Posts Tagged Under ‘Business’

Free!

The Atlantic Monthly just opened up its paid site to be free to web users. I was just saying the other day how I had heard this 2005 article about talk radio was an excellent portrait of the industry, and that I wished the site were open to non-subscribers so I could read it.

Obviously I’m now off to read it. Nice work, Atlantic Monthly.

Pat’s Going to Michigan

I got the good news on Friday: I’ll be heading this fall to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan to be part of the class of 2010.

I mentioned this fall that application essays were sapping my blogging resolve, so now yinz know what that was about. I’m definitely relieved to hear I was accepted, and more than that, I’m psyched to start grad school. I’m also hoping I don’t revert too much back to undergrad, but I don’t think business school students tend to beard-out quite as much as your average 20-year-old junior. (Note: that photo is of Microsoft’s staff in 1978, but it’s so awesome that I had to link it.)

“But Stack,” you may be saying, “where’d this MBA idea come from? I thought you were a web media guy.” You’re right: I am a web-media guy, and on first glance, it might be confusing. But the longer I’ve been doing what I do, the more I’ve realized an MBA is a solid idea.

I’m all about the success of online media: the format is still new, and media companies are finding their way through the changed climate, so it can be a scary thing for those steering the media to where it needs to be. Good websites are built on three legs — content, technology and business — and having worked a lot on the first two, I knew that strengthening the third one would help me out in the field. There’s a lot of harsh rhetoric on both sides about who’s going to “win” in the new / old media divide, but non-suckas know that it’s a mutually beneficial relationship up in this. Both old and new media need knowledgeable people to help guide the industry along and use the web’s opportunities. That’s where I’m coming from.

Journalists have long believed very strongly in the separation of business and editorial, and I share that opinion. But I think there’s a definite role for website managers who can navigate both sides of the field: an appreciation for the vital democratic role of the media with the ability to keep the site economically thriving is what’s needed here, and in a nutshell, I’m going to b-school to play that role.

And for the record, I’m agnostic on the football question right now. Sure, Michigan will help with future success, but I lived in Columbus from ages zero to one-month, my mom’s family is all over Central Ohio, and I can hardly turn my back on the greatest NU football moment of all time:

Conflicted.

Sprint Bearded Dude Commercial

There’s been this one ad on all the time during football this season, the one where the bearded dude is talking about how this Sprint service makes it seem like there are multiple copies of a person. It has lots of miniature copies of people running around.

My question is, what is the bearded dude’s accent? He sounds mostly Irish, but then he mixes it up enough that I have no idea.

These are the questions on which I think deeply.

Pittsburgh At Its Dumbest

It seems that Kennywood Park — Pittsburgh icon and the scene of such Pat Stack childhood highlights as the Jackrabbit Double-Dip and the time that I puked after getting riding the Pirate Ship — has been sold to the Spanish amusement-park company Parques Reunidos. This is after more than 100 years of being owned by the same two local families.

I was reading some reactions to the sale on this forum, and being familiar with the yinzer “That Used To Be Where You Take Your Driver’s License Test” sense of nostalgia, I probably could have predicted how things were going to go down. That didn’t stop me from appreciating these gems:

Well… add Amusement Parks to the growing list of American companies and infrastructure being sold to foreign interests. Didn’t the Spanish either attempt to buy or did indeed buy the Pennsylvania Turnpike? I expect to see Mt. Rushmore be put on the Auction block next or maybe Yellowstone Park. It has been said by a few the White House & the Capital Building are already owned by foreign interests. In a figurative sense of course.

I HAVE SPENT MY LAST DOLLAR AT KENNYWOOD, SAND CASTLE, OR IDLEWILD. IS THIS AMERICA? I’M NOT SURE ANYMORE.

I think it a shame the everything in the United States is be bought up by foreigner isn’t any thing sacred any more.

I’m tired of seeing our country being sold to foreigners.

USA is being sold down the river, everything is going to be owned by outsiders and the USA citizen will no longer have a job with an American-owned company.

So much for keeping America, America. Let’s look at the bright side… At least it was not sold to the Chinese.

Kennywood — when you hear that name you think of Fun and Hometown America! Now it will be foreign-run and as everything else; workers and owners will not speak English. Sad, actually!

Really? Kennywood workers who don’t speak English? Because that would be an odd choice from a business perspective, but since fur’ners hate America so much, those Spaniards just might flush their $200 million down the toilet to spite The Burgh.

You know my first thought on hearing this? “I really hope they didn’t sell to Six Flags.” Yep, American-owned Six Flags Theme Parks Inc., where you can get an order of chicken strips for no less than $8.50 and the rich pay extra to cut you in line all day with that SpeedPass thing. (They really hit you over the head there with metaphors for the buying-and-selling of meritocratic democracy.) We’d have been attending Six Flags Three Rivers before we knew it, and so much for the Potato Patch or the Monongahela Monster — no way I’m riding The Texan Octopus.

Lots of posters on that forum have legitimate gripes with the fact that Kennywood is no longer a family enterprise. I second that: It’s sad to see such a longtime icon absorbed into yet another conglomerate, even if I’m glad it’s not the Six Flags conglomerate. Recognizing that the Kennywood families ultimately had the power and there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m holding out hope that a deep-pocketed company will be willing to invest more in new rides, while realizing the value of keeping the existing local-oriented management. (That’s what they’re promising so far.) The Kennywood families have resisted attempts to sell before, so they must have had their reasons to pick this company. Considering the business value of Kennywood’s history, it probably won’t change too much, and the next generation will still be going each year to buy a new Kennywood outfit from Kaufmann’s. (My bad, they’re owned by Macy’s now. Damn!)

So let’s chill with the xenophobia for a minute and accept that it’s no longer 1957: you can’t go dahn ‘a corner and get two pahnds ‘a jumbo for a nickel. This is the world that our society has long since chosen to make for itself. And for the record, even though Spanish people don’t eat them, tacos are delicious.

Strangest Brand Partnering of the Day

I just saw this today:

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/fox-news-for-iphone/

Fox News and Apple? That one just strikes me as a really unlikely pairing. But maybe Apple devotees have become so contrarian-cool that they’ve abandoned the leftist political views of the urban traditional-cool and embraced right-wing viewpoints as a sarcastic collective paean to right-wing America.

Why Media Companies Shouldn’t Go Public

What up, web.

Last night the Bancroft family, controlling owners of Dow Jones and its flagship paper The Wall Street Journal, seems to have thrown in the towel and potentially opened up to the takeover bid from News Corp., owned by NY Post-Loc Rupert Murdoch. They haven’t sold yet, and a sale isn’t guaranteed, but DJ did issue several statements saying their current structure is untenable and the company would better accomplish its mission “in combination or collaboration with another organization that may include News Corporation.”

That sounds like B to the S to me. The Bancrofts hadn’t been shopping the company around pre-bid; they then very publicly turned down Murdoch’s unsolicited offer earlier in May, hardly the move of a company that needs to sell. The real reason the family is willing to consider a sale is because the shareholders are hardcore leaning on them to do so. The share price of Dow Jones jumped from $36 clear up to $58.47 on May 2, when Murdoch’s bid became public. Shareholders in Dow Jones, like T. Rowe Price, stand to make a lot of windfall if the sale goes through.

This is the worst aspect of publicly traded media companies. The current ownership doesn’t even want to sell to News Corp., chiefly because they legitimately fear that Murdoch will turn their distinguished paper into another vehicle for his own politics-of-the-moment. (That can mean either appeasing the communist government in China or stoking war fever here in the U.S.) Yet the dictates of the public market are forcing their hand. DJ’s investors, seeing the cash to be made from the sale, are more than willing to throw the product itself under the bus, and one of America’s best newspapers—arguably the best—might start to undergo a subtle and disheartening shift. You can read better arguments against News Corp. buying the Journal here and here.

I think the market usually does decide what’s best, and while solvency is a necessity in any economy, an unregulated market will occasionally run roughshod over the very things that society most wants to protect. (Re-read The Jungle sometime.) I’m going to climb back up the j-school ivory tower and state that an independent—note that I didn’t say “objective”, even though that’s important to strive for—press is one of those things. A media that’s solely under private ownership will be more inclined to take risks with reporting, political angles, styles of coverage, technology and business models than a large, public company that’s beholden to shareholders. It’s not the drive for solvency that creates problems with media companies, it’s the drive for constantly increasing returns in a field that has always been more about viewpoints and information than it has about profitability. In theory the extra capital that comes with public ownership could be used to create a better news well, but anyone who follows the press will notice that newsrooms are laying off employees as fast as they can these days and relying more and more on centralized news sources.

Crazy rich guys have always gotten into the media business for the vanity that comes with loudly voicing one’s perspective, not because they see it as a highly profitable investment. They make their money elsewhere, then get into the media. That emphasis on viewpoints is a good thing, because unlike a capital market, the media is nothing if not the marketplace of ideas. I would hate to see the Wall Street Journal be forced into a partnership they don’t even want.

The Chrysler Sale

Daimler-Benz is selling off Chrysler to Cerberus, a private-equity firm. After the division lost $1.5 billion last year, I can hardly blame the Germans for that one, but it does leave me a little worried about my favorite U.S. carmaker. Chrysler in the past few years seems to be willing to respond to all the criticism frequently levied on American carmakers, save one major point: Can anyone name a fuel-efficient Chrysler model? I guess there’s the P.O.S. Dodge Neon—vague disclosure, my family may or may not have owned one in the past few years—but the gas savings there generally come from avoiding what my bro calls “the bare minimum of what can be put together and called a car.”

For real though, Chrysler has rolled out cars that are aggressively marketed and un-bland (though that Caliber “silly little fairy” ad took things into the realm of offensive homophobia), reversing that ultra-boring mid-’90s movement towards autos with names like “Sonata” and “Riviera”. While it was still popular, they jumped in big-time on the huge-SUV/truck movement (you should see the Ram truck that my bro’s Cajun friend drives) and remain the undisputed king of minivans (that sounds lame, but think how many families are out there that need the transport.) Finally, they’re out front on the tough-car revival with the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, plus the upcoming Challenger, which I would in no way turn down as a gift from the readaship.

Maybe all of that appeals to me as a dude in the 18-34 demographic, and the company is in fact too masculine in its approach. (Chrysler does indeed lack a Jetta ripoff.) I can’t be too optimistic about the sale of a unionized shop to a private-equity firm named after hell’s guard-dog, because 13,000 people are already going to lose their quality jobs, and who knows how many after that.

Both my hometown roots and my urban elite sense are pissed at this one: the roots because we may witness the crushing of a union shop, and the elite because we may lose a culture that wasn’t afraid to roll out new design ideas. Either way, not cool.