Eubie's notes

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.

Monday’s New York Times has an article of how spam has cut email response so much that many email marketers have reverted back to Web sites and other non-email ways to deliver advertising.

The article said the problem is similar to the English commons of the 19th century where common pastures “became depleted because no individual farmer had an incentive to moderate the size of his herd.”

Detroit Press tech columnist Mike Wendland’s Nov. 28 column is about area churches setting up low-priced Wi-Fi networks to serve low-income families. With a combination of donated and recycled equipment and up to $20,000 in grants, the churches can set up networks for up to 200 families at an annual cost of $100. The families will also be able to purchase a computer with Wi-Fi card for $150. This could be the start of a national system of low-cost Wi-Fi networks. The link is to his blog.

The organizing group is Detroit Connected.

Last week’s Editor and Publisher reported on readership editors and other efforts to get all departments of the newspaper to think about readers. Editorial departments at many newspapers don’t think as much about readers as they claim. If they did, they probably would not trim the high school sports sections.

Steve Yelvington’s current post on his site says the only way newspapers can reverse 30 years of readership decline is boldly rethink the entire product line.

When the audience becomes fragmented, the right thing to do is to find targeted ways to connect with those fragments. You can’t draw together an audience that you don’t reach, and you can’t fix the circulation problems of newspapers by trying harder to sell the newspapers that fewer and fewer people want to read.

The E&P piece mentions resistance to change by various departments at newspapers and difficulty in getting resources to building readership as hurdles in reader-awareness efforts.

A bit of success will focus their attention. If the new tabloids publishing now in Chicago, Dallas (A.M. Journal Express and Quick), New York or elsewhere take off, more newspaper owners will take notice. Hypergene MediaBlog doesn’t expect these tabloids to be successful long term because they are trying to create a newspaper reading habit for 18-34 year-olds, who already have online news-reading habits.

An RSS reader is a great way to keep up with favorite news sites or blogs that have RSS or xml feeds. My favorite is Bloglines, a free, web-based program I can access from any computer, which works best for me. If I were choosing a computer-specific application for Windows users, it would be FeedDemon.

Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet is a serious look at the impact of the telegraph on the 19th century. Here’s a humerous Web site of what Victorian England would have made of the Internet. The Adverntures of Accordian Guy in the 21st Century, also has some Victorian Internet images.

Career Journal reported last week that the job market for editors and reporters has begun to loosen and that there may even be job shortages in 2004. Article says hirings at magazines may recover faster than at newspapers and editorial Web sites. It still depends on the continuing recovery in advertising.

It was good to see Bloom County back in the Sunday comics today. It was one of my favorites. With Far Side reruns in the paper, I’m beginning to wonder what decade I’m in.

Christmas trees can already be seen through the windows of Charlotte houses. It seems early to me. I suppose their trees will be down Dec. 26 Boxing Day. The tree at our house comes down sometime after New Year’s Day.

What is Boxing Day? According to this Web-Holidays.com, it’s an old Christmas tradition where employers gave servants boxes with gifts and the day off to visit with family. Now the tradition has evolved to the giving of gifts or money to those who provide service. Besides England, the holiday is celebrated in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.