Charles on… anything that comes along

“Instead of spending $15 for a CD, you buy two cuts for two bucks. That’s a lot of money left on the table,” said Joe Nordgaard, managing director of Spectral Advantage, a strategic consulting firm. “The traditional model with premium pricing has been so lucrative for the music industry. When they cut the deal with Apple, they did not realize what they had done. Now they want out.”

The now-famous article where Bronfman bemoans not getting any of the iPod revenues. (Yeah, well, collect from the 8-track makers first, OK?) But this quote is more telling, and explains what’s wrong: the music biz is still making 10 tracks, but fears in future it will only sell two. And Apple’s upset that, um, applecart

The other, more fundamental virtue of the gas tax is that it brings the price of gasoline in line with its true cost. When all is said and done, cheap gas is an illusion, because our reliance on gas creates a whole series of costs that aren’t factored in to the pump price—among them congestion, pollution, and increased risk of accidents. The most rigorous study of these “externalities,” by the economists Ian Parry and Kenneth Small, suggests that a tax that took them into account would come to $1.01 for every gallon of gas.

Suroweicki is terrific, consistently. A few years ago I gave a talk to a US engineering firm where I suggested that if there were a Superfund surcharge to remedy the damage that burning oil does to the environment, petrol would cost $40 per gallon. Looking at New Orleans and Iraq and Antarctica, that doesn’t seem too wrong.

I’m in a good mood and this flack seems nice, so I won’t out his name. Here’s part of an email interchange that has been going on since yesterday, when he sent me a press release about optical something or anothers in an email attachment. I do not open unsolicited attachments, and neither does anyone else in their right mind. I politely asked him to put it in the body of an email. Listen up young flacks, old flacks and flacks in ships at sea: Don’t ever do what this publicist did.

How weird - it’s like she’s channelling me… Unsolicited attachments (and emails called “PRESS RELEASE” with attachments called “PRESS RELEASE”) are the bane of my life. (Seen at B.L. Ochman’s weblog - Internet strategy, marketing, public relations, politics with news and commentary)

..Webdiary thus became Australia’s first mainstream media ‘blog ‘ - although I resisted this description for many years - and, perhaps, Australia’s first interactive blog.

For me, it was liberation from the depressing state of mainstream newspaper journalism. In my years in the game, I’ve watched newspapers cease becoming papers of record. Where once we would follow an inquiry or a court case daily, now we jump in and out, or not even turn up at all until decision day. This occurred in 2003 when Fairfax failed to have a reporter at Hanson’s fraud trial, despite the fact that her rise had dominated the news for years. Partly it is because of a contraction in journalist numbers, partly it is a crunch in news space, and partly it is the chase for scoops that will be mentioned on radio and TV, ignoring the fact that only newspapers can give readers comprehensive, value-added coverage of such stories.

Then there are the ever-earlier deadlines as papers focus on glossy supplements rather than news. This has seen the rise of ‘managed news’ where editors want to know what the news is at morning conference and are loathe to change their plans when news breaks later! Even worse, Fairfax editors started to talk of ‘managing’ reporters as well as news, and getting rid of reporters whose style was not amenable to ‘management’. As the layers of editorial management began to match or exceed that in public service bureaucracies, reporters became content providers, and news was seen as the space between the ads. Our audience became consumers, not citizen readers, and news judgement became a marketing game of creating the mix that pleased advertisers and accorded with consumer surveys.

Quite scary-sounding, but right on the ball. All the things she describes - earlier deadlines, less ‘recording’ of stuff - is happening, in spades, in the UK. She’s someone who started a blog at the (Australian) paper - the Sydney Morning Herald - and found it did more to get into news than she expected.

Were there any downsides to working for Apple? Of course. It’s an environment of extraordinarily bright and dedicated people, as I said before, and everyone was expected to be extraordinarily bright and, most of all, dedicated. The company asked a lot from all its employees. It ran them ragged. A coworker once commented that when he returned from one protracted series of business trips his child answered the door with, “Hey, Mom, there’s a guy with a mustache at the door.”

Moreover Apple never made any effort to make it any easier. For instance it’s been a rule at Apple for years that on any business trip with more than 25 travelers, like a large conference or meeting, everyone has to share a room. And this rule is enforced. Senior managers must request VP approval for every trip to get their own rooms.

Gee, you have to share rooms? And I thought it was just something they made the PR people do. Interesting blog from a guy who was a sales exec in New York, but involved nonetheless. His post about Tim Cook (who ran Apple when Jobs was ill) ring very true. Cook executes - in both senses of the word.