Can they fly? I agree with Jake Dobkin — the numbers are way off. The wrong way. Excel dude is smoking his own VC-focused PPT.

Cool idea:

Enterprises that want to get the word out about their products, services or ideas are moving quickly to new media — communicating through social networks like Twitter and by publishing their own blogs.

Of course, the challenge is getting more of the right people to see the messages. MinnPost.com is now offering an innovative solution to this problem: MinnPost.com Real-Time Ads.

For a modest weekly charge, you can show MinnPost’s readers the headlines or brief summaries of these messages you’re already creating, and watch them link to your full messages on your website.

But not quite as cool as our RSS ads, which incorporate up to 7 headlines per advertiser. 🙂

The essential problem we face: though the Times’ Baghdad bureau is a civic necessity, only a few individuals would spend $10 a year to get the Times’ Baghdad reports.

More evidence that there are twice as many publishers as the market will support. Here’s the Washington Post’s report on its own health:

The newspaper division reported an operating loss of $53.8 million caused by steep fall-offs in advertising, which are being felt across the industry. Print advertising revenue at The Post plummeted 33 percent in the first three months of this year, compared to the same period last year, and revenue at The Post’s online properties — chiefly, Washingtonpost.com — dropped 8 percent in the quarter, the first decline in ad revenue at the online unit in recent memory.

Adding insult to injury, “The newspaper division is now The Post’s third-biggest revenue-generator, providing 15 percent of company revenue.”

AP reports: “While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.’s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million.”

The online advertising pie is still growing slightly even in the recession, but the number of publishers with forks is growing much faster.

What’s older than yesterday’s gossip?

Yesterday’s gossips.

Doddering gossip doyenne Liz Smith and former rumor-monger Lloyd Grove get together at the Daily Beast to rue the revolution.

What has been the impact of Internet sites like Perez Hilton and Gawker, who are putting up items on an hourly basis?

I don’t think they mean anything either, except they mean instant success for these very, very energetic and ambitious young people. And it’s perfectly fine, but I wouldn’t give any credence to most of the stuff I read. I mean, there are no publishers, no editors, no lawyers vetting anything. This is the problem with the Internet where everybody has a voice and we’re stuck with it. We’re going to have the Internet even when we don’t have things to eat. We’re going to still have it. I’m all for it, and I’m doing it myself on the Wowowow.com site, but it’s not important. It isn’t even semi-important.

Turns out Smith was making $125k a year at the Post.

And here’s some video of Smith grousing about “these kids.”

Beware to boobtube:

Brian Primack, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who studies how teenagers’ use of media affects their health, analyzed survey data that followed 4,142 teenagers from 1995 to 2002. Teenagers who watched TV were more likely to report symptoms of depression, with the rate increasing 8 percent with every hour of TV watched.

Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to death” was truer than he knew.

Reading James Surowiecki’s sneer about NYT’s bathetic advertising of its own product reminded me that I’d recently taken note of NYTimes ad running in the TV screen the back of my cab.

What unnerved me the most was the Times ad’s emphasis on “conversation”… “center of the conversation”… “get the conversation going”… and “be part of a great conversation.” All these phrases were uttered by hip-ish looking 20 and 30-somethings.

Clearly, the Times is desperately hoping to stay relevant to the under-sixty-year-olds who are turning their collective back on the Times, even as they consume and create giant new volumes of their own media (aka conversation.)

Advertising its ersatz conversations, the Times’ resembles a Baptist church trying to compete for the hearts and minds of indie rock fans by running ads declaring “hey, we’ve got great music too!”

In this month’s Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn does a great job of summing up the challenge for television networks.

On the “buy side,” the problem is what I’d call cultural attention-deficit disorder, which afflicts the consumer bombarded with choices: more TV networks (the Emmy Award–winning show Mad Men is broadcast on AMC, a channel previously known only for showing movies), more video games, more Web sites, and more ways to consume shows than ever before (VOD, DVD, PPV, etc., etc.). And all of this is compounded by the loss of the social effect: the fewer people who consume any given piece of media, the fewer people there are to tell you how awesome The Life & Times of Tim is and how you simply have to watch it. Amid the chaos, it’s difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it—and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you’re showing matters becomes almost impossible.

I’ll continue to argue (as I’ve been doing since ’02) that blogs, as communities that create and consume news and opinion together, are uniquely positioned in this exploding universe as one of the few media players with centripetal force.

A friend’s 81-year-old father told me this weekend, “when the New York Times goes, I go.”

He was still kicking hard, but the same can’t be said for the Times this morning. Liquidity crunch?