"Truly great companies aren't built by the greedy, but by the passionate" William Gurley

Howie Kurtz writes up Mary Mapes the old school way...he lets her run her mouth...

She is disdainful of Moonves, the CBS president who ordered the outside investigation. "He doesn't know journalism from dirt farming," Mapes said. In the book, noting that Moonves courted and then married "Early Show" anchor Julie Chen, she writes: "I used to say everything Les knows about journalism had been sexually transmitted. Now I know even that hasn't taught him much."

She says Viacom, CBS's corporate parent, threw her overboard because Chief Executive Sumner Redstone feared regulatory retaliation by the Bush administration.

Linda Mason, a CBS News senior vice president, said Mapes was fired because "her basic reporting was faulty. She relied on documents that could not be authenticated -- you could never authenticate a Xeroxed copy. She led others who trusted her down the wrong road." Viacom acted because its executives were "stunned at the report" and concerned about restoring CBS News's reputation, she said.

Read the entire column here. Les has done an excellent, make that brilliant, job with entertainment, his team will fix non-entertainment is my bet. Viacom is waking up to the new opportunity rich marketplace; In addition to supporting, encouraging major change Sumner Redstone also understands the incredible future of gaming, as few others do. Joel Hollander is getting Infinity moving in the right direction after being handed a dog's breakfast.

More in the 400 year death spiral of the dead tree tribe

Bob Baker writes...

I don't know about you but I'm tired of listening to our obituaries. I ACCEPT death: Everybody dies sometime. If newspapers are going to die, as most "smart" people seem to think, let's go down swinging. Let's go down like the Texans at the Alamo. Let's publish the best, most interesting, most audacious stories we can, on our own terms. Let's not be businessmen. Let's be artists. Let's put our art--the stories we love to write, edit and publish--on the market and see who buys it.

Let's be all the things we love to read. Let's astonish our audience. Let's stop asking our readers what they want. Let's remember, as Frank Capra, the great director, once said, that "the audience doesn't know what it wants--until it sees it."

Read all of Bob's writing here

The Scobleizer Bunny weighs in...the Gates email, the Ozzie memo

Robert Scoble offers his pov, links and the comments here.

Check out the Nov 4 Gillmor Gang ("Disruption Gang") wherein the gang takes on Robert Scoble. Find it here. Every media company needs to stay fresh on these issues, it is way beyond the time that this was elective; Vista, LIVE, the entire issue of internet services disruption, what YAHOO and GOOGLE are doing..each and all merit your attention NOW.

Terry Heaton, always a good read, does "get it"...

It's not all or nothing. This is by far the biggest block to real progress in the face of the media 2.0 disruption. We hear things like "mass marketing is dead" and we react negatively, in part, because we intuitively know that's simply not true. There will always be mass marketing approaches to business in our world — even if they're smaller in scale. What Umair Haque calls the "blockbuster" events necessary to create mass audiences are and will be fewer and farther between, and that should be a concern to any mass marketer.

Do we have to drop ALL mass marketing to succeed in a media 2.0 world? I don't think so, but we do need to develop methods and models that work in an unbundled, individualized media world, and these are definitely at enmity with mass marketing practices. We can and we must learn them, however

We need to strike the words "always" and "never" from our language, because this is vastly more complex that simple black and white explanations would have us believe. That said, "getting it" includes a little willingness to explore extremes despite how we feel about them.

Read all of Terry's post here

Server is too busy

Above is the message returned (twice) when I attempted to sign-in to check mail at aol.com; no fancy marketing language, no graphics, no apology, no please try again later, nope, just...Server is too busy. For some things in 2005, user experience included, there just ain't no good excuse, none.