Finally: If you’ve been saying, Gee, I wish there was a business magazine for southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, here’s some good news for you.

Inspiring: This column from Chuck Finder of the Pittsburg Post-Gazette (via the WSJ’s Daily Fix) proves two of my core beliefs: 1. Adversity is in the eye of the beholder, even a beholder who the rest of us think is blind. 2. The best writing in a newspaper is almost always found in its sports section.

Future watch: A leading newspaper designer predicts the future newspaper will be something that sounds alot like a magazine.

Enter the era of post-common-sense: MediaPost contributing writer Larry Dobrow reports that advertisers are, “stilll thirsting for a system that accurately and efficiently guages the number of people who read a given publication.” Advertisers want to know about a magazine’s readers’ “passion for a publication.” According to Dobro, “everybody within the media food chain would like to see a research breaktrhough as soon as possible.”

From my experience, here are some other breakthroughs advertisers would like to see:

1. Research proving that a specific creative execution of an advertisement will cause the reader to immediately throw down the magazine and spint to the drugstore to purchase their product.

2. Research showing exactly what page an advertisement should appear.

3. Research proving that using a specific font sells more product than using all other fonts.

4. Research proving people don’t read magazines during the month of (fill in the blank) ____________.

5. Research that will enable media purchasing decisions to be made by monkeys instead of humans.