Did you get an email this morning from Reed Hastings, head honcho at Netflix? I did. Here’s an extended version of it on a Netflix blog. I am spared the trouble of writing a full response, because an NPR blog has spoken for me:
Netflix has figured out that people are very upset about its decision to split streaming video and DVD delivery — a decision that got it in huge hot water earlier this year. Customers who had previously gotten both streaming and DVDs for a single price would now have to pay separately. If you only use one or the other, you could pay less, but if you still wanted both, you’d pay more.
The Netflix response? Separate the businesses even more. In a new blog post, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings explains that for some reason, he has concluded that separating the businesses completely is going to help people understand what’s going on. Thus, Netflix will not send DVDs at all anymore but will only provide streaming, while the company’s DVD business will happen under the new “Qwikster” brand.
Hastings seems to be operating under the premise that customers don’t really understand what’s going on; that they are angry because they think that a single business has increased its price when in fact it has merely split into two businesses that charge separately. Presumably, the idea is that making the split more definitive will make people slap their foreheads and say, “Oh, now I see. Netflix actually lowered its prices, as long as I don’t buy Qwikster! And new Qwikster is cheaper than old Netflix! I’m coming out ahead, sort of, if I don’t want all the services I used to get!”
The only problems with this approach are that its underlying assumptions are almost certainly wrong, and that it ignores major inefficiencies that will be introduced for customers who do, indeed, want to continue to use both streaming and DVDs. Now, if you want both, you have to go to two different sites with two different queues, you have to pay two different charges to two different entities, and in general, you have to have two different memberships. That’s not psychologically better for consumers. That’s buying two things which are both less helpful than the single thing you could get before.
It’s like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that consumers will notice the lower 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe….
Good response, and I hope NPR will forgive me for quoting it so extensively (please go to NPR and fully experience its services).
Lemme ‘splain somethin’ to you, Mr. Hastings: Neither your DVD service nor your streaming service stands alone; they are complementary. OK, so maybe the DVD service is complete in its way, as a fine service if this were the year 2001. But you and I know (or think we know) that Web streaming is the way the business is going to go, so if you are survive you have to get into that business big. Which you have done.
But here’s the critical point you’re missing: Your streaming business (which you laughably call “instant”) does NOT stand alone. It is not complete. Perhaps you’ve noticed that you are unable to get permission to stream most popular, recent titles. Therefore if your customers want a full service that will provide them with a full selection of the movies and TV shows they want to see, they have to supplement their streaming with DVDs. Which you seemed to get until, quite suddenly, recently.
If I weren’t so dependent on you, I’d drop your service now. But I got rid of my cable (or all of it except local stations, which almost amounts to the same thing), so almost all of the video content I ever watch now comes from you. It’s not the added cost, although that’s not pleasant (I dropped the cable because you were such an economical alternative). It’s the way you’ve done this.
I used to think that Netflix was a company that knew what its customers wanted. Not so much now.
The other day, I was at the presser at which Jon Huntsman announced that Attorney General Alan Wilson was supporting him (which I still intend to write a post about, but haven’t had time to go back through all my notes), and at one point I happened to look around and think how very, very young most of the media people were.
When I stood in that same place two years ago representing The New York Post, in front of that same (I think) lectern, listening to Mark Sanford tell about his surprise vacation in Argentina, I didn’t think that. I saw mostly usual suspects I had known for years. (Although I did notice in photos of the gaggle later that I had the grayest hair in the bunch. It was one of those “Who’s that old guy? … oh!” moments.)
But the biggest difference between this group and the media mob scenes I experienced when I was as young as these kids were was that the TV crews are so much smaller. As I saw Ali Weinberg of NBC packing up her stuff after, I mentioned to her that back in the day, her network would have a four-person crew covering a presidential candidate: the talent, (at this point she started saying it along with me), the camera guy, the sound guy (and back then those two jobs usually were filled by guys), and the field producer. Now, it’s just her. And she’s in front of the camera, behind the camera, carrying the equipment, handling her own arrangements, Tweeting, and I don’t know what all.
Of course, it’s been this way for several years now. I remember Peter Hamby and others doing the same thing four years ago.
But seeing someone as petite as Ali getting ready to carry all that stuff kind of dramatized the situation. Yes, Ali agreed with me, all told it probably did weigh as much as she does. And no, she didn’t need any help.
Her affiliation reminds me of the NBC crew I kept running across in Iowa in 1980 when I was following Howard Baker, who was running in the caucuses that year. I rode with Jim and Flash (the sound and camera guys, respectively) through an ice storm in a four-seater plane between Des Moines and Dubuque. Just the two of them, the pilot and me. The pilot kept squirting alcohol on the outside of his windshield to make a clear space in the ice about the size of his hand to see through to fly. When we got out on the tarmac — which was covered in ice — I went to put my overcoat back on, and the wind caught it and I started gliding across the runway like a ship on the sea. (I only realized later — after the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac in 1982 — how dangerous that trip was.)
On another occasion, the producer of that crew — a pretty young woman who reminded me of the actress Paula Prentiss — overheard my photographer, Mark, and me discussing where we were going to stay the night and holding open our wallets to see what was left inside. She offered to put us up if we were in a bind. Producers had that kind of cash to throw around in those days. Like Ali today, we said no, thanks.
Consider this sort of an op-ed. Bryan Caskey writes to me to bring my attention to his own blog post about the city’s crackdown on food trucks, which I excerpt here:
Columbia Food Trucks Under Assault from City Council
Think that job-killing regulations are just a Federal problem? Think again. Columbia is just recently experiencing a food truck revival, which has brought great food and a wonderful sense of style to our little town. However, the City Council has passed a stupid regulation:
Starting in February, any vendor who wants to set up shop on private property to sell anything from puppies to produce must have written permission from the landowner. They also must provide city officials with drawings of the sites they frequent and must meet zoning requirements, especially having sufficient parking spaces.
This is ridiculous. If I, as a private property owner, want to invite a food truck to come to my business, I have to draft and execute a written agreement. Then, the food truck has to go down to the City of Columbia and provide a government clerk with a copy of that agreement, provide a drawing of the site, and must jump through other hoops, and probably fill out a couple forms…and probably pay some sort of fee. I would think that permission from the property owner should be sufficient….
Our City Government needs to focus on the serious problems facing Columbia. Food trucks selling me delicious BBQ are not one of them. The City is saying that this is an “unintended consequence”, and that they’re trying to get at other people, but what’s the deal with that? Are we having an epidemic of moving flea markets? Is that the biggest problem we have now as a City? This is just another example of the over-regulation that is running rampant at every level of government in America. Keep your regulations off my food truck!
For the rest of Bryan’s post, visit his blog, “Permanent Press.”
Perhaps that headline was a bit too alarmist. Because that would be TOO cruel — cutting anyone off from the black nectar. But to politicians, if not to normal people, being cut off from the cash flow would be as bad as losing the coffee itself. Because, you know, their priorities are seriously out of whack.
Thanks to Steven for reminding me of this item I meant to post a day or two ago (it was first brought to my attention by ADCO’s Lanier Jones:
Starbucks CEO to DC: You’ve been cut off
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is fed up with Washington.
And he is doing something about it.
Spurred by what he describes as a failure of leadership on the part of lawmakers, Schultz is mounting a one-man bull rush against apolitical culture that has “chosen to put partisan and ideological purity over the well being of the people.”
What does that mean? No more political donations — not for anybody.
And he’s recruiting other CEOs to join him…
If only Starbucks could run Washington. It would, at the very least, smell much nicer. And imagine if we could address the nation’s problems in the efficient, pragmatic way in which baristas fill orders. I’d want to hang out in Washington all the time. And then, and then… we could open more Starbucks governments in the state capitals! And so forth…
I’d never seen this before, but I certainly saw it tonight. I was wandering through the men’s clothing section (did you know you can’t find plain white boxers at Walmart any more? this was the fourth one I’d tried), and I started hearing something that could only be live music. So I flipped on the video on my phone and kept approaching, and above is what I saw.
Perception That Retailer No Longer Has Best Prices Undercuts Sales Turnaround
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is losing its longstanding reputation for offering consumers the lowest prices, complicating its efforts to end a two-year sales slump in the U.S.
The Bentonville, Ark., retail colossus became the world’s largest store chain by avoiding sales gimmicks through “every day low prices” on everything from food to sporting goods under one roof.
But surveys by retail consultants, analysts and brand experts now find that Wal-Mart’s aura of price leadership has faded since the recession, because customers who searched for better deals sometimes found them at competitors such as Dollar General Corp., Aldi Inc. and Amazon.com Inc….
It certainly didn’t look troubled tonight. Based on my difficulty in finding a checkout line that was neither too long (the “express” lanes”) nor featuring people with more than one filled cart. (I wrote on Twitter while waiting, “Waiting in crazy lines at Walmart. Apparently, a lot of people are simultaneously planning polar expeditions…”)
Not that I’ll mourn if Walmart suffers a bit. Walmart is just one of a bunch of factors that killed the newspaper business. You’ll recall a time when grocery stores were a huge newspaper advertiser, along with department stores. Well, Walmart threatened and undercut them both with a strategy that did not require regular local advertising: With “Everyday Low Prices,” you don’t need to advertise any specials. You just have to let the word get around town, and you’re permanently set. And a lot of traditional newspaper advertisers were permanently shafted.
But the live music makes it all worthwhile, right?
I hadn’t looked at my blog stats for awhile, and then I saw to my surprise that I had 230,000 page views last month. And the last six months have averaged more than 200,000. (It’s been more than half a million “hits” a month, but I don’t put stock in those.)
That’s my second-highest ever, so I have to ask — what gives? There were no really hot news stories running then. No election, and the Legislature was out of town, and it was really, really hot.
Only thing I can guess is that this is the groundswell that occurs as we build toward a presidential primary. And it’s still building. If you look at the average daily “pages” up there, you’ll see that we’re on pace this month to exceed 240,000, without anything remarkable happening to break up the Dog Days. (The highest ever was over 250,000 in June 2010 — but that was because of the freakish confluence of the rise of Nikki Haley, and that of Alvin Greene.)
My peak on my old blog was January 2008, the month of both the highly-contested Republican and Democratic primaries here, which drew a good bit of national and international attention to the blog. The total was something between 80,000 and 90,000 (I don’t have the numbers in front of me.) A typical month in the year following that was more like 40,000 (which was still higher than in years before). So you see, my traffic has increased fivefold without the benefit of having my name in the paper every day. Go figure.
SCRA described the company as a world leader and pioneer in deep ultraviolet-LED lamp technology. Nitek was launched in early 2007 with the goal of commercializing innovative micro-devices using III-Nitride technology, according to the company website.
The lab was formed as a small-scale, vertically integrated manufacturing facility for ultraviolet emitters, high-power electronics and visible LEDs and lasers…
The company will initially employ about 14 high-tech, high-wage employees. That number is expected to double in the next three years, SCRA said…
So… they’re selling light, from what I gather. Or something. Here’s wishing them huge success.
Yesterday, I was going to share something similar to this — the obligatory, ritual photos of distressed brokers, such as this one (there were others I was looking at yesterday, but they seem to be gone now). It’s almost like they’re thinking, “Oh, there’s a photographer! If I strike the right pose and expression, I’ll be on the front of The Wall Street Journal, and maybe that’ll help build my brand so I can find a new and very different job…”
But as I often do, I started thinking about copyrights, and just not wanting to deal with the huge hassle that could ensue.
With these photos there are a number of layers to laugh at – the poor broker, the photographer waiting to take that perfect photo of the poor broker, the media who love to run with these photos. And then there’s me, this guy who collected them and made a blog, which is totally ridiculous as well. People can laugh at whichever part they want to laugh at or maybe they’re not laughing at all. Maybe they think it’s beautiful, or horrible, or stupid. All of them are probably right.
We’ve gotta get some sort of enjoyment out of this mess, right? So go ahead. Smile at their misery. (How decadent. Perhaps as our economy continues to plunge, we’ll get to be like Germany during the Weimar Republic, and just mock everything…)
Today’s rout ranks as the sixth-largest point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in history. Here is a list of the top 10:
Date and decline
9/29/2008 — 777.68 points
10/15/2008 — 733.08 points
9/17/2001 — 684.81 points
12/1/2008 — 679.95 points
8/8/2011 — 634.76 points
4/14/2000 –617.78 points
10/27/1997 — 554.27 points
10/22/2008 — 514.45 points
8/4/2011 — 512.76 points
I just want everybody involved in this achievement to get credit. So when I say, “Way to go, guys,” I’m including everyone. The SC5 and their spiritual brethren, of course — couldn’t have done it without you. No one played a bigger immediate role in recent days. But let’s have a big hand for Speaker Boehner and the Establishment crowd, for not standing up to them and keeping their caucus in line. And to President Obama for, I don’t know, for failing to magically make people come to the table. Or for the stimulus that didn’t help enough. Or whatever. And W. for creating the new prescription drug benefit without paying for it. And LBJ, I guess, for giving him the idea by creating Medicare.
And let’s not neglect the private sector, the engine of America’s lack of prosperity: There are, of course, all those scared-of-their-shadow investors. And all the corporations and others who have been sitting on cash and refusing to take the risk of investing it throughout this four-year crisis. And the American consumer for failing since 2008 to keep the economy afloat by spending like it’s going out of style, the way they did for the few years before that. (I did MY part, right up until this past weekend.)
A packed house watches "Page One" at the Nickelodeon last night.
Last night, I went to see “Page One: Inside The New York Times” at the Nickelodeon. I had been asked to watch the movie, a 2010 documentary, and then stay to be a panelist for a discussion — along with Charles Bierbauer of USC and Dan Cook of the Free Times.
As I arrived, I felt a pang of guilt that yet again, I was making a public appearance and forgetting to tell you, my readers, in advance, in the remote chance you’d like to attend. But I needn’t have worried. The show was sold out. The audience included a lot of familiar faces, such as my old boss Tom McLean, who hired me at The State and was my predecessor as EPE, and the paper’s long-time attorney Jay Bender.
On the way in, I ran into Bill Rogers, head of the state Press Association. He said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to hear me, because the show was sold out. I told him they had given me two tickets, and my wife was at a book club meeting instead, so he could be my guest. When he sat next to me at the back of the theater (I couldn’t sit at the front because of my neck thing, for which I’m going to get another shot next to my spine today), I took advantage of his slightly owing me to make a pitch: Look Bill, I see that the Press Association is offering online, multi-publication ad packages, and advocacy-ad packages as well. Why not throw come blogs in? It might add some value for the buyer, and I need somebody to sell ads for me.
Shameless, huh? Well, that’s the state of news media in America today.
In fact, one of the most meaningful lines in the film, to me, was spoken by David Carr, who was essentially the star. He’s a great character. A former crack addict, he’s now a media columnist for the NYT — a brilliant reporter, and an awesome bark-off spokesman for why a dying industry matters. (Favorite momentThe movie wasn’t so much about the Times as it was about the horrific troubles of the MSM, using the media desk of the NYT as a window on that world.
Great Carr moment: He’s interviewing the founder of Vice, and said founder is going through the usual mantra about how the MSM don’t cover the real story, so you need the gutsy, edgy fringe guys to tell you what’s really going on and Carr interrupts:
Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.
Excuse the language, but one of the things this movie does is show the way people talk in newsrooms. And Carr was talking to a guy who pumped that up to the nth degree to show how hip and edgy he is, so Carr used his own terminology to put him in his place. By the way, here’s the story Carr wrote from that interview.
But that wasn’t his most meaningful line to me. That came when he had been researching an in-depth story about how the boorish Sam Zell had run the Chicago Tribune the rest of the way into the ground, and had done the obligatory interview with the Trib’s spokesman in which you say, Here’s what I’ve got; what’s your reaction? After the ritual comments about “hatchet job” and “I’ll get back to you,” Carr hangs up the phone. Sometime later, after communications from the Trib’s lawyers, he says,
The muscles of the institution are going to kick in at some point. It’s not up to me.
Exactly. And that’s one of the virtues of working in the MSM. There’s somebody to sell the ads, and you’re not even supposed to talk to them (usually, you don’t know them). There’s somebody else to worry about threats of legal action. You just worry about getting your story, and getting it right. And people who’ve never worked at such an institution — or even the somewhat smaller ones like it, across the country — have no idea how liberating and empowering that is.
Frequently, people ask me today whether I find I have greater freedom as a blogger than I did as editorial page editor of the state’s then-largest newspaper. That’s a really stupid question, although I don’t say that, because the asker has no way of knowing that.
Part of the stupidity of the question is based in the notion that when you work at a newspaper, “They tell you what to write.” I’m not entirely clear on who “they” are, but I suppose it’s the owners of the paper. I suppose, and I’ve heard, that when you work at a locally-owned paper where your masters are intricately tied into the community you cover, there are sacred cows, and positions you are told to take and others you are told not to take. But that doesn’t happen when you’re a part of a publicly-traded corporation. In all my years as editorial page editor, only once did anyone at corporate made even a suggestion about editorial content: Tony Ridder tried to make the case to Knight Ridder editorial page editors that the company’s papers should not endorse in presidential elections. His reasons for saying that appeared to be a) that we needed to concentrate on local issues; b) that what we said on our local levels about national politics didn’t matter; and c) that such endorsements only made about half of our readers furious at us. That last reason was, as I recall, more implied and stated; he really concentrated on reason a).
I thought that was a fine theory for a guy who lived and worked in California, but a pretty silly one for an editor in the home of the first-in-the-south primaries. For months before a primary, I had media from all over the country, and from abroad, contacting me to know what I, and we, thought about the candidates. I wasn’t going to tell our readers what we thought? How absurd. I ignored Tony’s suggestion. So did most of the other editors, to the best of my knowledge — I didn’t check, because I didn’t care what they did.
There’s another comment I used to get from people a lot, when I was at the paper. They used to commend me for my “courage” for taking a certain stand. That, too, was ridiculous. I got paid no matter what I wrote. I wasn’t taking any risk, beyond the inconvenience of maybe a source not talking to me any more. So I might as well take stands that mean something rather than write pap, right? I had that whole institution standing behind me, that warm blanket of security.
Here’s what I wrote a while back about the “liberating” effect of no longer working for the MSM:
The first casualty of unemployment is the truth.
OK, maybe not the first. First there’s the blow to one’s bank account. Then the loss of self-confidence. But truth is right up there. Especially for me. Until I was laid off in March, I was editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper. A colleague once said to me, accusingly, “You don’t think this is the opinion page. You think it’s the truth page.” I just looked at her blankly. Of course it was the truth page.
Readers expected me to tell everything I knew, and plenty that I only thought I knew – about South Carolina’s feckless politicians (Mark Sanford, Joe Wilson – need I say more?), or whatever struck me, without reservation. And I delivered.
My reputation survives my career. Recently, a friend warned me that people feel constrained in talking to me, because their confidences might turn up on my blog. After all, bloggers tell all, right? Ask Monica Lewinsky. Ask ACORN.
“HAH!” say I.
As a blogger who answers to no one, I am not nearly as frank and open as I was as a newspaper editor who thought he had a secure job.
I haven’t disclosed whom I have worked for on consulting gigs since leaving the paper, because my clients haven’t been crazy about the exposure. Every word I write, I think: Might this put off a prospective employer? And I know it has, despite my caution.
There are things I have not written – pithy, witty, dead-on observations on the passing parade, I assure you – because I think, “Do you have to write that and run the risk of offending this person who MIGHT point you to a job? Can’t you just write about something else?”
And where am I applying for jobs? Well, I’m not going to tell YOU, am I?
People used to praise me for my courage for taking on powerful people at the paper. But I was taking no risk whatsoever. As long as I was supported by advertising, a transaction I was ethically barred from even thinking about, I had impunity.
But an unaligned blogger still trying to function as a journalist stands naked and alone, and is not nearly as free and honest as he was writing from the once-impregnable citadel of an editorial page. At least, this one isn’t. Keep that in mind, citizen, as newspapers fall around you.
Watching that movie launched me on many different streams of thought; I could have talked about them all night. What I just told you describes part of my reaction to a single line. As Tom McLean said after one long-winded response I gave as a panelist, I always needed an editor.
South Carolina hardly rates a mention in this report in the WSJ today (“Amazon Battles States Over Sales Tax“), but I thought some of y’all, your nerves still jangled from the recent battle at the State House, might be interested in this step-back report on what was at stake for Amazon, and how SC fits into the company’s grand strategy. An excerpt:
SEATTLE — Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest online retailer, hasn’t charged sales tax in most states since its founding in 1994. And it has taken some extreme measures to keep it that way.
Among them: Staff traveling around the U.S. have been required to first consult a company map that shades each state red, yellow or green, said three people who have worked for the retailer. These people said they needed permission from managers or company lawyers before entering “red” states because a worker’s actions might trigger laws that force Amazon to collect taxes in those states.
Such steps to avoid local levies allow Amazon to undercut in-state retailers by the amount they must add in sales tax, which can exceed 8%.
A close examination of Amazon’s corporate practices, based on interviews with more than a dozen former employees and people who have done business with the Seattle company, as well as a review of corporate documents, indicates that the company believes its sales-tax policy is critical to its performance…
Not cheeky in the way these young women got infamously cheeky — we wouldn’t want to see that sort of mucking about, would we? — but in the English slang sense.
Today at Rotary, our speaker was from FN Manufacturing — you know, the plant in the northeastern part of our community that makes the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (the weapon that replace the legendary BAR), the M240 medium machine gun, and the ubiquitous M16. Among other things.
And I learned quite a bit. I learned that FN owns Browning and Winchester, for instance. Interesting stuff.
Including stuff that I didn’t realize I was learning at the time, but which came in handy.
Before the meeting, I was hefting and examining some of the wares on a table in the back of the room. And when I say “heft,” with some of them I mean heft. Our speaker would tell later about how the steel version of the M240 — or was it the 249? — weighs 28 pounds (without ammunition), and when they came out with a lighter, titanium version, the Army essentially said, “Great! Now our soldiers can carry five pounds less!” and the Marines said “Great! Now our Marines can carry five pounds more ammo!”
Anyway, as I was holding and examining a SCAR adapted for sniper use with a scope almost as long as the weapon (it looked something like this, and reminded me of “Vera,” which if you’ll recall was Jayne Cobb‘s very favorite gun), Kathryn Fenner walked by and said, in a tone calculated to cool my enthusiasm, “They’re not giving free samples…”
Turns out she was wrong. At the end of the meeting, there were two door prizes — a scrimshaw knife, and this lovely charcoal lighter. To get them, you had to answer correctly a question based on the talk.
Apparently, I was the only one who was listening when the speaker said the Columbia plant is 188,000 square feet. No, I didn’t write it down. I just heard, and remembered. (I did write down that the M240 — or was it the M249 — bears a warranty up to 100,000 rounds. Of course, it can fire 1,100 rounds a minute.)
You just never know when an odd sort of memory is going to pay off.
A couple of weeks ago — just before he went on a European vacation — Wesley Donehue asked me to be his first guest on a new web show he was starting. (I had already been on Pub Politics, which he and Phil Bailey host, six times.) The topic, rather than politics, was social media.
Funny thing is, we spent the first half of the show, if not more, talking about OLD media. I sort of reminisced about what it was like in the MSM before Wesley was born, and then brought the tale right up to the moment I got canned by The State, along with an explanation of the forces that led us to that point.
So there wasn’t all that much time left for social media. I get get to plug the blog a little, and talk about how I have close to 200,000 page views each month, etc.
But you know what we didn’t get to? The role that the briefer forms of social media — especially Twitter, to a less extent Facebook — have played in the growth of my blog.
The biggest month I ever had on my old blog, when I was with the newspaper, was something over 80,000 page views. That was January 2008, the month of those two hotly contested presidential primaries in SC, which drew a lot of national and international attention. After that, the average month settled down to something like 45,000.
Then, after I left the paper, Tim Kelly talked me into using Twitter (and Facebook) to promote my blog. My biggest month ever was June 2010, with 254,545 page views — largely a result of the national attention paid to Nikki Haley and Alvin Greene. After that, I settled down to where the last few months have hovered between 180k and 220k.
I attribute a lot of that to social media. Now I just have to figure a way to get Twitter to pay me for going around saying that.
Last night, my wife showed me a letter from The Wall Street Journal telling me that my subscription price is going to more than double. Guess that hacking scandal really has put ol’ Rupert in a bind, huh?
Then, just moments ago, I received this from Netflix:
Dear Brad,
We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $14.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 2 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $11.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $19.98 a month ($7.99 + $11.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.
You can easily change or cancel your unlimited streaming plan, unlimited DVD plan, or both, by going to the Plan Change page in Your Account.
We realize you have many choices for home entertainment, and we thank you for your business. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to call us at 1-888-357-1516.
–The Netflix Team
Hey, I just switched from the three-movies-out-at-a-time plan to the two-movies one because I didn’t LIKE spending something like 19 bucks a month on it…
Good thing I know that the private sector is driven by such wonderful motives as customer service and efficiency. Otherwise, I’d be a little bit ticked right now.
LONDON — The tabloid at the center of the British phone hacking is to be closed after a final, ad-free Sunday edition this weekend, according to a top official at News Corp., James Murdoch, in a sudden statement that underscored the devastating effect of allegations that targets included not only a 13-year-old murder victim but also relatives of fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The statement was so sudden that the paper, News of the World, was still advertising a subscription deal on its Web site.
The new reports of stunning intrusions came a day after Britain’s Parliament collectively turned on Rupert Murdoch, the head of theNews Corporation, which owns The News of the World, and the tabloid culture he represents, using a debate about the widening phone hacking scandal to denounce reporting tactics by newspapers once seen as too politically influential to challenge.
Whether this is a precedent or not depends upon your definition of “newspaper,” of course.
I’m going to be on Pub Politics tonight (my sixth time!), and one of several topics the guys want to talk about is Nikki Haley’s book deal — which is a bit of trivia I had missed (I knew she was writing a memoir, but nothing about a “deal”), so I had to go look it up:
NEW YORK (AP) — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has a book deal.
Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group (USA), announced Wednesday that Haley’s “Can’t is Not an Option” will come out in January.
Haley, a Republican and tea party favorite, was elected last year. At 39, she is the country’s youngest governor and only the second Indian-American governor.
In an interview in March with The Associated Press, Haley said writing had been “therapeutic” and that she would cover everything from growing up in rural South Carolina to her contentious 2010 campaign, when she faced — and denied — allegations of infidelity…
I wonder whether anyone at her publisher’s will pick up, between now and the pub date, on just how unsuccessful Gov. Haley has been in achieving her goals, aside from the goal of getting elected. And when they do, will they push for a title change?
Several years ago, I sort of embarrassed myself by making fun of Andre Bauer for having a MySpace page. (Actually, no one mocked me for it at the time, but looked at a year or too later, it made me look pretty hopeless…)
Back then — we’re talking 2006 — nobody at the State House did social media; not yet. Or not so I had noticed. There were a couple of bloggers, but MySpace? Facebook? Those were for kids, for college kids trying to hook up or whatever. And it was an indication of a lack of seriousness for a constitutional officer of the state to engage in such activities. Or of a constitutional officer trying to, you know, hook up. Ahem.
Then, everybody started doing it. Which sort of made Andre look like a trailblazer. Way before Obama.
But then… MySpace got really uncool. If we want to be taken seriously, we are still not allowed to make fun of Facebook — yet. And in fact, it seems to be going from triumph to triumph. To hear some talk, it will soon take over the world. Well, that’s another topic for another day.
My purpose in addressing you at the moment is to declare that it’s officially OK to make fun of MySpace again. It’s sort of been OK for a couple of years now, but this makes it official:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally found a buyer for MySpace, but the $35 million sale price is only a fraction of how much the company had been asking for.
Advertising network operator Specific Media and News Corp. finalized the deal Wednesday, allowing Murdoch’s company to move the once-mighty social networking site off its books before its fiscal quarter ends Thursday.
News Corp. had reportedly been hoping to sell the company for at least $100 million.
The $35 million price tag is either laughably high or embarrassingly low, depending on where you’re sitting. It is $545 million less than Murdoch paid for the site only six years ago. But that was when MySpace was the new Friendster, back when such a comparison was a flattering one. (Yes, we know we’ve used that joke before.)
Go ahead. Let’s hear your sarcastic remarks. It’s OK. (Ha-ha-ha — Friendster. The Aztecs had Friendster…)
