• $1 billion in debt keeping it from
  taking on Netflix source

• 2.2% dip in new home sales in February source

• Would you put your baby in one of these things? Apparently, a company that sells baby slings is learning the hard way that it’s hard to make a backpack-styled device safe for carrying an infant. Three babies died due to breathing problems caused by the slings. Then the Consumer Product Safety Commission told the public that the slings aren’t safe. Now, sling maker Infantino just took two of their models (including the one on the right) off the market entirely, and told people to stop using them immediately. Oh, baby. source

• 15% average pay cuts for highly-paid workers at bailed-out firms
• 33% average pay cuts for their non-stock cash payments source

• The original commercial Dish Network’s main selling point? It’s cheaper, and it offers the same quality of product as DirecTV. It’s not nearly the same as, say, AT&T and Verizon’s competing maps, but it understandably might provoke a response from DirecTV.
• The (supposed) rip-off And here’s that response! It’s honestly a more clever approach, using Alex Trebek in a Jeopardy-style game. However, if you listen about halfway through, you’ll hear the same kind of message as the original commercial in this clip, too. source

• Were the job cuts needed? After a report came out yesterday on the unofficial Gannett Blog noting the executive pay of the company’s chief executives, there’s definitely some deserved anger due to the number of layoffs that the newspaper company had. Truth is, though, their salaries, while high, are only a dent in a much larger pie, and from one perspective, they did their jobs well.

Executive salaries vs. 2009 job cuts

• 6,000 number of jobs that were lost throughout the company in 2009 through cuts and layoffs; many workers were also furloughed
• $4.7M the amount Gannett’s chairman and CEO, Craig Dubow, made in 2009, up $1.6 million from 2008 (including a $1.5 million bonus)
• $4M the amount president and COO (and former CFO) Gracia Martore made in 2009, up $2.6 million from 2008 (with a $950,000 bonus)

Would lower executive pay help? Not really

• $240M the amount the laid-off workers’ collective salaries would be if they were each paid $40,000 per year, around average for journalists (though some are paid higher)
• $700 the amount each laid-off worker would get if that $4.2 million difference between 2008 and 2009 executive pay was spread out evenly amongst them

Where the cuts helped most: Stock prices

• 907% the increase in stock price since 2009

Uncomfortable reality

• » The business consideration: Truth of the matter is, from an investing and financial perspective, Craig Dubow and Gracia Martore look very smart for cutting off some of the dead wood, even if it screwed over thousands of journalists as a result.
• » The real problem? Same as many other newspaper conglomerates: Gannett’s simply too big. It holds jurisdiction over many markets large and small, and as a result of heavy debt burdens from the financial crisis, it and companies like it, including McClatchy and Tribune, have had to make some tough decisions to protect the whole beast. Seems like all these mergers and buyouts had the effect of damaging local newspapers and local journalism. Financial sense and editorial sense are two different senses. source

• one the number of beefy men doing time for drug convictions that have beaten Bernard “Bernie” Madoff
• one number of broken noses said beefy man gave the notorious financial scammer back in December
• none the amount of selection Madoff has in prison movies; he’s forced to watch “Lethal Weapon” AGAIN source

• Oh boy, this is getting testy. YouTube and Viacom’s long-running lawsuit is still going on, and if anything, it’s heating up. On one side is Viacom, claiming the site was designed around copyright infringement. On the other is YouTube/Google, claiming that Viacom’s conduct suggests the company if full of hypocrites. Who’s right? Take a gander for yourself:

Viacom’s corner: “You’re stealing our stuff!”

• YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement.
• A statement from Viacom • Regarding what they feel is a culture of copyright infringement – a statement they released after documents from a lawsuit between the two firms became public today. Viacom first sued the Google-owned company in 2007 for $1 billion. They used old statements from the founders suggesting that they knew what they were doing – ripping off copyrighted content.

YouTube’s corner: “You guys are total hypocrites!”

• Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. … Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
• YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine • Giving his take on the lawsuit and documents on the site’s blog. He argues that YouTube is following the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Viacom themselves would send employees to a Kinkos for the singular purpose of uploading content to the site, going as far as “roughing up” the video to make it seem like it’s from a second-hand source. Oh, and allowing copyrighted video to just stay on the site. source

• Canon is sure an arrogant company. They think, for some reason, that they’re worthy of their own top-level domain, unlike every other company out there. We think this is really stupid, because, well, their top-level domain opens up the possibility of a .cocacola or a .southoftheborder, which means that what’s a fairly simple domain structure becomes unspeakably complex.

• bad standardThe reason why top-level domains work well as-is, mostly, is because they create an open environment. By getting their own top-level domain, Canon creates a walled garden separate from the rest of the Web.
• Is it really easier? Canon seems convinced that it’s easier to type in my.canon (or whatever) than it is to type in canon.com. People have been typing canon.com for 15 years; changing it makes it harder. It’s branding gone amok.
• showing restraint To us, this idea suggests a need to figure out just when the best time would be to pull out the generalized top level domains. Because it appears Canon’s taking a road down a slippery slope with this move.

.canon domains we’d like to see

• » pachelbels.canon: One of the most well-known pieces of music is Pachelbel’s Canon, and that’s been around way longer than Canon has.
  
• » isthis.furry.buffyfanfic.canon: The main definition of “canon” refers to whether something is part of a story’s universe. And you could probably have fun with it, too.
  
• » potato.canon: Some jokers will probably come up with clever uses of the TLD, although if they’re like this, they’ll totally be wrong, because “cannon” has two N’s.
• » myprintersucks.itsmadeby.canon: If Canon really wanted to be bold with this idea, they’d let people buy dissenting domains that criticize both the brand and its products.