Stilltitled

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.

…When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

…I believe in the people’s good sense and good taste, and I am not convinced that the people’s taste is as low as some of you assume.

…Broadcasting cannot continue to live by the numbers. Ratings ought to be the slave of the broadcaster, not his master. And you and I both know — You and I both know that the rating services themselves would agree.

—Newton Minow, Vast Wasteland speech, 9 May 1961, addressed to the NAB, where he implores television operators and producers to limit their reliance on ratings and the numbers and instead focus on the public interest.

If someone is looking for furniture, they are best served seeing the most relevant options, not just a classified advertisement for a used patio-set. Perhaps one should be able to advertise alongside it.

What happened to IHOP’s soul?

It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.

—Eric Von Hippel, on the patent system, via NYT: a bigger problem in the patent system, perhaps alluding to the tension with uncompensated externalities

The browser needs to be less promiscuous about revealing the information collected.

—Edward Felten, Princeton: NYT

Zittrain on the future of the internet and the shifting sands of privacy, facebook.

It looks like we are starting to gain some traction here

—Anthony Nieves, chairman of the ISM’s services survey, via Bloomberg.

This report really is pretty encouraging

—Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, on the ADP jobs report, which said companies cut approximately 20k jobs in February: Bloomberg

The Beige Book just confirmed the reality of muted economic growth. That shouldn’t be surprising to investors, but it did have a negative reaction today.

—Malcolm Polley, chief investment officer at Stewart Capital Advisors, $1 billion AUM

I think it’s too soon to say, Was that all?

—Ronnie Lowenstein, director of NYC’s Independent Budget Office, on the slighter than expected effect of the recession on NYC: NYT

There must be many reasons for Norway’s excellence, but some of them are probably embedded in the story of Jan Baalsrud….

—David Brooks, relating the unlikely, unfortunate and ultimately lucky misadventures of Jan Baalsrud: via NYT

It’s a business-led recovery. Manufacturing is going to be a part of it in a noticeable way and you’ll see it leak down.

—Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, though a recent measure of Chinese manufacturing declined, per HSBC, recently

An increasing number of American households, and this is true in my district and I think around the country, are regaining some confidence in their job prospects, their income prospects and that’s leading to a gradual expansion of consumer spending

—Jeffrey Lacker, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President: Bloomberg

Notes on the decline of film criticism in the form of “it sucks” reviews from Tom Doherty, Brandeis University: the Chronicle. Sense of Cinema and FlowTV edging out Cinema Journal and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television.

The decline might have something to do with the fact that though the latter two are online, they’re not anywhere nearly as accessible as Sense or FlowTV. Both not only sit behind ominous pay-walls, their respective web-sites do little to help one understand how to buy or otherwise acquire issues and articles. And those that don’t, Sense and FlowTV, actually aren’t “it sucks” review-sites.

The journey to Cinema starts with the website of University of Texas Press. The Journals section holds a profile for Cinema Journal, a list of issues, the recent cover, and a prominent option for subscription and single-issue purchases. Clicking on the Winter 2007 issue link, however, will only yield a bibliographic list of articles and no option to buy or preview the articles or the issue. The shopping cart remains a tangle of inputs at the top of the page. To buy a single issue requires profiling one’s geography and whether one is an individual or an institution. Following that, the shopping cart has a blank box in which to write the issue-number, eg. 48:4 for Summer 2009. If you require a single article, a text link sits below the shopping cart and leads to a description of various limitations and process considerations required for purchase. If you have gotten this far and can remember what you’re looking for, two text links lead to a generic single article order form, where each article can be purchased for $15, plus a $1 ordering fee. And the Historical Journal — it doesn’t even have a shopping cart.

The Cinema and Historical Journal strategy works if you want to hide the facts and ideas of its contributors away from the scrutiny of the world. It’s hard to find. It’s expensive to buy. It’s a risky purchase. Will the experience of reading an article live up to the $15 you paid? But it’s risky for more than just the individual reader. It leaves a vacuum for Sense and FlowTV to occupy, acquire influence, improve their publication, and compete with these storied journals.