September 2005 Archives

NY Times: Many financial planners advise saving for retirement before putting money aside for a child's college education.

NY Times: Some experts have been making waves by suggesting that it may make more sense to withdraw bigger amounts in the early years of retirement.

Recent spending studies show that since as one moves from their 60s to their 80s, they spend less in all categories except health care.

Wired News: Blood flows to the parts of the brain associated with anxiety and impulse control when liars do their thing. As a result, MRI machines spot fibbers with more than 90 percent accuracy.

NY Times: The total income of Americans in 2003, adjusted for inflation, was 4 percent smaller than in 1999, new tax return data showed ...

Wired News: The military wants to be a good public citizen by pumping more biodiesel into its tanks and trucks. The fleets will burn about 6 million gallons of the enviromentally friendly fuel this year. By Dan Orzech.

By JD Lasica on New Media Musings

Bob Cauthorn, former GM of SFGate, in Corante today: Newspapers, meet precipice: It's the product, stupid. He uses Tuesday's announcement of 500 layoffs at the New York Times/Boston Globe/IHT as the jumping-off point for an essay on the newspaper readership death spiral. Excerpt:

In October metro newspapers across the country will post astonishing year-over-year declines.

The circulation fall-off at large metro papers will be between 9% and 15%. Smaller market and mid-sized market newspapers will fair slightly better. But across America, the average decline will be somewhere between 3% and 5% year-over-year. ...

Nationally, the average time people spend on newspaper web sites is under four minutes. Clearly, people are reading a story or two and leaving. That's not to say that online readership doesn't matter -- hell, online readership is my religion -- but let's be honest about how people use newspaper web sites. You can't transform the media by lying to yourself about it. ...

Digital media will be recognized for exactly what it is: a full medium in its own right, with its own internal logic, unique advantages, specific shortcomings and opportunities. Newspaper companies will begin to ask the proper questions about digital media, instead of simply mumbling about cannibalization and print.

What are the right questions? Just a few starters: what form should storytelling take online, what is the natural and robust role the community plays, what does geo-focused and just-in-time news delivery look like, does data presentaion itself become a story, what does true interactivity looks like, how can the social conversation be distributed now, what level of personalization is valuable and what level is numbing to the intellect, how can digital media provide real value to local advertisers?

All of it, dead on.

Wired News: Blog network pioneers keep their finances close to the chest, but salary information for scribes behind hit sites like Gizmodo, Fleshbot and Gawker is starting to trickle out. Time to quit your day job and blog for a living? Commentary by Adam Penenberg.

NY Times: At a time when many newspapers are cutting back and announcing layoffs, McClatchy is building its properties. Still, the trends for newspapers are dismal right now and even McClatchy sees clouds on the horizon.

NY Times: For an increasing number of people, blogging is all about the money.

By Malcolm Gladwell in New Yorker

The U. S. health-care system, according to “Uninsured in America,” has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies.

NY Times: Engineers conceded that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 350 miles of levees around New Orleans.

Wired News: Chris Mooney skillfully uncovers the Bush era's institutionalization of spinning, distorting and ignoring science in The Republican War on Science. Book review by Brian Alexander.