Busily Looking Forward

It has been a while since my last post -- basically a month. It seems that my "real" job has occupied a huge amount of my time and practically 100% of my thoughts for the last month or so. Most people will see that statement and think that things are bad, that my company is struggling and we're in survival mode. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Right now we are experiencing growth and acquiring new customers on a daily basis. I have been busy dealing with that growth and with reaching out to prospective customers.

Isn't that interesting? The economy is "in the tank" according to everything that I hear and read and yet our business is experiencing a boom. I think there are a number of reasons why that is happening. 1) The economy is "bad" and my prospective customers are looking for ways to add value to their business. I offer them a service that typically will save expense and concurrently improve performance. 2) We have become more active in marketing our service. When times are tough you must work twice as hard to get in front of customers. You CANNOT cut marketing, advertising or sales expenses and expect to succeed. 3) We deliver what we promise. It's just good business. If you want repeat business, do what you say that you will do at a fair price. Give the customer value for their investment and they will be loyal.

The election was all about the economy. The consuming public was duped by the purveyors of socialism. It is going to get worse.

I hope that the President Elect is pragmatic enough to move slowly. It is a given that Pelosi and Reid will attempt to ram through their entire liberal agenda in the first 100 days. Be afraid -- be very afraid....

Concentration in the Media

Upon occasion I have referred to the "Elitist Media" in posts. There is an article concerning the concentration of media ownership that might be of interest to some readers. It is linked below.

Anup Shah, Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Sunday, April 29, 2007

When we talk about "Freedom of the Press" we have in mind the idea that government should not control the news. What about control in other hands? Is the media truly free when a handful of large corporations control the bulk of the content -- either through "friendliness" toward advertising revenue or through their own corporate and institutional biases?

The Internet has changed the shape of media in regard to news stories, however, one must consider where most content is generated. Often, bloggers merely take stories generated by existing main line media sources and present commentary. Investigations by bloggers are often primarily Internet searches. Often, information, or worse, misinformation, is promulgated throughout the "blogosphere" by individuals with agendas. Where is the public to find unbiased information?

I would never advocate government control of the media, however, it may be time to examine who does control news content and consider breaking the monopolization of the news. Better yet, new entries into the media business that do not carry the existing biases that appear to be inherent in current media sources would potentially return some balance.

In the early days of our country, every small town had a newspaper and most larger ones had multiple newspapers. Often, those newspapers were aligned with political factions within a community. Over the years, media companies have consolidated until, as the article examines, only a few companies control the bulk of news sources. Perhaps the question is, "How can new venues, such as the Internet, be shaped in such a way as to prevent the consolidation of news sources and thus insure balance?"