BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

May 13, 2005

A blog without the links

: Forgot to mention that The Week magazine has a new site with more content. I still wish that they'd add links.

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Armed pork

: I find the whining by both sides over Rumsfeld's base closings to be most unseemly:

Hey, every American industry has gone through restructuring. There's no reason why the U.S. military should not restructure given the changing nature of its business. And I don't give a damn whether the base in your state or your state or your state closed, senator or congressman.

It's one country. It's our money. It's your waste. Enough.

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Meeting Chairman Powell

: I just met Michael Powell.

The former chairman of the FCC was at the Aspen Institute forum I've been attending; he's a senior fellow there. So I knew I'd see him.

And I'll confess I was a bit nervous about meeting him. Or perhaps embarrassed.

I've been hard on Powell on this page over his role in the FCC's indecency blitzkrieg. And I certainly stand by that criticism.

But I also agree with him on his other unpopular stance, media consolidation. I respect where he stood on the First Amendment -- before he led the indecency stampede. I think he gets the importance of letting technology grow on its own (he has said that the best thing FCC did for wi-fi was nothing, or words to that effect). I've seen him speak at a conference and knew he was smart and softspoken. So it's not as if I was meeting someone I could ignore. Powell's not someone to be dismissed. I was eager to meet the man and hear from him.

And I didn't flatter myself to think that he'd paid any attention to what some blogger had snarked about him. But Larry Kudlow had told me that he'd brought up my criticism to Powell on the air. So I didn't know: He could have decked me.

I decided to make it clear from the first that I'd blogged about him, from the other side. Twice, I said I was a blogging gnat who'd buzzed about him and he dismissed that, waved the point away like a bug in the air, and said I was just one of many.

The Aspen rules are that you can't quote someone with attribution without permission and I didn't intend to blog conversations with Powell. I will say that when we discussed indecency, I said that the FCC and Congress have no cover to defend the First Amendment; if they do vote for free speech, they can be accused of voting for smut. And he didn't disagree. I will also admit that in a conversation about our favorite gadgets, I told about using my Treo to blog about the FCC's fine against Howard Stern from the choir loft of my church. He noted the irony of that. And otherwise, we talked about technology changing society and how the next generation thinks and about favorite gadgets and about telecom and video games and media consolidation.

I like him. He's smart and easygoing and charming. We disagree about indecency (though I suspect we're not as far apart as it may seem) and agree about other issues. And I'd like to hear more from him.

Is there any news in this post? No. But I figured that given our history, I couldn't meet Michael Powell without telling you.

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Schmodcast

: I wanted to hear the debut of Adam Curry's new PodShow on Sirius but my damned satellite service (I am both a customer and stockholder) has apparently broken its internet streaming tonight (great timing) and Curry's ownsite is also broken (great timing II).

So I'm making a damned fool of myself sitting in the car in the driveway with my laptop (ain't wi-fi amazing; can we say that enough?) listening to Adam's choices of podcasts and blogging about it. The good news: Some are musical, with neat mashups; that's the best part by far. The bad news: I just heard a really boring Canadian podcaster (no, that is not redundant and shame on you for thinking so) and Madge Weinstein, who is about as entertaining as and sounds like Mark Harris (of Martha Ray and Howard Stern fame). It's not a fair sample, since I have to run in and out of the house and turn the car on and off, but it is a mixed bag.

: Oh, and I wish they had links to all the podcasts played to both give credit and to let me listen to more if I want. Metadata, man, metadata.

: Curry ends by playing his own Daily Source Code podcast... apparently all 40 minutes of it.

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Whereabouts

: Driving back home this afternoon. Blogging later.

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How advertising really works

: Howard Stern told great and pathetic stories this morning about trying to get a job when he got out of college: radio guys who listened to his horrible audition tape and told him he was the worst announcer they'd ever heard, a close-miss at becoming a ladies' buyer at Bloomingdales, and stints with advertising:

He got a job as a media planner at Benton & Bowles. Math skills? they ask. Excellent, he says. And then he arrives at work and knows he's in over his head. He's working on Planter's Peanuts. The boss whips out a calculator and sheets of numbers and tells him to find all the Jewish newspapers in the country -- Jews like peanut oil for cooking, he says -- and calculate the CPM and then divide. In Howard's head, he shrieks: "Divide? DIVIDE?!?" He comes in on Saturdays and then Sundays -- "you don't have to wear a tie on Sundays," somebody tells him (which reminds me of the old working-at-Disney joke: "If you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday"). He can't do it. He quits with no notice.

Note that this is how money is divvied up to the titans of media: Some kid out of college who, if he's lucky, can divide, plans where to spend an advertiser's bucks.

Howard's father then got him an in a the B&B film department as the AV geek but he got fired before he was hired because he'd quit his last job there without notice.

And then he got a job in sales at a tiny radio station, where the boss, who wasn't wearing a shirt, told him to sell advertising and get in-kind trade: Howard went to a Chinese restaurant and convinced the man he had to advertise on radio and he comes back to the office with hundreds of Chinese dinners at the ready when he finds authorities taking documents. He goes back to the Chinese restaurant and tells him never to advertise on radio.

This is how media works.

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Measured

: I've been at the Aspen Institute for a day and a half sitting with smart people figuring out ways to get ethnic media its due with advertisers. There are some issues in common with online and citizens' media: trying to navigate advertising agencies as "gatekeepers of risk," as one of the participants called them, and agencies' fetish for measurement and performance. Kevin Riley, a marketing exec at IBM, gave advertisers a caution I love:

The less measurable it is, the more valuable it is.

Clark emphasized that he's not against measurement; who can be in his biz? But the point is that if advertisers and agencies wait for something new -- blogs, vlogs, podcasts, RSS, and whatever's next -- to be fully measurable, they'll miss the opportunity to get in on the buzz of something new while it's still new and still cheap.

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