Cable is a labor/product intensive delivery system. In Tampa Bay we had to string 9,000 miles of fiber optic cable before we could turn on the online service.
For each customer we add, we send two people to a home -- a cable technician and a computer expert. New cable is installed; a cable modem is connected; an Ethernet card is installed in the computer; and all necessary software is installed. It takes at least two hours -- more often three -- to do this work for one hookup. Physical limitations mean we can only connect about 350 homes a week.
Demand soars well beyond that. It will take time to wire America, but cable IS the future Internet delivery system for serious users.
That happens daily. Lordy, I wake up excited to go to work! I view my position today much as someone might have if Gutenberg had approached them and said, "Hey, I've invented this moveable type. Can you think of something to do with it?" Whoa, can I ever!
Online editors like myself are helping direct the invention of a new communications media. It's tremendously exciting -- and challenging, since I don't have bandwidth restrictions to worry about. I can do ANYTHING.
I like the fact that my customers vote their preferences for content every time they click a mouse. Instant feedback. The Internet -- or Web -- won't replace print media, or radio, or television. Each has strengths. But the Internet will take its unique place as a communications/information force in the future.
I really get a kick out of shaping that future, small though my role may be. But I enjoyed my newspaper years, too, and believe fervently in the power of the printed word and the still photograph. It's just that now I can add video, animation and audio for even more power. And you can interact with my work!
Each magazine review seems written from the same formula: Wonderful vehicle, great vehicle, few tiny nigglies, but a great vehicle.
The "review" always breaks into four parts and the complaints are relegated to a few so-sorry paragraphs on a jump page. The conclusion usually dismisses the complaints and heaps more praise on the tested vehicle.
If the reviews were indeed on the consumers' side, faults would be pointed out FIRST. Anyone making the second largest purchase in life needs to know FIRST what's wrong with the thing. But that would tick off advertising carmakers. Faults can't be ignored, of course. Just buried.
Yes. It depends on the paper and the writer.
Some writers feel loyalty to car makers who wine and dine them, foist gifts on them, fly them anywhere to test drive a vehicle, and use PR types to become "friends" with the writer. But some auto writers are above influence that way. Bless them. And some newspapers are big enough to stand up to threats from car dealers, who usually represent a huge chunk of a publication's annual ad revenue. It takes guts to do that. But it is done.
More frequently, I would guess, the advertiser's influence affects the objectivity of a review. Keep 'em happy is the motto at too many publications. Good newspaper auto writers? I like Warren Brown of the Washington Post, Paul Dean of the L.A. Times, Richard Truett of the Orlando Sentinel, Dan Healey of USA Today and John White of the Boston Globe.
Had a flat tire in a Corvette. On a 95-degree summer day.
You just don't want to know that the spare tire is located under the rear of the car, between two red hot exhaust pipes, and that it would be easier to break into Fort Knox than remove a wheel from a Vette, etc., etc. I had hours of immense frustration and ended up dripping with sweat before being towed 50 miles to a dealership. No human being -- not even the wrecker driver -- could change a tire on a Vette without ending up filthy and angry and cursing the designer of this idiotic spare tire system.
Would a Mercedes-Benz 500SL put me through that? Not a chance, and the cars are the same dimensions, with similar-sized engines, etc. Then again, I had a Mercury Tracer sling off the driver's side windshield wiper during a torrential downpour, while I was about 30 miles from the nearest service area. Now, that was a Florida thrill!
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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