The Brunch Table

I found this comment by Jerry Johnson buried in all the squabbles on James Howard Kunstler’s doomsaying blog:

Playboy itself, in my view, went down once they embraced forced circulation. In the days when it was very relevant, 80% of the circulation was newsstand. That is readers consciously chose to buy it each month: they were interested in what was presented. This was exceedingly important to advertisers because they knew their message would be read by someone timely interested. Today, barely 10% of the circulation is newsstand. The culprit has been the fundy attacks on local newssstands. They barely exist anymore compared to forty years ago. Who buy’s it? Basically long time readers. It has been overtaken by senility yet still has the same class it always had. Hef refuses to compromise with reader value.

Editors lead their audience. This was the story behind all the major mass market magazines with a message. That ended with the advent of formats like People Magazine. So today, we have mostly specialty magazines like Classic Toy Trains. Hef was the last great editor. Even great newsspaper editors are gone.

Subscriptions killed the magazine as an important information venue. You are muzzled because leading your audience does not increase circulation. It takes the newsstand to get the leadership to generate increased circulation. On the other hand, you only lose circulation via subscriptions because you piss off some percentage every time you take a stance. There are now so few newsstands that critical mass can no longer be generated. You will buy one issue for a hot subject. The same is not true for a subscription.

So, we are stuck with TV and radio.

…well, and my employer’s line of work, relevant internet advertising. I thought it was interesting because I hadn’t thought much about how magazine advertising related to distribution patterns before. Certainly, most of my magazine reading in recent years happened because I got a ridiculously cheap subscription through something like a frequent flyer point offer—and at those prices, you don’t really care if you let them pile up on the coffee table.

Thinking back, I probably did most of my magazine reading in my youth, leafing through the pages of GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly in Waldenbooks while my mom did her mall shopping. That seems to be a pretty hopeless segment of the magazine sector these days, where the the internet is now more timely and richer (you can now get HD clips of game footage for free online instead of squinting at screenshots on paper). From what I’ve seen, Ziff Davis Media is doing a good job of developing a portfolio of experiments around their 1up brand, particularly in developing a cult of personality around their writers through blogs and podcasts. When up-to-the-minute raw news is everywhere, commentary from trusted names is a more valuable commodity.

These days, magazines seem best suited for cases where the paper format is really more handy (airplane trips, beauty parlors, reading in bed), and where the content isn’t particularly time-sensitive. O’Reilly has taken the latter in an extreme direction, treating Make magazine like a collectable series of books—you can still buy the first issue new on Amazon.

In any case, Jerry Johnson’s thesis about newsstands is interesting (and credible, since he worked in circulation). While he blames “fundies” for the death of the newsstand, I wonder how much of a role suburbanization played—the withering of walkable areas meant that more people were going to supermarkets (and eventually Wal-Mart) for their magazines, which certainly created larger targets for puritanical pressure. (And since magazines are probably a minor revenue stream for grocery stores, it’s not worth their time and space to have an employee controlling access to more risqué or edgier titles, like you have with newsstands.)

I wonder how different the situation is in Europe? At least in the larger cities, I’ve still seen quite a few newsstands on the sidewalks there.

This has already been covered in Boingboing, but I think it’s worth drawing attention to–a speech by journalist Tom Stites about the importance of literacy for democracy. He doesn’t just speak in abstractions (obviously, he’s going to be strongly in favor of both, right?).

He argues that the ’80s shift to big-box retailers, who don’t typically advertise a great deal, has done the most to strip newspapers of advertising revenue. Papers began courting luxury goods to fill the gap, resulting in an overall repackaging to appeal to upper-class readers. It’s not a nostalgia piece about the overall quality of journalism–in fact, he argues that journalism back in the day was actually worse. It is, he claims, fundamentally a marketing problem, and a very serious one: if citizens of a democracy don’t read news, they can’t stay informed enough to use their votes wisely.

“There are 130 million Americans over 18 whose incomes are down the scale from the publishers’ favored top two quintiles…my mother was a single parent who worked retail and I know how we struggled financially. Nonetheless, my mother subscribed to The Kansas City Star and read it every day. But that was back in the old days, the way-long-ago days when I was a kid, when newspapers still wanted everybody to read them…

So my plea to all of us, myself included, is that we keep America’s discarded readers in mind as we work to strengthen journalism and shore up our withering democracy. We need to remember that they’re citizens, too, and to take care to make sure they have easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that affect their lives. Unless we do, there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed. Or, at the very best, our democracy will be disfigured by a class divide that’s the 21st century equivalent of our nation’s earliest days…”

On a side note, I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkin’s newest book, The Ancestor’s Tale. At one point, he’s explaining the process of domesticating animals, and wraps up by wondering to what extent we’re self-domesticating. When we alter our own environment (for instance, with the invention of agriculture), we place new biological demands on ourselves. He cites lactose intolerance as an example of a trait that wouldn’t affect a hunter-gatherer, but becomes a life-threatening liability in a developing agricultural society that grows heavily reliant on dairy foods.

His final example, though, is considerably more provocative. You can measure relatively little difference, he says, between the brain of a person speaking French and a person speaking Chinese. However, you can measure an enormous difference in the brain of a person reading either language, compared to a person speaking. This, Dawkins suggests, means that literacy is becoming a critical part of our self-domesticating process.

Taking Dawkins and Stites together, I think you get one heck of a more compelling argument than Levar Burton, despite his many good points, ever made.

Happy 4th!

Two editorials, one party line:

“The left has positioned itself so far away from ‘mainstream’ America that West Virginia voters are searching to align themselves with conservative leadership that represents the values and morality that West Virginia has always exemplified as a state and a people.”
–Mark A. Caserta, Herald-Dispatch, Huntington, WV
(10 jan 05)

“Yet in many ways, Bush is not out of the mainstream. ‘Like most of the billion-plus Christians, Bush believes God is firmly in control of events–an idea taught by both the Old and New Testaments,’ writes political scientist Paul Kengor in God and George Bush: A Spiritual Life.”
–Kenneth T. Walsh, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, DC.
(17 jan 05)

I’ve been reading the newspaper editorials in Huntington, intermittently, for about two decades. They used to be mostly harmless. When I was in high school, the Rev. Rex Bartholomew used to warn us that, due to lax moral standards, we were about to fall behind in our arms race with the Roman Empire. (He’d obtained intelligence that the Romans had nearly completed a Gamma Ray Weapon, with which they planned to forcibly convert the world to Catholicism.)

Who was it who said, it’s not the crazy people who’re dangerous, it’s the half-crazy people?

A few random thoughts on orkut, the newest Friendster-clone on the block:

• If there’s one thing that social network services have done for us, it’s given people a straightforward way to tell the world that they’re swingers.
• Too many questions! I’d rather fill out a 1040—at least I get money for that.
• Can anyone really check off “my style is fresh from the city streets” with a straight face?
• It’s odd that while you can type in things that are “turn-offs”, you have to pick from a grab bag of “turn-ons” such as “long hair”, “candlelight”, “sarcasm”, and “thunderstorms”. (Hmm, a dream date with Janeane Garofalo during a power outage?)
• One nice feature that I haven’t seen before is that you can specify which group of people can see which bits of personal information.
• As nifty as viral marketing is, I don’t like pimping out my friends & acquaintances. (Heck, I don’t even like saying brand names out loud because it makes me feel like I’m in a commercial.) So if you know me and want the orkut hookup, let me know.
• “orkut” certainly is a memorable name.
• As Cory Doctorow points out, most of the social network services essentially make users ask each other, “Are you my friend, yes or no?” (Kicking it elementary school style!) I prefer being able to say “I like this person”, without any explicit pressure on them to respond. Upcoming.org does this the right way, I think.
• orkut lets you rate friends along the “trusty”, “cool”, and “sexy” karma axes, but right now there’s no disincentive to keep the system from turning into an eBay-style “A++++++++++++ GREAT SELLAR OMG!!1!!!” love-fest. If I were king, I would constrain the points to make it a more interesting economy. If you only had, say 1/4 of a “cool point” to spend for each friend you had, you’d have to be a little more choosy. Maybe if enough people had dubbed you “sexy”, you could have more “sexy buying power”. Etcetera.
• The most impressive thing about Friendster is that everyone and their mom is on there, even people who are—shall we say—Hotmail users. It’s become a great way of tracking down old pals who aren’t geeks (I can just google for the old pals who are geeks). With so many early adopters complaining of social-network fatigue, will any of the other services attract anything more than geeksters?

Introducing the Maytag Skybox, a home vending machine. “A backlight illuminates the front panel for that exciting vending-machine glow…”? Someone call the Onion, they’re going to be out of a job soon if our culture keeps this up.

A law enforcement guide to breakfast cereal.

Precious Commodities

• Cookie Crisp – heist attempts are so common that many larger cities have a special Cookie Crime unit
• Lucky Charms – many reported attacks on leprechauns by youth gangs in search of these

Controlled Substances

• Frosted Flakes – performance enhancer, banned by the Olympic Committee
• Cocoa Pops – stimulant
• Corn Pops – addictive, users experience withdrawal pangs and rage
• Trix – sold over the counter in most states with proper child ID

What did I miss?