I got a call today from an old colleague who took the hint last summer and departed The Baltimore Sun when I did — with the aid of a decent buyout.

“Still have any regrets about leaving?” he asked.

“If I did, I’m over it now,” I said. We both chuckled, but the humor was bitter.

The reason for his call was news of the latest purge at The Sun. More than 60 staffers bought it this time, including many of the paper’s most experienced editors — not the big salaries at the top, but hard workers who knew their jobs, knew their community, and knew how to cover it responsibly. My friends and colleagues.

Nor was this a buyout — it was out-the-door-Charlie, with extra security guards manning the entrances. A few of the surviving managers delivered the news with some grace, but two sports writers and a photographer learned they had no jobs when they got heave-ho calls in the pressbox at an Orioles game. Members of the copy desk learned about it when they showed up for work and couldn’t sign on to their computers. Dilbert in real life.

Sure, I know that The Sun’s parent Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy, but would it have cost the creditors a penny to show even a smidgen of class?

Or was it true that Tribune had to fire people before May 1 because that was the start of the vacation season, and they would have owed everyone another week’s pay? That will really bail the company out of a $13 billion hole.

Anyway, with the staff at less than half the size it was a few years ago — and shrinking every day — it’s hard to see anything more than a death spiral for The Sun — and other papers in the same fix. The less news you print, the less reason people have to read you — online or in hard copy.

My new boss at MedPage Today asked me where I thought newspapers were headed. I wish I knew. Specialized news and education sites like ours may thrive in the new order (and I have to say it feels good, for the first time in years, to be part of a business that’s growing, not shrinking). But for old fashioned, general circulation news organizations, the future looks bleak.

For the gory details about the latest goings-on at The Sun, I recommend The Real Muck, by my ever-feisty colleague David Michael Ettlin. For a frightening glimpse of Tribune’s plans to homogenize local newspapers from the tower in Chicago, visit Charles Apple’s blog.

It’s been quite a while since I posted here, but now I can assure you that I haven’t (a) retired or (b) been kidnapped by aliens. I’ve just been getting settled in an exciting new gig.

For those who haven’t followed these posts, I joined a mass exodus from from The Baltimore Sun last August after 38 years in newspapers, and began looking for, shall we say, new career opportunities. Meaning new job.
It took a while, but I finally found one in daily journalism: this time in a medium that’s strictly online. I’m deputy managing editor of MedPage Today, a site that brings the latest breaking medical news to an audience of doctors and other medical professionals, as well as ordinary folks who want straight, accurate, informed reporting that hasn’t been dumbed down.

Although I was medical and science editor of The Sun before my departure, MedPage Today is a lot more intense. First, there’s the subject matter, which is more technical and focused than our coverage at The Sun. Second, there’s the Beast That Always Needs Feeding. I’m talking about The Web. Instead of fixed deadlines, the Web demands constant updating — which really brings me back to my roots at the late and lamented Evening Sun, an afternoon paper with five editions that we fed all day. It was fun then, and thanks to the talented people I work with, it’s fun now.

I am also a real telecommuter for the first time. World Headquarters of MedPage Today is a skyscraper in Little Falls, N.J., a New York suburb off the Garden State Parkway with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline (if you ride one of the glassed-in elevators or you’re the boss and have a corner office). While a hard core of news, production and business staffers work there, other reporters and editors are scattered around North America — from Toronto to Cleveland to Wheeling to Houston to Washington to San Jose. And of course, in Baltimore, where my commute consists of heading downstairs to my office in the basement.

Telecommuting definitely has its ups and downs. On one hand, I miss the cameraderie of the newsroom; on the other, I don’t miss spending two to four hours a day commuting by car or rail, like a lot of folks who live in Baltimore but work in the Washington area (where the jobs are these days). What has amazed me is how well a small but complex news operation — one that posts lots of audio and video recorded by a far-flung staff — can operate using the Internet and telephones.

This missive is to let you know that I haven’t given up on technology — I’ve been writing about it for a quarter of a century and don’t plan to give up now. It just took me a while to switch gears and get comfortable in a new setting. Henceforth, I will do my best to keep up the same flow of misinformation, disinformation and bad advice das readers have enjoyed so much over the years.

I get yet another chance to say I-told-you-so. A couple of years ago, when I first started writing about this subject, I predicted that Congress wouldn’t have the guts to go through with a scheme it approved in 1996 to replace analog TV broadcasts with new digital technology. At least not with the kind of underfunded, rinky-dink program lawmakers concocted to allegedly protect the poor and elderly viewers who have the most to lose from the switchover.

Only than a week after House Republicans blocked a four-month delay in the nation’s switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts, Democrats revived the measure Wednesday and pushed it through the lower chamber, assuring that millions of analog TVs will not go dark on Feb. 17.

By a 264-158 vote, largely along party lines, the House enacted a Senate-passed measure extending the deadline until June 12. The Obama administrations supports the bill and the President is expected to sign it quickly.

The wording allows local broadcasters to turn off their analog transmitters before June 12 if they notify the FCC and the public well in advance. Most have been broadcasting on both analog and digital transmitters for more than a year now, at considerable expense, and few have budgeted for the extra kilowatts they’ll need to keep both signals going through the extension.  But it’s doubtful many stations will jump in advance of deadline and risk losing a chunk of their audience to competitors who keep both transmitters humming. › Continue reading…

Will you lose your signal?

Yes, I told you so. If you’ve followed my rants on the subject, you’ll remember my prediction at the transition to digital TV – just five weeks away as I write this – would be a disaster in the making. Well, that prediction is coming true.

After months of assurances from government agencies and industry flacks that plans for the DTV transition were going great guns, President Elect Barrack Obama has asked Congress to delay the switchover, now scheduled for Feb. 17.

The reason: millions of perfectly good analog TVs will go dark because they can’t receive the new transmissions and won’t have converter boxes attached. Those are boxes the American public has to pay for – and a $1.34 billion subsidy program to help viewers buy them has run out of cash with more than 7 million households still at risk.

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If you subscribe to PC Magazine, hold onto the January issue: some day it may show up on Antiques Roadshow as a collector’s item. After 27 years of producing what was once the Bible of the microcomputer industry — a rag so dense with advertising that mailmen dreaded the day it showed up in their pouches — PC Magazine is giving up its printed edition and switching entirely to online publication.

First issue of PC Mag

Sadly, this scenario is likely to play out more often as time goes by. With advertising fragmented by the Internet  and cable TV channels, with young readers abandoning print for online publications, and with the cost of paper and distribution increasing too fast to be offset by online revenues, it’s a wonder that only a handful of magazines and newspapers have abandoned dead trees altogether so far.

As an editor whose former newspaper is a shadow of itsself these days, but at least still available in print, I bleed a little every time I read one of these stories. True, I am a wired guy — moreso than most people my age — and I read more news online than I do in print these days. But there’s still something satifsfying about sitting down with a real, honest-to-goodness printed paper or magazine and enjoying it with a cup of coffee at the breakfast table, or in my easy chair at night. I’m sure I could do the same thing with a tablet PC, but I still like the feel of paper. Various studies also show that people read faster in print than online, and retain more of what they’ve read.

But it doesn’t matter, because for many publications, the economics of print just don’t work out any more. Over the years I watched PC Magazine slowly waste away as advertisers and readers dropped out. It cut back publication from twice a month to once, and its final issue was just under 100 pages.

But I also have to note that the magazine’s reason for existence is less compelling than it was. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a responsible voice of expertise in a technology industry that was exploding with new applications for the new IBM Personal Computer and its clones (IBM actually coined the term “personal computer,” quite accurately). PC’s reviews were throrough and rigorous; the magazine’s labs developed benchmark tests for hardware and software that became industry standards. So influential was the magazine that some hardware vendors rigged their circuit designs to detect when PC Labs tests were running and produce faster results than they ever could in real world applications. Catering to a variety of audiences, the magazine provided programming tips for geeks, sound tech advice for general users, comparison grids for corporate purchasing agents, and yes, a lot of hype about a lot of products that turned out to be vaporware or just plain duds.

Unfortunately, the industry isn’t nearly as exciting as it was 15 or 20 years ago. For most users, PC’s have become near-commodities. In the says when a computer cost $3,000, consumers were likely to look a lot harder before they leaped. Today, $500 buys you a solid computer and $1,000 buys you a great one. Factor inflation into the equation and today’s PC is only a step above an impulse buy. The only people who really care about what’s in them are gaming enthusiasts who need the performance and corporate IT types who have to support and repair them. When Dell, HP, Sony or Lenovo come out with a new model, it’s about as exciting as Whirlpool announcing a new dryer. The real action today is in online software (Facebook, cloud computing applications and illegal file sharing), and in mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Indeed, read a recent print issue of PC Magazine and you’ll find an inordinate amount of space devloted to to phones, large screen HDTV sets, and digital cameras. So moribund is the PC market that the magazine has taken to reviewing Macs.

Online outlets (Including pcmag.com, the company’s excellent Web site) also offer something print editions can’t — instant access to late-breaking news. Printed magazines have lead times measured in weeks and months.

Enough of this tale of woe. For PC Magazine subscribers who love print, there’s one bright spot — PC Magazine will deliver a print-formatted electronic copy to your e-mailbox every month. So you can read it on your PC,print all of it, or just the handful of articles you want. To misquote the great John Updike, it’s “progress with an escape hatch.” Visit http://go.pcmag.com/subscriberservices/

While most of the world was watched Barack Obama make history on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission quietly voted for its own little revolution.

Despite furious lobbying by TV broadcasters, Broadway producers, Dolly Parton and rock band roadies everywhere, the panel approved a plan to open up the so-called “white spaces” between television channels for unlicensed wireless gadgets.

Dolly Parton and other show biz names objected to FCC White Space proposal.

Back in the dawn of television, the government left these little gaps in the TV spectrum because broadcast TV stations were so powerful – and the available technology was so limited – that engineers feared the stations would step on each others’ signals if they were too close together.

That issue became less important as equipment improved over the years, and it will change even more with the switch from analog broadcasting to a more efficient and precise digital system in February. For more about that, read my DTV Transition Q&A page.

A coalition of major industry players, including Google, Intel, Microsoft and Motorola, backed the plan, which they see opening up a whole new market for wireless Internet access. Because these white spaces are smack in the middle of the TV spectrum, signals in can travel considerable distances, opening up the possibility for relatively cheap, high-speed wireless Internet service in rural areas.

But TV broadcasters are still worried about newcomers with faulty equipment or intentions interfering with their frequencies, and the people who produce plays and concerts are furious. That’s because the wireless microphones they use every day use those very same frequencies. After an acrimonious battle and repeated tests by FCC l aboratories and a lobbying appeal by country legend Dolly Parton. She conceded that she knows nothing about the technology, but does know a thing or two about how important wireless mics are for musicians in concert. They’re the reason singers can prance all over the stage without worrying about tripping over a cord, and why Broadway musical stars don’t need penetrating “Broadway” voices any more.

In an attempt to pacify the theater and concert producers, the FCC is requiring manufacturers of equipment to set of databases with locations where wireless microphones are typically used, as well as sensors for wireless microphone transmissions. The theory: with current technology, the new wireless devices can avoid frequencies that are being used and switch to unoccupied channels.

With deep pockets on both sides, this isn’t likely to be the end of the issue. Here are good explanations from USA Today  and the Washington Post.

As a rule, members of Congress have sided overwhelmingly with the wealthy and powerful music, TV and motion picture industries when it comes to “fair use” of copyrighted material on the Internet. That means both the law and federal enforcement agencies have been backing the army of attack lawyers who have been suing 12-year-olds who post songs on the Web for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now John McCain’s campaign has complained that YouTube is too aggressive in removing the Republican’s videos from the Web site because they contain copyrighted material. Often it’s not much — a few seconds from a televised campaign debate, or a few bars of a catchy song in the background. But it’s enough to draw complaints and a virtually instantaneous response from YouTube, which has become very gunshy about this kind of thing.

In the old days before the Internet, this type of “infringement” might have been covered under the so-called “fair use” doctrine, which allows at least brief sections of copyrighted works to be used by others for critical, educational or other worthwhile public purposes. One of those purposes is political, inasmuch as political speech has the very highest degree of constitutional protection. Of course, YouTube isn’t a court — it doesn’t have to post any video it doesn’t like, and if somebody complains about copyright infringement, it’s likely to yank the material, even if the poster of that material would prevail if the case ever reached the Supremes.

Here’s a good, concise story on the subject from WiredNews.com.

For months I’ve been getting complaints from readers who say some of their favorite cable TV channels are disappearing. Depending on where they live it may be Discovery, or MSNBC or some other cable-only channel with a dedicated,  if not overwhelmingly large following. The cable company tells customers it has moved the channel to its “digital tier.” If viewers want to  see the channel again, they’ll have to rent a digital cable box for $10 a month.

A lot of victims think this is part of the great DTV Switchover, and they blame the government. But it’s not. It’s a case of cable companies trying to wring a few extra dollars out of their subscribers without raising overall rates and free up more bandwidth for the high-definition broadcasts that their premium customers want. Here’s the story: › Continue reading…

Aside from bingo, horse racing was the only legalized form of local gambling open to most Americans for more than a century. In fact, so prized was the government’s interest in horse race betting (or more accurately,  the state’s share of the track’s gambling revenue) that communications devices were virtually probhibited in race tracks, lest they be used to transmit results that illegal bookmakers could use to pay off illicit (meaning untaxed) wagers.

This has changed radically in recent years, and in many traditional strongholds, horse racing has fallen on hard times. One reason is the relatively easy availability of other forms of gambling — first state lotteries, then casino gambling in Atlantic City and other venues far from the flesh pots of Las Vegas, and now online gambling — the easiest bet of all.

The other problem for horse track operators and the states treasuries who feed at their tough: as a sporting event, a day at the races is inherently boring. Think about it. You watch a bunch of horses run around a track for two minutes (for about half of that, they’re almost out of sight in the backstretch), then you wait 20 minutes, and then you watch some more horses run for two minutes, and so on. The total action over a 10 race card that occupies 4 hours of your time is 20 to 25 minutes. So gambling was the only real mass market attraction racing had going for it.

In some states (such as my home state of Maryland) ailing race tracks and state governments have banded together in an unholy alliance to boost revenues with track-based slot machines — possibly the ugliest form of gambling next to dog fighting. But not the great state of Kentucky — home of the eponymous Derby and a breeding industry that employs thousands and attracts crowds of Arab oil sheiks whose Boeing 747s crowd the airport every year as they line up to buy untested yearlings with the millions they’ve collected from us at $4 a gallon. › Continue reading…

There are folks who believe Comcast’s customer relations manual was written by Franz Kafka, and it’s hard disagree. For example, Comcast’s usage cops routinely called up big-time downloaders, told them they were hogging too much bandwidth and threatened to cut off their service.

The downloaders naturally responded, “How much is too much?”

“We won’t tell you,” Comcast said.

“Why not?”

“Because if everyone knew how much they could use, they’d use it.”

Yes, Kafka would have been proud. But when you’re a monopoly, or even a near monopoly, this is the kind of baloney you can can serve.

No more. After the FCC got on its case, Comcast announced that starting Oct. 1, its residential customers would officially be limited to 250 gigabytes of data transfers per month. That includes e-mail, Web browsing, Instant Messaging, uploading and downloading. It was the company’s first public qualification of the “unlimited” Internet use it promised for a set monthly fee. Of course, “unlimited” didn’t really mean “unlimited,” because if you used more bandwidth than Comcast thought you should, the company would start hammering on you to cut back – without being willing to tell you how much to cut back.

With typical circumlocution, Comcast said the 250-gigabyte limit wasn’t really new. That was the bandwidth limit all along– the company just wouldn’t admit it. So there’s really no change, right?

Well, there is a change. Comcast is finally being upfront about what it’s doing. And naturally, there was a chorus of moaning and groaning after Comcast’s announcement — from the people who believe (with considerable justification) that a restaurant advertising an all-you-can-eat buffet should let you eat all the shrimp you want.

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