New York City has negotiated a deal with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision where the cable companies will have to pay if appointments aren't kept, with the refunds equaling up to the cost of a month's bill until 2012, when Verizon FiOS (and its way superior on-demand offerings — hello, Come Dine With Me!) arrive in the city. (At that point the refund maximum drops to $25.) I suspect that there will be more than a few people who are just bored/underemployed/cheap enough to serial scheduling service appointments in hopes of catching this windfall — stopwatches at the ready, praying for a traffic jam or some other [...]

Today's Observer has a big piece about mandated niceness at Long Island's once-respectable tabloid Newsday, specifically within the sports section. I don't know if I know a single person on the planet who reads sports sections for coverage that avoids speaking plainly about its subjects, but perhaps the demographic number-crunchers at Cablevision, which bought the paper in 2008 and which also owns the Knicks and the Rangers, have identified this fan demographic as one that is underserved?

Gothamist, a metro website company, founded in 2003, now has 13 city-specific websites, which reach 2.7 million unique readers a month, according to Quantcast. For a long time, in my opinion, Gothamist was stubborn about growing as a business. Its publisher, Jake Dobkin, did much of the business himself, and didn't think the math worked out to have full-time ad salespeople. More recently, that math has apparently changed, and now the goal is to have as many ad salespeople as can support themselves. 16 million pageviews a month is, in the web business, a totally decent amount of inventory to sell. And for a larger media company that [...]

Some people wait a year and then beat their tormentors silly in the parking lot in retaliation for dick jokes employed within professional contexts. But if you're as monied and powerful as Cablevision head honcho Jim Dolan, you can go the parking-lot ambush one better, and withhold your ad revenue from the media outlets that torment you — and if you're really steamed, you can get your cronies like the megapromoter Live Nation to join in on the act. The result: "In toto, a mediocre dick joke about a media acquisition has now cost [Village Voice Media] upwards of $1M in yearly advertising revenue." Um, yipes?