With Katie Couric, the News Anchor Nobody Watches™, fearful of losing her job and Les Moonves, aka Mr. Julie Chen, fearful of having to admit he made a grievous error by shelling out some $15 million a year on a celebrity instead of the 100 or so actual journalists he could have hired in her stead, CBS embarked on a Couricapalooza of a PR campaign to salvage the Chipper One’s job.

It was extremely successful, with agreeable tongue-baths in the LA Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times, provided by such stalwarts as Howard Kurtz, Tom Shales and Jacques Steinberg.

Each of these worthies is entitled to his own opinion as to Couric’s competence (or rightfulness) as an anchor, of course; but all went above and beyond, carefully dishing out the Couric-friendly ratings details CBS supplied them, and not spending too much time putting those numbers into context or looking at bigger trends.

(And none spoiled the game by pointing out what was even more obvious, that each of their exclusive interviews was part of an orchestrated PR onslaught.)

Anyway, having exhausted all takers on the national level, the Couric PR myrmidons are now doling out press availabilities to even less credulous local news outlets. Couric turned up recently in both the NY Post and the NY Daily News, both of which agreeably repeated the organization’s Couric-friendly talking points and didn’t focus too awfully much on the bad ratings news.

Check out what the Post ran with:

Two years after leaving NBC’s “Today” to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” Katie Couric can finally gloat about her ratings — but she’s not going to. Couric, who’s taken her hits and repeatedly placed third nationally in the evening news race behind ABC and NBC, has beaten NBC’s “Nightly News” in the big New York market for the past six months — and last month logged a 22 percent increase in overall viewers. But Couric refuses to take credit. “It’s all due to the staff, the correspondents and producer Rick Kaplan,” she told us. “It takes a while for anything to click and for people to get used to me.”

That’s impressive—isn’t NBC by far the ratings leader? That seemed strange to me; I did some research and discovered (on Media Bistro) something I didn’t know—that the ABC Evening News kicks everyone’s ass in NYC. In the New York media market, at least, Charles Gibson has more viewers than Couric and Brian Williams combined. Who knew?

(Note how Page Six doesn’t mention that Couric’s big Williams kill is just for the second-place prize.)

The NY Daily News piece is just as fluffy, with each bit of bad news carefully balanced by someting positive:

With two years under her belt at CBS, the “CBS Evening News” still trails NBC and ABC in the national ratings, but Couric seems to have won over some of her loudest detractors.

Though Couric recognizes she’s had a bumpy adjustment period, she says she doesn’t live and die by the numbers.

What’s interesting in both cases is that all the talk that powered the national pieces—about those improved ratings—is gone.

(As I noted at the time, while there had been some improvement in her shows’s perennially bottom-basement standings, this had come at the end of last year, only after the presidential race had concluded, suggesting that, for many people, CBS and Couric was a place to turn to only when the real news was over.)

Now, to go back to the Post and the Daily News, when you’re practicing PR, and not journalism, not saying anything doesn’t mean there’s no news.

It means there’s bad news.

That’s why neither the Daily News nor the Post took a look at the most recent CBS ratings. Just a few weeks ago Tom Shales was telling us that Couric’s numbers were up five percent. This was in that heady period immediately after the inauguration when, again, folks had started drifting back to Couric.

I couldn’t quite figure out where that five percent figure had come from, but here’s the situation now:  The CBS Evening News is attracting just north of 6 million people, a hefty 20 percent decline from that post-inaguration high Shales was crowing about, demonstrating again that Couric can’t hold on to an audience.

The last two weeks have been disrupted, TV Neswer says, by the college basketball finals, but the trend downwards by CBS has been ineluctable for eight weeks, and has lost the network more than a million viewers in the process.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric Watch: Ratings plummet!
Paging Katie Couric!
Dear Tom Shales
Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

The NYT takes a very friendly look at John Rich, half of knuckle-headed country duo Big & Rich, and his oh-so-topical new song, “Shuttin’ Detroit Down.”

It is Hitsville’s contention that one of the goals of popism is to present news about artists in as PR-friendly a fashion as possible, and that this practice has seeped deep into the psyche of many writers, offering examples big and small.

Note this sentence:

[”Shuttin’ Detroit Down”] reflects not only Mr. Rich’s songwriting gifts — he collaborated on the verses with the longtime country singer John Anderson — but also his acumen in gauging and channeling the mood of the country….

Now, this is on the minor side, but it’s telling.

The problem? An uncomfortable truth: “Mr. Rich” didn’t write the song by hmself. This conflicts with the clean PR purposes of the profile.

The solution?

Toss a bit of gossamer in readers’ eyes about “Mr. Rich’s songwriting gifts” …

…and then slip in, backhandedly, the off-message irritant.

“Longtime country singer John Anderson” disappears from the story, not to be heard from until he earns his fluffy profile, when his contributions to the song will be played up.

The writer, Jon Caramanica, in a long story never bothers to ask Rich any disturbing questions about the conflicts between his right-wing ideology and the song’s message.

Like, how the Republican party he campaigned for got us into the mess, or any fault the workers (via some of their crazy union practices) might have had in the predicament the auto industry is in, or even just what his perscription is for  Detroit: Should it just continue on, business as usual, except with—heavens!—government handouts?

And neither Caramanica nor Rich seem to be aware that “Okie from Muskogee,”to which they compare Rich’s song endlessly, was a satire. (The fact that even Merle Haggard seems to have forgotten that is beside the point.)

From a Reuters story on the prospects for the merger, republished on the Billboard site:

Live Nation board member Ariel Emanuel is a powerful Hollywood manager who is also brother of Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff. Ariel Emanuel was also a major Hollywood fund-raiser for Obama’s election campaign.

Julius Genachowski, nominated by Obama earlier this month to be the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was on Ticketmaster’s board until March 10.

___________

Previously in Hitsville:

A new Ticketmaster Phish screwup
An economist on scalping
Live Nation’s NYC parking fee three-card monte
Ticketmaster’s definition of the word ’scalping’
Bono, noted Live Nation employee, ducks merger questions from DeRo!
The Corgan meltdown—It gets worse
Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and the ’secondary market’
The best article yet on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation debate
Hillary Rosen—She’s baaaack!
Ticketmaster servce fees: Where the money goes
Live-blogging the House hearings on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger
“Re”-selling tickets that don’t yet exist
Liveblogging the Senate’s Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger hearings
Seal & Van Halen in Azoff’s corner!
Updated! 26 questions that should be asked at the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger hearings tomorrow Ticketmaster shareholders sue to stop merger
How Live Nation does business
Will the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger mean higher concert prices?
Another suit against Ticketmaster
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges

Hitsville titled the previous post about Time magazine’s blowjobby piece on digital 3-D “Spinning 3-D,” using the word “spinning” in its metaphorical sense.

I mean, that’s essentially what writer Josh Quittner was doing: Presenting a unquestioning, upbeat and not-too-skeptical account of a new technology that will need a lot of friendly news coverage to gain some traction in the marketplace.

Turns out … it wasn’t metaphorical. Time Inc. has apparently cut a deal to provide friendly coverage of the technology in five of its magazines. Commenter “DW” passes along this post from a blogger who follows Canadian publishing:

Five Time Inc. magazines — Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly– are running simultaneous, corporate-ordered editorial on 3-D technology and, in return, are getting a big advertising payday from Macdonald’s [sic], according to a story in AdAge.

The “Canadian Magazines” blog seems … evanescent, but the story* The story the blog refers to is apparently real. I can’t get the full version yet, but here’s the abstract from the AdAge site:

 MediaWorks

Time Inc. Helps Out Future of 3-D

Five Titles Coordinate Coverage After Dreamworks CEO Katzenberg Calls Huey

By Nat Ives

Published: March 13, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Synergy couldn’t deliver on the grand dreams of AOL Time Warner, but it still has life at the Time Inc. magazine division. Later this month readers of five fairly dissimilar sibling titles — Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly — will find each magazine giving big editorial coverage to the subject of new-wave 3-D. …

The blogger continues:

The campaign came about because Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc. to pitch the subject, Mr. Huey said. “I said, ‘What magazine are you pitching for anyway?’ He said ‘All of them.’”

What would have happened if Fortune, for example, came back with an article arguing that 3-D was a doomed fad, not the future of cinema at all? That problem didn’t arise, said John Huey, editor in chief of Time Inc. “It isn’t something I had to deal with.”

What a surprise.

* I misread the blog originally and didn’t apprehend it was as substantive as it was, which is why I said it seemed evanescent.

Time magazine agreeably envisions the movies’ digital 3-D future in a way guaranteed to please its picture boys, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and James Cameron.

The new digital 3-D isn’t going to work for the studios without a lot of stories like this, which play up the technique’s wow factor and play down the retro aspects (kids are still going to have to wear glasses) and the not-quite-iffy but definitely unestablished business prospects.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt to me like the writer, Josh Quittner, was making everything seem as hunkily dory as possible. Consider this, from early in the piece:

But proponents say digital 3-D is a different animal from the analog stuff that came before 2005. Viewers often wore cardboard glasses with red and cyan cellophane lenses … As just about everyone knows, old-school 3-D was less than awesome.

Note the past tense in that second sentence. Sure sounds like you don’t have to wear those dumb glasses any more! It’s not until the end of the story we get this:

Gone are the completely cheesy cardboard glasses, replaced with slightly less cheesy disposable plastic-frame glasses that have gray lenses.

It doesn’t help that the piece boasts a correction:

The original version of this story misstated the cost of the film Avatar as being in excess of $300 million. The correct figure is in excess of $200 million.

Avatar is Cameron’s long-awaited super-duper spectacular, done in motion capture and digital 3-D, set for release this December. Variety has said the budget is an estimated $250 million to $300 million, and that was more than six months ago.

As the LAT’s Patrick Goldstein has recently demonstrated, film budgets are fungible figures. Avatar might cost $300 million to make, but tax credits could drop the price down 10 or 15 percent. (Of course, the studios will also lie about the budget, too.)*

Still, in the end, you’d have to be crazy to believe that Avatar is not going to cost a lot closer to $300 million than $200 million. (Evan Almighty had an official cost of $175 million two years ago, and reliable reports had it at $200 million. What do you think the chances are that James Cameron can make a movie for less money than Tom Shadyac?**)

Crazy or … kind of a tool. So why did Time make that craven correction? To an outsider, it sure looks like it was made to assuage the ego of a temperamental story subject.

Finally, the real issue with digital 3-D—unmentioned in the story—is how it will transfer to folks’ living rooms. One of the beauties of the process is that it can make a seamless 2-D version. But as the bottom drops out of the DVD market the mechanics of getting your money back on big budgets is getting more complicated.

Can studios and hardware makers agree on a 3-d home video standard? If they do, will it be a inferior one, or the gold standard of two HDMI inputs delivering at 1080p per eye? Will kids sit in their living rooms with glasses on?

The WSJ yesterday treated the subject with a lot more distance:

While the 3-D technology on display in films like “Monsters vs. Aliens” is more sophisticated, it remains to be seen whether people will still be drawn to it after its novelty has worn off. Many theater owners say they wonder if it makes sense to raise ticket prices more in a downturn. And the technology, which relies on actually going into theaters, may have little effect on home-video sales, which have boosted studio profits for years but fell about 9% in 2008, according to Adams Media Research.

p.s.: Cameron is a lunkhead in a league of his own, but it’s also true he directed the two Terminator movies and one of the highest-grossing films of all time, Titanic, so he can’t be written off. But the Anne Thompson piece reminded me of another Variety interview with Cameron, which began with this priceless quote, an ineffable distillation of the utter artlessness of his psyche:

I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow.

I imagine Cameron holding court at the Marmont, acolytes like Michael Bay and Brett Ratner in attendance, hanging on his every word:

“Hitchcock said that actors should be treated like cattle, but that’s ridiculous. Cattle are held in stalls and left to stand around in meadows all day and eat grass! Actors are human!”

“They say that money can’t buy love, but I think it can. I bet I could find someone, and pay them, like $1000 a day to, literally, love me. If they didn’t, they’d get fired. Why do people say that when it’s demonstrably not true?”

* Uncorrected in the story is this assertion:

Avatar is filmed in the old “Spruce Goose” hangar, the 16,000-sq.-ft. space where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane.

The Spruce Goose wouldn’t fit in a building that size. I think there’s a zero missing.

**  T2 cost about $175M in today’s dollars. Anne Thompson at Variety:

By way of comparison, Cameron’s Terminator 2 had 42 shots with CG characters. Avatar has 1700.

Detailed here, at Consumerist.com.

Not that big of a deal: The company put some Phish tix on sale early, recalled them that night, apologized to fans and gave then $50 gift certificates—though, as one fan noted, that’s like $27 after service fees.

A week or two ago I discussed a blog post on scalping by an economist named Eric Crampton.  I called him British; he’s actually a Canadian teaching in New Zealand. The original post is below.

he and a colleague were kind enough comment on a couple of issues. One was my precis of what he meant by the concept of “clearing.” I glossed it as ““everything selling for the top price people will pay for it.”

The colleague, Paul Walker, wrote:

Demand curves slope downwards so the market clearing price will be such that only the marginal person will in fact pay what they actually think the ticket is worth. All intra-marginal consumers will pay less than what they think the ticket is worth. That is, they will pay less than their maximum willingness to pay. Your statement would be true under first degree price discrimination, but we just don’t see that in practice.

(He also discusses this more on his own blog, here.

The really interesting question the original post raised was why tickets aren’t sold at market prices.

A British Canadian economist, Eric Crampton, discusses scalping here. When he talks about “market clearing” he means “everything selling for the top price people will pay for it,” and in his world that’s how things not only should work, but do, which is why scalping takes place and “clears” the tickets appropriately.

I respect that position but don’t agree with it. Some of these free market types: You’d think a little kitten dies if every goddamned thing in the world isn’t sold at top price.

But I do have some observations to make about other conundra he ponders.

For the first, there’s too much hand-wringing over why tickets aren’t priced higher than they are. Of course it’s because rock stars don’t like the image of charging $500 or $1000 for tickets.

That was 1963, and the idea has been a key part of the rock ‘n’ roll ethos ever since.

But it’s really a larger issue than that. Very few entertainment options in American life aren’t subject to scalping, from sports to Broadways shows, which means that few of these are priced appropriately outside of the broad tiered pricing we are all familiar with. (I don’t know how things are in England.)

In some venues, the practice has been scaled back: Not too many movie theaters have that pricier loge seating. More often, as in rock shows and on Broadway, though, there has been a move to monetize the very best seats.

Still, it’s been done fairly quietly; and the press, as Hitsville has charted variously, goes along with it for the most part, parroting producers’ claims that the price hikes are all about “flexibility” or “consumer choice.”  (Just as Ticketmaster execs use euphemisms like “dynamic pricing” for higher ticket prices or refer to scalping as “the secondary market.”)

In other words, the main reason entertainment tix in the U.S. are not all sold at their full market value is that there is a long-standing cultural distaste for that practice.

Secondly, again trying to come up with a sober explanation of why an artist would sell a ticket for less than its market price, Crampton postulates:

I can buy that the artist would want the most enthusiastic fans up at the front rather than the boring folks who can afford to pay $1000 per ticket. Giving an economics lecture is a lot worse if the students up front seem less interested than you think they ought to be, and I’d fully expect that the effect is greater for musicians. Why shouldn’t they trade off some monetary income for being able to put on a show that’s more fun for them?

As is explicit in Trent Reznor’s detailed explanation of how he tries to thwart scalpers, the issue is more rewarding one’s supposed “true fans” than trying to buy a little enthusiasm in the front rows, which is always there no matter what. With very rare cases, everyone in the front section of every show I’ve ever gone to is, if anything, too enthusiastic.

In those case, I’m the guy with the free ticket who just wants to watch the show, and I’m invariably surrounded by inebriated frat boys yelling “Roxanne!” or “Rosalita!” They are the ones who paid top price at the least and, at the most, several times top price to a scalper to get up front and holler.

High ticket prices have had the effect of making it virtually impossible for anyone to admit they saw a bad show—you’d feel like an idiot after having paid more than $100!

Jim Farber in the NY Daily News details how Live Nation has been slipping its parking fees in and out of the ticket prices for shows:

A parking fee by any other name is still a parking fee.

A day after music lovers panned a new $6-per-ticket parking charge for shows at New Jersey’s PNC Bank Arts Center, promoter Live Nation eliminated it from its Web site - only to pile it back on top of the basic ticket price.

When the Daily News called to ask about the sneaky switch, and why there was no real change in overall ticket prices, Live Nation suddenly reversed itself and again itemized the parking fee on its Internet purchase page.

Link via the Daily Swarm. At the end of the story, Farber mentions the obvious thing: That the company makes a lot more money by making the fee part of the purchase price.

Have no fear about the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Psmith would say, “The cry goes round—the SF Bay Guardian has been heard from!”

The Chron, for reasons I have detailed here, has a reputation as the least-distinguished daily at a major U.S. city.; as you might know, its owner, the Hearst Corp., has said that it’s losing $1 million a week and says it will sell it—or shut it down—if it doesn’t slow the losses.

Outsiders may not know that the Guardian, one of the two local weeklies, one-ups the Chron by being  probably the worst alternative paper in the U.S.*: It’s a ponderous and lunk-headed institution that combines a still-tenuous grasp of journalistic niceties (like not letting lines of text drop off from the bottoms of stories) with a reality-denying brand of political thinking that gives leftism a bad name.

Evidence? Consider its editorial on preserving the Chron, which Guardian watchers will savor for its deft handing of the facts of the case and its sophisticated rasp of corporate economics.

For example:

Hearst is complaining that the Chronicle is losing about $50 million a year. Of course, Hearst, a private corporation, won’t show anyone, even its own unions, its books.

Actually, in 2005, an auditor for the paper’s unions found that the paper lost “at least $62 million” in 2004. Given the climate facing newspapers in the years since (and particularly within the last few months) there’s little reason to think that the paper hasn’t been continuing to lose money at that rate or something close to it.** (Alan Mutter, in a blog post here, using actual facts, argues that it’s higher.)

But the Guardian doesn’t care about facts. The editorial continues:

We realize the newspaper business is rough right now, but we’re not convinced that running a daily paper in San Francisco is a doomed proposition. This is one of the wealthiest, best-educated markets in the world

The Guardian, you will note, having eliminated the $1 million a week losses from the discussion, doesn’t have to come up with a plan to deal with them. Part of the reason the Bay Area is so wealthy, of course, is the digital industry, which sprang up under the corporate noses of the Guardian and the Chronicle.

When the New York company [i.e., Hearst; the Guardian is playing the out-of-towners card here, though Hearst’s involvement in SF journalism via the SF Examiner goes back more than a century] bought out the deYoung Thieriot family in 2001, it sought to create a true monopoly by shutting down the Ex entirely. A local outcry, a lawsuit by Clint Reilly, and threats by federal regulators forced Hearst to sell the bones of the Ex to the Fang family, which essentially got the paper free and was given a $66 million subsidy to run it.

After darkly questioning the idea of losses, the Guardian even more darklier suggests the Chronicle was a would-be monopolist. You don’t have to feel sorry for a powerful company like Hearst to note the $66 million payment to the comically inept Fang family was wasted.

(For a time it was fun to look at the front of the Examiner in newspaper boxes and see how many typos you could spot in headlines and photo captions, just on the top half of the front page.)

The Examiner was traditionally a better paper than the Chron, but its value—its more competent, less lassitudinous staff—came over to the Chron at the time of the merger, and it is now barely a presence in the city.

The Guardian continues:

Now, after all this, Hearst is threatening to close shop and walk away, destroying hundreds of union jobs and wiping out a newspaper that is, by its nature, something of a public utility.

A more correct recitation of this might be,”After being forced to throw that $66 million away, being saddled with two newspaper staffs to put out one paper, dealing with the end of the dot-com bubble, and, now, a major recession, Hearst has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the paper, and, given the spiraling nature of the industry, no one seems to have a good idea of how to make money with it. Since the paper wasn’t that good anyway, San Franciscans won’t notice too much of a difference when MediaNews, which owns all the other daily publication in the Bay Area, takes it over, as seems likely.”

Instead, using its own internal logic, the Guardian has a solution:

The Chron unions have talked of an interest in buying the paper. Financier Warren Hellman confirmed to us that he supports creating a nonprofit entity to take over Chronicle operations. Hearst Corp., which has almost certainly already written off its $600 million purchase as a tax loss, should be forced to work with potential buyers — and give them a deal no worse than what the Fangs got in 2001.

If I read this correctly, the Guardian is saying that, since Hearst has lost $600 million (the Guardian is still not conceding any losses, which could bring the total to $1 billion) anyway, the company should give the paper to someone, along with at least $66 million more.

Finely argued debates on complex financial and social matters like this are what give San Francisco journalism its special flair.

* I worked at a competitor for the Guardian, the SF Weekly, in the 1990s, so readers are welcome to take my perspective on the paper with a grain of salt.

** One local SF union guy has made a convoluted argument on one of the Guardian’s blogs that Hearst wasn’t telling the truth in 2005 and that this is all a pot to bust the pressmen’s union; but the overall tenor of his complaints are a little … excitable, and I don’t believe him, at least on the point about the reality of the losses. Neither he nor, typically, the Guardian’s blogger asks the question of why the union didn’t challenge the figures back then.

————-

Previously in Hitsville

Why the SF Chronicle will not be mourned
Not mourning the Chronicle: The comments
Chronicle Watch

I’m a journalist and don’t sign petitions as a matter of course, but I’m making an exception here, for three reasons:

1. It’s not a political act per se, but voicing a concern about one’s profession; and
2. The profession should occasionally take steps to fix itself; and, most tantalizingly…
3. It sure seems like NBC is feeling a bit vulnerable on this one! If nothing else, the network behaved very badly last week. It sure seems like it decreed a blackout on talk of the Stewart-Cramer showdown on the Daily Show.

———

Previously in Hitsville

Is NBC whitewashing the news?
Is NBC twisting its coverage to protect Jim Cramer?

Ars Technica is always impressive; the site has good reporters and good editing. Indeed, it reports! But consider its latest story from the front lines of the RIAA’s war on file-sharing.

Now, the RIAA says it’s stopping the mass lawsuits, but for various reasons it’s continuing with the ones already in the pipeline. The Ars story is about one of those cases.

Here’s the impression you take away from it: A woman with a rudimentary understanding of computers gets dinged by the RIAA for file-sharing, but says she doesn’t know how to download. She thought she was the target of a scam. It wasn’t, and she was found in default in a federal case—but fortunately some local law professors stepped in and are helping her out.

A heart-tugging story, no?

But … a lot of this seems fishy. She claims she was only a basic computer user and her husband didn’t use the family computer at all. That’s believable as far as it goes, but then we hear that her two kids, 19 and 21, didn’t use it either … and didn’t have computers of their own.

That’s less likely, but god knows not every kid is Twittering these days.

Read the Ars story carefully, however, and things get fishier.

Our computers carry a lot of incriminating information about us, like it or not. The woman’s computer?

[Her] home computer actually became nonfunctional in the spring of 2007 and was removed from her home by her brother, who took it to his house to fix it. He found a machine infected with “one or more viruses” and then replaced the hard drive, recycling the original.

This doesn’t quite track. If it was “non-functional,” how did the brother find the viruses on it? And if you have viruses, you either clean them out or, as a last resort, wipe the hard drive. Viruses are software issues. They don’t ruin hardware.

And note how this practically off-the-grid family suddenly has a brother who’s swapping out hard drives like a pro.

Track the chronology carefully and it certainly seems possible that there’s a different scenario: The woman could have been getting notices from the RIAA in 2007. Her hard drive is suddenly “non-functional” and, conveniently, disappears. She decides to play dumb. (Real dumb—the story says she’d been “personally served” with legal papers a year ago.)

The RIAA’s legal campaign against file-sharers is misguided and destructive and counter-productive, the dangerous flailings of a wolverine with its leg caught in a trap.

It is also, in its mass-attack strategy, certainly likely to hit a few innocent people.

The opponents of it like to cite the examples of 70-year-olds, or 7-years-olds, who for one reason or another have their names turn up on subpoenas.

Nothing wrong with using whatever means are available to undermine a corrupt industry’s crazy and damaging legal campaign.

But as the Ars story suggests, here’s also going to be a category of cases where the subjects make some bad decisions. Jammie Thomas, who ended up getting fined more than $200,000, tried a variety of things to explain away the downloaded songs on her computer, but the jury looked at, among other things, her long-running use of the screen name that downloaded the songs and didn’t believe her.

Thomas is getting a new trial, for other reason, and that’s the point. Opponents of the RIAA should be attacking it head on, and not waste time focusing on the RIAA’s missed shots—particularly when the shot may not have missed in the first place.

On March 10 and 11th, CNBC’s Jim Cramer appeared on TV almost hourly—on the Today show, on his own CNBC show, even on Martha Stewart.

Why? Because on Monday, Jon Stewart had gone after CNBC on the Daily Show. It wasn’t really about Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, but on Tuesday the former hedge fund manager inserted himself into the debate.

Stewart responded by showing a series of clips that showed Cramer enthusiastically talking up Bear Sterns stock, just before the stock dropped to 2.

Cramer, his reputation on the verge of being permanently tarnished, spent the next two days bouncing merrily from one NBC-owned show to another to vamp and try not to look like  a bad guy.

Finally, in a last-ditch attempt to limit the damage, Cramer appeared on The Daily Show, meeting face to face with a guy who’d been dogging him for several days. So anticipated was the showdown that it made the front page of USA Today.

As those who saw it know, the confrontation did not disappoint; the face off was a sensational bit of media criticism as Stewart hammered home his point: That Cramer in particular and CNBC is general were complicit in the financial crisis enveloping the country, by helping cheerlead a stock run-up that any conscientious person could have seen was untenable.

Anyway, here’s what happened on MSNBC on Friday:

Chris Matthews didn’t mention it. Matthews has a little segment called Sideshow, which addresses a few little amusing tidbits in the news that day.

He mentioned a Michelle Obama interview about her kids in the White House; Joe Biden talking up Amtrak; and a Democratic Party web site that twits Republicans.

No room for Cramer vs. Stewart.

Keith Olbermann didn’t mention it, either. Olbermann has a shtick similar to Matthews’ Sideshow, which he calls Oddball. He riffed on a couple who bought a second-hand couch … which turned out to have a cat living inside it; a monkey that used dental floss; and a dim Florida state senator who suspected that the science of “animal husbandry” involved naughtiness with animals.

A monkey that uses dental floss! But nothing about Cramer vs. Stewart.

As for Rachel Maddow—she has one of those amusing segments, too, called Ms. Information. She dealt with Cramer vs. Stewart there, tucked away at the end, but in an odd way; she didn’t show a clip, and her take was to talk vaguely about problems in “the business journalism world” without mentioning, specifically, CNBC. She also ended with a bizarre bit, ominously noting that while everyone was watching Stewart, the Washington Post had “quietly, quietly announced sotto voce today that it was eliminating its business section in the  weekday paper.”

It was a pregnant point, except for the fact that it wasn’t true. The Post had merely folded its standalone biz section into its section A. And I’m not sure how exactly a company announces something “quietly, quietly … sotto voce,” but the paper sent out the news in a lengthy memo to its staff and it was duly noted on journalism blogs and on sites like Politico.

Finally, on Meet the Press, NBC’s premiere news show, David Gregory mentioned the event, but in vague terms—”a nerve was touched” … Stewart “raised some really tough questions for CNBC…”—but didn’t manage to mention Cramer, and he didn’t show a clip either. He then let CNBC’s unfortunately named Steve Liesman give a commercial for all the “investigative work” he and the network did.

Now, Keith Olbermann is fast turning into a pompous bore, and I don’t understand the outsized appeal of Maddow, but Matthew is a fast thinker, Gregory’s trying hard to fill Russert’s boots, and on the whole it’s hard to make the case that this group is intellectually dishonest.

But the Daily Show face-of between Stewart and Cramer was the most talked about political event of the week.

First Cramer starts popping up like a prairie dog on NBC show after NBC show.

Then he gets his ass handed to him on a plate by Jon Stewart …

…and a lineup of shows always previously at the ready to play a little bit of fun tape suddenly fall mum.

The idea that this was not dictated from on high at NBC strains credulity.

Joe Freeman, a senior VP of Ticketmaster, writes in to the WSJ today to say … well, basically to confirm everything Ethan Smith wrote in his pungent piece last week detailing how Ticketmaster is helping artists scalp their own tickets:

Ticketmaster’s Platinum ticket program isn’t used to mask scalping (”Concert Tickets Get Set Aside, Marked Up by Artists, Managers,” Marketplace, March 11). To the contrary, and as our Web site states, Platinum tickets are primary sales that enable “artists and other people involved in staging live events to price tickets closer to their true value and participate more fairly in the economic value of the experience they’re providing to fans.”

Note how right after he says the program doesn’t mask scalping he … masks scalping.

By the way, I left in the parenthetical reference to Smith’s original article to call attention to the fact that the Journal doesn’t link to the original stories when it posts letters to the editor on the web. As newspapers die it should at least be a footnote that many could not manage simple new concepts like web linkage, much less evolve their thinking on the macro level to meet technological change.

TV Newser says that a tipster tells it that

MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today. In fact, the only time it came up on MSNBC was during the White House briefing, when a member of the press corps asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if Pres. Obama watched.

And over the last couple of days we’ve seen Cramer go on everything from the Today Show to Martha Stewart to try to clean up his and his network’s image after Jon Stewart has cleaned their clocks no less than three times this week.

Cramer’s appearance on the Daily Show last night, in which Stewart delivered a Singapore-style intellectual caning for 25 excruciating minutes, would ordinarily be fodder for the Matthews/Olbermann/Maddow trinity.

We’ll see; Chris Matthews has been on for 20 minutes with no mention of it yet …

The LAT’s Patrick Goldstein has a nice little analysis of how a bad piece of information gets ricocheted around Hollywood. It is written, in typically Patrick Goldstein fashion, soberly, carefully and with humility, including a nod to his own fallibility and a cite of his own organization’s role in helping the bad information get around.

(It was about Juan Antonio Bayona supposedly being tapped to direct the third Twilight installment. Not really earth-shattering, but that’s big news amongst the folks he’s writing about.)

Anyway, Crazy Nikki has a starring role, being the person who got it wrong first. Then Variety chimed in, as did other film news sites, including a blog at the LAT.

Goldstein, as I said, carefully goes back and re-constructs what happened, speaking to everyone involved, including the head of the studio.

So Nikki Finke, who is fond of using the hedline “TOLDJA!!” when she is right and forgetting when she is wrong, responds and … goes nuts. The funniest thing about her response is a long preliminary digression about the head of the studio laying down a rule that only he can talk to the press, when Goldstein wrote nothing about that at all.

The second funniest thing is how she tries to defend her original news tidbit by pointing out its weasely wording. This is a classic fallback of bad journalists: “Well, all I really said was that someone said something was true, and he did say that, so what I wrote was correct!”

The third funniest thing is that she pegs the whole thing to the head of the studio apologizing to her. Shouldn’t she be apologizing to her readers?

The issue here isn’t whether Bayona ultimately gets the job, which he might. Read the whole exchange carefully and you can see that Finke also didn’t have Goldstein’s detail that the director in question had met with Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series. (She said flatly that he hadn’t.) Finke would have had her scoop if she’d done a little more reporting, found out about the Meyer meeting, and simply said what might indeed be the truth—that Bayona was the current leading candidate inside the studio and that Meyer hadn’t vetoed him. But the humility gene is one Finke doesn’t have.

… will be held at the Chicago-only Lollapalooza (Beasties, Depeche, Jane’s) and Coachella (Paul McCartney, the Cure, MBV, and Morrissey) (I’m averaging) this summer.

In fairness, the second night of Coachella has the Killers headlining, with Theivery Corporation, TV on the Radio, Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses, roughly, second billed. (Amy Winehouse has cancelled.)

But the balance of both lineups is otherwise pretty pathetic.

I’m trying to think back… when I was twenty, would I have been clamoring to endure a dusty and crowded  mess of folk in the desert to see bands that were big when I was barely out of kindergarten?

These festivals … all those reunion tours … this sad practice of playing some album from the past in order ….

(”Oooh—Sonic Youth is going to play ‘Teenage Riot’ … and then ‘Silver Rocket’ right after it!“)

… are we reaching some sad decadent place, where a new generation is being told that this is quality entertainment?Why is it cool to populate these allegedly hip fests with artistically moribund nostalgia acts?

I mean, I’ve seen Paul McCartney. This is a guy who, in 1976, thought it was an inspired bit of stage patter to say, in the course of introducing his band, “This is my wife, Gertrude Higgins” (yuk, yuk) … and to keep using it the next time he toured, in 1989.

Did I miss the discussion of how retro this lineup is on Pitchfork, or is “strong lineup” all it had to say?

According to an arts brief in the Times today,

The channel is apologizing in advance for an upcoming episode of Big Love, which supposedly features some oh-so-sacred Mormon rituals:

In a statement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said, “Certainly church members are offended when their most sacred practices are misrepresented or presented without context or understanding,” according to The A.P. HBO said that it did not intend to cause offense to the church and apologized…

So, aside from the fact that HBO is obviously publicizing the non-controversy to get a little PR bounce for the show, why is the network apologizing?

Religious groups don’t get a say in how they are portrayed. Why didn’t HBO say, you know, tough shit?

Then the network could have said, By the way, being dependent on the nation’s creative community for the billions of dollars we’ve generated in profits for Time Warner,  we don’t much appreciate the Mormon Church, a Utah-based cult, throwing its money around, funding intolerance, rolling back basic rights, and fomenting prejudice against gays in California by bankrolling the Prop 8 campaign?

I’m chatting with Steve Knopper, whose new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction, charts the travails the music industry has been going through, Part I is here. Part II is here.

HITSVILLE: I was just thinking about your list of what a record company does: “signing talent, buying studio time to make albums, bribing radio stations to play the albums, bribing record stores to display them prominently and bribing journalists with free albums to write about them.” Let me add: Manufacturing and shipping CDs and doing muscular national marketing. Look at those two lists, and really, with maybe one exception, you could make the argument that, in theory, everything on them can either be done by any band or … isn’t really necessary any more. (I think that the argument that some strength in national marketing is still important, in terms of getting artists on magazine covers and TV shows and so forth.)

Now, I’d be interested to hear if you think that’s all really true, yet. I felt like I needed the weasely “in theory” in the sentence above because I think it’s clear we’re still in a transitional phase. Has a star yet been created outside the label system? I thought Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was a candidate, but their presence seems to have faded. Industry haters like me love to visualize a world in which the labels don’t exist. Will all that is solid in the record labels really melt into air? Or are they going to still be around and rambunctious?

KNOPPER: It depends on what you mean by “star.” Some acts have broken through via the Internet, like the one-man pop band Secondhand Serenade or the MOR singer Colbie Caillat, both of whom became experts in MySpace marketing before becoming big enough to attract a major label’s attention. But yes, even these examples speak to the reality that you need a major label to get REALLY big. That’s because the most efficient way to turn an unknown artist into a star remains the traditional route—sign with a label, use its connections to get on the radio. But with radio and the labels shrinking, I believe we’ll soon start to see bigger examples a la Secondhand and Colbie or even OK Go, a Chicago rock band that made it big based on a random YouTube gimmick sensation. (Curiously, OK Go were signed to Capitol/EMI at the time.) I don’t see labels melting completely. I mean, you and I could own the Beatles’ catalog and make enough money off it to be pretty dang rich. And you’re right, some of the marketing and publicity functions labels do are difficult to find elsewhere. But they’re shrinking, even more so with the recession, and we’re already seeing artist managers take over the traditional functions of some of the labels. That will probably continue to happen on a greater scale.

The Katie Couric Media Onslaught, charted here with alacrity, has slowed to a trickle. There was that appearance on Letterman last week, I guess, and this week just a Very Important Award from the USC J School, for those “extraordinary and persistent” Sarah Palin interviews.

When last we checked in with Couric’s actual ratings, we saw, despite all the spinning, squinting and selective citing of the data, her ratings were stuck at about 7 million.

The irony was that this was better than they had been during the campaign, which did not lack news interest. As Hitsville’s analysis proved, viewers really didn’t want Couric when actual historic events were taking place.

But, after the election was over, and after the financial meltdown had been addressed, then people felt they could go back to superficial Couric.

But now, it seems, they’ve checked her out again and … they’ve decided they really don’t like her that much. TV Newser helpfully collects the last few weeks of ratings here.

Couric had 7.2 million viewers the week of Feb. 2, coming off the inauguration high.

The next week, Feb. 9?

6.75 million.

Feb. 16? 6.73 million.

Feb. 23? 6.44 million—down for four weeks in a row, TV Newser notes.

And March 2? 6.44 million again.

She’s lost ten percent of her audience in a month, and this after the biggest PR assault the industry has seen in a long time.

Now, this number is above her bottom basement mark of some 5 million two years ago, but it’s not too much above the 5.9 million she had when all that talk started about her leaving the anchor position last April.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Paging Katie Couric!
Dear Tom Shales
Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

[Please send me any stories I’ve missed and I will post.]

The WSJ goes after artists who scalp their own tickets today:

Less than a minute after tickets for last August’s Neil Diamond concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.

Ticket reselling — also known as scalping — is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.

In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster’s former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond’s personal manager*, have acknowledged the arrangement, as has a person familiar with AEG Live, which is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Corp.

The writer, Ethan Smith, who has not heretofore impressed us with his coverage, redeems himself here, detailing a system that bills itself as “fan to fan” sales but is really limited to artists’ scalping their own tickets. He even names names:

Virtually every major concert tour today involves some official tickets that are priced and sold as if they were offered for resale by fans or brokers, but that are set aside by the artists and promoters, according to a number of people involved in the sales.

That includes recent tours by Bon Jovi, Celine Dion and Van Halen, and a current tour starring Billy Joel and Elton John. Spokesmen for Bon Jovi and Ms. Dion had no comment. A spokesman for Van Halen said that the band could not be reached. A booking agent for Messrs. Joel and John did not respond to requests for comment.

* Azoff!

—————

The CEO of Livestub.com, a ticket reselling site, op-eds in Billboard today against the merger. Michael Hershfield, noting that traditional tour income was hitting a wall, continues:

On the re-sale side of the ticket business, however, revenues have exploded. Traditionally, almost all the ticket inventory across the secondary sites belongs to brokers, often with the same tickets showing up on multiple sites simultaneously. Despite the crucial role brokers play in the industry, and the fact that it was on their backs that the biggest secondary marketplaces succeeded, primary sale participants greedily eyed their profits.

The actual secondary marketplace operators had already carved out their pound of flesh with the 25%-30% in fees added to purchases (and the original motivator for launching LiveStub), and now these “primary” players wanted their piece of the secondary ticket pie. They realized that the real money was to be had in the secondary marketplaces.

I don’t agree with the idea that brokers are crucial. (Hitsville’s position is that selling tickets above their purchase price should be illegal, but that artists should be able to charge what the market will bear.)

But the rest of his argument is interesting; he says that Ticketmaster needs to control the secondary market because that’s the only way to keep the ticket manipulations of the promoters and artists secret:

Theoretically, the only way to make sure this practice wouldn’t be discovered is to actually own a secondary market outright or to have an exclusive, high-level relationship with one. Creating a vertically integrated “walled” system where tickets would go directly into a preferred secondary marketplace and stay there was the ideal way to make more money.

Unfortunately, with the potential merger of Live Nation with Ticketmaster, this scenario is no longer hypothetical. Consumer concerns about a single primary seller of live event tickets should be amplified by the possibility of this entity using the anonymous cover provided by the secondary market to play by different rules and engage in duplicitous behavior with consumers.

———–

The head of AEG, Live Nation’s main competitor, blasts the merger in a chat with Billboard’s Ray Waddell:

[Anschutz Entertainment Group president/CEO Tim] Leiweke pointed out that Live Nation produces two-thirds of concerts held at the country’s top 50 arenas and top 50 amphitheaters, and that Ticketmaster accounts for 94% of the ticketing. “This merger won’t create a new idea on how to sell more tickets,” he said. “It’s all about the bottom line.” Consequently, the consumer will ultimately end up paying more, he predicted.

—————

The Financial Times editorializes against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger:

Its dominance in ticket sales would be worrying. Technology makes it easier to enter the market; challengers are emerging. But the merger would deal a blow to competition. Live Nation would presumably stop building up its rival ticketing business.

A greater concern comes from “vertical integration”. A single entity running the entire process – from signing up the talent, to staging of the concerts and selling the tickets – would stifle competition. This would work against the fans in the longer term, no matter what innovations were on offer initially.

So Christine Varney, President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Justice department’s antitrust division, should take time to unpick the deal and exact strict concessions if it goes ahead at all. This is one of those happy moments for governments when the popular course is also the right policy.

While I agree with the paper’s position, it’s interesting how its knowledge base of the issue, like that of other publications, is weak. For example, nearly fifteen years after Pearl Jam’s futile battle with the company, no competitor has emerged—and the only one that presented any challenge to it … was owned by LN. Secondly, it’s not technology that has prevented others from entering the market; it’s Ticketmaster’s exclusivity deals with venues an artists, which, as we have sen, the fans have to pay for.

__________

Sound off with Dave has testimony of how it certainly seems as if someone’s “re”-selling tickets before they get sold in the first place:

Let’s take one recent high-profile example. Paul McCartney is slated to open the new Joint at the Hard Rock Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. When tickets went on sale recently, those who were on Ticketmaster.com at 12:00 PST were completely shut out of the sale. Not a single ticket was there to be had. I tried, for one ticket, at the top of the hour.
[…]
However, you could find tickets for sale at TicketsNow immediately following the sale. There wasn’t even enough time to process an order, then go to TicketsNow to post your newly purchased tickets for sale. But, there they were, albeit at a much higher ticket price.

—-

From the yKvz blog, news that some challengers to Ticketmaster are trying to figure out a way to break the stranglehold the company has on venues via its creative kickback scheme. Their plan? Buy them off:

With the proposed $2.5 billion merger between TicketMaster and Live Nation looming large, many venue owners and promoters are up in arms, deeming the deal anti-competitive and monopolistic (they may be right - the deal is being examined for possible anti-trust violations). Now ShowClix, a TicketMaster competitor that launched in early 2007, is launching the Fair Ticketing Fund, setting aside up to $5 million to entice venues and promoters away from the pending Live Nation Entertainment goliath. Other ticket vendors are also beginning to offer similar deals, including TicketBiscuit, which launched a $10 million fund last week.

Emphasis added. Wouldn’t it be nice if venues contracted with ticketing vendors based on how cheaply and efficiently they could get tickets to fans?

—————-

This Bloomberg story speculates that LN’s largest shareholder would oppose the merger with Ticketmaster. It seems that it was just a shot at Barry Diller and that the investor, Read more