The return of the newspaper barons – very rich (and political) owners

Folks with several hundred million dollars and outspoken opinions have been buying up newspapers. The Omaha Herald, San Diego Union Tribune, Portland Press Herald, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

At the end of last year, Warren E. Buffett bought The Omaha World-Herald through his company, Berkshire Hathaway. This would be the same Mr. Buffett who told his annual shareholder meeting in 2009 that newspapers faced “unending losses” and that he would not buy most of them “at any price.” Yet there he was, ponying up $200 million for a relatively small regional newspaper in Berkshire Hathaway’s hometown.

And he is not alone. Douglas F. Manchester, a very rich developer, bought The San Diego Union Tribune at about the same time, for a reported $110 million. At the end of last month, S. Donald Sussman, a hedge fund manager and philanthropist who is married to a congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, bought a stake in the company that owns The Portland Press Herald in Maine.

And then word came at the beginning of last week that a group of very rich, very influential Philadelphia businessmen — including George E. Norcross III, a Democratic power broker in Southern New Jersey, and Lewis Katz, the parking magnate — bought the Philadelphia Media Network, which owns The Inquirer, The Daily News and Philly.com.

via NY Times

What does this mean?

If you pull back a few thousand feet, you can see newspapers coming full circle. Before World War II, newspapers were mostly owned by political and business interests who used them to push an agenda.

People like William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick wielded their newspapers as cudgels to get their way. It was only when newspapers began making all kinds of money in the postwar era that they were professionalized and infused with editorial standards.

“We are going back to a form of ownership that dominated in an earlier era,” said Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper and technology consultant. “As newspapers become less impressive businesses, people are going to buy them as trophies or bully pulpits or some other form of personal expression.”

“People just have to be aware that other agendas exist”

Aaron Sorkin releases trailer for his new show – The Newsroom

He became a giant of television for creating The West Wing, then the toast of Hollywood for The Social Network…now Aaron Sorkin, is set to launch one of the most eagerly anticipated media events of the season.

The Newsroom, which begins on the cable channel HBO on 24 June.

A trailer has been released online, and set television critics raving. It featured the show’s star, a news anchor called Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, having an apparent meltdown on a chatshow.

But just in case anyone is thinking that liberal darling Sorkin is going only for the Democratic half of America, the clip contains a shocking revelation. “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure, not gay marriage,” McAvoy growls. Not that this has appeased many on the Republican right, where there has been rapid condemnation of McAvoy as an unlikely and unpatriotic televised version of an American conservative.

The Newsroom, like The Social Network, will reveal a secret story behind the world of modern media. But this time Sorkin is setting the drama in the old-tech world of a television news studio.

“It looks set to examine the process of how something is made. That’s what Sorkin is good at,” said Caryn James.

via Guardian

Netflix goes to Washington D.C. – forms PAC

In yet another move to boost its Washington profile, Netflix has formed a political action committee (PAC), new federal records indicate.

Called FLIXPAC, the committee may now make contributions donations directly to federal candidates — up to $5,000 per election.

And it provides Netflix with another political tool with which to aggressively press a pro-intellectual property, anti-video piracy agenda — an effort it began in earnest in 2010, when the company began heavily investing in federal lobbying efforts.

In 2009, for example, Netflix spent just $20,000 on federal lobbying, congressional records show. But that figure grew to $130,000 in 2010 and $500,000 in 2011.

via Politico

 

// Photo via Mr. Thomas

The Army’s secret Arctic underground nuclear base in Greenland

No, this picture doesn’t show a black and white image of the rebel base on the ice planet Hoth. It’s part of a semi-secret, nuclear-powered U.S. Army base that was built under the Greenland ice cap only 800 miles from the North Pole. The base was officially built to conduct scientific research but the real reason was apparently to test out the feasibility of burying nuclear missiles below the ice under an effort known as Project Iceworm.

Remember, Greenland is way closer to Russia than the ICBM fields located in the continental U.S. Rumor has it that the Danish government had no idea that the U.S. was considering installing nuclear missiles on Greenland.

The base was massive, described by some as an underground city, and consisted of 21 steel-arch covered trenches; the longest of which was 1,100-feet long, 26-feet wide and 26-feet high. These tunnels contained numerous prefabricated buildings that were up to 76-feet long. The base was powered by a portable PM-2A nuclear reactor that produced two megawatts of power for the facility.

“The camp was staffed year round, with population peaking at nearly 200 over the summer months.”

via Defense Tech

The base makes sense if you look at maps with the Arctic Circle at the center, Russia is a direct shot over the ice.

 

// Thx to Dave Schroeder

Ever been RickRoll’d by telegram?

In what was quite certainly one of yesterday’s more complicated (sophisticated?) April Fool’s gags, the folks at Twilio rolled out an actual API… for telegrams. Built in the same spirit as their drop-in telephony services, the Telegram API lets any third-party developer add hand-delivered, TaskRabbit-powered telegram functionality to their applications. I was curious as to whether or not the telegrams really got sent, and the Twilio-team found the perfect way to prove it: old-timey Rick Astley, hand delivered.

And I quote:

Never Shall I Cause You Duress. Never Shall I Say Good Day. Stop.
Never Shall I Say A Falsehood And Wound You. Stop.

via Pando Daily

San Diego – becoming the country’s biotechnology corridor

It’s interesting how San Diego is positioning itself as the country’s greatest biotech corridor:

San Diego is in the midst of yet another big building boom…which involves some of the city’s biggest interconnected industries — science, medicine, biotechnology and engineering.

At least nine major structures are nearing completion, under way, or soon to start. The projects will cost at least $785 million to build, and will provide the region with about 1.1 million square feet of research, office, manufacturing and conference space.

“We went through a long period of consolidation (in biotech), but now the vacant space is pretty much filling up,” said Joseph Panetta, president of Biocom, an industry trade group. “We’re beginning to see an investment in facilities, and a willingness to growth these industries.”

The focus of each building:

  • Biopharmaceuticals
  • Innovative therapeutics
  • Biomedical research
  • Genomic research
  • Structural and materials engineering
  • Clinical and translational research
  • Planetarium
  • Ocean research
  • Marine ecosystem sensing

More details at UT San Diego

Do you enjoy watching TV on the internet?

I have always found it difficult to watch videos on YouTube. Somehow my body is ok with spending hours on the couch, but a few minutes on YouTube pushes me to insanity.

I think this has something to do with the Muppet Babies and Saturday morning cartoons. Which makes me wonder if the younger, internet-generations have this problem.

Maybe it’s just a conditioning thing. Having spent so many decades on the couch we just aren’t used to internet TV.

Though, some numbers from a popular smartphone app, Read It Later, show that video on the internet is booming:

In the past year alone, video saves using Read It Later have grown by 138 percent, and YouTube is now the No. 1 most-saved domain in all of Read It Later.

We’re also seeing new evidence that our app is helping people consume longer video than what’s been traditionally embraced on the web: In an analysis of Read It Later’s top 1,000 saved videos, the median length was nearly 30 minutes.

Of course, with 68 percent of videos saved under 5 minutes, short-form still rules…users love to save everything from music videos to animation, movie trailers, news clips and more.

News, movies, and music videos…sounds a lot like what TV was like in the good-old days (the 1980s).

Photo – the most volcanic body in our solar system – Jupiter’s moon Io

How big is Jupiter’s moon Io?

The most volcanic body in the Solar System, Io (usually pronounced “EYE-oh”) is 3,600 kilometers in diameter, about the size of planet Earth’s Moon.

Gliding past Jupiter at the turn of the millennium, the Cassini spacecraft captured this awe inspiring view of active Io with the largest gas giant as a backdrop, offering a stunning demonstration of the ruling planet’s relative size.

Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter. That puts Io nearly 350,000 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops, roughly equivalent to the distance between Earth and Moon.

The Cassini spacecraft itself was about 10 million kilometers from Jupiter when recording the image data.

via NASA

Google Maps adds real-time traffic to driving directions

Google Maps now includes the ability to see the estimated time of your trip, based on real-time traffic conditions. The data will show up when you search for directions, and Google Maps will show how long several different routes will take with no traffic, as well as the estimated amount of time it will take based on the current traffic.

“In areas where the information is available, this new and improved feature evaluates current traffic conditions and is constantly being refreshed to provide you with the most accurate, up-to-date estimate possible,” Szabolcs Payrits, software engineer for Google Maps.

Users might remember that Google Maps used to show estimates of trip times based on traffic. But that information was based on historic traffic data, and didn’t always reflect real-time traffic conditions.

via PC Mag (more details and link to official Google Maps article)