As daily newspaper publishers and even magazines continue to mull charging for content online, little has been written about how such a move would help or harm alt-weeklies. Village Voice Media new media director Bill Jensen, for one, says he's licking his chops. "We're praying for the day that [daily newspapers] go behind a pay wall," he tells Mediaweek. "That's good for us. We've always been free and we know free. We're not complaining about it."
A new survey from Compete finds that nearly half of all smartphone owners are receptive to location-based offers at restaurants and offers to save and pursue at their leisure, and 45 percent would use mobile grocery coupons. "[It looks like] impulse purchases are a better hook for marketers than a considered purchase," Compete's Elaine Sanfilippo tells Marketing Daily. "Those offers that have that instant impact really resonate with people."
Republican Michael D. Duvall has resigned from the California state Assembly amid the scandal uncovered on Tuesday by OC Weekly and KCBS/KCAL. The staunch conservative was caught on video talking graphically about two affairs, one of which was with a lobbyist whose clients had business before a committee on which Duvall sat. Weekly reporter R. Scott Moxley and TV reporter Dave Lopez were both chasing the story at the same time on Tuesday -- literally -- as they followed Duvall around the capitol, trying to get him to respond. In a statement, Duvall says his resignation "is in no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs," adding that his only "offense was engaging in inappropriate story-telling."
Independent film is more reliant on film critics than mainstream big-budget film, with critics often having the ability to "help drive positive word of mouth and nudge arthouse moviegoers into seats without a big marketing spend," Variety reports. And the distributors of indie film say they're feeling the pain from "the loss of regional movie reviewers and diminishing newspaper space." Strand Releasing's Marcus Hu says his company has been particularly hurt by Village Voice Media's practice of assigning reviews to a few critics that run in every VVM market. "Before, at least, you had a new shot in each market," he says.
Small Society, the company whose work on iPhone applications for the Obama campaign, Whole Foods and Zipcar has earned wide recognition and praise in the growing app development field, is partnering with Pre1 Software and the parent company of Willamette Week and Santa Fe Reporter to develop an iPhone publishing platform which they hope to make available to AAN publishers by late 2009. "We think this may be the killer app for alt weeklies," Willamette Week editor Mark Zusman says.
The band's latest album, Backspacer, will be released on Sept. 20 with a nine-panel cover concept created and executed by Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins). The New York Times reports that the band's partnership with the alt-cartoonist came about "partly as a result of the transformations of their fields by new media, since the internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry," a point Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder expands on. "It used to be real simple," Vedder says. "Dan writes a strip, it gets in the paper, people read it, Dan gets paid. That's how we felt too: make records, people buy them at a record store, we tour, there you go. It's not that simple anymore." MORE: On his blog, Perkins has one small correction to the piece.
A new survey of 5,300 small and mid-sized advertisers from Round2 Communications agency finds that 33 percent expect to increase their ad spending compared to 2008. The survey also contains a touch of bad news for print, with 46.6 percent of respondents saying they expect print expenditures to decrease in 2009.
in 1996, Jeff vonKaenel wrote a widely discussed piece predicting that most daily newspapers would be out of business in ten years. Although his timing was off, there's no question he nailed the trajectory. Now he's back to ask, What comes next? His "guess" and "hope" is that weekly newspapers will survive as "a viable economic model," and journalism that is "more cutting-edge, more controversial ... (and) less locally based" will flourish online through the joint support of nonprofits, corporations and individual citizens.
Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World" returns to the Village Voice this week after a seven month absence. Tomorrow's comic was cut from all Village Voice Media papers -- along with all syndicated comics -- back in January. The strip is only returning to the Voice for now, but that may change in the coming months. "Altweekly cartooning overall has kind of been on the ropes for the past year or two, and any editor who takes a stand in support of the art form deserves profound thanks," Tom Tomorrow writes on his blog. "This is a first step, but it's a huge one in the right direction -- for me personally, of course, but with any luck, for other cartoonists as well."
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