My old comrade Matt Welch blasts alternative weeklies in the Columbia Journalism Review… and goes on to offer a meticulous argument that blogs are the future of journalism. Even for those of us who’ve read and written these things many times, Matt’s rendition is sweet.

Plus there’s some great egg-tossing. Standing at the bar during an Altweekly convention in San Fransisco, Matt reports, “I started a discussion about what specific attributes qualified these papers, and the forty-seven-year-old publishing genre that spawned them, to continue meriting the adjective ‘alternative.’ Alternative to what? To the straight-laced ‘objectivity’ and pyramid-style writing of daily newspapers? New Journalists and other narrative storytellers crashed those gates long ago. Alternative to society’s oppressive intolerance toward deviant behavior? Tell it to the Osbournes, as they watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Something to do with corporate ownership? Not unless ‘alternative’ no longer applies to Village Voice Media (owned in part by Goldman Sachs) or the New Times chain (which has been involved in some brutal acquisition and liquidation deals). Someone at the table lamely offered up ‘a sense of community,’ but Fox News could easily clear that particular bar.”

A new Bain study looks at what makes brands grow. As this blog sums up: “Quick, pick the best indicator a brand will grow faster than its category: Brand size? Newness? Leadership within a category? Such is conventional wisdom, but a recent Bain study of 524 brands across 100 categories found none of the above. The study “winners”-defined as any brand that beat its category’s growth each year from 1997-2001-invested differentially in just two components of the marketing mix: product innovation and advertising.”

Budgeting fails in many big companies, say some Harvard Business School profs. “In some instances, the budget process consumes up to six months and 20 percent of management’s time.” (ViaFastCompany’s new blog.)

I don’t know. Budgeting has always taken what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for our small company — gee, we should be out selling or programming… or drinking beer — but in the end we always learn interesting new things about ourselves and our vision. Interesting, invaluable things we couldn’t have learned through “normal” liberal arts brainstorming. We don’t get overwrought about holding to the budget — sh*t happens — but it’s good to try to periodically corral your dreams behind a fence of numbers.

Everyone who’s ever been tortured by a computer will enjoy reading this post and its comments.

I hear it is 10 degrees cooler in Black Mountain. Back Monday.

“In 2002 the oldest baby boomers (born in 1946) were 56 and the youngest (born in 1964) were 38. Now, consider this: Consumers between 35 and 44 spend about 20 percent more than average consumers and those between 45 and 54 spend about 30 percent more. In 2001 these two age groups represented about 40 percent of U.S. households — and half of spending.”…

“In 1946, just after World War II, consumer debt amounted to 22 percent of household after-tax income, reports the Federal Reserve. (That is, for every $10,000 of income, there was $2,200 of debt.) Now debt is almost 110 percent of income.”

Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post.

Eli Israel, who runs the fantastic spam filter Messagefire that’s been advertised on a number of blogs, writes, “Thanks for the blogads service. We’ve gotten very good CPM and CPC rates this way; it’s definitely been helpful to us.”

David Diamond reports in Wired on initial feedback on MIT’s open source online curriculum: “One of the most popular offerings turned out to be Laboratory in Software Engineering, aka 6.170, a tough requirement for electrical engineering and computer science majors. Lam Vi Quoc, a fourth-year student at Vietnam’s Natural Sciences University, relied on 6.170 lectures to supplement a software lab he was taking, and Evan Hoff, a software developer in Nashville, followed the course to improve his coding skills. In Karachi, Pakistan, a group of 100 students and professionals met weekly to study 6.170. In Kansas City, five members of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association gathered monthly to take the course. In Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, Priya Durshini Thaunoo used 6.170 to prepare for a master’s degree program at the University of Mauritius. Saman Zarandioon, an Iranian refugee living in Vienna, studied it to continue an education that was stalled by the Iranian government. And software developer Rahul Thadani in Birmingham, Alabama, took it to sharpen his skills.” Great to feel the spine tingle. (Via BoingBoing.)

The thing may work well, but when I search Google for “Management 15.810,” (Introduction to Marketing) which Wired lists as one of MIT’s most popular open source courses, I find this this page, which is a gateway to a bunch of pages that are blank except for the words, “This page is a stand-in for empty content.” Hmm.

Newspaper owners often depend on government advertising — notices for things like zoning changes, tax notices and land sales — for their profit margin.

“The St. Petersburg Times earns more than $750,000 per year from legal notices and employs the equivalent of nearly three full-time staff to handle the requests, according to advertising director Richard Reeves. The Pinellas Review, a 1,000-circulation weekly, gets 90 percent of its revenue from such ads,” reported the St. Petersburg Times.

So publishers are lobbying hard against legislation in Florida that would divert these notices online and cut the newspapers out of the taxpayer-funded ad moolah.
As more citizens read their news online than off, continued giant government expenditures on print advertising are going to be hard to justify. If local publishing looses its subsidy, someone is going to have to step in to fill the information vacuum.

Perhaps it is time for local bloggers to lobby for some of this advertising. The government could help underwrite blogging… publishing of the people, by the people, for the people.

Still catching up on blog reading. I enjoyed Rick Bruner’s blackout notes, which end with this wonderful image: “Stars over Manhattan.”