MediaFlect

Anyone else having problems with their MarketWatch.com email alerts? I’ve set up to get alerts for “Media”, and while my Blackberry used to fill with lots of daily messages about any conceivable media moves financially, my account keeps going dead. When I go to the account area of the site, sometimes it says my alert needs to be “activiated,” as if I’ve turned it off (which I haven’t, unless I”m suffering from severe memory loss or even more incompetence than I think I possess.)

I consider this, along with customizble RSS (which I no longer see on them or WSJ.com, both owned by DowJones), one of the great news technology aps moving ahead in business media. But why the functionality problems?

Pardon, by the way, for not posting Friday. Traveling. With children. By myself. Without a deadline or boss or “assignment”.

Bob Cauthorn finally writes in Rebuilding Media and his post is more like an essay than a blog entry. He writes that newspapers and other mainstream media can’t blog because they don’t get how to be opinionated, and are generally made up of mediocre people.

Sure, there’s a point: Some blogging is goofy when done by the MSM. But there are legit MSM uses for blogging. A weekly like Business Week for example, has Tech Beat, in which a reporter who gathers and monitors all week can unload bits he’s finding to us. And I like how BW’s Blogspotting surveys corporate and other industry-related blogs. For even more of a niche, I sometimes check out ZDNet’s blogs on what’s going on in parts of the tech industries. ABCNews’ “The Note” has been written about plenty as a must-read inside the Beltway.

One gets the sense that these were created to fill specific needs of an audience, to fill a “niche.”. They are part of the conversation, and finding things for all of us. They have ads (on BW, big interruptive ones) and so add to the bottom line. What’s wrong with all that?

Buying a treat at Starbucks the other night, I offhandedly asked the young lady behind the counter how many of the music CDs on their counter they actually sold. She said she thought they had more of them shoplifted. A co-worker concurred. They said the store had lost some $200 to shoplifting the previous month.

But what if everyone had a digital device and for a fee Starbucks would load music into your iPod or laptop or celphone or whatever? Cuppa Joe, Jack in, pay for both. Then they’d make their money from the music sales and not have to worry about the lifted CDs — they could still use a nice display for the music, but there’d be no point in shoplifting a piece of cardboard. (There I go, thinking out loud again.)

I’m not sure how to translate this to sandwiches, which she said were also a big item for shoplifters.

I like Yahoo! Mail. I pay to use it, so I can have POP3 access, more storage, disposable email addresses for spam protection. I like the folders, the design is straightforward enough.

I also use Google’s gmail, and don’t like it as much. But over the past 16 hours or so when I’ve repeatedly gotten this message from Yahoo: “There was a problem accessing your account.” or “Temporary problem accessing your mailbox” I’ve had to turn to gmail to get my stuff. The POP3 has been a little flaky. Yahoo! at this point can’t afford to be anything but blue chip. Delivery and technology is as important as design and utility. If the reliability doesn’t improve, I’m gone.

A lesson for all of us in this media space.

The previous post was about reportorial fiction. Tonight’s “On Point” was about the new TV drama on FX about the Iraq War. A caller, who said he was on active military duty, said he wanted more and better reporting. I sympathize, and agree with him that I want reporters to have better access. But while reporting may be more factual, it’s not always more truthful, in the full, rich sense of “truth.”

I remember a character in the Riverworld science fiction series, an alien from another world who came to Earth, saying he read our novels because they were more instructive in the truth about humanity than our non-fiction.

Every so often a little bit of honesty sneaks through from reporters who interpret financial markets. Lisa Singhania of The Associated Press on On the Media says “nobody knows quite what’s going on in the market” and so all those “the market rose on (such and such political development)” or “down on (such and such)” declarations are, if not fiction, certainly not fact. More like assertions based on assumptions that reporters and editors claim are reasonable based on the facts.

Singhania’s quote comes in a fun piece that asserts Alan Greenspan — the oracle through whom we pass much of the financial markets’ news — is better known than Justin Timberlake. Again, not provably accurate, but fun to consider.

So, we’ve got a drama starting tonight on FX about a war that, for the first time, is on WHILE the war is happening. M*A*S*H really being about Vietnam aside, is it really that surprising? How soon until some solders get a little stipend to give us a “helmet cam” view of what they’re doing and up to? How commercial could it get? Maybe helmet cams could be a way to defray some of the cost for taxpayers?

I hope you’re wondering whether I’m kidding.

Buzzmachine’s got a new look, but not yet ads that Jeff Jarvis has promised. (He does note in one post that the blog gets him consulting gigs.) He expounds today on the adjustments TV Guide is making to its “(cough)” rate base, shrinking the number of guaranteed readers by millions. The coughs acknowledge what the magazine industry (wink-wink) knows: that a lot of circulation is based on assumptions, but are not truly provable.

On a panel a few years ago, Michael Elliott of Time talked about the failed venture he’d participated in, ecountries.com, and how the Web had essentially shot itself in the foot by offering so much data to advertisers. By telling advertisers exactly how many ads users or readers were actually seeing (the number of “impressions”), he argued, we were letting the advertisers have information they would then demand of other media. (You can tell a marketer exactly how many times his ad is shown in a Web page, but who knows how many people actually see that page in a magazine regardless of how many copies are sold?)

Marketers might gravitate away from print because print didn’t offer such fine detail, I supposed, or such specific targeting as the Web. Michael protested that magazines can do specific demo targeted with print runs to specific zip codes, but conceded just slightly a wee bit that magazines can’t target quite so finely as the Web.

I think Michael is a fabulous writer and editor, a tremendous thinker, and I like him as well. But I also saw in his comments a kind of defensiveness. What, we should bring rational thought and provable data to the process?! Heaven forfend. That would upset the whole model.

Cough.

On your site you make sure to get all the various verifications and certifications: W3C CSS, XHTML, Verisign, etc., etc.. … We all know what RSS is and can decide which standard to use, as well.

But is your site Cynthia Tested? A project of the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI), the Cynthia certification says that your site is accessible to people with disabilities

If you write to their specifications you can put their button on your site . It’s not clear there’s an actual Cynthia (seems to be a joke), but the mission seems rather serious, and beneficial. I found the certification on the University of North Carolina’s Ancient World Mapping site (thanks, Andrea), and the Cynthia Says news page has more institutions that use it.

How many media or news Web sites — which like to talk of themselves as serving the community — test their sites for people with disabilities? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the insignia on a media site.

A missive, no a screed, from Vin Crosbie on newspaper “myopia” springing from the NY Times story on Rob Curley (who’s moving to Naples, Florida from the Lawrence, Kansas perch from which he gained fame in these circles.) Some choice quotes from Vin:

“Most newspapers are ill with myopia. Nearsightedness. Short-term thinking.”

“The primary reason why the Lawrence Journal-World succeeds is because its owners approach any new media with long-term, fresh thinking.”

“Resist mimicry and instead think afresh for solutions.” Vin has six pointers for future thinkers to make themselves successful today.