SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy AT&T. A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984.
The AT&T of today is a weak shadow of its former self. SBC is one of the powerhouses among the regional monopolies.

This deal, by itself, wouldn’t do much to disrupt the marketplace immediately. But it’s a harbinger of trouble.

The worry is on the data side. Voice is already moving into the data sphere as VoIP, and will someday be seen as a small add-on to data.

SBC is one of the most arrogant of the “Baby” (!) Bells. But all of them, assisted by an FCC that has been determined to let the phone and cable duopoly control data access, are moving to throttle the most important competitive market of the future — broadband — by insisting on absolute control over the wires they’ve installed based on government-granted monopolies. This local duopoly makes other kinds of consolidation look tame.

Someday, wireless broadband could help. But competing wireless systems have to connect to backbones and their local nodes. If the Bells can take over the companies that provide such data access, they can be anticompetitive in new ways.

I predict a slew of deals like this, where the regional Bells take over the long-distance and backbone companies, with little regulatory concern. Then we’ll be even deeper in the soup.

One of these days, a newspaper currently charging a premium for access to its article archives will do something bold: It will open the archives to the public — free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins.

I predict that the result will pleasantly surprise the bean-counters. There’ll be a huge increase in traffic at first, once people realize they can read their local history without paying a fee. Eventually, though not instantly, the revenues will greatly exceed what the paper had been earning under the old system. Meanwhile, the expenses to run it will drop.

And, perhaps most important, the newspaper will have boosted its long-term place in the community. It will be seen, more than ever, as the authoritative place to go for some kinds of news and information — because it will have become an information bedrock in this too-transient culture. Read the rest of this entry »

In an appropriately scathing posting on his Wi-Fi blog, Glenn Fleishman goes after think tanks and lobbying organizations that seem, in at least some cases, to be what he calls “sock puppets” for the telecommunications-industry giants that want to stop municipally built data systems before they start.

The lack of transparency in the world of opinion-making is an ongoing scandal. What we have today is a system of opinion laundering, where powerful interests try to create public support for their side of issues without disclosing the hidden agendas. Media organizations then publish or broadcast credulous reports that may be grossly biased, without even hinting to news audiences what’s going on.

We need far, far more transparency than we get the opinion-making business — and don’t kid yourself, it’s big business. What we have, instead, are increasingly more sophisticated efforts to hide the laundering.

All of this is one reason why I recommend that you stop by Source Watch, formerly called Disinfopedia. It’s a “a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.” (See, for example, the site’s “How to Research Front Groups” explainer.)

On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday. But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn’t on TV in America, it doesn’t exist in our culture. Read the rest of this entry »

The president of the National Newspapers Association has written a whiny letter to Wal-Mart. Mike Buffington relates a call from a PR person who
advised me that Wal-Mart representatives were “available for interviews” about the firms nationwide campaign to “set the record straight about the facts about Wal-Mart.”

In addition to co-owning and operating four community newspapers in Northeast Georgia, I also currently serve as president of the National Newspapers Association. As both a newspaper publisher and as a spokesman for several thousand community newspapers in America, I want to let you know that I, and many of my fellow publishers, are insulted by this Wal-Mart PR effort.

The letter’s logic runs roughly as follows:

1) Wal-Mart is under attack for its business practices.

2) Wal-Mart wants newspapers to cover its side.

3) But Wal-Mart is grossly stingy because it does little or no newspaper advertising.

4) So if Wal-Mart wants coverage it should buy advertisements.

I’m not a fan of Wal-Mart. I refuse to shop there specifically because of its business practices, and I found its recent newspaper ad campaign (which ignored the smaller papers Buffington is trying to defend) almost totally unpersuasive.

(To see the company’s press release, go to this page, click on News Releases, then General News and the release titled, “Wal-Mart Launches Nationwide Campaign to Set the Record Straight.” For reasons I can’t fathom, Wal-Mart’s site offers up on-the-fly Java server pages that make it impossible to link directly to the release.)

But Buffington may not have realized how insulting his letter is to the people who do journalism — and to his customers. This letter strongly implies a “you pay or we don’t cover you” attitude. What he calls “free PR” is nothing of the kind. It’s one part of a story, and it’s worth covering no matter who puts the ads in the paper.

The public is already skeptical of newspaper publishers’ motives. It’s hard enough to be a reporter these days, but letters like this one give credence to people’s more cynical assumptions.

Buffington responds:
The issue here isn’t news vs. advertising; it’s simply an attempt to manipulate PR in community newspapers.

At the corporate level, Wal-Mart has made it clear that it does not see value in advertising in community newspapers. Can’t argue with that, it’s their money and they’ve been successful without us.

But to take that attitude, then expect community newspapers to be a free tool in a political PR campaign, smacks of corporate arrogance.

Wal-Mart could have bought 3 page ads in our newspaper and I still wouldn’t run their PR stuff. It isn’t relevant to our market. And I can’t be bought, period.

But ask yourself this: Wal-Mart did buy page ads in major metro newspapers across the nation with their PR message and many of those newspapers did write high-profile news articles about the firm’s PR campaign.

Was there a tacit link between those news stories in metro newspapers and the Wal-Mart ads?

Probably not, but it’s interesting that Wal-Mart paid to run its message in those urban markets, many of which don’t have Wal-Mart stores in their core area, but they didn’t see value in running the ad in suburban and rural markets, the heartland of their company.

Why was that?

My theory is that this PR campaign is really about Corporate America talking to Corporate America. The goal isn’t to communicate with Wal-Mart customers in the rural and suburban areas stores are located, but rather to sell their PR to opinion-makers at the state and corporate levels. Talking with customers is, I think, a secondary consideration.

That’s fine, but the company shouldn’t have insulted community newspapers in the process. Don’t go to the metro areas and buy advertising in big corporate newspapers, but expect mom-and-pop newspapers to dish out the same stuff as free PR. We have higher standards than that.

Perhaps Wal-Mart didn’t intend to send such an arrogant message, but it did. And frankly, I don’t think very many community newspaper publishers in America have much respect for a firm that looks down its corporate nose at our profession.

Passing through Los Angeles this morning, I bought a copy of the Orange County Register. On Page One was a huge promo to this story (reg req), which took up three inside pages.

The feature article, entitled “Real estate brought riches,” tells of an immigrant family that bought a house about 13 years ago, sold it last fall for triple the purchase price and moved to Arizona with the profits to live the good life.

The family’s tale, the Register said, was also “a story of wealth creation played out countless times across a county where the local median home price doubled in a mere four years to more than half-a-million bucks.”

The piece disturbs me. It invites readers of modest means to throw everything into real estate and take enormous financial risks.

Maybe this is good advice. After all, California real estate has been appreciating for a long time, and in the past few years southern California prices have been absolutely soaring.

But maybe there’s a housing bubble, as more and more experts worry. (I strongly believe there is a dangerous bubble in much of California.) Maybe the people who take this kind of burden on today — at a time when a smaller percentage of households can afford a median-price home than ever and lenders are offering dangerously leveraged deals — are going to lose everything.

There’s one small cautionary element to the Register’s story. It describes how the owners started borrowing against the appreciated value of the house and how that led to a worryingly higher debt load. The solution was to cash out and move to Arizona. Bingo, the lottery. Time to celebrate.

If we are in is a bubble, or even if there’s a moderate correction, the newbies in this particular lottery are going to get absolutely screwed. This market may be a sucker’s bet. Even a hint of that in the Register story would have been the responsible thing to do.

I got on what must have been one of the last flights out of Boston last night. After not being able to go through Chicago back to California, due to Midwest storms, I was booked on an evening nonstop to San Francisco. I noticed a flight leaving for San Diego about 90 minutes earlier and asked to be put on that one, which the airline did. Turned out that the San Francisco flight got canceled.

An inexpensive overnight stay (I’m turning into a big fan of the Hotwire service, which has been a reliable way to get decent hotel rooms for a low price) in San Diego and a commuter plane hop to LAX, I’m waiting for my connection back to San Francisco. I’ll be home by 10:30 this morning, and happy to be there.

I frequently tell people how much I miss the seasons in New England. But I don’t miss blizzards like the one they’re having in Boston today.

In other circumstances I’d be grumpy about this detour and overnight layover. Right now I’m feeling lucky.

I’m at Logan Airport in Boston, waiting for a flight to Chicago San Diego and then to California San Francisco. My original schedule was to head back tomorrow, but the whopper storm approaching here is expected to dump a foot or two of snow amid high winds (can you say 8-foot snowdrifts?).

The airline suggested getting out while the getting was good.

This is the kind of advice I tend to take.

UPDATE: Still on the ground, 3 hours after my original departure time. Half the flights in and out are canceled at this point. I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll be checking back into the hotel in Cambridge this evening…

It’s amazing to hear some passengers complaining about these problems. Like the airline people can do something about the weather…sheesh.

The Connected Get More Connected. This month, 100 of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, bloggers and promoters will begin receiving cool new stuff for free, delivered straight to their homes and offices. In return, these movers and shakers promise to sample the products and offer feedback to the their manufacturers. The companies hope that, if the mood strikes, the Silicon Valley 100 will chat up, blog on, or just plain recommend the products to friends and colleagues, generating that most invaluable of currencies: buzz.
This is oddly creepy. Will the people getting this stuff will routinely tell people they’ve gotten it for free? (Glad to see that Joi Ito says he will…)

How does this differ from the stuff that shows up in news organizations’ newsrooms all the time, from companies hoping to get reviews of their products? When writing a tech column, for example, I got ridiculous amounts of software, back when it came in boxes. (I went out and bought copies of the stuff I decided to use in everyday ways.) Sportswriters don’t pay to cover the games. Movie reviewers go to private screenings. And so on.

What bothers me is the lack of transparency (apart from Brad Stone’s scoop in getting the story) in this case. It’s just an extension of a concept of what some call “buzz marketing” — getting allegedly “regular people” to tout products without disclosing the practice.

I hope the people named in this story — some of whom are friends of mine — will decide either to disclose what they’re doing, or bow out of this exercise entirely.

I’m updating this essay soon for a posting on my new Center for Citizen Media blog.

UPDATED

(This is a draft. Over time I hope, with your help, to revise this into a better document. Let me know what you think.)

Maybe it’s time to say a fond farewell to an old canon of journalism: objectivity. But it will never be time to kiss off the values and principles that undergird the idea.

Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible — not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).

There were good business reasons to be “objective,” too, not least that a newspaper didn’t want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it “got both sides,” perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.

Again, the idea of objectivity is a worthy one. But we are human. We have biases and backgrounds and a variety of conflicts that we bring to our jobs every day.

I’d like to toss out objectivity as a goal, however, and replace it with four other notions that may add up to the same thing. They are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency.

The lines separating them are not always clear. They are open to wide interpretation, and are therefore loaded with nuance in themselves. But I think they are a useful way to approach quality journalism. They are, moreover, easier to achieve in an online setting. Read the rest of this entry »