Blogging (page 2)

For many decades, pub lishers of business mag azines such as Business Week, Fortune and Forbes thrived by following a simple formula: Target upscale executives and sell ad space to auto makers, financial-services firms and technology companies.

But in recent years, that formula has come undone. The dot-com meltdown in 2000 sent technology advertising into a steep decline. The slump in the auto industry has led to a cutback in car advertising. And then there's the Web, which has weakened the magazines' hold on their readers and advertisers.

Complicating matters further, the three incumbents face a new threat from a deeppocketed competitor: Condé Nast's Portfolio, a glossy general-interest business magazine that debuted in April. McGraw-Hill Publications' BusinessWeek and Time Warner Inc.'s Fortune are responding to these crosswinds with redesigns. BusinessWeek's new version hit newsstands Friday, and Fortune's will debut in December.

With Detroit in a slump and the subprime mortgage crisis taking a toll on the financial sector, the situation may get worse. Total financial advertising pages fell 7.3% in the first half of this year, while technology dropped 12.8%, and autos fell 4.5%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Hardest hit were BusinessWeek and Fortune, each of which saw ad pages drop 20% in the second quarter, while Forbes LLC's Forbes was down 1.1%.

Forbes's competitors say its tally includes supplements and other pages that the rivals don't count. Adjusting for these factors, they say the performance of the three is roughly equal. Forbes denies this and says the data prove that it is well ahead of the competition in terms of ad pages even without the special sections.

"They ought to spend more time making ad calls than slinging mud," says James S.

Berrien, president of the Forbes magazine group.

BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune don't publish financial results, but executives at all three acknowledge that their print ad revenue is falling. As the magazines are mostly sold by subscription, rather than on the newsstand, their circulation doesn't tend to fluctuate as much and has remained stable.

While most advertising categories may recover, the loss of ad revenue to the Web is only likely to get worse. The Internet has undermined the business models of nearly all print media.

Magazines, which have a longer shelf life and offer fancier graphics than newspapers, had been seen as less exposed to the Web. While that is certainly true for fashion magazines, it isn't the case for newsier categories like business.

Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.

Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person?s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.

Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.

Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life ? and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.

?When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity ? stories, isn?t that cool?? said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, ?The Redemptive Self.? ?Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.?

Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.

SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, a Latvian-born Oxford philosopher who died in 1997, may well have ranked among the greatest conversationalists who ever lived. According to Robert Darnton, a Princeton historian, Berlin's friends would “watch him as if he were a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels and without a touch of showmanship”. Darnton reckoned that Berlin's only match in relatively modern times might have been Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Enlightenment philosopher. By one account Diderot's conversation was “enlivened by absolute sincerity, subtle without obscurity, varied in its forms, dazzling in its flights of imagination, fertile in ideas and in its capacity to inspire ideas in others. One let oneself drift along with it for hours at a time, as if one were gliding down a fresh and limpid river, whose banks were adorned with rich estates and beautiful houses.”

Churchill was another magnificent talker, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, but often a poor listener. Virginia Woolf was given, in the words of one biographer, to “wonderful performances in conversation, spinning off into fantastic fabrications while everyone sat around and, as it were, applauded”. A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sir Tom Stoppard, Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal.

Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful too—although Samuel Johnson, one of the most admired conversationalists of 18th-century England, seemed to manage without much of it. For those of more modest accomplishments, but attached to conversation as one of life's pleasures and necessary skills, there is a lively market in manuals and tip-sheets going back almost 500 years, and a legacy of wisdom with an even longer history. One striking thing about the advice is how consistent it remains over time, suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local conventions.

The principle that it is rude to interrupt another speaker goes back at least to Cicero, writing in 44BC, who said that good conversation required “alternation” among participants. In his essay “On Duties”, Cicero remarked that nobody, to his knowledge, had yet set down the rules for ordinary conversation, though many had done so for public speaking. He had a shot at it himself, and quickly arrived at the sort of list that self-help authors have been echoing ever since. The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.

Every morning, the 22-year-old Ohio State University senior spends at least an hour wading through 100 of his favorite Web sites -- mostly blogs and mainstream news sites -- looking for unique news items he thinks online readers would like. A few weeks ago, he scored big: He found a New York Times story that identified a woman based on the Internet searches she performed using AOL, which released its users' search data in a privacy breach earlier this month. He quickly copied and pasted the story's Web address into an online form at Netscape.com, wrote a headline and summary of the story, then clicked the send button. "It's nice to be the first one to get a big scoop that just came out and nobody's heard of," Spring said. "You want to be the first to say, 'Hey, look at this!' "

Spring neither reports nor writes the news, but he submits stories he finds interesting to one of several popular "social news" Web sites -- places where seeing a story first in a major publication counts as a coup. Such sites encourage visitors to share articles they find interesting, vote on items they like best and post comments about them. The idea is to digest the most current information swirling around the Internet -- as diverse as global news, celebrity gossip and tech tips -- and post it in one place, where top stories can change hour by hour.

 But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink the spy agencies' secure internal computer network the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn't connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog -- that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.

With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers--not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy. Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.

What has changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.

At the same time, advertisers--shunning old-line media in favor of the Web--are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers--which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), "The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop."

But before you quit your day job, consider that this isn't easy money, nor is it guaranteed to last. For one thing, the market is small right now: Web ad agency Organic puts ad spending on blogs at $40 million this year. Bloggers are typically selling only about a third of their available ad space at top rates. (The rest goes at heavily discounted prices.) And as with any business dependent on the mercurial ad market, prone as it is to sudden skids, the threat of crashing and burning always looms.

• Given a choice, most people playing an investment game created by the researchers initially decided to join a group that did not penalize its members. But almost all of them quickly switched to a punitive community when they saw that the change could profit them personally.
• The study, appearing today in the journal Science, suggests that groups with few rules attract many exploitative people who quickly undermine cooperation. By contrast, communities that allow punishment, and in which power is distributed equally, are more likely to draw people who, even at their own cost, are willing to stand up to miscreants.