This is ridiculous.
Bearing in mind that when I wrote that in the 8 o’clock hour here it was 5:41 a.m. in Anchorage. Ridiculous. And, also, quite the chilly day. Nothing to do about it but shiver. Because my offices never get warm. (Until about April.) So there I sat for most of the day, space heater six inches from skin, wrapped up in various clothing patterns, hoping for the best, or at least some temporary global warming. Even a bit of change would have been good. We’re all ready for spring, I think.
Newspaper fun today. This is, apparently, the rumor addition of the paper. Not so keen on that. Rumors are rumors, after all. That’s what Yik Yak is for. Right?
I tried Yik Yak. I lurked for a bit and then posted one or two things there and lurked for a bit more. I lurked in more than one community, as the quasi-anonymous platform (but not really) is geography based. I suppose if you have something to get off your chest it would be good for those thinking they can do so without proper retort. But that seems to the biggest extent of it. (I’ve read a few pro Yik Yak stories and they all have the same positive Yik Yak anecdote. You’d like to see more, suggesting they have more than the one, but not yet.) And that’s kind of depressing. So I deleted it.
So I’m playing with new platforms this week — watching and reading how others are experimenting. I’d like to venture out to the bleeding edge of things again. Once upon a time I got to play with stuff that was brand new and that no one had ever really tried. I can do that again. But first I have to make sure I’m caught up on what’s going on today. And so here we are.
Saw this while out to dinner this evening:
I’m not a big sticker-on-the-car guy, most messages being ephermal, but the anti-sticker sticker seems especially weird. Hey, someone made four bucks off of you! Congratulations!
I do enjoy the “0.0” sticker, and I run. Or shuffle.
Things to read … or at least shuffle through.
As I have not received my rejection notice, I suppose I am still in the running on this. That’s the way these things work, right? 100 Candidates Selected for One-Way Mission to Mars:
Over the past two years, more than 200,000 people have applied to be the first colonists on Mars (that we know of), and now the pool has been narrowed down to 100. The Dutch nonprofit Mars One intends to send just four people on a one-way mission to the red planet that’s scheduled to leave Earth in 2024. According to the Washington Post, the most recent cut was made after chief medical officer Norbert Kraft interviewed 660 candidates. Now 24 people will be selected for training by undergoing the most rigorous competition known to humankind: being a reality-show contestant.
Of course I didn’t apply, so there’s that.
That story is 289 words, in total, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find 300 words that better define our era than that little post.
Coverage does not equal care. Out of Pocket, Out of Control:
In the past five years, the average price to see a primary care doctor has risen 20 percent. For a specialist it’s gone up 29 percent, and for outpatient surgery it’s up 43 percent. And that’s just for employer-sponsored insurance; on average, those covered through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges face even higher expenses.
No wonder 22 percent of people now say the cost of getting care has led them to delay treatment for a serious condition. That’s the highest percentage since Gallup started asking in 2001. Another poll found that as many as 16 million adults with chronic conditions have avoided the doctor because of out-of-pocket costs.
See if you can find the key here, Posting a photo is the worst way to get people to see your Facebook posts:
Data provided to Business Insider by the social-media analytics company Socialbakers shows just how badly photos perform compared with videos, links, and even simple text-only posts in terms of reach on Facebook.
What makes this data so remarkable is that it wasn’t so long ago that posting photos used to give brand page owners the best chance of their posts being seen by their fans (indeed, a Socialbakers study dated April 2014 declared “Photos Are Still King On Facebook”). Now the algorithm has changed, punishing photos, perhaps in response to page owners trying to game the system by constantly posting photos, or maybe because Facebook has been shifting its strategy ever more toward video in recent months.
The numbers keep climbing: Smartphone Penetration, Rising in All Age and Income Demos, Hits 75% of the US Mobile Market.
The end of the beginning of the beginning’s end, TV ad model: Dead:
Television as we knew it died this week at 73. Or at least the advertising model did. Boomers and Generation X won’t have to quit ad blocks cold turkey but they will note that a growing percentage of what they see will be ads for retirement villages and Cialis. The kids, which in this case means anyone under 34, are moving online and the money is going with them.
Commercials started with a 10-second spot for Bulova watches during a baseball game in 1941. The death blow came yesterday during PepsiCo’s (PEP) conference call when CEO Indra Nooyi said her company’s ad budget would stay at 5.9% of revenues but be “reallocated.” A Pepsi spokesperson tells Yahoo Finance that means “realloacted to consumer facing activities.” I read that to mean moving ads off television and into other formats.
5.9% of PepsiCo’s 2014 revenues works out to roughly $3.9 billion. They’re the company that brought us Katy Perry and Left Shark, for God’s sake. Sports was the last great hope for ads and one of its biggest backers is drawing the line. There’s nothing in Indra Nooyi’s history to suggest she’s bluffing.
But don’t take PepsiCo’s word for it. Omnicom Media (OMC) which positions some $50 billion worth of ads a year for not just Pepsi but Apple (AAPL), McDonald’s (MCD) and Starbucks (SBUX) advised its clients to shift 25% of their budgets away from TV last year.
You live in a transitional time, to be sure.
Another, sad transition:
I don’t know Larry Stogner, in fact I’ve never even been in his market to view his work, which, of a sudden, seems a shame. But it is clear what his community has meant to him and, having known people like that in a handful of local media markets, I have a good guess what he means to the community.
At some point, not too far off, we’ll see more and more farewells. It is a generational thing. And then more people will come along and be important and stay in one market for a long time and then they’ll retire to see their grandbabies or because the pension kicks in or because they want to travel or are ill. And then that’ll be the end of it. By then every TV newsroom will likely be some version of the hub-and-spoke model and the local feel will, improbably, fade away. (You’ve seen it in radio, it is happening in some aspects of the newspaper business and, already, in some smaller television markets.) We live in a transitional time.
Atlanta’s been on this tear for a while, but as you’ll see the migration isn’t limited to north Georgia. It all started when the northerners realized we’d mastered air conditioning, and they’d ruined their rivers. Mercedes-Benz’s move to Georgia is the latest in an epic and under-reported migration:
According to the latest Census figures, the South was the fastest-growing region in America over the past decade, up 14 percent. “The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve ever seen in history,” Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said at a news conference in 2011.
“The hegira to the Sunbelt continues, as last year the South accounted for six of the top eight states attracting domestic migrants,” Joel Kotkin reported in The Daily Beast in 2013.
And it isn’t just millions of American citizens packing their bags and heading south. Last month, in a move that shocked residents of northern New Jersey, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz USA announced it was moving its headquarters from Montvale (just miles from where I grew up) to Sandy Springs, Ga. And it’s bringing nearly 1,000 people along with it, at an average salary of nearly $80,000 per worker.
I kid, of course. Tax incentives, infrastructure and a willing workforce are just as important as clean rivers.
This story is just getting itchier, isn’t it? To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel Neely Tucker is a son of the South, a seventh-generation Mississippi boy. He’s perhaps got as good a read on this as most any outsider could.
