Latest Edition:
Winter, 2010
Thoughts on the past, present, and future of American magazine publishing.
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Features
and Fancies
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A Publisher's History of American Magazines
Two new installments? Double the fun! The first looks at the guy who gave us the headless horseman, the Knicks, Christmas, and a lot of good magazine reading: Mr. Irving. The second takes us to Philadelphia in the days of "hard drinking and high thinking."
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if you measured it in bytes? The experts at UCSD decided to find out. Here are the findings... which count you, me, the woodchuck, and everyone else.
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Out on the Links
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Print Ads Are More Effective! Or Are They?
A new study from Microsoft says that print advertising delivers better results than TV or online. But there's more than one response to the conclusion.
Those interested in how Americans really spend their time will find this new Nielsen study interesting. It turns out that we invest more than 30 percent of our waking hours watching TV. And the trend is pointing up.
Research Society for American Periodicals
An outstanding resource for anyone interested in the history of American magazines and newspapers. Broad-ranging... interdisciplinary... fascinating.
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January 4, 2010 Two reports recently caught our attention, both of which are accessible at left. One, from the University of California at San Diego documents the extraordinary volume of information consumed annually in the United States. The other, from Microsoft Corporation in the UK, demonstrates the relative effectiveness of print advertising when compared to advertising in other media. Both make fascinating reading.
One thing that struck us, however, is the utter implausibility, not of the two studies' premises or conclusions, but of the likelihood that anyone can really measure this sort of thing accurately.
In the case of the UCSD study, which uses bytes as a metric, our question would be simply how in the world you could possibly estimate all the bytes of information an average person is exposed to and expect the answer to be anything other than a W.A.G... especially when so much information is communicated graphically.
In the case of the Microsoft study, while we're very much inclined to agree with the findings, it seems like there are far too many ways to define "effectiveness" for any finding to be definitive. In fact, there are a number of perfectly fine research studies that have reached a different conclusion... just as there are others that agree.
Well, it's not necessarily the results that are interesting as much as the effort itself... as Evel Knieval once said. Enjoy!
"Not only an Itch, but a kind of Colourable Right and License"
