The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous:
- 65 and older — 60 percent.
- 50-64 — 52 percent.
- 30-49 — 39 percent.
- 18-29 — 23 percent
Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.
The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls “a post-journalism age.”
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Weinberger Dumps a Mainstream Media TV Gig
David Weinberger (activist blogger):
It’s an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It’s possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They’re nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But…
They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — “Nothing out of the mainstream,” the producer told me yesterday — say about a “major” topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere’s reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn’t a job I’m comfortable with.
New Local Site: www.urbanmadison.org
This is the Urban Madison web site. It is a home for informations and discussions about preserving the unique urban environment that we have in Madison.
It is for people that live in, work in, shop in, or do just about anything in urban Madison.
Our efforts to Save the Woman’s Building is what brought us together to discuss issues like this. We look forward to your participation in our neighborhoods and discussions.
Losing Patience, Not Weight
Great article by Bruce Weber on the President of the Cooper Institute, a non-profit organization in Dallas dedicated to research on the relationship between living habits and health:
“I’m a short, fat guy who runs every day,” Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I’ve gained 30 pounds.”
This doesn’t exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise “are going straight to hell,” he said, “because they’re living in paradise now.”) But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government’s new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn’t controlled his weight.
The Death of a Salesman
Frank Hayes offers some useful comments on the perils of CEM (Customer Elimination Management using CRM – Customer Relationship Management Software):
Siebel was built, inside and out, on CRM. Siebel was all about automating CRM as a business process.
Trouble is, customer relationship management isn’t primarily a business process that can be automated. Real management of customer relationships is a culture, a strategy, a way of doing business.
And too many organizations use CRM in a way that marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has dubbed CEM — customer elimination management.
They don’t use CRM software to help good salesmen do a great job. Instead, they feed customers into the CRM sausage machine, a mechanical data-grinder that combines a phony familiarity — strangers in a call center who know everything about the customer — with a relentless, robotized drive to sell, sell, sell.
Pressthink: All Regimes are Founded on Opinion
Jay Rosen has a very useful post over at PressThink:
He says, “As a pastor I have a very real sense of the importance of local dailies and even crappy ol’ free weeklies to build community, or foment division if that’s what clarity brings. Some regular platform for cueing the 20 percent of any town, village, or city that actually get things done as to what needs doing, or stopping, is incredibly important. I can’t figure out what that would look like in Midwestern communities without a newspaper, but I’m afraid that folks who are concerned about big-C Community had better start imagining, fast.”
Jack’s Shoes
Jack’s always has interesting shoes.
Murdoch: The End of Newspapers as We Know Them
?I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers, ?Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings ?don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important,? Mr Murdoch said, ?and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.? And yet, he went on, ?as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.?
Download Murdoch’s speech for free from audible.com
Why Google is Like Wal-Mart
Adam L. Penenberg comments on the two firms similarities.
Skype & Telco Disintermediation
It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this growth and they would have over 200 million concurrent users online. This is not beyond plausibility given how Skype and broadband are symbiotically driving adoption of one-another; the addressable market is exploding too.
That means even if you’re a mega-telco — a Verizon or a Vodafone — you’re screwed. You can create your own Private Voice Application, and start marketing it to your early-adopter users, but who ya gonna call? Ain’t nobody but Skypers out there. Want some Skype presence in your Vodafone-branded VoIP app? Gonna cost ya!