Category: Media Matters

So rumors abound that Spin magazine might move to San Francisco, a weird geographic time reversal from when Spin’s arch rival Rolling Stone, split San Francisco, the city of its birth, and moved to New York in 1976. Spin’s having a hard go of it and may be for sale. Hartle Media, publishers of local rag 7×7 Magazine, have expressed interest.

What’s this mean for people in my line of work? Remember that Simpsons episode when the family is at a giant bookstore and Bart teases the clerks by saying “I hear there’s an adjunct professor job opening.” San Francisco is lousy with underemployed journalists. I’m guessing Spin already has inquiries even though they haven’t advanced a single step towards California.

seems to be the theme of the day…

First two articles via New Media Musings. The first, about peer recommendations profiles Pandora, Musicplasma, Neflix and other media companies working on the “If you liked this, you’ll like that” model. The second, on the habits of the “digital generation” (I can’t tell if that’s me or not), had this to say.

In addition to thumbing his nose at notions of “prime time” by downloading his favorite shows (without commercials), Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.

“Papers are so clunky and big,” he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today’s marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.

Hear that?

Elsewhere, Scott Andrew, weary of more rants about the imploding music industry has this to add

And then there’s that remaining core of artists that really do believe that the CD Is Never Going Away¹, that People Won’t Pay For What They Can Get For Free², and that Internet == The Devil’s Xerox Machine³, etc.

What I’d like to do is shove all these people into a time machine and send them back to 1990, where you could charge $20 for a CD but commercial radio ruled everything and the only way to be known in Australia was to go to Australia. And then when they weren’t looking I’d teleport back to the present and blow up the lab. Ha ha!

Still not convinced the music industry is on a collision course with its Day of Reckoning? Here’s an example of how ardent music fans are relating to it these days.

Thank you, Sam Cooke. The change has come.

Because I was gone so much of this summer book touring, there’s a pile of unread magazines on my bedroom chair about 18 inches high. Some are from a Journalists Day Out I did with my friend Leslie last month but most are simply collecting dust from a few months ago. They arrived home. I wasn’t here.

So now that I’m taking the month off, I’m going to dive into this pile of unready goodness. Since I’ve never accumulated like this before, I’m going to be blogging what I learn right here.

The Inventory: 48 Periodicals (40 magazines, 4 literary journals, 2 newsletters, 1 comic book and 1 xeroxed article).

Contents:

1 copied article from The Nation.

Nov. 21 issue of said magazine.

Issue #10 of Optic Nerve.

Issue #1 of the Nextbook newsletter.

Summer/Fall issue of the Folk Art Messenger.

Issue #3 of 3rd Floor.

2 Utne.

Issue #70 of Punk Planet.

3 Paste Magazine.

April 2005 issue of San Francisco Magazine.

2 Harper’s.

2 Mother Jones.

1 GQ.

5 issues of American Craft magazine.

4 issues of Raw Vision.

3 New York Times Magazines.

1 Fortune.

1 issue of Bust.

5 issues of the New Yorker.

2 Columbia Journalism Reviews.

1 Fast Company.

1 issue of Heeb.

1 issue of Wired.

1 issue of Juxtapoz.

1 Esquire.

1 Forbes.

Issue #5 of Hobart: a literary journal.

3 issues of Topic.

Issues #19 and #24 of The Believer.

1 issue of Cineaste.

Here we go…

The LA Times reports (with some glee), that my hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle’s circulation is plummeting, 16% in the first half of 2005, the largest amongst any of the nation’s biggest 20 newspapers. The usual row of factors (the Interweb, Craigslist, the generational divide in how folks get their news) is exacerbated by the unique character of the Bay Area–a cosmopolitan, tech savvy readership that gets much of their news online and from out of town papers. Oh and Craig lives here.

I applaud the efforts of the Chron to modernize because A) I think ragging on one’s hometown paper holds about as much wait as calling Hollywood shallow and B) SF Gate, the paper’s web presence, is one of the most popular newspaper websites in the country and has rapidly grown and diversified over the last year, adding blogs, podcasts, and rss feeds.

Question I have then: Is it too little, too late? SFGate got rss feeds only after months of complaining from readers (I had to have one designed for Beth Lisick’s column). Podcasts are broken down by category but there’s no way to get them all and then pick and choose like you would when, say, reading sections of a newspaper. I haven’t really checked out the blogs yet but doesn’t SFist and Laughing Squid already do what the Gate’s Culture Blog does?

“Forum” did a pretty good show about The Future of Newspapers not long ago. I also liked this Slashdot article about the topic.

How is your hometown paper grappling with change?

According to this article, magazines are being launched at an alarming rate and are specialized as ever. Which is why as soon as I put this entry down, I’m subscribing to Bonsai Today.

How this for ultra-contemporary? Salon reports that Sirius Satellite Radio will be starting an all-podcast show hosted by Adam Curry and called, rather unimaginatively, Adam Curry’s Podcast Show.

My buddy Merlin took the words right outta my mouth. His assessment of the Delicious Library program, a very slick OS X dealy that creates visual shelving of your books, dvds and music, includes a pitch for social networking. In other words, it’s cool to log all my own media on a database but the potential is really in whether I can see what my friends and other people like me have got. Social network the bastard and the possibilities are limitless. That’s what I’ve been sayin’.