Archive: Posts about Media
February 27th, 2009, 4 Comments »
Over at Capulet, we do a fair bit of business writing. It’s mostly for our technology clients, and usually white papers, web content and so forth. We regularly do case studies, which are short documents describing how our client’s customers happily used their products or services.
This involves interviewing our client’s customers, which is harder than it sounds. The customers are busy, and random interviews with service providers are often a low priority.
I was trying to think of a way to make the process simpler, and wondered if there would be a market for a site that facilitated interviews:
- It might offer similar functionality to When Is Good, enabling the interviewer and interviewees to agree to a time.
- There would be some kind of form-creation service, so that interviewers could create interview templates for interviewees to complete.
- Interviewees could type in their answers, record an audio answer using their computer’s microphone, or maybe call a number where they’re asked each question by a creepy computer voice and their answers are recorded.
- Maybe there’s a kind of sign-off or approval process which enables interviewees to review the final interview text.
Even as I write this it seems like nail in search of a hammer, but I’m curious what you think. Is this a stupid idea, or just marginally idiotic?
4 Comments »
December 1st, 2008, 6 Comments »
Since we’ve come back from Morocco, I haven’t been reading an offline newspaper. The local paper, the Victoria Times Colonist, is pretty mediocre. We sometimes get The Globe and Mail on Saturday, but that’s the extent of things.
While in Vancouver this week, I’ve had the chance to look through a couple of copies of the Vancouver Sun. I was interested to page through the front section of Friday’s paper. I snapped photos of the front page and pages A3 and A4. Look for the little portrait shots of the columnists:
Here’s what I was struck by: in the three (I assume) most-read pages of the paper, there were more column inches given over to editorial commentary than hard news. The same is true, as I look at it, for Saturday’s front page. It features three stories–one news piece and two editorials. I’m hesitant to use the term, but I’m struck by how bloggy the Sun is looking these days.
Is this evidence of the paper’s recognition that it is not, first and foremost, a source of timely news?
I was chatting with a reporter at a regional newspaper the other day, and she commented that her periodical was “circling the drain”. I have little sympathy for newspapers, because their operators were handed every opportunity to lead the web-based new media charge a decade ago. They declined, and they’re suffering the consequences of playing catch-up. There are obviously exceptions–The Guardian springs to mind–but too many papers seem to be clinging to an expiring paradigm.
6 Comments »
November 26th, 2008, 9 Comments »
Last year I complained about a periodical incursion–how magazines for men were increasingly being annexed by magazines targeted at a female audience. I was down at Pharmasave today, and snapped this photo of this ongoing trend (click for a bigger version):
I couldn’t get the whole newsstand in, but this is certainly representative. You can find a smattering of men’s interest magazines on the top shelf, but that’s really it. And most are buried in the third or fourth row, the way girlie magazines used to be.
I’m not actually lobbying that men deserve more shelf space. It’s pure economics. Consider this table from the Magazine Publishers of America. Of the top 50 magazines sold in 2007, only three could be considered primarily of interest to men (by my count, two others might qualify as appealing equally to both genders). The top male interest magazine, Men’s Health, is in the 17th spot, with a single copy circulation of 544,054. Cosompolitan, the top magazine, has a circulation of 1,882,061.
Men just aren’t buying magazines. Or, more accurately, women are buying a lot more magazines than men.
9 Comments »
November 12th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Playboy is among the many periodicals making job and budget cuts this year:
Playboy Enterprises Inc. disclosed in a Wednesday regulatory filing that upcoming cost-cutting measures will include eliminating 55 jobs at the Chicago publishing and entertainment concern.
In the Securities and Exchange Commission document, Playboy said that a plan to reduce annual costs by $10 million is being increased to $12 million “in light of current economic and media conditions.”
In fairness, there’s more to Playboy than a magazine, but the news got me thinking about the 55-year-old periodical. I don’t know that it’s in any serious trouble. According to Wikipedia, it’s got a circulation of 3 million, down from a high of 7.1 million in 1972. That’s still better than, say, Maxim (2.5 million), Esquire (700,000) or Details (500,000).
But let’s imagine that the magazine is struggling. I got to thinking about what radical action I’d undertake to right the ship. The first thing that occurred to me: get rid of the naked women.
“But,” says the VP of Marketing, “the naked women are our brand! They’re what differentiates us from Maxim et al!”
Nay, I say. Nudity stopped being a differentiator some time in the mid-nineties, when the web became a den of inequity and rife with porn. As any web surfer knows, there’s all forms of nudity to be found for free on the web, from the gentlest erotica to the weirdest fetish. The same is true for periodicals, obviously. There’s Hustler, obviously, but even mainstream magazines like Maxim are often exactly two exposed nipples away from precisely mimicking the images in Playboy.
So, I’m unconvinced that anybody really buys the magazine for the pictures anymore. They buy it for the fantastic essays, interviews and short fiction.
Personally, I’d feel still feel a little sheepish buying an issue of Playboy and a lot sheepish reading it on the bus. Maybe Playboy ought to drop the naked photos altogether, and focus on what really differentiates them from the herd?
6 Comments »
October 29th, 2008, 9 Comments »
In a comment earlier today, Duncan referenced a New York Times article about recent cuts and closures in the publishing industry. It includes a quote from big-brained thinker Clay Shirky:
Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.
“The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem,” said Clay Shirky, the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones.”
I know very little about the auto industry. What sort of products–that is, what kind of vehicles–do the auto industry’s new customers want?
9 Comments »
October 29th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Yesterday I read on Mathew Ingram’s blog that the Christian Science Monitor is going strictly digital (though it’s launching a weekly magazine next year). It has always been, in my mind, a highly reputable publication. However, as the Times article reports, its print circulation reflects trends across the industry:
The Monitor is an anomaly in journalism, a nonprofit financed by a church and delivered through the mail. But with seven Pulitzer Prizes and a reputation for thoughtful writing and strong international coverage, it long maintained an outsize influence in the publishing world, which declined as its circulation has slipped to 52,000, from a high of more than 220,000 in 1970.
On the other hand, I think of the CSM as one of the first papers, along with The Guardian, to really embrace the web. If I recall correctly, they never used a pay-only firewall to block off their content. I hope they can retain their high quality of reportage and make a go of it on the web.
More locally, the Canadian satirical magazine Frank is folding (again):
But in today’s world of free - and instant - political blogging, [publisher Michael] Bate said it’s been getting much harder to present fresh material on a bimonthly basis to a paying audience.
Ottawa’s media circuit “was a gentleman’s club in the early ’90s and I think we wrote about subjects that were taboo,” Bate said. “In a way, we were the Internet then.”
If you look at their tremendously irritating website, it’s clear that they haven’t paid enough attention to their web strategy. From the sounds of it, they didn’t want to be an online magazine.
While I’m never happy to see an independent voice of the media (and particularly a satirical one) silenced, I’m pretty ambivalent about losing Frank. Whenever I looked at the magazine, it always felt like inside baseball exclusively for those in and around Ottawa. Plus, I’ve never forgotten a pretty despicable Frank stunt where they ran a fake contest to deflower a then 17-year-old Caroline Mulroney.
UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and, according to Wikipedia, ‘a relatively early participant in The WELL’ (that ‘relatively’ is so catty, eh?), has some interesting thoughts on the CSM move.
1 Comment »
October 28th, 2008, No Comments »
I feel like I’m recommending a This American Life episode every other week, but it’s a reflection of how much I enjoy the show. Last week’s episode was called “The Ground War”, and tells several stories from the electoral battles being fought in Pennsylvania:
This American Life goes to Pennsylvania, a battleground within a battleground, to figure out why, and how, John McCain and Barack Obama both think they can win there. And we get to know the ordinary people who’ve become the candidates’ most forceful foot soldiers.
Pennsylvania, I take it, is one of the few states that John Kerry won in the last election that McCain could take this time around. It’s a classic battleground state, described by one Democratic consultant as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”. It does feel like a metaphor for the entire election, with passionate people on both sides debating the issues and the personalities of the candidates. Simultaneously, we hear from racists and sundry imbeciles from around the state.
One segment profiles volunteers canvassing door-to-door. I’ve never done it, and I’ve always admired people who have the gumption (yes, I said ‘gumption’) to talk to complete strangers about their voting choices.
UPDATE: I meant to mention the swinging cover of Billy Joel’s “Allentown” near the end of the episode. It’s by a German band called Berlin Voices, and feels like an improvement on the original (you can hear a snippet here). They released a whole album of Joel covers. You might want to pass on “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (which you can hear on their MySpace page).
UPDATE #2: Today I read a Slate article about voter registration form. This seems desperately needed in the US. How undemocratic is a process where, in some states, you must register a month before the actual election?
No Comments »
September 24th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I spotted this magazine in the ‘great room’ (an odd phrase, that) of the resort where we’re staying here in Tofino:
What are the other issues about? Ducks? Glassware? Maybe they should have called it ‘The Architect’s Issue”.
3 Comments »
August 1st, 2008, 3 Comments »
I’ve become a This American Life convert. I anticipate listening to it every Monday, and am rarely disappointed. I always worry a little when the show’s host Ira Glass does not say “a show in three acts, three acts”. And instead, he says “we’re dedicating the entire hour today to…”. See, if the topic doesn’t interest me, that’s the whole show shot.
Last week’s episode was such a show. It was entitled Switched at Birth, and it was fantastic. Here’s the blurb:
On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families. One of the mothers realized the mistake but chose to keep quiet. Until the day, more than 40 years later, when she decided to tell both daughters what happened. How the truth changed two families’ lives—and how it didn’t.
It’s an absolutely riveting show. It’s about nature vs. nurture, the big secrets in every family and the influence of the church on small town life. The producers just get everything right. They skillfully manage the large cast of characters in the two families. More importantly, the show is a classic example of radio at its best–it’s a story tailor made for the medium. Plus, it feels like a very American story. Which, of course, is what the name of the show promises.
3 Comments »
June 23rd, 2008, 6 Comments »
From the New York Times, things are going from bad to worse for the purveyors of ink-stained tree bark:
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.
Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.
The article goes on to explain that the San Francisco Chronicle is losing US $1 million every week. Every week. The primary cause of this downturn is “the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue”.
Would I care if the physical version of every newspaper in the world went away? Nope. The real question is whether newspapers can work out a way to survive as Internet-only entities. I’d really like to see a balance sheet for, say, the Vancouver Sun, to understand how much they’d save (and how much ad revenue they’d lose) if they moved to an exclusively online format. That’s certainly not viable today, but it looks like the writing is on the wall.
6 Comments »
