Traditional news mongers have just about died and willed politics to the Internauts, according to a survey and analysis released yesterday by the Pew Internet and the American Life project.

In brief: all age groups, particularly the young, are foresaking traditional news sources like nightly news shows and newspapers and mobbing the Internet. People who rely on the Internet are better informed than patrons of any other news media. Nearly one person in three online is doing something political with Internet tools. Here’s the details I dug out of Pew’s report:

* “The Internet, a relatively minor source for campaign news in 2000, is now on par with such traditional outlets as public television broacasts, Sunday morning news programs and the weekly news magazines.” Today, 13% of the public “regularly” learns about the campaigns from the Internet, up from 9% four years ago. That contrasts with nightly network news, which dropped from 45% to 35% over the same period, and newspapers, which dropped from 40% to 31%.

* The really bad news for old media: its fascination for younger citizens is being eclipsed quickly by the web. Just 23% of 18-29 year olds say they regularly learn something about the election from the nightly network news, down from 39% in 2000. Almost as much of the same cohort, 20%, now rely on the Internet for political news.

* The average Internet reader is also far better informed than folks relying on other media. Asked to identify which presidential candidates were a former Army general and former House majority leader, 39% of Internet fans gave two correct answers, versus 31% for Sunday political TV watchers, 30% for newspaper readers, 21% for those devoted to TV news magazines, 20% for watchers of nightly network news and 14% for local TV news watchers. Tom Brokaw, who’s your Daddy?



* Not only are the folks who rely on the Internet for their election news exceptionally well informed compared to everyone else, they are also particularly politically active. Fully 30% of Internet users engage in some form of online political activity. 18% get candidate information, 18% send/receive campaign e-mails; 10% get information on local activities; 9% visit web sites of political groups; 8% visit candidate web sites, 4% engage in chats, discussions, and blogs. (Pew’s terminology is fuzzy here, but I guess this refers to blog posting rather than blog reading.)

* While generally less political than the general public offline, 24% of all 18-30 year olds are politically active online, versus just 18% of the general public.

Ironically, Meet the Press pundits got together yesterday on TV to paw over the concept of , sounding alternately bemused, scandalized and titilated… like an elderly women’s Sunday school class in 1959 discussing for that new so-called music “The Rock and Roll.”

For the record, Meet the Press pundits said [url=http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3916793/]blog, blogger or weblog 31 times, which must set a record for television. And the transcript makes it sound like they tittered each time. Sadly, Pew’s study suggests that, today, at least 69% of Meet the Press’s viewers still have no idea what a blog is.

The Ibolya Cafe, where Matt Welch, David Reilly, Miklos Gaspar,Susan Skiles, Ken Layne, Renee Cordes, Jim Lowney, Ben Sullivan and I used to hold the Budapest Business Journal’s editorial meetings, has gone the way of the dodo and print newspaper scoop. But Rick Bruner, visiting Budapest recently, finds the Ibolya’s unlit neon sign still hangs above a new cafe. Matt, who was also in Budapest over New Year’s, reports, “at current rates of development, the entire city of Pest (Buda is the hilly half across the Danube) will be one sprawling café/wine bar/bistro/restaurant by roughly 2007.” And anyone wondering why Matt

The Ibolya is 20 seconds walk from the Cafe Central, where the concept of six degrees of separation was birthed in 1929. Of course, while the Cafe is now nicely restored, when we were working in that neighborhood in the nineties, the place was a combination bagel store and video arcade.

Finally, anyone wondering why Matt recently wrote that “gulping down cheap & sweet champagne, even for a short while and mixed with better quality stuff, can lead to acute, projectile-style poisoning, for up to 20 hours,” should check out this photo to see Matt’s hangover in the making.

Watched W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Playing Egbert Souse — pronounced with a gleeful French twist as “Sue-zay” — Fields wanders into the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, his favorite bar.

“Um, was I in here last night and spend a twenty dollar bill?” asks Souse.

“Yeah,” says the bartender.

“Oh, boy,” he says, then grins like a baby given its bottle. “What a load that is off my mind.”

After falling out of bed laughing, all I could think was… unfunded US social security liability. Twenty years from now, a befuddled US retiree will stumble into a bar and mutter to the bartender — “Did I spend $2 trillion in here a couple of decades ago?”

Csaba Garay, one of the key guys coding Blogads, took December off to complete his master’s degree at Hungary’s brutally hard Budapesti Mûszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem. I haven’t talked to Csaba since before Christmas. Wow, it makes my spine tingle to remember taking those final exams.

Csab (11:50 AM) :
exams: 2 down one to go.
henry (11:51 AM) :
great. and the thesis bug got resolved?
Csab (11:51 AM) :
but the last one should be easier than these two…
Csab (11:51 AM) :
yupp. I allready turned it in..
henry (11:51 AM) :
great.
henry (11:52 AM) :
must feel darn good.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
yes, it’s a biiig relief…
henry (11:55 AM) :
must feel like a weight lifted from your shoulders.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
especially after this last exam i had today… I was up all night studying hard for a ‘C’ (3)
henry (11:56 AM) :
Wow. Sometimes the best grades are the 3s… which are much better than 1s, right?
Csab (11:56 AM) :
The teacher was kind of picky. giving me a hard time…
henry (11:56 AM) :
Ugg.
henry (11:57 AM) :
I’m glad to report that blogads is growing pleasantly as you study… at current rates, bloggers will be doing roughly 100 million impressions a month in November, so we’ll have to work hard to keep up. 🙂
Csab (11:57 AM) :
2 days ago i was told i was stupid to pick this subject as a final exam (i did not know about it…) and turned out to be true. There were only 2 other guys besides me, while on other courses there were like 20-30…
henry (11:58 AM) :
ouch.
Csab (11:58 AM) :
that IS great news about Blogads! I’m glad to hear that. You do a good job at marketing, and promoting!
henry (12:00 AM) :
your nice machine and a string of lucky synapses… leading from mattwelch to gregbeato to atrios to talkingpoints to daily kos and others… i hope the string keeps unrolling for us.
Csab (12:01 AM) :
i hope so too.
henry (12:01 AM) :
ok, won’t keep you. when are you back with us?
Csab (12:01 AM) :
tomorrow!!!!
henry (12:02 AM) :
wow. i better get my head organized.
Csab (12:02 AM) :
🙂
henry (12:02 AM) :
ok, i wish you a good night’s sleep and some relaxation.
Csab (12:03 AM) :
will have a little drink with friends tonight, then a long good night sleep, and back in the saddle..
Csab (12:03 AM) :
thank you!
Csab (12:03 AM) :
see you tomorrow then!
henry (12:03 AM) :
see you tomrrow.

Here’s a prior icq with Csaba via his mobile phone. Why do I blog this stuff? Because I’d like to remember it, and hope a couple of you who know us will enjoy the grist.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

Since November, Raymond Popovich has been battling his insurance company over a claim. His latest strike was a public one: a large red, white and blue sign in the front yard of his Meadowthorpe home. The sign, equipped with a flood light for night viewing, says: “Shelter Insurance Company Wouldn’t Pay My Claim! How About Yours?” Neighbors so far are OK with the new billboard. Well, most of the neighbors. Two doors down from Popovich lives the insurance agent who sold him the policy, Willie Lee Morrison Jr., who drives a truck emblazoned with his name and the name of his company.

(Via ObscureStore)

Looks like political weblogging is going into orbit. Judging from the ads being pulled from our server, daily traffic this week is up 30% versus good days in December. Glad we invested in that new Rackspace setup last fall.

Reading the history of any newspaper, you’ll find two engines driving step-changes in audience levels: the sustained narrative of a political race or lower prices.

Blogging has both.

With 170 million Americans online and only 3 million of them reading blogs, we’ve got a lot of upside.

What would happen if blogs selling ads grow 30% each month through November? Without adding new blogs, Blogads will be serving 96 million impressions monthly. Ahh, the joys of compounding.

I’ll try to post something tomorrow graphing current traffic growth. To try to better reflect this momentum, we’ve changed the way we forecast monthly impressions on our order page. We used to tally the prior 30 days, but now count the last seven days impressions and multiply by four.

(Footnote from New York Times history: October 10, 1898: “In a gamble, [Adolph S.] Ochs lowers the price of the [New York Times] to 1 cent [from 3 cents.] Circulation triples within a year, to 76,000 from 26,000, and advertising revenues soar.”)

Update: Here’s the graphic I promised. Most recent data is at the left.

BTW, another thing to notice… blogs are read during the work week, during the day. Ergo: most political blog readers are people with jobs, people with jobs with computers, people who are actually taking time away from their jobs to look at blogs. These are the “knowledge crafters” who advertisers crave to meet. Put it all together and you could argue (I sure do!) that these readers are 10-fold more engaged than the folks wandering by the average television at 9PM on a Tuesday night… the folks most political advertising is currently wasted on. Here’s the day graphic. The leftmost edge is 8.40AM EST. Over the next four hours traffic will rocket as people in across the country roll into work.

Looking more at old ads in the Duke archives, these excerpts give me a sense of advertising’s winding path of invention:

1841 – Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 – Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1856 – Mathew Brady advertises his services of “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes” in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1861 – The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 – There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1864 – William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1869 – George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1870 – 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1879 – John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s – $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham’s Pink Pills.
1885 – New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1889 – James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1890s – Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.

BTW, I saw Cold Mountain last night. As fine as the book. Renee Zellweger excelled.

Got this note, titled “Site Traffic Quadrupled OVERNITE: A Testimonial you will like” at 3AM from Richard Luckett, the creative Texan behind lefty paraphernalia-seller and publisher Agitproperties, about blogads he’s running on DailyKos and Atrios.

“HC:
I wanted to get the word out about our new column written by an anonymous Army intelligence officer just back from Iraq and Afghanistan for two years. These ads were updated late Monday night. I was extremely pleased with the results. Feel free to use this info as you see fit. I even wrote the pitch for you. ; )

Richard”

Here is Richard’s testimonial:

Agencies: are your clients’ shrinking ad dollars this well-placed in front of a pool of potential consumers virtually pre-screened to have an interest in what they are selling? These stats prove plainly that a small, inexpensive campaign of well-written and well-targeted blog ads can quadruple a site’s traffic (and potential sales) overnight.

Day before ‘The Trooper Speaks’ blog ads were posted:

Total Page Views for this date:289
Unique Visitors for this date:178
First Time Visitors:148
Returning Visitors:30
Average Page Views per Visitor:1.6
Average Page Views per Hour:12.0
Average Unique Visitors Per Hour:7.4

Day after ‘The Trooper Speaks’ blog ads were posted:

Total Page Views for this date:1,545
Unique Visitors for this date:743
First Time Visitors:695
Returning Visitors:48
Average Page Views per Visitor:2.1
Average Page Views per Hour:64.4
Average Unique Visitors Per Hour:31.0

Many Internet advertisers would not be ashamed to see results like that for an entire campaign, not just day one. As you may recall, Luckett has raved about blogads before, saying ads on blogs are four times as effective as ads in the Village Voice. I should note that it is not just blogs that drive Luckett’s success. His laser-sharp design and punchy copy are key. He also changes his creative every one to three days, sooner if an ad is dogging. Here’s the eye-grabbing graphic for the ad he mentions:

Here is the ad’s current text:

After two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, “Anonymous”, a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, speaks out weekly on what he saw and experienced. His sad, brave and poignant words should be required reading at CENTCOM. Read his new column exclusively at agitproperties.com, the home of the world-famous FAUX NEWS coffee mug, KIRK ANDERSON’S Got Allies? tee and our new COALITION OF THE BILLING tee. agitproperties.com – the truth starts here.

I had lunch last week with Ed Cone last week in Greensboro. Ed took the first and most exhaustive look at Dean’s Internet Strategy, and lots of journalists have since followed in his path.

We debated whether Howard Dean’s Internet tactics might work in local campaigns this year, specifically for the NC campaign of Chester Erskine Bowles for Senate.

I think Ed is right that blogs + Meetup could make a big difference in the NC contest, particularly in a tight race. I agree that a little effort could catalyze dozens of ‘Bowles blogs’ by June. But I’ll stick to my guns on my third argument: well-established institutions and inside players are too often willfully blind to new tactics and technology, particularly when the technology upends the power structure they’ve built their lives and bank accounts around.

So, no Bowles blogs this year in NC unless someone outside the Democratic aparat pushes them.

Wandering around the Duke University Ad archives, I found this 1928 Chicago Tribune advertisement for a Zenith radio titled “At the conventions, you’ll always get the whispered ‘asides’ with a Zenith Radio.”

Not only the speeches and the voting — but the speaker’s whispered ‘aside’ — the fascinating by-play will be yours if you have a Zenith receiver — just as if you were at the Chairman’s right hand.

1928 was the first year radio played a roll in national politics. After conventions held in June, the election pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Alfred E. Smith.

Funny how easily the word ‘blog’ could stand in today for that 1928 radio. The Zenith ad testifies that news technology and politics have always been entwined, and reminds us how eloquently ads describe the interplay of culture and material life.