How To Get Consumers To Buy Your Product After Looking At The Print Ad

It may be tempting to use attention-grabbing visuals in your print ads, but research shows that if you go too far, as Budweiser did in this ad, readers will remember the visual and not the product

On average, readers only spend about 2 seconds looking at a print ad. Given the short amount of time you have to grab their attention says Francesca Pefianco, a marketing analyst, it’s important that any ad you create 1) grabs the reader’s attention, and 2) encourages them to buy your product or service.

Most print ads are composed of a strong visual, a headline, body copy and a logo or signature. But producing a great print ad isn’t as simple tossing these elements together. There are several do’s and don’ts that are essential to creating effective print ads:

DO:
Agree on your SMART goals. Your objective should be more than to simply “increase sales.” Get more specific with your goals, such as to “increase lunchtime store visits by 30% in 3 months” or “drive 15% more customers into our retail locations over the course of 60 days.” Specific goals are called SMART goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic and Timebound. Design your ad around SMART goals and be sure to hold yourself accountable to them.
Hook the reader within 2 seconds. On average, readers only spend 2 seconds looking at a print ad. It’s important to use visuals and headlines that cause the reader to stop and look at your ad. Headlines that evoke an emotion from the reader are more likely to catch the reader’s attention. Using white space and bullet points in an ad have both proven to stop readers in their tracks and produce a higher response rate as well.
Use high-impact visuals. In the 2 seconds a reader takes to look at your ad, 1.5 seconds are dedicated to visuals while only 0.5 seconds are spent looking at your copy. Use bright, clear images to promote your product. Research shows that people recall photographs 26% more than artwork and are more likely to look at an ad where the subject’s eyes are looking directly at you. That said, your visuals should always support the concept of the product or service you’re selling. Using attention-grabbing visuals just so you can stand out can have a negative impact on your brand.
Put strategy before creativity. Many advertisers sacrifice targeted content for witty or appealing messages. Even if it would be interesting to use a cartoon to advertise your product, would that really be appropriate in an ad about fine jewelry? Think about where your ad will be printed as well. The message you might want to use to sell your orange juice will be different in a local newspaper than it would be in a specialty magazine.

DON’T :
Don’t stuff your ad with too much information. Less really is more. Too much copy or too many images can actually cause the reader to skip the ad because they feel overwhelmed. In most cases, brand-oriented ads should only use one or two images, have a one-sentence headline and keep the copy to four sentences or less. (There are exceptions to this rule such as when you’re running a promotional/retail ad. But if you’re running a branding ad, it’s a good idea to keep your ad clean and uncluttered.)
Don’t force unrelated connections. It may be tempting to use a funny visual of a baby with food all over its face in your ad, but if your ad is for a new desktop computer, the audience might not make the connection. Worse yet, research indicates that when an association in an ad isn’t clear, the audience will forget about the product and simply remember the funny visual — in this case, the baby with food all over its face.
Don’t create negative associations. You might think its clever to compare your energy drink to a cheetah, but the second you mention that a cheetah hunts and kills its prey, the audience automatically applies that association to your product. It’s difficult to avoid some negative associations when using analogies in your messaging, but think through all of the possibilities before printing your ad. In the same vein, try to forgo offensive or stereotypical associations in your message. What may be funny to one person might enrage another and forever damage your brand image.
Don’t let your brand disappear. It’s not unusual for a brand to disappear in a print ad. When the integration is stretched or when your logo and signature are not prominently displayed, people can forget what product an ad was about entirely. Be sure to place your brand’s logo at a readable size in one of the corners of your advertisement.
When crafting a print ad, compose your elements in a way that’s eye-catching, creative, thought-provoking and positive. Be sure to avoid clutter, negative association and bad integration. Print ads are still a prominent form of advertising and can be an incredible tool for your marketing when done correctly and effectively, so use these tips as guidelines the next time you create an ad for your product or service.

Reinventing the Newspaper: Part 620

To date, the print newspaper’s relationship with the Internet has been a little bit like Dr. Jekyl’s learning to live with Mr. Hyde: On the one hand, enormously powerful; but on the other, quite difficult to control, and pretty easy to have turn against you, says blogger Nate Hubbell. And in recent years, the traditional newspaper has more often than not found itself on the receiving end of Mr. Hyde’s more destructive side.

The popular way of fighting back for larger newspapers and print magazines, if they have the brand
recognition and readership base required to support it, has been to launch a so-called “paywall” – basically a digital subscription – for their online content. Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Wired, The New York Times -they’ve all got a paywall of some design erected around their Web content now.

In the main, all of these paywalls have been examples of the newspaper and magazine companies trying to apply their print business model to the digital age. Very few, with the possible exception of The Daily, have tried
to really break the mold and do something completely different.

The New York Times has launched a new section of their website, called beta620 (the 620 refers to their headquarters’ building number in Manhattan, NY), which appears to approach the idea of the newspaper in 21st
century from a truly fresh perspective.

As GigaOm noted, the site itself has the feel of a startup, “with the lower-case beta620 label, and a series of quirky images that identify the different projects underway at the NYT.” And, indeed, it does have somewhat
of the same goal in mind. The projects underway are explained quickly, and the lead developer of the project is given direct credit for the idea right on the page. Additionally, at least for the time being, all the apps on the site are free to try out – much like the give-it-away-free-at-first-to-get-them-hooked strategy of many Internet and social startups.

The new site is a great attempt by the newspaper company to actually innovate and move the industry’s model forward. In my humble opinion, we find some of the ideas very cool, especially the Longitude app, which shows
news stories’ geographical origin and spread overlaid on Google Maps; and Buzz, which puts a “filter” over the normal NYT.com site appearance to show the extent to which each story is being shared and generating “buzz” across various social networking platforms.

Of course, we have no way of knowing if this new startup-like path is the future for newspapers. But, for our money, it seems like a good idea, and at least they are trying something new. We’re certainly interested. And that’s really the point.

Will Books Survive eBooks?

This is a post by Ned Resnikoff, researcher and freelance writer.

When you cut through all of the chaff, the debate over whether analog books are dead sounds a lot like this:

Pro-ebook, anti-book: I personally think ebooks are fine. They are also cheaper to produce. Therefore, the book is dead.

Pro-book: Hey! I happen to like books. Therefore, the book is not dead, and we should continue to pay taxes supporting our local libraries.

Those are some pretty self-centered arguments, but as a stalwart book partisan I figure the least I can do is be unabashed about my self-centeredness. I happen to like books. Therefore, the book is not dead.

Here’s the thing: I don’t have anything against ebooks. I own a first-generation Kindle, and sometimes I even use it. But it’s almost always easier and more pleasurable for me to read a book. My attachment to them is pragmatic, and not just aesthetic or sentimental (though it is both of those things as well). As Nicholas Carr writes:

Because we’ve come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments. It’s easy to flip through the pages of a physical book, forward and backward. It’s easy to jump quickly between widely separated sections, marking your place with your thumb or a stray bit of paper or even a hair plucked from your head (yes, I believe I’ve done that). You can write anywhere and in any form on any page of a book, using pen or pencil or highlighter or the tip of a burnt match (ditto). You can dog-ear pages or fold them in half or rip them out. You can keep many different books open simultaneously, dipping in and out of them to gather related information. And when you just want to read, the tranquility of a printed book provides a natural shield against distraction. Despite being low-tech – or maybe because of it – printed books and other paper documents support all sorts of reading techniques, they make it easy to shift seamlessly between those techniques, and they’re amenable to personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities.

E-books are much more rigid. Refreshing discrete pages of text on a fixed screen is a far different, and far less flexible, process than flipping through pliant pages of fixed text. By necessity, a screen-based, software-powered reading device imposes navigational protocols and routines on the user, allowing certain patterns of use but preventing or hindering others. All sorts of modes of navigation and reading that are easy with printed books become more difficult with electronic books – and even a small degree of added difficulty will quickly frustrate a reader. Whereas a printed book adapts readily to whoever is holding it, an e-book requires the reader to adapt to it.

Maybe someday the ebook will become as versatile as the book. I rather suspect it will just become a different kind of medium with its own advantages and idiosyncrasies. The book will remain the book: disposable for some, not so much for others.

That’s all the justification I need for keeping libraries open and well-stocked. If a statistically significant slice of the population still finds it easier and more pleasurable to read a physical book than an ebook, taxpayers should accommodate them. After all, the whole reason we have libraries is to increase everyone’s ease of access to information. For quite a few folks, gleaning that information from ink and paper is still easier than squinting at a screen.

To Charge For Content Or Not To Charge, That Is NOT The Question!

People is the world's most profitable magazine. But People achieves its profitability by giving away more content to more readers than any other magazine. Yes, People is giving away print readership. How can they make money when they give away so much free? What can we learn from this about making money in online publishing?

Three million, four hundred and fifty thousand readers pay to read People magazine every week, and 40.08 million read it free every week. We’re not writing about their Internet readership. Three and a half million People readers don't want to miss an issue or an article. In Internet parlance, they are "highly engaged." They subscribe or buy People on the newsstand. In the magazine business we call them primary readers. There are another 40 million readers, about 10.8 readers per print copy as reported by MRI, who are somewhat less committed to People. These secondary readers probably don't read it cover to cover, and certainly not every issue. If you measured the unduplicated number of people who read the four issues of People in a given month, it would be an even higher number. These casual readers are a significant part of what makes the People franchise so valuable. Advertisers want to reach them.

Virtually every print property has multiple readers per copy -- some far more than others, points out the MediaPost. Most newspapers have more than two readers per copy, and lots of magazines have between three and six RPC because weeklies and monthlies have time to accumulate additional readers while they sit on waiting room tables or coffee tables for a week or a month or more. These secondary readers are likely to be highly engaged with an article, but not so frequently that they want to pay for a subscription or buy a single copy.

Print analogies are an irresistible way to think of online content strategies, But let's get them right. One false analogy that has been perpetrated on the industry is that print thrived because its readers pay for it. However, analysis shows that most print readers don't pay. In every category of content, some readers who need or want the information most, are willing to pay to get more, get it more regularly, even get it earlier. Others, not so much.

Ironically, the information some people pay for is worth more to them later if others read it. Being the first to know, and being able to say I told you so, is worth paying for, or in other cases, getting more in-depth coverage or more sophisticated interpretation is what information consumers will pay for. But in the print world, may free readers will get the same information as the paid readers, but not as often, or as certainly.

Some people have suggested News Corp. is smart to put up paywalls limiting access to its content for certain properties because great content should be purchased. Inferior content should be voted off the island. The difference between the two can be found by measuring the commitment consumers make to embrace it. By lowering the level of commitment required online, publishers have lowered their own value. However, some people will pay to receive lots of great content. Others will not. But both groups of readers are valuable to advertisers. And the Internet allows us to discriminate between those people who care enough to pay, and those who don't, with metering systems.

Murdoch may or may not "own" the idea of charging for content. But what Murdoch really owns is greater experience with the economics of paid AND free readership. After his purchase of the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's company, News Corp., did not follow up widely speculated strategy to drop the pay wall, but kept it up on the WSJ site, meanwhile adding lots of free content to attract readers and increase the total advertising inventory. It's the Goldilocks strategy: Not too much, not too little, but just the right amount of free content. When content is paid for, the audience is more saleable because it creates a more salable "engagement." So why are publishers struggling to define the consumer engagement they deliver online? It's because their content is not directly paid for. But in the world of print, the more readers a title has per copy, the more valuable it is -- strong evidence that its content is attractive and read.

Most newspapers have two readers per copy and most magazines have two to six readers per copy, meaning that for a magazine with six readers per copy, 83% of the audience is reading it "free." The demand-and-pricing configuration of paid circulation magazines is based on charging the core audience who most values the content and wants it with regularity for access; daily, weekly or monthly, as the case may be. Some readers who are less dedicated may pay on a once in a while basis for single copies. But the majority of the audience is people who know and appreciate the title, but not as much as the core audience. They read it casually -- much like an online reader who finds an article in Google and clicks to read it.

Rupert Murdoch may bluster about putting content behind a paywall. But he's not the world's leading media mogul because he isn't subtle enough to emphasize one thing as a marketing ploy and do something more nuanced. Murdoch's News Corp., like all top media companies, is evolving to a model that extracts the most money, often in the form of subscriptions, from the most avid, or needful customers, and makes some or all of the content available to others on a more casual basis. ESPN is doing this with its subscription products too. Even Yahoo has paid content products like Rivals.com for sports fans.

It's been clear for quite some time that there are some consumers who will pay for content online. And we also know that there are more readers who will not pay, but who are valuable to advertisers. So each media franchise is going to have to experiment with where and how to implement limitations and possibly a pay wall to get the optimum revenue from readers and advertisers. A good example of the nuanced approach to this is Time magazine’s limited access to magazine content in a variety of ways.
This is exactly the right way to think. The magazine and newspaper businesses evolved over 250 years to optimize the balance between circulation and advertising revenue, developing circulation sales strategies that were economically viable. It will take a while, but online publishing will get there, too. So let's move from the "to charge or not to charge" question, on to the really interesting question of how to merchandize content and price the multiple delivery platforms that media companies will be delivering their content through.

To bundle or not to bundle, that is the question.

5 Tips to Create an Effective Newsletter

Newsletters can be a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. They help to create trust, build brand recognition, and establish you as the expert. Here are a few tips to help you take your newsletters to the next level.

1. Know your readers.

Although your newsletter should promote your business, its primary function is to build relationships with prospects and customers. Be sure to discuss topics that are relevant and interesting to your readers. If they know they'll be getting useful information, they'll continue to subscribe.

2. Make it unique.

If you want your newsletter to get noticed (and read), make it different. Add a touch of personalization by including a snapshot from your office, a video message from your staff, a link to an entertaining website, etc. Don't be afraid to portray emotion and personality.

3. Take time for design.

The visual appeal of your newsletter has a lot to do with its success. The right design can captivate your audience before they read a single word. Create a design that is clean, simple, and reinforces your brand.

4. Solicit feedback.

Include your readers by asking for comments on your articles or stories. They'll feel welcomed and you will get feedback on what you can do to improve and what your readers really like. 

 5. Include your contact information.

Although your goal isn't to sell through your newsletter, you probably wouldn't object to an occasional sale. So make sure readers have a way to reach you if they feel the urge to buy now.

Implement the above steps and your newsletter will help convert your readers into lifelong customers. To your success!

Why The Print Industry Can’t Leave The World Of Messy Ink

Lately we’ve heard growing concern from magazine and newspaper publishers regarding the challenge of providing content for mobile media while preserving their print franchises. The concern is nothing new, but it’s apparent that content providers are at risk of losing track of their customers like toddlers in a shopping mall, says John Squires, a former EVP of Time Inc., and founder of Next Issue Media.

Apple’s iPad success and the imminent release of new application distribution platforms from Google and other software companies threaten another seismic shift for publishers that may have far greater impact on their business models than the growth of free media on the web. Devices like the iPad offer consumers a rich reading experience and offer publishers even more targeted advertising, but the revenue tradeoff as publishers navigate the path from print to this new world is lopsided–and not in a good way.

While we all enjoy browsing publications at newsstands, over 90 percent of the circulation of U.S. magazines is delivered directly to consumers through the mail. The data and cross-marketing opportunities that these direct customer relationships provide to publishers is the fundamental underpinning of their business model.

Data informs advertising in magazines and allows for better targeting. It provides for the sale of ancillary products like books, videos and special issues. It allows multi-title publishers to solicit new readers across their enterprise. Even competitors agree to exchange lists because it benefits the industry by building more magazine readers from a pool of customers who already enjoy receiving their publications through subscription rather than by single copy purchase.

Without direct access to customers, publisher revenue will decline sharply and the publications that we depend on for in-depth reporting, news and entertainment will risk a final digital Armageddon. Should we care? Why can’t the publishing industry just leave the world of messy ink and rural route delivery? Can’t it pivot to a less costly distribution model where customer ownership isn’t as critical?

Unfortunately, even if we assume that publishers retain their customers, there are extraordinary business challenges in transforming today’s print consumers into exclusively digital readers. And publishers can’t afford to relinquish their direct connection to readers without a more attractive economic model than the digital publishing world presents today.

Here’s why:

1. The Advertising Model Won’t Pay.

Magazines are a wonderful advertising medium. Among the top fifty publications ranked by advertising revenues, each copy of paid circulation generates a pass-along audience that averages seven readers. Those seven readers factor heavily into advertising rates, and provide a significant revenue multiple to be weighed against the editorial, marketing, printing and distribution costs of delivering a copy to the consumer.

What happens to this audience with a digital magazine? If a publisher wishes to be paid for its distribution, it will likely set entitlement requirements that discourage free circulation of its products. Even with integration of social networking tools to enable article sharing, publishers won’t generate more than 1.5 or two readers per copy. So the advertising revenue per circulation unit will fall due to the fact that fewer people see the ads. Even to remain constant, advertising effectiveness per copy would have to increase over four times to make up for the audience decline from seven to 1.5 readers per copy.

Of course, most publishers believe these new digital magazines will have wonderful consumer engagement qualities that will result in a higher value being placed on their advertising. They believe digital ads will be better targeted and more efficient than print at delivering the right message to the right reader. But will that value be four times the value of print today? Not likely.

Some argue publishers must cast their lot with free content and endeavor to survive with an exclusively ad driven model. But we need to remember the lessons of the web for most publishers. Even with the powerful reach the web provides, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair would fail without the significant vote their consumers make every month by making a direct payment to the publisher.

So editors and consumer marketers will bear a larger burden in this new mobile reading world. They’ll need to increase the revenue from consumers. And one could argue that this is a good thing, redressing the imbalance of an industry that has been too highly leveraged on advertising. But for the consumer stream to become more valuable, one of two things must happen: either the demand for magazines must rise, or the cost of distribution must fall.

2. A 30 percent Cut to the Store Isn’t a Great Deal.

Isn’t selling your magazine through an app store and receiving 70 percent of the revenues a great deal? After all, magazine subscription agents and newsstands don’t return anywhere near that amount to publishers. But this is argument misses an important point. In iTunes and the Android Marketplace, there’s virtually no merchandising of magazine products. A magazine app must swim to the top of several hundred thousand other applications. And even in the context of a dedicated magazine store, the publisher won’t control featuring. The value of the brand must pull the consumer through to the purchase. And brands are expensive to build and nurture. So the publisher will continue to bear a high marketing cost to ensure enough sales for a stable level of circulation, just as they do today in the offline world. These marketing costs would certainly erase any advantage that a 70 percent cut would provide over the conventional agent model, particularly if the publisher cannot capture information on the customer and determine an effective ROI against their marketing expenditures.

3. Margin Must Come Before Marginal Cost.

What about the fact that there is virtually zero distribution cost? Well despite the problems of the U.S. Postal Service, the cost of printing and distribution represents a relatively low percentage of publisher expenses–somewhere on the order of 20 to 25 percent today. Of course there are significant creative and technical costs in publishing a beautiful new magazine in tablet form. Just adapting to the variety of screen sizes, screen resolutions and operating systems requires significant new investments. These costs, together with the aforementioned ad revenue decline, more than eclipse the savings from eliminating paper and postage.

So where will this margin come from if not from the consumer?

Tablets provide publishers a wonderful opportunity to rethink their products and add more value. But no manner of reinvention will be possible if they can’t mine their customer relationships to merchandise these new products. If the relationship between the magazine publisher and customer is broken, the industry will end up like music and book publishers–removed from customers, wedded to old habits and powerless as digital delivery inevitably overtakes and diminishes the value of their physical distribution.

Lastly, let’s consider the argument from a consumer’s perspective. Nearly one out of every two Americans subscribes to a magazine today. Many will purchase iPads and other tablets over the next year. When they do, Apple and others suggest that 150 million consumers ignore their existing relationships with publishers.

In this battle over ownership consumers are the losers. They will not be able to direct publishers as they wish, choose to get both a print and digital version of the magazine, or move to digital only delivery. They won’t be afforded the opportunity to get a better value by bundling their print and digital delivery together. They won’t be able to align their print and digital purchases so that expirations synchronize and billing is simplified. They won’t be able to move their experience to the device that suits them–irrespective of the platform–and read on phones, laptops, tablets or anywhere they like. Nothing in the transition will remove friction or frustration. Is this an experience we will be proud of?

Luxury's New Niche: Guitar Aficionado

Guitar Aficionado’s publisher says the magazine's readership consists "of the very upper echelon of guitar buyers; those who spend upwards of five figures for instrument, and consider it a work of art." Though from reviewer Karl Greenberg’s perspective a five-figure instrument had better be a player, and the magazine features rock stars and their lairs, anyone who can drop that kind of money on a work of art is unlikely to be a serious musician. That takes too much time.


The American guitar-collector phenom tracks the baby boom, the instrument's electrification and consequent graduation from rhythm instrument in big bands to (with Charlie Christian's help among others) solo instrument, blues, rock n' roll, etc. and its explosive proliferation in style and variety. But the first instrument of today's law firm partners, plastic surgeons, bankers, and account executives  was very likely an air guitar. That's Guitar Aficionado's reader base. 

The publication, however, which claims a circulation of 100,000, with median household income of $218,400 and net worth of $1.3 million, is a bit disingenuous. It's not only not really about players (the instruments, not the people), it's really not about guitars that much, either. But that's OK, because its readers likely regard collectible guitars either as investments like that self-winding watch carved from a scimitar blade that happens to tell time on the moon. Or, like "Rosebud" from Citizen Kane, guitars are seen as whimsical talismans for a lawyer or oral surgeon to rub now and then so they can recapture that boyhood dream of playing "More Than a Feeling" in front of 10,000 screaming women.

The tag line for the book is "Luxury's New Niche." But as is the case with Cigar Aficionado (published by a different company), the mag uses the eponymous product to talk up the collector lifestyle: private islands, bungalows, collector cars, movie stars, rock stars, the wealthy, the successful, the Concours d'Elegance crowd. There's a story about Paul Stanley's house, with a shot of him in front of his collection of remarkably unattractive guitars. There's a piece on diving watches, another on rum, and one on rock fossil David Crosby's California wine country hangout. There's a story about Maui. There's something about a $1 million gold-topped guitar.  The spring issue had Jeff Bridges on the cover with the title, "The Dude Collects" and a story about his guitars and his sprawling house. Lenny Kravitz graced the cover of the summer ish, and the story about him details his recording studio in an Airstream trailer parked on a beach in the Carib. These could all be in Travel & Leisure, or AARP for that matter. As expected, the photos are gorgeous and the writing's solid.

The occasional guitar story notwithstanding, the magazine could quite easily be called Whisky Aficionado, Lobster Aficionado, or Gnarly Watch Aficionado. No one would be the wiser. It falls into the "I'm targeting your urologist" shelter-book boilerplate of beautiful-house-owned-by-gracious-celebrity photo essays and lifestyle journalism.

As for the upper echelon of guitar PLAYERS, there's an entirely different story. Steve Khan played a couple of workman-like thin hollow bodies, Gibsons, with his name on them; Peter Bernstein, some sort of hand-made jobbie, same with Jim Hall. Alex De Grassi played a gig in Tallahassee a long time ago, but not many remember what he played, or paid for that matter. But, really, it doesn't matter too terribly much. He could make a cigar box sound good. 


Seems this magazine is much more than a source of information for the average guitar player -it's a lifestyle. However, one wonders if it will survive in the electronic age when the target audience might not be too technology-inclined.

The Case For Government-Funded Journalism

By Derek Thompson, an associate editor at The Atlantic, Published in the Washington Post
What should we call dumb news stories that inspire smart debates? Sarah Palin's "death panel" comment was self-refudiating, but it galvanized a fruitful discussion about rationing Medicare spending and end-of-life choices. Rep. Joe Wilson's "you lie" outburst was a silly break in decorum, but it inspired some intelligent takes on the responsibility of government to undocumented immigrants.

You could say the same about the GOP's effort to punish NPR for firing Juan Williams by cutting funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. On the one hand, this is political theater, and it's not a terribly precise performance, at that. (The CPB doesn't directly support NPR. Instead, it funds between 10 and 16 percent of public radio stations that pay NPR for programming.)

On the other hand, maybe we should take this debate seriously. Does it make sense for government to support the news? I lean toward saying yes.
Your first objection might be: Derek, you can't trust government-supported journalism to critically cover government. My answer would be, maybe you can't. But everybody else seems to. Publicly supported media like the BBC, PBS and NPR are more trusted than "independent" news like Fox or MSNBC. If we think publicly supported news is discredited by its relationship to government, we seem to consider privately supported news even more discredited by the race to the bottom to attract an audience for its ads.
Okay, you respond, but that's a cheap response. Capitalism has to allow for winners and losers. We don't bail out florists or hot dog vendors who go bankrupt. What's so special about the news?

Well, news isn't like flowers or sausages. It's more like universities and research, which are publicly supported without much controversy because they're seen as offering wide benefits that cannot be captured in profit. As my friend Conor Clarke put it, "the government can and should close the gap between the individual value and the social value." Articles about cars and celebrities regularly attract more attention with less effort than articles about foreign affairs and public policy. I'm sure Nick Denton could make a compelling argument that each individual viewer is 100% justified in preferring to read about McLarens than Medicare. But is society better off if each individual viewer makes that choice?

It's becoming clear that somebody has to close the gap between the great need and small demand for in-depth reporting. Maybe it's a foundation, maybe it's one rich guy, and maybe it's the government. All of three benefactors could theoretically compromise news-gathering, but I don't see any hard proof that one is so much worse than the others. Convince me otherwise?

Essence Hires White Fashion Director Perplexing Some

Should Essence, one of very few magazines exclusively for black women, have hired a white fashion editor? After debate on this question recently simmered online, Editor In Chief Angela Burt-Murray defended her decision as a color-blind merit pick.   She also noted that when the magazine covers issues possibly more substantive than an editor's race, the public reaction is generally "crickets" (or, as translated by my people, "bupkes").
"Black Girls For Sale," in the October issue, is an example of the meatier journalism Burt-Murray references: a case history of how police and prosecutors worked to bring a pimp in Oakland, Calif. (known for a thriving sex trade that targets young black women) to justice. It's a powerful investigative piece, matched in its seriousness by last February issue's report on black men's sexual tourism in the Dominican Republic, and a March package  on education, which includes case histories of top teachers and a cover interview with President Obama.
Surrounding these thoughtful articles are many features standard to garden-variety women's magazines. So, yes, you'll find "55 Makeup Tips To Beat The Heat" and other perfectly competent beauty, fashion and celeb pieces. It can make for a jarring juxtaposition, with "10 Of the Sexiest Men You've Ever Seen" followed by a profile of "The Toughest Woman In Detroit," prosecutor Kym Worthy.  Is Essence perhaps trying to do too many things at once -- to be Cosmo as well as The Atlantic?
The magazine's real strength lies in serving its target market with subjects covered almost nowhere else, like a "Single Mom's Money Guide" and a piece on preventing serious health conditions that affect African-American women more than others. July's six-page pictorial, "Why I [heart] being a black woman," celebrates happy facts that include "we have so many different hues and have so many different hair textures" and "we're in the White House." Nicely empowering.
In July's "My Blind Date Diary," author Demetria Lucas expresses a hard-headed and yet still vulnerable voice: excellent qualities for anyone looking for romance. She sets clear boundaries, like “a one kid max rule for anyone I date,” yet are willing to give a guy a second chance even if there's little initial chemistry.
OK, so maybe Essence, like most women's magazines, has too many cosmetics advertisers and can't go too deep into particular issue. But a hit-you-in-the-guts blend of the personal and investigative could be a good direction for the pub to consider -- a way to bridge the gap between fluff and serious journalism. That might even bring more visibility for Essence -- and defeat the "crickets" reaction bemoaned by its editor.

When Journalism Runs Amok People Suffer

According to the New York Times, when Forbes published a cover story recently by Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author, asserting that President Obama is opposed to free markets and traditional American values because he inherited his father’s anticolonial beliefs, all the media tripwires were set off: enthusiastic support by conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, and an uproar among liberal bloggers and columnists.

But after a meeting with the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the magazine, which initially defended the article, agreed to a post-publication fact-checking process to see if an apology or a correction was warranted, according to Bill Burton, a White House spokesman. Monie Begley, a spokeswoman for Forbes, said that the magazine’s Washington bureau chief made the decision to check the article in response to the general clamor in the news media.

In one sense, the episode was a cautionary tale for the new media age, which finds traditional media outlets like Forbes responding both to the economic imperatives of the digital age by cutting staff and to the editorial imperatives by bringing in more outside voices — Mr. D’Souza is not a staff writer — and sometimes elevating opinion above rigorous reporting, says writer Tim Arango.

Those efforts are amplified by the country’s coarse political discourse, where everyone has a soapbox to advance theories — buttressed by the truth, or not, in the case of the so-called birther movement, which argues that President Obama is not a United States-born citizen — and facts are fought over as much as ideas.

The magazine issued a minor correction on its Web site, saying that Mr. D’Souza had “slightly misquoted” Mr. Obama from a speech he gave about the BP oil spill. Mr. D’Souza also said that Mr. Obama did not focus in the speech on “cleanup strategies.” Forbes’ correction stated, “Obama’s speech did discuss concrete measures to investigate the oil spill and bring it under control.” The Forbes spokeswoman said that the correction put an end to the magazine’s review of the matter.

The essay in Forbes was adapted from Mr. D’Souza’s book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” which is being published by Regnery Publishing and will be released on Oct. 4. Kathleen Sweetapple, a publicist for Regnery, e-mailed a statement on behalf of Mr. D’Souza, who wrote, “there are a couple of minor errors that are completely inconsequential; what the critics are fuming about are not factual errors but disagreements of interpretation.” In discrediting Mr. Obama’s American-ness, the essay by Mr. D’Souza, seemingly stitched some intellectual heft to what has long been a fringe idea of the far right — that Mr. Obama’s Kenyan roots and Hawaiian boyhood make him a lesser American. Mr. D’Souza offered as evidence Mr. Obama’s support for the Islamic center and mosque project near ground zero, even though the president has gone only so far as to say the developers have a constitutional right to build a mosque. Mr. Gingrich described Mr. D’Souza’s theory as “stunningly insightful,” while an editor at The Columbia Journalism Review called it, “the worst kind of smear journalism.”

One of the most contentious points in Mr. D’Souza’s article was his citation of a transaction by the Export-Import Bank of the United States to finance offshore drilling in Brazil, a deal Mr. D’Souza believes indicates Mr. Obama is more concerned with helping countries that formerly were the domains of colonial powers, rather than Americans. A Forbes fact checker recently contacted the bank to check on the assertion that Mr. Obama supported the 2009 transaction with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company. Mr. D’Souza asserted that Mr. Obama supported the deal, “not so oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.”

A note written by Kevin Varney, the senior vice president and chief of staff of the bank, and posted in the comments section of Mr. D’Souza’s blog — and verified by a spokesman for the bank — criticized Mr. D’Souza for not contacting the bank before publication. “I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)”

In an interview, Mr. Varney explained that the transaction “was begun in 2008 with career staffers and approved in 2009 by five Bush-appointed board members.” Mr. Varney said that to cite the deal as evidence of “an anticolonial, Kenyan ideology” on the part of Mr. Obama is “preposterous, it’s false and it’s wrong.”

Making a Name Writing to Editors

Bobby Crawford, 38, has been delivering mail at the Hearst Corporation for 13 years, regaling everyone from interns to executives with tales of his skateboarding escapades. But what most of the writers, editors and arbiters to whom he delivers letters and packages do not realize is that he has been published in more magazines than many of them. For the past 15 years, Crawford has been firing off handwritten letters to magazines — skateboard publications like Thrasher and Slap, culture and arts magazines like Interview and BlackBook, music magazines like Magnet. More than 100 of his letters have been printed in their pages, reports Abigail Pesta, editor at large of Marie Claire, a Hearst Corporation magazine.

He recently sent off a missive to Thrasher, complaining in his slightly backward-slanting print that snowboarding was “just another rip-off from skating.” Mop-haired and boyish, he usually signs his letters “Shaggy,” though he uses his real name for more serious topics, like a 2006 letter to BlackBook about how the day John Lennon died is not a day to celebrate.

“All the morons that go to Strawberry Fields playing his music, smoking dope and drinking alcohol are making his true fans (like myself) look bad,” Mr. Crawford wrote. (BlackBook ran the note, but pointed out that the article he had been commenting on was about a celebration of Lennon’s birth, not his death.)

In a letter to Slap in December 2007, Shaggy let loose on youth: “Kids these days are turning into fat, lazy slobs. They don’t know how to express themselves. People need to get off their computers, out of their houses, and meet some people in the streets.”

One of his main complaints was that people rarely write letters on paper anymore. Slap itself no longer appears on paper, in fact, having gone Web-only in December 2008. But in its final few months of paper publication, Slap put out a full-page appreciation of Shaggy. Next to a photo of one of Crawford’s crumpled, hand-addressed envelopes, an editor noted, “Shaggy has indeed been mailing us letters for at least a decade now, and they are always funny, mean, disturbing and good.”

“Shaggy was relentless,” Slap’s editor in chief, Mark Whiteley, said in an interview. “He’d send letters every month. Sometimes they were terrible, sometimes they were pointless, sometimes they were just too harsh to print. But a lot of the time they were hilarious. They were also incredibly ‘my way or the highway,’ which made them entertaining.”

Asked what inspired him to become a cantankerous letter writer, Crawford said he simply wrote what he saw. “I don’t get fooled,” he said. His favorite letters? The ones that make people angry.

When not writing letters, Mr. Crawford can often be found on his skateboard at Union Square Park or around Astor Place, sometimes until the wee hours. A favorite activity: jumping over “passed-out drunk people” on his skateboard. To prove it, he produced a photo of himself soaring over a man sprawled on the ground at Union Square.