History > 2008 > USA > Internet, media (II)

Dick Martin,

Who Rode ‘Laugh-In’ to Fame,

Dies at 86

May 26, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL GENZLINGER

Dick Martin, a veteran nightclub comic who with his partner, Dan Rowan, turned a midseason replacement slot at NBC in 1968 into a hit that redefined what could be done on television, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., according to The Associated Press. He was 86.

“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the hyperactive, joke-packed show that Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan rode to fame, made conventional television variety programs seem instantly passé and the sitcom brand of humor seem too meek for the times.

The show was a collage of one-liners, non sequiturs, sight gags and double entendres the likes of which prime time had rarely seen, and it proved that viewers were eager for more than sleepily paced plots and polite song-and-dance. “Laugh-In” quickly vaulted to the top of the television ratings, and it spawned an array of catchphrases: “Sock it to me,” “Here come da judge” and Mr. Martin’s signature line, “You bet your sweet bippy.”

“People are basically irreverent,” Mr. Martin said in 1968, explaining the appeal of the show. “They want to see sacred cows kicked over. You can’t have Harry Belafonte on your show and not have him sing a song, but we did; we had him climbing out of a bathtub, just because it looked irreverent and silly. If a show hires Robert Goulet, pays him $7,500 or $10,000, they’re going to want three songs out of him; we hire Robert Goulet, pay him $210 and drop him through a trap door.”

Though Mr. Martin had a respectable career in nightclubs before “Laugh-In” and enjoyed success as a television director after the show went off the air, his five years on “Laugh-In” elevated him to a different level of fame. The show won the Emmy Award for outstanding variety or musical series in both 1968 and 1969, and the special guests who dropped by over the years to deliver one-liners included Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Cher, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Johnny Carson and, memorably with “Sock it to me?,” Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan, who died in 1987, became international stars; in 1972 they were hosts of a variety show staged before Queen Elizabeth II at the London Palladium.

Thomas Richard Martin was born Jan. 30, 1922, in Battle Creek, Mich. His father, William, was a salesman; his mother, Ethel, a homemaker. In the early 1930s the family moved to Detroit, where Dick’s teenage years included a bout with tuberculosis that would keep him out of the military.

At 20 Mr. Martin, with his older brother, Bob, headed for Los Angeles with hopes of breaking into show business. He worked fitfully as an actor, a comic, and as a writer for radio shows like “Duffy’s Tavern,” but he was plying another trade, bartending, one day in 1952 when the comic Tommy Noonan brought in Dan Rowan, a former car salesman with showbiz aspirations of his own. Mr. Noonan introduced the two, and they quickly found their shtick — Rowan the sophisticate, Martin the laid-back lunk. They took their act on the road, inching up the club-circuit pecking order.

“It had no real highs or lows, it was just straight-ahead work,” Mr. Martin recalled of those early nightclub years in a 2007 interview. “I don’t think we ever failed. We didn’t zoom to stardom, but we always worked.”

Some of that work was on the small-time television programs that had sprung up in local markets — “Every city had a show like that: ‘Coffee With Phil,’ whatever,” Mr. Martin recalled — and the duo achieved a comfort level in the medium that proved useful once they became nightclub headliners. National television shows came calling, including Ed Sullivan’s, where Rowan & Martin made at least 16 appearances.

Mr. Martin also had a recurring role on “The Lucy Show” in the early 1960s, playing Lucille Ball’s neighbor, Harry Conners. But it was his work with Mr. Rowan that held the big payoff: the two had appeared on Dean Martin’s variety show on NBC, and — this being the era when stars took the summer off but their shows didn’t — in 1966 they were asked to be the hosts of “The Dean Martin Summer Show” for all 12 episodes.

“They were so high-rated that NBC said, ‘We want you to do a show for us,’ ” Mr. Martin recalled in 2007, and that led to a pilot for “Laugh-In,” which was broadcast Sept. 9, 1967. The show was well regarded — it won an Emmy as the outstanding musical or variety program — and when “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” began to falter in midseason, Rowan & Martin got their shot at a series. Replacing that spy drama, “Laugh-In” made its debut on Jan. 22, 1968.

The show, partly the brainchild of the producer George Schlatter (who would later get into a court battle with Mr. Rowan and Mr. Martin over the rights to it), pushed the envelope of topical humor, something “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” had begun doing the year before. “Laugh-In,” though, was more interested in creating a frenetic pace than in creating controversy. To do so it relied on a cast of young, largely unknown comics like Judy Carne, Henry Gibson and Jo Anne Worley — a risky approach that one writer who logged time on the series, Lorne Michaels, would use when he shook up television anew in 1975 with “Saturday Night Live.” And, just as with the “S.N.L.” cast, a few “Laugh-In” alumni went on to impressive careers, most notably Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.

“Laugh-In” stayed No. 1 through its first two seasons, garnering 11 Emmy nominations in 1969 for Season 2. The novelty, though, began to wear off, and by 1973 it was off the air. A string of specials in later years revisited the format but without the jolt that the show’s first two seasons caused, and a 1969 film featuring Mr. Rowan and Mr. Martin, “The Maltese Bippy,” was panned. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, called it “a movie that cheapens everything it touches.”

Mr. Martin’s friend Bob Newhart helped him transition to the director’s chair. He directed a number of episodes of the long-running “Bob Newhart Show,” as well as spot episodes of shows like “Archie Bunker’s Place” and “Family Ties” and Mr. Newhart’s later series. Mr. Martin also continued to act, playing roles on shows like “The Love Boat” and “Diagnosis Murder,” and turned up frequently on game shows and celebrity roasts in the 1970s and 80s. Among his occasional film roles was an appearance in “Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver,” a 1998 comedy directed by his son, Richard Martin.

In the early “Laugh-In” years Mr. Martin and Mr. Rowan were as opposite offstage as they seemed to be onstage. Mr. Martin, whose 1957 marriage to Peggy Connelly had ended in divorce in the early 1960s, was the swinging bachelor, Mr. Rowan the quiet family man. But in 1971 Mr. Martin married Dolly Read, a former Playmate of the Month who had appeared in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” After divorcing four years later, they remarried in 1978. She survives him, as do Richard Martin and another son, Cary, from his marriage to Ms. Connelly.

Despite the fame and wealth that “Laugh-In” brought, Mr. Martin always retained a fondness for the earlier part of his career.

“My life has been divided into three parts in the show-business world: nightclubs, television, and then I was a director for 30 years of television shows,” he said in a 2006 interview on “The O’Reilly Factor.” “And I think the most fun I ever had was nightclubs. I loved nightclubs.”

    Dick Martin, Who Rode ‘Laugh-In’ to Fame, Dies at 86, NYT, 26.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/arts/television/26martindick.html?hp

Google Offers Personal Health Records on the Web

May 20, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

After a year and half of development, Google began offering online personal health records to the public on Monday.

The Internet search giant’s service, Google Health, at google.com/health, is the latest entrant in the growing field of companies offering personal health records on the Web. Their ranks range from longtime online health services like WebMD to the software powerhouse Microsoft to start-ups like Revolution Health.

The companies all hope to capitalize eventually on the trend of increasingly seeking health information online, and the potential of Internet tools to help consumers manage their own health care and medical spending.

Google enters the field of personal health records with a leading online brand, deep pockets and a wealth of technical skills. In a two-month trial this year, the Cleveland Clinic found that its patients were eager to use the Google health records.

The pilot project, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly oversubscribed, said C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer. Dr. Harris also said that when the clinic’s online health records, introduced in 2004, were linked to the Google record the clinic’s records were used more frequently by patients. “It positioned our personal health record more into an activity that they use every day,” Dr. Harris said.

The Google record, he said, allows the user to send personal information, at the individual’s discretion, into the clinic record or to pull information from the clinic records into the Google personal file.

The ability of patients to send information, in particular, can be helpful to clinic doctors, Dr. Harris said. For example, if a person sees specialists outside the clinic and receives a drug prescription from an outside doctor, it raises the risk of harmful drug interactions. “Until now, if a patient doesn’t remember to tell me,” he said, “I don’t know about drugs prescribed outside the Cleveland Clinic system.”

In the Cleveland trial, patients apparently did not shun the Google health records because of qualms that their personal health information might not be secure if held by a large technology company.

In Google Health, as in the pilot project, the company is not selling advertisements. And what information is shared with doctors, clinics or pharmacies is controlled by the individual, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products.

More than two dozen companies and institutions announced that they are partners with Google Health, including Walgreens, CVS, the American Heart Association, Quest Diagnostics, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic. The partnerships are not exclusive arrangements.

Cleveland Clinic, for example, is also talking to Microsoft. “As these online services become available, we expect to connect to them all,” Dr. Harris said.

Google Health, Ms. Mayer said, represents a “large ongoing initiative” by the company, which she said she hoped would eventually include “thousands of partners and millions of users.”

    Google Offers Personal Health Records on the Web, NYT, 20.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/technology/20google.html

New York Times Company Posts Loss

April 17, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York Times, posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter — one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen — falling far short of both analysts’ expectations and its $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier.

The company did break even on a per-share basis, compared with the average analyst forecast of earnings of 14 cents, down from 17 cents in the first quarter of 2007.

The company’s main source of revenue, newspaper advertising in print and online, fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory, as the industry suffers the twin blows of an economic downturn and the continuing long-term shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

In a conference call with analysts, Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive, said it was “a challenging quarter, one that showed the effects of a weaker economy,” compounded by “a marketplace that has been reconfigured technologically, economically and geographically.”

Looking ahead, she said, “We see continued challenges for print advertising in a faltering economy.”

The company recorded an operating profit of $6.2 million on revenue of $748 million, down from $54.5 million in operating income on revenue of $786 million a year earlier. That included a noncash charge of $18.3 million for an asset write-down and one-time costs for changes that will lower costs in the long run, like closing a printing plant and employee buyouts. The company lowered operating costs by 1.1 percent, and it predicts sharper declines later in the year.Excluding the write-down, depreciation and amortization, operating profit for the company was $66.4 million for the quarter, down from $98.9 million a year earlier.

The poor showing stemmed from The Times Company’s core news media group, which includes The Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, as well as several regional newspapers.

Excluding the $18.3 million charge, depreciation and amortization, the unit reported an operating profit of $68.5 million for the quarter, down from $99.4 million in the period a year earlier.

The group’s revenue dropped 5.7 percent, driven by the 10.6 percent decline in advertising revenue. But it also recorded a 1.9 percent increase in circulation revenue, after the company raised the prices of newspapers like The Times and The Globe.

The About Group, which includes About.com, reported an operating profit of $12.6 million, a 9.5 percent rise from a year ago. Revenue at the group increased 25 percent, to $28.2 million as the unit benefited from increased ad sales and acquisitions.

The Times Company’s declining fortunes have sowed shareholder discontent, and the weak first-quarter results could intensify calls for a shift in strategy. A pair of hedge funds, Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, acquired a large stake in the company early this year, demanding that it sell assets and invest aggressively in Internet operations.Rather than endure a proxy fight, the hedge funds and the Times Company struck a deal, agreeing to expand the board to 15 seats from 13, with the two extra seats going to the funds. That agreement is expected to win approval at a shareholders’ meeting on April 22.

“I think there is a great deal of common ground that we already have,” Ms. Robinson said. The company will move judiciously, she said, but it is already open to the kind of buying and selling the funds advocate, “constantly evaluating the portfolio, not only for performance but also for strategic fit.”

Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue — print and online, combined — fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The Times Company’s ad revenue dropped 4.7 percent last year, when adjusted for a change in the length of its fiscal year.

Over the last year, classified ads continued a decadelong flight to the Web, and display ads for real estate and cars fell sharply as those industries contracted.

As it wore on, 2007 grew steadily worse, meaning that as 2008 passes, some of the year-earlier comparisons will become a little easier.

Ms. Robinson said that April should be somewhat better than the first quarter, but that is partly due to timing of Easter and of one of the Times newspaper’s magazines, Key.

    New York Times Company Posts Loss, NYT, 17.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/media/17cnd-times.html?hp

Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing

April 16, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — An e-mail scam aimed squarely at the nation’s top executives is raising new alarms about the ease with which people and companies can be deceived by online criminals.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

Another piece of the software allows the computer to be controlled remotely. According to researchers who have analyzed the downloaded file, less than 40 percent of commercial antivirus programs were able to recognize and intercept the attack.

The tactic of aiming at the rich and powerful with an online scam is referred to by computer security experts as whaling. The term is a play on phishing, an approach that usually involves tricking e-mail users — in this case the big fish — into divulging personal information like credit card numbers. Phishing attacks that are directed at a particular person, rather than blasted out to millions, are also known as spear phishing.

The latest campaign has been widespread enough that two California federal courts and the administrative office of the United States Courts posted warnings about the fake messages on their Web sites. Federal officials said they stopped counting after getting hundreds of phone calls from corporations about the messages. At midday on Tuesday, one antispam company, MX Logic, said in a Web posting that its service was still seeing at least 30 of the messages an hour.

Security researchers at several firms indicated they believed there had been at least several thousand victims of the attack whose computers had been compromised.

“We have seen about 2,000 victims, more or less,” said John Bambenek, a security researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a volunteer at the Internet Storm Center, a network security organization.

Researchers were studying a list of the Internet addresses of infected computers that iDefense Labs, a research unit of VeriSign, had assembled by monitoring network traffic.

Personalized scam messages have been on the radar of security researchers and law enforcement officials for several years, but the latest variant is a fresh indication of the threat posed by such digital ruses.

“I think that it was well done in terms of something people would feel compelled to respond to,” said Steve Kirsch, the chief executive of Abaca, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif.

Mr. Kirsch himself received a copy of the message and forwarded it to the company lawyer. “It had my name, phone number, company and correct e-mail address on it and looked pretty legitimate,” Mr. Kirsch said. “Even the U.R.L. to find out more looked legitimate at first glance.”

When the lawyer tried to download a copy of the subpoena and the computer restarted itself, they quickly realized that the file contained malicious software.

Several computer security researchers said that the attack was the work of a group that tried a similar assault in November 2007. In that case, the e-mail message appeared to come from the Justice Department and stated that a complaint had been filed against the recipient’s company.

The software used in the latest attack tries to communicate with a computer in Singapore. That system was still functioning on Tuesday evening, but security researchers said many Internet service providers had blocked access to it.

A number of clues, like misspellings, in the fake subpoena led several researchers to believe that the attackers were not familiar with the United States court system and that the group might be based in a place that used a British variant of English, such as Hong Kong.

“This is probably Chinese-based,” said Mr. Bambenek. “If all the key players are in China there is not much the F.B.I. can do.”

Several security researchers said that the real danger of the attack lay in a second level of deception, after the hidden software provided the attackers with digital credentials like passwords and electronic certificates.

“There are very subtle nuances to their attacks that are well known in the financial industry but are not well publicized,” said Matt Richard, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefense.

Mr. Richard said the criminals were going after a particular area of the financial industry, but he would not elaborate. He said that law enforcement officials were investigating the fraudulent documents.

Calls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for comment were not returned.

Although the software package used to deliver the eavesdropping program is well known, it was hidden in such a way that it avoided detection by commercial programs in many cases, researchers said.

“This is pretty well-known code,” said Don Jackson, a researcher at SecureWorks, a computer security firm. “The issue has to do with repacking it.”

Recipients of the e-mail messages are directed to a fraudulent Web site with a copy of the graphics from the real federal court site. They are then asked to download and install what is said to be a piece of software from Adobe that is used to view electronic documents.

“There are several layers of social engineering involved here,” said Mike Haro, a spokesman for Sophos, a company that sells software to protect against malicious software and spam.

    Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing, NYT, 16.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/technology/16whale.html

Eight Teenagers Charged in Internet Beating Have Their Day on the Web

April 12, 2008
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MIAMI — The six teenage girls accused of beating a classmate and filming the attack for the Internet made their first court appearance on Friday, looking down and occasionally covering their faces with their hands and hair to avoid a gaggle of cameras.

The six girls were seen by the judge via video uplink from the jail where they were being held. They and two male classmates were charged as adults with battery and kidnapping in the March 30 attack in Lakeland, a lower-middle-class town in Central Florida. The girls’ sudden display of shame — like the order against talking to the news media that Judge Angela Cowden placed on local officials — could hardly offset the case’s mutation into a media juggernaut.

The beating left 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay, a cheerleader, with a concussion and two black eyes. The combination of violence, girls, video and criticism of the Web seems to have made the case a magnet for attention and outrage.

Since the teenagers were arrested just over a week ago, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and NBC’s “Today” show have focused on the incident, with anchors often describing how hard the beating was to watch, even as clips of the attack played over and over on screen.

The Internet, in particular, has become the preferred outlet for comment.

On Friday, six of the 20 most-viewed videos on YouTube were related to the attack. Outtakes of interviews with the parents of the victim and the attackers have been posted alongside news segments, parodies and hundreds of responses by YouTube viewers.

A few of the amateur rants have attracted more than 700,000 viewers each, and thousands of written comments.

One of the most popular responses, by Philip DeFranco, denounces the teenagers for ganging up on the victim, calls vaguely for vigilante vengeance and addresses the irony of the girls’ getting the attention they wished for. “Yeah the video has gone viral,” he said in his video, “except I don’t know if they can see it from jail.”

Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, released three minutes of the videotaped beating, which went on for roughly half an hour. Before the gag order stopped him from doing interviews, he said the attack might have been retaliation for comments Ms. Lindsay posted on her MySpace page about some of the other girls.

By his account, the eight teenagers under arrest — Mercades Nichols, 17; April Cooper, 14; Brittini Hardcastle, 17; Kayla Hassell, 15; Brittany Mayes, 17; Cara Murphy, 16; Zachary Ashley, 17; and Stephen Schumaker, 18 — were not initially remorseful. He said he hoped that the attention the case had drawn would raise awareness about the Internet’s power to desensitize young people to violence.

The victim’s parents have taken a similar line. “For whatever reason, this MySpace, my-you, this YouTube has gone too far,” said Talisa Lindsay, in an interview outside their home. “It’s just too much.”

Her husband, Patrick, who stood beside her, went even further, declaring that Internet companies were to blame for what happened.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “MySpace is the Antichrist for children.”

Such sentiments and counterarguments appear to be what has made the Lakeland incident so riveting. The Lindsays’ interview was YouTube’s 15th most-popular item on Friday afternoon, up from 18 a few hours earlier. And the 1,800-plus comments generally followed a similar line: “its not about youtube and myspace!! its about those 8 freakin’ teenagers!!”

Other bullying cases, of course, have also drawn national interest. In 2003, a group of girls outside Chicago filmed themselves attacking a girl in a hazing incident that became a segment on the Oprah Winfrey show. More recently, attention focused on Billy Wolfe, a frequently bullied Arkansas teenager who was the subject of an article in The New York Times. One of those attacks was captured on a cellphone camera.

In the Florida case though, the authorities say the attackers intended to use the attack to become Internet celebrities.

But if they are released on bail — set Friday at a minimum of $30,000 each — they may not get a chance to see the attack on the Web, or to discuss it. Judge Cowden ordered them to have no contact with one another, and definitely no Internet allowed.
 

Jason Geary contributed reporting from Lakeland, Fla.

    Eight Teenagers Charged in Internet Beating Have Their Day on the Web, NYT, 12.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/12florida.html

In Web World of 24/7 Stress,

Writers Blog Till They Drop

April 6, 2008
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the Internet, and advertising has followed.

Even at established companies, the Internet has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices and work from anywhere at any time. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house.

Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break,” he added. “But that’s never going to happen.”

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

“The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write — that’s kind of cool,” he said. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he said, “I just want to lie down.”

Sometimes he does rest, inadvertently, falling asleep at the computer.

“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again,” said Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. “It’s happened four or five times.”

Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco — hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.

“I’ve got a background getting punched in the face,” he said. “That’s why I’m good at this job.”

Mr. Lam said he has worried his blogging staff might be burning out, and he urges them to take breaks, even vacations. But he said they face tremendous pressure — external, internal and financial. He said the evolution of the “pay-per-click” economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.

In the case of Mr. Shaw, it is not clear what role stress played in his death. Ellen Green, who had been dating him for 13 months, said the pressure, though self-imposed, was severe. She said she and Mr. Shaw had been talking a lot about how he could create a healthier lifestyle, particularly after the death of his friend, Mr. Orchant.

“The blogger community is looking at this and saying: ‘Oh no, it happened so fast to two really vital people in the field,’ ” she said. They are wondering, “What does that have to do with me?”

For his part, Mr. Shaw did not die at his desk. He died in a hotel in San Jose, Calif., where he had flown to cover a technology conference. He had written a last e-mail dispatch to his editor at ZDNet: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.”

    In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, NYT, 6.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html

MySpace and Record Companies

Create Music Site

April 3, 2008
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE and JEFF LEEDS

SAN FRANCISCO — In the latest effort by the ailing music industry to bolster its declining prospects, three of the four major music companies have struck a deal with MySpace to start an music Web site.

As part of the deal, MySpace will spin out its popular MySpace Music service as an independent joint venture in partnership with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. EMI, the fourth major label, is not a part of the deal at this time, but people involved in the negotiations said it would probably join soon. The music companies will own minority stakes in the venture and will make their entire music catalogs available.

Chris DeWolfe, chief executive of MySpace, a division of News Corporation, described the new service, which will be introduced later this year, as a one-stop source for all music, in all its various digital incarnations.

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.

A subscription-based music component, where users pay a monthly amount for unlimited access to downloadable tracks, is also being considered, Mr. DeWolfe said.

“This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s the first service that offers a full catalog of music to be streamed for free, with full community features, to be shared with all of your friends.”

Additional products like tickets, T-shirts, ring tones and other music merchandise will also be available. “It’s the full 360-degree revenue stream,” Mr. DeWolfe said.

Exact terms of the deal and details about the new site, like prices for downloaded music tracks, were not disclosed. But MySpace did say the site would offer songs free of digital rights management software or D.R.M., which is used to prevent illicit copying but can create technical hurdles for buyers. The songs would be playable on any portable music device, including Apple’s iPod.

The new venture will be run by an executive team that will report to a board s made up of representatives from MySpace and the major music companies.

An analyst at Pali Capital, Rich Greenfield, said MySpace was offering a big opportunity to the music companies.

“They have a huge community that wants to talk, share and learn about music,” he said. “Nobody else has that. There is music discovery happening on MySpace that is far deeper and broader than what’s going on on iTunes.”

But first MySpace will have to prove that it can actually sell music. Though the company earns $70 million a month in advertising for the News Corporation, according to estimates by Pali Capital, it has never successfully sold products on a wide scale. A download service for independent music, began in 2006 with Snocap, a music start-up, was considered a disappointment.

For the music industry, the deal is partly born of desperation. In the face of widespread, escalating online piracy, music sales dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006 from a peak in 1999 of nearly $15 billion.

That has forced the industry into a new age of experimentation. Last year, all four major record labels backed Amazon’s nascent MP3 music store, partly in an effort to counterbalance Apple’s strength in the market for music downloads. The music companies say Apple now has too much control over the distribution and pricing of digital music.

The industry is seeking revenue that does not come directly from its customers — like the ad-supported element of the MySpace service. Along those same lines, music executives have recently raised more draconian ideas, like surcharges on the sales of iPods and Internet access to compensate for rampant file sharing. The moves have been met with widespread resistance.

Universal Music sued MySpace for copyright infringement in 2006. MySpace would not say whether that suit had been dropped before Thursday’s announcement.

    MySpace and Record Companies Create Music Site, NYT, 3.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/technology/03cnd-myspace.html

Intel Makes a Push

Into Pocket-Size Internet Devices

April 2, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — Intel plans to proclaim Wednesday in Shanghai that the next big thing in consumer gadgets will be the “Internet in your pocket.”

The challenge for the giant chip maker will be to prove that it is not too late to a market that has rapidly become the hottest spot in the consumer electronics business in a post-PC era.

At a developer event in China, the company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will display a range of wireless Internet devices that Intel believes will fill a gap between smartphones and laptops. The company is hoping to capitalize on the success that Apple has had with its iPhone, which is one of the most popular mobile Web smartphones.

Intel is calling the new computers Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, and claims that it will have a significant advantage over makers of chips for cellphones because the Intel version will be highly compatible with the company’s laptop and desktop processors for which most Web software is written today.

The first generation of Intel’s MID technology will be aimed at data, not voice communications, leaving the company out of the market for smartphones. That has not damped the enthusiasm of Intel executives who foresee a proliferation of devices ranging from advanced ultracompact laptops to small, tablet-size devices that will be used for browsing the Web, navigation and Internet chat, rather than voice communications.

“What enables the innovation is the ability to bring over all the existing PC applications,” said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of the company’s Ultra Mobility Group.

The weak link in the Intel strategy is that voice communication remains a significant factor for consumers choosing to buy hand-held devices.

Intel backed out of the cellphone market two years ago when it sold its Xscale microprocessor business to the Marvell Technology Group. Intel then set out on an ambitious redesign project for ultralow-power versions of its PC-oriented X86 chips. The current system requires two chips, one for the processor and one for peripherals. It will take the company another technology generation to place everything on a single chip.

That leads some analysts to believe that the company’s real breakthrough will not come until 2009 or 2010, when a new processor, now code-named Moorestown, arrives.

“We’re pretty bullish on it with some qualifications,” said Van L. Baker, a research vice president at the Gartner Group, a market research firm. “We don’t believe they get there in a significant way until the next generation of technology.”

Meanwhile, Intel’s strategy is moving the company toward a direct confrontation with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip maker that is also trying to deliver the wireless Internet on hand-held devices. The company, which refers to its strategy as “pocketable computing,” is offering a competing chip that offers lower power consumption and which is aimed for devices that blend voice and Internet data.

“We need to deliver an Internet experience that is like the desktop,” said Sanjay Jha, Qualcomm’s chief operating officer. “People are used to the Internet, and you can’t shortchange them.”

The new Intel mobile Internet strategy takes advantage of the company’s Atom microprocessor, which was announced in early March. The Atom will have performance roughly equivalent to laptop computers introduced four years ago, but will use little more than a half-a-watt to two-and-a-half watts of battery power. That is significantly lower than the 35 watts of power consumed by the company’s state-of-the-art microprocessors in today’s laptops.

The new MIDs, which are scheduled to begin showing up in consumer electronics outlets in June, are the clearest evidence to date of the effort that Intel has made since its chief executive, Paul Otellini, set the company on a low-power strategy in 2005. In interviews, Intel executives said that the company was slightly ahead of the commitment Mr. Otellini made to bring out a line of lower-power processors before the end of the decade.

Complicating life for Intel is the fact that the chip maker is locked out of the low-power cellphone and smartphone marketplace, which today is entirely based on microprocessor chips made by designs licensed from the British design firm ARM Ltd. to companies like Qualcomm.

More than 10 billion ARM chips have been sold by more than 200 licensees, and ARM now says that more than eight million chips a day are being used in cellphones, smartphones and a wide range of hand-held consumer products.

Until recently, early efforts by the PC industry to create so-called palmtop PCs, such as the Microsoft-inspired Ultra-Mobile PCs, have failed to find a broad consumer audience. Indeed, the entire P.D.A., or personal digital assistant, market is all but dead as many of its functions were overtaken by the smartphone.

However, the category showed renewed signs of life last year when Asus, a Taiwanese equipment maker, made a name for itself by introducing the Eee PC, a two-pound Linux-based laptop that sells for $400.

Now many of the mainstream PC makers are rushing to introduce similar laptops that fall well below the traditional PC laptop price, but allow Web surfing and many basic computing tasks. There is also renewed interest among consumer electronics makers in devices that are neither laptops or cellphones.

Introducing products at the Intel event in Shanghai will be Asus, BenQ, Clarion, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Lenovo, LG-E, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, WiBrain and Usi. Intel has also distanced itself from its traditionally close relationship with Microsoft and Windows by striking up a new partnership with Ubuntu and Red Flag, two distributors of Linux software for consumer markets.

“Think of it as, ‘honey I shrunk the PC,’ ” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a consumer electronics market research and consulting firm. “Intel is betting that this will be a win in China, which already has the world’s largest mobile phone market and therefore influences the rest of the world market.”

    Intel Makes a Push Into Pocket-Size Internet Devices, NYT, 2.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/technology/02chip.html