AllThingsD » Robert MacMillan

Short, Shorter, Shortest!

Peter Kafka — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:13:20 +0000

Michael Kinsley, writing in The Atlantic, takes some 1,800 words to argue that newspaper stories are too long, and that Internet stories “get to the point.”

Robert MacMillan, writing for Reuters, takes almost 700 words to argue that there’s a lot of lousy and long writing on the Internet, too.

They’re both right! And both worth reading! And this post is 64 words long.

Mel Karmazin's Wish List: More Satellite Radios, Fewer Journalists

Peter Kafka — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:23:21 +0000

Sales of new satellite radio players are doing just fine, Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin tells Reuters. That’s more important for the company than ever because car sales, which traditionally drove the company’s revenue, don’t seem likely to bounce back for quite some time.

Karmazin credits some of his sales success to a new ad campaign. I guess he has to say that inasmuch as he approved the campaign, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve seen this ad several times, but until I read this interview, I had no idea it was for Sirius (SIRI):

Meanwhile, maybe it’s just self-interest/projection, but I was struck by the fact that Karmazin seemed to go out of his way to tell the Reuters staff how little he thought of it.

Or maybe he was talking about journalists in general: After being greeted by a dozen Reuters reporters at the company’s Global Media Summit,” Karmazin declared that if he was running the news service, only one of them would be employed.

Here’s Reuters media reporter Robert MacMillan’s account of the exchange, via Twitter:

New York Times's Front Page: Worth $29 Million a Year?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:46:36 +0000

Snap consensus on the New York Times’s (NYT) decision to start selling space on its front page to advertisers: What took you so long?

In another era, the move would have occasioned finger-wagging from a certain kind of journalistic moralizer. But I think that any moralizers left are busy job-hunting or thinking about new careers. And the Times certainly needs the cash.

But how much cash will this provide? Reuters’s excellent Robert MacMillan takes some preliminary guesstimates from the New York Post and does his own rough math. He figures the Times could pull in $28.6 million a year if it sells the inventory every day of the year. For comparison, that’s a little more than nine percent of the company’s November sales.

Very nice, especially given that this is essentially found money that the Times can count on as along it still has a sales staff and a print edition. But at this rate, that may not be long. Again: What took you so long?