jmproffitt

The iPhone is the hot pink line on this graph. Yellow is the Nokia N95. Then a couple BlackBerry models and another Nokia.

Heating + gadget charging? Sign me up!

The newspaper industry today talks a lot about the need to get paid for its content online. But in the late ‘90s, Denver was an experiment in essentially free newspapers. By the peak of the newspaper war, more than 400,000 subscribers to the two Denver papers were paying a penny a day for home delivery. The Rocky was bleeding money and the Post was heading the same direction. So the owners called a truce, asking the Justice Department to approve what’s known as a joint operating agreement, which allows newspapers to merge business operations while maintaining separate and independent newsrooms.

The agreement, written in 2000 under the direction of two seasoned newspaper executives - William Burleigh and Dean Singleton - didn’t even mention the Web. Yet another sign that the Web was an afterthought all along. The Web wasn’t perceived as central to the success of the new business. It was believed that savings from combining the business operations of the two papers plus the ability to raise advertising rates would produce very healthy returns for both owners. Instead, what happened was that classified revenues dropped by more than $100 million a year from the start of the JOA to the end, and national and display categories tanked, too.

This is an amazing speech, written with such absolute clarity from a newspaper leader that ended up losing his job along with everyone else at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

These kinds of warnings have been written for the newspaper industry for a long time now, with special urgency over the last 5 years. But the analyses and recommendations remain largely unheard.

So-called journalists seem to deeply misunderstand their role in society and all the executives are leading the industry, company by company, to oblivion.

(And public media leaders in Alaska are headed down the same road that promises greater market "control" and lower operating costs as they plan to merge some or all of the public radio and TV companies into one.)

Thanks, as always, to the awesome @jayrosen_nyu for pointing out this piece.

Alternative energy is the next big tech market, the one that will spawn the next Google, or Apple, or Microsoft. But guess what? Those companies probably won't be based here. As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his column a few days ago, the Chinese are racing past us. They're investing billions -- in physics, in nanotech, in material science, in fuel cells, in solar. They're going to own this market.

Meanwhile we sit here with our heads up our butts, debating things like a gas tax or whether power plants should have to cut back on CO2 emissions and whether we can make this leap to a new paradigm without hurting our economy (read: without hurting the companies that sell oil and run coal-powered generators and which contribute loads of money to politicians in Congress.)

Fake Steve knows the truth when he sees it.

And where is all this time coming from? Who's losing out? Traditional broadcast or "push" media. The people are doin' it for themselves now. Not entirely. Not evenly across the populace.

But it's happening. And it's growing.

Pay particular attention to the SMS count. More SMS messages are sent globally than Google is searched!

Former NPR C.E.O. Kenneth Stern, who departed in 2008, is atop the pubcasting list, receiving $1,319,541 as part of his four-year contract. Another former exec, PBS C.O.O. Wayne Godwin, who served from 2000 to 2008, was paid $398,063. Current PBS C.E.O. Paula Kerger, $534,500, up from $424,209 at end of fiscal 2007. Rounding out the list, in descending order: Laura Walker, c.e.o. of WNYC Radio, $474,808; Al Jerome, KCET president, $426,688; Jeff Clarke, c.e.o., Northern California Public Broadcasting, $406,501; Neal Shapiro, WNET president, $400,570; Sharon Percy Rockefeller, WETA president, $391,904; Thomas Conway, WNET v.p., $374,321; Daniel Schmidt, WTTW president, $347,491; William Kling, Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media president, $347,217; Jonathan Abbott, WGBH president, $337,870; Jon McTaggart, MPR/APR c.e.o., $313,967; Joseph Bruns, WETA executive v.p., $303,108; Linda O'Bryon, Northern California Public Broadcasting chief content officer, $282,360; Paula Apsell, senior exec producer at WGBH, $278,209; Dean Cappello, chief creative officer, WNYC Radio, $272,072; Deborah Hinton, KCET exec v.p., $251,446; Dennis Haarsager, NPR interim c.e.o., $219,369; and Reese Marcusson, WTTW c.f.o., $214,397.

Of this list, only Kling at MPR and Haarsager at NPR are worth the money. Paula Kerger's pay is particularly obscene, given how poorly PBS is run from a strategic perspective -- she's a booster, not a leader. Of course, that's what the stations want (a booster), so it's really their fault, but still.

It is very true you have to pay well to get good talent, even in the nonprofit space. That said, the notion that any of these people would make more than $250,000 annually is absurd. Only those living in Manhattan would need to make more, given the shocking cost of living there.

Some say you have to have well-paid execs so they can hobnob with the rich and powerful in their towns to raise money. That's also true, but it's only relevant if your mission is to be part of, and to reinforce, the existing power structure in your town. If your mission is true public service, the hobnobbing should be an afterthought, not a primary objective.

Please... tell me... who's breaking the $250,000 barrier amongst leaders of homeless shelters? What about women's shelters or rape support groups? Anyone working in mentally or physically disabled services camps getting rich? What about community blogging and news projects? Yeah. That's what I thought.

It's interesting to note that Jack Galmiche, one of the best CEOs and public servants in the public media world, is not on this list. Yet he led the nation in starting up the "Facing the Mortgage Crisis" project in St. Louis.

Perhaps everyone would grab the brass ring if offered, whispering "my precious" all the way to the bank. Shoot, I'd love to make wads of money, too. But in a public service organization? That doesn't seem right to me.

Recommendation: $250,000 cap + a COLA for cities with cost of living indices of 150% above average or higher; absolute cap of $350,000.