Tag: nyt

NYT on data brokers

Sift knew, for example, that I’d used my iPhone to order chicken tikka masala, vegetable samosas and garlic naan on a Saturday night in April 3 years ago. It knew I used my Apple laptop to sign into Coinbase in January 2017 to change my password. Sift knew about a nightmare Thanksgiving I had in California’s wine country, as captured in my messages to the Airbnb host of a rental called “Cloud 9.”

Privacy Fundamentalism

a takedown of (one of the many) nonsense NYT articles on privacy.

the privacy debate needs to be reset around these 3 assumptions:

  1. Accept that privacy online entails trade-offs; the corollary is that an absolutist approach to privacy is a surefire way to get policy wrong.
  2. Keep in mind that the widespread creation and spread of data is inherent to computers and the Internet, and that these qualities have positive as well as negative implications; be wary of what good ideas and positive outcomes are extinguished in the pursuit to stomp out the negative ones.
  3. Focus policy on the physical and digital divide. Our behavior online is one thing: we both benefit from the spread of data and should in turn be more wary of those implications. Making what is offline online is quite another.

Too many shows

Spending on original programming is starting to slow down, or even reverse. “The cable networks have had a decent pile of cash that’s absolutely now tapped out,. The historic growth that has happened over the last 10 years in cable, whether it’s basic or premium, has been pretty fantastic. [But] we all know that has slowed, plateaued, and, in some cases, declined.” Even Netflix may not be immune: There are already some signs — at least on a micro level — that it’s starting to tighten its purse strings after 5 years of expansion. “For sure, they [have] been the big spender. But we’re having conversations now where Netflix is saying, ‘Wow, we really love that show. It feels too expensive.’ I hadn’t previously had that conversation before with Netflix.”

It appears netflix et al are ordering so many shows that talent is scarce, pricing are stratospheric etc.
2019-07-11: Typical NYT hand-wringing and whining, but has some interesting background.

One big question is what all this means for us, at home, fishing in the cushions for our remotes: If even a network as seemingly sacred as HBO can be pressured by corporate bosses to crank out more shows in order to better compete with smartphones, what new era are we entering?

2022-02-08: Tyler Cowen on the streaming glut

Netflix’s market share has been declining steadily, and has now fallen below 50%. One estimate claims that the company’s share of consumers fell more than 30% in a single year. Netflix’s recent quarterly report was a disaster, spurring a share sell-off. You could easily conclude that “Netflix’s long awaited funeral is finally here”—as Bloomberg hinted in its blunt assessment of the results.

Of course the company is still worth quite a bit, so my own view is no more or no less optimistic than what the market indicates.  Still, it is worth asking what the equilibrium here looks like.  There is also AppleTV, Disney, Showtime, HBOMax, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and more. I don’t think it quite works to argue that we all end up subscribing to all of them, so where are matters headed?  I see a few options:

1. Netflix and its competitors keep on producing new shows until all the rents are exhausted and those companies simply earn the going rate of return on capital, with possible ongoing rents on long standing properties of real value (e.g., older Disney content). These scenarios could involve either additional entry, or more (and better?) shows from the incumbent producers.

2. Due to economies of scale, one or two of those companies will produce the best shows and buy up the best content. We end up with a monopoly or duopoly in the TV streaming market, noting there still would be vigorous competition from other media sources.

3. The companies are allowed to collude in some manner. One option is they form a consortium where you get “all access” for a common fee, divvied out in proper proportion. Would the antitrust authorities allow this? Or might the mere potential for antitrust intervention makes this a collusive solution but one without a strict monopolizing, profit-maximizing price?

4. The companies are allowed to collude in a more partial and less obvious manner. Rather than a complete consortium, some of the smaller companies will evolve into “feeder” services for one or two of the larger companies. Those smaller companies will rely increasingly more on the feeder contracts and increasingly less on subscription revenue. This perhaps resembles the duopoly solution analytically, though a head count would show more than 2 firms in the market.

It seems to me that only the first scenario is very bad for Netflix. It seems that along all of these paths short-run rent exhaustion is going on, and that short-run rent exhaustion is costly for Netflix. They keep on having to pump out “stuff” to keep viewer attention. It doesn’t matter that new shows are cheap, because as long as the market profits are there the “bar” for retaining customers will continue to grow.  Very few of their shows are geared to produce long-term customer loyalty toward that show – in contrast, people are still talking about Columbo!

Putting the law aside, which economic factors determine which solution will hold? My intuition is that there are marketing economies of scale, but production diseconomies of scale, as the media companies grow too large and sclerotic. So maybe that militates in favor of scenario #4?  That to me also suggests an “at least OK” future for Netflix. The company would continue its investments and marketing and an easy to use website, while increasingly going elsewhere for superior content.

Cop self-own

Officer Ettienne was being held to the words that he wrote in cyberspace. Besides the “devious” mood setting, the jurors learned that a few weeks before the trial, the officer posted this status on his Facebook page: “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure.”

hello, nyt? it is 2009. you are writing an article about something that happened online, yet you don’t link to it?

Playgrounds for Data

Mainstream media is often chided for not being hip with the latest in design technology. The New York Times, having started in 1851, is about as mainstream as you can get. Yet, in my opinion, they are a leader in creating interactive modules to accompany their news stories, often yielding in an impressive and fun experience.

indeed, the nyt is often breaking some new ground. good for them.

Against NYT

The Times’ list is completely fictional. Made up. Divorced from reality. The stated goal of the list is to find (and promote) books that Times editors want people to read, not books that are actually selling a lot. So, they make up ‘rules’ to appear consistent. When Harry Potter was selling like crazy, they invented a new list so that they could take JK Rowling’s books off the real list. When diet and other books started selling a lot, they made up a new ghetto (miscellaneous) for those books. When books started selling in places like Walmart (thus driving the snootiness factor down) the Times penalized sales in chain outlets. And books like the Bible are banished because they’re not current enough.

Carefully curated so as not to have dreck like harry potter or diet books on it.
2013-02-14: Aww, how inconvenient. NYT makes up story, gets owned by pervasive data logging in the car.

After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives. While the vast majority of journalists are honest, some believe the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story. In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance. The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.

2013-09-12: NYT got trolled by Putin. Syria op-ed by Putin, publication date 9/11. Masterful pr.

RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

2014-03-19: NYT fails at economics. The rag of record apparently slept through economics class.

most states have limits on direct sales by auto manufacturers. These rules are meant to ensure competition, so that buyers can shop around for discounts from independent dealers, and to protect car dealers from being undercut by automakers.

2016-03-21: NYT middlebrows Terrrrists

To summarize, if you see something on someone’s computer screen that fits the description below, the person with the computer could be an ISIS terrorist!
It looks like “a line of gibberish across the screen.”
It’s “a bunch of lines, like lines of code.”
There’s “no image.”
There’s “no Internet.”

2020-06-26: nyt delenda est

This morning, like many others, I woke up to the terrible news that Scott Alexander—the man I call “the greatest Scott A. of the Internet”—has deleted SlateStarCodex in its entirety. The reason, Scott explains, is that the New York Times was planning to run an article about SSC. Even though the article was going to be positive, NYT decided that by policy, it would need to include Scott’s real surname (Alexander is his middle name). Scott felt that revealing his name to the world would endanger himself and his psychiatry patients. Taking down his entire blog was the only recourse that he saw

2021-02-21: NYT is middlebrow. The reason the NYT is so smug, and yet also consistently wrong about everything, is because it is middlebrow.

The NYT has 7.5M subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”

Yes, the NYT story is awful in all the ways that are currently being discussed by its critics, but the fundamental problem is inescapable. Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. This case is no different. It’s just how things work.

2022-10-24: NYT pretends to do corrections, but only on things that do not matter.

if you’re willing to correct the spelling of 1 vowel in somebody’s middle name or the location of a statue of a rambunctious horse, you should be willing to correct the erroneous statement, “Researchers find that female-named hurricanes kill 2x as many people as similar male-named hurricanes because some people underestimate them,” or various erroneous economic and education statistics.

For Brooks or Kristof to admit to a non-trivial error, as you suggest they do, would be for their admissions to immediately become high-profile fodder for their critics. And not just then, but forever more — a link to the admission, a quote of it, will be repeated at any occasion when a club to use against their credibility is wanted. But more to the point, such a club will work. It will work because people strongly recall that someone was proven wrong about something and especially they recall when someone admitted to it and, finally, they weight that information very heavily when evaluating credibility.