Pete's final stock picks

		Google Inc.	GOOG	497.00							3	588.82
		Apple Inc.	AAPL	184.02							25	198.64
		Cablevision Systems...	CVC	24.98							33	25.08
		Time Warner Cable Inc.	TWC	42.24							40	42.86
		The Washington Post...	WPO	462.03	3 414.90 Final total: 10, 518.42

My stock..

Name Symbol Last price Change Shares Gain
Google Inc. GOOG 588.61 1.1 18 10594.98
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. MHP 30.6 0.26 5 153
Yahoo! Inc. YHOO 15.25 -0.06 14 213.5
Archos JXR 4.24 -0.76 7 29.68
HTC Corporation 2498 365.5 -2 7 2558.5
ASUSTEK Computer Inc. 2357 63.6 -0.2 8 508.8
Hewlett-Packard Company HPQ 49.29 0.31 8 394.32

Portfolio value: +13.47 (0.12%)

Okay, buy technology products, don't buy their stocks

Yonghwan's Results

Yonghwan's results of the investment.

Acer
Before: 81.9 x 50 = 4095
Now : 82 x 50 = 4100

Google
Before: 498.53 x 10 = 4985.3
Now : 589 x 10 = 5890

NYT
Before: 8.39 x 100 = 839
Now : 8.62 x 100 = 862

Total
Before: 9919.3
Now : 10852
---------------
(+) $932.7

I can get a new laptop.

Sung Woo's earning.

I am out of the contest, because I earned less than a thousand.
Here is link to my portfolio.
http://finance.yahoo.com/p?k=tpf_cA9Qw52_jrS0ITg-

Kang's media stock competition

Here is the result of my media stock competition.

Kelly's picks

Well, not so good. I should have followed my wife's advice and bought all Google (up 23%) and Apple (up 16%) but I spread it around to my dismay. I especially should have followed Avery and bought ONLY Google.

News Corp. investment arm -5.99%
News Corp. media arm -0.07
Walt Disney Corp +6.33
Time Warner +4.85
Google, Inc. +23.48
Apple, Inc. +16.12
Viacom, Inc. +13.52
Gray Television, Inc. - 8.94
Belo Corp. +10.82
Discovery Communications +12.74
______________________________
Total +10.90
+ $1,098.37

So I finished with about $11,000 - not enough to keep up with Google.

I think I did well

The good news from what I can tell is all of the stocks I purchased have gone up in price.

Apple was purchased for $171 is now trading for $199.

Disney was purchased for $27 a share is now trading for $30.

Netflex was purchased for $47 a share and is now at $58.

And Viacom was purchased for $27 and is now at $31.

That means I have a net gain of 17.53% and I'm up $1740.90.

Go! Amazon!!

How exciting to check the portfolio in the crazy end of semester! After checking it (around 12:00 p.m. on Nov. 30, 2009), I'm more optimistic toward the future...:p

Amazon is amazing! Is it also because the black Friday that brings the stock up? Anyway, I'm satisfied with my earning, especially to the one who lacks the sense/knowledge of stock market like me! :D

Advertising online is better in video

Even the WSJ is now doing a "newscast" online twice a day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/media/11adco.html?_r=1&em

Google pays big money for AdMob

Google just absorbed an established online ad company for $750 million. Apparently the folks at Google think there's a future in online advertising.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/11/09/4471016.htm

Is online news really an inferior good?

What we have this week seems to reminding me of the concept of elasticity of demand and a question that "is online news an inferior good?".

Here's what I posted at the beginning of the semester:

We may raise questions regarding media products such as how the concept of elasticity of demand works when it comes to new media (e.g., online news media or other online services like blogs); and further, is media we are using normal good or inferior good? Dr. Chyi (forthcoming?) proposes a question, “is online news an inferior good?” and contends that online news is an inferior good based on a theoretical framework (normal vs. inferior goods) that “when income increases, the demand for an inferior good decreases; when income decreases, the demand for an inferior good increases, other things being equal”. It seems interesting that hypothesis was supported even after controlling for other media use (newspaper, television news, and radio news). Regarding this study, I’d like to talk more about why online news is an inferior good; what about other newly emerging media; and other possibilities regarding this.

As of other possibilities affecting the result that online news is an inferior good, we might think characteristics of market. In other words, whether online news is an inferior good or not may depend on the nature of markets. For example, to what extent people consume online news may differ in geographic characteristics of market (e.g., distance or market segment) and systems of market (regulatory system).

Now I'm kind of confused.
Is online news really an inferior good? It makes a perpect sense according to Dr. Chyi's article (in terms of theory adapted and method and analysis used).
However, then, is online news's quality really bad/lower compared to traditional forms/platforms news??
Assuming there's no significant difference of quality in between offline vs. online news, can we still say that online news is an inferior good?

Another thing is whether young people who are likely to get information on the Internet (including online news) are going to demand online news less when they get a job and their income increases?

Another survey about paid news content.

A combined research effort by Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD has revealed that 55.5 per cent of survey respondents would be very or extremely unlikely to pay for online newspaper or magazine content.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/business/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004030681

But I don't think this is all that pessimistic for the News Corporation.
Because, when questioned further about specific publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports, both of which are exisiting pay sites, 81.5 per cent of online users said the sites were good, very good or excellent value.

Bob Shullman, president of Ipsos was quoted as saying "the message that came out is that you can charge, but you better have incredibly compelling and unique data."

When news become public goods?

Mon journal offert, my free newspaper program has officially begun in France.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/business/media/28papers.html?_r=1

We mentioned about this briefly in class.
It has started two days ago. About 30,000 youth signed up voluntarily. Government is releasing Ad. campaigns also.

Can the news be supplied by the government like bridges or roads? What happens to consumer behavior then?

If you are 18~24 you can sign up for 1 year subscription of any newspapers.
French govement is spending 600 euro, which is about 900 million dollars.

I personally think this is a stinky business. Because many newspaper owners are Sarkozy's friends. The French president has been in charge of subsidizing newspapers when he was an Interior minister.

The Guardian reported that French people had little respect for news publications today, "in a climate where politicians rewrite their own interviews for publication and the president's powerful business friends, from construction to arms manufacturing, own several major papers or TV stations. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/23/sarkozy-pledges-state-aid-to-newspapers

Why can't we adapt to the Moore's Law?

The first day I went back to KXAN this semester, the only task I had was change the archive date of several pages. By default, all of our story pages will be archived one year later. This model works fine with stories, but not for our subindex pages. Therefore, we spent around half day simply to change the archive date of tons of pages so that they wouldn't be automatically offline soon.

We changed the date to 2016, which isn't really far from now. However, all of us know that we will NOT be using the same system at that time. We definitely will have new pages for that time. Four years doesn't sound like a very long time, but on web, it's like forever.

Thanks for the short life cycle of desruptive technology, nothing will be the same after two years.

But isn't everchanging also part of Journalism's nature?

Why can reporters deal with news, that's different everyday, but not techonology, which changes significantly only every two years? I know this is not a fair analogy, but think about it this way. News industry should have most information to understant and predict the movement of technology development. And maybe, just maybe, if the resource is used well, news industry can be better prepared for the technology evolution, which never happened.

Why?

Innovation is always going to lead to new and improved products. Within the 12 years I’ve been a reporter I’ve seen that first hand. When I started out in 1998 in Clarksburg, West Virginia we were shooting on SVHS cameras. These cameras were heavy, the tapes were cumbersome, and the quality was horrible. For larger stations they shot on BETA, which provided a better quality, and now P2 cards are the wave of the future. The tape has become obsolete in the TV world for stations that can afford the technology.

But as time goes on all new technology becomes not so new and the cost of the products goes down. I remember my first 5 disc CD changer that my parents got for me and I saved up for was $500 back in 1989. Now, who would pay that much? But then there’s technology television stations are taking advantage of that costs nothing.

Right now if we want to go live from a location we use a microwave truck . The trucks cost stations money because of the gas, the repairs, and updating equipment that gets old. But now with the “new media” craze we’re using Skype. It also allows a reporter to set up their own live shot without the use of a photographer. One big down side is that while technology is supposed to make our lives easier it has also led to more work at least in the TV world. As I tell our interns it will be interesting to see what technology is big once they get in this business. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hnagSBZbc