April 14. 2008 by Dick.

What is the most important part of the Sunday paper?

As a kid, I would have told you the funnies. As an adult (yeah, yeah), one might point to the arts and entertainment section or the world news on the front page, the business and help wanted ads, or the sports pages. Many people look for the coupons. As an op-ed writer, I’d like you to turn to the editorial pages first. As an advertiser, I’ll tell you that the first smidgen of ink the readers see is the most important part of the Sunday paper. Or the last.

I like two kinds of newspapers. A true, independent, local paper that covers every local occurrence and activity of impact as well as some that are simply interesting is a godsend. If you have one, subscribe to it. Cherish it. A big, regional paper is also crucial because it will have the farthest reaching, in depth coverage of most major stories. (Other than the specialized Wall Street Journal, the lightweight USA Today, and the tabloids, we have no national newspaper.)

All newspapers have another feature critical to a consumer society: advertising.

I grew up with the Philadelphia Inquirer. I now subscribe to the Miami Herald. The Sunday Herald offers most of what I want: world and South Florida news, business news, Entertainment, jobs, real estate, sports, travel, world class columnists and, of course, decent funnies. Oh, sure, I can do without Cathy and I wouldn’t mind if it carried B.C., but it’s not a bad comics section. As an aside, I sure do miss Al Capp, Milt Caniff, and Ham Fisher.

There is a point in here; this is Marketing 101.

Once upon a time the color comics were the easiest section to find in the overflowing Sunday newspaper. Now the color comics are just one more insert that wraps ads. I like the sales fliers the Miami Herald includes with every Sunday paper, but I don’t like the extra fold worth of ads the Herald puts on the funnies. It makes them harder to find and much harder to read.

I tear off that fold.

Right away.

I don’t even look to see if it is interesting.

If I dislike those ads so much that I’m writing about them here, I gotta think that’s pretty bad marketing. The primo law of marketing may not be, “First, do no harm” but methinks it maybe ought to be.

Posted in Marketing, Business, Media, Random Access | No Comments »

April 7. 2008 by Dick.

An email trumpeting that “Casa D’Ice is back!” has made the rounds again.

For anyone not in the know, Casa D’Ice is a restaurant in North Versailles, Pennsylvania, some 10 miles from Pittsburgh. The restaurant has a lighted message board sign out front, the kind that typically heralds the daily special or the Sunday sermon with black slide-in-the-groove lettering. Outspoken owner Bill Balsamico changes the sign every couple of weeks when he feels the need to make a political statement.

I don’t think Mr. Balsamico uses factcheck.org. In fact (heh) I reckon that 90.31% of all online content is not fact checked.

Fact checking is a reporting term for verifying statements through several reliable, independent sources before publication. We expect the professional media to do it and we censure the professional media when they do not. The Dan Rather fiasco over his CBS News story about President Bush’s Air National Guard service is a case in point. His statement on the documents that he reported were written by President Bush’s National Guard commander lead the 272,000 hits returned when I Googled “Dan Rather” “CBS News.”

I did not fact check my 90% statistic. I made it up out of thin air but I’ll suggest that someone out there can correct me. I’ll further suggest that I’m within 20% of the correct answer. That may be seriously poor statistically but it still means there is a lot of misinformation online.

According to another email this week, a 1,200 pound Great White shark was caught in the Chesapeake over the weekend. That’s wrong, too.

This Casa D’Ice sign caught my eye first: “President Bush’s great fuel efficiency program on trucks & SUVs [will] save 30 gallons in 2008.” I couldn’t find anything to back that up. The current energy bill requires auto companies to achieve a 35-mpg CAFE by 2020. “Social security recipients get 3 dollar raise per month.” The actual Social Security Benefit COLA Increase for 2008 was 2.3 Percent.

I like Mr. Balsamico’s signs anyway. They are pithy–sometimes Deckish–and popular. His heart is in the right place even if he sometimes uses “Internet wisdom” for his source. I have singled him out not because he is doing a bad thing but because he could do his good thing so much better. More people see Mr. Balsamico’s signs than read this blog. Since the signs have gone viral, many many more people see photos of Mr. Balsamico’s thoughts than read this blog.

All that leads me to posit this theory: Internet Information Popularity is inversely proportional to Internet Information Accuracy.

That’s a rather sad commentary.

FactCheck.org describes its own goal as “[reducing] the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center project is run by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Posted in Politics, Society, Media, Grumpery, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 1 Comment »