Eubie's notes

Parody from a Mac user. Very funny.

With the noreaster from last weekend, several journalists wrote about what should change with winter storm coverage. Tim Porter writes that it’s time to end the oh-so-predictable stories and use new methods, such as blogs, to bring personal stories of the storm’s impact.

I just finished Ed Cone‘s article in Baseline The Marketing of a President. Good reading about the impact of online, offline and your neighbor.

Highlight: “But the lesson of Dean’s campaign is that the Web is not for micromanagers. With the Internet, an effective campaign creates a community that will on its own begin to market your product for you. Properly done, you won’t be able ? or want ? to control it.”

I used to play LucasArts Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe years ago. Now there’s Secret Weapons over Normandy. I’ve put it on my Christmas list. But some folks reviewing it on Amazon gave it weak reviews.

Lots of talk about cheaper high-speed acess. The Bell operating companies and others cut prices to compete against the cable companies, who are winning high-speed contest. One worry from a consumer view: the prices may be too low to cover the cost, says an analyst with The Yankee Group.

Had reason to look up how many unmarried Americans there are. The Census Bureau has the answer. It’s part of the Population and Household Economic Topics series. The Census Bureau is a great resource, but it’s been difficult sometimes to find what I’ve wanted on the site.

Cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds is no longer the lead sponsor of NASCAR’s premiere series, which Reynolds had for 33 years. Here’s an insightful story originally published in Sports Business Journal of How NASCAR outgrew RJR’s tobacco-stained image. Now the series will be sposored by Nextel, a wireless company.

I regularly check Yahoo! News’ Most Viewed page to see what people are viewing both in the U.S. and in other countries. There’s also Yahoo’s Buzz Index and Google Zeitgeist to see what’s on people’s mind. Now Amazon has Amazon Purchasing Circles where you can see what people are buying from your area.

I checked the books circle for Charlotte and wasn’t surprised to see Civil War books showing up, but where are the NASCAR books?

Now that Berkeley Breathed re-started Bloom County, will Bill Watterson bring back Calvin and Hobbes? This profile in Cleveland Scene says it’s unlikely. It sounds like he’s a recluse even in the town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland. One thing he objected to was the major push to license products with the strip’s characters.

This week, American Journalism Review has two articles about the Readership Institute’s latest research on what readers like and how newspapers are implementing the results of the research.

The Readership Institute’s report is big, but here’s a quick summary from AJR: Indeed, the so-called “local-local” news issue looms over everything. In what may be the most attention-getting sentence in its voluminous data, the Readership Institute says, “Intensely local, people-centered news ranks at the top of the list of content items with the greatest potential to increase overall readership.”

The articles are similar to Editor and Publisher’s recent article about readership editors that I mentioned last week.