4/3/09: Another tree-saving, newspaper-killing DLD

In 2005, when I was working for Safeway in San Rafael, I had the good fortune of getting some free-lance work with Media News Group’s Marin County edition.   Fifty bucks to write a high school football game wrap?  Great work, if you can get it. 

Later, I was able to make full-time (albeit-less-than-$14/hr) work out of it, getting hired first as the sports editor of Novato’s community weekly, and then as a sports writer for the Media News Group Vallejo edition.  But when I quit to move to L.A., I was looking forward to going back to making $50 per article with the Media News Group, L.A. edition.  Alas, that work hasn’t materialized.

So when I started up a high school sports blogspot for free, and even later when I joined examiner.com where they pay a cent per page view generated, I felt like I wasn’t competing with the newspapers so much as I was auditioning to join them.  Amidst all the voices saying Newspapers Are Dying, I keep thinking, “Well, they still pay better.”

That may be the case, but according to this article by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield, that’s only because while the Internet may already have caught and past newspapers in terms of audience captured, the ‘net still hasn’t figured out how to translate “audience” into “revenue.”   The Internet’s practically-infinite supply just far outstrips demand.

Yeah, that about sums it up.  As (my former Ad Age colleague) Rothenberg details, “Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are  built into her laptop. So from a very strict Econ 101 basis, you have the ability to create virtually unlimited supply against what has been historically relatively stable demand. 

So the biggest online publishers, with all their vast overhead, have no more access to audience than Courtney the eighth-grader.  And there are hundreds of millions of Courtneys, millions of them on Google AdSense, driving the price of ad space, down, down, down.

I always feared that the future of advertising was best predicted by Minority Report, in which retinal scans and surveillance cameras allow the bastards to follow us with their direct marketing from one monitor to another.  But here’s one optimistic note in an otherwise frustrated article—maybe the ads of the future will be entertaining and beautiful rather than intrusive. 

Rothenberg also acknowledges the problem of ad avoidance, as evidenced by average click-through rates approaching zero.  Yet, for all his economic realism, he stubbornly insists there’s a solution: “Better advertising.  More informational.  More entertaining.  More beautiful.”

Anyway, the article fails to contradict the general consensus that newspapers are dying too, so I may get old and grey waiting for my next $50 per article dream job.   

[Late edit by this post’s author, mjdittmer, dismayed that other than font-formatting issues, the body of this DLD has failed to generate a single word of discussion.  I guess this is where I should have put, ‘Anybody else have any feelings/experience/opinions to share regarding the dying industry, good or ill?’]

Sorry, enough about me.  How about a Ray Ratto column (about last night’s game, no less)?

And let’s see if I can embed video.  No?  Well, the preview for Sasha Baron Cohen’s next movie, coming this summer, can be found here.  Dump away!

 

DLD 3/31/09

Stuff to read through while you delay writing your dissertation…

Tigers release Gary Sheffield.

When Sheffield arrived at the Tigers’ clubhouse Tuesday, he knew something was up.

“People were looking at me funny,” he said.

Teammates or staff?

“Staff,” he said.

That’s because teammates didn’t know yet that Sheffield was about to be released.

When asked if he was stunned after it happened, Sheffield said, “I’m not stunned. But you don’t really know what to feel or what to call it.”

The Tigers will eat a delicious $14 MM.

Make sure you are well protected from the Conficker worm.

Security researchers are racing to head off an Internet worm that is scheduled to phone home for instructions Wednesday, possibly to cause widespread damage.

Researchers who have studied Conficker call it one of the most complex pieces of malicious code they’ve seen.
Known as Conficker or Downadup, the worm has been sitting dormant inside the 10 million to 12 million Windows PCs it has managed to infect all over the world since it emerged in November.

Obviously never spent time with the inner-workings of PECOTA.
World Series hero Cole Hamels will be out to start the season:

Hamels threw 65 pitches in a minor league spring training game Monday and allowed 10 hits and three runs in four innings. He walked one and struck out five.

“He was fine,” Dubee said. “I’m not looking at [how many] base hits he gave up or anything. His command is not there. That’s for sure.”

Dubee said he asked Hamels to throw more fastballs than he normally would and reported that his fastball was clocked at 85-88 miles per hour. In previous starts this spring, Hamels had raised concerns by topping out in the lower 80s.

So that’s Hamels, Lackey, Duchscherer…and, yet, my understanding is that Rich Harden is ready to go.  Speaking of pitchers, THT looks at Nick Adenhart of the dreaded Slegna:

• No swinging third strikes
• Fell behind often—1.6:1 ratio of 1-0 to 0-1 counts
• Barely ventured over the inside half against left-handed hitters
• Batters swung at only 35 percent of his curveballs when they were in the strike zone
• Other than that, he fooled no one—the swing rate on his pitches out of the zone (15 percent) was half the league average
• Even Adenhart’s change-up is below average in terms of missing bats (20 percent whiff rate, which is a good 10 points lower than league average for change-ups)

I wanna be…YOUR LINK DUMPER!  Why don’t you call my screen name?

RATTO WATCH

Um … why does this make me feel uncomfortable?

He comes off almost as a dilettante who wants to move out of his old neighborhood but wants the new neighborhood to come to him.