The Grey Lady, as it’s called, might possibly be in the winter of its lifetime. `According to Henry Blodgett’s calculations, the New York Times is burning cash much quicker than it’s making it, and this year might end up defaulting on their loans.  Their cash reserves sit at $46 million, and their gross income year over year is down by almost half. Additionally, according to SAI, the NY is “funding operations by rolling over short-term loans–the kind that banks worldwide are cancelling or making prohibitively expensive to save their own skins

Even though New Media barkers like myself have been predicting the downfall of Heritage Media for some time now, the news is no doubt going to be shocking to the public at large.  

Not long ago, back in July or so, Duncan Riley wrote over at the Inquisitr that of all the failing Heritage Media formats, he saw the TV format hitting the crapper first. He wrote with a number of compelling reasons that I didn’t necessarily see as invalid, but after considering all the various trends felt the conclusion was in slight need of adjustment:

For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.

Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.

Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.

I hafta say, when I was making the prognostication, I wasn’t thinking specifically of the New York Times. After all, they’ve made significant investments into technology, have recently made themselves a real presence and participant in the blogosphere.

The problem remains, though, that they have a very top-heavy editorial structure, and need to make strategic cutbacks that will allow them to maintain the same editorial output without so much overhead. We talked about this on one of the last Mashable Conversations episodes that Sean and I put out.

As we said in that episode: 

This is a year in which newsprint looks far more likely to collapse than we’ve ever seen before. Meanwhile, top-tier blogs continue to prosper and find their niche as virtual magazines. Traditional media magazines seem to see the writing on the wall and are looking to meet New Media halfway. 

I don’t think that the New York Times is un-savable, but I think that the print edition and the print-based business model is dead. If you need proof that a transition can be made, simply look to the tons of online-only publications that well into the black. 

Clearly, the New York Times isn’t hurting for online traffic, and they’re a very monetizable brand. Very simply, they’re going to need to look at ways of producing the same type of content for less money. This likely means some segregation of the publication from it’s very top heavy corporate structure and a lot of their extraneous business units (like the Boston Red Sox) from the actual publication.

Once they’re able to re-focus on what they think their core business is (being the world’s publication of record), and doing it on time and under budget.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:New York Times’ Free Content is Paying OffThe New York Times Eliminating 100 Newsroom Jobs in ‘08New York Times Sees Sense: Paywall Comes Crashing DownNew York Times Launches TechMeme CompetitorFacebook Sponsored Pages Add Feeds: NY Times Gets it FirstTimesSelect Officially Free (And Other NYT Stuff, Too)NBC Gets Around. Tango with the Times!

The New York Times is hurting financially these days, and its online business doesn’t seem to be helping much, but at least it keeps pushing forward. One area where the NYTimes.com has put a lot of effort is in video, and it has just redesigned its video page around the new Brightcove 3 player. Previously, the NYTimes was using the FeedRoom as its main video platform. (This swap doesn’t come out of the blue. The New York Times is an investor in Brightcove).

Are you ready to have your mind blown?  I hope so.  I never thought I would live to see the day when an Old Media institution defended piracy. One has, and I intend to make a big stink about it because it’s something we should all put on our calendars and remember.

I recently re-discovered the Dallas Morning News Tech Blog a few weeks ago.  It had somehow become a buried feed in my reader, relegated to relative obscurity of my “fallback bin.” It’s mostly geo-centric tech news to Dallas, but yesterday they proffered comment on a New York Times news item about the rise of piracy of school textbooks. In the piece, amazingly, they actually condone piracy:

But what if someone really does write an incredible organic chemistry book, one that will let students learn twice as much in half the time?

That’s why I say that professors — rather than textbook publishers or authors — are the villains. They should be the gatekeepers, the ones who distinguish between expensive me-toos and truly innovative works.

But they don’t. So the whole system is a fraud. Good for the kids who are subverting it.

I’d expect to see this attitude (though a bit more toned down) in TechDirt, or possibly this verbatim in TorrentFreak, but the Dallas Morning News?  Simply astounding. 

Not that I’m complaining.  I’ve always been sympathetic towards pirates of all stripe for a number of reasons, and this is one of the better explained defenses of piracy. As they quoted from the New York Times:

More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue.

Andrew Smith at the DMN Tech Blog expounds:

The Times focuses on a basic Organic Chemistry textbook that runs 1,300 pages and costs $210 new. The publisher sells a $110 e-book version that cuts book retailers out of the loop and eliminates the possibility of used books hurting new-copy sales.

Rather than focusing on actual innovation, these publishers are making minor changes to the texts, and pricing the books even higher than they were the previous year.  Certainly the books are a necessary part of the learning process, but the media type is quite obviously all wrong.  Rather than printing a whole new run of books, simply amending a line or paragraph that reflects the latest research on the topic and recompiling the PDF, or amending updating the database from which the hypertext is pulled from.

Clearly the printing costs (which aren’t going down, by the way) are a part of the justification for the high price. If they can offer the same text book in electronic form for half the price, then there’s clearly some wiggle room there.

Piracy in the music business forced new business models to arise. Piracy in the entertainment business is forcing the film industry to adapt by making better movies (for unique formats you can’t see in your living room).

Perhaps piracy will act as a market force here and end the cycle of racketeering by the school systems and publishers.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:RCMP Says: Piracy OK (for Personal Use)Don’t Download Illegally in France AnymoreStudy Confirms: Piracy Is Better Than The Real ThingHey, I Know A Way To Get Windows XP After June 30NBC Exec Heats Up Battle Against PiracyGoogle-Funded Chinese P2P Site Xunlei Sued For Copyright InfringementPirate Bay Takes Over Anti-Piracy Domain. A Major Hack?

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)

The New York Post likes to run “blind items” — a gossip-column tradition where just enough details are given to help readers guess who’s being talked about. Here’s the latest:

WHICH wild child daughter of an Internet billionaire has major problems? The lady-loving gal has been to rehab twice and still doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

Well, we’re pretty sure the Post is talking about Courtenay Semel, daughter of Terry Semel, the Yahoo CEO. Courtenay was recently seen palling it up with Lindsay Lohan. Forget that: Here in Silicon Valley, money is the new sex, so it’s the “Internet billionaire” part that intrigues us.

Sure, Semel made a ton of money prior to Yahoo as CEO of Warner Bros. But to be an Internet billionaire, Semel would have had to made a billion dollars off Internet stocks, right? Not even close: In 2004 and 2005, while Yahoo shares were rallying, Semel sold $403 million worth of Yahoo stock. Since then, he’s made about $60 million by exercising options and selling shares. He now owns 1.6 million shares in the company, whose shares are trading at $24. Forbes doesn’t even include him on its list of billionaires. Our conclusion? When we run blind items about him, we’re going to call Semel the “non-Internet nonbillionaire.”

Source:Valleywag

New York Times tech writers are confused, or at least a little bit lazy. Over Christmas Eve they posted to the Bits blog a post titled, “Questions We Thought, But Didn’t Ask, in 2007.” Then, “A Few More Questions” And then, “More Questions.” Reading them, it’s clear that coming up with questions required no reporting, little research and maybe five minutes. Why didn’t we think of that? One very special correspondent could have actually seen his wife over Christmas. Here are their top three questions — and our helpfully provided answers.

If you know someone obsessively checks his email on his iPhone, should you be insulted when he fails to answer your email in a timely manner? — Brad Stone

For mere mortals, the answer would be “no,” but Brad, you should take offense. After all, you’re Brad “Brad to the Stone” Stone, the Timesman who outed frigging Fake Steve Jobs. Has your email correspondent heard of you?

Are we about to enter 2008: “The year of the in-flight fistfight caused when the person next to you spends four hours from San Francisco to New York talking loudly on the cell phone about his/her dating habits/pet’s grooming needs/excitement over the availability of airplane Wi-Fi?” — Matt Richtel

Yes, Matt, we’re about to enter 2008.

If the theoretical limit of a social network is about 150 people, does an online social network decline due to the sheer weight of its popularity. Or is decline still tied to too many grandpas signing on making a network un-cool? — Damon Darlin

Actually, Damon, it’s when people prone to tossing the Dunbar Number into casual conversation start signing on that a social network becomes uncool.

The SEC’s website is the new location of the New York Times’ corrections page. NetSuite stock is up 12 percent today after its $26-a-share IPO debut, a long-awaited victory for the Larry Ellison-backed software company, as the Times noted earlier this week. But it appears that the paper got several things wrong.

Normally, a prissy letter to the editor would be in order. But since the story ran while NetSuite was in a quiet period, the time prior to an IPO when a company can only communicate through the smoke signals of SEC filings, NetSuite had to issue a “free writing prospectus” instead. While some of its complaints seem like quibbles, others seem like easily checked facts, such as when CEO Zach Nelson, shown here, joined the company. As far as I can tell, Times has not yet corrected the story. When the SEC has become your newspaper’s unofficial ombudsman, you have a problem.

I just published my first in what will be a whole lot of New York Times personal technology articles for non-nerds. “A Universe of Gadget Advice” leads those of us (read: me) who can’t follow the gadgetspeak on Gizmodo through the hell — well, the heck of online last-minute gadget gift shopping. NYT techniology [sic] editor Damon Darlin turns out to be a perfectly nice guy who gets my jokes. And then edits them into English. I’ll be writing about cellphones, cameras, TVs, and any Web 2.0 stuff that survives Ted at Uncov. I’m pretty sure I’m now the first writer to simultaneously contribute to the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and Gawker Media. Look, you’ve got your creepy life goals, and I’ve got mine.

Source:Valleywag

“Once every hundred years media changes.” With those words, at 2:37 PM Eastern time yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg officially flipped Silicon Valley’s bozo bit. East Coast cynic Nick Carr has the best response:

It’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day — the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it.

Source:Valleywag

The Q&A session at the Computer History Museum last night was billed as a talk between former Apple evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and former anonymous blogger turned book shill Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs. But it quickly turned into a sordid three-way. Brad Stone, the New York Times scribe who outed Lyons as Fake Steve joined the two on stage, and what was billed as the “Confessions of Fake Steve Jobs” turned into a celebration of Apple, blogging, and Dan Lyons’s massive mancrush on the real Steve Jobs.

Fireworks, we thought, were inevitable when Lyons got on stage with Kawasaki, whom he’s savaged on his blog. Turns out the worst thing Fake Steve said about Kawasaki was that he was a motorcycle designer, something Kawasaki found amusing. Our promised fireworks turned into kiddy-safe Independence Day sparklers.

Something to know about Dan Lyons: The man is as hilarious in person as in his best blog posts. He’s quick, succinct, and dead-on with his observations. He is, as they say in Detroit, “wicked smaht.” Also, he has a huge hard-on for Steve Jobs. Like, major mancrush. Lyons describes Jobs as a “son of Zeus born to a mere mortal” and other outrageous claims, which makes it seem like he’s taking the piss out of Jobsian worshipers. Not true. Lyons really is an Apple fanboy who believes in the infallibility of His Steveness. Jobs is, to Lyons, “the most interesting person alive.”

Which seems like the most boring thing he could say. But here’s a secret for you: That awe is what makes the blog work. Lyons clearly venerates Jobs, without which his Fake Steve blog might come across as mean-spirited, not a satirical celebration.

One question kept coming up: How was Lyons treated by people who he slammed in the blog? He admitted to being worried about their reactions, but said that there have been few negative repercussions. He brought up Bike Helmet Girl, an early target for Fake Steve due to her appearance in a photo taken at a Yelp party last year. He initially ran the photo with a derisive caption. “Bikey” wrote in, a correspondence was born, and her character became a recurring figure in the blog. Lyons finally got a chance to meet her at a book signing last week, and spent a good minute in the Fake Steve character, dreamily recounting their meeting. (Lyons never revealed the lingering question about Bike Helmet Girl: Why was she wearing a bike helmet in the first place?)

I asked him about an article he wrote for Forbes, “Attack of the Blogs,” a cover story which he railed against anonymous blogging as an abhorrent practice. Has being an anonymous blogger changed his mind about such practices? He admitted that he would like to “get a do-over” and rewrite the story. He likened his attack to writing a story focusing on spam as an example that all email was bad. “Tomorrow, Valleywag will call you a hypocrite,” Kawasaki warned him.

Other Fake Steve revelations:

• Someone named “Katie Cotton” — the same name as the head of Apple PR — ordered a number of Fake Steve T-shirts from CafePress. (Brad Stone asked the real Cotton about the purchase. She declined to discuss any clothing purchases.)
• The front row was filled with a line of Apple employees, one of whom brought an OS X programming book as light reading during downtime.
• Kawasaki asked Lyons and Stone if they thought they would always be known as “Fake Steve” and “the guy who busted Fake Steve,” much like Eddie Murphy will always be known as Donkey from Shrek. Lyons and Stone’s reactions suggested they thought Kawasaki was nuts — and then started talking about how Donkey wasn’t really representative of Eddie Murphy’s career.
• Brad Stone broke the news that Lyons was Fake Steve while Lyons was on his way to a Maine vacation with his wife, a vacation he had promised would be work- and blog-free. Stone’s call to Lyons while he was en route changed all that. During their conversation, it was revealed that Lyons is the father of two-year-old twins. Stone and his wife are expecting twins soon. As their call was ending, Lyons promised Stone that he would buy two voodoo dolls of the twins and poke them at 2 a.m. random nights, to make up for Stone ruining Lyons’s vacation.

You’ll learn many things from the New York Times profile of Andy Rubin, the Google employee in charge of its secretive wireless project. That he has a retinal scanner on his front door, for example. Or that he almost struck a deal with telecom pioneer Craig McCaw before Google bought his latest startup, Android. What you won’t learn? That Rubin actually has a Googlephone coming to the market. That, of course, is because there is no Googlephone

Sad, really. Even gadget-obsessed blogs like Gizmodo has made its peace with the idea that Google’s project has gone from full-on hardware to a mere operating system. And I bet Times tech scribe John Markoff gets that Rubin’s ambitions have been scaled back. But if he sent his editors a memo, they appear to have ignored it, working Googlephone mentions into the headline, text of the article, and sidebar. They apparently haven’t actually read the article. Here’s a key paragraph:

“Instead of making money on software, you have someone who is saying they’re trying to make their money on services,” said Michael Kleeman, a technology strategist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and