Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials.  While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it’s not a matter where government should intervene.

Says Suderman,

It’s easy enough to turn your TV off (or even live without one, as Szoka does). And if that’s too arduous, there are various technological solutions from companies like Dolby and SRS that help keep TV volumes on a more even keel.

[...]

But the larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government’s job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That’s bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It’s also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And  in the end, I think that’s far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Szoka notes that proposed legislation is technically unsound and subject to selective enforcement.  And there’s the issue of freedom:

[T]he bill does embody a recurrent presumption that it’s ok to regulate advertising in ways we wouldn’t accept for the “show” itself (i.e., non-advertising content). Of course, the show could be “commercial” (which, in First Amendment terms, means it would generally get only “intermediate” scrutiny) while the advertisement could be “non-commercial”—such as a political ad. But even if most ads are commercial, so what? If the government is going to protect us from “noisy or strident” commercials, why not all “noisy or strident” programming? Even the most annoying TV ad is probably less annoying than, say, the James Carvilles of the world debating the Glenn Becks of the world. (Of course, users really bothered by noise, but unwilling to give up TV, would probably much rather have a dynamic market for TVs with volume moderating features than rules that dull the din of commercials alone.)

Kevin Drum doesn’t care. He just wants the noise to stop.

[B]laring TV commercials have been an obvious and fixable problem for several decades and no “basic harmony of interests” has yet manifested itself.¹ This suggests to me that it never will unless the industry is pressured into doing it.

[...]

¹A shortcoming, by the way, that’s made worse by the artistic decisions of certain shows.  The worst for me is 24, which I have to crank up in order to hear the hoarse stage whisper that Kiefer Sutherland affects in his Jack Bauer role.  The ads are loud even at the best of times, but they’re really loud when you’ve already turned up the volume just to hear the show itself.

²This is an issue, like the Do Not Call registry, that transcends politics.  I don’t really care whether volume regulations are liberal or conservative or trample the Bill of Rights or whatever.  I just want the noise to stop.  If it takes jackboots to stop it, then so be it.

While I’m naturally in the Suderman-Szoka camp on the issue of Nanny Statism, Drum has persuaded me on this one with the strength of his footnotes.

The fact of the matter is that the federal government has regulated the manner in which television has been broadcast since before we were broadcasting television. (The Radio Commission, the forebear of the FCC, predates television.)  They regulate the spectrum on which broadcasters operate, require a certain amount of “public interest” programming as a condition of licensing, require a certain amount of “truth in advertising,” restrict the use of coarse language and images in over-the-air broadcasts, and otherwise oversee many aspects of what’s shown on television.   Why shouldn’t they set parameters on something that genuinely annoys most of us?

This isn’t a free speech issue. It doesn’t impinge on speech in any way. It merely requires that broadcasters refrain from blaring the ads.

Government already regulates the content of commercial speech, which has long been less protected than political speech.  Indeed, those of us over a certain age can recall the days when those advertising ladies’ undergarments had to use mannequins to demonstrate their wares.  Or that it took the AIDS epidemic to get the FCC to allow advertising for condoms — or, hell, the use of the word “condom.”

Yes, I suppose consumers could invest in sophisticated technology to solve this annoyance.  But why should we have to do that?

This weekend, I got one of those fake “virus clean” popups after clicking a link to a New York Times article from Memeorandum.   Apparently, I wasn’t alone as there are a dozen or more posts about it today at Techmeme.

The NYT itself has this Note to Readers:

Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.

That’s in fact what I did. But it’s very annoying since it either means losing all of the other pages you’re currently browsing or risking the malware popping back up when your browser tries to helpfully reload the unexpectedly closed pages.

Troy at Inputs & Outputs has some very technical details.  And Riva Richmond, writing for the NYT Gadgetwise blog, offers these helpful tips:

If you are a Windows user and saw a suspicious antivirus warning on your screen, it is possible that the ad’s creators infected your computer with a malicious program, even if you avoided all contact with it. “Click or not, the user could still get infected,” said Neil Daswani, a founder of Dasient, a security firm that specializes in Web site security issues.

Some similar antivirus scams have been known to use security vulnerabilities in Web browsers to automatically install malicious software in what are known as drive-by downloads, Mr. Daswani said. As a precaution, those who encountered a pop-up warning should run a scan using their favorite (legitimate) antivirus software.

If you don’t have such software installed, it’s time to get some. The big brand names in the field include Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, although it is not known whether their programs are able to detect any infections that might be caused by these latest ads. One analysis of the problematic ads indicated that an antivirus program called Avast, which has a free 60-day trial available, was able to spot them before they caused trouble. Another good free tool for Windows users is Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, which checks for the most common malicious programs on the Internet.

Peter Kafka at Media Memo:

You generally have to travel farther down the Internet publishing food chain to find this kind of bogus ad–go hunting for porn and/or illegal downloads, for instance, and you’ll find plenty of this stuff.

But Web advertising is still a wild and woolly place, and this type of thing still plagues high-end publishers too. Sometimes it’s the fault of ad networks the publishers use to move their unsold inventory; sometimes the bogus ads are bought directly from the publishers themselves.

Indeed, I’ve accidentally inflicted these type of malware pop-ups on my own sites, as several ad networks that run third-party advertisements — Google is the most noteworthy — do too little to prevent it from happening.

Jon Henke thinks it’s time for the Right to throw out the lunatics:

In the 1960’s, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being “so far removed from common sense” and later said “We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.”

The Birthers are the Birchers of our time, and WorldNetDaily is their pamphlet.  The Right has mostly ignored these embarrassing people and organizations, but some people and organizations inexplicably choose to support WND through advertising and email list rental or other collaboration.

Several of us — notably Melissa Clouthier, Doug Mataconis, and Matt Sheffield — bandied this about on Twitter yesterday.  And while I’m still inclined to agree with Jon that the Republican Party and organized conservative movement should distance itself from the yahoos, I’m not sure how much energy it’s worth.  Aren’t we better off, as Melissa suggests, in focusing “on a positive message all can unite around?”

Casting out the infidels will likely not have much benefit and comes with quite a bit of cost.

As Steve Benen notes, the RNC is among those advertising on WND.  And, while I’d love to see them not legitimate the loons by sponsoring their websites, it’s true that loons vote.  And they’re not going to go away just because the RNC doesn’t give them any money.  Indeed, it may well just prove to them that both parties are corrupt.

The more important criticism is that Jerome Corsi, the loon that sparked Jon to say “Enough” is the yahoo who was behind the Swift Boat Veterans slime group that attacked John Kerry so successfully in 2004.  While some of us on the Right denounced them at the time, most sat by and figured the ends justified the means.

At this point, I’d just be happy if the GOP can find leaders who rise above the Birther and Death Panels fray and put forth principled alternatives to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi programs.  Aside from continuing the status quo, what’s the Republican plan for solving the impending financial collapse of our health care system?  What’s the Republican vision of American security policy?  Does it envision continuing nation-building in every country where Islamist terrorists might live?  How do we pay down the national debt and get back on the road to fiscal sanity?

Ultimately, focusing on that might take the spotlight off the crazies.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A news executive has a plan to start charging for online news.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations. “How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air,” Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night. But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content.”

Barber is the latest leading executive to suggest the newspaper industry has to radically overhaul its existing business model.  Rupert Murdoch said in May that he expected his News Corporation newspaper websites to start charging for access within a year. The News Corp chairman and chief executive said free newspaper websites were a “flawed” business model. Murdoch’s rival, the New York Times, could begin charging for online news within the next three to four weeks.

Barber said last night that the Financial Times had pioneered the concept of a “frequency model”, giving access to a limited number of articles on the web before asking users to subscribe.  “We are seeing sustained and growing revenue as a result of our strategy of premium pricing for quality, niche global content – crucial at a time of weakening advertising,” he added. “Many news organisations are following suit in charging, latterly the New York Times which had previously come down in favour of free access to its own content.”

The Financial Times website, FT.com, has more than 1.3 million non-paying registered users worldwide, with another 110,000 paying subscribers.

The only news organizations that have had even a modicum of success at charging for online content are:  WSJ. FT.   That’s the list.  Both, not coincidentally, are specialized publications aimed at businessmen and provide news not readily available elsewhere.  Often, the subscriptions are paid for by companies or at least written off on taxes.

If NYT goes behind a subscription wall, people will simply stop reading the NYT.  I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks that would be a good thing; the paper puts out some extraordinarily good reporting on a wide variety of topics.  It would be missed.  But not for long.  Its best reporters would simply move on to a company less stupidly run.

I’m a news junkie and make a living consuming and analyzing news.   I do some occasional reporting but, fundamentally, I’m a commentator not a reporter.  But, even though I wouldn’t really miss $60 a year, I won’t subscribe to the NYT if they go through with their plan.  I simply can’t imagine that enough others would do so to keep the paper afloat.

Newspapers have been going under at a fantastic rate for years now.  Most cities are down to one significant paper.  But, aside from niche consumers of local news, no one who doesn’t make a living in journalism much cares.  So long as one can chose from a dozen or more terrific products online, who needs the local paper, anyway?

The Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear an appeal from the MPAA, thus letting stand a lower court ruling that Cablevision’s new remote DVR technology does not constitute a “retransmission” of the programming and thus require additional fees.

The new DVR service would work by storing a viewer’s recordings in computers housed at the cable operator, rather than in a box attached to the viewer’s TV set, making it easier and cheaper for cable and phone companies to offer a recording service. The court said Monday it wouldn’t disturb a federal appeals court ruling that the technology doesn’t violate copyright laws.

Cablevision has said it would launch the service as soon as this summer. Spokesmen for other pay-TV companies, including Time Warner Cable Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., said they are looking into using such a technology but declined to comment on when they might do so.

The decision is likely to accelerate adoption of DVRs in the U.S., potentially eating into ad revenue at TV networks. As a group, people watching recorded shows on DVRs fast-forward past more than half the commercials, according to network and advertising executives. That makes DVR viewers less valuable to networks selling ad time than the viewers who watch shows live.

But DVR viewers also watch more TV, some network executives say, making an argument for a potential upside to broader DVR penetration. The technology was already in 30% of the U.S. households with televisions as of May, according to Nielsen Co.

That last part is certainly right.  With the advent of DVR technology, combined with the ability to watch older shows via Netflix and/or Roku, I spend less time watching television and but see more programming.  Indeed, I’m at the point where I find even fast-forwarding through commercials an annoyance.

I’m not at all enthusiastic about having the cable companies, who are in bed with the TV networks, in control of my programming and can’t imagine switching to that sort of service.  Yes, having a massive on-demand inventory of current shows would be a boon.  But my strong guess is that, in short order, they’ll make it difficult or impossible to skip commercials.

The FDA now has the power to regulate what cigarettes taste like. For the children.

President Barack Obama cited his own long struggle to quit the cigarettes he got hooked on as a teenager as he signed the nation’s strongest-ever anti-smoking bill Monday and praised it for providing critically needed protections for kids. “The decades-long effort to protect our children from the harmful effects of tobacco has emerged victorious,” Obama said at a signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.

[...]

Before dozens of invited guests, including children from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, the president signed legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate tobacco. Obama accused the tobacco industry of targeting young people, exposing them to a “constant and insidious barrage of advertising where they live, where they learn and where they play. Most insidiously, they are offered products with flavorings that mask the taste of tobacco and make it even more tempting.” The new law bans candy and fruit flavors in tobacco products, and it limits advertising that could attract young people.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act also allows the FDA to lower the amount of addiction-causing nicotine in tobacco products and block misleading labels such “low tar” and “light.” Tobacco companies also will be required to cover their cartons with large graphic warnings. The law won’t let the FDA ban nicotine or tobacco outright.

Just think how far Obama might have gone had it not been for Joe Camel.

Do they still make those bubble gum cigarettes they had when I was a kid?  Presumably, they’re not banned by this action, since they’re not made of tobacco.  But they could theoretically encourage kids to smoke.

And couldn’t any advertising attract young people?

Photo by Flickr user Joan Thewlis under Creative Commons license.

Here we go again:  The government is looking to get into the business of regulating blogs, reports AP’s Deborah Yao.

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon. What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

At OTB, we mark even rather obvious advertisements as “advertisements.”  People are still apparently confused, as I’ll get the occasional comment (and see many at other blogs) questioning how we could write one thing and yet be endorsing some conflicting product/candidate/cause on the sidebar.

Further, Yao is taking a handful of cases — some of which I suspect are apocryphal — and generalizing.  The “trips to Europe” thing is almost certainly the BlogAds/Dutch Tourism Board trip that several of us participated in three years ago.  Despite the fact that the very conditions of the offer required full disclosure and that none of us regularly wrote about Holland, this somehow offended the ethical sensibilities of journalists and continues to stick in their craws.

I occasionally get offers to write posts — or publish posts others have written — for money.  I’ve always declined.  But the free laptop and $500 gift cards and “even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post” that Yao whines about are mythological or so incredibly rare as to be meaningless.  The number of blogs on which a 200-word post would be worth “thousands of dollars” would not require the use of both hands to count.   (Advertisers:  If you disagree, please contact me.  I don’t need a new laptop but for enough thousands I’ll be happy to extol the virtues of Viagra, Online Poker, or Ron Paul.  I’ll need a couple extra thousands on the last.)

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

Seriously?  That’s just insane.  In the interests of full disclosure:  Any link on OTB that offers to sell you a product is some sort of advertisement.  This is a blog, not a store.

“If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk,” said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices. “Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.”

How, precisely, would this work in practice?  At a store, I pretty much presume anyone trying to sell me something is an employee of the store, even if they’re not wearing a name badge of some sort.  Online, however, isn’t caveat emptor the obvious rule?

The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.  Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.  The blogosphere is quite different. “Rules are set by the individuals who create the blog,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Some people will accept payments and free gifts, and some people won’t. There’s no established norm yet.”

But journalists employed by someone else get paid.   That’s the nature of employment.  Independent bloggers, by contrast, are entrepreneurs.  Actually, most make no money or barely cover expenses, making them, in effect, hobbyists.

Even beyond that, the notion of journalistic purity vs. blogospheric greed is nonsense.  Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks rake in huge amounts of money from advertisers and sponsors.  The difference is that those outlets are compartmentalized whereas blogs tend not to be.  As I noted in the Bloggers in Amsterdam post, “I am not only the chief writer for the site but also the publisher, advertising manager, circulation manager, human resources director, and IT manager.”  Once upon a time, that was true for newspaper owners, too, before they became big businesses.

Existing FTC rules already ban deceptive and unfair business practices. The proposed guidelines aim to clarify the law and for the first time specifically include bloggers, defined loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online.

But here’s the difference: Most media companies have huge staffs and access to legal counsel.  Do we seriously expect people to hire lawyers before launching a mommy blog?  Apparently so.

If the guidelines are approved, bloggers would have to back up claims and disclose if they’re being compensated — the FTC doesn’t currently plan to specify how. The FTC could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers, and it could ask the Justice Department to sue for civil penalties. Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews.

So parents keeping blogs to update family members on their child’s first steps technically would fall under the FTC guidelines, though they likely would have little to worry about unless they accept payments or free products and write about them. But they would need to think twice if, for instance, they praise parenting books they’ve just read and include links to buy them at a retailer like Amazon.com Inc.

That’s because the guidelines also would cover the broader and common practice of affiliate marketing, in which bloggers and other sites get a commission when someone clicks on a link that leads to a purchase at a retailer. In such cases, merchants also would be responsible for actions by their sales agents — including a network of bloggers.

This is simply insane.  I tried Amazon affiliate links in the early days of OTB, found them ineffective, and removed them.  Others, like InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds, use them to what I presume (given that they’ve maintained them for years) is great success.  But there’s nothing insidious about the practice:  Books and other products are listed and people are free to buy them, with a tiny cut going to the site that posted the link.  You’re rather obviously at Amazon’s site and have to jump through quite a few hoops to order the item. Where’s the danger to consumers in that?

This sort of thing is more problematic:

Over the holidays, IZEA ran a campaign in which bloggers who don’t normally shop at Sears Holdings Corp.’s Kmart stores were given $500 gift cards and encouraged to write about their experiences in the stores. To reduce the chance of a bad review, the retailer said it avoided bloggers who previously made negative remarks about the company.

[...]

Mandatory disclosures could change how reviews are perceived online because many Internet users might never imagine that bloggers get compensation. “I don’t think, for the average reader of a blog, it immediately comes to mind that they actually have a relationship with the company,” said Sam Bayard, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You think about (blogs) as personal, informal, off the cuff and coming from the heart — unfiltered, uncensored and unplanned.”

Now, this is something I would decline. In addition to not being sure how I’d spend $500 at KMart, it strikes me as a bit sleazy.  On the other hand, I’m not sure why the FTC would investigate something like this but allows the common practice of product placements in movie and television programs.  Most viewers are unaware that the hero’s wearing of an Omega watch was secured by payment of princely sums.

Surely, the federal government has better things to do than scouring blogs looking for undisclosed conflicts of interest?

UPDATE: Aaron Brazell, who tipped me to the story on Twitter, weighs in on his blog (as well as the comments on this post).  The gist of his argument is that nothing is changing but the medium:

Businesses are still subject to FTC regulations that protect the consumer from the overrun of over-capitalistic companies trying to beat the competition at the expense of the consumer. This new regulation will simply update existing regulations to more specifically clarify that, hey, yes, companies have to play by the same rules when it comes to bloggers too. Companies should be enforcing their legal requirements on anyone peddling their goods in a quid pro quo or financial exchange. This is fair trade.

I don’t disagree with that.  The problem with the proposed change — or perhaps the misreporting of it by Yao — is that it appears to target bloggers as publishers rather than merely extend existing limitations on advertising to blogs.   I’ve got no problem with the FTC going after advertisers for illegal practices. If a blogger engages in payola, though, the penalty should be exposure and loss of journalistic credibility, not fines from the FTC.

UPDATE II:  Ed Morrissey has more thoughts on this, focusing on the Amazon Affiliates program.  This, though, strikes me as the heart of the matter:

Bloggers do not occupy either a public-airwave space or a space with shortage of bandwidth.  They speak openly and freely, and have to maintain their credibility with their readers in order to maintain the kind of readership where these links start to accrue revenue back to the blogger.  If readers think the blogger is nothing more than a shill, then readers will disappear.  The free market takes care of itself in the blogosphere, especially in terms of credibility.

Quite right.

Story link from Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) via Twitter. Image via Tom Kirkendall.

It is a truism that well-intentioned attempts by government to curb bad behavior often spawn unforeseen and perhaps worse behavior.

A classic, recurring example of that is the now-35-year-old effort to curb the influence of campaign contributions on politics, which has spawned the use of PACs, 527 groups, and other insidious activities far more harmful than single wealthy individuals giving money to favored candidates. (Not to mention forcing politicians to spend most of their time raising money instead of doing their jobs.)

Remember Monday’s ruling in Caperton v. Massey Coal Company that “[e]lected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench”?  I noted at the time that the vagueness of the ruling makes it impossible to know, a priori, where the line is drawn.  Brendan Nyhan points to an even worse problem with the ruling that I suspect Justice Kennedy and his co-signers never contemplated:

Imagine that you are a business or individual want to influence a state supreme court and you have large amounts of money at your disposal. This ruling may prevent you from directly obtaining favorable rulings from justices you help elect in cases to which you are a party. But you can still help put someone on the court who is ideologically sympathetic to your beliefs. And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

In a totally unrelated matter, Jacob Sullum notes a perverse effect of what seems to be inevitable:  a law allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco products.  Both the House and Senate versions are trying to grapple with an obvious consequence and trying to prevent tobacco companies from claiming that their products are regulated and therefore approved by the FDA.

FDA regulation of tobacco products is inherently misleading, promising safety improvements it won’t deliver. Even if the Senate version of this provision ends up in the final law, the FDA could still plausibly argue that a completely truthful statement such as “this product is regulated by the FDA” would “reasonably be expected to mislead consumers regarding the harmfulness of the product.” The plausibility of that argument reflects the ineffectiveness of FDA regulation, not the sneakiness of the tobacco companies.

It was one thing when tobacco labeling and advertising were regulated as simple commerce.  But, naturally, if the Food and Drug Administration is signing off on the packing and allowing the product to be sold for public ingestion, it must be safe, right?  I mean, the FDA isn’t in the business of allowing unsafe products to be sold, right?  Conversely, doesn’t putting their stamp of approval on a product known for more than half a century to be dangerous if used as intended undermine public confidence in other drugs and foodstuffs?

Jennifer Collins observes, “I can tell that I am deep in exam grading because when I read news updates about the Craigslist killer, instead of pondering questions like whether his girlfriend will continue to stand by him, I am focusing on all the great questions that can come out of the case for use on a crim pro exam next year.”

Conversely, I can tell that I watch virtually no television news because I read the words “Craigslist killer” and was expecting a discussion of some new application that rendered Craigslist obsolete in much that way that Craigslist killed newspaper classified advertising.

Jeff Bercovici reports the demise of his own job:

For nearly two years I’ve been covering the media industry’s bad news on this blog, including some that’s hit very close to home. Now it hits closer still: Condé Nast Portfolio is closing.

Our editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, just broke the news to staff, saying the decision had been made “because of financial reasons at Advance,” Condé Nast’s parent company. “It’s not anything that the company wanted to do.” She said she was informed by Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. this morning of the decision.

Lipman said the magazine is ahead of its business plan on various business metrics, and also noted that it won a National Magazine Award last year after publishing only a handful of issues, a very accomplishment. But a sharp and extended downturn in ad revenue has made success elusive.

And, no, Newhouse did not make the magazine’s list of Worst CEOS Ever.

Advertising is in a horrific crunch period and those of us with business models that rely on advertising dollars are well aware of the fact.  Microsoft['s online division] lost $575 million last quarter because of it. Obviously, putting out a glossy print magazine comes with more overhead than running a blog or even an online-only magazine.

Erick Schofeld argues that, even aside from the industry-wide woes, Portfolio’s business model was dubious.

Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact.

That’s probably right.

Commenter Bithead alerts me to a cross-blog debate that I somehow missed between Patrick Frey and Jeff Goldstein over Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope Obama fails” line at CPAC and the ensuing media frenzy.  Essentially, Patrick argues that conservatives should be more careful about what they say so as to avoid being distorted in the media and Jeff retorts that conservatives should be free to say what they want and expect to be treated honorably.

As a general matter, I’m with Jeff on this one.  I’m tired of obviously benign remarks being portrayed in the worst possible light for the sake of controversy and think it’s the duty of all good pundits to cry Foul when it’s being done. I’m equal opportunity in that regard.  When Joe Biden got charged with racism for calling Obama bright, clean, and articulate, I had his back.  When Team McCain claimed Obama called Sarah Palin a pig, I begged to differ.

Had Limbaugh delivered the “I hope Obama fails” line in the course of a three hour stream of consciousness monologue in the course of his daily radio show, I’d defend it, too.  But he didn’t.  It was part of a prepared speech with a major media presence and deliberately crafted to get precisely the reaction it got.   Of course “I want Obama to fail” was going to make the headlines.  He’d have been disappointed if it hadn’t!

Rush is a provocateur and a showman.  Ginning up controversy is free publicity which drives up interest in his show and thus his audience and his ability to charge “confiscatory advertising rates.”  Good on him for mastering his craft so well.

But I’m not going to then turn around and treat his deliberate provocation as part of a serious debate.

I actually seldom watch commercials these days, owing to my DVR.  But we’re visiting my mother-in-law and doing it old school tonight.   Several spots have taken on unintended meanings in light of the Obama confirmation debacles.

Any TurboTax ad, naturally, makes me think of Tim Geithner.  They’re advertising wall-to-wall but, not surprisingly, have not taken advantage of the tie-in.

Particularly amusing was a spot earlier this evening — perhaps Connecticut local but likely national — that featured several people holding up signs bragging that they had, for example, owed the IRS $200,000 but paid only $30,000.   I was like, great, maybe they had a shot at Commerce Secretary.  Instead, they were trying to get viewers to call a toll free number for similar help for those over their heads with taxes.

UPDATE:  I’m reminded of teaching political science classes during the latter days of the Clinton administration, when it seems that it was impossible to go 15 minutes without committing an unintentional double entendre.

An newspaper advocacy ad touting the virtues of the F-22 Raptor is displayed among stories about the ailing economy, in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Faced with a national economic crisis and a new president, the defense industry is itself playing defense. Its latest lobbying message: Weapons systems aren

Andrew Exum catches something that we online-only news consumers missed:

Those of you who still read the paper copy of the Washington Post in the morning could not have helped but notice the full-page color advertisement for the F-22 in today’s front section. The really interesting thing about the advertisement was that it made the case for the F-22 based upon two things:

1. National Security
2. American Jobs

And this, folks, is why the F-22 is never ever going away. Because at this stage, it’s defenders have all but abandoned the increasingly laughable idea that manned aircraft is the way of the future and have begun to call the F-22 what it actually is: a massive federal jobs program.

Yup. And a smart advertising campaign, too.

The thing is, even for a guy like me — who has been critical of spending our money on not just one but two new fighter-interceptors when we’re in a budget crunch and fighting two low-tech wars — this makes sense. If you’re trying to trim the defense budget and focus on the wars we’re actually fighting, spending as much money as we have spent on the F-22 is embarrassing. But if you’re trying to stimulate the economy and you’ve decided budget deficits don’t matter in the near term, there are many worse ways to preserve jobs than by spending money on the F-22. The only irony is watching all these free market, fiscal conservatives suddenly find their inner Karl Marx and go all command economy on us when it comes to big defense programs.

Well, if you’re going to spend tons of your grandchildren’s tax dollars, you might as well 1) bring jobs to the district and 2) buy cool military toys.   I agree that unmanned is the wave of the future — if not the present.  But F-22s are undeniably a good jobs program.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I found this year’s crop of Super Bowl commercials pretty lackluster. At one point, I speculated that perhaps Madison Avenue decided that it would be in poor taste to spend scads of money on commercials during an economic downturn. Then I remembered it was Madison Avenue I was thinking of and discarded that theory. Whatever the reason, though, it was a down year for the art.

There were a few notable exceptions, though, with Bridgestone and NBC itself easily leading the pack in entertainment value and creativity.

As per usual, viewers can vote on the best ones. I voted for the Bud Light meeting, Bridgestone’s Mr. & Mrs. Potatohead and Astronauts spots, Hulu, the (widely unshown) Ashley Madison spot, and (my personal favourite) the Heroes of the Gridiron NBC self-promo:

This billboard sign was mocking the $300 Divorce signs that have littered Toronto the past year or two

The 9th Circuit has upheld Los Angeles bans on billboards, saying no 1st Amendment issues were at stake.

Outdoor advertising company Metro Lights LLC had argued that the city could not prohibit new “off-site” signs — images that advertise products not sold on the immediate property — while at the same time selling advertising space on city-owned bus benches and kiosks. Metro Lights had accused the city of auctioning off “1st Amendment rights to the highest bidder.”

“This is strong, if rather sloganeering, language, but after reviewing the case law on which Metro Lights relies, we believe it to be little more than a canard,” the court wrote.

Howard Bashman has a good write-up on the case.

While my instincts are generally libertarian and to be dubious of anything coming out of the 9th Circuit, this strikes me as a no-brainer.  Decades of case law make clear that localities can impose time, place, and manner restrictions on speech in order to achieve public policy goals incidental to said speech.  Clearly, the city’s purpose here was a reasonable limitation in order to improve the aesthetic quality of the community rather than a backdoor attempt to regulate speech.

Metro Lights LLC is no doubt harmed by the law, since they’re in the outdoor advertising business.  But the harm isn’t to their free speech rights but rather to their commercial interests.  And they’re no more harmed than, say, newspapers and magazines denied the right to publish advertisements from tobacco and liquor companies.

That the city is selling outdoor advertising while prohibiting others from doing likewise is perhaps unfair but it’s hardly unusual.  For example, many states restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages to state-run ABC stores and many also have state-run lotteries while prohibiting private ones.  In any case, it’s not a free speech issue.

Photo by Flickr user Word Freak under Creative Commons license.