well with that lead character's worldview (yah, I know, he's really a softie underneath, heart of gold and all that. Blech).
This show deserves to be cancelled. It just wasn't well put together from the start.
Name a single wildly popular show with more than a few complex main characters.
I'll take that to mean an ensemble cast, which Firefly is unsuccessfully attempting.
Off the top of my head:
MASH
Hill Street Blues
St Elsewhere
Cheers
The Sopranos
The West Wing
Star Trek: TNG
ER
In essence, I agree with you -- large ensemble casts don't usually work on network television, mostly due to the tight format.. fitting character development + an engaging plot into roughly 40 minutes of screen time every week is a daunting task.
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Er, I'm not an expert by any means, but does it work this way?
Is every penny you spend in a business counted towards customer aquistion? Like if Charles Schwab buys pens for its brokers, then that counts towards the total cost of customer acquisition?
Also, note that the $80M figure is total over a 7 year period, and for a large chunk of that time, they had no subscription model, the thing was purely ad driven.
Best guess? If you're doing journalism, then you need to be where the news is. Salon put out a lot of tech (SF), culture (NYC) and political (DC) based articles back in their heydey of 1998-2000. You need to have correspondents + a staff in each of those places. That costs $$$.
l y scheme that a lot of other dot-coms followed, and I think it's just catching up with them now.
Now, I'm not saying that they went about in the right way -- the followed the same spend-insane-dollars-to-get-big-marketshare-quick
Also, as previously noted, Salon has behaved like a badly run print magazine (see Tina Browns "Talk") from the beginning, not a web-based venture. Remember at one time they even start publishing their own series of books a la Wired/Hotwired?
Yes, theoretically you're right. And I agree with the other poster's comments on the function of an editor.
n tent-chunks sort of way. I find the idea of reading a seven to nine page story on the web ridiculous and exhausting.
I don't think Salon editors and writers understood the medium as well as they could have in a Jakob-Nielson-people-dont-read-they-scan-micro-co
Who has the time and the patience to sit in front of a computer screen for that long to read a magazine article? (and yeah, I know, laptops, pdas, cells, etc etc blah blah but I think for the majority of people those methods aren't practical.)
For reference, compare the length of the stories on Slate to the stories on Salon. Slate gets the idea of writing + editing content specifically for the web. Salon always seemed to wish it were a print magazine, and never came to terms with the fact that it wasn't.
See the WSJ article. They've spent $80 mil since 1995. For a company that used to have a large staff of writers, plus name brand columnists, plus field offices in NY and Wash DC, that doesn't seem so much. Before the bust, they used to generate _a lot_ of free content.
I stopped reading them about 2-3 years ago. I couldn't stand the overly-long-desperately-needs-to-be-edited articles (which would have been fine for print, but jesus, not on the web).
In the end, it's a shame they couldn't find a sugar daddy to pay the bills like Slate.
You're right, of course.
But then I always think of Miami Vice. Stayed in the same horrible slot during it's entire run (friday nights, 10pm).
In what possible society are hookers considered upper class?
Ancient Greece. They were called the haegera. More like geishas (who aren't prostitutes either), but better educated. They were like intellectual companions + friends, paid (afaik) and sex wasn't out of the question either.
I think you can read about them somewhere in Herodotus's Histories
To paraphrase Stanislaw Lem :
Science fiction is "a whore" prostituting itself "with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes."
Before I get started, I should say I have seen almost every one of the episodes. The show is entertaining, funny, and surprising at times, but not enough to get over a host of other problems.
Firefly has too many needless characters that don't really contribute to most of the overall story arcs (the preacher, the doctor, that godawful crazy chick, the pilot, etc). But somehow, these characters seem to be in almost every scene. (And before you say that the original Star Trek had a lot of characters that didn't contribute to the story arcs, well, it wasn't like Uhura or Chekov were in _every_ scene, standing in the background + doing literally nothing.)
I heard once that good science fiction should have some aspect of the future or science integral to the plot/story/setting. If you take away the science fiction elements to this show, it doesn't radically change it. Most of the stories + characters stand fine -- in fact, I think the show would have been more successful as an out and out western. (Think a edgier, updated Rawhide or The Rifleman).
It's also highly deriviative. The melding of western and sci-fi goes waaaay back to the pulp magazine days (it wasn't always about sci-fi/horror, kids). It's not derivative in a fresh, new, interesting way (see original Star Wars, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc etc).
As one poster noted, it rips off old spaghetti westerns (and does it badly) but it also rips off bad sci-fi. The whole evil Republic/Empire/Dominion or whatever is tired, tired, tired. Look at the characters.They almost all fit very neatly into staid archtypes. (On a production note, I couldn't get over those lame ass uniforms the republican guys wore, black 30s era flight uniforms with jackboots and those hats. They looked like rejects from Star Wars and countless low-budget British sci-fi series).
Most of the stories, outside one or two, are simply dull + have that "I've seen this kind of thing before" if you're a sci-fi fan. There's not a helluva lot of tension in any of the stories. I' m not that hardcore, but shoot, I could predict what would happen in 90% of the episodes, minute by minute (kicking that guy into the ship's engine was a nice surprise. Too bad they didn't do more of that kind of thing).
To end on a snarky comment: if the lead guy is supposed to be sort of a greedy lowlife I-only-care-about-money type, then why is half his crew utterly useless to his making money? He doesn't, afaik, get a cut off the companion character's earnings (which would make him a pimp, ha!), the preacher, the doctor's crazy sister, really the doctor himself contribute nothing to the bottom line. All they do is take up space + consume resources. That doesn't jibe too well with that lead character's worldview (yah, I know, he's really a softie underneath, heart of gold and all that. Blech).
This show deserves to be cancelled. It just wasn't well put together from the start.
Name a single wildly popular show with more than a few complex main characters.
.. fitting character development + an engaging plot into roughly 40 minutes of screen time every week is a daunting task.
I'll take that to mean an ensemble cast, which Firefly is unsuccessfully attempting.
Off the top of my head:
MASH
Hill Street Blues
St Elsewhere
Cheers
The Sopranos
The West Wing
Star Trek: TNG
ER
In essence, I agree with you -- large ensemble casts don't usually work on network television, mostly due to the tight format