The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)

AdAge.com opens an article with these dismal facts:

Newspaper ad revenue fell almost $2 billion in the third quarter for a record 18.1% decline, according to new statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. What’s worse, newspapers’ online ad revenue fell for the second quarter in a row.

Link

In another, companion article titled “Huffington Post More Valuable Than Some Newspaper Cos.,” AdAge.com offers this regarding blog value versus newspaper value:

The [$100 million] funding means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies…

Link

The irony is that The Huffington Post “rarely provide original content” (to quote myself) but “select and repackage… information.”

In a CJR piece by Robert Kuttner with an urgent deck that reads “Newspapers have a bright future as print-digital hybrids after all — but they’d better hurry,” he writes of an interview with a 21-year old colleague. In their conversation he attempts to establish an argument in defense of the printed newspaper. Mr. Kuttner writes:

By now I was feeling very last century. And then Ezra… handed me a trump. You have one thing right, he volunteered. The best material on the Internet consistently comes from Web sites run by print organizations.

Link

My take away is this:

  1. Newspapers that don’t adapt to the print-digital hybrid should go the way of the buffalo.
  2. Newspapers that embrace the print-digital hybrid should do so quickly and reorganize as a news organization using the full depth of the new media platform. After all, newspapers are content providers who have been relying on a single (print) platform too long.
  3. The Huffington Post is funded. In a little known interview, the publisher of World magazine made the following statement:

As public companies that do most of the news-gathering cut back on their investments… We see an opportunity to increase news resources in the non-profit world. We may be looking at a paradigm shift in this industry from for-profit news-gathering to non-profit news-gathering.

Is the “broken windows theory” of social behavior correct?

Jason Kottke, “Does the broken windows theory hold online?” Dec 1, 2008, kottke.org, accessed Apr 29, 2026, https://kottke.org/08/12/does-the-broken-windows-theory-hold-online

“The average church in America has less than a 15% retention rate of first-time visitors. If I owned a pizza parlor and more than 85% of the people who ate there once decided to never come back, I would think a mailer might just kill the business.”

And The Greatest Of These Is Latte

So let’s forget the “V” word [viral] for a moment and talk about the “C” word: community.

Excellent piece on brands/social networks/marketing/customer service from AdAge.com:

But brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities…. Brands do potentially have opportunities to act as what I’ll call “facilitators,” but they have to be willing to start with a bit if research and then ask themselves if they are really willing to do what it takes to start and maintain a community.

And now the four C’s:

Content
Quality content is a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping to help build…. [keep] the content itself fresh and relevant.

Context
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are and serving them the right experience at the right time….

Connectivity
Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but require people to mind them….

Continuity
Communities that thrive often evolve to meet the needs of users…. need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

And the take away:

…building a community looks less like marketing and more like customer relationship management….

Link

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so many rss feeds. so little time to read them all. how many rss feeds is too much?

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so three guys were toking weed at the bus stop. they get on the bus giggling. i’m not sure if i prefer the drunks or the stoners.

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strong brand = (consistent customer experience + satisfied customer experience)

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what a monday. glad it is over, but i must say it was a very good and productive day. now, tuesday, what do you have in store for me?

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yes. i’m videochatting right now (which means i’m green… but really i’m red… more google lingo).

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the office water heater expired over the weekend. a dozen fans roar so loud i wonder if i work at an airport or just have a bad hangover.

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well, that’s a day. i’m leaving the office glow of the laptop screen and heading home to warm under the glow of a macbookpro screen.

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it’s 27°F outside. i’m working from home presently and wondering if the buses are on schedule.

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2 things about publishing books: a writer with an audience doesn’t equal book sales and a writer with an audience equals book sales.

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i’ve got an overwhelming desire to feed wheat thins with cream cheese in to the cd drive of my old mac desktop compooter.

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ah, spreadsheets and coffee. what could make the morning more exciting?

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what’s more important: the life you lead or the legacy you leave?

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‘painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’

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translating poems i composed in my moleskine journal to my laptop

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found some old sketch books in the barn. makes me want to draw this afternoon.

Susan Sontag

“To the academic reader, these are provocative, even flashy performances. To the common reader, they’re like shots of intellectual espresso.” read more »

Magazine of the Year reorganizes company

From Ad Age:

“Some of the layoffs are a result of the integration process,” the spokesman [for the Economist] said….

The majority came not from the magazine but from The Economist Intelligence Unit, the group’s business-to-business publishing arm, he said.

The Economist Group has roughly 225 employees remaining.

The magazine has seen ad page sales slow, however…. The Economist’s North American edition increased ad pages by 3.4% through the Nov. 1 issue….

Its paid circulation averaged 747,254 over the first half of this year, 7.6% higher than the first half a year earlier, according to reports with the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Link

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the inbox still has 80-something unanswered emails. if you emailed me in the last week, please be patient. i will reply.

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web ad done. working on weekly planner book and a full page ad.