July 30, 2003

The Times’ new plan to restore its credibility, is to print articles critical of itself

Times to Name ‘Public Editor’ to Be Readers’ Representative

Seeking to mend the damage to the credibility and staff morale of The New York Times following a reporter’s extensive fabrications, the newspaper’s new executive editor today accepted the major recommendations of an internal committee, including the appointment of a “public editor” to serve as a representative for readers.

Acting on his first day as executive editor, Bill Keller wrote in a memorandum to the staff that he would soon hire a public editor, or ombudsman, who would “have license to write about issues of our coverage, and to have those independent, uncensored commentaries published in our pages.”

The easy critique of this is that the public editor may be unlikely to be highly critical of the people who sign his checks. But the point I want to make is that even if he or she slams the Times like crazy, it’s not the way to go.

Just as when Liberals go after Bush with disregard for the facts, now the Times is hiring an employee whose job it is to rip on the Times, regardless of the facts. What if the Times doesn’t need any attacking that week? What if they did everything right? That’s irrelevant – the editor’s job is to attack anyway. That’s what he’s being paid for, and he darn well better do it.

The erroneous journalistic and Liberal notion that they make a contribution by slamming whatever people do—is now being directed against the journalists and Liberals themselves.

The last thing I want to read is a lot of self-critical Times articles. The way to help is by helping, not attacking. Improve things and make everybody at the Times look good. That’s what I’d like to see.

Update: This is brilliant.

iTunes Music Store for Windows Due This Year

Peter Lowe , Apple’s Director of Marketing for Applications and Services, http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_07_29.shtml#002622”>said:

Apple for Windows is on track to launch by the end of this year…Usage rules for Windows version of iTunes: certainly it is our intention to have the broad music rights…

The end of the album? Perhaps not:

Out of all our iTunes sales, 46 percent has been sold as albums..the disintegration of the album has not happened, contrary to what people are saying…

Apple’s thoughts on why people will pay to buy music:

The way to go after illegal file sharing services is to compete with them…go after their weaknesses. The reason why people used these services is instant gratification: for most of the people who use file sharing, it is more about flexibility and not about free…we aim to take advantages of weaknesses of illegal sharing services: unreliable encoding; bad connection; no previews; wrong music; no album cover art; and at the end of the day, it is stealing.

Check out what Charles Haddad of Business Week says about iTunes users:

Fans of iTunes represent an unstoppable force. Who wants to keep all those CDs if you can carry around 1,000 songs on an iPod and easily expand that library through the Internet? Not many I suspect. Nor is this growing army of Internet-savvy users going to stop at music. Not too far in the future an iVideo and perhaps an iTome, for downloading literature and audiobooks, respectively, will be available.

From Rolling Stone magazine:

The recent success of Apple’s iTunes Music Store may be the best news the industry has had lately. ... “iTunes has shown that there is a real business potential for selling downloads,” says a source at Warner Bros. “It has been encouraging from a symbolic standpoint even more than a financial standpoint.” Amazon.com and other online retailers now plan to launch their own download programs.