It Used To Be That 1/3rd of "Best" New Magazines Failed in the First Five Years… @1:30 PM
A study of 224 publications that were launched between 1986 and 2006 and honored as a best new publication by the Library Journal found that: "34 percent of these newly launched 'best' magazines failed within the first five years, with 13 failing within their first year alone. And while another 37 percent of these magazines are still being published, Black notes that this number is skewed because it includes some launched as recently as 2006." (Other studies show a "90 percent overall failure rate of magazines launched between 1985 and 2002.") But now? Or at least, between 1994 to 2003? 54 percent failed in the first five years. The good news is that they don't really make new magazines anymore, I think. 1
"'Yotta', 'zeta', 'exa' and 'peta' could now be joined by a new number prefix, the 'hella', if a physics student from University of California, Davis, gets his way. Austin Sendek has started a petition on the social networking site Facebook to establish a new, scientifically accepted prefix for [10 to the twenty-seventh power] (that is 1 followed by 27 zeroes, or 1000000000000000000000000000)…. 'Hella' comes from Californian slang for 'very' or 'a lot of'. Sendek says that by accepting the term the SI system can 'not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California.'" @12:30 PM 11
WaPo News and Mag Divisions Report Massive Losses; Revenue Plummets @10:36 AM
You may have noticed some very glowing stories this morning about the Washington Post Company! The AP says: "Washington Post Co. quadruples 4Q profit"! That is true! Now, this is a company with many different arms. Two of the wings, the cable TV stations and the Kaplan education services, provide fully 75% of the company's income. But what about the newspapers and magazines, you ask, from which the company takes its name? Well they are in the toilet, actually, and had a very bad year. READ MORE 13
Does Paying Sources Even Work? @12:40 PM
There's a segment of the journalism and media-product-making world that believes that paying sources for their exclusive version of events is a great business technique. It's competitive, it's efficient and it's not usually terribly expensive. (Unless you are talking about pictures of Angelina Jolie's babies, in which case it's very pricey—in 2008, People and Hello! together paid $14 million, to charity, for pictures of the Jolie-Pitt twins.) Over the weekend, Gawker paid an acquaintance of the insane balloon boy's family—I'm not even going to use their names, if that's okay?—to tell his story. It was pretty interesting, and damning, if not entirely conclusive. READ MORE 26
The Great Dentist Crisis! Is It? @4:09 PM
Slate claims that no one wants to be a dentist anymore, and that everyone hates them because of the movies. (There may be some truth in that! But I think people hated them first. Mostly people hate them because people hate dental work and are suspect of anyone who would do it all day!) Says Slate: "during the 20th century's final decades, a dwindling number of Americans chose to become dentists. In the early 1980s, U.S. dental schools produced about 5,750 new graduates per year. In 2007, with a population that's nearly one-third larger, there were about 4,700." And that: "In 1980, the United States had 60 dental schools; today there are 58, and class sizes are smaller." That is one way to look at the history of dentists! But let's pull some teeth here. READ MORE 29
'New York' Magazine Subscription 60% Less Valuable In Under Two Decades @3:35 PM
This weekend, I found myself in a bathroom that time forgot, and there was a copy of New York magazine's 1991 fall fashion issue. The third best part: the fashion edit was spectacular. It was like the first round of new wave flashbacks, and it was like a neon sign shop threw up on Taylor Dayne, with Samantha Foxx singing backup. Girls on the wet streets with smoke machines, with a hand sassily on the hip! The second best part was that David Blum was listed as a contributing editor. But the absolute first best part was the blow-in subscription card. READ MORE 7
The Correct Ratio of the Income of the 'New Yorker' Reader to the National Debt @9:40 AM
Recently, Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker had someone explain that if you represented the national debt as a basketball, that then the average American's income would be, in comparison, impossible to see with any microscope, no matter how powerful. Not entirely so, claims a physics dude in this week's letters to the editor! This physics dude, using an average income of $91K a year, cough, says that "the size of a grain representing the income of $91,000 is 1/493 the diameter of a nine-inch basketball, or about half a millimetre." See the above to-scale graphic, and be… reassured? Intrigued? Horrified? 7
How To Survive The Coming Zombie Menace @3:10 PM
Via Wired, here's the abstract of "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling Of An Outbreak Of Zombie Infection," a study included in Nova Science Publishers' 2009 title Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress (also known as IDMRP among aficionados, and due to be turned into a major motion picture directed by David Mamet and starring Viggo Mortensen for Christmas '10). READ MORE 8
Will Jupiter Save Us From Bombardment From Outer Space? Absolutely Not, And Here Is The Math @1:46 PM
Some big scary thing hit Jupiter and gave it a black eye. Freaky! Freakier: the guy who found this out is some dude in his backyard in Australia. (NASA? Anyone?) He told his hometown paper: "If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us." Well that's a nice idea, isn't it? But ha ha, um NO. READ MORE 16
