David Akin’s On The Hill

The Associated Press is reporting that bloggers are welcome to apply for press passes for the Democratic National Convention in the U.S. The Republicans, on the other hand, are a tad nervous …

“Blogs Welcome at Dems' Convention”
Coverage of this summer's political conventions could be a little more colorful than in the past: Democrats have invited bloggers to apply for media credentials for the party's bash. Republicans remain unsure how to handle the brash voices filling the brave new world of political blogs.
“….For traditional media, both big parties generally rely on rules established by committees of journalists for getting passes to cover Congress. But no such procedure exists for blogs.
Bloggers with Democratic credentials will get the same access as any other media to most of the FleetCenter in Boston. If they need assigned spaces, they'll be asked to pay for phone, furniture rental and other expenses just like mainstream journalists . ..”

The New York Times is taking it on the chin from all sides recently.
(The Jayson Blair scandal is one thing — something that was 'solved' with some new editors.)
The new charges — one critic is from the right and the other is from the left — suggest that some serious rot has set in at what once/is one of the world's great newspapers.
The shot from the right:

“The Worst of Times: A Once-Great Newspaper Has Adopted a Radical Agenda?
The New York Times has transformed itself from a news source to an ideological journal, writes Bill O'Reilly. “In almost every section, a Times reader is confronted with liberal ideology.”

The [more thoughtful and, if you ask me, damning] shot from the left:

Unfit to Print:
By Michael Massing
…The leisureliness of the Times's coverage is especially apparent when compared to that of its top competitor. In recent months, The Washington Post has stood out among US news organizations for its sharp and insightful reporting, in both Washington and Baghdad. Hardly a day goes by that the Post does not publish some revealing story about conflicts within the Bush administration, debates within the intelligence world, Coalition policies in Iraq, and the relations among that country's ethnic, religious, and tribal groups. During the prison scandal, the Post ran an eye-opening three-part series (“The Road to Abu Ghraib”) on the abuses that had occurred not only in Iraq but also in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Qatar—part of a “worldwide constellation” of secret US detention centers.
When it comes to Iraq, the rivalry between the Times and the Post has become “A Tale of Two Papers,” the one late and lethargic, the other astute and aggressive . . .

Massing's original criticism of the NY Times is also an important read on this subject.

Roger Ebert, of course, isn't just any newspaperman. He's one of the world's most famous newspapermen (and I'm using that term not to exclude women who work for newspapers but in the hopes that readers will attach some of that old-fashioned, blue-collar, Matthau-and-Lemon-in-The-Front-Page moxy to the term).
That kind of reputation, no doubt, lets him get away with this column in his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, that is simultaneously an apology, a rallying cry to colleagues and readers, and a denunciation of Conrad Black and David Radler, the two men who have bought, run, and sold hundreds of papers in their day since they nabbed that first one in Sherbrooke, Que. in the 1960s.

” My beloved Sun-Times has taken some body blows recently. The news that our former top bosses were apparently pirates came as a shock; knowing that the paper was solidly profitable, I assumed they were merely skinflints.”

Radler and Black are now under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Ontario Securities Commission, and the U.S. Justice Dept. on allegations they improperly received millions of dollars in payments from Hollinger International Inc., the company they controlled that owns the Sun-Times and other papers.

One of the way-too-smart economists behind the Marginal Revolution blog has posted some very helpful tips on getting through tough books. Number 7 and Number 5, in that order, are my favourites. I highly recommend them to anyone who's having trouble getting through, say, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
In fact, for those reading Shakespeare, you simply must apply Tip Number 7 when you are reading through a Shakespeare play you've never read before.
Come to think of it, Tip Number 7 should apply to any poetry and almost any other play you might come across. Poetry, of course, is all about rhythm and physical feeling words make when they leave your mouth so it makes perfect sense that they are written to be spoken not written to be read silently on the subway to work. Let's try it: You probably read Eliot's “The Waste Land” in college or even high school. Take a look at it again and this time, read it out loud. See? Wasn't that fun? It's a completely different work when you're speaking it. Do it again. You'll hear the poem for the first time all over again. (Tip for those reading poetry or Shakespearean verse: The end of a line does not necessarily mean you should pause. Keep on reading, Pause at commas, just as you would when reading prose. Take a breath at periods no matter where they fall in the poem. But don't be put off by the line breaks. Just push right on through.

One of my favourite Canadians to read out loud is the late great Al Purdy. His poem “The Country North of Belleville” cannot be appreciated without speaking it. In fact, it's impossible to really enjoy most of Purdy's poetry without speaking it.
Plays, too, are written to be spoken aloud, albeit by several people. You can have great fun, alone or with others, by grabbing any G.B. Shaw play, for example, and shouting — that's right, shouting — the play from start to finish. (This works best for Shaw and may work as well for Edward Albee's work but shouting is unlikely to work for the work of Beckett or Ibsen.
And while I'm on the topic of plays, here's another fun exercise you can do with a friend for a play that you're having trouble understanding: Try what's called an Italian line run. This is a technique often used by professional actors during rehearsal when a troupe is having trouble breaking out of an interpretation of a particular scene. The cast will get together and go through the play speaking each line as clearly as they can but also as fast as they can. It's speed-reading aloud of a play. Do that and you'll hear new things and hear new meanings. It's tremendously instructive.
OK: Tip Number 7 on Tyler Cowen's list is “Read the book out loud to yourself or to others.”

Reading out loud is a wonderful thing to do for any work. You will immediately understand what really good writing is all about when you read it out loud. Conversely, you will quickly be able to spot really lousy writing when you start speaking it. Pick up any academic journal in the arts or socials sciences and start reading the first article. See? Didn't I tell you? Lousy writing. Makes no sense.
But I digresss —
Here's all of Cowen's terrific tips:

Yes, today is the hundredth anniversary of “Bloomsday,” June 16, 1904, the day on which the adventures of Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) start. The book, long a favorite of mine, is not nearly as difficult as it is sometimes thought to be.

Here are a few tips for reading otherwise difficult works of fiction:

1. Try reading the last chapter first. Don't obsess over the sequential.

—-snipped

You can read the rest over at [Marginal Revolution]

The following note was sent around to my friends and colleagues in the PR world. Maybe you can help too. Read on: For a story I'm doing for CTV National News, I'm interested in talking to parents of teenaged girls and to the teenaged girls, themselves. Ideally, the girls are no younger than 11-years-old and no older than 13-years-old. The story will be looking at the relationship of young female teens to popular culture, such as television, film, magazine, and newspaper content.

Do you have any friends or colleagues that might want to put themselves and their teenaged daughter on national TV? Naturally, I'm happy to supply more information to our candidate family. Family has to be in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary or Vancouver.

Let me know by e-mail preferably some time before close-of-business Toronto time on Wednesday.

I was sitting one winter evening a few years ago in the parlour of Bob Metcalfe's townhouse on Boston's Back Bay with a plate of chicken and salad perched on my lap when Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, sat down next to me, a plate also perched on his knees.
We were both there as guests of a party held to promote a conference that Metcalfe was involved with as the keynoter and promoter.
Soon, the discussion Berners-Lee (pictured, left) and I had turned to the issue of getting rich from a technology invention. Metcalfe, after all, had paid for his multi-million-dollar townhouse, a beautiful farm on the coast in Maine, and other doo-dads because he invented Ethernet and then went on to found 3Com. But, as Metcalfe himself is fond of saying, he didn't get rich inventing Ethernet, he got rich working his butt off taking overnight trains to every small town in America trying to sell Ethernet.
Berners-Lee came at things from quite the oppositive view. He was a creator, a thinker, interested in toying with ideas rather than patenting them. In fact, he quite specifically declined to patent the Web after creating it while at CERN in Switzerland.
He feels strongly about those who claim intellectual rights too strongly; that such assertions can hurt a technology's adoption, particularly when it's something new like the Web was.
So Berners-Lee missed out on the fabulous wealth enjoyed by others, like Metcalfe, but he still makes a decent living. (I think most recently he held a chair at M.I.T. that Metcalfe endowed).
So it was great news to hear this week that the Finnish Technology Award Foundation gave Berners-Lee this week its Millennium Technology Prize, which comes with a cash award worth 1 million euros. Congratulations, Tim!

I loved Brazil and I'm pretty sure it was Gilliam's Brazil that I loved. Now I want to go rent a recent DVD collection of the movie. Here's a great bit from Aaron Swartz's blog:

If you like Brazil, you might also find interesting the incredible story on discs 2 and 3 of the Criterion Collection edition of the film. (You might look for it at your local library.)

Gilliam’s final cut of Brazil went five or six minutes over the contract he had signed, which meant the studio was allowed to recut it. Studio exec Sid Sheinberg thought that there was something to the film, and that if only the complexity was shaved off, it make a very successful sci-fi love story.

Sheinberg proceeded to have a team re-edit the movie to make it into this form, under the message “Love Conquers All”. Gilliam was furious at this butchering of his film, and demanded the studio release it unedited.

To pressure Universal, Gilliam purchased a full-page ad in Variety, reading. It was all white except for some text reading: “Dear Sid Sheinberg. When are you going to release my film ‘BRAZIL’? Terry Gilliam.” Gilliam also appeared on the Today show with Robert DeNiro to promote the film. When the host noted “You’re having some trouble getting the studio to release the film,” Gilliam responded. “No, I’m not having any trouble with the studio. My problem is with one man: Sid Sheinberg.” Gilliam resorted to a series of private illegal screenings around Hollywood, and eventually showed the film to the LA Film Critics Association, who promptly voted it Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director, even though it hadn’t been released.

Universal finally conceded and released the film mostly as Gilliam intended. But the DVD disc three includes Sheinberg’s edit. Watching it, and the associated commentary by a newspaper columnist, film critic and Brazil fan, is an incredible education in the power of editing over the film.

While using almost all the same footage, Sheinberg’s version tells the completely opposite story. Everything is dumbed-down in service to the love story, almost unthinkly. (As the commentary points out, the edit is forced to glorify terrorism to make the hero more heroic!) The result is an absolutely dreadful film, inept in numerous ways. But by examining why it’s so bad — and remember this film is made from the same raw material — the commentary shows us the genius in the details that make good films so good.

It also shows us why Hollywood films are all so dreadful. Every indepdent thought, every weakness of the hero and sympathetic characteristic of the villain, every ambiguous plot point, is simply eliminated and every subtlety is squashed. The result is a true Hollywood film — a lovestory told by a talentless hack.

[Aaron Swartz]

One of the fun things about the publishing platform this blog uses is that it lets you track the most popular blog entries, based on page views. Here are the top ten for May:

1. Where would you eat in Vancouver? (Posted May 4)
2. [CAJ] Panel: The Blog Revolution (Posted May 7)
3. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! (Posted Dec. 13)
4. Google by the numbers (Posted May 5)
5. Panel: The Blog Revolution (Posted May 3)
6. [CAJ] Kirk Lapointe (Posted May 7)
7. 1 Infinite Loop – The Front Door (Posted Apr. 16)
8. I Infinite Loop — The Icons (Posted Apr. 16)
9. [CAJ] Obligatory hotel shot (Posted May 7)
10. Gas prices; record highs in the U.S., bouncy in Canada (Posted Mar 24)

Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy was in Toronto yesterday and I talked to her about her business. The Globe has the story I wrote but here's an extended version, with more details about Xerox's work to restore its balance sheet:

Communication by now was supposed to be nothing but electronic beeps and burps, the pundits said.

But in fact, so much old-fashioned ink has never been put on so much out-of-style paper.

“”The greatest source of paper growth is the printing of e-mail. Isn't that amazing?,” said Anne Mulcahy, chief executive officer of Xerox Corp., on track to rack up more than $16-billion (U.S.) in sales this year because of the need to print and copy just about anything.

In fact, experts say that not only are people printing things more than ever before, but people want to print things in colour.

Those two trends, analysts say, have opened up some remarkable opportunities for Stamford, Conn.-based Xerox, which as recently as three years ago had been left for dead.

Now, it's a hot investment, with an improving balance sheet, strong cashflow, and a growing market, analysts say.
“Xerox poised to regain quality growth stock status,” said a headline in a recent report by Steve Weber, analyst at SG Cowen Securities Corp. of Boston.

Indeed, one of the meetings Ms. Mulcahy had during a trip to Toronto that ended yesterday was with a group of growth investors, who, she acknowledged, would hardly have given a Xerox CEO the time of day when she took the job in August, 2001.

At that time, the company had $14.1-billion of debt and just $1.7-billion in cash on hand and U.S. securities regulators had found that the company had misstated financial results.

Many thought Ms. Mulcahy would be the last CEO Xerox would ever have but today, with the company's fortunes turned around, she said the problems she inherited were relatively straightforward to fix, particularly when compared to other companies — she mentions Eastman Kodak Co. as an example — which are still trying to find their footing in a digital world.

“I would take those set of problems [I had] over a strong balance sheet with a bad business strategy and no core competencies. So I feel grateful for the assets that I walked into the job with,” said Ms. Mulcahy yesterday.

After hitting an all-time low of $4.20 in October, the stock is now trading around $14. Merrill Lynch analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer, who rates the stock a 'Buy', has a 12-month price target of $18.
“We believe that investor perception of the operational and financial performance [of Xerox] will continue to improve,” Mr. Vleeschhouwer wrote after Xerox released its first quarter results in April.

One of the factors driving investor interest in Xerox now are some relatively new products that enable high-speed, high-volume colour printing.

“We expect color to provide all of the top-line growth we see for 2004-05 and beyond, as high volume digital color printing, a truly disruptive technology, invades the very big market now dominated by offset printing,” Mr. Weber said. “This is virgin territory for Xerox, which clearly is the number one player; with no major competitive threat in view, Xerox's revenue should grow very rapidly.”

SG Cowen does not rate stocks but Mr. Weber believes Xerox should post a profit of 80 cents a share this year and $1.05 a share in 2005.

The key product for Xerox's revenue now and for the next few years is called the iGen3, which is being targeted at print jobs which once could only be done using relatively expensive and time-consuming four-colour Web offset printing — the kind of printing technology used, for example, to put out the Globe and Mail. In Web offset printing, giant rolls of paper are fed through rollers and four different colour inks — black, cyan, magenta, and yellow — are laid down on the paper one at a time. The combination of those four colours produces a full-colour document.

But now, many offset printers are buying or leasing iGen3 machines, which are essentially, $1-million (CDN) colour laser photocopiers. Analysts say that for print runs of up to about 10,000 copies, the iGen3 matches the quality of Web offset printing and can do that at a fraction of the cost and time.

Ms. Mulcahy, though, says it goes beyond just unit cost. High-volume digital printing is also about personalization. That is: With offset printing, the same content must be printed on the entire print run. But with products like Xerox's iGen3, each copy in a print of, say, 10,000 copies can be printed with a unique impression. For large corporations, the ability to cheaply print presonalized client statements and other customized documents is a boon.

“What it enables is this whole new industry of personalization that you could never do on offset,” said Ms. Mulcahy.
Mr. Weber estimates that Xerox's iGen product line was worth $60-million (U.S.) in sales last year and will be worth $240-million this year and $520-million next year. By 2008, the iGen could add as much as $1.56-billion a year to Xerox's overall sales.

“The number of short-run color pages printed appears to be growing by 6-8%. It seems quite plausible that, in 2008, 25% of the projected 230 billion short-run color impressions will be printed on digital systems; if so, digital print volume will grow at a steep 48-50% rate over the next five years,” Mr. Weber says.

Ms. Mulcahy says Xerox believes there is a market worth $18-billion in sales a year in opportunities where a high-volume digital printer can displace Web offset technology.

“And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It'll just get better and better and better,” she said.

So, while Dell, HP and a host of others fight it out in the low-end market for colour printers, copiers, and multi-function peripherals — machines that can print, scan and fax documents — aimed at the consumer and small-office, home-office (SOHO) market, Xerox will extend its technology portfolio at the high-end corporate market.

“It's a decision we came to three years ago, that focus is usually important on getting a return. Understanding what you do well and aligning your resources behind it and being brutal about ensuring that there all supported by core competencies and capabilities that differentiate you in the marketplace is a big deal. So we exited the SOHO business. That's not us. Would be be number one? The answer was no. But where we participate, we'll be number one.”

Ms. Mulcahy is also paying close attention to Xerox's balance sheet. Debt is being rapidly paid off, one factor which is helping Xerox generate what Mr. Weber describes as “terrific cash flow” of as much as $1.1-billion to $1.2-billion this year and next.

Analysts expect Xerox to use this free cashflow to buy back two to three per cent of its oustanding common shares each year. Mr. Weber also believes that interest Xerox earns on its cash reserves will generate as much as $100-million a year by 2008.
“We intend to continue pay down debt and get in a stronger position,” Ms. Mulcahy said. “And I think, going forward, we'll look at options like investments or technology acquisitions. But there's no question we are looking at options that are available to us now that haven't been for a number of years.”