Cute non-threatening boys vs independent single mom. Guess who wins?

As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.

Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted

The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show.  By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that?  The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.

There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control.  For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game.  Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’

The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenious in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks).  It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.

That’s appropriate for something called American Idol.  Is it right for your product?

One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well.  (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.)  The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files.  If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read.  Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.

(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence?  That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)

Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device.  If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.

Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped.  Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.

Shuffle play has its place, but I still love to listen to albums start to finish, letting the artist present their music in their own context.  After playing around a bit last week with Smart Playlists, I’m pleased to offer this post on filling your iPod/iPhone with random albums.  Doing this has brought up a lot of forgotten favorites and released space on my portable device from newer albums that I liked, was tired of but couldn’t bring myself to delete.  It’s entirely refreshed my whole portable listening experience by digging out records I haven’t thought about in years.

Here is an easy step-by-step for getting it done:

1)    In the Control Menu, set Shuffle to “by Album”

2)    Create a new Playlist Folder for your iPod or iPhone.  (For the rest of this post, I’m just going to call it an iPod, OK?)

3)    Create a regular Playlist for your “Musts,” the albums that you still feel like you absolutely must have handy – or perhaps albums you’ve recently acquired.

4)    Drag your Musts into that list and note at the bottom of the iTunes screen how much hard drive space they take up.

5)    This is the critical step. Create a Smart Playlist.  Use the three setting shown in the illustration below:Artist contains [press Space Bar once], Media Kind is Music (to keep out pesky Audiobooks and Podcasts) and Playlist is not [the name of your Musts Playlist], which prevents duplicates.  Use the “Limit” line at the bottom to be however many GBs are remaining on your iPod after you subtract the amount of space reserved for your Musts from Step 4 plus anything else you keep on your iPod (Podcasts, Photos, Videos, etc).  You can add on more lines to fine-tune it for your needs by adding lines like “Last Played is more than 90 days ago,” excluding certain artists or genres, or whatever you fancy.

6)    Now plug in your iPod and select it from the left sidebar.  On the Music tab, select Sync Music: Selected Playlists and deselect the “Automatically fill free space with songs” button.  Down below select the Folder that has your Musts and Random playlists.

7)    Sync and be happily surprised next time you’re out & about with your iPod.

You likely wound up with a few dud albums on your Random Smart Playlist.  Use the Grid View to delete it.  The list will automatically refill to your level of GBs.  Sync again and you’re set.

An important note about maintaining your Random Smart Playlist:  Because you are filling with Albums to some level of GBs, you will inevitably have an incomplete album at the bottom of the playlist.  My suggestion is tonever sort the random playlist in List View.  That way you can always go into List View to delete those fragments from the bottom of the list.  If you don’t do this, after refilling your Random Playlist you will wind up with a number of incomplete albums, obviously an undesirable situation.  Of course you can always Go Nuclear and delete everything in your Random Smart Playlist to refill from scratch, too.  Happy listening!

Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Nowthat would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

Baseball-dedicated magazines have been around since time immemorial and – like every other magazine segment – they aren’t exactly killing it these days.  Baseball Digest, founded in 1942, recently downshifted to an 8x schedule from monthly, while the baseball-heavy Sporting News showed a 39% decline in ad pages for the first half of 2009.  The biggest players in sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine, saw ad pages down 28% and 31% respectively in Q1 2009.  (Curiously SI for Kids is one of only 11 magazinesthat showed an ad page increase so far this year.)

MLB Insiders Club would need to bring something different to the table in order to succeed and what it promises is attractive: “Behind The Scenes looks into the clubhouse and front office of MLB teams” and “MLB Insiders Club Fantasy League Tips!”  First off, it’s surprising to hear that a major league would directly support fantasy leagues.  It would be a lucrative opportunity for a major sport league to get involved in fantasy leagues, but it’s also tantamount to supporting gambling – which has a history, especially in baseball, of being the worst crime a player or manager can commit.  One wonders if the MLB Powers That Be is aware that an official licensed product of this tacit endorsement.

As for “Behind The Scenes,” a review on Baseball Reflection reveals that the magazine practically begs for user-generated content.  The official license may get some access, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee more or better; the premiere issue features an interview with Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, but he’s probably MLB’s most open GM, frequently giving long interviews to blogs like Athletics Nation.  And if UGC is the majority of content, you can be pretty sure the fans mailing it in don’t have any special access.

MLB Insiders Club is published by North American Media Group, a company that specializes in niche media with a few key licenses, including the Professional Golf Association and History Channel.  In addition to magazines, it also pumps out expensive coffee table books.  So for $24/year, you get some indeterminate number of baseball magazines (they don’t say whether its monthly or what) and the opportunity to buy more books (or as the come-on says “Preview Great Books and DVD’s”).  Ouch.

Baseball’s marketing and media sophistication continue to be disappointing and well behind its rivals for attention in the NBA and NFL.  Few of MLB’s teams or players are involved in social networking, while Shaquille O’Neal is the world’s ninth most-followed twitterer (as of this writing) and the NFL has so many tweeters that it had to conjure a “No tweeting during games” policy.  When these other leagues and their team are putting together their communications strategies, they are way past trying to sell magazines to their best customers. With overall attendance down nearly 6% so far this year, MLB needs to do something to make itself more compelling – more necessary – to its fans.  A clever coordinated social networking policy would be an inexpensive, low-risk way to go, especially in light of the vitality of fantasy baseball – one of the original pre-Internet social networks.

More on point: yesterday the Giants E-mailed me an offer for $5 tickets for next week’s Pirates series for my “vote for Pablo.”  Now that’s something I can use.

The ‘hold-back’strategy is ridiculous and totally ignores how most readers actually use their books.  While E-Books only represent a small slice of total sales today (but growing fast), there’s little question that somebody willing to shell out $200-300 for a ‘reading device’ is likely to be a passionate reader.  As one of those, I would surmise that many of the sales on E-Readers are actually incremental to publishers’ income, keeping people like me away from used book stores and libraries.  That’s where the E-Books goldmine is for publishers: not in keeping existing sales but in diverting money away from long-standing secondary and ‘free’ markets.  While its true that publishers get a nice arbitrage gain from the de facto DRM of a first-edition hardback (tough to reproduce cheaply, tough to read freely in its reproductive form), that gain can in turn be picked up by the reader upon completing the book by selling it or trading it.  An E-Book edition is essentially non-transferable.  I pay less – and perhaps the publisher makes less – but its fungibility also destroys its secondary market value.

Take, for example, my current reading: Infinite Jest.  It’s been fifteen years since it was first published, so there are plenty of used copies out there for around $10 and libraries consistently stock it, while a new copy runs $16.  Because of its ease of delivery and portability, I elected to get the $10 Kindle edition with the publisher getting some profit and no incremental printing costs.  Had I purchased a used copy, I would likely have resold it later for half-price – meaning no profit for the publisher, virtual cost of only $5 to me and $10 profit to the used book store (for selling it twice at 50% profit).  So where is the advantage to the publisher in holding it back?  It’s simply ceded its ability to profit off of its back catalog.

This is one of the central mysteries of Kindle Store availability to date.  It features plenty of hot new titles, but the back catalog titles is still mysteriously empty with many major authors most famous works; Roth, Mailer, Pynchon, Heller and Updike just for starters.  Wouldn’t a great cut-rate selection be a great source of found profit with barely any incremental cost?  I understand there may be unanticipated contractual issues (a la last year’s Writer’s Strike over web royalties), but the longer they wait, the more the price will drive towards Zero (as it did for the music industry and iTunes).  Already sites like ebooksbay.org are popping up with ‘free’ back titles.  (I found a fully convertible PDF copy of Gravity’s Rainbow last weekend.  There goes a lost sale.)

On this very same day by coincidence, Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future Of A Radical Price was released for free on Kindle and immediately shot up to #1 on the Kindle sales chart.  I’ll leave his argument for other bloggers, but in Anderson’s eyes, he’s able to do this because he (and presumably his publisher and agent and c.) can use it as a platform to make money other ways: speaking fees, leverage at his job, increased opportunities generally.  This is also the direction the music industry has taken with its ‘360-degree’ contracts for its biggest artists; Live Nation taking a cut of all of an artist’s revenue streams, from ticket sales to licensing.  The book publishing industry needs to figure out its ‘Freemium’ strategy quickly.  As a post on Mashable points out this morning, not all Free business models are created equally.  People will pay (as I have done with IJ) for convenience or added value.  What can book publishers bring to the table?  Figuring this out quickly before E-Readers become commonplace – look for them to spread like wildfire among textbook-toting students – is absolutely urgent for an industry that’s lived off the same industrial-based business model for hundreds of years.

One of the things I most looked forward to in my Kindle was the magazine store.� For a fraction of the cover price in most cases, the full text of a magazine is quickly and seamlessly downloaded to your Kindle.� If you order a subscription, each new issue supposedly turns up automatically upon publishing.

For publishers, you�d think this would be a great deal: distribute a copy with no physical costs, satisfy your hungriest readers, allow inexpensive sampling and get a few more eyeballs on the advertising.� (Disclosure: I have no idea what Amazon�s deal points are with publishers.)

In its actual use, however, the Kindle Store seems to be doing everything possible to frighten away new potential readers.� The Kindle Store, from which every issue is sold, is a neglected sad piece of real estate that does little to provoke buying.

First, KS forgets the basics of single copy sales: featuring what�s actually in an issue.� Instead of that week�s cover lines and an illustration, you get a narrative of what the magazine�s history and its mission statement.� So instead of buying Newsweek with this review and that think piece and such-and-such�s guest column, you�re faced with a black box.

The review system doesn�t help either.� It appears to be entirely unmoderated.� I found one one-star review that said I love the magazine but I�m canceling to save money.� How is that a review of issue content?

On such a small screen, of course I don�t expect the full featured infographics that are the one true unimpeachable USP of magazines, but I was surprised to get no illustrations whatsoever. The New York Times is able to provide photo lead-ins for its Kindle-formatted issues, why can�t The Atlantic?

Finally, the pricing structure is bizarre.� A single issue of Newsweek at 49 cents is an awesome bargain.� But The Atlantic charges a monthly fee even though it does not publish monthly; it�s a 10x.� Worst of all, the just-added Economist has a single issue price of $5.49, which pretty much says Stay Away, Do Not Buy Me in the competitive arena of the Store.� I�d also saw the discrepancy makes its competitors also look like it does not value its content highly enough since there are no ad impressions attached at this point.� I appreciate that the pricing is probably set by the publishers, but some iTunes-style guiding hand could help a lot here.

I know the Kindle DX is supposed to amending many of these issues with its larger screen and greater graphic capabilities, but expecting me to pay $480 to get a better magazine delivery system is just not going to happen.� In the meantime, Amazon should spend a little time in the Kindle Store making the magazines and newspapers a little more enticing.� You know, with marketing.

I still stumble across the Contact entries of departed friends and family in my phone and my various electronic address books.  To delete them feels disrespectful, but honestly when will I need these again? When is it OK to unfriend the dead?

Dolla was one of Twitter's hottest topics on May 19. "Hmmm, how can we monetize that?"

All of this unpleasantness brings me to this post’s real topic. Especially in the face of 8.9% unemployment, there has been considerable discussion lately over online reputation management. Sure, we know not to put up pictures of partying and other hijinks. But the ultimate uncomfortable social network question faces all of us participants: blogging and micro-blogging our private lives and thoughts, registered and active on any number of social network sites, what happens to all this stuff when you die?(And remember, death never comes at a convenient time.)

This is no small problem for media companies and people actively involved in self-branding and promotion. The rapper Dolla, who was murdered earlier this week, had just opened a Twitter account and posted his first tweets. His MySpace page (56,000+ friends) has no mention of his passing except RIP notes from his fan base, while a couple of telephone promotions still feature his voice hyping his latest single. (Try dialing (678) 500-8475 to hear Dolla speak from beyond the grave.) This is no small problem for his record company, which is still presumably going to try to shift a few units of his upcoming album.  The sheer volume of tweets after the news got out should be encouraging to those who still want to make dollas off Dolla.

Vote for Nick!

Major League Baseball has a terrific series of unified web sites packed with all the information you could ever want (assuming you’re not a Baseball Prospectus type). When Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was suddenly killed earlier this season, the folks who run the MLB web sites were faced with the task of stripping all his information respectfully from the network. Unfortunately there were a couple of embarrassing cases where his name was missed and remained on the site – most egregiously, as of May 19 on MLB’s official news site, Adenhart was still touted as an up-and-coming pitching prospect.

(MLB also made the curious decision to cease selling Adenart’s name on customized jerseys. Possibly respectful, but also cutting off an avenue for fans to pay tribute. In fairness, this also prevents using Adenhart as a political statement, having been killed by a drunk driver.’ Imagine a ballpark MADD/Adenhart protest and you can (possibly) understand that MLB would not want its brands involved.’ Beer is a pretty big sponsor of all things MLB.)

So what about the rest of us? Looking over at my links over on the right-hand sidebar, I have nine social media sites that I actively use and there are several others that I’ve abandoned without pulling down my pages. If I were to disappear tomorrow, what would be my legacy? My tweets? My blog? I would hope not, but the reality is this is the best evidence of my existence, especially to friends and others that I don’t see on a regular basis (which is, what, 75%+ of most folks’ Facebook friends?)’ And what should I do about it?

One company believes it has the answer.’ Deathswitch promises to send out an E-mail upon your death, which could include your passwords, final wishes or (most tantalizingly) the last word in an argument.’ A premium account would prompt as many as 30 different mails sent to your friends, enemies and other interested parties.

The simplest thing is to do what you should do for all your interests: make sure that your loved ones know what you want done with this stuff.  Recognizing that your reputation may be it when you leave ‘ and that your reputation may be founded entirely on your public life make taking care of your online presence an essential part of your tending to your legacy. And since the health of social media depends on pages of user-generated content creating advertising platforms – at least that’s what it is today – you may wish to consider if you want an ad on your electronic tombstone.

Further Reading

• Wikihow – How to Share Your Obituary with Your Online Friends
• Barefeet Studios – Death, Social Media, Personal Branding

My bet – or, as last as things move these days, this month’s bet – is that we’ll start to see a merging of the forms.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in this week’s New Yorker, the biggest handicap that underdogs give themselves is engaging in competition on the terms of the stronger party.  An underdog’s chance of victory nearly triples if it finds a way to not play the game.  Right now newspapers – whether they admit it or not – find themselves the underdog for information distribution but still (so far) the best at obtaining information.  So why do they insist on sharing the same distribution models as their potential destroyers?

The New York Times' new reader uses AIR capabilities to flow text and show video. (Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

The New York Times is one of the best at this.  To my knowledge, it was the first with a dedicated iPhone application, it looks great on a Kindle, and its new Adobe AIR format is simply spectacular.  Still, as everyone knows, the Times is hurting and in talks with everyone from Google to Geffen to find a suitor.

So instead of wringing our hands about public trusts and eroding institutions, perhaps we should be asking of our Third Estate “What can you do to adapt?” Something basic to your business model that doesn’t play to the other guys’strength?  Here are a few I’ve thought about:

• Does it really need to be daily? If people are already receiving a stream of real-time news everywhere they go and at their desks, do newspapers need to be real-time, too?  Local ‘alternatives’ with a more magazine-like format and deeper stories like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly are well positioned to take over many of the essential local functions of a newspaper – and with lower circulation, their ad rates are less prohibitive, meaning they get the bar, restaurant and nightlife ads that are essentially blocked from big dailies.  Reliance on major retailers to be your biggest advertisers is a recipe for death in an era where retail doors will close continuously, like, forever.  (But what about the recent SF/LA closure of The Onion?  I’ll address that in a minute.)
• Does the news need to lead? Every news site has a ‘Most Frequently Viewed’ or ‘Most Frequently E-Mailed’feature.� It’s very rare that the top stories, even on the most serious sites, are today’s news. (Or as SFist notes about the Huffington Post today:  Boobies.  Boobies. Boobies. Boobies. Boob.)  I would hate to see our locals ignore the news, but why couldn’t it be treated like a magazine cover  with offers of advice, news coverage, quizzes… Things that reel the reader in.Here are today’s SF Chronicle leads:
  * A stricter, drier Bay to Breakers
  * Craigslist cuts ‘erotic services’ section
  * If state cuts too deep, it loses stimulus funds
  * Senate testimony sheds light on alleged torture
  * Young boost diversity as population agesSeriously, not a single one of these lines would sell a magazine at the checkstand.  No editorial viewpoint expressed, no help offered – simply no answer to Why Buy?  Why not feature elements from throughout the paper?  ”Take your medicine, it’s good for you” doesn’t work for marketers in any other industry, including medicine.  Why is it the norm here?
• Does it need to be shaped like a newspaper? Why not a glossy cover?  Billions of magazines have done just fine that way.  In particular, I;m a fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker’s newsstand strategy: a single compelling image with a flap violator that entices the reader to pick up the magazine and look inside.
• Can it be targeted better than “It’s local, it’s yours”? In printing ‘All The News That Fits’, newspapers lose the single biggest weapon a marketer has: the freedom to select an audience.  It’s wonderful that the Chronicle tries to express the region’s diversity and interests, but I think it’s fair to say that the news interests of, for example, a 70-year old woman in the Sunset and a 25-year old man in The Mission are very different.  So how come the same information in the same format is being sold to both?  Using copy splits, could different front pages go to different neighborhoods – and not just regional sections to outlying areas?
  It’s also worth noting that this could open up new revenue streams.  In my opinion, one of the seeds of the demise of The Onion in SF/LA is that it didn’t take the thinly-veiled prostitution ads that are easy money for the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.  With CraigsList now discontinuing those same ads, that’s a lot of advertising cash set free.  Where will it go?Well, if you had a well-targeted newspaper that didn’t need to worry about offending its audience with certain content/ads, you just might be able to scoop it up.  So, yes, I’m imagining a world where Candy TS Outcalls replaces Macy’s.)
• Further, why is it serving so much of the area? In an era when advertisers pay more for the specificity of an audience, why is the San Francisco Chronicle the leading paper of Contra Costa County?  And Oakland?  And most of remote Northern California?  Surely some of these readers are more profitable than others.  And those that aren’t can get their news somewhere else.
• Does every copy need to have the same content? When I received the Sunday paper, the first thing I did every week was throw away 50% or more of it.  Why not allow a la carte sections?
• Is it automatic for its customers – and especially its best ones? Mark Cuban – who got me thinking about this originally and reels off another thousand or so ideas in his blog post on the subject – points out that his local paper was blowing one of the very basic elements of keeping him engaged: pricing policies.  Aside from receiving no volume discount, Cuban says that the billing policies discourage people from staying involved.  Why aren’t subscriptions annual = or far more?  In the core areas, closest to the printer and the most attractive identified customers, especially those that own their home and are less likely to move, why not offer 5 years, 10 years, even a lifetime subscription?
• Finally, what unique advantages can newspapers bring to ‘real-time’ media? Yes, there’s still an opportunity for symmetric warfare for newspapers.  My old colleague Sebastian Provencher at Praized Media recently blogged on just this with regard to the Yellow Pages, but it applies equally well to local papers.  His 2300-word post on real-time information flow between local merchants and customers should be required reading for local media outlets that seeks to make its revenue from being an intermediary in these relationships.  You should have a look, but I can boil it down to one tantalizing word: souq.

I’m curious for your thoughts on this since I know my few readers are newspaper lovers, too.  Don’t forget to comment!

As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.

The big bellwether is now upon us.� Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch.� (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now.� But it was also schizophrenic.� Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)

While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it�s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again.� Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target � say, ukulele players � while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction.� In other words, not just the price is better; it�s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.

So what for magazines to do?� The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do.� Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount.� ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed?� Probably more like $30.� Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy.� I�ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)

But the reality is that it�s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography.� In the face of low demand, we�ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years � maybe months.

Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side.� The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature.� It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up.� (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)

HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines � for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example �100 Days� magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it.� Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content.� In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers.�� More on this in a coming post.

Joba Chamberlain opens the second game ever at the new Yankee Stadium. Empty seats outnumber specators in the exclusive areas behind home plate and the dugouts. (Flickr / Fansherpa)

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar happening in my own backyard.  At Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum, all the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions in town and a Sunday afternoon.  What we found instead was a micro-market in disarray.  As the credit markets teetered last October, the market for sports tickets has apparently fallen apart as well.

The first indication there was a problem was the total lack of online ticketing activity.  There were practically no offers on CraigsList, even from brokers, and none at all on eBay.  At the walk-up ticket booth, we found that we could buy any section in the house, including the Diamond Level.  This should simply never be the case. The Diamond Level is a very limited “VIP” area, maybe 60 seats tops, right behind the plate on the playing field level.  Seats go for $225 and include free food and drink service for the whole game.

Weirdest of all was the scene inside the stadium.  The A’s bifurcate each of the two seating levels – a minimum of two pricing levels in each deck.  In both decks, there was a cluster of people behind the plate, emptiness for several sections as the seating moved along the infield, another cluster in the sections where the new pricing tier begins, again fading to nothing.

The mystery is why shouldn’t the people forced out to the outfield be able to sit in these empty “mezzo-sections.”  The answer could come from a nimble dynamic pricing system at game time.  As airlines like Virgin and JetBlue have discovered with exit rows sold at check-in, why not ask fans as they arrive if they would like to purchase a better seat for an extra few dollars?  It would be an easy thing to equip ushers with Palm-style barcode and credit card machines like those carried by the clerks at The Apple Store.  Everybody gets the opportunity to move closer (or elect not to), getting rid of the weird empty spaces and (I’m assuming) presenting a better, more invigorating environment for the home team.  (I know they’re supposed to ignore the crowd, but ask any actor or musician if they’d rather play to a full orchestra than have the front rows empty and the crowd loosely dispersed.)

Meanwhile across the bay, the Giants are trying out a number of dynamic pricing policies.  First, the team partnered up with a firm to build elastic pricing around its unsold inventory for the least attractive games. Last week, though, came the real reckoning – and a big indication that the team is running scared about its attendance.  Ticket prices were dropped 40% for the Giants series this week against the Dodgers, traditionally the most attractive opponent.  Granted the team is trying to stir up interest for later in the year – it appears they’ll be competitive in a moderately challenging division – but to have to do this so early and against the team’s best natural rivarly is surprising.  One wonders how scared the Giants are about advance sales for the rest of the year.

In the Oakland A’s case, the lack of a fluid ticket market is framed by the fact that the Oakland Coliseum is a horrible dump, getting dumpier every day.  The tarps in the third deck look weathered and depressing, while the bathrooms, parking lot and facilities remain some of the worst for a major league sport.  Nevertheless the empty seat patterns – along with all the unsold display ad inventory throughout the stadium – are clear indications that baseball is not recession-proof.  There are easy ways to make profit from making markets more efficient.  Let’s see if the A’s and their brethren take up the challenge.

Quaker Oats, one of America�s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.� The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times � sick of bailout-themed ads yet? � but also for the way that it reframes oats as a �power food.�� That is indeed a new, compelling USP for the brand and subtly introduces the idea of value as a �bang for the buck� food.�

A closer look shows something else: a new emphasis on �bang for the buck� marketing.� By bringing all of its product lines under a single campaign, however big or expensive, Quaker must be saving here, there and everywhere on its promotional and internal costs.� The most obvious way is the now-gone requirement to discretely support each of its panoply of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, Quaker Quick Oats, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Quaker Oatmeal Squares and on & on.� It also means potential reductions in tmarketing personnel, in-store marketing, graphic staff (fewer executions), agency support,�and so forth.� One wonders once the initial advertising launch blast is over with where the savings will go: into the product (reaching consumers) or simply as a hedge against falling revenue.��

Either way Quaker looks smart.� The company gets a new convincing USP out there, it cuts costs and � as James Surowiecki points out in this week�s New Yorker � finds a way to keep innovating and marketing in the throes of the recession.�

�a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies� return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did.

The Quaker Oats campaign may be a bellwether for the overall marketing economy. As long as we see only one campaign for all its many products � I count 30 currently on its web site � we�ll know that US brands are still in cost-cutting mode.� But when the company starts to support its individual brand lines again � especially though general advertising, not just couponing and in-store marketing � then we can surmise that it�s sufficiently confident that spending is rising again.�

Wired

The only hook here is that (ostensibly) it’s about the music business.� It isn’t; no insights whatsoever into its demise.� Oh, sure, the suits don’t feel the soul of the product; executives playing out of position make poor decisions; changes in technology can overwhelm a company.� But this is news? Really, this is just a litany about working a crap office job — and you can go to a cocktail party and find that story any day.

So bad, it makes me not trust Wired‘s book reviews ever again.� Nice work, Wired.

The only place you’ll see this kind of guy today is on late night infomercials – or getting ready to call on a VC about his new web site.� In a big box retail world, it’s hard to imagine the Frisbee even making it past the buyer, much less becoming a large-enough hit that each home would have several.

In the first year, Wham-O sold as many as 40 million hoops; by 1960, 100 million, a mark no other toy had ever reached. After too many households had two or three of the hoops, the fad evaporated, leaving Wham-O marooned on a mountain of tubular plastic. Total profit: only $10,000, a result of business inexperience and millions of unsold hoops.

�We completely lost control,� Mr. Knerr told Forbes magazine in 1982.

The Hula Hoop financial debacle was unusual, however. The company had done, and would do, considerably better on products like the Frisbee, for which it bought the rights, streamlined and named. Brought to market in 1957, the Frisbee became a lasting diversion, and even the basis of competitive sports, some of which Wham-O invented.

Other Wham-O brainstorms included the exceedingly bouncy SuperBall, the Water Wiggly sprinkler, the Slip �N Slide water slide, the Limbo Game and Silly String, a seemingly endless stream of liquid that hardened after being expelled from an aerosol can, all too often in a child�s hair.

New York Times: Richard Knerr, 82, Craze Creator, Dies

Back in June, the Supreme Court issued its decision invoking Brown v Board Of Education to end racial quota systems in Louisville and Seattle public schools. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, legal support of diversity is a an assumptive underpinning of our lives that anyone born from 1965 forward has had to take for granted.The reaction dramatized what a swing this was:

As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his blistering dissent, this decision “upsets settled expectations, creates legal uncertainty, and threatens to produce considerable further litigation, aggravating race-related conflict.” Judge John Paul Stevens went further, noting the “cruel irony” in the majority opinion’s evocation of Brown v. the Board of Education as justification for its position, proclaiming that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

Regardless of whether you think this decision good or bad, it’s still a fascinating twist in our recent history, and that twist is the subject of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book The Nine: Inside The Secret World Of The Supreme Court. Using the same style Bob Woodward uses to mixed effect in his books — top to bottom sources speaking without attribution — Toobin paints a colorful, if incomplete feeling, view of the last 15 years of the Court’s life. The color comes from the obvious high level of access he had to certain of the Justices or their top staffers (especially O’Connor, Souter and Scalia) , while the incompleteness stems from the sense that other of the Justices were less willing to participlate (Thomas, Stevens, Roberts and Alito).

The book’s core thesis is that the Supreme Court, as one might fear, is led more by ideology than legal sense. Of course, this on its face is not surprising when any Court vote, with the same set of facts before it and high level of intellect applied, can lead to a wide variety of opinions on the same issue. The Nine‘s true value is in tracing the story of how the Court (and its people) moved from left to right on so many issues and basic tenets in the last few years, from reliable protector of certain attitudes about privacy, liberty and a certain style of government to something far less willing to support these assumptions in the years ahead. It also clearly demonstrates that the centrists still hold the true power in the Court, though because of the hyper-political climate around Court nominees, the number of centrists is declining over time.

Toobin misses the chance to be explicit about the biggest implication of the rise of the Roberts Court. This book is really about the dismantling of the last line of defense of the New Deal. It also could have used one last edit-rinse (at least four times we are told that Souter’s judicial heroes are Harlan and Hand), but it I’m pleased to report that he also clearly and efficiently explains the contentious legal issues behind recent key cases.

All in all, The Nine is a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand the often-eccentric people behind the Court and how the institution uses its power.

Excerpts at CNN

• How conservatives won the court back
• O’Connor led the court on abortion
• Bush v. Gore marks high court’s low point
• Court rewrites the law on gay rights
• 2008 election will define court’s future

http://entroporium.com/mp3/01%20On%20the%20Transmigration%20of%20souls.mp3

From Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul:

Ours is a time of connection. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted.

Foreign Policy: The Day Nothing Much Changed

[I]f you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11, what is remarkable is how little the world has changed. The forces of globalization continue unabated; indeed, if anything, they have accelerated. The issues of the day that we were debating on that morning in September are largely the same. Across broad measures of political, economic, and social data, the constants outweigh the variations. And, five years later, the United States’ foreign policy is marked by no greater strategic clarity than it had on Sept. 10, 2001…. Perhaps the truest thing that changed because of 9/11 was the way in which the Pentagon’s budget soared.

From In The Shadow Of No Towers by Art Spiegelman:

Martin Amis reminds us in The Guardian that the Iraq War may be but a distraction to the war in which we have been engaged:

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven’t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion… Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason… The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation – it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

Thinking about the long-term and "victory," in a world more and more besieged by "Inconvenient Truths," does it really make sense to have the values inculcated by our presence to be so overtly comsumption-based? What local children are going to see all of our cool gadgets and huge cars and not want at least a chance to own those items? If we’re worried about the pressure on our oil economy that China poses now, just wait until the rest of the equitorlal world realizes that it can afford air conditioning in every building.

It’s not just democratic values our military ventures should bring to the developing world. It’s sustainable values, too.

Ars Technica – iPods at war
Also: Miltary.com: David Sears: American Stuff

Random thoughts on a day of defeat:

Isn’t it appropriate that I have the US entry following the Saudi entry? We’ll follow those guys anywhere. (rimshot) I’ll be here all the week, don’t forget to tip the waitresses.

Rant coming: If people get so upset about American flag-burning, why is it OK to wear Old Glory as a bandana or a T-shirt or facepaint or a bikini top or a towel or…? I am always shocked when I see alleged patriots displaying old faded flags, flags touching the ground, faded flag bumper stickers, flags left out at night, unlit… It’s fundamentally wrong and easy to see & know that it’s wrong. When the military has elaborate routines about how the flag should be hung, folded and destroyed with honor, surely my fellow citizens should easily see that wadding up their faded American flag t-shirt and throwing it on the bedroom floor or drooling ice cream on it is disrespective and certainly not patriotic. Am I wrong in thinking that the people who are most likely to “wear the flag” are closely related or perhaps even the same people who get so upset over flag desecration? Shouldn’t proposed constitutional amendments banning flag-burning also cover bikinis?

Which is all just a way of working to this next thought: When I see people from other nations at the World Cup wearing their national colors, I usually think “Wow, that’s so great that they have such spirit.” On the other hand, if I see a bunch of Americans with stars and stripes painted on their faces or chests or whatever, I’m embarassed. Am I wrong to feel shame? Or would it be worse to be at the stadium and not proudly display the colors?

My colleague Simon over at My Name Is Betty, who has some pretty great World Cup music coverage going himself, heard this same complaint from me and responded “As for the people in national dress, you’re embarrassed? English national dress seems to be a shaved head and a beer gut, maybe a novelty hat. I’m fortunate to live in London though – my street alone has Ghanaian, Trinidadian, English, Australian, Portuguese, Italian and even Jamaican flags out, and it wouldn’t take me too long to gather the rest. It’s good fun, every four years doesn’t come often enough.” It must be nice to live in a place where immigrants are considered pluses.

I worked for a Frenchman for a number of years and he told me several times how amazing he thought it was that there so many flags displayed in America. I plead ignorance until we looked out at the view from North Beach and, sure enough, every building in downtown SF was flying the colors. It was shocking to really see this, and this was long before 9/11. It’s nice to be patriotic, sure, but it looked more neurotic than anything else, like the old saw that nothing is Cool that has to continually tell you it’s Cool.

And now to the task at hand. It’s completely ridiculous to try to sum up my home country’s rich musical tapestry in a couple of songs. Just think of the musical forms that are indigenous and original to the US: rap, jazz, surf, tin pan alley, musical theatre, blues, country… When I think of how my “World Cup World Tour” is trying to put this same straightjacket on 31 other countries, it brings home that I’ve taken on an enormous task with at best well-meaning chutzpah and at worst total arrogance. (And doesn’t that make me so quintessentially American?) But just to be clear, I’m not trying to sum up or size up countries or their musical output with just a couple of songs, but simply trying introduce a taste of the musical life that floats through each nation’s cultural aether. Hey, I can try, right?

So in that spirit, I offer for the United States its greatest living songwriter ruminating on natural disaster & cultural collision and two of its most rockin’ clown princes having a cultural collision and just being silly. Enjoy.

Bob Dylan – High Water (For Charley Patton).mp3
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with Rufus Thomas – Chicken Dog.mp3

Insult to injury: There was no baseball on the night after the US-Ghana game.

Transgression: Somebody plays Brian Eno’s hour-long ambient piece “Thursday Afternoon” on the jukebox at their local drinking hole. Anger and discomfort ensue. Remember this next time you want to conduct an anthropological experiment (or a prank).
NYT: True Life Tales – Unhappy Hour

“What makes a great conservative rock song? The lyrics must convey a conservative idea or sentiment, such as skepticism of government or support for traditional values. And, to be sure, it must be a great rock song.”

Surprisingly, Mr. Miller missed the all-time greatest conservative song (in the revulsing conservative kinda way): “Student Demonstration Time” by The Mike Love Beach Boys.

The National Review: Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs
The National Review: Another 50 Conservative Rock Songs

Bono guest-edited The Independent UK today. If you’ve been hoping for a newspaper in which rock stars write about politics and politicians write about music, today is a great day for you.

Condoleezza stands in from the political side with the dreaded “Ten Best” list. Ms. Rice has mostly classical music on her ipod, but still gets hip with Cream when she’s working out at the gym. “Believe it or not, I loved acid rock in college – and I still do.”

Features” href=”http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/article484642.ece”> The Ten Best Musical works – chosen by Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State
Probably the only Ten Best List you’ll ever see to feature both Kool & The Gang and Mussorgsky.

Previously: Bush’s ipod filled with infringing files

Everyone,
I just returned from my first trip to Louisiana this weekend since Katrina. I spent the entire trip back trying to decide if I wanted to tell you all about what is happening down there, because honestly if I had the choice, I would choose not to know. But in the end, I figured e-mail you all was better than talking to each of you on the phone and over e-mail.

It is beyond what you can imagine… it’s hell on earth. I flew into Baton Rouge, which sits about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, and the city is destroyed, but not by the storm. There are over 750,000 refuges from New Orleans in Baton Rouge. People are camping on the side of the roads, in their cars if they have them, and all over the LSU campus. The first thing you notice is how outraged everyone is. The people of Baton Rouge don’t want us here. There seems to be no plan for the New Orleaneans once they are dropped off in Baton Rouge, and everyone is confused, horrified, or worse. They know this is potentially a permanent situation, or at least the way it will be for the next several months, and it is safe to say they are as scared as the homeless and exhausted refuges that litter their streets.

My sister and I rented four houses in Houma, Louisiana, which is about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge or about 30 miles west of New Orleans. We spent the weekend moving our family there, then our friends, and then in the end, people we met that had no other options. When I left, we had perhaps forty people with another twenty on the way. It is an amazing thing to see: your best friends, your family, and everyone in between huddled on floorboards, makeshift beds, and sleeping bags. It is truly like a nuclear bomb hit our city, and we are doing everything we can just to keep everyone housed, fed, and with water.

Saturday morning, I decided to go into New Orleans. There were far too many people from our home unaccounted for, but beyond that, New Orleans is part of everything that I am; it’s more than a city to those of us who call it home. It’s part of your family, and with the stories of looting, flooding, and complete inability of the government to make the matter better, it was as if a family member was being slowly killed. I was told by everyone it was impossible to get in and I would be arrested for trying, but I’m sure you call imagine how little that did to deter me.

There is no way to get into the city. The roads that are open are being used to bring people out, and no traffic is headed into the city. I had a rental car, and I started to drive the 30 miles on backroads that I guessed wouldn’t be flooded. I made it about half way before there was no way to get into the city by car. I loaded up a backpack with as much water as I could carry, two packs of breakfast bars, three canisters of bug spray, and an extra pair of shoes. Then I started walking.

From there, it was hell on earth.

First, there is the climate. It is almost 90 degrees, and the humidity plus the still water everywhere has made the swamp come alive with bugs. Trying to describe the mosquitos is almost impossible. Do you know the sound of the wind in the north when a blizzard is happening? The “whirring” sound? That is the sound this many bugs make. You have to wear long sleeve shirts and pants, and you are drenched with sweat because of the heat.

The first group of people I met were very friendly. I traded my ipod for a kid’s dirt bike so I could make better time, and they gave me some extra water. They did their best to warn me it wasn’t safe to head into the city, but they didn’t argue when I said there were people we couldn’t find. They warned me about what neighborhoods to avoid, and they said beyond everything else, it was critical to stay away from the police. They would force you to leave by putting you on a bus destined for who knows where, and if you resisted, they’d shoot you. It was the first I saw of a constant epidemic: the police and the government are considered absolute enemies by Katrina survivors. At first, I tried not to judge and simply considered that shortsighted, but over the next two days, I started to understand where it came from.

I got into the outskirts of the city by about 2pm… an upscale neighborhood called “Metaire,” where most of the money of New Orleans lives. To even get that far had already involved about half a mile of swimming. There is no way I can get you to understand just how destroyed everything is. It’s not just underwater – it’s more that the swamps have risen over New Orleans. There are snakes and alligators everywhere, and the more you see, the more you realize the city isn’t going to be livable for who knows how long.

And then there are the bodies. I first started seeing them as I crossed from Metaire into what is called “mid city.” Have you ever been to Jazz Fest? The neighborhood you drive through to get there and the fairgrounds are called “mid city.” It was the first place where I saw them. Before this weekend, I had only seen a few dead bodies in my entire life: traffic accidents, I once witnessed a shooting, and then funerals. I don’t know how many dead people I saw this weekend. Some have been pushed against dry spots by what I am assuming are rescue workers. Others are just floating in the water. Then there are all the houses with red marks on them, meaning there is someone dead inside. The most horrifying part of all of it is what happens when a body is floating in the water for two or three days. It’s barely recognizable as a person. When you see one, it is riddled with mosquitos and who knows what else.

The other thing you have to understand is people are still everywhere. Any idea the media may have given you about a city wide evacuation is insane. I found hundreds if not thousands of people in all the different neighborhoods, and they have no intention of leaving. First and foremost, they have nowhere to go. And having come from Baton Rouge, the people that did get evacuated are simply unloaded from the busses, told loose plans of food that is coming, and told to hold tight and someone will come up with a plan. It’s chaos. Second, they don’t want to leave. They don’t trust they will ever be let back in, and they certainly are not going to allow their homes to be pillaged by the people crafty enough not to get kicked out. Finally, they just don’t believe the argument that the city will be unsafe and riddled with disease. The people still in New Orleans are our uneducated and angry masses. You know the people of the world that “don’t beleive” in AIDS, who thinks the government is out to get them, and don’t understand why they should ever get jobs when unemployment pays just fine? Try convincing them typhoid fever is real. But beyond that, they are armed and angry, they have already survived five straight days of no food and no water, and they don’t believe those who haven’t gotten them food or water are going to find a place for them to live. I know it sounds ignorant on their part, but can you imagine it? I was there on Saturday, five days after the storm, and still no one had been told where to go for food or water. People are surviving by breaking into each other’s homes. It’s chaos, and it’s dangerous, and there doesn’t seem to be a plan to fix anything any time soon.

My main goal was to go to the homes of family and friends and make sure everyone was safely out of the city. I grew up in the 9th Ward – it’s one of the lowest income areas in the city, and it is also the sight of the first levi break. For me to get to my childhood home, I would have needed to dive down underwater just to get to the roof. I went to the second house we lived in after that. It’s roof had been torn off, and there was a body floating not fifty feet away from the front porch. I wish I could say the journey to friends’ houses fared better, but I can’t. Most of the homes were either completely submerged, sitting in ten to fifteen feet of water, or just not standing anymore. I found three people I knew in all, and they set off for Houma that afternoon.

Then I started to explore the city. Like I said, it is hell on earth. The people are furious. They feel as if they have been abandoned. You have to understand, there is no power anywhere. The rescue crews are going through New Orleans proper, not all the neighborhoods where people live. Most of the city doesn’t even think there is a rescue effort underway at all. It became clear to me the one thing people need is communication, and in the absence of communication, fear takes people over. I never realized how powerful the raw ability of communicating is. There is nothing more important to restoring order than giving the leaders an ability to get messages to everyone.

I know you have all heard about people firing on helicopters. I’m certainly not saying it is right, but after being there, I understand. For five days, helicopters were flying overhead, but none of them are even so much as dropping water or food down for people. They fly by using load speakers saying that anyone found looting or stealing will be arrested, and those are the helicopters that are followed by gunshots, from what I saw. I don’t know who is controlling the message being given to everyone, but they need to be replaced. The only government group anyone has seen are the police with sawed off shotguns threatening to arrest everyone who is walking around on the streets. Everyone is scared about their future, about their friends and family, and about their city, and fear leads people to do amazing things. Like I said, I’m not saying firing guns at the helicopters is the right thing to do by any means, but after being down there, I understand.

When I left, I thought I was going to see the 3rd world, but it isn’t the third world. It’s a state of war. People don’t even know who they are fighting, but they know they are at war. Twice, I had to bike at full speed away from gangs that came at me, and before I left the city, I had my cash, my backpack with my food and change of clothes, and my camera stolen from me. It’s like a family member of mine has been possessed by a confused, frightened, angry force that can’t be stopped. Every interaction with someone who is supposed to be helping, like the helicopters flying overhead or the police barking threats only makes it worse.

When I left for New Orleans, I thought I wanted to help the people I couldn’t find. But once there, I realized I was just trying to feed my selfish vanity of wanting to see the city in turmoil. If it was flooded and there was chaos, I wanted to see it and be a part of it. It was as if I was one of those idealistic kids who wanted to head off to war to seek glory. I’ll never forget this weekend my entire life, and I’ll spend years wishing I could. You just can’t describe what it is like to see your hometown that you love, that is a part of everything you are, with dead bodies floating in the street and the people you consider “your people” firing guns at strangers and hating everyone and everything. It was one of the worst things I have ever felt or seen. It’s a war being fought against no one.

But not all is ruined. I was thrilled to see the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the central business district were all ok. The shipping yards along Tchapitoulas were also undamaged. It is enough to make you believe the city can be salvaged.

I got back to Houma Sunday morning, and that is where the real work began. We’ve been trying to construct mosquito nets around the houses. Jjust using screen doors and screen windows isn’t enough, because of how many people we have living there. Opening the door for ten seconds every hour can make the house unlivable. We managed to get a generator going, and we are using it to boil water, keep food cold, and charge up non-working cell phones (we can make calls out of state, but we can’t receive any phone calls with in-state phone numbers).

So many of you have asked what you can do, and I am sorry to sound pessimistic, but I just don’t know. I wish I could say “donate money to the Red Cross,” but I didn’t see the Red Cross doing anything. The entire time I was there, I only saw Jesse Jackson and his buses, a huge congregation of busses from Baltimore (for some reason) bringing food and water, and private companies like Dysani, Evian, and K-Mart bringing supplies. The more you look around, the more you realize it is the private sector that is the only group that is doing anything. I genuinely believe private companies are going to do more for us than our own government, but I’m ignorant to the entire picture, I only know what I saw, so I don’t want to judge anyone.

If you want to help, all I can say is there are different levels of help. There are 1,000,000 people that need homes and some semblance of a future. My sister, mother, aunt, and I are going to do our best to make a home for people in Houma. We don’t need money, but we do need bodies. There is just too much to do.

I’m going back on Thursday, and I hope to figure out an address for people to ship things to us. Right now, what we need more than anything else are:
- light sleeping bags (not designed for the cold)
- battery chargeable power tools
- mosquito netting by the square yard
- CELL PHONES with out of Louisiana phone numbers are CRITICAL

We have enough breakfast bars and bottled water for now, and there is no power for preparing food as it is. There are stores to the north that can sell food once we have the power to make it, so that isn’t needed, even though you would think it is.

I know this sounds crazy, but if there could be anyway to make an outdoor movie theatre powered off a generator, it would do more good than you can imagine. New Orleaneans are social, and one of the biggest problems we have is not being able to be with each other… share the stress and find a way to deal with it together. It’s being isolated from each other that is really destroying people’s will.

If you can, please consider opening up your home to people that need one. But as these people are strangers, I don’t pretend it is something everyone will find comfortable. If you can, there is an amazing site setup to help you register as a host (http://www.shareyourhome.org/).

Thank you to you all for everything you will do in the next coming months,
Nick

The Bushes do culture their own way

An early frontrunner for the best sportswriting I’ve seen in 2005.

‘A big confession: I lied about Bonds’

OK, I’m a little confused. I listened to the President’s inaugural address yesterday and it sounded eerily familiar. Sure enough, it’s a Goldwater ’64 Greatest Hits compilation!

I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow. I believe that the communism which boasts it will bury us will, instead, give way to the forces of freedom. And I can see in the distant and yet recognizable future the outlines of a world worthy of our dedication, our every risk, our every effort, our every sacrifice along the way. Yes, a world that will redeem the suffering of those who will be liberated from tyranny. I can see — and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate — the flowering of an Atlantic civilization… And I can see this Atlantic civilization galvanizing and guiding emergent nations everywhere…

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

…except that George had to go and get his Jesus on, enough so that it even managed to freak out Peggy Noonan. At least Goldwater managed to keep the God thing under his hat.

So if Goldwater was so easy to beat — a mere two years after the nation was brought to the brink of nuclear war — why the hell can’t anybody do anything about George? Have the nation’s hearts & minds really become immune to the Daisy Ad? Where is LBJ when we need him?

[Soundtrack]
Morrissey – America Is Not The World.mp3
Barry Goldwater accepts the Republican Presidential Nomination 1964.mp3

To celebrate, a vision of unrest in the streets and flowers on the hillside.

May we all be safe and strong.

[Soundtrack]
Bright Eyes – Old Soul Song (For The New World Order).mp3

FORT HOOD, TEXAS (Reuters) — A lawyer for Specialist Charles Graner, the accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner-abuse scandal, said yesterday that leashing inmates was acceptable prisoner control, and compared piling naked prisoners into a pyramid to routines performed by cheerleaders.

He compared some of the alleged instances of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison to the pyramids cheerleaders form at sporting events and parents putting tethers on toddlers.

“Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year? Is that torture?” Guy Womack said in his opening arguments to a 10-member U.S. military jury at the reservist’s court-martial.

In an astonishing piece of kismet, Charles Graner managed to find a lawyer who’s even more of an asshole than he is. My hunch is that he knows he’s screwed already, so he’d might as well go out throwing bombs. Can you imagine the global conflagration that will go down if Graner gets off the hook? It’ll make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday in Golden Gate Park.

The scariest thing for me about Graner was learning that his civilian job was as a corrections officer. Are things like Abu Ghraib happening in our prison system every day? Why haven’t I seen this connection made in any media? (Because I’m wrong about this, I hope.)

It’s easy to see how he got his job in Iraq. “Find me the meanest, scariest MF you can get.”

[Soundtrack]
Dead Kennedys – Police Truck.mp3

Weird aside: A Google image search for “Charles Graner” gets you nothing?

You know I’m really grasping for straws of good news when I hear that Arlen Specter is getting his rightful seat as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and I say, “Good!”

[Soundtrack]
Willie Brown & Woodie – Ventriloquist Rap.mp3

I’m tired of thinking about this … thing. And you are too.

So here is the silliest, most cheerful record I could find on the spur of the momen — a rap by a ventriloquist and his dummy, surely the only rap record of its kind. (If anybody has any more “dummy rap,” let’s get together and start a genre!)

Hey, his lips aren’t moving! How do they do that?

Looking back it seems so obvious now. That sense of foreboding, of torpor and motionlessness was all the build-up to the election. Basically nothing seemed to happen in October — and the molasses-slow playoffs did nothing to dispel that impression. In retrospect, it feels like a peaceful time.

My dear friends in the Red 26, let me extend a hand. We can make it through the next four years together. You promise not to restrict my civil rights or any of my friends’ and I’ll promise to not call you stupid. You can try not to overcommit our troops or legalize abusive use of our environment, energy supply or national infrastructure.

Mmmmm maybe not. Maybe you just don’t give a shit. More likely, you live in a parallel universe where we’ve found WMDs and Sadaam and Osama get together for cocktails. There’s got to be an explanation. Right?

There’s tons more at the Propaganda Remix Project. Go get ‘em. Plaster the town.

[Soundtrack]
American Music Club – Patriot’s Heart.mp3

Swing states are part of the story, but consider: For the second time in a row, the Democratic ticket has failed to carry its own states. John Edwards’ North Carolina has 15 electoral votes; add on either Iowa or New Mexico and that’s enough to swing it — and that negates Ohio. In 2000, forget Florida; Gore wins by carrying his home state of Tennessee where his family had held national elective office since the 50s.

What’s the use of a running mate that can’t deliver his home state, especially when he presently holds office there?

I’ll return with my sense of humor tomorrow.

[Download]
Stevie Wonder – He’s Misstra Know It All.mp3

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel: for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.

– Second Corinthians 11:13-15