Earth Hour

I encourage everyone to take a bit of time out of their electricity-intensive day to just turn off the lights and appliances. Use battery power on your laptop. This is one of the easiest things you can do and it will help on the power bill too.

Earth Hour Website - Check it out

So I interned at a newspaper near my hometown this summer, The Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune. I became fast friends with most of my co-workers there. I didn't fetch coffee, I didn't do any type of typical, horror-story intern work. I was out on the street learning first hand how to report on anything and everything. It has been invaluable to me. Enough with the praise, my editor when I was there is no longer with the Trib, but he is working for a philanthropy-based online news service. I encourage you to check it out if you live in central Wisconsin, I am sure it will be worthwhile as Jeff is as excited as I am for the future of our medium. You can find him here: Community News 2.0. Here is a classy pic of him, looking to break the next big news story.

da Silva: Magazines aren't going anywhere, but...

A magazine editor visiting the University of Wisconsin says the quality production values of magazines will ultimately be what saves them from their economic woes.

Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of the Australia-based science magazine Cosmos, readily acknowledged that print media faces some challenges, but that he supports magazines as “low-cost high tech.” What he means by that term is that the cost of printing the magazines is easily offset by the quality of content and production values that magazines offer readers including high-resolution photographs and quality features that are more enjoyable offline. He even went as far as to say that magazines, as a form of quality distribution, is an inevitable creation.

“If magazines didn't exist,” da Silva said, “we would have to invent them, I would argue.”

Da Silva says that the economic problems that newspapers and weekly magazines like Time and Newsweek are facing are difficult issues to pin down. Cosmos is a bi-monthly magazine and according to da Silva most subscribers subscribe for two years at a time and only 8-10 percent of the magazines revenue comes from advertisers, where weeklies have more content and more magazines per year and thus must rely more on advertising.

Print, web, or cellphone — the medium doesn't matter as much as the idea that news and advertising are “decoupling,” says da Silva. Advertisers are leaving print, but not following through to the Web, and in that process news disseminators are left with a large bill to pay. Magazines, with their unique attributes and unmatched quality, will survive precisely because of those attributes and quality. Subscribers would be more willing to pay more to support a magazine that is worth their time — if it is not worth their time then why should it be worth their money?

Cosmos is an example of a multi-revenue supported magazine that can serve as a blueprint for other magazines, says da Silva. Whether or not that model can work for all kinds of magazines, like weeklies or bi-weeklies, is still not determined, but publishers and journalists have to be willing to listen to what their audience wants. That is what he and his colleagues at Cosmos do.

“We have a saying in the office,” da Silva said, “We don't do worthy, we do interesting.”

Wilson da Silva speaking with students

Ed. Note: The Blackberry Curve has pretty poor resolution. I will try to find something that I can use to post mobile photos that are of a better quality. Mr. da Silva is in the blue shirt on the left.

da Silva end

Lecture is complete. I will post an article about the discussion later this evening after I gather my notes and my thoughts. I am still deciding on the angle that I want to take with this story but a bit of time away from the subject matter and I will figure it out.

Moving? Before the lecture?

Well, I did not anticipate my first break being before the lecture even began, but so far, though I caught a glimpse of our mysterious speaker, he is currently nowhere to be found. It gives me a good chance to rail about preparedness, something that I often have issues with. We are now being moved to a new room two floors down. I hope that this is a lecture that is worth the commotion because at the moment it seems to be a touch annoying.

Wilson da Silva Lecture Prep

The da Silva lecture begins at 4 p.m. at which time I will be "twittering" or "tweeting" or whatever one chooses to call twitter posts. If there are any breaks I will likely update the blog directly and I will try to get another update on the web tonight after the lecture hopefully discussing interesting ideas that da Silva has as well as analyzing the lecture through my eyes.