June 22, 2006
Dealbreaker.com pointed to a study, “Annual Report Readability, Earnings and Stock Returns,” by an accounting professor at Univ of Michigan.
Among its findings, “Opportunistic managers may have incentives to make the annual report harder to read, if good earnings of this year are not persistent or if poor earnings are very persistent.” “On the other hand, firms with better future performance may want to disclose information more precisely to distinguish themselves from the ‘lemons’ by making their annual reports easier to read.”
It’s common sense that obfuscatory language is widely used as a smokescreen in business and management, as well as politics. The great George Orwell wrote 60 years ago in his seminal essay, Politics And the English Language:
(more…)
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, a news blog, is relentless in proselytizing about digital media these days.
Yesterday the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival was abuzz with her “polyga-media” remark. The FT reported that she used the term, slightly self-servingly, for the co-existence of MSM with user-generated internet content. Online would not replace offline media, she said, but technology allowed publishers and advertisers to become more “interactive and intimate” with audiences. What we find most insightful is her comment on winning blogging style: bloggers should write short, informal, timely pieces, often with a satirical slant, in contrast with stodgy MSM.
(more…)
While we’re on the YouTube beat, it seems the buzz gets louder by the day. Carat, a leading media buying group, is quoted on the FT saying that YouTube has greater US reach than MTV.
The FT also reports that one the world’s biggest advertising agencies, Leo Burnett agency, believes commercials would work on YouTube. Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at Leo Burnett, said at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival that successful future campaigns would need to imitate viral content by being easy to consume repeatedly and to forward on.
(more…)
According to news report, researchers at Oxford University Press (OUP) have just published a new list of the most common nouns in the English language. Their verdict: English speakers are obsessed with time.
Time tops the list, followed by Person, Year, Way, Day, Thing, Man, World, Life, Hand.
OUP project manager Angus Stevenson said the frequency with which words such as “time” and “man” occur could be attributed to the love of phrases in English such as “I would not even pass the time of day with him”, and “time waits for no man”. “The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90 percent of the top 100 words were one syllable,” Stevenson said. Despite the invasion of foreign words, “A large proportion were actually from Old English, meaning the basic words we use all the time in basic sentences are from before the Norman Conquest.”
What can we say? Time, beckoning us.
The much talked about Anderson Cooper’s interview with postpartum Angelina Jolie not only reaffirmed the power of celebrity but also blazed a new trail for the Cable Network News whose once-famed ethos is “News is the star.”
Many had regarded the network that earned its stripes by using young reporters gathering news ahead of the established stars as a bulwark against personality-based television news. In 2001, under the tutelage of Walter Isaacson, CNN began the transformation by abandoning the old star and embracing “star” personalities. “Television is also a personality medium,” says Jamie Kellner, the then chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting System.
(more…)
A new Yahoo! Video was released on May 31. It claims to index the entire web, having “a larger library of content than YouTube and other video services out there.”
The videos at Yahoo Video include Yahoo’s own properties, as well feeds from mainstream media, like CBS News, Reuters and Scripps Networks, as well as videos from rival sites like YouTube and Grouper. Google Video also offers user-generated video and content produced by major media companies. But neither Google Video nor YouTube have channels just for movie trailers.
(more…)
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, YouTube must be feeling good about itself. There are a staggering 173 vlog outlets today. Notable rivals include OurMedia.org, a not-for-profit Web site for videos and other content, videoblogger.org, Blip.tv, Open Media Network, etc.
YouTube, the current leader of the pack:
- has 12.5 million visitors a month
- serves more than 50 million videos a day
- accepts 40,000 new videos per day
(more…)
