At The End Of The Day

And Now A Message From...Us

CNN.com is selling inauguration 2009 shirts. They have headlines ranging from "With a wave Bush leaves Washington" to "This is America happening" and "Change comes to Washington." Each quote is followed by "I just saw it on CNN.com" with the date & time of the headline.

For $15 (plus $5.69 shipping) you can have your pick of six colors, women's cut or mens. What strikes me is that in addition to getting $15 a shirt (plus I'm sure a couple dollars of the shipping costs), CNN will be getting some free advertising through these walking billboards promoting CNN.com. So really they are making people pay to deliver impressions for them. I wish I could convince some stations to pay our clients to run their ads- it sure would stretch the media budgets.

A New G-G-G-Generation

High School students are showing the new generation of newspaper reporting. Word from MediaPost about a student newspaper in Minnesota that was shut down because of an article that was not approved by the school superintendent.

The students, however, took matters into their own hands, and created an online newspaper that is out of reach of school administrators.

This is the new model for news publishing. School administrators need to be aware, but also mainstream newspapers. The generation now in high school, and well beyond, don't care to wait for the publication of the morning's paper, or the weekly, or the monthly. They are more interested the news, and the freedom of expression. I love it.

More credit where credit is due: the graphic accompanying this story comes from a Maine student web site.

Shoot First, Then Dig

Garden & Gun magazine was named the second hottest launch of the year by the Media Industry Newsletter magazine.

I was surprised to see out of a field of 700 new titles in 2007, only Conde Nast's Portfolio beat out Garden & Gun for top honors. Hard to believe, I know, but apparently it was honored for its "enterprising concept." I'll say. Gardens & guns aren't exactly milk & cookies, but upon further investigation I did learn that Garden & Gun is a magazine about 21st Century Southern American. So maybe the title makes a little more sense to me now. The south has always been a mystery to me. Growing up in northern New England, I guess I just don't get it.

Sexist Pigs

People magazine is about to put out its Sexiest Man Alive issue. To save you the trouble, it's Matt Damon. That will make my daughter happy.

That issue also has a feature, Guess the Chest, in which you see a picture of someone's chest, and you have to guess who the celebrity is. Of course, all of the chests in question are men. 

How sexist! If they were all women's chests, what would one think? Know what? It's People magazine. No one thinks.