Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

There’s a fascinating article this morning from the Wall Street Journal, reporting that NBC is shipping its writing work overseas to writers unaffiliated with the Writers Guild of America. It looks like Hollywood is yet another industry (on top of software, radiology, and investment banking) which is looking — in thanks to the WGA strike — at offshore outsourcing.

For anyone interested in a detailed, play-by-play of the WGA strike, Los Angeles attorney Jonathan Handel has a well thought out, detailed analysis of the day to day developments in his blog.

For an otherwise, sort half-vacation day that Monday was, nothing topped the strange saga of the case of the cloned press release. Basically, a press release(credited to a new firm “HD AmeriTV”) showed up on one of the marginal “free PR release” services, and was picked up by a bunch of venture capital blogs. However, quite a few of them noticed that the PR was almost a word-for-word copy of a release from Joost a few months back announcing their $45M funding.

Followers of Southern California’s high tech market might recall back to August 2000, when a faked press release took an astronomical amount of market cap from Emulex (for awhile — it recovered when the hoax was uncovered, but left a landscape littered with battered investors). That release went out on Internet Wire (which subsequently had to rename itself Marketwire to escape the stigma attached to the fact that one of its employees was the instigator of the fake release).

Astute observers on the art of “vetting a press release” might notice:

1) The release did not come out of any of the major press wires. Most of those wires charge a pretty hefty fee for posting a release, which has the side-effect of weeding out most of the scams and junk. The service in question lets anyone register and create an account, for free, and send out whatever release they want.

2) The release did not carry any contact information from the company. (no contact name, no phone number, no email address, or web address).

3) The release did not have any PR firm representation. Usually, a company which is raising $45M would tend to have professional representation, from a well-known firm.

Anyway, it was something interesting to spice up a Monday in the blog press world.

The biggest story today in the region is the Writer’s Guild strike, yet the vast majority of technology firms here —even in the Los Angeles area—have very little to do with Hollywood and entertainment. Looking over the companies we cover on a regular basis, I can only find one or two companies (who provide technology to the entertainment industry) who might be affected directly by the strike. There’s a lot of companies who have absolutely no connection to Hollywood (chip companies, software companies, Internet services); and in fact, some companies which have connections, but might actually benefit from the strike (professionally and user generated video sites and related companies). In fact, I suspect many of the creative minds who are currently being idled due to the WGA strike — if it continues beyond just a short few days — might have some time to think about their new Internet ventures, if they are so inclined. I wonder if there will be an uptick in new media deals over the next few weeks, as people have more time to work on their Internet/new media related projects?

Anyone familiar with Google News is well aware of the duplicate articles — usually pulled from AP, AFP, UPI, and other wire feeds — which show up in their automated news ranking systems. So the announcement Friday that they will carry AP and other wire feeds directly — not through the publications which  license AP content themselves — is probably not a huge surprise.

However, it looks to me like a prime example of “channel conflict” — the issue all tech companies face when they are looking to craft their product distribution structure. Channel conflict results when you, because of poor planning or understanding of the market, or even just pricing policy — compete against your resellers and distributors.

In this case, the Associated Press and other wires in essence are competing for Internet traffic (and hence, revenues) against their own customers, the many local and other newspapers who license and distribute their content. It’s a dangerous road to go down–by allowing Google to essentially capture all of the viewers of that content from the wires, the wires risk alienating the publications who rely in a great part on traffic and readers driven to their web sites. It also puts Google in a bad spot — in particular, as Google said it may begin running ads next to the content–because it is pitting itself against the publications for the same eyeballs. If I were a big publisher (which I am not) I’d be very concerned over the move.

The Los Angeles Times just announced a few minutes ago that it has appointed a Vice President of Software Engineering and Architecture — shortly after appointing a CTO from Edmunds.com and Yahoo/Overture. Now, what does this say about the massive changes facing the newspaper publishing industry, when they are laying off journalists and hiring software VPs? Are newspapers media companies, or software companies?

Tom Foremski (a Silicon Valley independent blogger/reporter) had an interesting post on this earlier this year, claiming that the center of the media world is shifting to Silicon Valley. From my own experience–although I’m probably biased, as I started out my career as a software engineer, not a journalist–our own business is as much software as it is media.