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Search Results for: Max Chafkin
Why ESPN Still Can’t Quit Cable
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Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong 
As a casual sports fan, I periodically check in with myself: Do I enjoy watching live sports enough to pay for cable?
The answer for the last few years has been: No thanks, I’ll just check out these GIFs on Twitter.
ESPN is having the exact opposite problem, as Ira Boudway and Max Chafkin explain in their latest Bloomberg Businessweek cover story. No matter how innovative or cutting-edge the sports giant makes itself, the cable money is just too lucrative, and the costs of licensing live sports are just too great, to finally cut the cord and offer itself as a standalone internet subscription service the way HBO did with HBO NOW. Boudway and Chafkin do the math:
Other media companies, most notably HBO, have confronted cord cutting by offering their programming “over the top,” which is TV-speak for “on the internet.” More than 2 million people pay $15 a month for access to the HBO Now app, but that strategy doesn’t translate to ESPN. The network’s programming costs are far greater than those of HBO—the budget for an entire season of Game of Thrones costs around $100 million, or less than what ESPN pays for the rights to air a single Monday Night Football game—and ESPN’s customers are accustomed to getting the network at no additional charge as part of their cable package. If ESPN were to charge $15 a month for a standalone streaming channel, it would need more than 43 million subscribers to match the money it collects from cable carriers. HBO has about 35 million total subscribers in the U.S., including cable and over the top.
Now, I’m obviously just one person, but I’m pretty sure I would subscribe to a service that just offers an endless loop of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America. Just a thought for the folks over in Bristol.
Confessions of an Instagram Influencer
Longreads Pick
Can an agency turn anyone into an Instagram star? Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin volunteers to find out.
Author:
Source:
Bloomberg Businessweek
Published: Nov 30, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,353 words)
Can a Company Really Disrupt Itself? Roger Hodge on Zappos and Holacracy
Posted by Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong From a Zappos office tour. Photo by techcocktail, Flickr
Roger Hodge went inside Zappos for his October 2015 in the The New Republic, investigating CEO Tony Hsieh’s radical decision to eliminate management and fully embrace the concept of Holacracy at the online shoe retailer. Read more…
Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing
Longreads Pick
This year’s best in business writing as chosen by Max Chafkin, Burt Helm, and the staff at Longreads.
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Source:
Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2014
Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing
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Longreads
Longreads We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.
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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.
Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)
This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
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Longreads Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The Future of Online Education: A Longreads Guest Pick by Teddy Worcester
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Mike Dang
Mike Dang Above: Sebastian Thrun
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Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web.
Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right course for Udacity, with staggeringly low class completion rates and weak test performance. Chafkin eloquently covers Udacity’s pivot toward offering a vehicle for “academic branding.” Highlighting Udacity’s recent deal powering Georgia Tech’s AT&T-sponsored academic program, Chafkin quotes Thrun lauding corporatized higher education, “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”
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Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education
Posted by Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong “The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”
–Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.
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Posted by Longreads
Longreads [Not single-page] A profile of Oliver Samwer and his web copycat factory in Berlin, which specializes in building knockoff websites inspired by growing American startups—then, sometimes, them back to the original company:
The decision to copy a given business generally takes three hours to a couple of days; actually building the first version of the new company’s website takes four to six weeks. “The speed at which you can make decisions here is amazing,” says Brigitte Wittekind, a former McKinsey consultant who was recruited last year to create a clone of Birchbox, the New York start-up that offers samples of cosmetics to subscribers for $10 a month. Wittekind’s company, Glossybox, spent its first year opening websites in 20 countries. It has 400 employees and 200,000 paid subscribers—twice as many as its American counterpart—and just launched in the United States, one of the few instances in which a Rocket clone will go head to head with the company on which it is modeled.
“Global Copycats: The Sincerest Form of Flattery.” — Max Chafkin, Inc.
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