Advocacy Consultant
My Mom just pointed out a local news story about the District of Columbia sending people door-to-door to make sure people in the lower-income neighborhoods are ready for the Digital TV transition coming this February. While looking for the story online, I ran across a press release marking the 100-day countdown to the digital conversion date on CivilRights.org.
I’m glad we’ve come far enough in this country that “civil rights” means making sure everyone gets to watch TV.
In the face of the appalling terror attacks in Mumbai, the Indian blogosphere has been lighting up with reactions.
It used to be that like politics, all news was local. Journalists even had a macabre joke about the newsworthiness of a tragedy based on a ratio of distance to human lives – one dead person in your town was equal to ten in New York City, which was equal to two dozen in California or a thousand halfway around the world.
That’s still true to a degree, but now we can communication with those people halfway around the world is as easy – if not easier – as with our neighbors. Thanks to online media, we can see the real human element to this tragedy beyond the images on our TVs.
I last weekend in Pittsburgh, Penn. for Light Up Night, the Steel City’s annual kickoff for the Holiday Season.
While other cities sometimes have trouble with the concept of separating church and state around Christmas, Pittsburgh had no trouble blasting Christmas carols and fireworks from the juncture of the famed three rivers. And the crowds had no problem with it, either: Despite temperatures in the twenties, hundreds if not thousands of natives and tourists gathered in the streets of downtown.
Perhaps most appropriately, the downtown Macy’s unveiled a series of window displays of Santa and his elves making toys, Christmas ornaments, and other traditional hoiday emblems. The common theme for the series was, approporiately enough, “Believe.” Can anyone want anything more out of Christmas?
…is actually Fox, according to a recent Zogby poll. Respondents ranked the Fox News Channel (39%) ahead of “the most trusted name in news,” CNN (16%). In fact, CNN scored just slightly ahead of MSNBC (15%) – likely meaning that it wasn’t able to position itself as the “moderate” news channel between Fox on the Right and MSNBC on the left.
The best news is that the internet is the most trusted news medium over all. I take this as a good thing: though more susceptible to hoaxes, stories on the web are also easier to verify immediately. In other words, if you don’t trust mass media (and, according to the poll, most Americans don’t) the internet is a great way to take personal responsibility for staying up to date.
The rumor broke late yesterday and hit the sports airwaves this morning: Mike Mussina is retiring. Mike and Mike called him a “borderline hall-of-famer” on ESPN Radio this morning, and Joel Sherman said the same in the New York Post.
I’d like to hear one compelling reason why Mussina does not belong in the Hall of Fame. The numbers say he belongs.
His 270 wins over 18 seasons is an average of 15 per year – and a scan of Mussina’s year-by-year stats show he was remarkably consistent. He won 16 games in a strike-shortened 1994 and 19 in a strike-shortened 1995. He pitched in a hitter’s park during a hitter’s era.
And he has the historic street cred. His stats compare very favorably to Juan Marichal, who had 27 fewer wins and 500 fewer strikeouts in two fewer seasons. Marichal’s career ERA was 2.89 while the league had a 3.55 ERA over the span of his career; Mussina posted 3.68 while the league put up 4.51. (If you do the math, the ratios are almost identical.) He has more wins than Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson, and Mordecai “What happened to your hand” Brown, all Hall of Famers.
Mussina wasn’t a loudmouth who talked above his talent. He’s not a moody superstar. But he was, quietly, one of the most consistently good pitchers of the past thirty years. Hopefully he’ll get his spot in Cooperstown.
Al Qaeda’s second-in-command called Barack Obama a “house Negro” and claimed he betrayed his black and Muslim heritage by veering off the path forged by “honorable” black Americans like Malcolm X.
Racial insensitivity is not groundbreaking for a terrorist group. But this comment – specifically, the historical context of the slur leveled at our President-elect – reflects a high level of understanding about our culture. I wonder if we know our enemy as deeply as our enemy appears to know us.
Jerry Yang announced he is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! today. Yang’s year-and-a-half long tenure as CEO was marked by him railing against a Microsoft takeover and failing to complete an advertising agreement with Google that probably would have been blocked by the Justice Department anyway.
Yang understood what his company isn’t: it isn’t an arm of Microsoft, the Gibralter of computing that makes up for its lack of innovation with its largess. Though he did express some willingness to negotiate, surely Yang’s heart had something to do with his resistance. As the first search engine to acheive mainstream appeal and recognition back in the late 1990s, perhaps Yang felt it would be unfair for the once-cutting-edge Yahoo! to be swallowed by Microsoft’s corporate establishment.
The problem is that Yang can’t answer what his company is – and, more importantly in the online world, what it will be. Google fills so many niches in the online world, how does Yahoo! compete? Yang saw this and attempted an ill-fated search advertising deal that, in the end, went nowhere. Clearly, Yang loves Yahoo!, but the company – whose stock price has fallen from a 2008 high of jsut over $30 per share to a low of just over $10 per share – clearly needs a direction and vision.
Hopefully for Yahoo!, Yang’s replacement will match his passion for the company with a vision for how it fits into the modern web world.
TechPresident told the story yesterday of Vanessa Sievers, a junior at Dartmouth University and now the Grafton County (N.H.) Treasurer-elect. Sievers campaign strategy relied heavily on $51 worth of Facebook ads. She defeated the incumbent by 600 votes.
The most obvious lesson is that microtargeting works: Sievers figured that to win, she would need her fellow Dartmouth students as well as those at nearby Plymouth State. Given that New Hampshire was a swing state and how feverishly the Obama campaign focused on turning out young voters, she had lots of help. So she made sure they knew her name by advertising in a venue that was high visibility but low expense. She worked smarter rather than harder.
But there’s another lesson: if you want to see things change, you don’t always have to wait for someone else to do it. If a college junior was able to pick off a 68-year-old incumbent, there are opportunities for you in your community. As Woody Allen famously said, “80% of success in life is just showing up.”
I was amused by Senator Chris Dodd’s admonition to banks receiving help a piece of that $700 billion pie that Congress so generously doled out earlier this fall. The Connecticut Senator urged these banks to lend more money.
Seriously. In the wake of a financial crisis created, in large part, by irresponsible lending to irresponsible borrowers, and resulting in almost $1 trillion in corporate welfare, Dodd feels like the sollution is creating more debt.
Maybe the plan is to ride it out until we find a new bubble to invest in.
I was amused by Senator Chris Dodd’s admonition to banks receiving help a piece of that $700 billion pie that Congress so generously doled out earlier this fall. The Connecticut Senator urged these banks to lend more money.
Seriously. In the wake of a financial crisis created, in large part, by irresponsible lending to irresponsible borrowers, and resulting in almost $1 trillion in corporate welfare, Dodd feels like the sollution is creating more debt.
Maybe the plan is to ride it out until we find a new bubble to invest in.
Jim Eltringham 