BuzzMachine

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is again pushing a la carte cable.

Like every cable customer, I resent paying for channels I don’t want. I hate sports. I cannot abide religious nuts. I don’t speak Spanish. I miss various demographic targets. I have no use for tons of channels and would prefer not to pay for them.

At the same time, I think the marketplace will take care of this in the form of a la carte program downloading and purchasing on the internet. The fact that I can watch Desperate Housewives via iTunes — albeit at a high price — broke the lock that cable MSOs had on programming.

Martin is now speeding up the process.

For if a la carte pricing really comes into effect, it will kill off lots of channels that could not be supported in the open marketplace. That is, there aren’t enough people willing to support channels on their own and they survive only because they are subsidized via bundled pricing and cozy deals among the holders of content and distribution in cable. If they had to make it on advertising alone, they’d fail. If they had to make it on consumer fees alone, they’d fail. They simply don’t have the audience to support either. But cable companies make more by making us buy more TV and so they survive. That is the system Martin is threatening to break.

And when it does break, this will drive people to finding different, better, cheaper, easier means of getting the programs they want. And it will drive program owners to find more and more efficient ways to distribute their shows to larger audiences. Just as today, we no longer know the difference between broadcast and cable, soon enough we won’t know whether the shows we want to see come from a network or from the internet. And when we reach that world, we’ll no longer be hostage to network programmers’ schedules. And then we’ll have to ask: What is a network, anyway, and why do we need them?

The world of on-demand content is coming.

The funny thing is that Martin, a Republican, is using his indecency crusade to hurt big business big time. At FourSquare, I challenged him on this, saying that the FCC’s and PTC’s fringe minority jihad against Howard Stern and free speech forced Stern to satellite and immediately shrunk not only the businesses of Clear Channel and next Viacom but also the entire radio industry. I said he should be paying attention to modernizing our infrastructure instead of to Stern’s farts.

Now, by threatening regulation and censorship of cable in the form of trying to force a la carte pricing, he will be doing the same thing — he will be shrinking the network TV business.

For those who want to cheer Martin from the perspectives of fighting for consumers or fighting against big media, remember: You are dancing with the devil who wants to censor your speech. Danger, danger, Will.

This morning, Howard Stern had a good laugh about this for he said that the FCC will only kill tons of cable channels. I agree. I looked at the lineup I’m forcefed by Cablevision.

The channels I want: NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, HBO (though I’d rather watch it on demand), PBS, HGTV (the wife), CNN, FoxNews, Disney (though the kids watch that on demand), Nick (for a bit longer), Comedy (thank you, Jon Stewart), VH1, Encore, maybe the Weather Channel (though I get weather online now). That’s pretty much it.

The channels I don’t want, a partial list: WB, UPN, Pax, any religious channels, any Spanish channels (don’nt speak it), News12 (cheesey local cable news), MSNBC, CNBC, Discovery, Discovery Times, Discovery Home, TLC, Toons, TVLand, all the ESPNs, USA, TNT, Fx, TBS, Spike, WE, Oxygen, AMC, Bravo, Lifetime, A&E, Sci-fi, History, ABC Family, MTV, E! (without Howard, what is there?), BET, Fuse, Animal Planet, Travel, Fit TV, Speed, YES, MSG, FSN, QVC, HSN, Game, TCM, Golf, Biography, Military, G4 (after they ruined TechTV), FMC, Hallmark (yech)…. And on and on….

OK, I might want to see an occasional A&E show — occasional as in twice a year. So they charge me $2 each. I’d pay the price.

Or they’d be desperate to keep viewers for their ad base and they’d end up distributing their channels and every show on them online. That’s where this is headed. And the FCC is speeding it along that path. Is that the FCC’s job? Is so-called indecency the reason to do it? No on both counts. But it’s fun to watch, for the end result may well be more control of media in our hands. And that is a good thing.

: LATER: Glenn Reynold says:

SORRY, BUT THIS IS INCREDIBLY STUPID:

“You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don’t want,” Martin said, “but why should you have to?”

Um, so that other people can watch the shows they want to, maybe?

Microsoft is now going into the free classifieds business.

At yesterday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on decency, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin continued to threaten cable and satellite with regulation — read: government censorship:

Martin warned that if cable providers didn’t police indecency themselves, broadcast standards could potentially be extended to cable and satellite operators. Companies could be forced to create a family-friendly tier of channels, he added, or they might be required to offer channels individually.

Stevens added that if the indecency problem could not be resolved, “we’re going to see a bill that many of you will not like, and we are going to be in litigation for many months.”

That would be unconstitutional as hell, but that won’t stop him and the committee members from trying.

And I warn again: What comes after regulation and censorship of cable and satellite is the internet.

Get ready for the dump button on your blog.

The Telegraph has a good story on blogs in Iran and the regime’s fruitless efforts to contain them.

But the Iranian authorities are fighting a losing battle to crush these new outlets of dissent. As fast as one perpetrator is tracked down and closed, another rises in its place and takes up the cause.

The authorities have reportedly spent millions on programmes designed to filter cyberspace and block access to controversial sites, with names such as “regime change Iran”, “free thoughts on Iran” and “women against fundamentalism”.

I haven’t fully gotten my head around Ray Ozzie’s announcement of SSE, a two-way RSS that allows you to not only receive new data but send and sync new data. I’m delighted that he consulted Dave Winer in the process, by the way. Ozzie mentions SSE’s use in such applications as calendaring and contacts. But I wonder if there’s not something else here, something about making one-way feeds two-way, something about making RSS conversational.

I have to believe there are applications for news here: various correspondents share the latest news on a story, for example. Perhaps this is how we update disaster reports. Perhaps this is how first-responders do, too. Or perhaps this is how we can keep data bases of current inventory and prices of materials. Maybe it has an application in shared reviews. Or maybe I’m getting it wrong.

How do you think SSE could be useful to news?

: Crunchnotes says new companies will be built on the back of SSE.

: LATER: See good discussion in the comments.

: I wonder, also, whether this is one way to handle corrections.

Brad Feld invested in Judy’s Book, yet another effort to get people to submit reviews of local merchants and such. Fred Wilson concedes that the same issues folks like me raised with Riffs hold for Judy’s Book. Judy’s Book tries to encourage people to submit reviews by having them earn coffee cards and iPods — paying them, in other words. Paying for contributions is great. But it just indicates that it is otherwise difficult or impossible to get people to contribute content. And I’m not sure this will scale any better than previous efforts have.

I go to the North Jersey page and the questions I see are about earning those spiffs, not about good Mexican restaurants. And even if I did find those reviews, I don’t know who these people are; I don’t know whether to trust their taste. So such efforts have two problems: Getting enough contributions — which is a lot of contributions, since you’ll want to cover most vendors in most areas — and then worrying about the quality (aka trust) of those contributions.

Feld says part of the reason he invested in Judy’s Book is because it comes from Andy Sack, who created the very similar Abuzz, which was a success … well, at least it was for Sack and his investors (including Feld). But Abuzz was bought by the New York Times Company and proceeded to be a bust. There were efforts to get us involved when I was working at Advance and I resisted them all for the same reasons then as I do now:

1. It’s hard to scale local.

2. It’s hard to convince people to contribute content to me when they can now control content on their own.

If, instead, you can find ways to harness (aggregate, link to, make searchable, whatever) the content that people create under their own control and connected with their own identities (aka trust), then I think that will be superior.

There are models for local that may work, just not in a neat, centralized way. Baristanet is one. NashvilleIsTalking is another. Both leave control and content and trust and identity at the edges.

If you can figure out a way to enable that — with search, functionality, ratings of the raters, and revenue — then I think you’ll have a winner. Until then, I will wish luck to Judy’s Book and Riffs and other such services. But I think you’ll be just a centralized waystation on the path to a distributed future. Think edgey.

Juan Cole maintains his, well, unique relationship to the facts. He calls me a big supporter of Allawi’s. Here’s what I said when he was chosen in May 2004: “Tonight, NPR’s reporter said outright that he’s corrupt and second in Iraqi contempt only to Chalabi.”

Does anyone else think it’s odd that a news company, Time Inc., has a public event with a public official, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but makes it off-the-record?

I wrote my Guardian column this week about Annik Rubens (aka Larissa Vassilian), the podcaster behind Schlaflos in München and Filme und So, whose voice was a siren call that helped draw me to Munich on my way back home from Europe a week ago. The column is here; an alternate page is here. An excerpt:

I wanted to meet Vassilian to find out whether that voice was indeed authentic - it is - and to learn how she does it. In a Munich cafe, she told me she has loved radio since she was young. Instead of watching German TV, she escaped to her room and listened to the Voice of America because “it seemed wonderfully exotic”. As a result, she learned to speak flawless English and also how to make lively radio - how, in her words, to put laughter in her voice as she speaks into her microphone, imagining that she is simply talking to a friend on the phone. As a teenager, she worked part-time at a Munich radio station. Now, as a 29-year-old journalist, she can be, like any freelancer, chewed up and spat out by various German publications. And so she came to try podcasting.

This is a cautionary tale for media bosses: it’s hard for talent to rise and survive in your institutions. But on the internet, with her podcasts and her thousands of faithful fans, Vassilian has the freedom to be herself. Later, I asked her partner on Filme und So, Timo Hetzel, what he plans to do when he finishes his studies. “Podcast,” he replied, without hesitation. Beware: tomorrow’s stars are no longer necessarily interested in yesterday’s media.

We spent hours in a Schwabing cafe talking about podcasts, journalism, advertising, media, and that night, I got to meet Timo with other bloggers in a restaurant over great wurst (Eamonn Fitzgerald reported).

One tidbit I didn’t put in the Guardian column because it would have been meaningless to a UK audience was that one of the DJs who influenced Vassilian was Shadoe Stevens. See, he was good for something.

She was amused that one of the commenters here wondered, upon learning that I’d meet her, whether she was a “babe.” I’ve never been asked that about meeting bloggers. (Winer’s no babe.) Her smile is every bit as enchanting as her voice and, yes, she is as lovely as she sounds. But she doesn’t look like what you’d expect. And this leads to a funny media story she told me. Vassilian’s mother is Bavarian and her father is Armenian. She has long, curly, and dark hair — which is to say that she doesn’t have the blond hair and blue eyes you’d expect. She said that based on her cohost Timo’s voice, she might have thought in turn that he has blond hair and blue eyes but he, too, doesn’t look like he sounds. Anyway, Larissa said that the German TV magazines (more successful these days than TV Guide) seem to have a rule that they must have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress on the cover for every issue and she had to write some of those cover stories. One week, part of her story was how the actress had two different colored eyes and how bizarre that is. But by the time the issue came out, though that anecdote stayed in the cover, the actress’ picture had been Photoshopped so she had two blue eyes. In old media, you have to look the part. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a brunette.

There has been much comment and speculation surrounding what Craig Newmark said in London a week ago and then blogged:

I’m working with some folks on technologies that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories… and this is personal, helping out another group not associated with craigslist….

Craig was trying to clear up some misimpressions in various stories and posts that jumped off from this Guardian report but he couldn’t say much because the company is still stealth. To help clarify:

Craig invested in the news startup I’ve been working with, which I mentioned briefly back in May. He is one of our angel investors and advisor as an individual, not on behalf of Craigslist.

We’re not ready to show or describe our service in any detail; we’re still in development. Our goal is to create a platform to organize the world’s news using the best of technology, community, and editors. We see an explosion of interest in and coverage of news from incredibly varied sources around the world and see a need around that.

We plan to have a beta in the spring. And as I’ve blogged before, we will be looking for talent in various areas; we’re not ready to take on more folks yet but I’ll let you know when we are. And of course, we’ll post the jobs on Craigslist! In the meantime, stay tuned.

I was planning to webcast the courses I teach at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. Suppose I should podcast them, too.

My friend Rich Gordon of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern asks for a plug to get us nontraditional journalists to fill in a survey about the job skills in the trade that will be needed tomorrow. It’s not wholly relevant to our humble craft but please do help influence the stats to show that there’s a newer, simpler way in terms of basic technical skills (but not intelligence). I generally tire of such surveys but this one is quick.