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Friday, March 5, 2004
Dis infections 
| | The most interesting thing about this is this. |
| | From my perspective, if a generalist blogger wants my return traffic, it'll happen when his/her blog shows itself to be a nexus as opposed to a dead end. There's nothing magical about finding a good link. The value add is helping me find more like it. |
| | I always thought blogging was mostly a matter of link farming, or of sourcing in the best academic sense of the word. Back when I was a failing academic (in high school, and I mean "failing" in a highly literal sense, since I sucked at studenting), I hated compiling bibliographies and footnotes. All those ibids and op. cits and loc. cits drove me nuts. But I never doubted their necessity for well-qualified scholarship. Sources matter. There's no reason (other than laziness, vanity or passive aggression) not to cite them. |
Howard's end?
| | I do oppose government regulation of broadcast content. But, on the other hand, if you agree that there are standards, then the only question is whether a "record fine" is appropriate in response to Stern's on-air conduct here. I'd say that, if there are to be standards at all, then Stern's conduct is over pretty much any line you're likely to draw. (And Rush Limbaugh would be off the air for much less than this -- in fact, he was taken off ESPN for much less than this, with no noticeable hue and cry from Stern's current defenders). |
| | So while other people are upset about this (including Jeff Jarvis, a smart and generally reasonable guy), I have to say that I just can't muster much outrage. I'd like to see the FCC out of the business of regulating broadcast content entirely, but I'm resigned to the political reality that that won't happen. And, given that the American public seems to want regulation here by a huge margin, it's hard for me to call this particular exercise an abuse of regulatory authority. |
| | I also think it's silly -- as the earlier example, which I picked up from Jeff's comment section, which has others showing that Stern got in trouble all through the Clinton Administration, illustrates -- to pretend that this is an example of Bush somehow crushing dissent. (And, as I noted earlier, Kerry supports the dropping of Stern from the Clear Channel stations). If you want to argue that Clear Channel's dropping of Stern was an example of a big corporation sucking up to Bush, well, maybe it is -- though I suspect that the Bush people would just as soon have avoided this issue entirely -- but then you've got to grapple with the media concentration issues that people like me, and Larry Lessig, have raised: If the airwaves are dominated by a small number of big companies, they'll always tend to reach an accommodation with the powers-that-be. That's how these things work, and it's why too much media concentration is bad. |
| | In my ideal media world, we'd see a lot more low-power radio, and a lot less concentrated corporate ownership. We don't live in that world. But in the world we do live in, it's hard for me to see the Stern business as anything but more of the same Stern schtick, grown even more tiresome. |
| | I've heard little of Howard since I listened during a drive to L.A. and back the other day (I live well outside the L.A. station's deep fringe shown here.) But it sounds like the dude expects to be fined off the air, basically. I also think what he's been saying (at least what I've heard of it) about creepy social climate changes, driven to some degree by the religious intolerance, are right on. Knight-Ridder reports on a "gathering storm" against "indecency": |
| | After years of pushing limits and pocketing profits, broadcasters find themselves in a gathering storm over indecency. And it is not likely to blow over soon. Too much is at stake. |
| | The FCC, having been blasted as inattentive, is seeking congressional support for a tenfold increase in fines for objectionable content. On Wednesday, a U.S. House committee said the proposed increase - from $27,500 to $275,000 - wasn't steep enough, voting to raise penalties to $500,000. Commission member Michael Copps is saying it is high time the FCC, which has never pulled a station's license for indecency, got the attention of broadcasters by holding revocation hearings. |
| | With Congress circling and presidential politics in season, the industry has responded, radio in particular. |
| | Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest radio broadcaster, pulled Stern from six stations last month after a caller dropped a racial epithet during a show in which Stern asked celebutante Paris Hilton's ex-boyfriend whether they had had anal sex. |
| | That week, as broadcasters prepared to testify before a House subcommittee about indecency, Clear Channel fired a Florida DJ named Bubba the Love Sponge. He had racked up $715,000 in fines for 26 infractions, including a segment in which such cartoon characters as George Jetson and Scooby-Doo discussed sexual techniques. |
| | Though many media observers say the exposure of Janet Jackson's right breast during the Super Bowl spurred the sudden shock over indecency, a movement against coarse content has been building for at least two years. During that time, FCC hearings have drawn those who connect a rise in objectionable and violent content to a rise in media consolidation, Copps said. |
| | Before the Jackson affair, regulators were debating whether the singer Bono ran afoul of regulations when he used the F-word during the live broadcast of the 2003 Golden Globes. |
| | Since then, media executives have threatened to fine offending DJs. They've built time delays into award-show broadcasts such as the Grammys and Oscars. They've announced "zero-tolerance" policies toward indecency. |
| | "People are scared," said Tom Taylor, editor of the industry newsletters Inside Radio and M Street. "Stations are concerned for their licenses. This atmosphere ... is as intense as we have seen in decades." |
| | To bring some sense to this whole thing, let's return to the late Communications Decency Act, by which Congress attempted to impose "decency" on the ungovernable chaos of the World Wild Web when it first appeared on the public radar in the mid 90s. The best thing ever written about that act came from the typewriter of Steve Russell, a retired Texas judge. |
Misadventure capitalism
| | This new system required capital to start and build the little companies and the VC community was able to provide that. The goals were modest -- a 20 percent compounded annual rate of return to venture fund investors. And it generally worked. But then came the Internet fever of the late-1990s when the goal changed from that 20 percent return to what the VCs liked to call the "hundred bagger." A hundred bagger is a startup that returns 100 times the original investment. There have been very few hundred baggers, but the fact that for awhile there were some has had a horrible effect on the venture capital business, because now any investment that doesn't have hundred bagger potential is viewed as not worth making at all. |
| | That's just plain stupid, of course. |
| | The goal is no longer to make a certain return, but to find a hundred bagger -- something that is just about impossible to do. You can stumble on a hundred bagger, you can luck into it, but actually setting out to invest only in businesses you feel are likely to return 100X, well that pretty much means you'll never invest again, which is the way the VC business feels right now. |
| | The problem with finding that hundred bagger is that whatever you as a VC think you are investing in isn't what you think it is. That's because every startup -- EVERY STARTUP -- faces a crisis early-on and changes dramatically what it intends to do. So the smart VC invests more in the people than in the idea because the idea is going to change. And that means what you think is a hundred bagger will inevitably turn into something else. |
| | Searching for the hundred bagger has dogged the entire system. The big companies that are used to buying-up startups to feed their product pipeline no longer have much to choose from. That old engine of the economy is no longer creating new jobs, and still we scratch our heads and wonder what's happening. |
| | Not sure I agree, entirely. (This is the first I've heard the term "hundred bagger," though it certainly makes sense.) |
| | Somewhere around here I have Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society. I don't know if it was in that book, or somewhere else, that Drucker talks about the end of the "modern corporation," which he said was only one and a quarter centuries old. For most of that period, Drucker said, the largest corporations possessed advantages exclusive to size: access to capital, international reach, publishing clout, the ability to confer health and retirement benefits. In the last decade the first three of those ceased to be exclusive, and the fourth was reduced extensively. At the same time, the downdrift of those advatages to companies of every size has had endless positive effects. The thresholds of creation, innovation and just about everything else have been reduced to surmountable levels for companies of all sizes. This is not a bad thing. |
| | I think we're still a long way from building the society Drucker saw emerging in 1993. I also think VCs, for all their flaws, still offer some of the best help we can get along the way. |
Worth the $29 U.S., I hope
Two words
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