Tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon, Stu Shostak's doing a special live edition of Stu's Show on his channel, Shokus Internet Radio. It airs live at 4 PM West Coast time (7 PM Eastern) for two hours. This is not a podcast. You have to tune in live when it's on, which you can do by going to that website and clicking as instructed. Then you listen right through your computer speakers.
The topic is the Conan O'Brien/Jay Leno situation and I will be one of three panelists, along with Wesley Hyatt and Steve Beverly, discussing who did what to whom and made which mistakes. Oughta be a lively discussion.
This episode may not rerun. It's only currently scheduled as one-time event. So if you miss it, you can't hear it the next day. Don't miss it.
According to this poll, 71% of Americans do not want Sarah Palin to run for president. 56% of Republicans say that, 88% of Democrats say that and 65% of Independents say that.
It doesn't say what percentage of Democrats do want her to run but presumably some do. So my question is what percentage of those folks who do want her to run think she'd make a good president and what percentage think her candidacy would destroy the Republican party? And I'm also curious about how many of those 56% of Republicans think she'd be good in the job but think the campaign would just be too divisive and painful.
Sez here that The New York Times is about to go "pay," forcing those of us who want to read it to cough up some sort of fee. There's no word yet on how much that might be and exactly what you'll get for it so I don't know if I'll be paying. But I do know I won't be linking. The Times has one of the busiest websites on the 'net and reportedly makes some serious money on the advertising it sells because of that. It's because they're The New York Bloody Times and because so many other sites link to pieces there.
But even if I'm a subscriber, you all won't be...so there's no point in me linking you to a great piece on their site. I know sometimes on some webpage, I'll see a link to what looks like a piece I'd like to read and I'll click and discover the article in question is behind a subscription firewall and is therefore inaccesible to me. That's annoying. I'm not going to join any site, no matter how low the fee, to read one article. And I know readers of this site feel the same way because when I've accidentally linked to a piece behind a firewall, I hear from you.
The Times obviously knows that their traffic will drop when they start charging. Presumably, they've estimated that the revenue they'll lose from what it does to their ad rates will be more than offset by the loot they'll make from subscriptions...and maybe it will. But I'll bet they've underestimated how much traffic they'll lose.
I should also note that for a time, they tried charging for access to their opinion section and columnists. I subscribed to that for, as I recall, a year. During that time, I don't think there was a single article that I read there via my subscription that I couldn't find for free on some blog. If I wanted to read Frank Rich's column, I sometimes didn't even bother to hit the N.Y. Times site. I'd just Google "Frank Rich" and easily find five other places it had been re-posted in full. They dropped the subscription deal before it became time for me to renew. In fact, I think I even got some sort of partial, pro-rated rebate on the fee I'd paid. But the point is that if I'd had to renew, I probably wouldn't have. I absolutely believe that content providers have a right to charge if it's what they want to do, and I pay for many sites I enjoy. In this case though, I just felt kinda dumb that I paid for something that was so readily available for free.
My friend Dawna Kaufmann, who's been mentioned here in the past, is a triple-threat. She's a comedy writer. She's an investigative reporter. And she's a radio talk show host. Any one of those three makes her a force to be reckoned with. Taken together...well, I'm scared of her so you probably should be, too.
Tonight, she's hosting the call-in show on KABC Talk Radio, which is at 790 AM here in the soggy city of Los Angeles. She's on from 6:30 PM until 10 PM and around the 7:00 hour, she'll be having an in-depth discussion of the whole Conan/Jay roller derby. Her main guest for that discussion will be me.
If you aren't in or around L.A., you can listen online at www.kabc.com. They don't seem to archive these shows so you've gotta listen live. (Well actually, you don't have to listen at all. But if you want to hear it, you have to listen live.)
Predicting whether Conan O'Brien will wind up on Fox is a tough call since we seem to lack a vital piece of info.
Years ago, after the debacle that was The Chevy Chase Show, Fox turned the 11 PM timeslot back to its affiliates. The network doesn't program that hour and the local stations have filled it with their own shows — local news in many cases. Does Fox have the right to make them yank that programming (some of which is probably quite profitable for them since popular network programming feeds into it) and put on something like a Conan O'Brien show?
I dunno and you probably don't, either. I've been reading news reports and seeing all sorts of different answers — different enough that I don't trust any of them. Some claim that Fox would have to persuade all or most of its affiliates to yield the time for Conan. As much as I like Mr. O'Brien, he doesn't have a great track record lately, ratings-wise. On the old Late Night show, he was getting beaten by Craig Ferguson the last few months, even with Jay's Tonight Show delivering a strong lead-in. Conan's Tonight Show hasn't done that well unless he was about to be fired from it. That might make things difficult, clearance-wise.
On the other hand, some articles say Fox retains the right with its affiliates to just program an 11 PM show and force them to carry it. That would make things a lot easier.
So which is it? I guess we'll find out in the next few days. (It also might be some halfway-situation; i.e., the network can clear some markets and not others...)
Ezra Klein crunches some numbers on what the Health Care Reform bill will do and cost. Bottom line: He sez it won't cost as much as Republicans claim...and might not do as much as Democrats claim. That sounds about right for most things in Washington these days.
Since we're on the topic of late night TV here, let's look at a capsule version of Mr. Carson's last show. The date was May 22, 1992...and pay attention to what Johnny says at the end. A lot of people think that when he left, he took a vow not to perform again on television. That came later. When he left, he said he was going to look for something else to do on TV...
E. J. Dionne on the problems Democrats have being more or less in power during hard times. My Conservative friend Roger thinks that if Obama doesn't have the economy solid by Memorial Day, he oughta do the honorable thing and turn the White House over to Dick Cheney.
January 17, 2010
