BoSacks Speaks Out: The Following News Flash was submitted by a BoSacks Reader. I felt it was too important not to pass along immediately .
"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else"
Benjamin Franklin
It appears to be a little known fact that included in the next increase and effective May 14th is the elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for foreign subscribers. Publishers will no longer be able to include foreign mail on Form 3541, nor will they be able to pay for these subscribers from their Periodicals accounts at their respective mailing points. These copies will have top be repackaged and mailed with postage affixed via ISAL. The USPS will not allow the copies to be mailed even though the new mailing statements 3541-1 (8 pages vs. 3) don't go into effect until July 15. As an example a 10oz magazine from the US to Canada will go from $1.09 to $2.45 that is almost a 244% increase. I don't think the fulfillment houses are even aware of this change.
The USPS says the change is being forced due to complaints on service to foreign countries by Publishers, but won't give any names. I don't know what service the IMTAC committee has provided in this area for the small publisher as most of their foreign subs are already being handled by remailers. This is about the stupidest thing I have see the USPS do in the 33 years I have been in this business.
(Submitted by a Director)
Friday, May 11, 2007
The year advertising turned digital
The year advertising turned digital
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2530809.ece
Traditional media groups are finding it hard to claim a share of increasing advertising budgets as online services grow at breakneck speed. By Nic Fildes
Published: 11 May 2007
Commercial media companies that have struggled amid tough market conditions over the past few years will have to navigate further choppy waters in 2007 with the latest data in the radio and newspaper publishing sectors suggesting that the threat from online competitors will continue to bite hard.
Despite steady increases in the amount of money that companies have spent on advertising, the proportion allotted to television and radio marketing has stayed flat and, in the case of newspapers, has fallen.
The UK radio sector has been one of the worst hit by the surge in interest in online advertising. Alongside outdoor and cinema advertising, radio companies have struggled to fill the gap left by advertisers attracted to online advertising, a form of marketing that can be targeted specifically at individual groups based on demographic data.
With advertising industry heavyweights such as Sir Martin Sorrell predicting that online advertising will continue to grow at breakneck speed in the UK, newspaper publishers, television broadcasters and radio companies face the prospect of further revenue declines in the coming year.
Online advertising has taken off particularly quickly in the UK due to the equally rapid uptake in broadband services among consumers. Traditional forms of advertising like billboards and radio jingles are fairly unsophisticated compared to flashy new video advertisements that can be used on webpages. While traditional advertising relies on attracting the attention of random passers-by or unknown radio listeners, online marketing can be targeted at specific individuals, increasing the relevance of the advertising. Advertisers can also tell whether the user looked at the marketing, important data in gauging the effectiveness of the campaign.
Radio companies' struggle to attract more advertising revenue is not helped by volatile audience figures. The latest data from Rajar, the radio industry's ratings body, yesterday showed that commercial radio companies have continued to lose market share to the BBC, which took a record 56 per cent of the radio audience during the first three months of the year. Despite the ongoing progress of digital radio, commercial broadcasters slipped to 42 per cent from over 43 per cent last quarter.
Commercial broadcasters like Emap, Chrysalis and GCap took some heart from increases in the number of young people listening to stations like Magic and Galaxy. However there is still much work to do to challenge the BBC and win back advertisers that have moved online.
Some commercial radio companies are coping better with the tough market conditions. UTV's TalkSport station reported record listening figures whilst Emap's Magic station won back its top spot in London status during the quarter.
However analysts were disappointed with the performance of Chrysalis, whose Heart station lost out to Magic, and GCap's flagship station Capital which reported a record low audience share of 4.6 per cent. Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that SMG's performance was the most disappointing with Virgin FM recording its worst ratings performance since 2003.
Analysts said the data suggests that radio companies face an uphill struggle in 2007. Howard Bareham, an investment director at Mindshare, said: "It's a Catch-22. Radio companies need to invest in product but to do that, they need the advertising revenue."
Newspaper publishers have also struggled as advertising budgets have increasingly moved online. Trinity Mirror yesterday warned that advertising conditions remain "challenging and volatile" with advertising revenue falling 2.4 per cent in the first four months of the year. The drop represented an improvement on the 6 per cent fall that Trinity Mirror reported in the last quarter of 2006, but analysts attributed the slowing rate of decline to easier comparative figures, rather than an improvement in the underlying advertising market. Advertising revenue at the company's national newspapers such as Daily Mirror fell 4 per cent while circulation revenue dropped 0.7 per cent.
Companies such as GCap, run by long-serving chief executive Ralph Bernard, and Trinity Mirror, which has Sly Bailey at its helm, face tough challenges over the coming year as the structural shift in the industry gains pace. Mr Bernard has said that he doesn't expect recent investments in improving its radio stations to show up in Rajar figures until August but remains confident that the company can be turned around after a disastrous performance since the merger of GWR and Capital in 2005. Meanwhile Ms Bailey has overseen the acquisition of a number of websites in areas like online recruitment and real estate to offset the collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. However, digital revenue still only accounts for 5 per cent of Trinity Mirror's revenue.
Publishers, terrestrial television broadcasters and radio companies also face significant threats from emerging online competitors aiming to take advantage of changing consumer behaviour to take a large chunk of advertising budgets. In the radio sector, Rajar reported that 24 per cent of people in the UK now listen to the radio via the internet while 11 per cent listen to the radio on mobile phones. With computers becoming an increasingly popular way to consume media, a new form of radio station has emerged where consumers have control over the sort of songs that are played. Pandora and LastFM, two of the most high profile user-controlled radio stations, have proved very popular among young radio listeners.
In the television sector, Joost has created headlines as the first broadcast-quality internet TV platform that offers users free access to an increasingly large amount of content. Similarly advertising-funded services have been launched in the music and mobile-phone space as new media companies look to offer consumers free services if they agree to listen to advertisements.
Patrick Yau, an analyst with Bridgewell Securities, said that radio companies have been slow to invest in the internet despite attracting large audiences to basic internet radio websites due to a "fear of the unknown". "Radio and the internet are very complementary media - we can consume both at the same time. Why aren't we seeing a more integrated online strategy from radio companies?" he said. He noted that Virgin Radio argues it has the most popular internet radio site in the world but has not taken advantage of that traffic, perhaps by offering community-based information.
Richard Menzies-Gow, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that overall radio-listening figures will continue to rise as more people listen to radio on mobile phones or at work but that radio companies need to figure out how to ramp up revenue as a result of higher listening figures. He expects that over time, there will be an interweaving of old and new media with a relaxation of cross-media ownership laws "inevitable" as advertisers look to run integrated campaigns.
Mr Bareham said: "In some respects, technology is against radio at the moment but the strengths of radio are as relevant today as a decade ago when the young and sexy radio industry outflanked the traditional media sector. Now it's online that is in vogue." He said radio companies needed to focus on taking advantage of the interactive elements of online radio and personal devices such as mobile phones over the coming year to stimulate growth in 2008 and 2009.
BT unveils vision to compete with Sky and Virgin
The media sector is getting increasingly crowded, with BT upping the ante in the television space.
Sky and Virgin Media have torn strips off each other to win new customers over the past few months while BT has slowly added customers to its BT Vision service. Customers will receive a set-top box that connects to BT's broadband network and offers customers video-on-demand services, Freeview television and an in-built video recorder.
BT will kick off a multi-million pound national marketing campaign tomorrow to promote the service and compete more aggressively with Sky and Virgin. BT is expected to spend at least £10m promoting the service.
BT Vision is designed to be more flexible than its cable and satellite-based rivals as it does not charge customers a minimum monthly subscription. There will be a set-up fee of around £90 although BT expects to launch a self-installation version later in the year at which point, analysts expect customer numbers to soar. The company has invested in building a large library of content for the on-demand service, including sports and hit movies.
BT expects to have up to 3 million customers in the medium term as it continues to invest in offering services outside its legacy residential telecoms business.
The threat to advertising revenue
* Personalised internet radio stations such as Pandora and Last.fm have built large customer bases by giving listeners control over playlists and dispensing with DJ chatter. Such stations ask the listener to list bands they like and then play songs by similar artists based on those preferences. Listeners can reject songs they don't like and buy ones they do. However the companies have hit licensing problems and Pandora has stopped allowing access to the site outside the US.
* Following on from the success of YouTube, new companies that offer free broadcast-quality television over the internet have started to emerge. Joost, set up by the founders of Skype, has made headlines and built a large library of content, and the company has just secured financial backing from a series of investors, including eBay backers Sequoia Capital, to strengthen the offering. However analysts expect it to be a niche service in the medium term.
* Another possible threat to advertising revenue comes from new companies which aim to offer free content and services to consumers who accept advertising. Blyk, a mobile phone company that uses Orange's network in the UK, will offer free calls and texts to people looking to save money by pumping ads down their handset. Meanwhile, We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, left, offers free digital music tracks to customers happy to accept advertising.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2530809.ece
Traditional media groups are finding it hard to claim a share of increasing advertising budgets as online services grow at breakneck speed. By Nic Fildes
Published: 11 May 2007
Commercial media companies that have struggled amid tough market conditions over the past few years will have to navigate further choppy waters in 2007 with the latest data in the radio and newspaper publishing sectors suggesting that the threat from online competitors will continue to bite hard.
Despite steady increases in the amount of money that companies have spent on advertising, the proportion allotted to television and radio marketing has stayed flat and, in the case of newspapers, has fallen.
The UK radio sector has been one of the worst hit by the surge in interest in online advertising. Alongside outdoor and cinema advertising, radio companies have struggled to fill the gap left by advertisers attracted to online advertising, a form of marketing that can be targeted specifically at individual groups based on demographic data.
With advertising industry heavyweights such as Sir Martin Sorrell predicting that online advertising will continue to grow at breakneck speed in the UK, newspaper publishers, television broadcasters and radio companies face the prospect of further revenue declines in the coming year.
Online advertising has taken off particularly quickly in the UK due to the equally rapid uptake in broadband services among consumers. Traditional forms of advertising like billboards and radio jingles are fairly unsophisticated compared to flashy new video advertisements that can be used on webpages. While traditional advertising relies on attracting the attention of random passers-by or unknown radio listeners, online marketing can be targeted at specific individuals, increasing the relevance of the advertising. Advertisers can also tell whether the user looked at the marketing, important data in gauging the effectiveness of the campaign.
Radio companies' struggle to attract more advertising revenue is not helped by volatile audience figures. The latest data from Rajar, the radio industry's ratings body, yesterday showed that commercial radio companies have continued to lose market share to the BBC, which took a record 56 per cent of the radio audience during the first three months of the year. Despite the ongoing progress of digital radio, commercial broadcasters slipped to 42 per cent from over 43 per cent last quarter.
Commercial broadcasters like Emap, Chrysalis and GCap took some heart from increases in the number of young people listening to stations like Magic and Galaxy. However there is still much work to do to challenge the BBC and win back advertisers that have moved online.
Some commercial radio companies are coping better with the tough market conditions. UTV's TalkSport station reported record listening figures whilst Emap's Magic station won back its top spot in London status during the quarter.
However analysts were disappointed with the performance of Chrysalis, whose Heart station lost out to Magic, and GCap's flagship station Capital which reported a record low audience share of 4.6 per cent. Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that SMG's performance was the most disappointing with Virgin FM recording its worst ratings performance since 2003.
Analysts said the data suggests that radio companies face an uphill struggle in 2007. Howard Bareham, an investment director at Mindshare, said: "It's a Catch-22. Radio companies need to invest in product but to do that, they need the advertising revenue."
Newspaper publishers have also struggled as advertising budgets have increasingly moved online. Trinity Mirror yesterday warned that advertising conditions remain "challenging and volatile" with advertising revenue falling 2.4 per cent in the first four months of the year. The drop represented an improvement on the 6 per cent fall that Trinity Mirror reported in the last quarter of 2006, but analysts attributed the slowing rate of decline to easier comparative figures, rather than an improvement in the underlying advertising market. Advertising revenue at the company's national newspapers such as Daily Mirror fell 4 per cent while circulation revenue dropped 0.7 per cent.
Companies such as GCap, run by long-serving chief executive Ralph Bernard, and Trinity Mirror, which has Sly Bailey at its helm, face tough challenges over the coming year as the structural shift in the industry gains pace. Mr Bernard has said that he doesn't expect recent investments in improving its radio stations to show up in Rajar figures until August but remains confident that the company can be turned around after a disastrous performance since the merger of GWR and Capital in 2005. Meanwhile Ms Bailey has overseen the acquisition of a number of websites in areas like online recruitment and real estate to offset the collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. However, digital revenue still only accounts for 5 per cent of Trinity Mirror's revenue.
Publishers, terrestrial television broadcasters and radio companies also face significant threats from emerging online competitors aiming to take advantage of changing consumer behaviour to take a large chunk of advertising budgets. In the radio sector, Rajar reported that 24 per cent of people in the UK now listen to the radio via the internet while 11 per cent listen to the radio on mobile phones. With computers becoming an increasingly popular way to consume media, a new form of radio station has emerged where consumers have control over the sort of songs that are played. Pandora and LastFM, two of the most high profile user-controlled radio stations, have proved very popular among young radio listeners.
In the television sector, Joost has created headlines as the first broadcast-quality internet TV platform that offers users free access to an increasingly large amount of content. Similarly advertising-funded services have been launched in the music and mobile-phone space as new media companies look to offer consumers free services if they agree to listen to advertisements.
Patrick Yau, an analyst with Bridgewell Securities, said that radio companies have been slow to invest in the internet despite attracting large audiences to basic internet radio websites due to a "fear of the unknown". "Radio and the internet are very complementary media - we can consume both at the same time. Why aren't we seeing a more integrated online strategy from radio companies?" he said. He noted that Virgin Radio argues it has the most popular internet radio site in the world but has not taken advantage of that traffic, perhaps by offering community-based information.
Richard Menzies-Gow, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that overall radio-listening figures will continue to rise as more people listen to radio on mobile phones or at work but that radio companies need to figure out how to ramp up revenue as a result of higher listening figures. He expects that over time, there will be an interweaving of old and new media with a relaxation of cross-media ownership laws "inevitable" as advertisers look to run integrated campaigns.
Mr Bareham said: "In some respects, technology is against radio at the moment but the strengths of radio are as relevant today as a decade ago when the young and sexy radio industry outflanked the traditional media sector. Now it's online that is in vogue." He said radio companies needed to focus on taking advantage of the interactive elements of online radio and personal devices such as mobile phones over the coming year to stimulate growth in 2008 and 2009.
BT unveils vision to compete with Sky and Virgin
The media sector is getting increasingly crowded, with BT upping the ante in the television space.
Sky and Virgin Media have torn strips off each other to win new customers over the past few months while BT has slowly added customers to its BT Vision service. Customers will receive a set-top box that connects to BT's broadband network and offers customers video-on-demand services, Freeview television and an in-built video recorder.
BT will kick off a multi-million pound national marketing campaign tomorrow to promote the service and compete more aggressively with Sky and Virgin. BT is expected to spend at least £10m promoting the service.
BT Vision is designed to be more flexible than its cable and satellite-based rivals as it does not charge customers a minimum monthly subscription. There will be a set-up fee of around £90 although BT expects to launch a self-installation version later in the year at which point, analysts expect customer numbers to soar. The company has invested in building a large library of content for the on-demand service, including sports and hit movies.
BT expects to have up to 3 million customers in the medium term as it continues to invest in offering services outside its legacy residential telecoms business.
The threat to advertising revenue
* Personalised internet radio stations such as Pandora and Last.fm have built large customer bases by giving listeners control over playlists and dispensing with DJ chatter. Such stations ask the listener to list bands they like and then play songs by similar artists based on those preferences. Listeners can reject songs they don't like and buy ones they do. However the companies have hit licensing problems and Pandora has stopped allowing access to the site outside the US.
* Following on from the success of YouTube, new companies that offer free broadcast-quality television over the internet have started to emerge. Joost, set up by the founders of Skype, has made headlines and built a large library of content, and the company has just secured financial backing from a series of investors, including eBay backers Sequoia Capital, to strengthen the offering. However analysts expect it to be a niche service in the medium term.
* Another possible threat to advertising revenue comes from new companies which aim to offer free content and services to consumers who accept advertising. Blyk, a mobile phone company that uses Orange's network in the UK, will offer free calls and texts to people looking to save money by pumping ads down their handset. Meanwhile, We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, left, offers free digital music tracks to customers happy to accept advertising.
Magazine scam hits Severna Park
Magazine scam hits Severna Park
By SCOTT DAUGHERTY, Staff Writer
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/05_10-53/CSP
The young man at the door told a good tale.
He had just moved to the area and was working his way through college.
He said he was at the Severna Park doorstep yesterday trying to help a local charity.
And, the man said, if he managed to sell enough magazines and books; maybe, just maybe, he could earn a trip to Barcelona.
"It was a hard luck story," said Al Passori, of Boone Trail, explaining the salesman - who signed a receipt with the name Bryan Ackerman - sold him on the idea of buying some reading material for the YMCA in Towson.
"I wrote a check for $160," he said.
But then Mr. Passori started to worry about what he'd done and launched his own investigation into the young man and his company, "Xtreme Marketing."
Mr. Passori said the boy gave a fake address, the YMCA had never heard of the group, and that there are several fraud alerts about the company and Mr. Ackerman posted on www.ripoffreport.com.
Calls to Xtreme Marketing, which does not have a Web site, were not returned.
An employee at their Sugar Hill, Ga. offices initially said she could not connect a reporter to a manager because the president of the company didn't have an office - only a cell phone.
She eventually agreed to take the reporter's number and pass it to him.
"I'm glad I had the presence of mind to investigate further and stop the bank check before it could be cashed," Mr. Passori said. "It breaks your heart that kids would try to cheat a bona fide charity out of $160 simply to enrich themselves."
County police are now investigating, but advise against giving money to anyone who comes to the door unsolicited.
Other Severna Park residents reported similar incidents yesterday involving two teenage girls from "UMD." Those girls, however, said the books would go to a pediatrics hospital and never mentioned the company's name.
And Mr. Passori said he turned two boys away two weeks ago when they came to his door and immediately started asking about his cars.
"It appears to be a pattern," he said.
According to ripoffreport.com and numerous other Web sites, Xtreme Marketing also works under the name United Family Circulation and Ultimate Empire Sales. Among the postings on ripoffreport.com - some of which praised and some of which vilified the company - was one from a person claiming to be a former employee of United Family Circulation.
"Basically they told us lies that we could tell people to get them to buy our subscriptions. A common story was something like "Hi, my name is Scott. I just moved into the neighborhood."
The Better Business Bureau of Atlanta is aware of several similar complaints involving such lies. Xtreme Marketing told the bureau, however, they do not condone lying by their "independent contractors."
United Family Circulation has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to unanswered complaints. Sixty-two complaints were filed against the company.
Also, according to the bureau, Xtreme Marketing, Inc. entered into an "Assurance of Voluntary Compliance" with the Georgia Governor's Office of Consumer Affairs.
"This was due to the company allegedly not providing refunds when consumers did not receive magazines, not honoring cancellations within the correct time frame, and while selling magazines the salespeople stated affiliation with or connection to various charitable organizations, high schools and universities, when such was not the case," the Web site said.
Mr. Passori said the incident will make him think twice about donating to a charity or giving money to a door to door salesman.
"This really irks me," said Mr. Passori. "This has really soured it on me."
By SCOTT DAUGHERTY, Staff Writer
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/05_10-53/CSP
The young man at the door told a good tale.
He had just moved to the area and was working his way through college.
He said he was at the Severna Park doorstep yesterday trying to help a local charity.
And, the man said, if he managed to sell enough magazines and books; maybe, just maybe, he could earn a trip to Barcelona.
"It was a hard luck story," said Al Passori, of Boone Trail, explaining the salesman - who signed a receipt with the name Bryan Ackerman - sold him on the idea of buying some reading material for the YMCA in Towson.
"I wrote a check for $160," he said.
But then Mr. Passori started to worry about what he'd done and launched his own investigation into the young man and his company, "Xtreme Marketing."
Mr. Passori said the boy gave a fake address, the YMCA had never heard of the group, and that there are several fraud alerts about the company and Mr. Ackerman posted on www.ripoffreport.com.
Calls to Xtreme Marketing, which does not have a Web site, were not returned.
An employee at their Sugar Hill, Ga. offices initially said she could not connect a reporter to a manager because the president of the company didn't have an office - only a cell phone.
She eventually agreed to take the reporter's number and pass it to him.
"I'm glad I had the presence of mind to investigate further and stop the bank check before it could be cashed," Mr. Passori said. "It breaks your heart that kids would try to cheat a bona fide charity out of $160 simply to enrich themselves."
County police are now investigating, but advise against giving money to anyone who comes to the door unsolicited.
Other Severna Park residents reported similar incidents yesterday involving two teenage girls from "UMD." Those girls, however, said the books would go to a pediatrics hospital and never mentioned the company's name.
And Mr. Passori said he turned two boys away two weeks ago when they came to his door and immediately started asking about his cars.
"It appears to be a pattern," he said.
According to ripoffreport.com and numerous other Web sites, Xtreme Marketing also works under the name United Family Circulation and Ultimate Empire Sales. Among the postings on ripoffreport.com - some of which praised and some of which vilified the company - was one from a person claiming to be a former employee of United Family Circulation.
"Basically they told us lies that we could tell people to get them to buy our subscriptions. A common story was something like "Hi, my name is Scott. I just moved into the neighborhood."
The Better Business Bureau of Atlanta is aware of several similar complaints involving such lies. Xtreme Marketing told the bureau, however, they do not condone lying by their "independent contractors."
United Family Circulation has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to unanswered complaints. Sixty-two complaints were filed against the company.
Also, according to the bureau, Xtreme Marketing, Inc. entered into an "Assurance of Voluntary Compliance" with the Georgia Governor's Office of Consumer Affairs.
"This was due to the company allegedly not providing refunds when consumers did not receive magazines, not honoring cancellations within the correct time frame, and while selling magazines the salespeople stated affiliation with or connection to various charitable organizations, high schools and universities, when such was not the case," the Web site said.
Mr. Passori said the incident will make him think twice about donating to a charity or giving money to a door to door salesman.
"This really irks me," said Mr. Passori. "This has really soured it on me."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
by Mark Glaser, 11:44AM
If you’ve grown tired of answering the question, “paper or plastic?” you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: “Online or print?”
Environmental critics have decried “dead-tree media” for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print publishers have started to look at recycled paper content and other environmentally friendly practices, the web remains a more eco-friendly choice for information consumers who care about their carbon footprint.
And it’s not just about getting news on the web; people are now getting information on smartphones and other wireless devices, too. In their unpublished research paper, “The Impact of Environmental Issues and Information Technology on the Future of Paper Industry,” Lauri Hetemaki and Majella Clarke of the Finnish Forest Research Institute explain how digital technology could eventually substitute for print:
One of the main trends in the publishing business has recently been the proliferation of media and venues for delivering content. Three interconnected drivers are likely to have an important impact on this process: bandwidth affordability, wireless communication, and the convergence of digital equipment. The rapid increase of broadband services and their declining real prices result in increasing usage of computer-based equipment for the delivery and consumption of media. Wireless communication allows people to break free from the tether of the network, and significantly increases the portability of digital media platforms. The convergence of technologies implies that single-function analog devices are giving way to multi-function digital devices.
The paper goes on to mention the environmental problems of technology and electronics hardware, often becoming obsolete quickly and containing toxic chemicals. Still, the amount of energy and environmental impact of one session on a computer pales in comparison to the impact of reading a printed newspaper or magazine. Frank Locantore is director of the Magazine Paper Project at the non-profit Co-op America. The aim of the project is to help magazines start using more recycled paper content.
Frank Locantore
“With the web we’re talking about energy use more than anything else,” he said. “When you talk about magazines and newspapers, you’re talking about forests, as well as energy and water use and even social conflict from where the forest fiber is being sourced. I can’t imagine magazine readership and production having less impact than the web.”
While that might be true in general, web and computer usage does have its environmental impact with the electricity and power used for server farms. And conversely, print publishers have started to pay attention to environmental concerns by pushing recycling programs as well as using recycled fiber in their publications.
Mixed Record for Newspapers
Recycling newspapers has become an ingrained habit for Americans over the past couple decades. Publishers have increased their use of recycled paper in newspapers and have become more cognizant of the impact of discarded newspapers on the local communities they serve.
In two separate investigative reports, specific newspapers detailed the environmental impact they were having. The Sacramento Bee’s State of Denial report from 2003 includes a section detailing how California forests had been preserved but newspaper publishers were taking paper stripped from the Canadian boreal forests. And the Montreal Gazette literally gave itself a Green Report Card , figuring its own ecological footprint with an in-depth package. The Gazette noted that it had taken some environmentally friendly steps by using 20% recycled paper content in its newspapers, but that the dream of a paperless office was far from coming true.
Tyson Miller, director of the Green Press Initiative , has helped book publishers switch to recycled paper, and is planning to start doing the same thing to the newspaper industry. He told me there were already a lot of good signs that newspapers were ahead of books and magazines — but there was still a long way to go.
“Newsprint consumption is 9.2 million tons per year, and the average amount of that which is recycled material is 32%, so about 6 million tons of virgin fiber is used to make U.S. newsprint per year,” he said. “That’s more virgin fiber than the books, magazine and catalog business combined. So even though they use a lot more recycled content, and print circulation is dropping, the industry as a whole uses a lot of paper. The good news is that the industry has a fairly high recycled fiber use rate.”
The Newspaper Association of America found that 69% of newspapers in the U.S. were recovered and recycled in 2005, up from about 57% in 1995. The NAA has been touting digital distribution of news articles and the rise of newspaper website readership for the past few years, though it hasn’t made it an environmental issue. David Johnson, administrator of ScrippsNews.com, wrote an Earth Day-related blog post detailing the eco-friendly steps the newspaper industry was taking. He told me newspapers had lowered the amount of newsprint used in each paper — though that was more for cost-cutting than anything else.
“I know at Scripps [environmental issues are] a big deal,” Johnson said. “I just got out of a newspaper technology directors meeting a couple weeks ago, and we’re looking for every way we can to increase profit and one of those ways is recycling. We’re recycling everything that we’re not distributing…There are a few boutique presses here in DC that say they only do recycled newsprint and that’s their marketing advantage. The newspapers will find that as a marketable peg they can get onto as eco-friendly.”
When I was visiting London last year, I was amazed at all the discarded free Metro newspapers in the subway trains. The trend toward free commuter newspapers is not one that has captured the hearts of environmentalists. Quite the contrary. London-based photographer Justin Canning started the website Project Freesheet to ask people to photograph the waste created by free newspapers, and to pressure publishers to promote recycling and pay for the garbage they are creating.
Justin Canning
“Will people change the way they read because they have concerns for the environment?” Canning said via email. “I’m not sure because I don’t think people are yet 100% comfortable about sitting in front of screens to read for hours. Papers and books still offer the ability to ‘disappear’ (into the garden, on the beach, on the train, etc.) and read for amounts of time, without the need to worry about support for your device…So I think the onus still rests on the producers of printed matter to take responsibility for their product and produce it in a way that is positive for our environment.”
Magazines Still Lagging
The magazine industry has been slower to embrace recycled paper in their publications, citing a higher cost and lower quality of the paper. As paper production changes and recycling becomes more widespread, those arguments will start to lose their strength — especially if readers start asking for more eco-friendly publications.
After the Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” magazine publishers are starting to pay more attention to environmental issues, at least in their editorial outlook. The Week magazine decided to do one online-only issue with a green theme around Earth Day this year. Elle and Vanity Fair both had special green issues as well, and WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive launched the online-only enviro-women’s pub, Sprig .
Yet, there’s a hint of hypocrisy in some of these nods toward the green revolution. Vanity Fair uses absolutely no recycled paper in its issues, and Elle has only used recycled paper in its two green issues over the past couple years.
“It drives me batty,” said Frank Locantore of the Magazine Paper Project. “It’s like a Ford Escalade SUV with a ‘Stop Global Warming’ bumper sticker. Vanity Fair and Elle make such a hullabaloo with their Green Issue, and the most impactful thing that they could do for the environment is to switch to recycled paper, and Shape [magazine] does that for every issue.”
Locantore says that only about 100 magazines out of 18,000 titles in print use some recycled paper content or use responsibly sourced virgin fiber. (His group includes a list of these titles on a special Heroes page .) He is starting to see more interest from publishers to use recycled paper, and is hoping to convince six high-profile magazines to set examples by using some recycled paper content in their publications. He ticks off the enivoronmental benefits if magazines would switch from 0% recycled content in their publications to 30% recycled: 16% less solid waste; 10% less waste water; 13% less greenhouse gases; and 10% less total energy expended in production.
There are a lot of other areas that magazines could help out the environment beyond just using recycled stock paper. Samir Mr. Magazine Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, notes that publishers could do a much better job of printing up the right number of copies instead of overshooting.
“The newspaper and magazine industry must find ways to trim the waste, and that’s why they have to be more clever about delivering relevant information to relevant audiences,” he said. “We can’t afford to have publishers who say, ‘I’m going to print 1 million copies and will see who’s going to buy them.’ And we know that only 3 out of 10 copies will be sold, and 700,000 will go to waste. We have to be more laser-targeted in our publishing instead of a shotgun approach. The technology will help us laser target our publishing, our printing.”
E-Ink to the Rescue?
Despite the obvious ecological problems with ink on paper, the Internet isn’t exactly solar-powered and eats up plenty of energy. An Ask.com executive told Wired Magazine last fall that the five leading search engines have about 2 million servers for a total of 600 megawatts of power consumption. When you add in hard drive power and air conditioning, the total energy usage for search engines hits 5 gigawatts — enough to power Las Vegas on a hot day, according to the article.
Journalist/blogger Nicholas Carr noted that 4,000 servers power the virtual world Second Life, and that there are an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars living there. He wanted to know if Second Life citizens ended up using up more energy than real-life people and found that the average avatar uses up 1,752 kilowatt hours per year — about the same amount used by the average Brazilian. “Avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem,” he concluded. “They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”
So perhaps a more perfect ecological solution for getting news and information would be on low- or solar-powered e-readers that were cheap, flexible and reusable.
Sony Reader with E-Ink
“I think with the increased use of handheld electronic devices, the consumption of traditional printed media is already being affected,” Project Freesheet’s Canning said. “But we’ll always have our favorites that we will want to buy hard copies of, so the book/magazine/paper format will not fall out of demand for a long time — or until someone invents a device that can open up to the size of a magazine and fold down to the size of your present mobile phone. That is why we have to encourage the publishing industry to look at the products they produce and to ask them if they can really justify polluting the planet for the next 50 years with a product that is showing itself to be extremely bad news for the environment.”
The researchers from the Finnish Forest Research Institute believe that e-readers could eventually become a real substitute for printed material — unlike the desktop computer, which doesn’t lend itself to lengthy readings.
“When consumers see that paper-like displays or smart paper are as easy to use and as good quality as print media, and that they come at mass-market prices, then the environmental perspective (green purchasing) becomes much more relevant,” they write. “The further we look to the future, the more likely the relationship between print and digital media is to evolve from that of a complementary preference, to that of substitute…The more consumers accept electronic media as a substitute for printed media, the easier it is for politicians and environmental authorities to regulate media that are environmentally more damaging.”
by Mark Glaser, 11:44AM
If you’ve grown tired of answering the question, “paper or plastic?” you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: “Online or print?”
Environmental critics have decried “dead-tree media” for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print publishers have started to look at recycled paper content and other environmentally friendly practices, the web remains a more eco-friendly choice for information consumers who care about their carbon footprint.
And it’s not just about getting news on the web; people are now getting information on smartphones and other wireless devices, too. In their unpublished research paper, “The Impact of Environmental Issues and Information Technology on the Future of Paper Industry,” Lauri Hetemaki and Majella Clarke of the Finnish Forest Research Institute explain how digital technology could eventually substitute for print:
One of the main trends in the publishing business has recently been the proliferation of media and venues for delivering content. Three interconnected drivers are likely to have an important impact on this process: bandwidth affordability, wireless communication, and the convergence of digital equipment. The rapid increase of broadband services and their declining real prices result in increasing usage of computer-based equipment for the delivery and consumption of media. Wireless communication allows people to break free from the tether of the network, and significantly increases the portability of digital media platforms. The convergence of technologies implies that single-function analog devices are giving way to multi-function digital devices.
The paper goes on to mention the environmental problems of technology and electronics hardware, often becoming obsolete quickly and containing toxic chemicals. Still, the amount of energy and environmental impact of one session on a computer pales in comparison to the impact of reading a printed newspaper or magazine. Frank Locantore is director of the Magazine Paper Project at the non-profit Co-op America. The aim of the project is to help magazines start using more recycled paper content.
Frank Locantore
“With the web we’re talking about energy use more than anything else,” he said. “When you talk about magazines and newspapers, you’re talking about forests, as well as energy and water use and even social conflict from where the forest fiber is being sourced. I can’t imagine magazine readership and production having less impact than the web.”
While that might be true in general, web and computer usage does have its environmental impact with the electricity and power used for server farms. And conversely, print publishers have started to pay attention to environmental concerns by pushing recycling programs as well as using recycled fiber in their publications.
Mixed Record for Newspapers
Recycling newspapers has become an ingrained habit for Americans over the past couple decades. Publishers have increased their use of recycled paper in newspapers and have become more cognizant of the impact of discarded newspapers on the local communities they serve.
In two separate investigative reports, specific newspapers detailed the environmental impact they were having. The Sacramento Bee’s State of Denial report from 2003 includes a section detailing how California forests had been preserved but newspaper publishers were taking paper stripped from the Canadian boreal forests. And the Montreal Gazette literally gave itself a Green Report Card , figuring its own ecological footprint with an in-depth package. The Gazette noted that it had taken some environmentally friendly steps by using 20% recycled paper content in its newspapers, but that the dream of a paperless office was far from coming true.
Tyson Miller, director of the Green Press Initiative , has helped book publishers switch to recycled paper, and is planning to start doing the same thing to the newspaper industry. He told me there were already a lot of good signs that newspapers were ahead of books and magazines — but there was still a long way to go.
“Newsprint consumption is 9.2 million tons per year, and the average amount of that which is recycled material is 32%, so about 6 million tons of virgin fiber is used to make U.S. newsprint per year,” he said. “That’s more virgin fiber than the books, magazine and catalog business combined. So even though they use a lot more recycled content, and print circulation is dropping, the industry as a whole uses a lot of paper. The good news is that the industry has a fairly high recycled fiber use rate.”
The Newspaper Association of America found that 69% of newspapers in the U.S. were recovered and recycled in 2005, up from about 57% in 1995. The NAA has been touting digital distribution of news articles and the rise of newspaper website readership for the past few years, though it hasn’t made it an environmental issue. David Johnson, administrator of ScrippsNews.com, wrote an Earth Day-related blog post detailing the eco-friendly steps the newspaper industry was taking. He told me newspapers had lowered the amount of newsprint used in each paper — though that was more for cost-cutting than anything else.
“I know at Scripps [environmental issues are] a big deal,” Johnson said. “I just got out of a newspaper technology directors meeting a couple weeks ago, and we’re looking for every way we can to increase profit and one of those ways is recycling. We’re recycling everything that we’re not distributing…There are a few boutique presses here in DC that say they only do recycled newsprint and that’s their marketing advantage. The newspapers will find that as a marketable peg they can get onto as eco-friendly.”
When I was visiting London last year, I was amazed at all the discarded free Metro newspapers in the subway trains. The trend toward free commuter newspapers is not one that has captured the hearts of environmentalists. Quite the contrary. London-based photographer Justin Canning started the website Project Freesheet to ask people to photograph the waste created by free newspapers, and to pressure publishers to promote recycling and pay for the garbage they are creating.
Justin Canning
“Will people change the way they read because they have concerns for the environment?” Canning said via email. “I’m not sure because I don’t think people are yet 100% comfortable about sitting in front of screens to read for hours. Papers and books still offer the ability to ‘disappear’ (into the garden, on the beach, on the train, etc.) and read for amounts of time, without the need to worry about support for your device…So I think the onus still rests on the producers of printed matter to take responsibility for their product and produce it in a way that is positive for our environment.”
Magazines Still Lagging
The magazine industry has been slower to embrace recycled paper in their publications, citing a higher cost and lower quality of the paper. As paper production changes and recycling becomes more widespread, those arguments will start to lose their strength — especially if readers start asking for more eco-friendly publications.
After the Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” magazine publishers are starting to pay more attention to environmental issues, at least in their editorial outlook. The Week magazine decided to do one online-only issue with a green theme around Earth Day this year. Elle and Vanity Fair both had special green issues as well, and WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive launched the online-only enviro-women’s pub, Sprig .
Yet, there’s a hint of hypocrisy in some of these nods toward the green revolution. Vanity Fair uses absolutely no recycled paper in its issues, and Elle has only used recycled paper in its two green issues over the past couple years.
“It drives me batty,” said Frank Locantore of the Magazine Paper Project. “It’s like a Ford Escalade SUV with a ‘Stop Global Warming’ bumper sticker. Vanity Fair and Elle make such a hullabaloo with their Green Issue, and the most impactful thing that they could do for the environment is to switch to recycled paper, and Shape [magazine] does that for every issue.”
Locantore says that only about 100 magazines out of 18,000 titles in print use some recycled paper content or use responsibly sourced virgin fiber. (His group includes a list of these titles on a special Heroes page .) He is starting to see more interest from publishers to use recycled paper, and is hoping to convince six high-profile magazines to set examples by using some recycled paper content in their publications. He ticks off the enivoronmental benefits if magazines would switch from 0% recycled content in their publications to 30% recycled: 16% less solid waste; 10% less waste water; 13% less greenhouse gases; and 10% less total energy expended in production.
There are a lot of other areas that magazines could help out the environment beyond just using recycled stock paper. Samir Mr. Magazine Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, notes that publishers could do a much better job of printing up the right number of copies instead of overshooting.
“The newspaper and magazine industry must find ways to trim the waste, and that’s why they have to be more clever about delivering relevant information to relevant audiences,” he said. “We can’t afford to have publishers who say, ‘I’m going to print 1 million copies and will see who’s going to buy them.’ And we know that only 3 out of 10 copies will be sold, and 700,000 will go to waste. We have to be more laser-targeted in our publishing instead of a shotgun approach. The technology will help us laser target our publishing, our printing.”
E-Ink to the Rescue?
Despite the obvious ecological problems with ink on paper, the Internet isn’t exactly solar-powered and eats up plenty of energy. An Ask.com executive told Wired Magazine last fall that the five leading search engines have about 2 million servers for a total of 600 megawatts of power consumption. When you add in hard drive power and air conditioning, the total energy usage for search engines hits 5 gigawatts — enough to power Las Vegas on a hot day, according to the article.
Journalist/blogger Nicholas Carr noted that 4,000 servers power the virtual world Second Life, and that there are an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars living there. He wanted to know if Second Life citizens ended up using up more energy than real-life people and found that the average avatar uses up 1,752 kilowatt hours per year — about the same amount used by the average Brazilian. “Avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem,” he concluded. “They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”
So perhaps a more perfect ecological solution for getting news and information would be on low- or solar-powered e-readers that were cheap, flexible and reusable.
Sony Reader with E-Ink
“I think with the increased use of handheld electronic devices, the consumption of traditional printed media is already being affected,” Project Freesheet’s Canning said. “But we’ll always have our favorites that we will want to buy hard copies of, so the book/magazine/paper format will not fall out of demand for a long time — or until someone invents a device that can open up to the size of a magazine and fold down to the size of your present mobile phone. That is why we have to encourage the publishing industry to look at the products they produce and to ask them if they can really justify polluting the planet for the next 50 years with a product that is showing itself to be extremely bad news for the environment.”
The researchers from the Finnish Forest Research Institute believe that e-readers could eventually become a real substitute for printed material — unlike the desktop computer, which doesn’t lend itself to lengthy readings.
“When consumers see that paper-like displays or smart paper are as easy to use and as good quality as print media, and that they come at mass-market prices, then the environmental perspective (green purchasing) becomes much more relevant,” they write. “The further we look to the future, the more likely the relationship between print and digital media is to evolve from that of a complementary preference, to that of substitute…The more consumers accept electronic media as a substitute for printed media, the easier it is for politicians and environmental authorities to regulate media that are environmentally more damaging.”
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Old Media turns Combative against New Media
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence: Courtesy of BoSacks and The Precision Media Group BoSacks on the WebAmerica's Oldest e-newsletter est.1993 The BoSacks Blog Spot Click here to forward this email ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| "There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry." George Armstrong Custer Old media turns combative against new media | |
| Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out" "Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence: Courtesy of The Precision Media Group.
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| Publishing Links and News ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| Contact Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ email: bosacks@aol.com phone: 518-329-7994 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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Bill Gates: Reading to Go 'Completely Online'
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Precision Media Group | PO Box 53 | Copake | NY | 12516 |
BoSacks Speaks Out: Paid Circ Is What Matters says Ad Chief to Publishers
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence: Courtesy of BoSacks and The Precision Media Group BoSacks on the WebAmerica's Oldest e-newsletter est.1993 The BoSacks Blog Spot Click here to forward this email ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| BoSacks Speaks Out: Paid Circ Is What Matters Well, here you have it. Right out of the very mouths that feeds us. Please read this article and think about our pursuit of metric changes. And while you're mulling it over . . . I have these two statements for you from the article below: " . . . our business decisions, like yours, are driven by facts and results," Publishers of newspapers and magazines have tried to shift advertisers' focus to overall audience from the established metric, paying subscribers and newsstand buyers. Get that? . . . The advertisers want facts and results . . They want paying buyers and paid subscribers . . . not fluff, not subterfuge, and surely not smoke and mirrors. So it seems that we need to look deeply within ourselves and our current business models to deliver what is increasingly becoming the demand and mantra of advertisers and media buyers: Accountability -30- "Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale. That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability." Michael Chertoff Macy's Ad Chief to Newspapers: Paid Circ Is What Matters --------------------------------------------------- | |
| Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out" "Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence: Courtesy of The Precision Media Group.
| |
| Publishing Links and News ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| Contact Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ email: bosacks@aol.com phone: 518-329-7994 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| ||||
New York mag is to journalism what The Eagles were to rock
Adam's Apple
Adam Moss is America's most celebrated editor. So why is New York magazine such a bore?
By John Cook
http://www.radaronline.com/features/2007/05/adam_moss_new_york_magazine_1.php
ADULT CONTEMPORARY Much like The Eagles, New York magazine is solid, respectable, and often lameThe most successful album in the history of recorded music is a greatest hits compilation by The Eagles. It has been purchased 29 million times since its release in 1976. This fact has long been a cause of consternation to people who care about rock music. It's not so much that The Eagles were an execrable band (which they were), or that they outsold worthier competitors like Michael Jackson or Led Zeppelin (which they did). It's that The Eagles should have been the best rock band ever, but instead opted to remain a slick and empty confection. All the elements were there—exquisite harmonies, some truly beautiful songs, gifted musicians—but somehow the expensive ingredients all collapsed into a flaccid soufflé of radio-ready pabulum. Notwithstanding their success, The Eagles are now generally remembered as either the worst good band or the best awful band of their era.
Why can't I remember anything I've read in 'New York' over the past two years? Because all too often it's a magazine without elbows—or a spine, or a pulse.Which brings us to New York magazine, the title that swept the National Magazine Awards last Tuesday in five categories, including general excellence and design. Despite all its recent accolades, New York is to journalism what The Eagles were to rock: a technically flawless assemblage of expertly crafted elements that look, on paper (as it were), as though they ought to translate into a superb magazine, and yet somehow still manage to suck.
Superficially, of course, there is much in New York to justify its current ascendancy, which is now so clearly entrenched that former Newsweek chief Mark Whitaker joked at the NMA ceremony that editor Adam Moss had replaced the New Yorker's David Remnick in the top slot of the city's rigidly delineated media hierarchy. Moss, who took charge of the magazine three years ago after a long stint at the New York Times Magazine, has proven himself a brilliant technician. The New York that he redesigned is a precision-machined and conceptually refined Platonic ideal of magazine-ness.
Each issue is beautifully laid out, from the cool, sepia-toned headshots illustrating Intelligencer to the playful schematics and illustrated sidebars in the feature well to the arresting product shots that open the Strategist (yeah, the antique doorknobs are $200, but they still look great) to the Boy Scout Handbook-style instructions on basic culinary tasks in the food section. With the exception of Jim Cramer, the writing is generally crisp and felicitous, and the editorial voice of the magazine—as expressed in coverlines, headlines, captions, etc.—is, while relentlessly white and privileged, clever enough.
So why can't I remember anything I've read in New York over the past two years? Because all too often it's a magazine without elbows—or for that matter, a spine, balls, or a pulse. Good stories are pointy things that lodge in the brain. But to open New York is to sluice the same robotically calibrated sensibility over the same well-worn neural pathways week after week. The collective judgment of the NMA panel notwithstanding, New York is frosty, astringent, soulless, and so risk-averse as to leave the reader desperate for the dressed-up tabloid stories of its glory days. Reading it is like eating a bowl of ice shavings prepared by Jean-George Vongerichten. (Full disclosure: I once met with Moss to discuss potential employment at New York, I've pitched its editors and been rejected, the editor in chief of Radar used to work there, and my wife has written in its pages.)
MOSS GATHERING The editor collects all five of his 2007 National Magazine AwardsWas anyone surprised, for instance, by anything that appeared in April's "Sex and Love" issue? That Katie Roiphe, whose career rests on her ability to spin her own sexual experiences into what she takes to be transgressively counterintuitive polemic, would reveal that going through a divorce actually makes one "jangly" and "productive" and that the kid will turn out just fine? That the "sexually frustrated dad" who submitted a "sex diary" didn't screw his wife while she was menstruating, or that the gay 38-year-old magazine editor's diary included a sexual dream about a coastal estate in Maine that he termed "a real-estate fantasy"? (The term "real-estate porn" had heretofore been deployed as a metaphor to describe New York's voyeuristic and obsessive approach to the beat; now it has become a reality. Also, expect an "Is the coast of Maine the new Hamptons?" story this summer). Did anyone even blink when Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell's head popped up in the background of a photo (on page 51—check for yourself) taken at Ariel Levy and Amy Norquist's wedding that accompanied Levy's piece on the fact that lesbians now marry, and that their marriage ceremonies tend to differ in substantive ways from the marriage ceremonies of heterosexual couples?
The Mossian feature must be about something other than what it appears to be about—it must say something meaningful about The Way We Live Now.You can't always see it, but Gladwell's head is tucked away somewhere, Waldo-like, in each page of New York. Though he writes for the the New Yorker's momentarily deposed David Remnick, Gladwell is a principal practitioner of the style of maddening posturing that has increasingly infected New York's stories. The magazine earned its stripes in the '60s by pioneering a new genre of rollicking, narrative-driven, first-person journalism. But New York, in its current version seems constitutionally incapable of telling a good story. The Mossian feature must be, as per Gladwell, about something other than what it appears to be about—it must say something meaningful about The Way We Live Now, to borrow a preposterously pretentious phrase that Moss bestowed on the front-of-the-book section of the New York Times Magazine during his tenure there. So Adam Sternbergh's account of the development of the High Line in last week's issue is not actually about the development of the High Line—which would have been sufficient. It's actually a treatise about how New York commodifies its own self-generated nostalgia, or some such.
Likewise, David Amsden's profile of Mets third baseman David Wright isn't really about David Wright but about his "mechanized" persona of "pure packaged Americana," as telegraphed in the subheadline of the article: "David Wright is the perfect New York sports star—almost too perfect." And Steve Fishman's 2005 profile of Ilario Pantano, the Marine lieutenant charged with murdering two Iraqis, was as much about how a hunky Horace Mann grad and Goldman Sachs trader wound up doing something so vulgar as serving in Iraq as it was about his case.
Of course, despite the magazine's meta-version to narrative stories, good features frequently slip through the cracks. While New York has access to some of the finest magazine writers in the country, their efforts are undercut by a prim editorial voice that is more concerned with analyzing what it all means than with who did what and why. In its high-minded effort to avoid anything resembling gossip or impudence, the magazine regularly manages to turn even the most juicy tales of power, sex, and violence into uptight, cerebral dispatches that seem more suited to the New Republic than New York. After Ron Perelman's public, bilious split with Ellen Barkin, featured on a March 2006 cover, New York couldn't resist the impulse to elevate the irresistible tabloid tale into a dreary sociological exegesis, politely headlined "Divorce: How the Rich Call it Quits."
Moss's devotion to this overthought, pre-packaged style, says a former colleague, is so complete that writers can seem like obstructions to his grand designs. "Adam would talk about the need to 'writer-proof' stories," the source said. "Define the story in such a way that the writer won't ruin it for us."
That's the attitude of an editor who is so intolerant of risk that he views the very engines of his magazine as potential saboteurs. New York takes no chances, climbs out on no limbs, plants no flags. It is the only magazine, with the possible exception of Christianity Today, in which you will find photographs of clothed (!) virgins illustrating an issue purportedly devoted to sex, to cite just one missed opportunity for mixing it up.
Tina Brown, the trailblazing editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Talk, certainly has her own well-chronicled faults as a magazine editor, but she famously remarked—correctly—that "an act of bad taste in every magazine is very important on a regular basis," an axiom that also explains the difference between Robert Plant and Don Henley. One thing that Moss's New York cannot be accused of is bad taste. It is never exercised, never angry, rarely funny, and never, ever profane. According to New York lore, founding editor Clay Felker's vision for the magazine amounted to something along the lines of a more lively, energetic, crass—in a word, Jewish—version of the New Yorker, which at the time was a paragon of WASPy propriety. In 1965, when New York was still a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, Felker assigned Tom Wolfe a hit piece on New Yorker editor William Shawn that attacked the magazine as "the land of the walking dead" and tossed in several transparent and mocking falsehoods, including an assertion that Shawn was one of the intended victims of Leopold and Loeb, for good measure. That biting, obnoxious ethic is long gone, and Moss's New York is much closer in spirit to Shawn's New Yorker: Timid, bloodless, and respectable.
New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain.New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain. The Plate-U coffee table featured in the Strategist a few weeks ago, described with words "thriftiness can be elegant," can be had for $1,800, or the balance of a month's salary after taxes for a family that earns New York's median household income of $43,393. There's nothing wrong, of course, with pitching a magazine at ludicrously wealthy people desperately trying to fill the holes in their lives with grapefruit-and-vodka-pedicures. But New York is, after all, a city and not a colony of hedge-fund managers. A magazine that purports to capture the life of a teeming and mixed-up metropolis ought to at least occasionally acknowledge the fact that very few people who live there are served by a chart detailing the caloric content of a $250 nine-course tasting menu at Per Se.
Felker's New York was in many ways just as unapologetically elitist as Moss's, but, in addition to throwing in the occasional ghetto story as a sop to liberal guilt, its coverage of New York's social, political, and economic elites was muscular and often daring. "Clay's chronicles of life in the city were not about the remoteness of power and status and prestige but about the immediacy of those things, even the intimacy, and the excitement, the buzz, of power gained and power lost," wrote Michael Wolff in New York on the occasion of the magazine's 35th birthday. "By bringing the large and powerful down to size, you could, of course, begin to see yourself in those roles—and shortly we were all role-playing." Where Felker saw a barfight, Moss sees a playground.
I noticed a curious thing about the "Sex and Love" issue that helps explain much of what ails New York: The central characters—not just the writers, but the people being written about—were all people likely to run into one another at a book party. The sex diaries featured both a publishing assistant and a magazine editor. Katie Roiphe, a New York City writer, wrote about her own life. Ariel Levy, a celebrated New York writer—and occasional Radar contributor—wrote about her wedding. Caroline Leavitt, a New Jersey (close enough) writer, wrote about the break-up of her marriage. These are people who are ostensibly supposed to take journalism's reflective surfaces and turn them outward to the world. But Moss asked his writers to turn them inward.
Adam Moss is America's most celebrated editor. So why is New York magazine such a bore?
By John Cook
http://www.radaronline.com/features/2007/05/adam_moss_new_york_magazine_1.php
ADULT CONTEMPORARY Much like The Eagles, New York magazine is solid, respectable, and often lameThe most successful album in the history of recorded music is a greatest hits compilation by The Eagles. It has been purchased 29 million times since its release in 1976. This fact has long been a cause of consternation to people who care about rock music. It's not so much that The Eagles were an execrable band (which they were), or that they outsold worthier competitors like Michael Jackson or Led Zeppelin (which they did). It's that The Eagles should have been the best rock band ever, but instead opted to remain a slick and empty confection. All the elements were there—exquisite harmonies, some truly beautiful songs, gifted musicians—but somehow the expensive ingredients all collapsed into a flaccid soufflé of radio-ready pabulum. Notwithstanding their success, The Eagles are now generally remembered as either the worst good band or the best awful band of their era.
Why can't I remember anything I've read in 'New York' over the past two years? Because all too often it's a magazine without elbows—or a spine, or a pulse.Which brings us to New York magazine, the title that swept the National Magazine Awards last Tuesday in five categories, including general excellence and design. Despite all its recent accolades, New York is to journalism what The Eagles were to rock: a technically flawless assemblage of expertly crafted elements that look, on paper (as it were), as though they ought to translate into a superb magazine, and yet somehow still manage to suck.
Superficially, of course, there is much in New York to justify its current ascendancy, which is now so clearly entrenched that former Newsweek chief Mark Whitaker joked at the NMA ceremony that editor Adam Moss had replaced the New Yorker's David Remnick in the top slot of the city's rigidly delineated media hierarchy. Moss, who took charge of the magazine three years ago after a long stint at the New York Times Magazine, has proven himself a brilliant technician. The New York that he redesigned is a precision-machined and conceptually refined Platonic ideal of magazine-ness.
Each issue is beautifully laid out, from the cool, sepia-toned headshots illustrating Intelligencer to the playful schematics and illustrated sidebars in the feature well to the arresting product shots that open the Strategist (yeah, the antique doorknobs are $200, but they still look great) to the Boy Scout Handbook-style instructions on basic culinary tasks in the food section. With the exception of Jim Cramer, the writing is generally crisp and felicitous, and the editorial voice of the magazine—as expressed in coverlines, headlines, captions, etc.—is, while relentlessly white and privileged, clever enough.
So why can't I remember anything I've read in New York over the past two years? Because all too often it's a magazine without elbows—or for that matter, a spine, balls, or a pulse. Good stories are pointy things that lodge in the brain. But to open New York is to sluice the same robotically calibrated sensibility over the same well-worn neural pathways week after week. The collective judgment of the NMA panel notwithstanding, New York is frosty, astringent, soulless, and so risk-averse as to leave the reader desperate for the dressed-up tabloid stories of its glory days. Reading it is like eating a bowl of ice shavings prepared by Jean-George Vongerichten. (Full disclosure: I once met with Moss to discuss potential employment at New York, I've pitched its editors and been rejected, the editor in chief of Radar used to work there, and my wife has written in its pages.)
MOSS GATHERING The editor collects all five of his 2007 National Magazine AwardsWas anyone surprised, for instance, by anything that appeared in April's "Sex and Love" issue? That Katie Roiphe, whose career rests on her ability to spin her own sexual experiences into what she takes to be transgressively counterintuitive polemic, would reveal that going through a divorce actually makes one "jangly" and "productive" and that the kid will turn out just fine? That the "sexually frustrated dad" who submitted a "sex diary" didn't screw his wife while she was menstruating, or that the gay 38-year-old magazine editor's diary included a sexual dream about a coastal estate in Maine that he termed "a real-estate fantasy"? (The term "real-estate porn" had heretofore been deployed as a metaphor to describe New York's voyeuristic and obsessive approach to the beat; now it has become a reality. Also, expect an "Is the coast of Maine the new Hamptons?" story this summer). Did anyone even blink when Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell's head popped up in the background of a photo (on page 51—check for yourself) taken at Ariel Levy and Amy Norquist's wedding that accompanied Levy's piece on the fact that lesbians now marry, and that their marriage ceremonies tend to differ in substantive ways from the marriage ceremonies of heterosexual couples?
The Mossian feature must be about something other than what it appears to be about—it must say something meaningful about The Way We Live Now.You can't always see it, but Gladwell's head is tucked away somewhere, Waldo-like, in each page of New York. Though he writes for the the New Yorker's momentarily deposed David Remnick, Gladwell is a principal practitioner of the style of maddening posturing that has increasingly infected New York's stories. The magazine earned its stripes in the '60s by pioneering a new genre of rollicking, narrative-driven, first-person journalism. But New York, in its current version seems constitutionally incapable of telling a good story. The Mossian feature must be, as per Gladwell, about something other than what it appears to be about—it must say something meaningful about The Way We Live Now, to borrow a preposterously pretentious phrase that Moss bestowed on the front-of-the-book section of the New York Times Magazine during his tenure there. So Adam Sternbergh's account of the development of the High Line in last week's issue is not actually about the development of the High Line—which would have been sufficient. It's actually a treatise about how New York commodifies its own self-generated nostalgia, or some such.
Likewise, David Amsden's profile of Mets third baseman David Wright isn't really about David Wright but about his "mechanized" persona of "pure packaged Americana," as telegraphed in the subheadline of the article: "David Wright is the perfect New York sports star—almost too perfect." And Steve Fishman's 2005 profile of Ilario Pantano, the Marine lieutenant charged with murdering two Iraqis, was as much about how a hunky Horace Mann grad and Goldman Sachs trader wound up doing something so vulgar as serving in Iraq as it was about his case.
Of course, despite the magazine's meta-version to narrative stories, good features frequently slip through the cracks. While New York has access to some of the finest magazine writers in the country, their efforts are undercut by a prim editorial voice that is more concerned with analyzing what it all means than with who did what and why. In its high-minded effort to avoid anything resembling gossip or impudence, the magazine regularly manages to turn even the most juicy tales of power, sex, and violence into uptight, cerebral dispatches that seem more suited to the New Republic than New York. After Ron Perelman's public, bilious split with Ellen Barkin, featured on a March 2006 cover, New York couldn't resist the impulse to elevate the irresistible tabloid tale into a dreary sociological exegesis, politely headlined "Divorce: How the Rich Call it Quits."
Moss's devotion to this overthought, pre-packaged style, says a former colleague, is so complete that writers can seem like obstructions to his grand designs. "Adam would talk about the need to 'writer-proof' stories," the source said. "Define the story in such a way that the writer won't ruin it for us."
That's the attitude of an editor who is so intolerant of risk that he views the very engines of his magazine as potential saboteurs. New York takes no chances, climbs out on no limbs, plants no flags. It is the only magazine, with the possible exception of Christianity Today, in which you will find photographs of clothed (!) virgins illustrating an issue purportedly devoted to sex, to cite just one missed opportunity for mixing it up.
Tina Brown, the trailblazing editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Talk, certainly has her own well-chronicled faults as a magazine editor, but she famously remarked—correctly—that "an act of bad taste in every magazine is very important on a regular basis," an axiom that also explains the difference between Robert Plant and Don Henley. One thing that Moss's New York cannot be accused of is bad taste. It is never exercised, never angry, rarely funny, and never, ever profane. According to New York lore, founding editor Clay Felker's vision for the magazine amounted to something along the lines of a more lively, energetic, crass—in a word, Jewish—version of the New Yorker, which at the time was a paragon of WASPy propriety. In 1965, when New York was still a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, Felker assigned Tom Wolfe a hit piece on New Yorker editor William Shawn that attacked the magazine as "the land of the walking dead" and tossed in several transparent and mocking falsehoods, including an assertion that Shawn was one of the intended victims of Leopold and Loeb, for good measure. That biting, obnoxious ethic is long gone, and Moss's New York is much closer in spirit to Shawn's New Yorker: Timid, bloodless, and respectable.
New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain.New York's most egregious sin is that it's aimed at such a narrow sliver of the city. It's become the bible of the ultra-entitled New Yorker, the kind of person who would actually spend $200 on a doorknob described in the magazine as a bargain. The Plate-U coffee table featured in the Strategist a few weeks ago, described with words "thriftiness can be elegant," can be had for $1,800, or the balance of a month's salary after taxes for a family that earns New York's median household income of $43,393. There's nothing wrong, of course, with pitching a magazine at ludicrously wealthy people desperately trying to fill the holes in their lives with grapefruit-and-vodka-pedicures. But New York is, after all, a city and not a colony of hedge-fund managers. A magazine that purports to capture the life of a teeming and mixed-up metropolis ought to at least occasionally acknowledge the fact that very few people who live there are served by a chart detailing the caloric content of a $250 nine-course tasting menu at Per Se.
Felker's New York was in many ways just as unapologetically elitist as Moss's, but, in addition to throwing in the occasional ghetto story as a sop to liberal guilt, its coverage of New York's social, political, and economic elites was muscular and often daring. "Clay's chronicles of life in the city were not about the remoteness of power and status and prestige but about the immediacy of those things, even the intimacy, and the excitement, the buzz, of power gained and power lost," wrote Michael Wolff in New York on the occasion of the magazine's 35th birthday. "By bringing the large and powerful down to size, you could, of course, begin to see yourself in those roles—and shortly we were all role-playing." Where Felker saw a barfight, Moss sees a playground.
I noticed a curious thing about the "Sex and Love" issue that helps explain much of what ails New York: The central characters—not just the writers, but the people being written about—were all people likely to run into one another at a book party. The sex diaries featured both a publishing assistant and a magazine editor. Katie Roiphe, a New York City writer, wrote about her own life. Ariel Levy, a celebrated New York writer—and occasional Radar contributor—wrote about her wedding. Caroline Leavitt, a New Jersey (close enough) writer, wrote about the break-up of her marriage. These are people who are ostensibly supposed to take journalism's reflective surfaces and turn them outward to the world. But Moss asked his writers to turn them inward.
Macy's to Publishers: Engage Audiences
Macy's to Newspapers: Engage Audiences
Tuesday May 8, 1:31 pm ET
By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
Macy's Chief Marketing Officer Delivers Tough Love Speech to Newspapers
NEW YORK (AP) -- The chief marketing officer of Macy's department stores delivered tough talk to the newspaper industry Tuesday, telling a publishing conference why her company is moving ad dollars to other media such as TV, magazines and the Internet.
Anne MacDonald, a self-proclaimed newspaper "junkie" who keeps stacks of them around her home and reads several each day, told publishers they need to do more to win back business from Macy's, which is part of Federated Department Stores Inc.
With Macy's now a national brand following Federated's acquisition of May Department Stores, the chain is turning increasingly to media with a national reach such as fashion magazines, television and Web sites, she said.
Newspapers are still effective at delivering local messages, she said, but need to do more to engage Macy's shoppers -- primarily women aged 18-54.
"In order for your newspapers to be winning our advertising dollars, you need to be winning in the marketplace, and that's not currently the case," MacDonald said in a keynote talk at the conference held by the Newspaper Association of America.
Analysts and investors have long been concerned about the decline in ad spending by department stores, and in particular Macy's, as they become national brands and less likely to use local media such as newspapers. Also, newspapers have been struggling with declining circulation and ad dollars as more people get their news online.
Among MacDonald's several suggestions for change was for newspapers to collaborate more effectively across regions and with each other in selling advertising, which would allow national companies such as Macy's to reach a broader audience.
As it is, individual ad buyers for Macy's stores deal with individual newspapers on advertising plans. "That's not productive for either of us," MacDonald said.
She pointed to her own industry, department stores, which had to undergo significant changes over the past several years to adapt to competition from online stores, television shopping channels, big box retailers and discounting clubs.
Macy's, she said, is seeking to establish itself as a more upscale, fashionable brand and drive foot traffic even when there aren't promotions, and is still trying to understand how customers are changing the ways they shop. "Like us, you must change the way you think," she said.
MacDonald pointed to the example of her two favorite sections of her hometown newspaper, The New York Times. Every week she pulls out the science and dining sections and reads them first.
If the Times were to somehow deliver those sections to her wrapped on the outside, she would be impressed that the publisher had learned something about her reading habits, she said.
She also issued a plea to publishers to collaborate with advertisers on research to better understand the rapidly evolving habits of their customers. The idea was immediately embraced by Jack Sweeney, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, who asked MacDonald how to find out what questions they needed answered.
Mark Contreras, senior vice president for newspapers at E.W. Scripps Co., called MacDonald's remarks a "very thoughtful call to action for newspapers to pay very close attention to. ... We have the wherewithal to meet many of their needs."
Tuesday May 8, 1:31 pm ET
By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
Macy's Chief Marketing Officer Delivers Tough Love Speech to Newspapers
NEW YORK (AP) -- The chief marketing officer of Macy's department stores delivered tough talk to the newspaper industry Tuesday, telling a publishing conference why her company is moving ad dollars to other media such as TV, magazines and the Internet.
Anne MacDonald, a self-proclaimed newspaper "junkie" who keeps stacks of them around her home and reads several each day, told publishers they need to do more to win back business from Macy's, which is part of Federated Department Stores Inc.
With Macy's now a national brand following Federated's acquisition of May Department Stores, the chain is turning increasingly to media with a national reach such as fashion magazines, television and Web sites, she said.
Newspapers are still effective at delivering local messages, she said, but need to do more to engage Macy's shoppers -- primarily women aged 18-54.
"In order for your newspapers to be winning our advertising dollars, you need to be winning in the marketplace, and that's not currently the case," MacDonald said in a keynote talk at the conference held by the Newspaper Association of America.
Analysts and investors have long been concerned about the decline in ad spending by department stores, and in particular Macy's, as they become national brands and less likely to use local media such as newspapers. Also, newspapers have been struggling with declining circulation and ad dollars as more people get their news online.
Among MacDonald's several suggestions for change was for newspapers to collaborate more effectively across regions and with each other in selling advertising, which would allow national companies such as Macy's to reach a broader audience.
As it is, individual ad buyers for Macy's stores deal with individual newspapers on advertising plans. "That's not productive for either of us," MacDonald said.
She pointed to her own industry, department stores, which had to undergo significant changes over the past several years to adapt to competition from online stores, television shopping channels, big box retailers and discounting clubs.
Macy's, she said, is seeking to establish itself as a more upscale, fashionable brand and drive foot traffic even when there aren't promotions, and is still trying to understand how customers are changing the ways they shop. "Like us, you must change the way you think," she said.
MacDonald pointed to the example of her two favorite sections of her hometown newspaper, The New York Times. Every week she pulls out the science and dining sections and reads them first.
If the Times were to somehow deliver those sections to her wrapped on the outside, she would be impressed that the publisher had learned something about her reading habits, she said.
She also issued a plea to publishers to collaborate with advertisers on research to better understand the rapidly evolving habits of their customers. The idea was immediately embraced by Jack Sweeney, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, who asked MacDonald how to find out what questions they needed answered.
Mark Contreras, senior vice president for newspapers at E.W. Scripps Co., called MacDonald's remarks a "very thoughtful call to action for newspapers to pay very close attention to. ... We have the wherewithal to meet many of their needs."
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