AMC Ad Uses Snarky Blog Post to Mock Dish Network

By STUART ELLIOTT

Does the snarkiness of a blog post translate for a mainstream, general audience? A cable company is hoping to find out.

The company, AMC Networks, ran an ad on the back cover of the Aug. 24-26 issue of USA Weekend that reprints excerpts from the Mediaite blog.

The ad is the most recent riposte from AMC Networks in a dispute with Dish Network, which began at the end of June.

As part of the dispute, Dish dropped three channels owned by AMC Networks - AMC, IFC and WE tv - and replaced them with HDNet Movies, HDNet and Style. The Mediaite post, which went up on July 2, was a sardonic take on the substitutions. “Don't Worry Dish Subscribers!” began the headline on the blog post. “Here Are Some Perfectly Good Shows You Can Watch Now That You Lost AMC.”

The post, by Jon Bershad, mockingly suggested “Bikini Barbershop: Jersey” on HDNet could replace “Mad Men” on AMC an d, tongue firmly in cheek, proposed “Tia & Tamera” on Style as an alternative to “Breaking Bad” on AMC.

Earlier Coverage of Dish Network-AMC Fight

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here.

Don\'t Let the Original Price Haunt Your Decision to Sell

By CARL RICHARDS

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at BAM Advisor Services. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of chatter about Facebook stock. The headlines all seem to echo each other by focusing on the opening price:

• “Facebook gains after dropping under $19, half of initial public offering price” [Washington Post]
• “Facebook hits record low for third straight session, falls to less than half of IPO price” [Mercury News]
• “Facebook stock falls below half its IPO price” [Los Angeles Times]

These headlines are a prime example of our very human tendency to anchor to a number, and it's usually the first number we see. In this instance, they're referring to the number $38, Facebook's initial public offering p rice.

But here's the deal: the decision to buy, sell or skip Facebook stock shouldn't have much to do with its opening price of $38.

Because we're human and we like anchors, that $38 price is hard to ignore. Anchoring can lead us to make mistakes with other money decisions, too. For instance, Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic, highlighted how that first number can impact your buying decisions:

You walk into a high-end store, let's say it's Hermès, and you see a $7,000 bag. “Haha, that's so stupid!” you tell your friend. “Seven grand for a bag!” Then you spot an awesome watch for $367. Compared to a Timex, that's wildly overexpensive. But compared to the $7,000 price tag you just put to memory, it's a steal. In this way, stores can massage or “anchor” your expectations for spending.

It's common to see a version of anchoring when people are selling their homes. Not surprisingly, most sellers mentally start with the price they paid. Depending on the market and other factors, they may play around with that number a bit, but it's hard not to anchor to that original price.

Let's say a family bought a home for $300,000 back before the housing market crashed. Over time, the house climbed in value, but then the market came to a screeching halt, and the home's value dropped. Then the homeowners got a job offer in another city, so it's time to sell. Even though they know the market has gone down, it's hard to forget that they originally paid $300,000.

So they list the house for $300,000. A few weeks and then months go by, and finally there's an offer for $275,000. Because of anchoring, it can be incredibly hard for the homeowners to weigh the offer on its merits. After all, they already had a number in their heads.

We carry sets of numbers in our heads in so many ways, and without realizing it, those numbers can weigh down our decisions. In stead of acting in a way that best suits our needs, we get stuck because the numbers don't match. Maybe we bought a stock for $100, determined after a time that it didn't fit our goals anymore and decided to sell it. But the stock now sits at $75. Do you still sell or do you wait? You'll find it's incredibly tempting to wait in the hope the stock will get back to $100.

Numbers matter, but you need to avoid the trap of anchoring to a single number and making it the primary guidepost for your decision. The first number will rarely be the number that should matter the most to you. As I've discussed before, the only number that matters when you need to sell is the price today.

 

Why You Have 49 Different FICO Scores

August 27, 2012, 11:30 am

By ANN CARRNS

As a consumer, you hear a lot about the importance of maintaining a good credit “score.” Most often, that means your FICO score - the score developed by the company of the same name to help lenders evaluate the creditworthiness of a potential borrower. But it probably makes more sense to talk about your credit “scores,” plural.

That's because other outfits produce credit scores, too - and FICO itself has many different varieties of scores, depending on the type of loan you're seeking. In fact, John Ulzheimer, a credit expert, has worked with Creditsesame.com to create a snazzy infographic (which you can click on above, and then zoom in on) showing a total of 49 different versions of your credit score under the FICO umbrella.

That's right, more than four dozen. Why so many?

FICO created the basic formula - the general purpose FICO, if you will - that is used to crunch consumer credit data for all loan types. The credit data is collected by the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) and analyzed by FICO to create a single, three-digit score. So there's three versions of the basic score, just for starters.

But FICO also has several other versions, customized for the specific type of loan in question - say, an automobile loan, a mortgage or a credit card. Each is also offered by the credit bureaus, under their own brands. And each version may have multiple releases, as FICO's formula for crunching the data is updated. So you can see how the versions pretty quickly add up to nearly fifty.

All this can be very confusing for consumers, Mr. Ulzheimer says, who may wonder, “Why is the score I get here not the same as what they get there?”

That issue is currently under review by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because consumers may pay for a credit score from various consumer Web sites but get a generic FICO or other score, which may differ from the actual score a lender is using to evaluate their creditworthiness.

For now, the main point to keep in mind, Mr. Ulzheimer says, is that the same general principal applies to keeping your scores attractive to lenders: Pay your bills on time, maintain low credit-card balances and apply for credit only when you really need it, “not to save 10 percent at the mall,” he said.

Have you paid for your credit score recently? Did you find it useful?

With Isaac Bearing Down, Networks Weigh Their Options

August 27, 2012, 10:18 am

By BRIAN STELTER

Put yourself in the shoes of a network news president for a moment. There's a tropical storm bearing down on the Gulf Coast, reviving memories of Hurricane Katrina seven years ago. But there's also a political convention beginning in Tampa, Fla., representing the start of a two-month sprint to Election Day. Where do you send the symbols of your news division, your news anchors?

At this moment, the networks are splitting their staffs between the two locations. Other news organizations big and small are also making the same calculations, stationing reporters in Louisiana and Mississippi while leaving other reporters in Tampa, where the Republican National Convention was supposed to begin Monday.

Over the weekend convention organizers canceled most of Monday's events because of the possibility of bad weather from Tropical Storm Isaac, which was churning off Florida's west coast. The bulk of the convention events are now scheduled to begin on Tuesday, when Isaac - forecast by then to be a Category One hurricane - will be approaching the Gulf Coast.

Two of CNN's top anchors in Tampa, Anderson Cooper and Soledad O'Brien, will be moving this morning to New Orleans, a CNN spokeswoman said, while Wolf Blitzer stays in Tampa for the convention. Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief for CNN, foreshadowed the channel's coverage of the twin stories in a Twitter message. He wrote, “Split screen Tuesday night?”

Similarly, one of the Fox News Channel's best-known anchors, Shepard Smith, a native of the Gulf Coast, will start reporting from New Orleans on Monday.

For now, the three top network news anchors are staying put in Tampa. D iane Sawyer of ABC appeared from there on “Good Morning America” on Monday, with video showing her hair blowing in the wind earlier in the morning. Brian Williams of NBC and Scott Pelley of CBS are also there. The networks are each planning to provide prime-time coverage of the Republican convention on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights.

But the networks are moving other anchors into position in New Orleans, near where the storm is forecast to make landfall on Wednesday morning. After anchoring the Sunday edition of “NBC Nightly News” from New York, Mr. Williams's primary substitute, Lester Holt, flew to New Orleans; he appeared from there on “Today” on Monday. NBC's main weatherman, Al Roker of the “Today” show, is also on the way to New Orleans after spending the weekend in Key West, Florida.

ABC had its weather anchors in two states on Monday morning: Sam Champion, the weekday weather anchor on “Good Morning America,” was in Naples, Fla ., while Ginger Zee, his weekend counterpart, was in New Orleans. Ms. Zee and her producer drove there from Fort Myers, Fla., on Sunday, an 800-mile trip.

After “G.M.A.” on Monday, Mr. Champion is going to move to New Orleans, an ABC spokesman said, while Ms. Zee moves to the Mississippi coast. (Some residents in Mississippi in Alabama are sensitive to the fact that New Orleans tended to get more attention in the aftermath of Katrina, despite the widespread devastation in their states. After reading residents' messages to her on Twitter, Ms. Zee wrote on Sunday night, “Lots of folks concerned we are forgetting about Mississippi/Alabama… Definitely NOT the case!”)

CBS said Monday morning that it was contemplating changes to its coverage plans, as well. “We continue to watch the storm closely and we will have correspondent coverage throughout the region,” said Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, a vice president of CBS News. “We will reposition some of our res ources as necessary.”

The Breakfast Meeting: Isaac Crashes G.O.P. Convention, and Whither \'Nightline\'?

By NOAM COHEN

Tropical Storm Isaac is now projected to veer away from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and toward New Orleans, but it still promises to take the spotlight away from the convention to nominate Mitt Romney. If Isaac hits the Gulf Coast states it could become a breaking news event that pulls attention away from the convention. Under one unpleasant scenario, Jim Rutenberg and Michael D. Shear write, the networks could go to a split-screen, pairing

the revelry and partisanship surrounding Mr. Romney's nomination with the threat of the storm making landfall in Louisiana or Mississippi seven years to the week after Hurricane Katrina left an American city in ruins.

• The cancellation of Monday's convention events because of the storm means that the “big surprise” from Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, was canceled as well. Still, Mr. Trump, who has no spea king role at the convention, was in Florida to accept the Statesman of the Year award from the Sarasota County Republican Party, Politico reported, where he brought up the recent joke Mr. Romney told about no one asking to see his birth certificate. “He did make a joke, and some people thought it might not be a joke,” Mr. Trump said. “It happens to be an issue that a lot of people believe in.”

• The problem the political parties have in getting the networks (and the public) to care about the conventions should be no surprise, David Carr writes, because they have little of the spontaneity that we come to expect from television. He asked experts in reality TV what they would suggest to liven things up, but their ideas - for example, showing more of the (nonpolitical) partying that goes on, or behind-the-scenes footage of how the stagecraft is produced - show why the conventions are perhaps destined to keep losing audience and network TV time. The suggest ions involve giving up control of the message â€" maybe the only thing more worrisome than having a smaller audience.

The decision by ABC to move up Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show to 11:35 p.m. means he will be able to challenge directly David Letterman and Jay Leno. Lost in the shuffle, Bill Carter writes, is what the move means for “Nightline,” the pathbreaking news show that is being pushed back an hour. It will now follow an entertainment show instead of the 11 o'clock news. Some “Nightline” hands interviewed were blunt, saying the move would inevitably be a hurtful and possibly fatal blow to the show.

The British newspaper The Guardian backtracked on Friday over a controversial hiring for its United States Web site. Joshua Treviño was brought in to give a conservative perspective to the site's coverage, but was immediately under attack for extreme posts to Twitter he had made in 2011 about an international flotilla headed to Gaza to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Palestinian territory. But Mr. Treviño and The Guardian said they agreed to part ways for another reason entirely - a commentary he had written as a freelancer.

Two members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot have fled Russia, the band announced in an online posting, in order to avoid prosecution for the anti-Kremlin protests that led to a two-year prison sentence for three other members of the group. These other two women have never been publicly identified by the police, Andrew E. Kramer writes, and they have been referred to only by the nicknames Balaclava and Serafima. “Two members have left the country because they are wanted,” the Twitter post said. “They are recruiting foreign feminists for new protest actions.”

Monday Reading: Scandinavia on $125 a Day

By ANN CARRNS

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.