Collisions with Reality

. . . try, try again, apparently, if you’re the New York Times. The NYT’s latest experiment in charging for online content starts next Monday, and this article has some interesting details on the business decision. The article has some actual numbers, which don’t seem to support their final decision. For starters, one quarter of the NYT’s advertising revenue comes from their online advertising. That strikes me as huge. And I do want to note that I do have deep empathy for the reporters who feel that their work deserves monetary compensation. I just don’t see why, other than precedent, that has to be via subscription and not advertising.

According to the article, the NYT’s website has 30 million unique visitors per month. They’re hoping to get 300,000 subscribers in the first year. That’s one percent of their monthly visitors. They’re willing to sacrifice the other 99% of the visitors in order to make more money. (Yes, there is some nominal number of articles you can read for free, etc.) I do not see how this can help them sustain their current position as the paper of record in the US. Aside from one crazy Canadian woman sending checks to the NYT, how many people really are going to pony up the cash once they hit 20 articles? Unless I can figure out a way for my husband and I to share an account*, once I hit my monthly limit I’ll probably just read the news elsewhere. Apparently, the NYT projects that 99% of their visitors will do exactly that.

On the technical side, what’s to stop someone from scraping the content (assuming there are still RSS feeds) and porting the links to a twitter or blog account, so that an infinite number of articles could be read for free? Or will people expect their favorite bloggers to take the financial hit for access to the NYT, and subsequently post links to articles? Will people be able to make money by being a gateway agent? Pay for NYT access, but make more money from online advertising as your site traffic increases?

I think this experiment will fail for the NYT, just as their Times Select experiment failed. I hope it fails, because as it’s structured now, the people who will lose the most access are those with neither the money nor the tech-savviness to move beyond the free 20 articles per month. (Is that the goal, perhaps? Do the advertisers want a richer, more tech-savvy audience?)

*The article doesn’t even address if accounts are per individual or per household — clearly, if we subscribed to a paper, we’d only need one subscription for the two of us. So why should we both pay for online access?

Yes, it’s been another week of mostly bad news. But there are still some lovely and interesting things out there:

• From Information is Beautiful, a collection of vintage infographics from old articles and textbooks. My favorite is this graphic from the 1930′s comparing the lifespans of many well-known animals:
  

• Via Flowing Data, I found the moviebarcode tumblr. Each frame in a movie is compressed into a sliver, such that a two-hour movie becomes a colorful barcode. Slumdog Millionaire becomes a series of blues and browns. Pinocchio and Dumbo both hit a broad, bright range of the spectrum. And in some movies, like Rear Window, you can see the static setting.
• If you’re interested in the weird history of punctuation, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves just wasn’t comprehensive enough for you, check out the Shady Characters blog. The entry on the pilcrow — the funny little “new paragraph” sign rarely seen nowadays — draws upon the interwoven histories of Christianity, Europe, and writing. Plus, it has quite possibly the greatest parenthetical comment ever:
  

  (“BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER” — one might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capital letters when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lower case)

I know this post does nothing but reveal what sort of nerdy blogs I follow. I’m okay with that.

Have a great weekend! And Go Blue (in the CCHA semifinals tonight! . . . what, is there something else going on?)!

It seems like it’s been all bad news over the last couple of weeks. But there are some interesting and bright spots out there!

• So apparently the iPad 2 is out? Is coming out soon? Whatever. Will no one think of the marginalia?
• The Unnecesarean has a fascinating post sharing the script used by 911 dispatchers for guiding someone through an unassisted birth.
• The Year in Pictures had a great writeup of Pier 24, a private gallery/museum in San Francisco. Admission is free, but you need to schedule your visit. No labels or descriptions: just the photographs. I know what I’m doing the next time I go into the city by myself!

Have a great weekend and Mardi Gras, everyone!

Believe it or not, this week I actually read things that weren’t about the Michigan coaching search!

• This article about the dearth of taxis at 4 p.m. in New York is fascinating. It’s not easy to balance 12-hour shifts, equity of rush hours for the drivers, and skyrocketing rents for the cab companies.
• If you’re feeling a bit bummed about the past decade, Charlie Stross has a post on how the world has gotten better. Lots of medical advances!
• I was poking around the Onion AV Club site, and found their television reviews. And in their classics section, they’re reviewing episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. I absolutely adore that incarnation of Batman, and am so excited to see a serious analysis of it. (I’m not sure it shows up anywhere in syndication nowadays, but the series is available on DVD.)

Three-day-weekend! Yay!

Two posts in a week? What?

• This article about the Cowboys & Aliens trailer cracks me up, because while we were not at a midnight showing, we did see the trailer before seeing the Harry Potter movie in Santa Monica. Our audience was not laughing at the preview, but when the movie title was shown, at the end of the trailer, the entire crowd essentially went, “WTF?” We overheard one person asking her companion, “Is this a joke?”

• After watching Rudolph on Wednesday, and last night’s awesome episode of Community, I am ridiculously excited for next week’s Rankin/Bass-style episode of Community. If Alison Brie (Annie on Community and Trudy on Mad Men) isn’t already a walking, talking Rankin/Bass character, then I don’t know who is.
• Here’s a handy guide to the 2010 TV schedule for Christmas specials. Why the Harry Potter movies count as holiday movies, I do not know, but there you go.
• Speaking of Christmas specials, enjoy this flash back to 2003 with the Peanuts gang dancing to “Hey Ya”:
  

Happy Chanukah to those of you that are celebrating!

It’s been another busy week, but here are a few things that make me very, very happy:

• If you love Michigan, Big Ten football, and/or marching bands, you must watch the Michigan Marching Band’s halftime show [NB: Facebook link] from last week. I laughed so hard I cried. Also, I am glad that people are still referring to Michigan State as “little brother”. Genius. If nothing else, thank Mike Hart for that. (via @hooverstreet)
• I haven’t even finished listening to the Cities episode of Radiolab, but it is so good. There’s such a strong undercurrent of enthusiasm for cities in this episode. I love cities, so it feels like finding kindred spirits on my radio.
• Tom and Lorenzo have a great take on gay characters and gay romances in pop culture — especially for teens — and Glee.

And to top it off, it’s sunny and cold here — my favorite kind of weather. Have a great weekend, everyone!

We’ve survived yet another week here, so here’s what’s been on my mind lately:

• It is a crime that half of the Jersey Shore cast has a book deal, but Fred Clark does not. His in-depth analysis of the Left Behind series is amazing. How in-depth is it? He’s been doing this weekly since 2003, and is only halfway through the second book. But every post is a launching-off point for a discussion of theology, sexism, fiction, and the general evangelical culture in modern America. Here’s a recent post that has a little bit of everything (and somehow the comments on this post devolved into a discussion of tipping), but the whole archives are worth perusing.
• On a much lighter note, while I read most syndicated comics for ironic purposes, Sally Forth genuinely makes me laugh. Here’s a strip from last week, and here is my all-time favorite, from 2007:
  Oh, Ted.

• Finally, having a tough day, and need a pick-me-up to get to the weekend. Look no further than this delightfully crazy video to “Jogi”, which got me through many a thesis draft:
  

Have a great weekend! I am looking forward to being the only person in the state who actually cares about the Michigan-Michigan State game. Helloooo, twitter.

I have little time to read nowadays, but I recently finished an enjoyable genre novel — the fluffy sort of book that could be read in many short spurts. Sure, it was a bit trite. The characters were way too blase in the face of preposterous plot twists. Material acquisitions were described in loving detail. And of course, it ended with a wedding.

Sounds like I’m describing a formulaic chick-lit book, right? Nope. It was a sci-fi/alt-history book with a heavy military focus. (I’ll reveal the specific book in the comments.) Given the on-going discussion about the (lack of) gender balance of the books reviewed by the NY Times, and the related discussions on genre fiction, I thought this was worth pointing out. The crimes attributed to “chick lit” books are committed elsewhere, too.

There’s good and bad in every genre, whether it’s more often read by men or women. I loved Farthing and Ha’penny, but hated The Eyre Affair. I adore Bridget Jones’s Diary, but hated Confessions of a Shopaholic. A military presence in a book does not automatically make it serious, nor does an unmarried female protagonist make it frivolous.

(And speaking of genre, Blackout should arrive tomorrow. Eeeeee!)

There are lots of things I want to talk about that don’t quite deserve their own post, but can’t be condensed into 140 characters. So here they are, together at last:

• Which is the most egregious omission in one’s literary background: Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? This is an ongoing argument between my husband and myself. I vote for Prufrock as the most egregious omission, because I actually get a “water, water everywhere” reference, while my husband once missed a “do I dare to eat a peach?” reference. (He also once missed a reference I made to the song, “Maria”, from West Side Story, but that is a different post entirely.)

  Of course, despite having this argument for the past several months, neither of us has actually gotten around to reading our missing poem. Clearly neither of us has been convinced that we have the most egregious omission!

  On a slightly related note, one of my husband’s selling points for the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is that it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island! And until I saw today’s xkcd, I hadn’t realized that ballads have a specific meter, or that the theme to Gilligan’s Island is a ballad! Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day singing, “. . . and immortaliTY!”

• A general house rule is that we don’t watch TV while our son is in the room, with the exception of sporting events. We thought that was reasonable, especially as he didn’t pay attention to the TV, even as recently as during the World Cup. But college football started last night, and he was actually paying attention to the TV for several minutes at a time! I would feel more guilty about this, except that every minute he is looking at the TV is a minute that he’s not attacking a laptop. (Right now he loves opening and closing things: doors, drawers, CD cases, laptops, you name it. If anyone has a recommendation for a toy that has, like, lots of little doors on it, that would be awesome.) Also, this is correlated with him having more of a reaction to the video when we’re skyping with distant family members. Overall, it’s a pretty cool cognitive development. We just have to make sure we’re not ignoring him during football games.
• If you’re in the US, yesterday was 9/02/10 — or 90210! — and the Fug Girls commemorated it appropriately.
• You probably don’t think NPR when it comes to pop culture, especially television. But their Monkey See blog is really good. One of the bloggers, Linda Holmes, recapped at Television Without Pity for many years as Miss Alli, and she always has a great, dry take on the more ridiculous elements of various reality shows.

Next up: three day weekend. Woo-hoo!

I don’t really get much reading done nowadays, but there are several great things I’ve seen in the last few days that I want to share:

• This article on Japan’s centenarians finds that many of them are deceased or missing. And have been for decades. It’s kind of alarming how many of them turned out to be pension fraud schemes. Doesn’t anyone worry if you haven’t seen someone since 1983 or so?
• This profile of Michael Kors is awesome. He clearly loves what he does, and it’s just great to read about someone who is enjoying his life that much.
• I know everyone keeps linking to Catalog Living, but it cracks me up every time. Right now, it’s probably the blog I’m most excited to see a new entry from in my RSS feeds.
• Finally, here’s a round-up of places that are two blocks from Ground Zero in NYC. I think some of the opponents to the Cordoba House just don’t have a feel for how dense Manhattan is.

Enjoy!