Random musings of Jeromey Balderrama
Why can’t we have politicians like this on our side of the pond?
Money quote (no pun intended): "I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician. Namely, the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate."
I just wanted to share my latest amateur graphic design work with you, in the form of my Greenfoot gig posters. I’d be anxious to hear any of your thoughts:
If you do happen to be in Denver/Evergreen, I’d love for you to come check out my band!
Good news on the Greenfoot front! You can now find music from our Living Artifacts EP on the Amazon MP3 store! The six tracks can be purchased for $.89 each.
Amazon Mp3 is my favorite on-line music store by far, so I’m really stoked to have our music available here!
See Greenfoot on the AmazonMP3 store.
We went through the TuneCore process to get our songs up and running, so Amazon Mp3 is the first of many additions, including iTunes. Watch in the coming weeks!
Ever since that last weekend in February, when the rumors circulated that Cutler was about to be traded, I’ve tried to lie low and simply let this blow over. Here we are three weeks later, with the same problem that only seems to be getting bigger.
When I first heard this, I was furious at Coach McDaniels. The thing that made the Broncos such a great coaching prospect was the fact that we had such a prolithic offense, led by a young and talented quarterback – and somehow McDaniels managed to screw all of that up. He got rid of Offensive Coordinator Jeremy Bates, basically fixing something that wasn’t broken. Then when the opportunity arised to get his coveted pupil Matt Cassel, it became clear that a 32-year-old first-time head coach was going with what was most familiar with him. Stupid? Maybe, but understandable in this case. Nonetheless my blame was on McDaniels for that first day.
Then came Cutler’s reaction, which made me flip-flop and turn my frustration towards him. I understand how initially he felt the way that many fans did, but he has to realize that this is a business, that at one time or another players’ names are brought up in trades. Cutler hasn’t reached that elite untouchable status of Manning. Even Tom Brady, who is always compared to Manning as the best QB, was probably discussed in trades.
Broncos fan-wise, it’s been agonizing to have every trade scenario under the sun that involves your QB – none of them good. If a team’s looking for a QB, they don’t have a good one to offer you.
Peter King offers an excellent recap of the situation. He summarizes Cutler’s predicament the best by writing:
Maybe Cutler can’t take the dissing he feels from McDaniels, or maybe he’s fabricating the dissing to justify in his own mind going somewhere else. I don’t know. But I do know this: If I had the choice of Denver, Tampa Bay, Detroit and the Jets, and the Denver coach has worked successfully with Tom Brady and Matt Cassel, I’d be thinking very hard about not burning a bridge that can’t be reconstructed.
The more I’ve been reading, the more I think the person responsible for this mess is Cutler’s Agent Bus Cook. Read this article and take that into account. Bus Cook has been associated with four words: The Brett Favre Saga – need I say more?
Right now I wish that the NFL was playing games, because winning would likely cure this problem. In the meantime, I just wish owner Pat Bowlen would call Cutler and McDaniels into his offense office, then walk out and lock the door behind him until these grown men can work out their issues.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend a little time observing the end of an era. Starting tomorrow, Denver becomes a 1 Newspaper Town, as the Rocky Mountain News published their last edition today.
To commemorate (or commiserate), the Rocky put together a well-produced video talking about the course that brought them to the end. I would suggest taking some time to check it out:
I feel badly for the staff at the Rocky, those are no longer have jobs and have to worry about how they’re going to take care of their families. I want to put that out there, as this is a horrible situation and you never want to see anyone lose their livelihood under these circumstances.
At the same time, the failure does require some analysis. I’m not an economist or a newspaper expert, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts:
One of the things that bothers me about the economy is the tendency for people to scapegoat the recession. While there are things genuinely affected by the economy, it’s simply not that simple. I believe that in the cases of some businesses, the current economic climate exposes and accelerates failing business models.
Circuit City serves as a good example of this. It’s been known for sometime that Circuit City was losing market share and wasn’t keeping up with their competitors. Some say it’s due their sales atmosphere, others say that circuit city failed to grasp the changes in the electronics retail climate (e.g. Geek Squad vs. Firedog). Today’s economy may have expedited their fall, but the writing has been on the wall for Circuit City for some time.
I see newspapers going through the exact same thing.
If you watch the video, they reference circumstances that threatened the Newspaper industry: classifieds and blogs. As well done as this video is, when Jeff Legwold starts criticizing bloggers he demonstrates the industry’s failure to grasp new media. It’s easy to paint bloggers with a broad brush of unreliability. The importance of speed in news & blogs comes with its own set of problems, but rather newspapers spent a great deal of time grandstanding and criticizing, when they should have been adapting to this model.
Technology improves, media changes. The printing press has enjoyed a centuries-long dominance of media, a dominance which slowly eroded due to the radio, then television, and now the Internet. Things evolve, and businesses must change. I’ve subscribed to the daily and weekly newspaper before, only to find that those quickly stacked up in my recycle bin, going unread. Why? Because our generation consumes media differently, and in some ways more efficiently. It’s easy to vilify Craigslist as a mean dog that ate all of your lunch, but newspaper industry’s failure to recognize the changes and opportunities is what brought this about. This is not unlike the music industry’s reluctance of digital music, ultimately crippling their power and influence.
Does the printing press still have its place in media? Yes, but no where near the prominence that it’s enjoyed over the centuries. The newspapers that will succeed are the ones that will embrace this, as an opportunity to scale down their overhead, migrate to delivering their content to new media, and letting go of old business models.
In the case of the Rocky, it quickly became obvious that their parent company wasn’t willing to invest the time and resources to allow them to do this. They ignored the writing on the wall until it was painfully obvious, then set up the Rocky for failure. Scripps Media put the Rocky on sale on Dec 4, giving a 2 month deadline for the sale of the paper. Most people couldn’t sell a house in 2 months during this time (especially in this climate). This goes back to my original point – the economy isn’t the cause of the decline, it simply accelerated the effects of poor business model and decisions.
My prayers are with the employees of the Rocky Mountain News today, and hope that they will continue to be able to apply their skills through meaningful work.