yelvington.com

 Here's a piece I was interviewed for in a local San Diego paper, The Reader, that is a fairly well-balanced take on the local/non-local issue.Check it out.

From MediaPost:The problem: auto, financial, retail and real-estate businesses that generate more than half of local media advertising revenues will not recover anytime soon. Some are never coming back. The number of retail store closures in 2009 could exceed last year's 148,000 closures, due mostly to major chains filing for--or trying to avoid-- bankruptcy. Small local businesses are especially under pressure. As many as 3,800 local auto dealerships risk collapse from dwindling sales and credit. The consolidation of investment banks will continue across regional banks. Real estate values and sales will continue to fall. Federal recapitalization, which could boost the deficit to $4 trillion, will occur at the top of the food chain. The solution: TV, radio stations and newspapers must work more closely with communities and merchants to strengthen local economies. Their survival depends upon on their effective use of digital interactivity. Job one is to connect local consumers with goods and services of choice using location-based marketing on cell phones and Web sites. With thrift the new norm, marketers ranging from Procter & Gamble to Liz Claiborne have learned to monetize the coupon comeback.What we are going to witness in 2009 is the diminished importance of how large your audience is and the increasing importance of how effectively you connect that audience, whatever its size, with the advertisers and marketers who have the goods and services that audience craves.Ironically, just as PPM is coming into widespread use the importance of this (or any) type of head-counting is diminishing.  "Digital interactivity" doesn't mean banner ads or streaming ad inserts.  It means using digital tools to give the people with the power - your audience - what they want the way they want it.Surely, there will always be a need to reach lots of people via the type of shorthand mass media specialize in.  But this deep recession is moving other priorities to the head of the table.Every radio station ...

Newspapers face three different, but interrelated, economic challenges. One is the technology-driven restructuring of the news business, in which the Internet is a major force that is disintegrating the traditional product model. That's a very real long-term process. It's not the biggest immediate source of trouble, but it's a factor. Two is an acute cyclical global economic crisis, brought about by widespread criminal practices in the U.S. mortgage-banking industry, which has knocked the legs out from under the traditional sources of advertising revenue: car dealers, real estate agents, businesses seeking to hire employees, and retailers seeking foot traffic in local stores. When your customers hurt, so do you. Three is an ownership crisis that combines with the first two to set us up for disaster in 2009. Owners -- corporations, entrepreneurs -- borrowed heavily back in the days when banks were passing out cash like candy at a Christmas parade. They borrowed not to build toward an Internet future (which they should have done), but rather to grab more of the past by taking over other newspaper companies. And they borrowed against assumptions of obese profit margins that have been snatched away by points one and two. If you don't understand the ownership crisis, Alan Mutter has a detailed explanation in the form of an analysis of Lee Enterprises, which is the poster child for this particular form of woe. He writes: While Lee is in a distinctly unpleasant position with respect to its shareholders and lenders, it is important to note that the business generated $207.2 million in operating profits last year on sales of a bit more than $1 billion. Its operating margin of 20.1% surpasses that of Exxon Mobil Corp., which generated a 19.1% margin in the last 12 months. And Lee’s profitability positively blows away Wal-Mart, the largest Fortune 500 company, whose margins were only 7.4% in the prior 12 months. What? Lee Enterprises is profitable? Yes, it is -- until you count ...

I’m teaching an online course, Life Incorporated, through the MaybeLogic Academy beginning January 12, for six weeks.

“Students” will get a working draft of the book (to be published in June) as well as six weeks of discussion and interrogation of the issues within and beyond it. I’ll be doing some live video lectures, as well, and inviting participants to help devise ways of restoring bottom-up commerce and social exchange to a world that seems incapable of abandoning its faulty, top-down, disconnected way of extracting value from people.

But the bulk of the exploration will be history, economics and social theory: How did corporatism become the dominant cultural ideology and operating system, who did it benefit, how did we internalize it, and what keeps it running?

Here’s a description from the catalog. If you are interested in taking the course but just don’t have any money, let me know and I’ll see if I can subsidize your participation.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to

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A few more interesting things, as I attempt to clear all those open browser windows:

• PR journalism. Very good design, but very bad journalism, says Juan Antonio Giner. “This is what can kill a newspaper.”
• Looking for good news. Steve Yelvington continues his campaign to help journalists understand how media works and their role in making its future. A good read.
• Best & Worst of 2008 - Trends. I wasn’t that impressed with many of the looking-back posts of recent weeks, but Paul Gillin’s is one of the most helpful. Related: Alan Mutter’s Newspaper share value fell $64B in ’08, which looks back at an horrendous year for newspaper stocks.
• Media Predictions for 2009. From Jon Fine, who writes, “Dare we go into the breach with another column’s worth of predictions, at the risk of looking shortsighted, foolhardy, and stricken with all manner of naïveté?” And then says, yes. Interesting, plausible stuff.
• Monetizing Neighborhood News: More from Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog (Part 2 of 2). Part 2 of Angela Connors’s interview with Tracy Record. The two-parter is packed with solid information on creating

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If I were smarter, I would have bought CanWest stock a couple of weeks back when it was 34 cents a share. It ended last year, and started this one, strong, closing today at 91 cents after briefly flirting with $1.

The stock has been on a steady climb over the past 10 days or so, but average trading volume has been relatively low.

As always, I have no idea what’s going on.

I have collected far too many links for a single post, so I may spread them out over the weekend.

• The Rise of Cloud Agents. A whole new concept to get my mind around: software to help deal with the massive amounts of data around us. Some implications for media here, although I’m not yet sure how extensive they may be.
• More than photos: The changing role of photojournalists in Canada. A piece at the NPAC*APPC website that includes this quote from the photo editor of the Globe & Mail: “There will never be another still-only photographer job in Canada anywhere.” No response to the piece in the site’s forum yet, but I’m sure some is coming.
• Lots left to learn after a year of learning. A very nice piece from Steve Buttry on what he learned this year and why he’s no closer to his younger self’s idea that one day he would move from learning to knowing.
• A look back at 2008. A huge list of Mac resources at UsingMac.com.
• Forget Survival: The Journalist’s Guide to Owning 2009 and Beyond. A good, much-pointed-to piece at New Media Bytes. Lots of good advice and make sure you set aside 15 minutes to watch the video of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation.
• Matt Harding: Where The

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Over the last several days, I’ve come across these headlines in the feedreader.

One More Newspaper Gives Up the Ghost: Spanish Language Hoy New York Goes Web-Only

Kansan going online-only starting Jan. 10

AsiaWeek kills print edition: A growing trend?

Three related bits of news do not a trend make. Or do they?

A note: One of my students who’s is on Twitter (@sarahsodyssey) was responsible for me finding Suzanna Yada’s Resolutions for journalism students, part I: Become invaluable, the essential post I mentioned earlier today.

That’s a Twitter first for me: my students are starting to beat me to the good stuff.

Now I know what a proud dad feels like.

Jeff Jarvis has started a good conversation with a post titled " Bad news, good news " at Buzzmachine. In response to a comment that "The problem with the Good News is that newspapers can’t translate an equal online readership into the same revenue as in print," I posted the note below, which cites the frequency-of-usage failure that I've mentioned on many previous occasions. Once again, I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem. I have to differ with Dan Thornton. There is no equivalency in the online readership. If there were, we might actually see equivalency in revenue. The unique-user number is inflated BS calculated from counting cookies from a wandering global audience. It’s primarily useful for spreading fog at senior management meetings and issuing chest-beating and ultimately misleading press releases about how newspapers are extending their audience reach online. It should never be compared to in-market commercially relevant print readership data. The true number of in-market users who consume pages with enough frequency to be affected by an advertising campaign is distressingly low. At the core, it’s not an advertising problem. Local businesses still need to reach potential local customers, and they’re willing (although certainly not eager) to pay for results. It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience that’s breaking the newspaper business model. That points the arrow back at the people who create the content. The 20th century content model isn’t working any more, regardless of whether it’s in print or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex by a modified laser beam. If I were looking for good news, I’d be looking at the transition that many companies are making from single-product strategy to a portfolio/aggregation strategy. I’d be looking at the newspapers that are beginning to figure out behavioral targeting in a network context. I’d be looking for new ...

Voting ends tomorrow, Jan. 2, for best legal podcast in the ABA Journal Blawg 100. Our podcast, Lawyer2Lawyer, was in the lead, but has fallen into second place in these waning hours, behind the LexisNexis Legal News and Litigation Report. Voting is easy -- all you have to do is click on a box. Do it today (or tomorrow) and forward this on to your friends.

Vote here.

A few things for your reading pleasure:

• ‘Cincy Enquirer’ To Drop Classifieds 2 Days. The latest money-saving moves from a big American daily, also includes shrinking the size of the pages and combining sections.
• The Internet Is Bad For The Truth. This is an odd, not-too-believable argument: the internet is bad for the truth because it allows for too many voices, not the handful that use to drive “the very process by which we form opinion, or taste, or ultimately a sense of the truth.”
• Why journalists need to stop playing catch-up, start focusing on the next news model. A cogent argument from Daniel Victor for journalists to take hold of the task of driving the development of new models for news.
• Multimedia Projects You May Have Missed in 2008. I’ll be spending at least part of my day working my way through this list, from Regina McCombs at Poynter. Note to students: expect to see some of these when classes resumes next week.
• Neiman Reports - Special edition on the future of digital journalism. I’m not sure when I’ll have time to read all 39 articles in the Neiman Report, so Cindy Royal’s recap of some of the highlights is

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It should be.That's what a new report from BIGresearch says (reported by MediaPost).According to a recent analysis of BIGresearch's SIMM database by Prosper Technologies, wide gaps exist between how ad dollars have been spent versus what consumers say works best when it comes to buying a car. The Prosper analysis and media allocation model utilizes the SIMM Survey of 17,231 consumers to determine "what" and "which" media forms are most influential to consumers for buying a car, the consumption of the media, and pricing of various measured media. Automotive Ad Spend vs. Prosper Media Allocation Model  (% of Total U.S. Advertising Spend in 2007) General Motors Spend ShareFord Spend ShareChrysler Spend ShareProsper Allocation ModelMagazines 12.4%11.9%10.5% 15.6%Newspaper5.0%5.2%6.9%6.2%Outdoor1.5% 0.7%0.5%14.6%TV 39.1%38.9%43.2%17.3%Radio 3.5% 2.3%1.9%21.5%Internet 7.0%6.5%  3.0%8.5%Other 31.5% 34.5%34.0%16.3%Source: Ad Age Domestic Ad Spending by Category (2007)/Measured media from TNS Media Intelligence's Strategy, Prosper Media Allocation Model So here's the key part: The report concludes that the amount of radio consumed, its influence to purchase, combined with lower costs makes it a stronger media option for automakers, which, according to consumers, is under-utilized. Consumers - not broadcasters - say radio is far more influential to their auto purchase decisions than the automakers themselves believe.Can you sell that, Radio?Happy New Year.

Twitter screenshot

I have no idea whether the Sun has had any response to this tweet yet, but it really is great to see the local daily using the ‘net to build its journalism.

Image isn’t great: needed to do a lot of sharpening to ensure that it’s readable.

Back to media blogging after a holiday rest, and I have some catching up to do. A reminder: I post some interesting links throughout the day on Twitter. They’ll show up on the sidebar of the home page or you can follow me.

• Print News Fading, Still Source of Much News. This piece at Slashdot isn’t interesting so much for the post itself, but for the unusually thoughtful discussion in the comments. (I say unusually thoughtful, by which I mean the comments aren’t littered with idiotic screeds on how it’s the perceived political bias of the press that is killing newspapers.)
• How the “nobody syndrome” costs us great bloggers. A nice piece on how to become a blogger. Includes this: “You can be the authority you want to be.”
• Just what are they teaching future journalists? This is brilliant. Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words has run the online course descriptions of some U.S. journalism schools through Wordle, producing some revealing word clouds.
• Talk is cheap, but here’s my money. Howard Weaver is really, really choked about a recent Jeff Jarvis column and writes well in defence of McClatchey’s future. Jeff responds in the comments. A good read from both.
• 12 and a half rules to be

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A rare sight in Vancouver: shovelling knee-deep snow to get the vehicle out.

And still falls the snow.

Download audio file (silent_night2.mp3)

A little, light music, put together by overdubbing two guitar tracks and a violin track in Garage Band, using the built-in mic in my MacBook. Update: A new version, this time with Laura Blumenthal on santouri.

A note for music fans: The amateurish violin part, mistakes and all, was my fifth take. I finally realized, at this point in learning the instrument, that’s what I sound like.

I haven’t finished my photo edit from today’s shooting, but these are three I particularly like. The bottom one is my favourite so far. (Note: I haven’t done any manipulation to any of these yet: they are straight out of the camera.)

Downtown Vancouver against the North Shore mountains.

In the small park between Granville and Fir, north of Fourth Avenue.

Sunlight on snow, with the footings of the Granville Street Bridge in the background.

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No holiday slowdown in the mediasphere.

• Why I stay. John Robinson on why he didn’t take a buyout at the News-Record. “I love the people I work with, and I embrace the challenges facing the industry.”
• Connecticut Could Lose 30 Newspapers Within a Month. Grim.
• 2009 prediction: Guerilla journalism for the public good. Alfred Hermida’s addition to this month’s Carnival of Journalism is one of the most interesting predictions. (Note: There’s a link to the carnival in his post.) Related: Ryan Sholin also sees more local startups in 2009.
• How debt did in America’s newspapers. Alan Mutter’s latest in-depth look at the situation too many newspaper companies find themselves in, with particular attention to the dire situation at Lee.
• Media Debate Ready for Take Off. Mediacheck, by Steve Anderson, is a new column at The Tyee exploring the role of media and democracy. His first column sets up what he will be writing about. It’s bookmark-worthy.
• Denver Media, wake up. And not just Denver: Zac Echola takes the Colorado newspapers to task

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While I was out fighting through the slush today, someone left a particularly nasty, hateful comment on my recent post about the last gasp of the curmudgeons.

As soon as I saw it, I deleted it from the site. If you were subjected to the nastiness for the short time it was here, I apologize.