MediaFlect

Harvard Business Review’s Web site, a persistent big revenue generator at very low cost for the school because of all the MBAs buying publications, and case after case after case, will soon do away with its complex digital rights management scheme.

The way it is now, you pay, say, $6 to buy PDF of a document replete with research and data about anything from the inner workings of Wal Mart to USA Today’s attempts to reorganize to Disney’s foreign currency hedges, and then you end up infuriated because you can’t download it to your laptop after buying it on your desktop, or print it out easily, or send it to your PDA, or email it to yourself or to classmates you’re working with. (If you call the 800 number, the people are very nice at granting new permissions, but who wants to waste all their time like that for every little thing?)

While there’s been some debate at Harvard – I’m told there’s a lot of pilfering of the school’s materials off the Web in China – the folks in Cambridge have decided to simplify things, essentially removing the digital rights management, so that folks who buy the cases legitimately can use them more easily. So, if you buy a case at the site, you’ll be able to do all the things that now are so difficult – email, print, open on more than one computer, etc.

Expect the new scheme this summer, though it could be delayed – these things take time, you know.

The tuxes and gowns were just so, the champagne and fondue flowed (white and black chocolate fountains!), and the glitz went from KT Tunstall singing her hit “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” to John Waters and Carrie Fisher flubbing a couple of their lines on stage.

Fun, impressive, and magnificent as the National Magazine Awards took over the Rose Theater, now at Columbus Circle, for the evening. A few folks, though – including one top editor up for an award — bemoaned the lack of intimacy. The event a few years back was at a Waldorf hotel ballroom, where the crowd mingled and table-hopped as the winners were lionized on stage. Well, as some noted, at least it wasn'’t live on TV – yet.

At the National Magazine Awards: With folks tittering about Newsweek NBC’s Mark Whitaker saying that New York Magazine editor Adam Moss is the new David Remnick (after New York last night cleaned up the way Remnick’s New Yorker has in previous years), a pithy comment by Moss got missed.

“I’ve never understood,” Moss said after apologetically taking the stage for the fifth time to accept an award, “why we don’t give these awards to the writers, themselves.”

He’s not alone in wondering why it’s always the editors-in-chief who accept awards, even for the work of individuals.