The kids at Boing Boing pointed us to this Smoking Gun photo of a guy arrested after attempting to buy spray paint at a hardware store. A sharp-eyed employee noticed the guy’s face was covered with gold paint and called the cops. While there, I discovered TSG’s favorite mug shots of 2002 and laughed until I peed just a little bit.
Cabin Fever: Day Three
We’ve been iced in since late Friday and even the dogs seem ready for us to get out of the house. We’re tapped at the top of our very steep hill which, like everything else, is covered in break-a-hip ice. No loss of power and net access has allowed both of us to work. I plan to rappel down the hill and hitch to work in the morning. This happens every four or five years, providing a horrifying glimpse of what retirement must be like (shudder). No thanks.
Making money with news web sites
Graeme Newell –the president and founder of 602 communications– is a consultant “who shows cable and broadcast teams how to effectively market and tease their shows.” We’re talking TV here but his ideas for increasing revenue from news websites apply equally well to all media.
Most broadcast web sites are money pits. Still, there are a lot of companies making serious money on the web. These are entrepreneurial pirates who have a bloodhound’s ability to sniff out revenue models that actually work. All of these moneymaking sites share some common traits and business characteristics.
Lesson #1 – Web moneymakers are entrepreneurs, not businessmen.
Lesson #2 – Businesses making money on the web are typically small.
Lesson #3 – A 30 year old is considered ancient.
Lesson #4 – Moneymaking web sites focus on niche content.
If one of the Learfield Grownups called me in tomorrow and asked me for a strategy to make money with our news websites… I would point them to Mr. Newell’s lesson plan.
I searched (in vein) for his article on the 602 COMMUNICATIONS website. I hope Mr. Newell doesn’t mind me posting it (after the jump). Emphasis (bold) is mine. [Thanks, Bob Priddy]
Bloggers take on talk radio hosts
A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers. This article at NYTimes.com explains and I posted on this when it first came up.
For a dozen years (a long time ago) I co-hosted a one-hour daily call-in show. We did silly shit and almost never got into politics. But we picked the topics for the most part and if the water had gotten too hot, we’d have just stopped taking calls.
That bloggers can now record what we say and send those recordings to our advertisers, urging them to stop advertising on our show… well, that just changes the rules of the game. Big time. Nothing gets a station manager’s attention like a cancellation from a sponsor. “We can always find a new talk show host. Sponsors? Not so easy.”
Your politics will dictate who’s “right” in the story above. But like it or not, yesterday’s “broadcast” is today’s “conversation.” And sometimes it’s all shouting.
Wood Badge Rockettes
My friend (and your pet’s “best” friend) Everett, somehow manages to fit scouting into his busy life. I stole the image above from his blog and direct you there for some context. But this photo just spoke to me on some Monty Python level.