NYT home delivery

For the New York Times, it is cheaper to give me only iPad access as opposed to iPad access and home delivery.

Yet it costs less money to get both.

Clearly it is an attempt to drive up their home delivery numbers.

But why would they want to do that? Why would they want to prop up a delivery mechanism that costs them more money? It's not a sustainable business model for home delivery.

Typically, businesses achieve success by convincing customers to choose options that save the company money rather than the other way around.

Some search engines

From the New York Times Co. press release: "Readers who come to Times articles through links from e-mail, search, blogs and social media will continue to be able to access those individual articles, even if they have reached their reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of five free links to Times articles."

That's confusing.

What do they mean by "some search engines"?

Why not be specific?

Flipping around the NCAA tournament

For better or worse, our society is relying increasingly less on newspaper editors to tell us what the most important stories are. We can find the news we want ourselves. I could, for example, consume only stories about the Wisconsin Badgers without ever coming into contact with a single story about Syria.

The same thing is happening in the NCAA tournament.

For years, CBS had been forced to choose a single game per viewing area. When it came to seeing other games happening at the same time, fans were at the mercy of CBS to flip around.

CBS began sharing the broadcast of the NCAA tournament with Turner Sports last year, and it means that each game would be televised — if not on CBS then on TBS, TNT or truTV. Rather than sit passively as CBS picks which game to show, viewers can flip around and see for themselves.

This is a huge improvement for hard-core fans who know what game they want to watch. But what about casual fans?

They probably miss the ability to let someone else find the best games and flip around for them.