#john koblin

[funtime-error]

🎮 AT&T will end HBO as we know it

Edmund Lee and John Koblin, reporting for The New York Times:

AT&T executives said all the right things during the long prelude to the company’s $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which was completed last month. They acknowledged that the corporate culture of a Dallas-based telecommunications giant was different from that of the more freewheeling media and entertainment concerns in New York and California. They pledged to take a hands-off approach to the company’s crown jewel, HBO, which has won endless Emmys while generating billions in profits.

But the town hall meeting suggested that AT&T would not be a passive corporate parent. [...]

“We need hours a day,” [AT&T's John] Stankey said, referring to the time viewers spend watching HBO programs. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.”

Continuing the theme, he added: “I want more hours of engagement. Why are more hours of engagement important? Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow’s world.”

On the surface, this sounds like an astonishingly stupid plan. However, there is some logic.

The internet is slowly killing old media, including the cable bundle where HBO's parent company Time Warner lived.

Time Warner knew this and sold itself (including HBO) to AT&T.

AT&T spent billions on Time Warner because it wants to get into the advertising business and needs content to put around the ads.

Advertising is a horizontal business that monetizes best with lots of content so you can run more ads.

HBO is a vertical business that makes a small selection of content so good you have to buy a subscription (Game of Thrones, Insecure, Westworld, etc.).

As you can see, HBO's old model is completely counter to AT&T's plans for Time Warner!

John Stankey seems very upfront that AT&T will spend the next year dismantling HBO as we know it.

HBO employees are presumably unhappy about this, which is why this story (which is unflattering to Stankey and AT&T) was leaked to the NYT.

TLDR: AT&T wants to sell ads, not HBO subscriptions. Enjoy HBO's high-quality programming while it lasts.

🎮 funtime-error

[mediamattress]

The Mostly Sexless Sex Scandal That Shook ESPN

By John Koblin, Deadspin (June 6, 2013)

A few hours after the 2009 Home Run Derby, Steve Phillips bought Brooke Hundley a drink. They were at the bar of St. Louis's Millenium Hotel, a block from Busch Stadium, where more than a dozen ESPN staffers had gathered after wrapping up another day's work during MLB's extended All-Star weekend. Hundley was a 22-year-old from Colorado making $10.96 an hour as an ESPN production assistant. Phillips was the former general manager of the Mets who'd spent the previous four years as a baseball analyst at ESPN. They'd met there in St. Louis, and Phillips had clearly taken a shine to Hundley. "Denver chick," he would call her. "Look at this little thing," he'd said to Chris Berman, one of his derby booth mates, as Hundley escorted Phillips from the stadium to a production truck. "She's going to be my bodyguard."

Phillips and Hundley had barely spoken to one another, however, and now here he was, delivering her a screwdriver at the hotel bar. Hundley put the drink down—it tasted of pure vodka, and she couldn't stand it—and headed to the bathroom in the hotel lobby. She came out and found Phillips in the hallway. She shouted over to him, "What were you doing with that drink? Are you trying to get me drunk? It was really strong." He approached her. He put his hand on her shoulder and said he'd never do that. He told her she was pretty. He touched her chest and kissed her. "You should come upstairs with me," Phillips said, as Hundley would later recall. "I got a suite."

And thus began a relationship that in a matter of months would metastasize into the biggest sex scandal in ESPN history—"a 'Fatal Attraction' freakout," in the words of the New York Post, where the story made the front page two days running. It was a low moment for the network, which already had a reputation as a handsy, sex-crazed Connecticut Babylon where the talent freely chased the help around the office. The consequences were numerous and immediate. A contentious little feud broke out between this site and ESPN. Talented people lost their jobs. Bristol executives went so as far to tell employees that boinking each other would mean trouble. "This wasn't just about Steve Phillips and Brooke Hundley," Jim Miller, co-author of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All the Fun, told me. "That episode set in motion a hysterical reaction on the part of ESPN leading to significant collateral damage."

Read More

[beatyourwings]

The mystery began almost immediately. Covers posted three columnist photos—one next to the byline, one at the top of the page, and one in the body of her column. The seemingly bewigged woman in the first one didn't look anything like the blonde in the other two. In the second column, another photo appeared, this one showing the blonde posing with another woman and an Asian guy named Justin. A commenter pointed out that the same photo could be found on the 'Hot Chicks with Douchebags' website. Were all these photos of the same person? It didn't seem like it. And were all these photos actually of Sarah Phillips?

I'm a day late here, but y'all have to read John Koblin's incredible investigation into ESPN.com's employment of a possible scam-artist.

[tradereads]

On Nov. 7, a memo was handed out to Newsweek reporters and editors. The note detailed a new process in how to pitch stories.

“Stories are generated in a variety of ways, from chance conversations with Tina or other senior editors…” the memo began.

It read like something one might find in Journalism 101 — not at a legendary weekly magazine.

Original Article

[tinaspacey]

Un cane di nome Scout

A luglio, quando era ancora direttore del New York Times, Bill Keller si lamentava del fatto che nella redazione tutti volevano scrivere un libro. “Libri sul basket, sulla Cina, sul basket in Cina. Libri sulla famiglia Bush, sulla famiglia Obama, libri di cucina, libri di libri, di puzzle, di cinema. Due editor hanno perfino scritto un libro sui loro cani: contemporaneamente!”.

Viene fuori che uno dei due libri sui cani è scritto dalla nuova direttrice del New York Times, Jill Abramson. Raising a dog named Scout, è il titolo. Su Twitter, John Koblin fa notare che sul Times è già stato recensito due volte.