Month: October 2006

Sagging Sundays Lead Dailies’ Drop

Editor and Publisher has the latest six-month circulation figures for newspapers, and the news isn’t good.

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005.

The San Francisco Chronicle was down. Daily dropped 5.3% to 373,805 and Sunday fell 7.3% to 432,957.

The New York Times lost 3.5% daily to 1,086,798 and 3.5% on Sunday to 1,623,697. Its sister publication, The Boston Globe, reported decreases in daily circulation, down 6.7% to 386,415 and Sunday, down 9.9% to 587,292.

The Washington Post lost daily circulation, which was down 3.3% to 656,297 while Sunday declined 3.6% to 930,619.

Circulation losses at The Wall Street Journal were average, with daily down 1.9% to 2,043,235. The paper’s Weekend Edition, however, saw its circulation fall 6.7% to 1,945,830.

Daily circulation at USA Today slipped 1.3% to 2,269,509.

As the article points out, the latest report seems to indicate that the circulation decline is accelerating:

This is the fourth consecutive semi-annual report to register a severe drop in daily circulation and — perhaps more troubling to the industry — Sunday copies. While the estimated decline 2.8% for daily circulation for all reporting papers may seem negligible, consider that in years past that decrease averaged around 1%. Sunday, considered the industry’s bread-and-butter, showed even steeper losses, with a decline of about 3.4%.

In fact, of the top 25 U.S. dailies, only the New York Post, New York Daily News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed any gain. The table is here.

Some Perspective: Newspapers are clearly facing a tough climate, as the recent budget problems and staff cuts at the Los Angeles Times testify. Obviously these circulation declines can’t continue forever if these papers are to remain economically viable; and maybe the “paper” part of daily newspaper will need to become less important.

But newspapers are still among the places where it is possible to make the biggest splash about an issue and reach a broad audience. When a web-based story or viral video reaches a million people, that’s a huge and extraordinary hit. The LA Times reaches (with pass-alongs) that many people with its top stories every day.

That’s why getting a story about the DM&E in the Times this week was a huge lift in drawing attention to this record $2.3 billion federal bailout (bigger than Chrysler), to help turn up the heat on the issue.

(Disclosure: I work for Mayo Clinic, one of the members of the coalition attempting to kill this $2.3 billion federal loan to DM&E. For more information about this issue, click here.)

New media, like the web site maintained by the “Track the Truth” campaign, make it possible for people and organizations other than the traditional news media to reach a broad audience directly. But even though the audiences for traditional media are declining, big dailies, local metro TV news and national broadcast and cable networks are still the best ways to reach a big audience.

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Pew Releases Report on Health Web Search

The Pew Internet & American Life project has just released a new survey (download the PDF here) examining the behavior of the American public when it comes to on-line search for health information.

The Headline:

Most internet users start at a search engine when looking for health information online.
Very few check the source and date of the information they find.

About 10 million people search for health information each day, but only 15 percent check the validity of sources they find. The Pew pollsters hypothesize that it is because about 10 times as many people say they have had positive health results from their on-line information quests as compared to those who say they got bum info.

For people looking for trustworthy health information, I would suggest (in addition to the official government sites like NIH and CDC) MayoClinic.com for general health information or mayoclinic.org for information about specific treatments at Mayo Clinic. I know the people who work on both sites, and I know the editing and double-checking processes ensure that the information will be reliable. If you don’t check the sources, they have.

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Weird Al: Nerdy Hit Machine

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing out this story about “Weird Al” Yankovic having his first-ever top 10 hit and top 10 album, 22 years after his Michael Jackson parody, “Eat it!” peaked at number 12 on the Billboard charts.

Weird Al

Steve correctly points out that Weird Al has used a variety of creative promotion methods, including YouTube. The article Steve references also highlights Al’s use of MySpace and his release of some free downloads from his website as important to his success.

I would only take issue a bit with Steve’s characterization of this as a Long Tail example. I understand the essence of the Long Tail as niche marketing, or as the subtitle of the book says, “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” In his recent use of internet technology along with exposure in traditional media (CNN, etc.), Weird Al has his biggest hit ever. He’ll be on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Nov. 2. Al’s in the head now, not the tail.

The Long Tail is about making it economically viable for non-hits (or oldies) to still see the light of day, because inventory and delivery costs have essentially reached zero, and search helps us find even obscure titles. Weird Al has lots of songs that are truly part of the Long Tail: “Addicted to Spuds” can be available on iTunes even though it would never find shelf space at Tower Records. (Come to think of it, even the big hits aren’t getting shelf space at Tower anymore.)

Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with most of the new songs Al is parodying. I probably don’t “get” his jokes quite as well as I would have two decades ago. When he did “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Girls Just Want to Have Lunch,” and “Like a Surgeon” they were songs from my high school days. Part of the humor was knowing what the next line in the original song was supposed to be, and seeing how Al would change it. Or how he would arrange the preceding lines of his parody so that the original song’s concluding lyrics would become the joke’s punch-line.

I listen more to spoken word podcasts and non-hit music these days, which are part of The Long Tail.
But I did download one of his new freebies, “Don’t Download This Song,” and even though I don’t know the original, I thought it was pretty good. Maybe someone can’t clue me in on the part of the joke I don’t yet get.

It’s interesting that in an age in which software companies and web sites (like WordPress.com) are giving away free services (or at least samples) to build an audience or community of users, most of the recording industry is still in 1980s mode. It’s cool that at age 47, Weird Al gets the new marketing methods of the digital age, even if I don’t fully “get” his songs.

Weird Al was an inspiration to me about 10 years ago, when I was working in politics, and for fun I was involved in a parody band that used to play for some parties. We even recorded some cassettes. Unfortunately it was five years before the iPod and widespread mp3 distribution.

Congratulations to Weird Al on his latest and biggest hit!

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Blog Business Summit Highlights

I met Janet Johnson last week at the ALI conference on blogging and podcasting in San Francisco. She led the preconference workshop, and you can see my posts on her presentation (and some of her posts from the last week)here.

At the time, Janet was a little sheepish about the state of her blog because she had recently left Marqui, was waiting to get the design done on her new blog and hadn’t posted much yet.

That’s no longer an issue.

Janet’s reports this week from the Blog Business Summit, particularly the tips from Maryam and Robert Scoble and the post on Brands as Symbols of Social Aspirations, are give a good window into the proceedings for those of us unable to attend.

Thanks for the highlights, Janet!

Getting Real: Toxic Meetings

The 37Signals gang has now made its magnum opus (or whatever the minimalist programming equivalent would be) available on-line for free on the web. If you want to take it with you, you have the $29 hardcopy option or $19 for a PDF.

The basic thesis of Getting Real is that for software, fewer features executed well beats the jack-of-all-trades approach. But as the authors say, their working philosophy has applications even when you’re not building an application:

Note: While this book’s emphasis is on building a web app, a lot of these ideas are applicable to non-software activities too. The suggestions about small teams, rapid prototyping, expecting iterations, and many others presented here can serve as a guide whether you’re starting a business, writing a book, designing a web site, recording an album, or doing a variety of other endeavors. Once you start Getting Real in one area of your life, you’ll see how these concepts can apply to a wide range of activities.

Here’s a sampling of this broadly applicable wisdom, from the essay entitled Meetings are Toxic:

Don’t have meetings

Do you really need a meeting? Meetings usually arise when a concept isn’t clear enough. Instead of resorting to a meeting, try to simplify the concept so you can discuss it quickly via email or im or Campfire. The goal is to avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting. Here’s a few reasons why:

They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow
They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)
They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute
They often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow
They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about
They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway
For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting (this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

Set a 30 minute timer. When it rings, meeting’s over. Period.
Invite as few people as possible.
Never have a meeting without a clear agenda.

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