Category: business

My Thoughts on the Delta Thermo Deal and Last Night’s City Council Meeting and What I Said There

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I just got home from City Council.  I had to leave before the vote, but not before I waited 4 hours to share my thoughts with the public and with Council.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can learn about it here.  In the interest of time, I’m just going to post my thoughts as I shared them.  Some context:  you should know that there was a very large union presence at the meeting, so much so that before 7 PM the Council Chamber was packed out and people weren’t being let in.  It was at this point that some folks reached out to some local media, because it looked like the fairness, integrity (and possibly, legality) of the meeting was in jeopardy.  Thankfully, that got resolved (and the media was already there).  More context: the unions are strongly in support of the DTE project.  I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I’m not.

What I ended up saying, in a nutshell, around 11 PM:

  • I live in Allentown, work in Allentown and pay taxes in Allentown.
  • I work for the Air Quality Partnership of Lehigh Valley – Berks, but I also sit on the Justice and Advocacy Committee of the Lehigh County Conference of Churches.  In both capacities, labor issues are extremely important.   The Justice and Advocacy Committee deals with issues of worker justice, livable wages, economic disparity, and I’m sympathetic to those concerns.
  • I was able to have a conference all today with Peter Crownfield (of the Alliance for Sustainable Communities LV) and permitting official with DEP.  That official explained to us that DTE does NOT have an air quality permit from the Commonwealth (they’ve used vague language to intimate that they do).  They DO have an exemption that pertains to research and development, not a commercial facility.  (Here I affirmed what Peter already said).
  • I talked about my discomfort with this and other transparency issues in this process.  I said that unions know better than anyone that when Business isn’t transparent, Labor doesn’t win.  The environment doesn’t win, our communities don’t win, and our politicians [in this case] don’t win.
  • The Mayor (he’s strongly in favor of the project) said he thought it was a progressive solution.  I said “I’m having trouble reconciling that with the fact that I’ve seen nothing in this discussion that shows me there’s anything in place to incentivize our communities to waste less and reuse/recycle more.  Progressive movements nationally have said with one voice that reduction and reuse are the way forward, and there’s nothing here that makes me think this project will reward that over the next 35 years.  (It’s a 35 year commitment to 2012 technology.  After 10 years, there’s an opt-out option, but  that wold require the City to buy out DTE’s interest and/or facility.  That’s a lot of money we don’t have).
  • With respect to the gentleman from DTE who talked about one of the other bidders having just gone out of business as a sign that the City was right to chose DTE, I said that frankly, that makes me worry more about the utility of this project and its long term prospect for success.
  • I said that as City Council knows, the Pennsylvania Constitution makes some pretty progressive claims about the environment.  Clear air, clean water, and clean land (all germane to this discussion) are a right of all Pennsylvanians.  We need to be committed to a truly progressive way forward, and a deal that locks us in long-term to today’s technology (actually, three technologies that have never been used together in the way DTE proposes, and never put into a practice in a plant anywhere by DTE) negates the possibility of us moving forward in truly progressive ways.
  • 35 years ago, Bethlehem Steel would have paid a  lot of the salaries in this room and put chickens in every pot.  Whatever happened to Lehigh Structural Steel?  Anyone remember Hess’s?  Things change, and they change quickly and that’s truer now than ever.  We know that this kind of technology is changing all the time: entering into this deal on these terms prevents us from pursuing truly progressive technologies as they emerge.
  • Thank you for the time.

The Huffington Post Gets an AOL Redesign, Kind Of

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

If you’re not regular Huffington Post reader, you might not notice the changes in the masthead design evident below.  The AOL-HuffPost merger became official official this week (they’re, like, totally listed as “married” on Facebook), and the changes are rolling out.

A few days ago, Andrew Breitbart ran a piece on Huffington about the the liberal bias of NPR and the MSM (that’s mainstream media, in case your blogging IQ remains fixed in the pre-Swift Boat-era)  with regards to the Tea Party.  I’ve said all along that HuffPo has been positioning itself as a “beyond left and right” general interest portal/magazine for some time now, and that the AOL purchase wouldn’t mean the watering down of some hard-left new media beacon.  But even I didn’t expect to see a piece like Brietbart’s just yet.  Eventually, yes.  Just not yet.  But the more I think about it, the more sense it seems to make to make these changes sooner rather than later.

Speaking of changes, the first thing regular Huff readers will notice is the change in font, style, and organization of the section (vertical) links in the banners of the home page and each vertical.  The entire presentation is streamlined, and some verticals have been bumped off the main masthead’s real-estate and issued a spot on drop-down menus.  (Religion, for example, is now a drop-down under “Living.”)  You’ll also note that some of the drop-down items link directly to other AOL properties.  While I understand the need for integration, this aspect does feel rather patchworked (no pun intended).  As a placeholder for some sort of unified branding across platforms and sites, I suppose it’s fine.  It achieves goal #1 for AOL in this stage of the merger: show Huffington readers links to AOL’s other content sources. But loading TechCrunch via a drop-down link from the HuffPost Tech box is clunky, and the style disparities between sites could be jarring for people expecting to stay on huffingtonpost.com.

Original logo for America Online, 1991–2006
Don't act like you don't also like to sometimes maybe play mp3s of modem sounds and pretend its 1995. Just don't.

I’m sure, in time, AOL and the newly-formed Huffington Post Media Group therein will iron these things out.  But for right now, this first phase of integration feels less like an upgrade of the “The Internet Newspaper” and more like its portalization.  I don’t mean to be down on you, AOL-Huff (that is, I sure do want you to hire me for full-time winning analysis), and I want you to know that I’ve been pulling for you, AOL, ever since the mid-90s when all my techie friends were total ISP snobs.  Where are their precious BBSes now, old friend? Exactly.

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Upset About the Huffington Post/AOL Merger? Count to Ten Before You Flame Me in the Comments.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments
Arianna Huffington
Simmer down, friends.

I’ll be honest.  When I logged onto The Huffington Post around 1 am this morning, my jaw just about hit the floor (the dog was in the way).  I’m still thinking about what AOL’s acquisition of Huffington and the installation of Arianna Huffington as editor-in-chief of most (all?) of AOL’s online editorial content is going to mean for everyone involved.  A few things it won’t mean, as far as I can tell:

TechCrunch, Engadget, Movifone, PopEater, Patch etc. are going to become repositories for a particular political agenda.  No, they won’t.

The Huffington Post is going to, like, change so much, and in all the wrong ways. It might change a lot, and in some ways, I hope it does.  But it’s not going to cease being what it’s been branding itself as for sometime now, a “beyond left and right” (Arianna’s words, not mine) general interest destination with a distinctive point of view and activist spirit. Will it continue to lean “liberal”?  Of course.  Has that been its main focus for the last year?  On political and social matters, sure, but HuffPost has grown in that time to include 21 separate verticals, four of which focus on local news in urban areas.  Like I said yesterday, it’s just not the case that the corporatization of the Huffington properties means that Ms. Huffington’s priorities have shifted.  They’ve been clear for some time, and were made even more explicit by the merger. The Huffington Post, as a company, wants to cover a wider range of topics and engage a wider audience.  It’s been doing that for at least the past two years, and the AOL deal means it can go on doing it in bigger, better ways.  If you’re interested in seeing a hot media property complete its evolution from political niche to top-of-mind general interest, news, and information, keep your eyes on Huffington.  If you’re looking for the Daily Kos, well, there’s always…the Daily Kos.

Click through to read this morning's post.

I wrote a new post for the media vertical right after reading the merge announcement last night.  The editors put it up this morning, and I want to thank them for their quick turnaround.  Disclosure: like most of the people creating HuffPost’s content, I don’t get paid for what I do there.  I don’t have an agenda, though as a content creator, I obviously do want the venture to succeed.  More thoughts on all of this as I have them.

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