On The Turning Away

It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
- Daniel Defoe (English writer)

Speculations have been flying over the spinoff of NBC Universal by GE on the grounds the former is perceived as having “no meaningful synergy with the rest of the portfolio”.

The ubiquitous Google was mentioned as a potential buyer, seen as a boost to its effort of adding to its mix of media offerings. While ratings at NBCU have hit historic lows recently, the unit did increase operating profit by 5% in last year’s 4th quarter and 6% in this year’s 1st quarter. Despite a chorus of analysts shouting “sell”, GE may want to wait to see how the media sector develops as an industry before it decides to divest NBC Universal.

Tony Jackson, of the FT, argues that London, with its time zone and the universal language of English and to a degree helped by the rise of China, is becoming the Silicon Valley of finance. Small wonder New York has waken up to “a chilling fact”: If New York and the federal government do nothing, within 10 years New York will lose its status as the financial capital of the world.

More money is now managed in London than in the four top American financial centers combined, including New York. And London is bringing more companies to the market in recent years, as global equities are almost as fungible as currencies. The liquidity glut looks unlikely, albeit not impossible, to disappear, thanks to the continuing march of privatization in Russia, China and India. The real question for both New York and London is whether in the foreseeable future the world will still have a financial capital as we know it.

A cliche is a truth one doesn’t believe.
- Bernard Taper

Magazines’ digital efforts appear to pay off as top magazine content brands are growing at a pace that is well ahead of the Web norm. The January 2007 traffic to lifestyle, tech and auto sites has seen an explosive growth, compared with the same period last year.

Top five in the fast growing league are rachaelraymag.com, houseandgarden.com, fitnessmagazine.com, brides.com, and businessweek.com., reflecting the overall strength of print brands in the Web ecosystem. For magazine publishers and marketers alike, it’s reassuring to know that brands still have equity online.

After being outflanked by a spate of deal-making from its archrival Google, Yahoo is hitting back.

It’s taking Right Media, an operator of online advertising exchange used by more than 20,000 buyers and sellers, under its wing. The deal gives Yahoo a new channel for excess demand and a chance to sell ads more efficiently on its less-visited Web pages. DoubleClick, acquired by Google recently, has been testing a similar product - a mix of eBay and Sabre - for the buying and selling of digital ads.
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In an ambitious drive to expand content, Businessweek.com is branching into financial info on “42,000 public companies, 322,000 private companies and roughly 1 million executives, pulling the latest stock prices and earnings data, as well as listings of companies’ boards of directors”. Hoping to get a leg up on the competition, the entire content will be free with TD Ameritrade, eTrade and Vanguard as initial sponsors.

The question is not whether the charm offensive, a clever leverage of McGraw-Hill Cos. digital products, will help lure more users to BusinessWeek.com, but whether its targeted readers are the Wall Street types who would flock to the expanded financial content like moths to the flame.

The Virginia tragedy has highlighted a burgeoning phenomenon. With the Internet assuming an increasingly vital role for traditional media amid intensifying online competition, more news outlets are turning to “search marketing” to drive traffic to their Web sites.

This came at a time when U.S. newspaper circulation fell 2.1% in the six months through March, according to Newspaper Association of America. Customers are canceling subscriptions in favor of getting news and information from the Internet, dragging down revenue from circulation and advertising. As a result, newspapers are trying to turn advertisers’ attention to their Web sites to help stem the decline in ad revenue.
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Ever wonder what to do with your advanced training in finance? The NYT Magazine article, “A Disciplined Business“, may give you some ideas, not the least…launching a fetish adult Website. After all, this is a $3-billion-a-year industry that’s populated by “serious-minded, tech-oriented entrepreneurs working outside the influence of the porn establishment”.

First off, as “pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career”. Who knew? Those with an elephant memory may recall the blissful dot-com days before the crash but today porn has increasingly become just another career that creative people latch onto in the fog following college.

Secondly, the misonception of pornographers as “a bunch of sleazy guys that are drunk all day” is debunked. While some more enterprising types are ““lifestylers”, others are dotcom castoffs who are as into “American Idol” as the average Joe .
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A piece on a transsexual sportswriter for the LAT caught our eye. Mike Penner is to become Christine Daniels, believing, after “extensive therapy and testing”, his brain was wired female. We don’t pretend to have a firm grasp on the “complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition” of transsexualism, fortunately Science Daily came to our rescue. It cited a research published this week in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research about the role gender plays in how we talk, challenging the conventional wisdom that “being a man or a woman is a matter of, among other things, talking like one”.

On the subject of female brain (apropos of Mike Penner), the paper tackles the question whether language perspectives retain a built-in social bias.
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