It seems December 2008 will be a month of layoffs, cutbacks and shutdowns in many industries. This sucks.
Hard times demand good information. Unfortunately, a downturn cultivates misinformation like a petri dish grows mold. There are two reasons for this. First, a tiny spark of panic will ignite a total breakdown of common sense. Desperate for direction, people will believe almost anything. (Aside: Now would be a great time to start a cult.) And second, the people who actually know what’s going on will get very quiet. Wouldn’t you? For the next few months, you’ll hear a lot of false reports in the news (or more likely, on blogs), and no voice of authority will speak up to knock them down.
My job is going to get harder, and so is that of every business journalist. Be careful about what you believe in the next few months as we all try to find our way out of this mess.
A highlight from the holiday weekend was seeing They Might Be Giants perform their entire Flood album at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Friday. (”It’s a brand new record! For 1990!”)
Here’s the thing about rock concerts: They aren’t very much fun. Concert venues treat fans like cattle. The lines are long, the tickets expensive, the beer warm. Usually you have to stand up for three straight hours. Depending on the crowd, there’s probably somebody right in front of you who is so annoying they distract from the rest of the show. It’s hard to see the stage. Occasionally the volume is painfully loud, or there’s a light shining in your eyes. Bathrooms are a disaster. Parking is a joke.
But when you leave, you forget about these things. You remember the music. And the friends you were with. And the rocking out. And how fantastic it was to watch a band play that song that you’ve listened to 65 times on your iPod.
“A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.” — “Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death,” The New York Times.
What??
“Whensoever a man transferreth his right, or renounceth it, it is either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself, or for some other good he hopeth for thereby. For it is a voluntary act: and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
Story 1: Journalism is dying because journalists now must compete with bloggers and other user-generated online media. Citizen journalism is gaining in influence as volunteer enthusiasts realize they can cover the news as well as or better than the dinosaur media. The democratization of media means professional journalists can no longer cling to power as the gatekeepers of information. The only way professional journalists will survive is to immerse themselves in new technologies – TypePad, Flip video, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Story 2: Journalism is dying because, for all known memory, it has been bankrolled by traditional advertising, and traditional advertising is in a slump. Companies are cutting ad budgets because of the recession. Moreover, advertisers are finding better ROI in lower-cost, higher-impact marketing of all sorts, from product placements in TV shows to sponsorship of events. Online advertising is still a low-impact, paper-thin segment that commands far lower rates than traditional broadcast and print. The only way professional journalists will survive is to apply their skills to specialty publications that cater to specific, advertiser-friendly audiences, or seek other sources of funding such as grants, donations and corporate underwriting.
One of these stories is true. The other is 95% hype. Do you know which is which?
Route modifications – shorten G, operate N via Manhattan Bridge late nights, eliminate W and extend Q to Astoria, operate M to Broad rush hours, eliminate Z, add J local service.
Increased headways and loading guidelines during non-rush hours – headways increase from 8 to 10 minutes on ADEFGJMNQR on Saturdays and the ADEFGNQR on Sundays; headways increase from 20 to 30 minutes from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.
MTA also wants to cut some low-ridership/redundant bus service, eliminate jobs (management, station booth managers) and cut back on (ugh) cleaning. The MTA’s budget presentation says they are trying to make budget and still: “Fulfill fundamental mission of getting people where they need to go.”
Okay, let’s talk about the cuts. As I wrote earlier, we’ll be fine without the W and Z. I hadn’t considered the possibility that they would run the Q all the way out to Astoria once they kill the W, but that’s a good solution. Confirmed that they want to stop running the M all the way to south Brooklyn during rush hours, which is a bummer. The R train is going to get crowded. And the G… [long silence]… That poor train…
Most serious is increasing the overnight space between trains from 20 to 30 minutes. Psychologically, there’s a huge difference between waiting 19 minutes for a train and waiting 29 minutes. We’ll have to start carrying timetables for the subway!
About once a month I end up taking the subway during those hazy hours between 2 and 5 a.m. (heading home after parties, or heading out to an airport or Penn Station early in the morning). During the pre-dawn hours, most of the people riding the train here in Brooklyn are working-class immigrants on their way to work. Anybody who works that hard deserves a break. A functional, round-the-clock public transit system is one of the few breaks they get in this hard city. If we’re pinching pennies, let’s find another service to cut.
Check out my new Pantech Breeze: Thin, smooth, sturdy and smartly designed. No goofy lights or music buttons or other tomfoolery. Did I mention this phone is marketed toward the elderly? I frankly don’t care if it’s for old timers, because it is one of the best-designed cell phones I’ve seen. It just looks and feels like a high-quality product, and AT&T offers it at a good price for a quad-band GSM phone with a decent camera. (I switched to AT&T from T-Mobile because my company offers me a corporate discount on AT&T service.) AT&T customer service was polite and efficient in setting up my account. Too soon to know if I love this phone a lot or just a little bit, but I already know it’s a hundred times better than my old Motorola lemon. I like this simple design much better than the tricked-out phones that get all the hype these days. The old folks are all right.
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