Blogged on my Handspring on Friday night:

I'm sitting in the historic Senator Theater here in Baltimore, with my sons waiting for the start of Episode II. Kevin & Jonah are engaged in a vigorous debate with a kid in the row in front of us over the relative merits of Super Smash Brothers on Nintendo 64 and Super Smash Brothers Melee on GameCube, as well as the quality of the stories of the N64 “Zelda” games.
Natalie Portman in something as close to the slave girl outfit Carrie Fisher had to wear for “Return of the Jedi” as possible.

Given that George Lucas is making these movies as wholesome as possible for the preteen toy-demanding set (aside from all the computer-generated violence crammed into them), it's doubtful that they'll ever see something like that again, or anything more passionate than light kissing and low-grade sexual tension in the final installment.

But my kids don't care. My 8-year old closed his eyes through the few kissing scenes. And my 11-year old was more concerned about the fate of Jango Fett, the bounty hunter–whom he considered the most interesting character in the movie. (Frankly, I did too, and found myself rooting for him against Ewan McGregor's Obi-wan).

So the movie works for its real intended audience–kids who can't get into a PG-13 movie on their own. It's the most expensive sci-fi serial adventure series of all time, 40 years after the genre's prime. Like Lucas says, “It's just a movie.” If you want some real exploration of psychology, go see a Sam Raimi movie–like

The url for the href="http://www.theneteconomy.com/article/0,3658,s=902&a=27312,00.asp">Net
Economy self-sendoff has changed, as has the title — rather than
“Belly Up for the Net Economy”, it's now “It's Goodbye for the Net
Economy”…though the title bar for the page still has the original
headline.

explore this

I'm so damn sick of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser for Mac OS
X. It crashes at least four times a day. So I've downloaded the beta
of Opera for Mac OS X. Some
minor issues–cascading stylesheets are broken, so the template graphics
don't show up on my Radio blog href="http://www.dendro.com/dotcommunist/opera.JPG">interface . But it's faster–and for a beta, it seems much more stable than the
crap Microsoft ships. I'd use href="http://www.netscape.com/">Netscape's browser (I have it loaded
on my laptop), but it's even slower than IE and only somewhat more
stable in its current shipping version. (Not to mention it's AOL
property).

More on the href="http://www.theneteconomy.com/article/0,3658,s">closure of The
Net Economy, on the magazine's site, from Dennis Mendyck, the
magazine's editor. He pulls no punches.

Ziff is shutting down The Net Economy today, after forming a relationship with Advanstar Communications. The assets of Net Economy will be combined with the Advanstar publication America's Network. Advanstar has 92 business publications, and 79 tradeshows.

Apparently tradeshows are part of the reason for the deal; Ziff doesn't have any events to speak of. But events (at least tech events) aren't doing terribly well these days either…

Net Economy was a relatively new pub, targeted at the xSP segment –businesses that provided Internet-based and telephony-based services. It was a great magazine. Unfortunately, the market it served cratered shortly after the book launched.

Ed Cone reflects on the contrast between the high times (all of 2 years ago) and the low ones (which I guess would be now).

The note Ziff CEO Bob Callahan sent out about the deal was as upbeat as messages like this can be, talking about the benefits of the deal to Ziff. He also took time to hammer an unnamed competitor for spreading lies about the future of other Ziff pubs.

I've been through this cycle before; the ads are hard to come by, so salesmen will say anything they think anyone will believe (and some things they just hope they'll believe). There's always a grain of truth in the best lies.

The question is, at what point do the salesmen who run publishing companies start talking to editors like they're customers?

This happened at my last company. A magazine I was running was a new launch, and I was reassured over and over by my boss (a salesman, I should add) that the pub was going to be given time to take off, that it was strategic to the future direction of the company, yadda yadda yadda. I knew the magazine's original model was flawed (though it was tough to sell that up the chain, because the company president's significant other did the market research behind it), and I was close to fixing it I was the last person to find out the magazine was being shut down.
The problem these days for word jockeys like me is that even if you think you're getting more sales pitch than truth from above, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. I'm inclined to give my bosses the benefit of the doubt, but even if I didn't , my options would be limited–I certainly don't see me monetizing my blog anytime soon.

But I'm told Baseline is doing well, so I try not to worry too much about the background noise of debt restructuring and closing publications. Happy Happy, Joy Joy.

By the way, for those interested in some low-tech silicon technology, I throw to suit.

The merger of Internet-service-for-the-masses purveyor America Online and print/television/film media for the masses purveyor TimeWarner has, thus far, been a textbook M&A failure. The reason is simple–the company's been doubly slammed by the advertising drought over the last year because of its (a)attempt at mass appeal and (b)a bloated, corpulent heirarchy that, like a dieter being driven by hormones, just can't deal with this lean advertising market.

The ironic thing is that the cycles of capitalism may prevent what free speech advocates fear–the gobbling up of all media by giant conglomerates in search of synergy. The most profitable broadcast company right now is NBC, which -isn't- owned by a media conglomerate (though it is owned by GE). That's because it doesn't go after the broadest audiences with its programming, (as Joe Flint noted in his Wall Street Journal article this week).

Newsweek is another example–it's gaining on Time in revenue, and uses its smaller circulation as a weapon against the red-bordered big book of mediocrity. Online synergy? It hooked up with MSNBC.

Disney has similar problems to AOL-TImeWarner; its ABC is a money pit; it sucks as a whole, and Disney's heavy corporate hand has destroyed ABC's credibility as an independent media outlet (just look at the vacillations over Nightline). But it pulls its chestnuts out of the fire with its movies (as much as I hate Disney personally, I'm definitely going to see Lilo & Stitch” this summer). What's Warner got going for it? Scooby Doo?

You'd think AOL would bring in steady revenue with subscription fees, at least–right? Well, considering how much churn the company generates with all those free hours it gives out on all those CDs it sends out (I use mine for coasters), it probably spends most of what it makes on the subscribers it keeps on marketing costs. And while the service is still popular, it's most popular with people who don't have broadband–and thus with people not in the most profitable online demographic. The people who do use AOL on broadband do it mostly because they have been forced to, or they just don't know any better. The most successful AOL broadband service is instant messaging– which is free to users and depends on advertising for revenue (or at least chargebacks to the AOL-TimeWarner units that advertise on it).

Plus, AOL sucks. Thus the churn.

So there is some hope out there for small media. The lessons of the marketplace are pretty clear–find something you're good at and an audience you can easily define, and you will survive (and probably make money). Go for the lowest common denominator, and prepare to be a loss leader.