Treats: Spent the morning helping put on the roof (decking, as we roof putter-oners call it) of a Nashville Habitat for Humanity home, (the ninth to be built by members of the church to which I belong). This morning, four different churches were each constructing a house in the new Providence Park community, a planned community that will have 141 homes and a 4-acre Metro Park (the project has a photo-blog.) If you’ve never participated in a Habitat or similar construction project, I highly recommend the experience. Fortunately, our church has a number of seasoned, experienced carpenters who know how to organize and coach a squad including unskilled (but quck-learning) laborers like me.

After completeting the morning shift at the Habitat House, I picked up my son at church and made it to the Titans game by kickoff. An exciting game in which not only the team, but the fans turned up — loud and supportive, despite the rocky season. The Titans were the last team standing (against the Bengals) and so therefore ended with a “W” in their record (3-5). Except for a couple of botched (and costly) plays on defense, the Titans looked strong — especially with a backup QB leading the team. Chris Brown, who has “turf toe,” ran for 147 yards. It was even a good day for the running back Chris replaced as his team also won and he came within a yard of breaking 100. Ed-die.

Now, it’s time to get ready for the trick or treaters.

observation
<b>Boom times:</b> Bob Moos of the Dallas Morning News (hey, that rhymes) <a href=”http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/103104dnbusolderads.6c87a.html”>says that</a> national advertisers are changing their thinking about people 50 and over. There’s even a “Mature Market Group” at J. Walter Thompson.

Quote:

<blockquote><i> Today they’re being courted with ads featuring healthy-looking baby boomers promoting not just financial services and pharmaceuticals, but also low-carb beer and running shoes. Though Madison Avenue isn’t going to abandon the coveted 18-to-49 audience, it’s not apt to overlook the 50-plus consumer anymore.</i></blockquote>

Sunday magazines: More than you’ll ever want to know about magazines that appear in weekend newspapers can be found in this article at the website of the National Newspaper Association.

Custom publishing update: The Washington Business Journal is reporting that BearingPoint has launched the magazine Business Empowered, which will be sent to BearingPoint clients. “The quarterly magazine…will cover emerging business and technology trends and other issues facing chief executives”

Quote:

The magazine is part of a marketing relationship BearingPoint has with Forbes Inc., which includes BearingPoint advertising in Forbes magazine and on its Web site. The company estimates the initial circulation at 50,000.

Vaporpolitan: In vaporzine news, The Pittsburgh Metropolitan, a monthly glossy dedicated to “fashion, culture, dining and lifestyle” will debut in January, according to the Pittsburgh Business Times.

Quote:

The publication is the brainchild of Tara Rieland, the corporate director of marketing for the Oxford Development Co., one of the city’s largest development firms. While continuing to work with Oxford on a reduced schedule, Ms. Rieland will serve as the publication’s editor-in-chief. It will publish on a monthly basis 10 times a year, with double issues scheduled for January/February and June/July. Ms. Rieland plans to launch the magazine with an initial print run of 20,000. She plans to build a high-income readership by mailing 16,000 copies of the first issue to residents throughout the region who have a household income of more than $100,000. The remaining copies will be sold on newsstands and offered at Downtown condominiums and other area businesses.

Yet another magazine targeting the nouveau niche.

America, * * * * Yeah: Raymond Snoddy (I know this sounds like it’s from The Onion, but I can’t make this up), writing for the UK website, MediaBulletin, suggests American brand managers should fear a Bush victory because the USA needs a “rebrand.”

Quote:

“The Pugh ([sic] note: I guess that’s the way they spell “Pew” in the UK) Global Attitude survey, which closely monitors such things, shows marked declines in positive attitudes toward the US. The hostility, so far at least, is mainly aimed at Bush and his government rather than US brands. But is this about to change?”

Snoddy posits that most Americans don’t realize (although, he spells it realise) just how much the rest of the world, “Europeans in particular,” think “Bush appears plain stupid.” (I suppose it’s because we’re cut off from all international news sources.) Snoddy’s column is a stunning misunderstanding of the attitudes of Americans who live at least 100 miles inland from the Pacific or Atlantic oceans (this rule doesn’t apply to the Gulf of Mexico). Do you have any idea, Mr Snoddy, how “fly-over” Americans — even many who lean towards Kerry — will respond if they think their vote is about (rather than choosing a leader) whether or not Europeans will like them better?

As much as I hate commercial country music, reading something like this makes me want to turn-up the speakers on some Toby Keith music. Or, better yet, it removes all satire from this instant (but explicit) classic from the movie, Team America, which is this post’s bumper music.

Update: Those silly American media buyers obvioiusly haven’t read Snoddy’s column yet, as MediaPost.com is reporting an uptick in advertising demand from planners “who support Bush.”

Quote:

Interestingly, demand for media time and space appears to be strongest among supporters of the Bush/Cheney ticket vs. the Kerry/Edwards ticket. Forty-seven percent of Bush’s supporters said their demand for all media has improved relative to a year ago, while only 39 percent of Kerry’s supporters felt that way. Kerry’s supporters, however, had a far more stable view, with 57 percent saying their demand remained the same vs. 49 percent of Bush supporters. Only 4 percent of supporters of both tickets said demand had diminished.

It’s like I’ve always said, if you find there are media planners with hope and there are media planner with fear, go with the media planners with hope.

(via iwantmedia.com)

TGIO: I’m sorry, Laura. Congratulations, Patrick. Thank god it’s over. No more hearing about the curse of the Bambino. All it took was a total eclipse of the moon.

Yakety Yak: It’s 2004 (not, 1994) and all the big names in consumer magazines are still sitting in a room discussing how they can get their readers to pay for online content. Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc., says, “Find the market and they’ll pay.” (Huh? Where? Like at Wal-Mart?) And then they discuss how users can renew subscriptions online. I hope these people aren’t as clueless as the story by Jon Friedman of CBS.Marketwatch.com makes them sound. At least, moderator Sam Shepard of BusinessWeek says, “We come here every year and say the same thing.”

How sad is it that a few days after Google announces it generated almost $1 billion in online advertising revenue in one quarter that these guys are talking about renewing subscriptions online?

Okay, everyone, repeat after me: It’s the links, stupid.

(via: iwantmedia.com)

Speaking of PR blogging: How do you get a company to back off — or, uh, clarify — a bone-headed product decision? Inform bloggers of the bone-headed decision.

Quote from Marc Hedlund (at O’Reilly):

In an earlier post this week, I railed against Sprint for disabling the use of Bluetooth on the new Treo 650 for laptop Internet access. Jeff Shafer from Sprint Business Solutions Public Relations contacted me and said the following:

It is important to note that the characterization [in your post] is inaccurate.

Due to some development deadlines, the phone has been launched as described, without the DUN [dial-up networking] capability.  However, as part of a scheduled maintenance release of software (timing pending some testing), the DUN capabilities will be supported.  We also support the functionality in the just released PPC-6601 (Pocket PC device).   In no way is Sprint suppressing the functionality as you describe or with the motivations you assert.

(via: Gizmodo.com)

Dejazine update: According to the SF Chronicle, there has been a sighting of a weekly Redux Herring prototype.

Quote:

This time around, Red Herring won’t have the laserlike focus on venture capitalists and tech startups. “We’re going to be broader to reflect the maturing of the tech industry,” Dreyfus said. “It’s also important to be much more global than it was.” The magazine published a prototype earlier this month, with 8,000 copies going to potential readers and advertisers. In November, it will start bimonthly publication, and in January it goes weekly. The goal is 45,000 paid circulation.

Bimonthly? As in every-other month? So, there will be one issue between now and when it begins as a weekly, right? If it refers to twice each month, I think a better description would be semi-monthly, or every two weeks, fortnightly.

I still stand by my prediction of July 6, however, it appears a lot more money will be spent on the publication before it wraps up.

It’s a small world after all: In remarking on Seth Goden’s warning about CEO blogging, Steve Rubel says some too-kind things about me taking time from my “busy schedule” (okay, I can hear that laughter down the hall, stop) to have a conversation with “worker-bee bloggers” like him. (Yeah, right, worker-bee blogger: Steve gets quoted in the NY Times more than Mayor Bloomberg.) Thanks, Steve.

More coincidentally, Steve also sends a shout-out to Michael Hyatt for his weblog Working Smart, as another good conversational-blogger-COO-type. Michael, it turns out, is also a Nashville blogger: He’s the COO of Thomas Nelson, a big publicly-traded publisher of religious books (one, I’ve blogged about on occasion). I’ve added his blog to my Nashville blogroll in the left column of each page on the rexblog. Please let me know of other Nashville weblogs not listed.

How magazines get started (continued): Writing in the food section of the NY Times, David Carr profiles the new magazine Chow.

Quote:

Most food magazines are the glossy equivalent of an expensive chef knife: gorgeous to behold, and sometimes a bit challenging for the average amateur to use correctly. Chow is more like a Buck knife, utilitarian in the extreme and no-nonsense in approach. And unlike established magazines, Chow is far more irreverent and less bent on establishing foodie credentials….For the time being, Chow is a tidy snack of a magazine, with an initial circulation of 50,000 and a future mostly predicated on high hopes and the kind of optimism that keeps people putting out new magazines even as major publishers struggle against a punishing set of industry economics.

Great article. Can’t wait to see the magazine.

(Explanation: How magazines get started.)

Magazines online: From min online, an overview by Steve Smith of how magazines are doing the web thing in 2004.

(via: PaidContent.org and iwantmedia.com)

Magazine product placement, the real concern: Stories about magazine product placement are bubbling up from the MPA convention in Florida. Don’t have time now to go into it, but the real can of worms that would open up has nothing to do with the Federal Trade Commission, but with the U.S. Postal Service. Will explain later.

Later: Sorry, casual readers of this weblog — the following is over-the-top magazine wonkishness.

For years, I’ve said this is nothing new. (Perhaps the best example of true “product placement” in a consumer magazine (and this is pure product placement) are the sponsors of the idea homes built by Southern Living as described in a WSJ article two years ago.)

My complaint with coverage of this topic, however, is the confusion reporters have in understanding the difference in “product placement” and advertorials and custom publishing. My company publishes several magazines for corporations and national associations and we are considered a “custom publisher.” However, the magazines we publish are all clearly marked and branded by their sponsor — nothing hidden or “placed.” Despite their “branding” and ownership and distribution, these publications adhere to high ethical, editorial and design standards. They are not house organs if that term implies something negative (however, we do produce some newsletters that have as their editorial mission some internal communication challenge). We do not accept “paid placement” in these magazines, but we often review products and services and once-in-a-while, these products may be from advertisers…but they are not paid for or a part of any agreement or placement scheme. If an advertiser sponsors something in the publication other than an ad (an award, for example), it is clearly marked.

So (as implied in the article linked-to today and in posts I’ve made in the past) it is not the “federal trade commission” or even ASME or a group of professors that are my concern when it comes to mixing paid placements with editorial: it’s the US Postal Service who will rain on this parade. As I have the privilege of writing checks to the USPS each year that total, well, you don’t want to know, I have found it of value to have someone on staff who is an accredited expert in all things postal. At times, it has been my honor to have long conference calls with representatives of the fine folks who deliver our mail. I’ve even had breakfast with a Post Master General to discuss how much I appreciate the men and women in blue.

So, I’ve grown to appreciate the can of worms a magazine publisher can open up if he or she starts thinking that a revenue stream can be generated by selling “product placement” space. If he or she does, he or she better download some of these regulatory guidelines from the USPS and be ready to go through his or her magazine page-by-page and discuss “what is an ad” and “what is editorial” and “what is paid” and “what is not” and be ready to pull out the pen and write larger checks.

The ethics and legalities of product placement are, to me, not a concern if the relationship between sponsor and publication is transparent to the reader/consumer. However, the unintended consequence of this practice will be a new and potentially unwelcomed recalibration of USPS guidelines for “what is editorial?” in computing the postal rates a publisher pays.

(Sorry for the mixing of metaphors.)

[Updated: See below]

I guess it’s only appropriate that immediately after blogging that MIT student’s thesis, I would run across this. For a long time on this weblog, I have complained about story after story in which it is so obvious the reporter has no clue how to interpret anything dealing with numbers. I got so fed up with a recent example in the Wall Street Journal, that I blogged it (and here) and was later asked to write about the confusion for the current issue of Folio: magazine (the article apparently is not online, but I’ll post it later). Now, I understand this problem a little better.

Here is a story in the Northwestern University student paper reporting the possibility Medill School of Journalism will follow other J-schools around the country that have dropped statistics course requirements or have offered a “dumbed down” version of the course in the Journalism School.

Quote:

A common problem among many Medill students is that because they often don’t understand how statistics relates to their field of choice, they put off taking the course. Michelle Edgar, a fifth-year Medill and School of Music double major, left her statistics requirement until her second-to-last quarter at NU and calls her Introduction to Statisticsclass a “complete waste of time.” “I don’t see how any of the information is relevant to journalism or how it could be applied to
writing a story,” she said.

That’s fine Michelle, but if you become a reporter, please ask your editor to not assign you any stories that use scientific or academic surveys, opinion research or have anything to do with trends that are revealed through any form of measurement. (via: Romenesko)

Updated: A few months after this was posted, on April 4, 2005, I received the following e-mail from Michelle. I am happy to provide it for future “google” searchers who may land here.:

“I came across your posting on rexblog.com, referring to a comment I made to a Northwestern Daily reporter late last year. Just wanted to let you know that Andrea Chang needs to work on her reporting skills after taking my quotes out of context. I didn’t think anything much about the mistake until coming across your blog. A common problem among many Medill students is that because they often don’t understand how statistics relates to their field of choice, they put off taking the course. However, this wasn’t the case for me. What she didn’t include was that since I’m the first at Medill to complete a five-year double-major program, combiningjournalism and piano performance along with a business minor, I simply left all my distribution requirements (statistics being one of them) until my final year.

The reason I referred to the statistics class as a “complete waste of time” was rather because I felt the course itself was relatively simple and more importantly, did not relate to journalism. I would have much rather preferred a course instructing students on how to incorporate statistics into an article involving “scientific or academic surveys, opinion research or anything to do with trends that are revealed through any form of measurement,” as your blog mentions. Medill, along with many journalismschools, should at least take this into account. This class would presumably help students with actual scenarios in which students would have to apply their problem-solving skills and statistics backgrounds. I really don’t mean to presume, but I would really appreciate it if you could take my name out of your blog since both you and Andrea have taken my quotes out of context. Thank you for understanding. Looking forward to hearing from you.”

I’m glad to let her set the record straight.