Convertible Bonds
Business Week has done a terrific job covering the debt crisis in the telecom sector. This report makes your hair hurt. Convertible bonds, once thought to be the closest thing to free money for high-flying companies like WorldCom and Lucent, now threaten to put them out of business.
Curling Stones
Like Rich Galen, we've been hard-wired to the Olympic Curling competition. NBC's coverage (which has mostly aired on either MSNBC or CNBC, I'm not sure which is which on my DirectTV system) has been terrific. The sport itself is so eccentric that it's irresistable.
Anyway, turns out that one company in all the world makes Curling stones. It's based in Scotland and it's hoping that the British Women's victory will lead to a surge of interest and business.
Back At Ya
Reports of Napster's death may be premature. Let's go right to the text of an excellent report in today's New York Times:
"America's major record companies, which successfully sued to shut down the online music-swapping service Napster, suffered a setback today as the judge in the case allowed Napster to seek evidence that the record companies colluded to monopolize the digital music market."
"In her ruling, Judge Marilyn Patel of Federal District Court in Northern California wrote that while the evidence before the court had thus far been limited, she found reason for concern given that the five major record labels have created two joint ventures to distribute music over the Internet themselves."
"'These ventures look bad, smell bad and sound bad,' Judge Patel wrote. She added, 'If Napster is correct, these plaintiffs are attempting the near monopolization of the digital distribution market.'"
"The decision was a potential turnabout in a case that has helped define how copyrighted material is distributed over the Internet, who will profit from such distribution, and whether and how much consumers will pay."
"Judge Patel wrote that if Napster shows the record labels were involved in illegal collusion, it could invalidate their lawsuit. But, underscoring the complexity of the legal doctrines involved in the case, she added that even if that were to occur, the record companies could modify any anticompetitive activity and become eligible again to sue Napster."
Would a single sentient human being be surprised if it came to light that the five major recording companies colluded to monopolize the digital music market? I don't think so.
Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
The blogs are full of over-the-top examples of European carping about the Bush Administration. Many of these items are culled from leftish European media outlets. I assume that most European political leaders, looking for an "easy appease" of difficult constituencies, are directing their comments about US "unilateralism" at local markets. A little US bashing, after all, can go a long way and no one in the US much cares.
The New York Times has a different take. The editors there view alleged US "unilateralism" as a looming crisis and dispatch a senior correspondent to marshall the case. He comes back with every cliche, including (you really can't make this stuff up) a Kipling poem.
Knowing When to Go
My old boss David Greenway has a very good column regarding Cardinal Law's unwillingness -- so far -- to resign his post. Here's hoping that the Cardinal will read it and heed it.
Speaking of Stupid Lawsuits
Stewart Alsop has a typically excellent column in the new Fortune lambasting AOL's Netscape division for its frivolous lawsuit against Microsoft. An excerpt:
"Why did Netscape fail? Because it was managed with...incompetence. The last major revision of Netscape Communicator, version 6.0, which was introduced in April 2000, was a disaster. It was late to market. A complete rewrite of the original product, it was buggy and slow. Anyone who wanted a reliable browser had to either continue using the old version or switch to Microsoft's Internet Explorer."
"That product was developed before AOL merged with Time Warner, of course. But now here comes the fully merged company making the case that Netscape failed because of unfair competition. Nonsense. Netscape's own management killed the company that defined the excitement--and the value--of the Internet."
You gotta love John Huey, the editorial director of the magazine division of AOL. How many people in his position would allow a column like Alsop's anywhere near a printing plant. Much less prominently feature it in one of the major books in the empire.
Legally Crazed
Asbestos litigation has gone from the ridiculous to the insane. Check out this story from Fortune magazine. One of the truly awful consequences of the Enron debacle is that tort reform has become a radioactive political issue. No one will touch it, at least until 2003.
Speaking of Andrew Sullivan
He's got some good stuff today on Paul Krugman, the "money call" columnist and Princeton economist. The problem with Krugman is arrogance. In order to produce two really good columns a week, you have to devote yourself to it and work like a demon. You have to read everything and interview people in their offices and talk on the phone to as many people as you can and watch stuff on television and listen to stuff on the radio and fly around in airplanes and work it, day in and day out. It's a full-time, flat-out job. Say what you will about Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman or Nick Kristoff, the one thing they all do is work their tails off.
Krugman seems to think he can do it after he's done his real work (economics). The result is one tedious, lazy, repetitive column after another. He's now slipping into outright intellectual dishonesty (see Sullivan item). You might think someone at the New York Times would notice. Au contraire. They love him. They think he's great.
Jane Swift Update
Margery Eagan's column about Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift's highly (and stupidly) political decision in the Amirault case is excellent. I assume that most people reading this site are also regular readers of Andrew Sullivan's site, where I first saw the Eagan link. If you're not a Sullivan reader, you might want to bookmark it. It's consistently a terrific read.
Hit Me Again
The following item appears today on the ABC News Political Note:
"...(A)s Elizabeth Dole announces her Senate candidacy in North Carolina tomorrow, Democrats will launch a newspaper ad tying her to the retiring Jesse Helms. The ad will appear in the Salisbury, NC Post, the paper of Dole's hometown. According to a party source, the ad plays off a recent Dole quote that she could think of no issue on which she and Helms differ. Democrats will hit her over Helms' being the only Senator to vote against Head Start; calling Medicare, Social Security and veterans benefits "welfare;" and voting consistently against Social Security."
What are we missing here? Senator Helms was elected five times by North Carolinians over a 30 year span. In 1990 and 1996, he received 53% of the vote. He is beloved by roughly half of North Carolina's voters and is the one of the strongest vote-getters ever in the eastern, Jacksonian counties of the state. So tying Liddy Dole to Jesse Helms makes sense in what context, exactly?
Buried Way Deep Inside the A Section
You will find an interesting appraisal of President George W. Bush's diplomatic stance toward China. It stands in marked contrast to the unrealistic ebullience of the Clinton era. This is not a story you will ever read in The New York Times. Thanks to reader Bruce S. for the heads-up.
Best of the Web, Part Two
Is there one place where you can go on the web and find everything you need? Well, there's Yahoo!, of course. But another good place for "everything-in-one-place" is CEO Express. I guess the idea is that you are a busy CEO and so you need everything on one page. Bookmark it. It's very useful.
Best of the Web, Part One
If you're a political junkie, bookmark this link and visit it regularly. The ABC News Political Unit produces a solid daily news summary.
Furyk Will Win
A friend e-mailed demanding that I announce my pick to win the Accenture Match Play Championship. Fair enough. It'll be Jim Furyk. The course is the right length for him (just over 7000 yards), he's got a ton of match play experience (he's a Ryder Cup veteran and beat Nick Faldo in a legendary match at Valderama) and he can putt. He should win his next match over Kevin Sutherland, which gets him to the quarter finals. I like his chances.
Back in Order
Ed Luttwak had a good piece last weekend that went largely unnoticed. (You have to "register" with The Times of London to get to it.) Luttwak makes the point that President George W. Bush's national security team is properly configured and remarkably strategic in its approach. It doesn't sound like much, but it's worth reading.
It's worth registering with The Times of London anyway, as the paper carries a slew of good writers, including Luttwak and Andrew Sullivan.
Borrowed Interest
Special events television programming (like the Olympics, the Oscars and the Super Bowl) provides a platform for the nation's leading advertisers to showcase their best stuff. Some of the advertising on NBC's Olympic broadcasts has been excellent. The American Airlines ad about why the company is proud to call itself "American" recalls the great United Airlines advertising of the 1980s. The Budweiser ad about the guy buying the dorky sweater because some girls think its cute is both funny and, as the tag line says, true. And I get the BBDO stuff for Office Depot and Visa and GE. It's solid brand advertising.
But what is up with Mlife and Audi and Saturn and Chevrolet and Coke? The Mlife ads are embarrassing. Text messaging is so retro, it's almost over. Verizon Wireless featured it in an advertising campaign two years ago. When you watch the AT&T Wireless spots (urging you to have an "mlife," meaning a "mobile" life), you have the feeling that the people at AT&T just found out that people (particularly teen-agers) use their mobile phones as much for text messaging as they do for voice calls. In short, the ads lead you to believe that the people who run AT&T Wireless are clueless. This cannot be what they intended.
Audi, meanwhile, uses the borrowed interest of the American Beauty music score to sell its (superbly engineered) automobiles. Did anyone on the client side see the movie? It was about a guy who has a midlife crisis nervous breakdown and turns into a lecherous creep. How exactly does the borrowed interest of the movie enhance the Audi brand?
The Saturn ads are just creepy. Ostensibly designed to introduce a new Minivan/SUV called VUE, the ads feature a miniature model of the VUE being chased by a cougar and working its way through a small army of ants. What's that about? I drive a Chevy Tahoe and navigating through the ants has never really been a problem. I just drive over them. Saturn advertising used to be great; much better than the cars themselves. Now it's like the product.
As for Chevrolet, the only word is "pathetic." The ads feature guys plastering the Chevy logo on the backs of hockey players and other Olympic athletes. The Chevy guys are dorks and losers. Chevy actually makes some great product (like my Tahoe). Why is their advertising agency being allowed to diminish the brand?
The Coke advertising is the major disappointment of the Games. It's utterly pedestrian and oddly diffident, like they really couldn't be bothered. The only spot that works is a remake from the old Polar Bear series, which was developed back in the days when Mike Ovitz was a Hollywood powerhouse. The rest is just wallpaper.
Too bad. One of the most significant findings of that TIVO survey of its customers is that people will actually flock to see good advertising. There's not much to see on the Olympics this year.
Kudos to NBC Sports
I don't think NBC Sports is getting nearly the credit it deserves for its coverage (or, perhaps, presentation) of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. They've done a spectacular job. Even the Curling and the Biathalon have been riveting. The speed skating, figure skating, hockey, skiing and sledding coverage have also been sensational. I haven't even minded the Mighty Midget, Bob Costas. Hats off to them.
Coming up: But what's the deal with the ads?
Slump Alert
Peter O'Malley made short work of Tiger Woods yesterday at the Accenture Match Play Championship. David Duval and Phil Mickelson also went down in the first round, proving yet again that anything can happen in match play competition. To read the local press here in New York, you'd think that O'Malley was some second-rate club pro from Loserville. In fact, as anyone who watches the Golf Channel knows, he plays the game from tee-to-green as well as anyone on tour. He just struggles with the six-footers. As do most touring professionals.
Woods's trunk-slam will undoubtedly give rise to chatter that he is "in a slump." Last year, he had to put the "slump" chatter away twice; once by winning the Masters with a brilliant Sunday performance and once by defeating Jim Furyk in sudden death at what used to be called The Firestone. This year, the golfing press has been itching to write a "Woods slump" storyline, but have held back, one presumes, because of what happened last year.
So is Tiger "slumping?" It's an important question for the three networks that cover golf. ABC's coverage of the Accenture Championship this weekend will probably garner half the rating it would if Woods were in the semi-final and final rounds. Tournaments without Tiger barely register in Mr. Nielsen's box. Tournaments with Tiger do better. Tournaments with Tiger in the lead or near the top of the leaderboard can sometimes break into Mr. Nielsen's double-digits. A ton of money rides on Tiger performing at the highest level.
The answer to the "slump" question is emphatically "no." Like all great golf professionals, Woods focuses on the four "major" tournaments -- The Masters, The US Open, The Open Championship and The PGA -- and schedules everything else, including his instructional training, around those dates. Right now, Woods looks like he's about a month away from being ready for the Masters, which is seven weeks away. He's clearly working on driving the ball straighter, distance control and putting. If he's not in the hunt at any of the four majors this year, then the answer to the "slump" question (at the end of the season) will be "yes." But until then, he's just tuning up for Augusta.
Get Me Rewrite
I just deleted those items about Katie Couric, Joan Didion and Johnny Apple. No one cares. I certainly don't. So why bother?
In the bigger picture, the R.W. "Johnny" Apple item is a fairly good metaphor for a never-discussed problem in Big Media. The problem is that no one retires. They just hang around, sucking up salary and bonuses and precious space in the paper or airtime on the television news.
I remember talking to a friend at The New York Times about another reporter there and she said to me: "he's the next Johnny Apple," meaning the next Big Foot Washington correspondent whose beat ranges far and wide. "Except," she said, "Johnny's not going anywhere." And now he won't be going anywhere for another 3-5 years, even though he's 67 years old and should have packed it in after the 2000 election (if not before).
Another Timesman who should retire is William Safire, whose column will soon enter its 30th year. I still enjoy Safire's work from time to time, but it's not about that. It's about getting out of the way so someone else can get a shot. Surely a journalistic organization as vast and prestigious as the Times can find another conservative voice out there somewhere. Let's get him or her or it on the op-ed page. Fresh blood is important to the vitality of any institution.
As bad as the hanging around is at the major papers, it's epidemic at the networks. I remember when Brit Hume left ABC News to join the Fox News Channel. A friend called and asked: "why would he ever do that?" The answer, of course, was that he had to do it if he wanted to anchor an evening news show. Jennings wasn't going anywhere. Koppel wasn't going anywhere. Barbara Walter wasn't going anywhere. Diane Sawyer wasn't going anywhere. The only place Hume could go (to be an anchor) was the Fox News Channel.
When I worked at NBC News, I remember someone saying that Garrick Utley was being groomed to be the next Tom Brokaw. That was 16 years ago. Now it is said that Brian Williams is being groomed to be the next Tom Brokaw. I wouldn't bet on it. Dan Rather will never go away. Mick Wallace will never go away. Ed Bradley will never go away. On and on the list goes. If you put all of their salaries together you'd have roughly $100 million to spend on young talent.
It's a staggering misallocation of resources. But it won't change. One of the reasons it won't change is that ratings are personality-driven. Consumers see the news as a commodity product. So who they "like" (Brokaw, Rather or Jennings?) is determinative. Retire Rather and the likelihood is that the CBS Evening News will drop nearly 1 Nielsen point. It would probably take CBS two years to rebuild that lost Nielsen point with a new anchor. In the interim, they would have to suffer through the lower ad rate (and lost revenue) that a lost Nielsen point implies. In a weird way, CBS is stuck with Dan Rather until he dies.
The E-Z solution is a retirement age policy. Everyone's gotta get lost at 65. But it'll never happen. These people are going to be yammering at us and opining to us for a good many years to come.
How to Talk to Your Kids about Enron
Instapundit, the great Tennessee blogger, has a must-read item about a special report on Enron on National Public Radio's Marketplace. You can't make this stuff up. Self-parody only begins to describe the content. The above headline was a segment. If you get to this later, scroll down the Instapundit site to the 9 pm posts on February 19th.
There Goes Swifty
Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift's troubles are so legion that it would take the speed-typing Instapundit a week to chronicle all of her woes. But begin at the beginning. She's a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. She's a mediocre governor, at best. She's a bad candidate, running in a deteriorating economy. Conservatives have no use for her, at all. And twelve years of Republican control of the "corner office" (as the governor's office is called in Boston) has led to repeated "Administration scandals." To top it all off, her personal life is politely described as "messy."
There are three Democrats who have a fair chance of being their party's gubernatorial nominee. They are, in rough order: State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, State Senate President Tom Birmingham and former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. In order to qualify for the September primary, a candidate must receive 15% of the delegate votes on a roll-call ballot at the Massachusetts State Democratic Party Convention. The convention will be held in about 100 days (on May 31 and June 1).
It is expected that Senate President Birmingham and State Treasurer O'Brien will easily cross the 15% threshold on the first ballot. If either should get 50%-plus-one-vote, then there won't be a second ballot. But if no one wins an outright majority, then the horse-trading begins.
Senate President Birmingham is doing everything he can to win 50%-plus-one-vote on the first ballot at the convention, since he believes (probably correctly) that this will leave State Treasurer O'Brien as his only primary opponent. State Treasurer O'Brien would prefer to have as many male candidates as possible on the primary ballot, since she's a woman and the majority of primary voters are women. So she's doing everything she can to make sure Mr. Birmingham doesn't get a majority of the delegate votes on the first ballot at the convention. She figures that if it goes to a second ballot, she can instruct some of her delegates to vote for Reich (getting him on the ballot) and that if it goes to a third ballot, she might even be able to get one of the also-rans (like former State Party Chairman Steve Grossman or state senator Warren Tolman) on the primary ballot as well. The more boys, the merrier she'll be.
Meanwhile, Mr. Reich is just trying to qualify for the September ballot. He did better than expected in the town caucuses (where town delegates were chosen) in early February, but is still thought to be shy of the magic 15% number. Should he get on the ballot, he might cut into Birmingham's base a bit, but no one really knows. Because he has never before been a candidate for public office and because Democrats are still angry with him for being disloyal to the Clinton-Gore Administration that employed him, the "Reich factor" is hard to measure. It's not at all clear how his candidacy cuts.
The larger question is whether the Democrats can lose the unloseable race. Impossible as it may seem, there's a chance that could happen. Tom Birmingham is described by his friends as "strange" and "scarey." Shannon O'Brien is as dumb as she is sweet. Reich has never run for statewide elected office. Rarely has a less impressive group of candidates lined up for a prize that is literally there for the taking.
The Republican fantasy is that President Bush, in the next few months, will appoint Governor Swift to some position in the federal government and that Mitt Romney, fresh from his role as savior of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, will become the GOP's gubnernatorial nominee. Romney would be a great governor. He may well be the single most impressive person in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But magic solutions rarely, if ever, materialize.
In the end, who will lose? That's how the question is phrased in Boston. The most interesting thing is that no one much cares who the winner will be. Absent Romney, it's just another chapter of what Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr calls the Hackerama.
The one thing that is interesting about Massachusetts politics this year is an initiative measure to abolish the state income tax. The measure has qualified for the November ballot. And it will draw a lot of disconnected voters to the polls. They'll be there on election day, but not for the governor's race.
CodeCon
Good report on CNET about the open-source conference in San Francisco. Amazing numbers of highly-talented code writers are currently unemployed and so have joined the open-source movement as a way to keep busy. No surprise, most of their attention is focused on peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, including one called Reptile that sounds significant.
Disconnect
There's always been a disconnect between the press caricature of George W. Bush and the actual George W. Bush. Every so often, evidence of the disconnect appears in the papers. Check this out from yesterday's Washington Post.
DEMO 2002
Those who missed this year's DEMO in Phoenix didn't miss much, says Alison Overholt of Fast Company Magazine. She filed a dispatch that is now posted on the FC website. A good read.
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