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The perfect year-end post: While I had decided to forego any blogging while enjoying the perfect Tampa Bay-area weather, I determined the following news item is too perfect a metaphor for the rexblog (I’ll leave it up to you to interpret it) to pass up:
An obsessive collector in New York had to be rescued by neighbors after being buried naked up to his neck for two days by an avalanche of books and magazines at his own home.
Moore was rescued on Monday by neighbors who finally heard his cries for help. Unable to open his door because of the weight of magazines behind it, they removed the door from its hinges and then clambered over mountains of debris to get to the trapped man.
Landlord Bennie Jones, 62, said he had actually first heard Moore’s shouts on Sunday but “didn’t pay any attention because he’s always talking to himself.”
Moore said he had been stacking a fresh batch of magazines when the pile became unstable and collapsed, triggering an avalanche of the floor-to-ceiling material that took up almost every available inch of space in his apartment.
Moore said he earned around $300 a week peddling items from his collection which he has built up over 10 years.
After his rescue, Moore was treated in hospital for dehydration.
What more can I say? Happy New Year.
Blog lite: The weather is too perfect in the Tampa Bay area. There will be little or no blogging this week.
No joy in Camelot: Utne Reader has announced its 2003 “Utne Independent Press Awards” of “the best, liveliest, wisest, most significant periodicals we’ve seen in the last year.” Utne Reader, the left-leaning Readers Digest, explains the awards: “Of the thousands of publications we read during the past year, those honored below excite us the most, expressing essential and quintessential thoughts not generally found in the major media. Some of the winners here are perennial favorites, some are new finds, but all are driven by a passion for putting new ideas and important stories out in the world.” Unfortunately, the rexblog’s favorite nominee, didn’t win.
Keeps getting media: Gary Price at ResourceShelf points to a story about KeepMedia.
Quote:
The premise of Louis Borders’s business holds that American readers will buy old magazine stories if they can pay far less than they do for research databases such as Factiva and LexisNexis. “All of them have the experience of wanting information that they can’t get to,” he says. So he created a company to tap into that perceived demand, sharing the proceeds with publishers and keeping a piece of any new magazine subscriptions his members sign up for through the site.
Gary Price (whose website is one of my favorites) thinks it is sad that while KeepMedia keeps getting media coverage, too few people know “that many public libraries offer FREE remote access to databases that offer searchable archives of THOUSANDS of publications.”
Here is what Gary suggests:
Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about regarding libraries offering FREE remotely accessible access (no need to visit the library building) to thousands of publications and other high-quality databases might want to take a look at a few examples of these services. All you need is a library card for that particular library. Contact your library to find out what you have access to. Here are five examples: NY Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, King County (Washington) Public Library, Fairfax Cty (Virginia) Public Library, Hamilton (Ontario) Public Library. School, academic, and other types of libraries also provide these services. Just ask!!!
I will add a link called “magazine article databases (free)” to the “magazine resources” blogroll on the left of each page. It will link to the appropriate page on Gary’s site.
(rexblog flashbacks about KeepMedia: here and here, which was a link to a column by Rafe Needleman on the topic.)
An Army at Dawn
Bangkok 8
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Charlie Wilson’s War
Cod
Da Vinci Code, The
Dante Club, The
Devil in the White City, The
Founding Fish, The
Geeks and Geezers
Gnostic Gospels, The
God’s Secretaries
Hazards of Good Breeding, The
Life of Pi
Love Me
Measuring America
Middlesex
Moneyball
My Losing Season
Odyssey, The
Partisans and Redcoats
Pattern Recognition
Prey
Short History of Nearly Everything
Stiff
Stranger & the Statesman, The
Substance of Style, The
To America
Under the Banner of Heaven
What Should I Do with My Life?
White Doves at Morning
Wigfield
Writing Life, The
Cracked: Yolk, a “pop culture magazine for Asian Americans,” has ceased publication. You’ll have to supply your own puns.
Funny numbers: Well, while I’m blogging G+J’s fast numbers, I decided to link to David Carr’s NYT story yesterday about Conde Nast’s decision to do like everyone else, and inflate its “implied” advertising revenue numbers.
Quote:
P.I.B. revenue figures bear little relation to a magazine’s actual advertising revenues - think one part smoke, two parts mirror - and it is hard to defend them.
The totals are calculated by multiplying the number of ad pages by the amount a magazine charges on its rate card, an immediately suspect equation because magazines routinely offer volume discounts, both those published on the rate card and those that are not. (Advertising Age, a trade publication, reported last year that the standard industry discount off the rate card was 32.1 percent.)
Michael J. Jeary, president and chief operating officer of Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners, suggested that while magazine rate cards were made of Silly Putty, other media industries traffic in their own questionable metrics.
Lies, damn lies and rate cards.
Fast numbers: No, I am not the complete and total geek implied by my posting to the rexblog on Christmas day a story about magazine circulation. However, as a couple of Santa items are computer-related (and lots of fun), I happened to be online and, well, the next thing you know I’m blogging someone else’s blue, blue Christmas.
Quote:
For the months of June, July and December 2002, Fast Company overstated its newsstand circulation by around 50 percent each month, according to a report that first ran in Women’s Wear Daily.
Not, that I didn’t suggest earlier that the folks involved had been naughty, not nice, during the past year. No news yet on the company’s new years resolutions.
Merry Christmas: So much to be joyful for this year. And very, very grateful. I’ll be blogging lightly until after January 1. Hug your families: they’re what really matters. Jeff Jarvis has Christmas thoughts about some other men and women who also will be in my thoughts and prayers this season. To them, to you, Merry Christmas.
Equal-opportunity failure: The Village Voice explores how Vanguarde Media “drowned in red ink.” Complete with a Samir Husni quote, the writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, says Vanguarde was “a noble mission” that “proved futile.”
Quote:
“The magazine world runs as much on exclusivity as it does on paper and ink. Vanguarde wanted to prove that an urban-read black house could run with the midtown big boys.”
While I love the writing in that paragraph, it is poppycock punditry packaged as reportage. Keith Clinkscales may have made lots of mistakes along the way, but one mistake he did not make was confusing entrepreneurship with mission nobility. Nor, for that matter, would he ever claim that his failure had anything to do with being shut out from some “mid town” exclusivity thing. Keith Clinkscales is one of the most charming, persuasive and plugged-in individuals in the small world of magazine publishing.
Clinkscales’ failure with this specific venture had more to do with the gods of entrepreneurism than with the demons of old-boy exclusivity. Look around: the magazine world has just gone through the worst three years in most living-publishers’ lifetimes. Failure in this environment has occured in a very equal-opportunity fashion. Trust me, I know.
I’m sure, with his Harvard MBA, Clinkscales knows the specific ways in which he screwed up. He knows also that the forces of the world’s economy overwhelmed any brilliance he could have mustered. He knows the precise wrong decisions he approved and can painfully recall the times he failed to make other difficult decisions, hoping that time would take care of things. As wonderful as it might sound in a beautifully worded Village Voice piece, the lessons offered in the failure of Vanguarde are not about dreams and noble missions. They are about market forces, the wrong management decisions and lack of capital.
Without a doubt, Keith Clinkscales has learned those lessons well.
Quote:
Even with the bankruptcy in process, Clinkscales isn’t willing to concede defeat. On December 18, Vanguarde announced that Triax financial advisers would be assisting the company in its bid to resurrect itself. “The advertising is there, the marketing is there, and there are a lot of investors out there who understand that there’s a readership,” Clinkscales says. “But anytime something like this happens, you have to find the lessons.”
Profundity: The next time I see one of those surveys that show more people use the Internet than read magazines, I no longer have to depend on common sense to display how ridiculous a comparison that is. I can now say: According to research by the Pew Internet Project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, “Different people use the Internet in different ways.” (via Resource Shelf.)
Back to the future: In 2003, venture capitalists poured $100 million into the “social networking” space, according to this story.
Quote:
“The feature set and product set of sites like Friendster is not hype - it’s a reality,” says Andrew Anker, a partner with August Capital in Menlo Park, Calif., and an investor in Tickle. “Hype is the $53 million [post-money] valuation on a company with no revenue. The classic venture bubble has now hit social networking. The pure play social networking companies are increasingly struggling to build a revenue model.”
via PaidContent.org (not Content Times) and another member of the online social network to which I belong, BuzzMachine.
What a coincidence: As often happens, my blogging posts are running together in a serendipitously surreal way today. For example, in my last post, I snidely implied that the purchase by Time Inc. in July 2001 of Business 2.0 was a dumb business decision (I won’t even mention ‘eCompany Now’ — hint, the “e” stood for embarrassment). Now, in the very next post, I point to a NY Times article (registration required) in which the individual responsible for that Business 2.0 acquisition decision is quoted explaining a more recent dumb business decision by others that, except for the names of the magazine, could be applied to the aforementioned dumb decision:
“Certainly, if you look at it from any business point of view, it is insignificant,” said John Huey, editorial director of Time Inc. “But because it is New York, with the New York media covering the sale of New York magazine, it takes on an aura that defies all logic.”
Talk about your glass houses that defy all logic? Perhaps, the next topic David Carr can get a quote from Time’s editorial director should be about executive travel expenses at New York Magazine.
(P.S. When I woke up this morning, I had no plans to only blog about Time Inc. today.)
Time’s Covers of the Year: As I have been known to have fun with Time Magazine covers, it is nice to see other folks get into the act. Seeing this reminded me of the quote from Time managing editor Jim Kelly that appeared in a mediabistro.com interview in October: “You know, there are many fun parts of the job, and the most fun part is figuring out what the cover is every week.” This being the case, I guess the Mudville Gazette should address its message to Jim rather than Time Warner. But you didn’t hear me suggest that.
(The Mudville Gazette via BuzzMachine)
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