Center for Citizen Media

The AP reports: XM and Sirius to combine; hurdles loom, and says:

It’s too early to say what the deal will mean for subscription prices. The merger could bring down the cost of providing service, but at the same time give the company more pricing power as the only U.S. satellite radio provider.

No, it’s not at all too early to say what this means. Of course it will bring higher prices.

Neither company has turned a profit yet. No matter what the combined entity — which will almost surely be approved by a federal government that doesn’t enforce antitrust anymore — can save in costs, it’s guaranteed to hike prices at some point.

The question, then, is whether that matters. It does, but not in the long run.

The audio business is rapidly shifting to something that falls in between radio and old-fashioned record players or CDs. We are moving around with the music we want to hear, and listening to Internet radio at home. About the only thing missing is the live information we need or want right now.

One of the few things I listen to on the radio is traffic reports. Even there I’ve moved most of my listening to the 511.org service, where I dial 511 on my mobile phone and instruct it, using voice commands to give me traffic conditions on the freeway I’m about to use.

What’s left? Live news that I really, really want to hear, such as major breaking news.

I still have antitrust qualms about this merger, but not the kind I’d have had a year or two ago. The Net and audio progress makes the issue much less troubling than it was.

Technorati Tags: MediaBusiness

The New York Times, running an interview with David G. Neeleman, the beleaguered chief executive of airline JetBlue, reports that “JetBlue’s C.E.O. Is ‘Mortified’ After Fliers Are Stranded” in last week’s snowstorms. Neeleman’s words to the Times are indeed abject in their regret, and forceful in his intention to turn around a situation that may have hurt his company badly.

Yet there’s not even a hint of this combination of apparently genuine regret and determination on the airline’s website. Not on the home page, where you might expect to find a heartfelt message from the management. And not even on the page you find via the home-page link so matter-of-factly named Operational Interruptions, which is a simple explanation of what’s going on and what passengers can do (not very much) to contact a human being at the carrier.

The news media aren’t the only venue for telling the airline’s new story, or shouldn’t be. The place where a lot of disgruntled customers are heading right now is the website.

By not using the site the way they’re using the traditional media, Neeleman and his colleagues at JetBlue are missing a major opportunity.

The online magazine spiked has a story entitled “Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’?” in which a writer asks some reasonable questions but then undermines herself with — at best — incomplete reporting. She writes, in part:

Much was made of a study conducted by Nature magazine at the end of 2005, which found that Wikipedia was about as accurate in covering scientific topics as was Encyclopaedia Britannica. According to the survey, based on 42 articles reviewed, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while the average entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica contained three. Of eight ‘serious errors’ the reviewers found, including misinterpretations of important concepts, four came from Wikipedia and four from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

However, soon after this report was published, Encyclopaedia Britannica published a damning response accusing Nature of misrepresenting its own evidence. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to Encyclopaedia Britannica were, in fact, not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles examined were not even in Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has been reported that the study was poorly carried out and its findings were laden with errors; one publication accuses Nature of ‘cooking’ the report (6).

Yet hundreds of publications jumped on the Nature story, echoing the argument that Wikipedia (based on collective intelligence) was as good as Encyclopaedia Britannica (based on professional knowledge). Jim Wales, founder of Wikipedia, continues to cite the Nature survey in his defence when quizzed about the accuracy of information on Wikipedia.

Several issues:

First, there’s no link or even a footnote pointing to the Nature report. Nor is there a link to the Britannica response, which as the story notes disputed the findings. (The reporter’s footnoted evidence of Nature’s errors is a story by a publication that has been deeply and consistently skeptical, if not downright hostile, to Wikipedia.)

And, given her damning of the publications that “jumped on” the Nature story, it’s utterly bizarre that she didn’t point to Nature’s reply to Britannica’s objections, which included a point-by-point response.

No one says Wikipedia doesn’t have its flaws. It has plenty. And Nature’s methodology, and its original headline, did leave something to be desired. But its response was thorough, and the fundamental points it raised essentially held up.

But when the reporter fails to point to any of the relevant material, she does readers no favors. Given that more than 10 months had passed since the magazine’s full replies, the missing links undermine the entire article.

(Note: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a member of this center’s board of advisors, and I’m an investor in his separate for-profit company.)

Chicago Reader: The Public Sentiment Machine. Not long ago a letter to the editor required three things: time, an idea, and the ability to put it into words. All three impediments have been swept away. Once American bedrock, today a letter to the editor is often a chunk of computer-generated boilerplate.

This practice indicts almost everyone involved: the organizations that gin up semi-phony public sentiment; the letter “writers” who cut and paste what they’re told to say; and the newspapers that print the letters without serious due diligence.

Yet it’s easy to see how they slip through, and not so easy to know how to stop them.

Maybe the newspaper editorial-page editors should work with a school of journalism (or computer science department, or both) to create a search-and-discover engine with the sole purpose of finding these things before they appear in the papers. There would be some human involvement, but a lot of this could be automated.

If I were an editorial page editor, I’d start a special column devoted solely to naming the readers who send these cut-and-paste letters. It might cause people to reconsider.

Rebecca Dube’s advice to readers who comment on the Toronto Globe & Mail includes:

1. Understand that an online discussion is not a free-for-all. Editors like me moderate online discussions for reasons of space, time and basic human decency.

This will be difficult for some folks, unfortunately.

(Disclosure: Dube’s husband, Jon, is a member of this center’s advisory board.)

Steven Rattner, in “Red All Over,” says:

We’ve had experience in the past — the New York City subways come to mind — with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It’s time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it — and pay for it.

The slime who use blog comment systems to peddle their often-fraudulent crap are innundating this and other blogs with spam. Luckily, the Akismet spam filter traps most of them and you never have to worry about seeing this garbage.

But the deluge is such that hundreds are now showing up in the filter each day. I used to be able to go through the quarantined spams, looking for “false positives” — that is, genuine comments — and mark them as OK. I no longer have the time to do this, given the large number of spam comments I have to wade through.

This means that some of you may have tried to post a comment and had it swept away with the spam. If so, I apologize. If you did try to post a legitimate comment and didn’t see it on the page, please contact me and I’ll try to help.

Meanwhile, the spams will continue to flood in, and I’ll continue to delete them.

IDG executive Colin Crawford, discussing the media company’s transformation, says:

The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization and take some chances.

Crawford works for one of the smartest CEOs I’ve ever encountered, Pat McGovern, a man who works for the long term. He has the further advantage of not reporting to Wall Street, as IDG is privately held.

If anyone can figure it out, it’s IDG. Is there anything like this vision in other media companies? For the most part, the answer is no.

I’m in an airport airline club where a big-screen TV is showing CNN. It’s a split screen. Half is devoted to some meaningless hearing in the Anna Nicole Smith case. The other features a private plane that may or may not be having trouble with landing gear.

Last night and the night before I was part of a semi-debate at the University of California’s Spectrum series. Former CNN Asia correspondent Mike Chinoy, a superb journalist, and I actually agreed more than we disagreed on many of the topics in the session, entitled Will the Internet Kill Newspapers and Broadcast News? I was arguing in the affirmative, wishing it wasn’t likely but unable to solve a business puzzle that demands more innovation than I’ve seen to date from these businesses.

CNN might survive as a National Enquirer of cable, though how it will compete with Fox for that dishonor is unclear. But the more the once-proud network sinks lower and lower into tabloidism, with this morning’s non-news voyeurism and its promotion of people like Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck — demagogues who degrade the public debate and demean everyone who cares about true journalism — the harder it will be for anyone to claim that CNN does anything but provide slick (and often sick) entertainment for people who don’t want to know what’s actually going on in the world.

Update: Anna Nicole Smith is still deceased. The plane landed safely.

Steve Outing collected some opinions for a piece in Editor & Publisher about where news habits are heading. Read them (including a brief comment from me) in “Where News Consumption Is Heading.”