• Everybody on TV and in Movies Reads the Same Newspaper – The same prop newspaper is used in most? all? TV and film productions (presumably standardized for rights clearance) (via waxy)

• Electric Literature Magazine Offers Fiction in New Media – The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.
• French Government Offers Free Newspapers to Young Readers – Under “My Free Newspaper,” 18- to 24-year-olds will be offered a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

  “Winning back young readers is essential for the financial survival of the press, and for its civic dimension,” the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said.

Adam Richardson recently wrote a strong critique of the San Francisco Chronicle – both their unattractive redesign and their poor content.

Although Monday’s Chron featured anti-elitist sneering about Nate Silver’s semi-failed Oscar predictions, I was impressed with a new feature, where startups get feedback about their ideas from venture capitalists.

They’ve done a good job at tying this coverage to a unique aspect of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Silicon Valley, long known as a hotbed for innovation, has one of the highest concentrations of startups and investors in the world. At any one time, 20,000 entrepreneurs in the valley are thinking about starting companies, and as many as 8,000 are circulating business plans and looking for funding

One example: Mojamix: Breakfast enthusiasts personalize their own cereal or granola online and have it shipped to their door in just a few days.

David Pakman, partner, Venrock: I’m skeptical that consumers at scale actually know enough about what ingredients go together to make a breakfast cereal or granola they will like and will taste good. If I pick dried cranberries over raisins, will I like it less or more? Kinda have to taste it to know.

Mass customization of food products is indeed an interesting trend, but I wonder if it is better to focus on areas where the customer does not have to taste it to know if they will like it.

Margins in food products are low and are thus only interesting at scale, so Mojamix would need to demonstrate that the lifetime value of a customer is large enough to afford the customer acquisition costs that would be required to attract lots of customers.

As I’ve written before, I appreciate the ability of some VCs to look at an idea and consider many facets and contexts.

Sure, this sort of material is available elsewhere, especially online, but seeing this piece in the mainstream media was refreshing.

Just the other day, more news that dark chocolate can help lower pressure (seems like old news, but okay). Here’s how the SF Chron presented the story:

Front page. Two columns. One of those columns is simply a (confusing) image of swirling chocolate, providing absolutely no information whatsoever. What the hell is the front page about, here? Advertisements, eye-candy imagery, very non-news stories.

Contrast the NYT treatment of the story:

Tucked away on page 11. No hype or imagery. The front page of the New York Times is still for news, apparently.

Although these are both products in the same category (newspaper), they are really not the same kind of thing at all. Their purpose, intent, motivation, audience differ vastly. I need to stop thinking of them as a set of like items, because that lulls me (as the user) into a misleading state of expectation.

The SF Chron devotes a fair amount of the front section and most of their Sunday Style section to stories and photo spreads about a new mall opening in San Francisco. Granted, it’s not the front page or anything, and we don’t expect hard news, but does it have to be such blatant content of commercial interest? It’s one thing when the local community papers write about small businesses, some quid pro quo for advertising dollars before, during, or after, but a big-city newspaper? Yuck.

Meanwhile, I only knew get ‘er done as the catch-phrase of Larry the Cable Guy, but I am noticing it now in stories about construction, like the above photo from the building of this new mall, or the re-opening of our local Devil’s Slide road. I guess it’s another example of cultural reverse engineering; presumably the working-class salt-of-the-earth lingo of construction works was where Larry picked up that particular phrase.

Stones ticket prices take a plunge

“I feel like they’ve kind of been mailing it in for a while,” says Steve Portigal, who in ’92 started the first Stones Internet discussion group, www.under-cover.net. “I used to fend off comments about the band being too old, but I’m embarrassed to say I’ve changed my mind about that.”

It’s not word-for-word what I said, but I guess it’s close enough. And a little different than the previous Boston Globe quotes (here, here).

Click to enlarge
Two items across the gutter (in the business section of the SF Chron, of all places) that use similar exercising imagery. One is literally for exercise gear; the other is a metaphor.

The left-hand ad is for a Soloflex gizmo that vibrates. And you stand it on and lose weight.

?

Sounds like something from The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices! Soloflex, supposedly a brand we’re familiar with (the first TV infomercials on film, the earliest users of infomercials for exercise equipment), offering ridiculous quackery!

The perhaps ironic/perhaps not references to God are also strange.

I’ve received my second issue of Spin magazine since a recent relaunch. It’s gone from being a youth-oriented slightly alternative music magazine that featured (one of my writing heroes) Chuck Klosterman (in an ever-declining role) to a youth-oriented slightly alternative People magazine.

I wasn’t exactly in love with the old Spin, given my rural lifestyle (i.e., Portigal Consulting world headquarters is just blocks away from an alpaca ranch), but I admit I found it strangely comforting to read about Coachella and Death Cab for Cutie even though there’s little chance I will go to the first or listen to the second. I want to say “I’m too old” but it’s really not a matter of age, I have always liked reading about this stuff, but I never felt part of it. Reading Spin a couple of years ago was an attempt to shake off the depressing feeling that Classic Rock Radio (and Rock Marketing) has been giving me for many years.

But I can’t stand this new magazine, it’s replaced attitude with vapiditude. Spin will certainly lose me as a reader. I’m not sure that’s a problem for them. I’m probably not a customer for their advertisers and therefore not a valued reader.

It does raise some interesting questions about how to “re-launch” or otherwise evolve a brand. I know this is not the first time Spin did this (at one point they were vaguely hard-hitting, big format, run by Bob Guccione, Jr., the Penthouse scion). But there’s no transpanecy in this process. Where is Klosterman? Why all the pictures of hotties? Parties? Hot parties? I’m asked to consider it as the same Spin, even though it’s not, and it doesn’t feel like it.

In this case, the entire experience has changed, it’s not a new ad campaign or new bumper graphics, old stuff is gone, new stuff is here, the editorial voice has been revamped.

Contrast with newspapers that change features all the time (newly designed stock tables, new font, new page format, you name it) and typically will explain the heck out of it, what was done, how it was done, and why it’s better. They know that when you have a comfortable relationship with a paper, you’ll be shattered if changes slightly without you knowing a little bit in advance.

A recent study we did around some commercial software that was used aggressively every day all day found that the management of inevitable changes is crucial, the software is “their” software, just like Spin is “my” magazine. The consumer/producer split has an emotional component that producers don’t always get. As one of the software users told us (paraphrase) “I don’t come to your office and change how your system works!”

That’s sort of how I feel. Spin didn’t ask me if I was going to be okay with this, and I’m not. I hate this magazine and I want my old one back. And Spin is probably all right with that reaction, but it’s easy to identify other cases where it’s not so cool to piss people off so much that they leave.

No pat solutions here, although maybe others have examples of good or bad to contribute here.

I love it when I’m mulling something over and an article appears that sums it up, at least partly. Don’t Blame the Web When Newspapers Die is one such example

The disappearance of the paperboy. I was a paper-boy as a kid. It was good money, and my knocking on doors seeking subscriptions or asking to be paid put a human face on the paper. Circulation grew with the population, but now newspapers must offer free subscriptions to sucker the rubes to renew. These offers come from Mumbai by phone, usually when you’re at dinner. The bean counters love it. Some middle-aged man now delivers the paper out of an old Chevy.

We are reading a lot about people getting their news from the web instead of print, or the failures of news companies (MSM – or “main stream media”) to allow sharing and get with the co-creation program, blah blah blah.

But really, these newspaper companies are messed for other reasons (such as are outlined in the article). They can’t provide their basic service very well – to get a printed piece of a paper to your door every day, and to stop getting you those printed pages when you ask them to.

Every single time I travel I have to put two papers on hold (the SF Chron and the NYT). I’ve started putting them on hold a day early, even though I’d like a paper that day, I have to ensure they actually do stop the paper when they are supposed to.

Last week we went away and I did my usual. One paper still arrived, so I called and spoke to a human who verified my hold was in the system and indicated that they would escalate a notice to some district person to get it stopped. The next day a paper arrived – and I was already in Toronto – so I called long distance (the 800 number doesn’t work outside the US, of course) and restated the situation again and told them I did not want to come home to a pile of papers. “Absolutely, we’ll let the supervisor know and get that sorted out.” The phone call, mind you, cost $8.00 from the hotel. Cheaper than my international roaming charges on Verizon? I dunno.

And we came home to find, indeed, a pile of papers. They didn’t follow the first notice, they didn’t follow the first escalation, or the second escalation, nor did they respond to the pile of papers sitting in the driveway (hey, maybe that would be a clue that they should not be delivering them).

The day after we got back, the other paper didn’t arrive. I had to call in to get that delivery problem sorted out. I’m so fed up with these papers – you can’t get anyone at the main office to take you seriously, all they can do is pass a message onto a mysterious supervisor who presumably deals with the middle-aged man in the old car who drives down my street early in the morning.

One day a few months ago neither paper arrived (and unrelated to any vacation hold, even), so I called both offices. And I actually got a followup call from the carrier, telling me to call them if I had a problem (in other words, don’t let our boss know). And – for the two papers – it was the same carrier!

Meanwhile, I’m feeling totally unresolved about last week’s unwanted deliveries. I’m not calling in and speaking to another drone again; I sent an email asking for a supervisor to call me about an unresolved problem, and I’m thinking about canceling the paper if they don’t take me seriously. The fact is, I need them more than they need me. They aren’t interested in me as a customer – the delivery mechanism is so far removed from the news gathering organization, that there’s no one who is going to respond in any fashion, let alone take any actual steps to keep this from happening. It’s just a lousy single customer for them, but it’s more than inconvenience for me, it’s about home security – there’s nothing worse than a bunch of papers to advertise that the house is prime for breaking and entering and stealing and leaving. If I can’t travel without worrying that a disinterested low-paid employee is going to put my safety and security at risk, then it’s maybe not worth it.

I still like the paper, and I like reading it cover to cover more than I could ever do online. But they don’t deserve my meager business.

I’m not sure if this consistently poor level of customer service is what’s going to further destroy the newspaper business, or if we’ll just tolerate it like we do with banks, HMOs, utilities, phone companies, Best Buy, and so on.