Archive for August, 2009

My review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free, ran on the City Journal website this weekend. The opening sentence? “Here, in a nutshell, is the puzzle of the digital economy: You are not paying to read this book review.”

Many thanks to Manisha Thakor, financial literacy guru, for her nice letter to the editor in USA Today about my column called “The Princess Problem.” You can read the letter here.

I suppose it was inevitable, but a little jaw-dropping nonetheless. On Monday, the Reader’s Digest Association announced that it was filing for bankruptcy.

I spent approximately 2 years as a contributing editor to the magazine, including 2 in-house stints — producing the inaugural “America’s 100 Best” section in 2004, and filling in for an edit spot that had been vacated for a bit. I enjoyed taking the train up to Chappaqua and seeing the Pleasantville campus, though of course, there were signs that the lavishness the place was famous for was disappearing even then. The salad bar started to shrink. RDA sold the building and partially leased it back, which required lots of people with great offices to suddenly be in cubicles. By my last on-site visit in summer, 2006, I barely recognized the place.

I — along with all the other shareholders — sold our stock to Ripplewood Holdings in 2007, so there’s no financial loss to me from this. I hadn’t written for them since April 2008. They’d always paid well — up to $4/word in 2004 — though that seemed to be coming down awfully fast as well by 2008 (more like $2/word)

Nonetheless, it’s strange to see a magazine like Reader’s Digest mentioned in the same headline as “Chapter 11.” The economic winds have been against general interest magazines. Once, big advertisers were content to reach everyone. Now, only car companies, pharmaceutical companies and household products have much interest in that, and even these blue chips would prefer to segment their market a bit more. Reader’s Digest had responded with two editions — a regular one and a “Young Families” one — but still, it wasn’t enough to really get the niche marketing dollars. And even niche marketing dollars may not be enough to sustain a magazine these days. Magazines like Portfolio and BusinessWeek, which are specifically for business people with high incomes, predominantly male, haven’t been able to hold onto their revenue streams.

The problem seems to be that the ad-supported revenue model of media is broken. As an editor once explained to me, magazine journalism is largely advertising dollars seeking eyeballs. While many editors and reporters like to convince themselves otherwise — and try to maintain a Chinese wall between ads and edits — they’re kind of fooling themselves. Advertising is what pays the bills, because there’s no link between subscription revenue and the cost to produce a publication. And so when advertising revenue falls, magazines have to produce less content (because there are fewer ad pages to fill out the magazine), pay their writers less by lowering word counts or rates, lay people off,  etc. Unfortunately, all these changes lower quality and give people even less reason to purchase or subscribe to a magazine.

Changing technology undermined the Reader’s Digest model almost 2 15 years ago, as people could suddenly get access to lots of consumer magazines without subscribing, via the web. So suddenly there was less of a motive to condense other articles and reprint them. Reader’s Digest had tried to convert itself into more of a service magazine (think lots of articles along the lines of “How to swap anythingt”), along with telling its trademark “Drama in Real Life” stories, jokes, and book excerpts. But even the jokes still became subject to cost-cutting. I remember reading Reader’s Digest in the late 1980s and seeing that jokes were paying $400. In the latest issue, that’s down to $100.  This is almost like monitoring the number of pencils employees take from the supply closet. Why burn the goodwill when we’re not talking huge amounts of money anyway?

I’m increasingly thinking that the media world needs to get its head around the idea of reaching fewer readers, but readers who are willing to pay most of the freight of what they read. And that involves giving them something worth reading. Even then, this is not going to be an easy transition. I think Wired magazine and the New Yorker do an amazing job with their features, and they’re both losing heaps of money. But partly this is because I’m only paying about $1/issue for both of them. I would definitely subscribe to fewer magazines if I had to pay more, but I’d still subscribe to some. If this were repeated for millions of readers, there would be a major shake-out in the industry, but some players would survive, profitably.

At least I hope. One of the saddest things as a writer is ordering vintage magazines from the 1950s or so and seeing that something like Good Housekeeping ran real fiction, and sonnets, and long articles in between all its service stuff. Now, the feature well is much smaller, and everything is pushed to be about “you, you, you” when really, we’re not all that interesting to read about. The world, however, is.

My column, “The Princesss Problem,” ran in this morning’s USA Today. It’s based loosely on some of the discussion we’ve had here on this blog about little girls’ obsessions with princesses, and what it means from a societal level. Researching and writing this column has reminded me of the importance of negotiating and maintaining one’s earning capacity as a woman. You never know when you will need to support your family. It’s an interesting question of why young women don’t see supporting their children financially as a crucial part of mothering. We will see if this changes over time.

I’m making my Education Week debut this week with a column, co-written with education writer (and former USA Today colleague) Richard Whitmire. The column, called “An easy (but seldom used) way to accommodate gifted children” is in the print Education Week edition, plus online (via subscription) at the EW website, and then in it’s entirety at EdNews.org.

The gist? In tough times, gifted education looks like a tempting target for budget cuts. But one of the best ways to accommodate gifted children — grade or subject matter skipping, aka “acceleration” — is incredibly cheap, and often saves taxpayers money. Given that studies have found it to be effective (and not socially problematic) we just don’t know why it isn’t used more often.

Just got back from an amazing trip to Scotland — just hubby and me (well, and the as-yet-to-be-named baby due September 16, but he didn’t cause too much trouble except forcing me on a tour of the public loos of the UK).

I’m hoping to write more about the babymoon concept and am exploring avenues for doing that, but in the meantime, I had a few key learnings:

* You know how the airlines say you need to be at the airport 2 hours ahead of time for international flights? Due to wretched Friday afternoon traffic, we arrived at Newark at 7:05 for a 7:35 flight. The check-in agent noted Michael’s platinum status on the airline and called ahead to the gate, a TSA woman taking pity on my hugely pregnant self hailed a cart to rush us through the terminal, and the driver yelled at the gate agent not to shut the door. Net result? We sat down in our seats at 7:28 and the plane took off on time. I hope never to repeat that experience again in my life.

* North Sea beaches look as pristine as Caribbean ones, but you will never get out of your fleece while sitting on them. Even in August.

* Scotch whisky is made from barley, yeast and water. The distilleries in Scotland (and there are many of them — we toured three) all have various elaborate processes and secrets, which I find kind of funny since it turns out that 60% of the whisky’s flavor comes from the wooden barrel it’s aged in. Given that most Scots proceed to dilute their whisky with water, you’re not tasting much beyond oak barrel, water and a lot of alcohol by the time you take a wee dram.

* Senseless gang violence is nothing new. We toured a museum on the Isle of Skye which mentioned a vendetta between two clans. One fine Sunday many years ago, one clan’s members located the other clan at church, set fire to the church and thus killed most of the people inside. They were on their way to get back in their boats when other members of the attacked clan tracked them down, trapped them on the beach and killed all the attackers. The outcome? Dozens of dead people for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

* Some people like to claim that mornings are rushed, what with getting kids ready for school and all that. Apparently, even early in the 20th century, it was common for “crofter” (sharecropper) Scottish women to go out into the fields, hack down some oats, grind them by hand, and then make this into bread or porridge before the children took off for school. Pouring Lucky Charms is nothing.

* Modern communications technology makes it possible to never truly unplug… and we’re OK with that. At one point we were in the Glenmorangie Distillery parking lot in the tiny town of Tain up near the North Sea and I was on my cell phone doing a radio show in Vancouver and Michael was lying in the grass beside a field of thistle talking to one of his teams.

* “Scottish cheeses with oatcakes” is a dessert that exists at all price points, depending on the restaurant. It tastes the same in all of them.

My review of Claire Shipman and Katty Kay’s Womenomics ran at Real Clear Politics. In general, I thought it was a good book, though I think that part of the premise — we’re working way too much — is flawed. The average workweek in America is now down to 33 hours. Still, it’s nice to read a book in this genre that’s very upbeat and avoids the usual suspects of conclusions (we need national subsidized childcare! Men need to do more around the house!)