Wayne Laugesen of Colorado's Boulder Weekly believes there are times when a member of the media must cease being a spectator and take action. As such, he traded his usual pen for a sledgehammer and smashed a bunch of windows, reports Westword media critic Michael Roberts. Laugesen felt that an order directing homeowner Paul Wenig to reinstall antiquated windows he'd removed from his historic residence needlessly endangered two children who lived there. To Laugesen, destroying the windows was the obvious solution. Of the incident, he wrote in his Sept. 9 column: "Every broken window was a score for fatherhood, husbandry, and God-given liberty."
For years Madison Avenue's leading thinkers have pondered the same fundamental question: How much of their advertising actually works? In what is likely the grandest post-buy analysis of all time, the Advertising Research Foundation this week will release findings of a review of more than a dozen of the most sophisticated cross-media case studies ever conducted. Its conclusion: About $50 billion in U.S. ad spending is "wasted." That figure equates to about 18.8 percent of the $266 billion in U.S. ad spending estimated by Universal McCann for 2004, but the precise number isn't as important as the fact that the ad industry now claims to have identified some of its biggest and most obvious areas of waste.
Any goodwill towards newspaper companies for strong performances in August may be short-lived. September is more than halfway through and already several companies are warning that in the end it won't look pretty.
Freelance journalist Becky Oberg wanted to expand her reportage for NUVO, an Indianapolis alt-weekly, into a book. Carlo DeVito, publisher of Chamberlain Bros., a Penguin imprint, was looking for new projects. Despite the fact that Oberg was, in her words, "an unknown, unagented, first-time author," DeVito called her and asked if she'd turn her story about an Army private's desertion to Canada via an "underground railroad" into a book. Why was a publisher scouring alt-weeklies for book ideas? Says DeVito: "We're always looking for a good story and a new point of view, and that's what a lot of these papers express."
Readers of Gambit Weekly, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Miami New Times, Weekly Planet (Tampa), Weekly Planet (Sarasota), Folio Weekly and Orlando Weekly have lately seen Mother Nature at her worst. Distributed in areas affected by the hurricanes that have pounded Florida and surrounding states since August, these alt-weeklies have come out on schedule -- thanks to determined staffers and contingency plans.
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