Rosh Hashanah Girl and the Jewish Robot are back, this time with a Passover music video. Happy Pesach everyone.

My far too infrequent trips to the gym normally coincide with CNN’s Situation Room starring Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty. If Wolf and Jack are to be believed, America goes down the toilet every day of the week only to reemerge each morning so that it can slip back down the toilet once again while they speculate on the sorry state of the economy and America’s incompetent politicians. If an alien landed in America and tuned in to CNN he would think that he had arrived in the worst country on earth.

I often think that it’s the kind of whingeing journalism that could only be produced in the richest, most powerful country in the world. And it gets even worse at 7pm when Lou Dobbs takes to the screen to rail against immigration and the “war on the middle class” while posing questions to his viewers that Gene Weingarten aptly summed up as: “Do you think America should forfeit its future by opening the borders to illegal, chimichanga-chomping busboys?”

It’s become so miserable lately that I have more than once ripped my headphones out of the socket and gone home feeling utterly depressed.

But it seems that Jack has finally gone too far by turning his wrath on the Chinese, describing their imports as junk and China as “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” That might seem harmless to the Situation Room’s regular audience, who are used to Jack’s liberal use of slurs. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down too well with the Chinese who have demanded an apology. (CNN, by the way, says Jack was referring only to the Chinese government as goons as thugs not its people. So that’s all right then.)

Not so long ago, Jack posed this question to his viewers: “Why do some politicians insist on sticking their feet in their mouths?” It couldn’t possibly be for the same reason commentators do, could it?

Related
China demands CNN to apologize for evil attack on Chinese people (China Central Television)
China Demands CNN Apologize for Commentary (NYT)

A story in this morning’s WSJ reminded me of the risk-taking entrepreneurs I wrote about in All the Money in the World. How long before William Wang makes it onto the Forbes 400 list?

Vizio chief executive William Wang was prescient. A native of Taiwan and a former marketer of computer monitors, he was struck by a 2002 ad for a $10,000 Philips flat-panel TV. He sensed an opportunity. Rather than sell the sleek sets as luxury items, he figured he could make flat-panel TVs that were affordable to average consumers.

Back then, the computer-monitor business had largely transitioned from clunky cathode-ray tubes to flat panels. Mr. Wang knew many of the parts in flat computer screens were used in flat-panel TVs. Tapping his computer contacts in Taiwan, he calculated he could get enough parts to qualify for a bulk discount and use them to make inexpensive TVs.

To fund the effort, Mr. Wang borrowed money from friends and family. He also mortgaged his home in Newport Beach, Calif., eventually raising $600,000. While he wanted to name the new company “W” after himself, he settled for “V” after learning that a hotel chain had claimed the letter. V launched in October of 2002.

And where is Vizio today?:

Vizio is a fraction the size of Sony and Samsung Electronics Co., both leading brands in the U.S. flat-panel market. Yet Vizio shipped 12.4% of North America’s liquid-crystal display, or LCD, TVs in the last quarter of 2007. That’s just behind Sony’s 12.5% share and Samsung’s 14.2%, according to research firm iSuppli Corp. Overall, Vizio’s sales have multiplied to just under $2 billion last year, up from $700 million in 2006 and $142 million in 2005, according to the closely held company.

Related:
US Upstart Takes on TV Giants in Price War (WSJ)

It’s not just newspapers and television that are hurting under the economic slowdown. It’s blogs too. Here’s Gawker Media’s Nick Denton explaining the sale of Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette:

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90 percent a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty’s sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

Related:
Gawker Media Sells Idolator, Gridskipper; Spins Off Wonkette (NYO via Complete Tosh)

The family of a boy called Seth get together for a little karaoke to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in 1993. Makes the Bergers sound like the Westminster Choir. (Via Shabot Shablog.)

A sitemeter graphic showing the last hundred visitors to this blog earlier this week. (Note: the red dot is the last visitor, the green dots are the previous ten visitors before that.)

A response to CR’s question yesterday about Neil Mcintosh’s and Nick Denton’s thoughts on the US media:

Here’s what Neil Mcintosh, head of editorial development for guardian.co.uk, had to say about US newspapers:

Taking a copy of the LA Times as an example, simply because it’s local and handy and described by one participant as the West coast’s most important news source, you have to say things could be better. For instance, this front page tale about safety checks on US airliners isn’t sure if it’s a human interest, business, aviation or travel story, and ends up being none of the above – at huge length. It sat, on the front page, alongside a long apology for, and probe into, a reporting cock-up on a story about an attack on rapper Tupak Shakur, also delivered at remarkable length.

Both stories were run without the design tricks we’re used to in Europe – big photographs, graphics, breakout panels. Because every angle had to fit inone long run of copy they struggled, structurally. Both were, as a consequence, real chores to read. They show, I’d suggest, that it’s not just the internet that’s driving readers away from print.

Neil has a point. I have more than once turned a page in the New York Times to be confronted by column after column of solid text and thought “I just don’t have the time for this.” But I’d hazard a guess there is something else at play in Neil’s analysis—and that is the fact that it takes time to learn how to read certain publications.

When I first arrived in America in 2003, I used to scream at my New York Times almost every morning. I’d rail at its winding sixty-word intros and at stories that didn’t get to the point until the penultimate paragraph. But a couple of years ago, I realized that I was finding less and less fault with the paper. Could it possibly be that the Times was a-changing? The answer, of course, was no. I had just grown used to reading it.

I had a similar experience with magazines. For months, the dozens of adverts at the beginning of Vanity Fair literally stopped me from reading the rest of the magazine until I learned that you have to dive in halfway through in order to get to the juicy bits. Likewise, the New Yorker’s acres and acres of print seemed like a weekly chore until I learned the only way to tackle it was to read the table of contents first and cherry pick the stories that interested me.

The funny thing is that when I left England a few years ago I thought of British journalism as the highest form in the world. Four and a half years on, I find it hard to read a UK newspaper cover to cover. The style is often so formulaic that it’s boring, and so simplified and full of hyperbole that it is often flat out wrong. Far more UK stories seem to be based on press releases and press conferences than you would find in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Plus, there seems to be no room in the UK for the kind of journalism that I so enjoy nowadays, like the Times’ nuanced and insightful ‘journal’ reports from around the world (such as Sarah Lyall’s UK reporting) or entertaining and informed commentary by writers like David Carr. And it’s not just the NYT. Is there a UK newspaper that can match the New York Post’s Page Six? Or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages?

But my point is not that one form is better than the other. They are just different. Give me a couple of years back in England, and I will probably have relearned how to scan the Guardian, the Times, the Mail and the Sun, and I will be left wondering how I ever got through the Times, the Journal, the Post and the Daily News every day.

Whichever style may be better, neither is likely to win back newspapers’ ever-dwindling readership. The problem, as Nick Denton pointed out, is that a few decades ago newspapers faced very little competition. All they had to do was please most of the people all of the time and their place in a city or region was secure.

But today the audience is fractured. The best websites and cable news stations are successful because they please some of the people all of the time. And as that audience is drawn away to places like the Huffington Post and Fox News, large organizations like the New York Times are left fighting over an ever-dwindling piece of the pie. No amount of punchy intros and fancy graphics is going to stem the losses.

Related:
UK Views on US News (EiNY)