Does this chart scare the hell out you?

via poynter.org

… not if you’ve been paying attention. If you have, it shouldn’t be telling you anything that you don’t already know: print ads and time spent with the “print product” is falling, while the mobile ad spend is sloooooowly creeping up.

* Graph is from Venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s annual analysis of Internet trends. Hit up the link to read a summary go go directly to her report.

Missing from this graph is the $50 Billion that printed newspapers still rake in. Will there ever be an equilibrium among p/i/m? My guess is no.

At least not for some time to come.

At least until advertisers finally jump the printed ship.

Let’s avoid becoming ‘click whores’

via latimes.com

“Click Whore.” I learned a new term today. Wouldn’t my dear old mom be proud of me.

Anywho… Insightful LA Times piece about the survival of print newspapers. It’s written by David Horsey, but has nothing to do with politics. File this under automated shovel ware to the web.

Anywho… They had me at the now (impotent) Man of Steel cartoon from way back in 2009. Just love the fact that the world’s best known superhero is a newspaperman!

Anywho… Horsey makes his point by starting:

“What’s black and white and read all over?” That is the setup for what used to be the first joke learned by most every American kid

and wraps up at the very end of the piece:

Sure, any fool can get a lot of page views by running photos of cute kittens, funny dogs, hot cheerleaders and bosomy models in bikinis. It might bring in a lot of money. It might be read all over.

But it would not be a newspaper.

Click whore. Yes, mom would be so proud.

Times-Picayune pulls the trigger to end its 175-year-old printed “commitment”

Down in New Orleans The Times-Picayune is undergoing a massive reorg. Hit the link below to read all about it and notice the buried lede.

… enhanced printed newspapers on a schedule of three days a week. The newspaper will be home-delivered and sold in stores on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays only.

via nola.com

Only because they still need to get out the coupons and preprints and they don’t want to design the flag to say Time-Picayune Shopper.

Sad.

A peek into The New York Times morgue — that’s “archive” to you civilians

via vimeo.com

The New York Times’s morgue would be a fun place to dig through — you can do some of that already digitally, but going through a paper morgue connects you back to the people of a specific era — reporters, editors, photographers along with those they reported on.

There’s also that wonderful musty smell of old clippings. I love it. Of course, one of these days, there won’t be any more paper morgues– it’ll all be digital and for a price you’ll be free to browse. What a shame. Another newspaper product will soon bite [byte] the dust!

I love the fact that the Times has moved their morgue to an undisclosed location three stories underground. Sort of like a doomsday-proof vault for old newspaper clippings!

BTW — that’s Marilyn Monroe looking as some clippings if you haven’t guessed.

Oy! Small town newspaper editor busted by blogger

via youtube.com

Having been a small-town newspaper editor, I feel for this ed. Apparently an article that ran in his paper was plagerized from a blogger’s website.

There’s no byline in the paper, so who knows how it got there. A freelancer? Did someone just “hand” it in…. yes, that does happen in small newspapers.

Confrontations are never easy and this is not the finest hour for either the editor or blogger or the woman, for that matter. I like the questioning of where the blogger lives, as if that matters — the implication being that he’s sticking his nose into an area that he has no right being in.

I’ve gotten that attitude for a lot of folks over the years — mainly from cops, who I swear had thought bubbles over their heads that start out “Hey, college boy. Take your fancy pants outta here …”

I guess the upside is that the editor was big enough or smart enough to pay the blogger and the blogger got his money. But I seriously doubt that the story would have run if the editor would have known it was going to cost him $500. To a small paper, that amounts to something like the YEARLY budget for coffee!

Read more of the story at the blogger’s site.

Prom dresses — made from newspapers!

Detroit Free Press slideshow

The Detroit Free Press had a contest for high school students to design and make prom dresses out of newsprint. Hit the above link to see the eight finalists.

Prom dresses out of newspapers! Lets see you do that, interwebs!

Suit yourself? :-0

via jimromenesko.com

This is a game. how many things are wrong with this?

OK. You got the headline, right? RIGHT?! But, check out her right arm. It looks like she’s able to scratch her right knee without bending down. Photoshop disaster for sure.

In defense of the crap headline, I can guarantee that whomever did this had a serious case of tunnel vision. Either they worked so hard to get the ripply water reflection correct they didn’t realize what it says, AND YES, it does say that.

OR,

They worked really hard to sneak this by, in which case the staff should hoist them atop shoulder and proceed to near by beer-selling establishment.

That’s if said person still has a job there.