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Swallowed Up

Not to self-promote too much, but it occurred to me while writing earlier that my involvement with TechTV actually goes farther back than my employment with the channel. About five and a half years ago, I reported on ZDTV (the station’s former name) for Wired: “You-Gotta-Be-Kidding TV.” It was my first assignment after I left the magazine to try my hand at freelancing and my first long feature ever. It’s pleasing to read now; I think it’s held up pretty well.

One small personal irony is that now I’m going back to freelancing, at least for the time being (I don’t anticipate doing a story on the channel now, though). A larger irony is that, through a history that involved ownership and management changes and a couple huge shifts in programming philosophy, ZDTV/TechTVmet the big challenges I wrote about. It kept expanding its reach, building an audience (a small but growing one), and establishing an ad base that was far richer than what even the CEO anticipated when I interviewed him (the big win there was to get past the reliance on tech-related advertising and bring in consumer companies, like carmakers; in fact, it’s similar to the ad mix that made Wired a publishing phenomenon). But despite the success, the channel is history.

On one level, the swallowing up of TechTV is just the way business goes. An early analysis of the sale called it “a teardown“: Comcast was buying the property to knock down the house (our programming, staff, and other assets), keep the real estate (our access to 43 million cable- and satellite-subscriber homes) and put up something new there (its G4 game channel, which has reportedly run through a big pile of money and has just 13 million or so households). Fine, it’s their dough, and you can play that way if you ante up. That doesn’t mean it’s a smart play, though you can’t really blame the buyers. The perverse part is the fact the former owner (Paul Allen) sold the property without any apparent concern whether it would be torn down or not. All you people who’ve worked to build this into something — get moving, because the building’s coming down.

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‘TechLive’: That’s a Wrap


Techlive_1
Last night was our last show. Odd to say it, given all the complaining I’ve done at work and away from work about wanting the show to be better, the stories to be better, everything to be better; and odd to say given all my doubts about whether what I was, we were, doing was meaningful at such a dark time in our world and our history; but: yes, I’m sad to see it end and to have my connection to a pretty great group of workmates severed. I was there three years, four months, and two days (not that anyone’s counting, and I still have to go in Monday for the final handshake and to turn in my laptop and keys and such). Anyway,the picture is a screen capture I ripped off a bulletin board on TechTV help guru Leo Laporte’s site. I’m there somewhere in the back.

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What Your Neighbor Gives

Hoo-ha today over a New York Times story about FundRace.org, a site that takes public information on campaign donations from the Federal Election Commission and makes it easy to see who’s donating how much to which candidates — and where the donors live. The concern is privacy, whether it’s a good idea to map the donations to names and addresses right in your neighborhood. Here’s the thing: All the information has been publicly available online — for instance, at the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org — and that’s a central feature of the campaign laws to keep things above board. All FundRace does is to eliminate a couple steps online searchers have to make on the FEC and other sites. I think it’s a great idea, even if it allows me to discover the embarrassing fact that three-fourths of the Brekkes who show up in the database have contributed cash to the wrong guy.

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Cement and You

A pretty good story in the Wall Street Journal: A cement shortage is threatening the building boom in the United States. That’s because a lot of the cement used to make the concrete that goes into home foundations and big projects like the Bay Bridge project comes from overseas sources like Thailand and Colombia. The cement can’t get here because a building boom in China is tying up ships bringing construction supplies there.

“The cement shortages exacerbate a headache for the U.S. building industry from increasingly scarce materials. Steel supplies have been tight, with prices for many products soaring more than 50% since January.And wood supplies have been so tight that the composite price of framing lumber — a kind of index price that reflect a mix of lumber products — has jumped more than 60% to $463 as of Friday from $285 a year ago, according to Random Lengths, an industry newsletter in Eugene, Ore. Some of the price increases are being passed on to consumers.”

I also like the fact there’s a newsletter called Random Lengths.

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Space History

Not exactly the Apollo program, but a big piece of space history nonetheless: A bunch of amateur rocketeers actually succeeded in launching their craft on a suborbital flight (altitude 70 to 77 miles) earlier this week. It’s the first time a privately funded, nonprofessional group with no government ties or money has managed to put something in space. The team’s leader, Ky Michaelson, is a former movie stuntman who lives in the Minneapolis area.

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Graduation Day

Just one small thing: Today, my son Eamon graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, one of 36 students in the East Asian Languages department who got their bachelor’s degrees (Eamon’s major was Japanese). I forget the exact words, but after the diplomas were all handed out, the department chair congratulated the group and said something like, “You’re now part of the community of educated men and women.” What a great accomplishment for Eamon. And the rest of the group, too. But especially Eamon. Did I mention he’s my son?

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Commute Picture

Ferryport

A shot from the evening ferry on May 7, looking west down the Oakland Estuary past the freighters unloading at the port of Oakland, to Yerba Buena Island and the western portion of the Bay Bridge.

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What’s News (2)

Our preferred local news show — amazing that such a thing still exists– comes on at 10 p.m. But lately, it’s had competition: From “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. I’m sorry — this might be the only way I can make it through our “Giant Mess O’ Potamia”.

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What’s News

A double bankshot from the world of Journalism Navel Gazing: An Online Journalism Review brief on an item on the Poynter Institute site:

“A new Intelliseek service could be a godsend for Web-savvy editors, Poynter Online reports. The ‘automated trend discovery system’ Blogpulse.com compiles the most popular names, phrases and links in more than 1 million blogs to find out what issues and personalities might be tomorrow’s front-page news. Steve Outing, a senior editor at Poynter, was surprised to see that the top news stories — prisoner abuse and beheadings in Iraq — did not top Blogpulse’s “key phrase” list. Rather, according to Blogpulse, many Weblogs are more concerned with the Mexican air force’s UFO sighting, Ralph Nader’s Reform Party endorsement and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader who allegedly beheaded American Nicholas Berg.”

Wow. Torturegate didn’t make the list. And parenthetically, but without the parens, I absolutely love the use of “allegedly” in that description of the Berg murder. Yes, journalists must pantomime their belief in the presumption of innocence and objective distance in criminal matters (even though they generally report the cops’ or government’s word as gospel). But this is where that exercise turns fatuous. Someone proclaiming himself to be Zarqawi is carrying out the murder on camera; further the reported evidence points to Zarqawi’s personal role; and finally, there’s no legal allegation at issue — there’s a video, a claim, and a bounty on a wanted man’s head. So if you want to be careful, you could say “the al-Qaeda leader suspected of beheading Nick Berg” or, “Zarqawi, the apparent self-proclaimed killer of Nick Berg” or something like that. But please, don’t use “allegedly.”