The Saints win, and unless you are from Indianapolis, it was hard to cheer against them. These are completely rehashed story lines, but it’s a brief, Monday Motivation, courtesy of Saints Head Coach, Sean Payton.
Two things he proved last night:
1) Play to Win. I’ll avoid going Nate Silver on everyone, but the 538 Genius/Sabremetrician is completely right. From a net point standard, the choice to go on 4th and 1 with the 2nd Quarter running down, mathematically, was always the right call.
2) Take a Chance. Going big has never been a trait of Super Bowl teams. Once the Saints got the momentum, they made sure to ride on house money and kept taking chances. From the minute they had won the coin toss, Payton had to have been thinking that the onside would be a way to keep the ball away from Manning…and it worked.
Good things happen when you work hard and aim high.
One theory the White House is testing is that people are beginning to treat their news like they treat their iPod – they consume it on demand, in segments. If people weren’t able to watch [the State of the Union] at 9 o’clock on Wednesday night, they can watch it on YouTube whenever they want. Or if they don’t have an hour to watch it, we have cut it up into the section on jobs, the section on energy, the section on health care, and then you can just watch that part. And we’re tracking it to get a sense of how quickly we’re moving to on-demand media consumption.
Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director, in a video interview with Politico as part of the “Inside Obama’s Washington” series. (h/t Mike Allen)
I took a cheap shot in my most recent Mediaite column at the Soul-Patched Speed Skater, and I don’t know if he really deserved it. In order to make up for that, I present the following comedy presentation of some of my old classmates at Boston College.
The two-part series, “On Thin Ice: The Legend of Apollo Anton Ohno.” Enjoy.
My newest column is up over at Mediaite. The topic this time? How NBC could have seen that $250 million Olympic loss coming. Here’s a quick excerpt:
[NBC Sports head Dick] Ebersol may hope that people have blocked out the downturn in 2006 thanks to the Olympic success in 2008 – but that credit should go to Michael Phelps and Michael Phelps’s Abs. The Summer Olympics have negligible competition when lined up near the February TV landscape, and there was also some really convenient scheduling: swimming events held in the morning in Beijing were live in American primetime, and brand name celebrities were plentiful through Phelps, the stars of the Men’s Basketball team, and even non-American studs like Usain Bolt. Ebersol hit the jackpot. Now? He’s resting his laurels on Apollo Anton Ohno, who’s about as hip as a Roots beret and a red-headed snowboarder who is more a poster child for extreme sports than Olympic gravitas.
The full post is here. Looking forward to some good comments on this one!
“We told the people we’re not going to be involved anymore because there’s such financial losses associated with those TV contracts.”
Dick Ebersol, September 2003, on why NBC was shifting their sports investments away from programming from the National Football League and Major League Baseball. Reports earlier this week indicate that NBC is set to lose close to $250 million. Look for a longer column on this in the next few days…
I’m no fan of paywalls, as most of my colleagues know. Thanks to a fantastic new feature from the Nieman Journalism Lab, you can see just how “useful” they are:
Unfortunately, no one knows for sure whether it will. It’s all estimates, assumption, and guesswork — even if it’s relatively well informed, carefully researched guesswork. We just don’t know how readers and advertisers will react.
But now, with the debut of Paywall!, our revenue game, all that guesswork can be your guesswork. It allows you to explore the situation at the Times or at any other news site.
Head over to Nieman’s site to toy with its feature.
Just a brief shoutout to the community at Crisis Commons, with whom I spent a good part of my weekend working to offer talents of geekery to relief efforts on the ground in Haiti.
You can read much more about what a Crisis Camp is – as we jokingly called it, a “Geeks without Borders” – and how 13 cities around the world banded their tech powers together to help Haiti in my special contribution to WeLoveDC.
Any and all can contribute their talent and time in upcoming Camps. More details at CrisisCommons.org.
…to link.
I’m trying to clear out my personal cache of things I’ve been saving during this hectic week, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t give some air space to the Right2Link campaign.
It’s an interesting question of fair use, information sharing and more. Basically, why shouldn’t bloggers and aggregators be able to compile and point people in the direction of news. As indicated in the mission of the organization, “All should be free to create, use and circulate links — they are the signposts to content on the web.” The group goes on to explain its belief that you can own the shop, but you can’t own the ways that people choose to get people there.
Stemming out of the recent block placed on a news aggregator – U.K.-based NewsNow – by News Corp’s Times Online, the question of free access to linking is certainly interesting. Going into the weekend, the topic of the link economy is certainly not the most exciting Friday post. Still, it speaks to an essential part of how online media works. The aggregator wasn’t re-purposing content, just sharing it from the source.
If information needs to remained chained, why is it even on a worldwide network to begin with? More importantly, if producers start blocking access site-by-site, does it start to make some more equal than others?
Check out this video from the movement’s leader, Struan Bartlett of NewsNow (clearly he has a horse in the race, but I digress; he still makes an excellent point):
As noted by WebProNews, Bartlett has some good folks on board with the idea, mainly What Would Google Do? author and Superblogger Jeff Jarvis:
“Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link),” says Jarvis. “The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.”
Some fun food for thought going into the weekend.
Someone might want to double check to see if they are still planning on releasing these bad boys on February 15th…you know, a full three weeks after Conan’s last show.
Emphasis added on two fantastic portions here.
First, we may need a better definition of availability for anything involving Mr. O’Brien these days. By my understanding on the final agreement, Conan’s availability is September, not February.
Second, and I hope this line lives forever, the description: “Show some love for the dominant late-night host and his new gig with the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”
UPDATE 1:24 p.m.: Thanks to the excellent photo work of Mediaite’s editor, Rachel Sklar, we get a few fun images from inside the 30 Rock store. Where will all that great (on discount tables and apparently flying off the shelves, according to Rachel) Conan gear go! Also, check out the contrast with the Leno display in the store.
Conan O'Brien apparel at 30 Rock (photo credit Rachel Sklar)
Jay Leno Show Display at 30 Rock (photo credit Rachel Sklar)
I have to put this on the shelf now and find a new topic, so I’m enacting a self-imposed Conan ban (at least on the blog, not on Twitter).
From Thomas Paine to Dan Rather, we've been trying to figure out where media - as an important institution - fits in as the essential element of democracy. But how does it survive in the new economy and age of digital information? That's what this blog aims to find out.
