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.

As we were walking home from brunch today, Justina noted that Bernal Heights was turning green again (now that the rainy season is starting). I wondered aloud whether there had been more trees on the hill in the past. Justina said, “If you look at 1946 in Google Earth, it looks like there were even less trees back then.” “Does Google Earth have pictures from 1900 for that area?”, I asked. Then I realized what I was saying.

How is it possible that I didn’t hear about a musical called Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification Of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses until after it had closed? Judging from Steven Johnson’s description, it sounds fantastic.

In the middle of a somewhat-unfocused Alternet article on the post-Reagan deterioration of California, I found this amazing fact:

In California’s glory days, in the 1960s, government spent as much as 25 cents out of every dollar on infrastructure: schools, roads and other stuff that Tom Higgins, a venture capitalist and Democratic activists in San Francisco, calls “engines of wealth creation.” Today those engines are cold. The state spends barely two cents per dollar on infrastructure.

Here are excerpts from a 31-page travel agency brochure that I found on the floor this morning. They actually seem like a pretty good outfit, if you can afford ‘em…but it struck me that a single thread ran through their writeups of exotic lands:

p. 3 “…linger at your cafe and stroll over to see it when the crowds are gone…”

p.5 “…wandering up and down trails at your own pace to see what–or who–you might discover…”

p.6 “…walking with your family through a magnificent mosaic…”

p.7 “…walking along the Aare River: stone-lined banks lead past shops, homes, and castles…” “…strolling home to your apartment at dusk to the accompaniment of…”

p.8 “…enjoying a tree-lined walk along a rushing river…” “…a long walk through your own neighborhood…”

p.9 “…walking alone at dawn through misty, empty calles…”

p.10 “…people filing into the streets for the Saturday market or sporting their finery for the evening stroll before dinner…”

p.11 “…you actually can’t remember what a traffic jam is like.”

p.12 “…wandering through narrow cobblestone streets lined with flowers…”

p.14 “…your pants are actually a little looser. (Must be all those walks along the…”

p.15 “…a home on the village square, complete with…”

p.16 “…walk pristine trails feeling younger than you have in years.”

p.17 “…the difference between amusement park attractions and the rich experience of ‘the real thing.’”

p.18 “…your home village–comprised of strings of colorful houses nestled together, interspersed with shops and spires–looks like the Christmas miniature on your grandmother’s mantle.” “…beginning to grasp a sense of place so deep it defies your imagination.”

p.19 “…meandering along tiny narrow streets…”

p.21 “…the narrow, traffic-free streets…”

p.22 “…walking around an ordinary city corner into Old Town Square…” “…strolling grand boulevards where coffee shops beckon…”

p.23 “…you take in the action of the skateboarders and shoppers…” “…a stroll through the fine shops, restaurants, and cafes of…”

p.24 “…you rent bikes and set off on a ride along canals…”

Last night I went to see Jaime Lerner, the renowned former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, speak at the Harvard Design School. Lerner is best known for the progressive programs that he instituted during his tenures as mayor. He and his team found creative ways to solve transportation, environmental, and city planning problems given the limited resources that were available to them. (He says, “if you want to get real creativity, drop a zero from your budget and a zero from your schedule”.) Rather build expensive subways, they built a pioneering bus rapid transit system with dedicated lanes and special bus-level platforms for quick boarding. Rather than building new parks, they preserved existing natural areas. They turned quarries into environmental schools and opera houses. To solve the problem of trash collection in slums, they simply paid the slum-dwellers (in food and cash) to bring in their trash. They turned the service vaults of a hydroelectric dam into a sculpture gallery.

Lerner delighted in telling us how quickly they were able to build certain things (An opera house in two months! A pedestrian mall in three days!) In part, he said that the speed was necessary to keep citizen opposition and bureaucratic obstacles from getting in the way. “Sometimes you have to teach by example,” he said. I couldn’t help thinking of the similarities between his attitude and the internet hacker ethic of “rough consensus and running code”. Rather than committing to expensive, grandiose plans, they were trying out smaller, simpler tweaks (“urban acupuncture”) and actually getting things done.

Of course, in many cases the public participation and review processes are in place for a reason; Robert Moses often acted with similar speed and stealth to pave over many parts of New York. (I’m tempted to think of Lerner as the anti-Moses.) I would love to see an in-depth examination and critique of Lerner’s work on the level of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker; so far, most of the criticism that I’ve found has come from light rail activists who view the Curitiba-style BRT model as a competitor for transportation funding.

My full notes from the talk are here.

This should be an interesting story to follow as it develops. The city government of Shanghai is debating whether to ban bicycles from the main roads and revamp the whole place for private cars. (Shanghai has 20 million people; 9 million of them own bicycles, and 142,801 of them own cars.) Higher fines for bicycle violations will help pay for the construction, of course.

As election day nears here in Somerville, MA, the mayoral race is heating up. With current mayor Kelly Gay having been voted out in the primaries, it’s down to Tony Lafuente and Joe Curtatone. I have to say that Curtatone’s campaign has been doing a better job of getting his message out to me personally—his flyers, with their excessively large type and relentless pimping of his cute kid, have become a weekly staple in my mailbox. By contrast, I think I may have gotten one piece of mail from Lafuente a while back, and the link to his platform on his website was broken until I emailed him. Also, this Weekly Dig article might’ve been more even-handed if they could’ve reached Lafuente for comment. Incidentally, that article noted that Curtatone was “challenging his opponent to run a clean campaign, free of negative personal attacks”; I guess he changed his mind, since today’s Curtatone mail was an attack ad (PDF, 370k) trying to pin Lafuente to the Mystic View Task Force’s efforts regarding the Assembly Square development. (more…)

This story about a strip mall built as part of what was originally intended to be a human-scale redevelopment plan for the old Denver airport ends with this stinger:

What’s more, streets run through the project’s center. When it decays in seven to 15 years, the city plans to replace the big boxes with densely packed houses, [project manager] Aldrete said.

Wow. Occasionally I run across something like this that reminds me how flippant we’ve become about our built environment (and its legacy) over the past 50 years. I can only hope that the local government is getting the tear-down money up front, as planners in Charlotte, NC have proposed.

Yesterday’s LA Times has an article about the trend toward fake gated communities. Shockingly, residents are finding that there are disadvantages to actually seceding from the surrounding city; for example, hiring their own trustworthy security forces, and maintaining their own streets. Still, people want the illusion of security:

Residents of Harbor View in Newport Beach recently remodeled the unmanned white guard shacks that stand at several entryways to the community. The shacks imply a private community, but anybody is free to come and go.

“They provide a sense of identity,” said Richard Gollis, a real estate consultant who lives there.

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