Kerfuffle

The death of my newspaper reading habit wasn't sudden; it was more like a long, slow, farewell.

Lately, I've been carrying our morning copy of the Wisconsin State Journal in with the afternoon mail and immediately dropped it in the recycling bin unread.  That's not to say I hadn't read the newspaper on those days.  I read several, in the same favorite chair I used to read the local daily.  But like many others, I read my "papers" online.  The State Journal isn't close to being as interesting as the online choices I make.

This past week, I didn't give it much thought when there wasn't a paper in the box.  I just figured Tom took it to work.  He used to do that sometimes and I thought he was doing that again.  But this morning, when he asked about the Sunday paper, it dawned on me:  our subscription ran out.  The bill came a month ago and I set it aside, unsure of whether we really wanted to shell out a couple hundred bucks just to fill the recycling tub.  We hadn't received a paper since a week ago Thursday, and it took us over a week to realize it.

I stopped to think about that for a moment.  It took over a week to realize the paper wasn't being delivered anymore.  Wow.  There used to be a time when I'd get up before the guy delivered my paper, and I would be agitated, waiting for the daily news of the world.  My morning paper and coffee was a solid part of my routine for longer than I can remember.  It was as ingrained a habit as any I have had. 

When I was maybe 10 years old, I began delivering the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times in my neighborhood.  It was then that I began my love affair with newspapers.  I read the Trib before school, and would ask my dad not to leave his afternoon Daily News on the train so I could read it to.  I discovered columnists like Mike Royko and George Lazarus, and began decade long devotion to certain comic strips.

We always took the paper at our house.  When we moved to California during my high school years, we subscribed to morning San Diego Union and afternoon Escondido Times-Advocate.  In college I read the Des Moines Register, and a Tribune if I could find one.  Once I was working, I loved getting the Tribune as well as the New York Times at home.  I was late to work on days when I fell way into a great story.

During the year I worked in Los Angeles, I was thrilled to discover my New York Times hit my doorstep around 11 pm.  I'd read tomorrow's paper before I went to bed, then wake up to the Los Angeles Times.  Awesome.

When we moved to Wisconsin, I found myself rather disappointed with the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison's morning daily.  It was OK, but nothing exceptional, but we subscribed anyway. I was much happier when I got home to read the Madison Capital Times, the metro daily afternoon paper.  The Cap Times was the superior paper, but like all afternoon papers, its circulation was wasting away. 

The beginning of the end came when I learned the Cap Times was going to stop printing a hard copy, and move to being an online news source with a free weekly print supplement.  This was a closely guarded secret, but the firm I used to work for was doing project work for the paper, so I knew before most the paper was going away.  Oddly, I stopped reading it then, in December 2007, even though the paper continued to print for another four months before going public and pulling the plug.  I just didn't want to keep reading it anymore once I knew it was going away.  Odd, but that was my reaction.

Instead, I followed the Cap Times' move to online.  These days, I look at their recently redesigned site frequently, and make it my go-to source for local news coverage (the local TV news in Madison blows, like in most mid-size and small cities).  When I focused my attention to online newspapers, I stopped reading the State Journal.  It came, and we just threw it out.  It was of little value anymore.  The fact that the shrunk the page size to the width of a paper towel didn't help make it any more inviting.

It's both humorous and sad to think that the State Journal stopped coming and it took us over a week to notice.  Talk about losing your relevancy.  It's really a shame.  I loved reading the paper, and don't want to stop now.  But with the State Journal failing (in my opinion),  I am actually looking to find another newspaper -- of the paper variety -- to fill the void.  I looked at the campus Badger Herald for the first time last Friday.  I may start taking the Jefferson County Times Union, a small-town daily from the the booming metropolis of Fort Atkinson. county.  They don't try to pretend they are something they aren't... and will probably be in print long after the State Journal tanks.

I hope the have Doonesbury.

Addendum:  I couldn't help but notice that nearly all the papers mentioned above have changed hands or disappeared.  Gannet more or less wrecked the Des Moines Register, once a great paper but now just another Gannet clone.  The Copleys sold the San Diego Union after 80 some years.  The Chicago Tribune sold the Times Advocate to another paper that folded it.  Years later, the Tribune bought the LA Times, only to sell out and then go bankrupt later.  The Sun-Times has changed hands several times since the Field family owned it when I was a kid.  These days, the New York Times is the subject of takeover rumors. 

Marcy Wheeler calls a blowjob a blowjob on MSNBC. And she does so while making a pretty good point about why we need to investigate Cheney and the DOJ's facilitation of certain equally indelicate matters... like torture

This pretty much speaks for itself...

And the quick apologies at the end apparently speak for Marcie Wheeler, who had this (and more) to say on her blog afterwords...

At some point, though, we as a country have to be willing and able to weigh what the Village did in the late 90s against the massive illegality of the Bush White House and, finally, realize there are more important things than a blow job, and we need to take those more important things at least as seriously as that magic blow job that captivated the press for so long under Clinton. 

I don't know whether my efforts today helped or hurt those efforts. Next time I'll just repeat, endlessly, torture torture torture. It'll probably cause the same kind of outrage.

Offensive?  The phrase "blow job?"  Gimme a fuckin' break.  DOJ maneuvers leading to illegal torture... orchestrated by Darth Cheney in the shadows... now that's offensive.

Newspapers even lose on their websites: "time spent" measures show drop

From The Business Insider's Silicon Alley Insider's Chart of the Day comes this chart of the day:

Sadly, even the new media part of old media is losing out to digital-only and other alternative news outlets.  No stickiness means limited engagement, which in turn means it's hard to charge advertisers much for web ads.

Ed McMahon and Budweiser: I can never think of the former without also thinking of the latter.

It says something about American culture when CNN Radio News leads a "special report" with the death of Ed McMahon.  But, fact is, anyone over 40 remembers Ed's "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" introduction of Johnny Carson in the 30 years Ed served as the Tonight Show announcer.  And who could forget Star Search?

For me, I think Budweiser.  When I worked on the Anheuser-Busch account in the 1980s, Ed would still make appearances at distributor conventions... and they loved him.  He was as popular as the Bud Girls, and you could tell he loved it.

In previous decades, he was the Budweiser pitchman, earning him lots of jokes from Johnny about his drinking.  But Ed seemed to have a way with those spots, ever the pitchman.

Another A-B pitchman, Frank Sinatra, joined Ed on occasion...

Ed did, apparently, show up drunk for work at least once...

God Speed, Ed McMahon.  Hiyo!

Everyone's tweeting but no one listens to terrestrial radio anymore. That's how it goes with the all or nothing media measurement scale

A couple of different media posts reminded me today that like lot of things, audience measurement can really be overly generalized.  Maybe it's an extension of the "glass half-full/empty" thing.  It's all about the spin. 

This morning I was reading a column by Chicago Tribune media writer Phil Rosenthal.  I found my way to the column via a link Rosenthal included on his Twitter feed.  Seems that WXRT-FM morning radio personality Lin Brehmer posted a rebuttal of sorts on his Facebook page about a mass email that went out to 100,000 radio station listeners under his name, asking his audience to lobby their Congressmen about a pending bill that (my interpretation) charges stations royalties for the music they play.  CBS Radio, XRT's owner, opposes the "radio tax" bill as they characterize it, but Brehemer claims to support the artists and took exception to how the station supposedly used his name without permission for their own political purposes.  Rosenthal's column had a long list of reader comments, and not all supported Brehmer.

So here we have a whole lot of discussion about radio stations, but it was all taking place in the digital ether.  That's because, of course, everyone is on the Internet and everyone Twitters, right?  But, as some posts in the comments section suggested, no one listens to radio anymore.

How many people listen to terrestrial radio anymore?
::

People still listen to the radio ? I hear mine for the less than five seconds per day that it takes for me to turn off the alarm clock. Radios will follow the same route as printed media. This is the 21st Century. The magic of radio is long gone. It was lost long ago. . The only listeners that they might have left are the unemployed people lounging around hoping to be the 100th caller to win free tickets to some concert or event. [emphasis mine]

Kind of reminds when of the time back in 1983 when Cubs manager Lee Elia used very colorful language when telling reporters that the only people who showed up for Cubs games were unemployed losers. (That was before they lit Wrigley Field and weekday attendance sucked.)

Fortunately, and rightly so, many more people pushed back to criticize the people who claimed no one listened to radio... and chided them for being "stupid enough to pay for it."

In contrast, now on to the other thing:  the mad rush to Twitter.  Everyone's jumping on board, don't you know?  Just last week here in Madison a brand communications firm hosted a conference where social networks and stuff like Twitter were a major topic of discussion.   It's so hot that, why, even Newt Gingrich is on Twitter!  And, goodness knows, Newt is the Jesus of Cool when it comes to being on the cutting edge.

But what's this?  Over half the people who are on Twitter have never tweeted?  And they have no followers?  And they follow no one else?  Ruh roh...

A new report about how the majority of the population uses Twitter reveals that most people, well... don't really use it. The microblogging service has grown exponentially over the last year, but a little more than half of its users have never sent a single tweet, according to the latest report from HubSpot (PDF). The report reminds us that, like many Web services, much of the content is produced by a small number of users while everyone else likes to look in and watch.

According to HubSpot's analysis of Twitter's 4.5 million accounts, 54.9 percent of users have never tweeted and 52.7 have no followers whatsoever. This doesn't actually surprise most of us who do use Twitter—a number of our friends and colleagues have joined the service but don't actively participate in it, therefore netting them a big fat goose-egg in terms of followers (why would anyone follow you if you don't tweet?).

What's more perplexing, however, is that 55.5 percent of Twitter users don't follow anyone else. This finding sums up the quintessential "Internet User Who Joins Service And Then Quits Immediately" stereotype, though the ones who don't follow anyone aren't necessarily the ones that aren't tweeting. HubSpot said that only 9.06 of all Twitter users are categorized as "inactive" (those with fewer than 10 followers, fewer than 10 people they're following, and fewer than 10 updates). This makes the usage statistics slightly less puzzling, though Managing Editor Eric Bangeman's account is basically inactive, yet he doesn't satisfy any of those requirements with his 140 followers. Needless to say, there are a lot of users who aren't making very frequent use of Twitter.

 What's all this mean?  Hell if I know.  But just like there are still a shitload of radio listeners out there tuning into local stations with actual radios, not everyone is lining up to anxiously await what Newt or other tweetmeisters had to chirp about today.  It's not an all-or-nothing game, no matter what anyone tells you... even me.  Jeez, especially me.

The glamour, the schmoozing, the bloated budgets and all the other things that made working in advertising so much fun: Goodbye to all that

I recall telling my father, several years ago, that the advertising business just wasn't as much fun as it was when I started (in 1982).  Having had a very successful career in the same business himself, he laughed and replied, "You should have been around in the 60s."

Dad might have been correct, and episodes of Mad Men certainly reinforce his position.  Still, for people who have recently been working in the ad game, or like me have recently walked away from it, this video is bittersweet.  Funny, true, but also rather telling.

[h/t to one-time media guy turned adjunct professor guy Dan Binder for the link]

Love them or hate them, National Public Radio has a pretty good grip on where the news and information business is going

While their for-profit brethren worked the system to consolidate and homogenize the radio waves, National Public Radio remained true to their goal of being an innovator in the way people get news and information.   Long before others saw the value of the Internet as a means of content distribution, NPR embraced it.  They were early adopters of all kinds of web tools, from text versions of stories to podcasts to Twitter feeds.  And it is paying off.

Josh Catone has a great story up on Mashable that highlights the solid approach NPR is taking to grow while commercial competitors are struggling.  It leads off...

In March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that’s causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

The three prongs?  Focus on Local, Social Media, and Ubiquitous Access. 

While none of those is inherently a novel idea, it seems as though NPR is among the very few media concerns that are actually making good on all three of them.

One area that I find very interesting and encouraging is how NPR is allowing listeners to customize and manage content in ways that far exceed the limited options offered by commercial radio operations.  Catone's post cites NPR's willingness to allow outside application developers to remix and reuse content.  This had led to cool stuff like this from Keith Hopper:

NPRbackstory is an experimental web mashup that I created to dig through the NPR archives and unearth the Public Radio backstory on currently trending topics. This "application" is currently running in Beta as a Twitter account. To use the application, you need to follow NPRbackstory in Twitter. I welcome any feedback on this idea in the comments section below.

NPR has also been at the forefront of podcasting.  While other media outlets fretted and schemed over how to make money from podcasts and feeds, NPR was able to just move ahead.  In fact, they have take it to a much more sophisticated level, allowing individuals to mix their own custom podcasts.  This strikes me as brilliant, given that I think a lot of people quickly became victims of podcast fatigue... subscribing to way more than they would ever listen to.  With this application, it is like being able to create your own mini-programming grid in one package.  That is the customization and convenience that makes podcasting valuable to an end user.

Early advocates of public broadcasting would be proud.  Somewhere, Graham Spry is smiling. (Yeah, I know he was Canadian, but he would have loved this.)

Walking the walk: Analyzing web campaign data and acting upon findings is a lot more than just talk

This tweet caught my attention as I scanned my TweetDeck page this morning:

Data geeks invade advertising world. You mean they weren't there already? http://bit.ly/TerIQ

It came from Markos Moulitsas (@markosm), the founder and chief blogger at Daily Kos.  Here's a self-taught master of digital communication wondering if high-octane digital data analysis is just now getting to the advertising world.  It piqued my curiosity enough to follow the tiny URL to a story in today's New York Times.

A few paragraphs into the report by Stephanie Clifford came this passage...

From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tag line, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman [Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management] and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.

“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”

My first reaction was to think that this story was a bit overplayed.  And maybe it is.  It's not as if marketers have been just winging it.  There are all kinds of analytic tools, services and strategies that make Google Analytics look like a training program, and people are using them successfully all over the place.

Or are they?

The old cliche,  "walk the walk, not just talk the talk," applies here.  Saying one can do the back end is easy; doing all the analysis and responding to it rapidly is the hard part.  And, as the Times article suggests, it is not something a lot of marketers and their communication partners are really doing.  In a world of self-professed experts and no shortage of firms claiming to have the smarts to do the digital data dirty work, maybe it's time to go with another cliche:  Talk is cheap.

Forward-thinking marketing and media firms are embracing detailed real-time data analysis and enjoying the benefits beyond just figuring out which web ad to use, according to Clifford...

Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, now they are at the core of the on line strategy. What’s more, they can help advertisers save money in traditional media by testing different phrases or images on-line to see what works before producing an expensive television commercial or magazine ad. Who attracts more clicks in a grape juice ad, for example — the blond girl or the brown-haired boy?

The shift to data-based campaigns is forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker to Madison Avenue. While most data executives now in the field came from media backgrounds, they are recruiting Wall Street math geniuses because the job requires hourly adjustments in strategy based on numbers.

When I started in the advertising business nearly 30 years ago as a media planner, media people were lucky to be invited into the strategic planning process until it was well underway... if at all.  By the turn of the millennium, best practices had the media people up first, determining and explaining how resources would be best deployed and in what medium in order to best meet strategic objectives.  That's why the major agency holding companies spun media into separate business units.  It wasn't just consolidation of spending clout; it was the aggregation of a lot of research and analysis resources.

It's happening again, but now in the area of data analysis...

Major advertising holding companies like WPP, the Publicis Groupe, Havas, MDC Partners and the Interpublic Group are starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five years.

As a wise old baseball man once said, it's deja vu all over again.  As much as I didn't want to see media strategy groups separated from the creative agencies, the powers that ran the big agency holding companies were right in making that move.  I have a feeling they are correct this time as well.  The independent and smaller shops would be wise to invest in this area too, lest they lose another piece of the marketing budget -- and the control that goes with it -- to an outside partner who not only understands the data but can act on it immediately.

If I had any advice to give to marketers when they are meeting with advertising, PR and Internet agencies, I'd encourage them to ask a few questions right off the bat: 

Would you please introduce me to your analytical team?  I'm not talking about your research people; I want to visit with the folks who will crunch the data.  And how are you going to harness that data on the fly so we know what's working while we are doing it, not after the fact?

If you get that deer-in-the-headlights look from them or, worse, they shine you on with a few catch-phrases and book references, you may want to rethink that partnership.  Find someone who can actually walk the walk.  Or, perhaps better said, who can run the run.

[Read Stephanie Clifford's entire article here.]

Like him or not, Jay Leno is a class act

I was lucky enough to see Johnny Carson do the Tonight Show live one time a few years before he retired.  To me, and to many other people including the NBC brain trust, he was irreplaceable.  While not the original host of the Tonight Show (Steve Allen), Johnny was an amazing personality who truly had a bond with his audience.

When NBC waffled, and ultimately picked Jay Leno over David Letterman, I thought they were nuts.  The two men have distinctly different styles and appeals and I was more of a Letterman fan myself.  In the end, though, NBC did make the correct decision when one looks at ratings,  the data that sets advertising rates.  Leno maintained the lead over time, and that earned him a nightly prime time gig beginning this fall.  Interesting choice, and given the way network TV programming has evolved, perhaps a pretty good one.  A live show like his doesn't cost nearly what hour-long series like Law & Order do, and they are essentially new every time.

I rather doubt I will watch Leno's new show; I didn't really watch the Tonight Show all that much.  But I still do think the guy is very, very good at what he does.  I find him funny, but also can see what NBC saw in him 17 years ago.  While Letterman is intentionally a curmudgeon, Leno is more like your funny uncle... that one who likes to say "I kid because I love," and means it.

Johnny Carson's emotional final sign-off was touching and heartfelt.  So too, was Leno's final goodnight from the show he had done since 1992.  He wasn't retiring into seclusion like Carson was, and will be back on TV in a matter of months.  But his goodbye served as a great example of what made -- makes -- Jay Leno popular in a way that few people other than Carson have been.  Like Johnny, Jay's a class act.

Can the utility of Twitter be explained in 140 characters or less? Sure. It's all about the information push.

Zits, by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman (5.25.2009)

My 82-year-old father asked me the other day what Twitter is.  He'd heard of it, but since he still uses a typewriter and has never had an interest in either getting a computer or using the Internet, he knew nothing more than the name.  I tried to explain it to him and finally told him that I'd show him some time when we were together and I could demonstrate it rather than try to deal with telephone-delivered abstractions.

One thing I did tell him was that it seems to actually be a dual-use platform.  (Which meant I had to explain what I meant by "platform," which was another few minutes of confusion.)  Essentially, I told him, it was either for status (still another thing that needed explaining) or for the transmission of news and/or information through brief introductions or comments along with a link.  (A link!  He knew that one!)

I was reminded of this conversation last night when I saw a few tweets from Jesse Russell (@calistan), proprietor of Dane101.  JR had picked up on the various tweets coming out of the Pacific Rim and advanced via BNONews, a Twitter-driven news service, regarding North Korea's apparent withdrawal from the armistice than ended the Korean War back in 1953.  As he posted on Dane101...

The news first came across the wire thanks to BNONews which reported around 10:45 p.m. CST "NORTH KOREA CALLS SOUTH KOREAN DECISION TO JOIN ANTI-PROLIFERATION PROGRAM A DECLARATION OF WAR."

In addition to passing along the news that North Korea was, again, proving how messed up they are, JR was also making the astute observation that most of the early news on this subject was to be found on Twitter.  He pointed out, accurately, that the major US news sites were being scooped by Twitter feeds...

Reports are flooding in via various news sources, specifically the Twittersphere, that North Korea may have ended the '53 armistice that brought the Korean War to a hot standstill. Dane101 is bringing you this news at this late hour because we've searched various news sites, including the New York Times, MSNBC (now has a report - 12:06 a.m. CST), CNN, and FOX (now has report - 11:50 p.m. CST), and don't currently see any reports. We figured the least we could to is try to piece some of the information together so we aren't all in the dark. Please note the question mark in the post title as we await specific details that will verify an end to the armistice.

Dane101 updated the story over the period of maybe an hour, linking who had the story and, of perhaps more significance, noting who did not have the story.  This sent me scurrying to check sites like the Australian News Service, the media in places like Malaysia and Singapore, as well as domestic mainstays like the AP, CBS News and others.  Meanwhile,  diarist Larry Madill was doing the same thing over at Daily Kos.

This is the kind of example I like to show people when I try to explain the value of Twitter.  This platform has the ability to push news out faster than anything else.  The concept of retweeting other posts makes Twitter a viral news ticker on steroids.  But it only works, in my view, it the tweet carries a link to something more.  Often that means a link to a news story or a blog post... which of course will have even more links.  The tweet as information catalyst, if I may characterize it that way, is what makes the thing valuable.

That gets me to one of the downsides of the 140 character bulletin board:  the empty comment.  I saw one yesterday from a fellow UWW student:

Supreme Court Pick = HORRIBLE

Care to elaborate?  Can't do it in 140 words?  That's what shortened URLs are for.  It would have been so much better to have included a link that expanded upon that one-word opinion, added a little context or otherwise advanced the thought.  This could have come from any number of news, blog or other sources.  To be sure, the empty comment could stand alone, but that leaves it in Twitter limbo as neither a status update nor a transfer of meaningful information.

So much better to have done something like this (from someone who does this a lot):

Sam Alito on empathy and judging - wonder why nobody objected to this: http://tinyurl.com/outnm4

This tweet pushes information while it also makes an initial comment.  It's a catalyst for further exploration and, perhaps, a little intellectual interactivity.  Therein lies the utility of Twitter.  And in utility, there is value.  Well, to the end user, there is.  I'm still not sure how the thing can make money.  But that's not my problem.