On Oct. 9, 1986, the Fox Network launched, with 88 affiliates across the country. At the time, most experts ridiculed the notion that a fourth network could challenge the dominance of the Big Three. No doubt executives at NBC, CBS, and ABC found themselves snickering, too.

When Fox took to the airwaves with its first show, featuring Joan Rivers, it did so in a year that saw CNN celebrate its fifth anniversary. Big Three news anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather still weren’t particularly concerned by the role of cable news.

We realize today that these events represent some of the early seeds of change in the modern media…

Continue reading the rest of my recent column in New Hampshire Business Review.

I had a conversation yesterday that spurred me to think back to the “old days” of the World Wide Web. You see, I’ve been at this game long enough to remember Yahoo before it was at Yahoo.com. Most of you probably don’t know that it used to live at http://akebono.stanford.edu.

In any case, I took a dip into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (a great tool for peeking at what web sites looked like on various dates in the past) to check out what some of my own early efforts online looked like.

I thought I might share some of my nostalgia with you — and then explain why it matters.

My First Web Site

My site itself no longer exists, but NCSA Mosaic, the organization that gave birth to the first popular web browser (which would later become Netscape), lists my site called CyberPolitics in a September 1995 list of “What’s New” on the web.

My First Web Site Listed in Yahoo

Ironically, the ad at the top of the page showing my CyberPolitics site when the Wayback Machine archived Yahoo on December 20, 1996 was for Townhall.com, a company I would become CEO of a few months later.

My First CEO Gig

Here’s what Townhall.com looked like around the time that I left my role as CEO there. It sure was green!

My First Blog

I started my first blog in 1999. It was called PrimaryScoop and it chronicled the presidential primary campaigns of 2000. It would serve in a roundabout way as the inspiration for CustomScoop.

The First CustomScoop Web Site

On September 1, 2000, not long after we launched the company, the Wayback Machine captured the first look we had for our web site. I especially like the big dip in the “p” to tie in the tagline — classy!

So there you have it. A brief trip down memory lane. What’s the point you ask? Besides a bit of nostalgia, I often find that the past often gives you good ideas for the future. It’s not worthwhile to linger in times gone by, but to check in to what you and others were doing years or decades ago may provide valuable insight that helps gel your thinking today.

Last night I ended up at the bar of a mass production restaurant in Broomfield, CO eating unhealthy food of marginal quality while drinking club soda with some of the saddest looking pieces of lime I have seen in a while. No, I’m not a down-on-my-luck recovering addict, just a guy who really wanted to watch the Boston Bruins play the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 6 of the 2011 NHL Eastern Conference Finals.

Unfortunately, my hotel room here does not carry Versus. Nor did the hotel bar. From my experience as a hockey fan, that’s pretty common.

Naturally, as a tech guy, I thought I would simply fire up my laptop and watch the game using my Slingbox to watch my TV back home in New Hampshire. Alas, either because of typical poor quality hotel room Internet access or perhaps more likely because I’m in a hotel with a bunch of other geeks who tax broadband more than your average business traveler, the connection was so bad that it would be less painful to call my wife and ask her to set the phone next to the TV so I could listen to the game that way.

Needless to say, listening to the game over the phone wasn’t really an option.

So I asked around at the hotel and was referred to a nearby local establishment that might have the game. And they did. In fact, it seemed like a good place to go to catch pretty much any sports action as the place was full of flat screen TV’s showing basketball, baseball, and hockey. Of course, it also had some poor guy playing a guitar while using his voice to butcher the singing of a wide range of country, folk, alternative, and rock music.

But that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to choose where to watch the game on TV. It requires greater consistency from a wide range of providers and can’t be fixed easily by just one player in the ecosystem.

And we’re not there yet. Hopefully we will be soon.

I really want to like the New York Times iPad app. You see, I have taken to really liking the iPad as my primary reading tool. I read books on it (mostly with the Kindle app). I read magazines (mostly with Zinio, but also a handful of publication-specific apps). I read newspapers (like the Wall Street Journal).

The New York Times remained one of the big titles I couldn’t read in full on the iPad. Until this week when the woeful “Editor’s Choice” version of the paper that had been made available on the iPad gave way to the complete content version. It is said that while the content is free today, it will require a subscription next year.

First, let me say that I’m fine with paying for the content. I have long been a proponent of the notion that Content Is Not Free, and I back that up by paying lots of money for compelling content.

However, I had much higher expectations for the New York Times on the iPad. My experience with it so far has been disappointing.

For the moment, I’ll set aside the fact that it seems to crash every few minutes. Changing the screen’s orientation with the app open seems to be a sure-fire way to have an unplanned exit. But it also crashes for no apparent reason as well.

I’m also going to ignore the fact that there are still some little bugs (like characters with accents failing to appear properly when used in a headline).

These are modest technical glitches that I’m confident will get worked out. They are also common to the iPad experience whenever a new app comes out or an existing one receives a significant overhaul or upgrade.

What I can’t let go, however, is the overall usability of the app. First, content is repeated between sections. That may be fine for a web experience, but it makes it painful to try to read the newspaper from cover-to-cover on the iPad as one might with the printed edition. Why do I need to see the same story in 2-3 places?

Of course, the repetition might be tolerable if it were easier to read the content straight through on the iPad. Unfortunately, the New York Times forces me to bring up a menu and select the next section I want to view every time I complete browsing through the last one. The Wall Street Journal handles these transitions much more elegantly by permitting me to move seamlessly from Marketplace to Money & Investing and so on.

I would also prefer an easier method to dispense with interstitial ads on the NYT app. Now, I don’t mind the ads in the first place. Ultimately successful ads will help hold the line on subscription costs, so I say go for it! But the “Skip this Ad” text is not very obvious. Again, I like the way the WSJ app handles this by allowing me to swipe through an ad screen just as I turn pages of content. In fairness, I will probably become more fluid with my motions as I get used to the placement of the Skip link.

The full content of the New York Times on the iPad has been a long time coming — in iPad time at least — but I do applaud the Times for making the move. Now I just hope they’ll work out the bugs and the usability issues so I can go back to reading the paper from cover-to-cover every day — just as the WSJ app has caused me to do with that publication.

Over the course of the past year, my schedule has been such that I have not been able to consume social media in the same regular, obsessive way that I used to. I have become, I suspect, more like a typical information consumer, if such a thing exists. I sample information from my favorite traditional and social media web sites as time permits. Some days I may be able to devote a couple of hours, while at other times I may go a couple of days without going beyond a handful of core information sources.

Unfortunately, most blogs are not set up well to handle samplers like the “new me.” The standard blog design calls for a timeline-style layout where posts are featured chronologically, without the benefit of editorial recommendation or discretion.

The “latest news layout” works great for regular visitors who consume the entire fire hose of content. But what of occasional readers? When I visit a blog today, I’m required to skim through a long column of content to find interesting stuff. If I time it just right, I may see a sparkling piece of original content above the fold. At others, I may just be looking at mundane “me too” blogging.

Not all social media sites fall victim to the chronological convention, however. Mashable carries a “trending” story at the top of its main content well, helping to highlight something that may be of greater interest than regular regurgitated news items.

Although Politico has a print product, it really supplements its powerful new media presence. The Washington, DC news outlet adopts a much more traditional layout approach that clearly demonstrates editorial judgment above the fold. Given the volume of content that Politico produces on a daily basis, this sort of visual cuing provides great benefit to even regular readers who may not live on the site every few minutes.

New media outlets create lots of great original content. Burying it among a pile of other blog posts that offer little beyond a brief comment on top news stories does readers and the publisher a disservice. Bloggers — professional and amateur alike as long as they create frequent enough content — ought to embrace layout, headline size, and other visual cues that help ensure blogs benefit not just the addicted audience, but also the casual content consumer.

Let your best content thrive.

Additional Resources

• Mashable
• Politico

Who among us has not been intrigued by what goes on behind closed doors at our office? Ever wondered what your boss was really thinking? Curious about the dynamics of your organization’s board and ownership? Or perhaps speculated about compensation questions?

Sarah Ellison got a chance to explore those and many other issues at her own employer when she undertook to write War at the Wall Street Journal. Originally assigned to cover the sale of her own newspaper to Rupert Murdoch for the pages of the Journal, Ellison ultimately expanded her project to be a book about the lead up to and immediate aftermath of the sale of Dow Jones to News Corp.

This book has a little bit of everything. There’s family intrigue as the author shines some light on the dynamics of the Bancroft family. The dynamics of this motley group of wealthy media heirs alone makes for interesting reading – yet it is just one piece of the story. The portrait of the tension between money, legacy, and pride maintains a sense of mystery even as we know the eventual outcome.

Ultimately, the family history gives way to hardball business wrangling. Here we get an inside look at the mechanics of big bucks mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street. The maneuvering of investment bankers, lawyers, board members, executives and others shows everyone looking out for their own interests – some with more success than others.

Most do not come out looking good at the end of the day. There are no true heroes. Rupert Murdoch himself is a stereotypical rich, old, pampered mogul. The perception of the Australian billionaire media titan as a cutthroat, scheming media titan is reinforced. Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann is an ineffectual former journalist desperate to hang on to the paper’s history. His successor, Rich Zannino, seems to be a young numbers wonk in over his head and eager to sell and run. The Bancroft family members are one part naïve, one part greedy, and a final part spoiled. Ellision’s fellow reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal seem detached from modern media reality and certain of their own superiority as journalists. Marcus Brauchli, the successor to long-serving and well-respected Managing Editor Paul Steiger, is portrayed as largely ineffectual because he spends so much time trying to please his new master but ultimately fails, like so many before him, to win Murdoch’s affection.

Once the Bancroft family and Dow Jones board comes to the only reasonable conclusion and agrees to  sell to Rupert Murdoch for more than $5 billion – about double the prevailing market value at the time of the offer – the story changes to one of a newspaper company trying to succeed in a new media world.

It becomes clear at this point in the book that Murdoch and his minions at News Corp don’t have the unmistakably clear competitive vision that their reputation might suggest. We see Murdoch himself admitting he can argue both sides of the question of what type of stories make most sense in the WSJ. His editorial maven, Robert Thomson, becomes Managing Editor for the paper but doesn’t seem to be able to explain exactly what he wants to do.

When it comes to the Big Question of online media – to charge for content or not – Murdoch flip-flops. First he argues for all wsj.com content to be free; then when presented with financial data from the bean counters at Dow Jones, he reverses course. As we know, today he is a powerful advocate for online subscription fees.

War at the Wall Street Journal makes for an interesting read if you’re interested in business, media, or family dynasties. Definitely worth picking up or downloading a copy.

Additional Resources:

• War at the Wall Street Journal at Amazon.com
• Sarah Ellison’s web site

In just nine days, Wired magazine’s iPad app sales have nearly equaled their typical monthly newsstand sales, Crain’s New York Business reports. Early buzz — and likely many curiosity seekers — drove more than 73,000 downloads at $4.99 each. That compares to Conde Nast’s official media kit information that shows December 2009 ABC numbers at 82,357 for individual copies.

Of course, these numbers pale in comparison to the total paper subscription number of 672,217. And all are less than the approximately 2 million monthly unique web visitors, according to estimates from Quantcast.

Nevertheless, the strong initial sales should provide a glimmer of hope to the magazine industry. There is at least some level of willingness by consumers to spend cash for content — despite all of the “content wants to be free” complainers.

The trick for Wired – and other publishers — will be to translate this initial interest into long-term revenue viability.

Additional Resources

• Wired magazine’s iPad liftoff from Crain’s New York Business by Matthew Flamm
• Conde Nast’s media kit for Wired
• Quantcast traffic estimates for Wired.com
• Official Wired iPad App Page

Kara Miller, an instructor on media issues at Babson College in Massachusetts, writes in her Culture Club blog at Boston.com about conflicts of interest in the media. Her focus is on the intersection between media coverage and sponsorship of media outlets.

She concludes:

Commercials, certainly, are not new to news shows. But there is something vaguely disturbing about integrating corporate logos into newscasts in 2010. What if Rachel Maddow wanted to report on Cisco? Or CNBC detected corruption within the ranks of Charles Schwab? Would they hesitate to expose those who make their shows possible?

With apologies to Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas: bias, for lack of a better word, is good.

In fact, all media is biased already. We all bring our own personal conflicts — people, products, and points of view which we like or dislike. Virtually all media outlets accept advertising or sponsorship to some degree, and that creates a conflict. Publishers, general managers, and others who control hiring bring on board people with whom they can work well.

These are all conflicts and they no doubt influence the news. These conflicts, however, are not new. Indeed, overt sponsorship of television programming is hardly new — it used to be common for TV shows to include sponsorship announcements as part of their broadcast.

Disclosure of Bias and Conflict

In the examples Miller mentions, it is hardly a secret that those companies sponsor portions of the newscast. Will it cause them to shy away from negative coverage? Perhaps. But it also makes it more likely that competitors will exploit that to their own advantage and drive negative coverage if it exists.

Where these conflicts become problematic is when a news outlet pretends to be impartial. That’s simply not possible. We all have biases and conflicts that we cannot truly bury. Yes, we can — and should — compensate for them where possible.

But ultimately we are only as good at it as the disclosures we make. If a network newscaster came out and admitted to being left of center, it would surprise nobody. If some of the Fox anchors announced they were conservatives, there would be no shock.

What Context Tells Us

These admissions would help. Imagine if the web sites of the various news organizations included information about the biases and conflicts of their reporters, producers, and on-air talent. Start with political bias, but let’s add in other relevant information. Where does a spouse work? Or children if they’re old enough to be employed. What about other experiences that have left an indelible mark?

Some conflicts or bias may only need to be disclosed in narrow circumstances, and that’s fine, too. I’m not looking for the media to turn their lives into a completely open book, but rather to share information that a reader, viewer, or listener would find helpful in establishing context.

When product reviewers veer off course, it hurts fellow consumers.

Online consumer product reviews have changed the way I shop. Rarely do I make a purchase without checking on the web to see what others have experienced themselves. I take into account the assessments of professionals, but I value the collective judgment of multiple consumers more.

The system works when many people take the time to offer their opinions at Amazon.com, other shopping sites, or pure review sites. More often than not, these reviews have prove to be highly accurate for me. When I ignore reviews that say products are cheap and break easily — I regret it. When the views are consistently good, I am almost always happy with the purchase myself.

Unfortunately, the system can break down when a few blowhards decide to hijack a review to send some sort of a message beyond a judgment of the product’s quality. Perhaps I’m just more attuned to it, but it seems to be happening more of late. Just this past weekend I came across a couple of examples while browsing books on Amazon.com

The first case is Michael Lewis’ new book The Big Short. I went to purchase it and noticed that it had just 2 1/2 stars. That’s pretty uncommon for one of his books, so I dove into the reviews to see what the problem was. I assumed it would be that it was hastily written or poorly sourced or something of that nature. But it turns out the reviewers who rated it poorly did so because the publisher is not offering a version for the Kindle. While I’m a huge fan of my own e-reader and was in fact hoping to pick up a Kindle version of the book, I can’t stomach giving a negative review of a book that the reviewer never even read just to make a point.

The second example was another book on Amazon.com, but this one was available for sale on the Kindle. Unfortunately, I can’t recall specifically which book it was, but the reviews took aim at its price. Many reviewers — who never read the book as far as the comments indicated — gave it one star and then ranted about how there was no reason for an electronic book to be priced at about $15. The reviews even went into detail — about how publishing companies don’t “get it” and are unjustified in charging “so much” for a book that is not even printed on paper.

Regardless of the merits of the arguments in either case, the outlet these individuals have chosen for their outrage does their fellow consumers a real disservice. It makes it that much harder to find good products or good content if reviewers do something other than review the actual merits of a product they have personally purchased or used.

In Amazon’s case, it would be interesting if they restricted reviews to just those consumers who actually purchased them. Alternatively, it would be useful to see the ratings segregated by those who purchased from the site versus those with an ax to grind (for better or for worse).

Obviously this does not work for pure review sites, but it would help to improve the quality of the crowdsourced reviews. Ultimately, we — as members of the crowd — have an obligation to others to provide accurate and helpful information rather than stepping up on a soapbox and talking about unrelated or only semi-related issues.

When a speaker or author drops the “f bomb,” utters excretory expletives, or launches a lusty cuss word, it doesn’t add emphasis. It doesn’t make them look cool, hip, and smart. It makes them seem crass, juvenile, arrogant, and less than they are.

I say this not because I’m a linguistic purist. Far from it. I use my share of colorful language in private conversation — probably too much and too widely, in fact.

But there’s a considerable difference between cursing in private and doing so in front of an audience, in the pages of a book, or on screen in a blog.

I recently read a pair of business books that seemed to revel in the use of foul language. No doubt the authors felt that such word choice helped to underscore the points they were making. In several cases, it was done as a way of expressing outrage. It fell flat.

Over the weekend, I also watched a presentation from a tech conference where a very popular speaker seemed infatuated by excrement, and he littered his talk with constant references of that nature. The audience often laughed when he would use the word, no doubt encouraging increased usage.

I’d offer up examples from social media, but blogs and podcasts are so frequently the venue for foul language that it hardly seems fair to do so. If you’re not quoting someone or writing fiction, there’s really no reason to reach into the toilet for such verbiage.

This sort of thing seems much more prevalent in geek culture where everything is a bit more casual and relaxed, even when it comes to business and professional life. But my advice to those who write and speak is to cut out the potty mouth. You can be even more effective — and reach a wider audience — without it.