Month: February 2009

February 1, 2009

Printing the NY Times vs a Kindle

An article on Silicon Alley Insider claims that the New York Times would be saving money if it were to buy every subscriber an Amazon Kindle. From the article:

According to the Times’s Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We’ve heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times’s delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: “We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.” Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

While this makes sense it also seems to me that the Times would have more readers than 830,000. I’m just wondering if that number even accounts for all of the copies sold at Starbucks and other coffee shops every day. While it may be cheaper for the Times to get all of its subscribers Kindles I can’t believe it would actually be cheaper to get all of the people who read print editions of the Times a Kindle.

Link via Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.

February 1, 2009

A Follow-up on Michael Phelps

Andrew Sullivan apparently holds a similar opinion to the one that I voiced earlier concerning the ridiculousness that is the sports media’s concern over Michael Phelps smoking pot. Sullivan writes that:

Yes, Michael Phelps took a few hits from a bong at a party. He also threw back a great deal of alcohol, maybe made a few passes at a few girls and bonded with a few dudes. This is news?

And yet this absurd ritual takes place in which Phelps has to pretend he did something dreadful and we all have to tut-tut and frown and furrow our brows, and the sponsors cluck and the press preens – while the only conceivable news is that a 23 year-old had a good time at a party, breaking no professional rules since he was not competing when he was goofing off.

And, seriously, does anyone think that smoking pot would give him an unfair advantage in the pool? Please. When on earth are we going to grow up as a culture?

Agreed, now let’s all just let this story fade away and hope that the next time an athlete engages in activity that thousands of other Americans do every day the media (and bloggers) don’t even notice or hear about it.

February 1, 2009

Barney Frank Speaks Up

Rep. Barney Frank speaks up to a Republican who claims that President Obama’s stimulus package is just a way to disguise the largest government spending bill in history.

http://www.youtube.com/v/mSw3QqSF_zU&hl=en&fs=1

Good for him, and I wish more politicians in our country would say things like this on national television.

February 1, 2009

I’ve heard enough of the way is the final

I really like the lines and shadows of this photo. Looks like a staircase I would enjoy walking up. It also reminds me in a way of the famous stairway in the Vatican museums that I saw this summer. Click the photo to be taken to the Flickr page.

February 1, 2009

The Grand Canyon

 

found on Flickr

There is no way that enough photos can be taken of the Grand Canyon. When I went backpacking through it for five days I took over 600 and still feel like there’s shots that I missed out on.

February 1, 2009

More on the future of books and publishing

There’s an interesting article that is featured on The Atlantic right now by Andrew Sullivan concerning the problems with and future of book publishing. In the short posting he writes that:

My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required.

The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us. It couldn’t happen too soon.

I couldn’t agree with him more. Particularly in an economy that is becoming increasingly poor it only makes economic sense for writers to explore means of making an income that does not require the overhead that the current publishing system does. Furthermore, what Sullivan suggests here would allow writers to create and define themselves as a brand online and then move to print when they know that there will be a significant demand for their works.

Link via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (February 01, 2009) – Self-Branding And Writing .

February 1, 2009

Concerning Supreme Court Vacancies

There’s an interesting article on the New York Times that is essentially speculation (but at least it’s interesting speculation) about what many see as the inevitable Supreme Court appointments that President Obama will have to deal with. The article says:

“A really powerful, articulate, moral, passionate voice on the left,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, “would really change the dynamic on the court. It would pull the other justices who are inclined to be sympathetic to that voice in that direction. It would shift the center of the discussion — about what’s the middle.”

There is precedent for this. Justice Antonin Scalia, who has been on the court since 1986, was for years a lonely and energetic dissenter on the right. But the seeds he planted in those dissents have over time taken root in majority decisions.

To me this makes a lot of sense. I would think that Obama would suffer a lot of criticism from the left  were he to appoint a moderate or even a justice that is slightly conservative. In addition, he would be able to argue to the conservatives that he isn’t actually liberalizing the court and is instead just maintaining the balance by replacing a liberal like Justice Steven’s with a perhaps more vocal liberal. It will be interesting to see how these appointments play out if and when they occur.

Link via To Nudge, Shift or Shove the Supreme Court Left – NYTimes.com.

February 1, 2009

Sports obsession

I’m always a little disgusted by the double-standard to which American athletes are held. We as a society expect far more out of them than we would ever expect out of fellow citizens and yet the reality is that we glorify people like Michael Phelps because of their physical accomplishments not their societal ones. It all just seems like a way for the American people to be caring about something that they see as important when in reality a swimmer smoking pot is about the least important issue that we ought to be devoting our attention to right now. From an ESPN article:

Olympic great Michael Phelps acknowledged “regrettable” behavior and “bad judgment” after a photo in a British newspaper Sunday showed him inhaling from a marijuana pipe.

In a statement released Sunday, the swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Games did not dispute the authenticity of the exclusive picture published Satruday by the tabloid News of the World.

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps said. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

Link via Phelps acknowledges photo showing Olympic swimming star smoking from marijuana pipe – ESPN.

February 1, 2009

Advice for college newspapers

As the feasibility of print journalism is declining there have been many discussions going on concerning what the place of college newspapers will be in this new economy. Below are a couple links to some interesting articles that I’ve come across recently concerning the Daily Emerald:

Free strategic advice for the @dailyemerald – Daniel Bachhuber.

Can the Ol’ Dirty be read? – Oregon Commentator.

It’ll be interesting to see the course that college papers take and whether those that rely upon school funding to survive (like the Whitman Pioneer) will be able to maintain their staff and funding.