by Dave Zornow

On a day when the world mourns the loss of Steve Jobs and the tech industry is iWriting about the iMac-iPod-iPhone-iPad, it’s valuable to remember that the original Man-In-Black didn’t always have the Midas touch. Which makes his successes that much more remarkable.

We’ve had an an Mac in our house since April 1984 — somewhat influenced by that iconic 1984 Superbowl spot introducing the first Macintosh. So, it’s fair to say we are fans from waay back.

The 1990's vintage Mac Classic, which holds a prominent place in our basement next to the water meter.

On the day after Steve’s death, we remember the good times. But, to be honest, they weren’t always good times.

For years — maybe decades — we suffered the taunts of the IT Crowd who called the Mac “a toy.” In 1990, I remember a conversation I had with the head of the computer department at my employer about bringing in a Macintosh to help create the cutting edge presentations our clients expected — work that was not possible to do on our Wang Word processors. In no uncertain terms, I was told no. Actually, her specific words were, “Thou shalt not use the ‘M’ word here.” My employer at the time was MTV Networks.

Like I said, it wasn’t always easy being a Mac fan.

Steve made us suffer in the early years because he refused to conform to the wishes of the IT community. Or even go out of his way to sell to the US government.

Winner of the “didn’t you see that coming award,” his hand picked successor at Apple Computer, John Scully, led a successful coup which ousted Jobs from the company he co-founded. Steve Jobs is also the guy who brought us the Apple III, didn’t think there was a future in desktop publishing, championed the pre-Macintosh LISA flop and could never get his head around the idea that two buttons on a mouse might be useful.

Then there’s that whole flash thing.

This is the guy who was the first to take away our built-in dial-up modems, forced us to use 3 1/2 drives when the rest of the world was 5 1/4 and floppy and finally took away our disk drives completely. Oh, and after he left us with only a network port, he then introduced a tablet computer that had no network port at all.

It hasn’t been an easy ride. Although his computers are fashionable, it’s hard to idolize a megalomaniac whose idea of a fashion statement is wearing a black turtleneck. All of the time. For 25 years.

One of the funny things about that Superbowl commercial is that most Apple users who were born after the Macintosh spot probably wouldn’t guess that the Big Brother in that spot was IBM. The first 128K Macintosh was the David to the IBM-PC Goliath. No, kids, it wasn’t Microsoft. It’s another testament to how far Apple has come since 1984 — these days IBM doesn’t even make PCs anymore, having sold that business to Lenovo.

At last Spring’s commencement address, Ithaca College President Thomas R. Rochon noted that when the graduates were freshman the first iPhone was introduced. As they received their diplomas, consumers were waiting on the fifth version of this revolutionary product. One which paved the way for the equally successful Android phone, too. As consumers, we have received quite a tech education during the time these kids were getting their college educations. And none of this would have happened if it were not for Steve.

For years, people have been talking about slate computing. And now we have the wildly successful iPad and iPad2. Forget about the fact that its no more than an iPhone with a bigger screen. It took a lot of vision and guts to “make it so.”

Despite his failures (I can’t even remember what that Apple see-through cube computer fiasco was called), Steve Jobs transformed Apple, the IT business, the way we look at user interfaces, how we use phones, the way we buy and listen to music, and how “tech” products are marketed to consumers. But for Steve, it was never about the tech — it was always about the consumer. Which is a legacy which will live on far beyond the Cult of Steve.

Steve Jobs, for all of his faults and failures, created a phenomenon, got kicked to the curb, and then resurrected both his company and his career from the dead all while making the turleneck stylish again. Steve Jobs, RIP.

New York, June 13 — New York Times David Brooks is an accomplished journalist and an author who has no sympathy for his publishing peers.

Brooks gave the keynote address at the Advertising Research Foundation Audience Measurement 6.0 conference (ARF AMS 6.0) on Monday, quoting frequently from his recent book “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.” He also spoke rapidly — giving anyone in the audience who was trying to take notes hand cramps and head shakes.

Fortunately, there were other social animals who came to the rescue. Here are some of the high points of his presentation, supported by twitterin’ soci-animals in the audience.

Brooks noted three key insights derived from current social science research.

• “While the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work,” said Brooks.  “People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. And people named Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers.” Brooks says it’s because we unconsciously gravitate toward things that sound familiar. Although the human brain can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, we can only handle about 40 separate items. It’s our unconscious mind that decides what to leave i and what to leave out.
• “Emotions are at the center of our thinking,” said Brooks.  “They are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value.” Brooks posited that emotions aren’t separate from reason but that they are central to organizing the way we think.
• Riffing on the “man is not an island theme,” Brooks says that humans are social animals. “We are not primarily self contained individuals,” he says. Humans are social — not rational — and the sum of what we are emerges out of the relationships we have with others.

Brooks also described a number of traits which set us apart which help define our inner social animal.

• Mindsight: The ability to look into other peoples eyes and download what they have to offer. “Babies come with the ability to mimic people around them,” said Brooks. “Mimicry is an important social skill.” Brooks cited work from the University of Minnesota where researchers were able to predict which children were likely to graduate from high school based on their ability to have a good two way conversation with their mother when they were 18 months of age.
• Equipoise: The ability to read the biases and failures in your own mind.
• Medes: “What we might call street smarts, shows a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment.” When someone says I get the gist of something, they are displaying medes. Soldiers in Iraq can look down a street and tell you there’s an IED somewhere. They don’t know how they know — they just do.
• Brooks said creativity comes from blending two different ideas together.  Picasso combining the concept of Western art and the concept African masks is one example.
• Limerence actually isn’t an ability, but a word that describes a person’s drive and a motivation. “The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige,” said Brooks. “The unconscious mind hungers for moments of transcendence and we are lost in a challenge or a task,”says Brooks.

And what did the masses “tw-ink” of Brooks comments in the Twitterverse? Here’s a sampling:

• #DavidBrooks: “We’re in the middle of a cognitive revolution”. — J.T. Compeau
• Via David Brooks @nytimes: Tough decision? Flip coin. Then act not on coin side up, but yr emotional reaction — Neil Glassman
• 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% of earners. David Brooks at #ARFAM6. Annnd that’s why we always need scientific measurement! — David Coletti
• david brooks emotion is the foundation of reason and unconscious mind makes most decisions — The ARF
• David Brooks – emotion is the foundation of reason. Tells us what we value — fettersac
• Fascinating speech by #DavidBrooks. “Blending” of ideas is the “core of creativity,” leads to innovation. — J.T. Compeau
• Why tax breaks for the rich so popular. RT @ddcoletti: 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% of earners.  — josh chasin
• RT @JTCompeau: “Emergent systems” are not “clocks”, “they need to be analyzed holistically” – DavidBrooks — Neil Glassman
• Via David Brooks @nytimes: Things on which we focus seem more important than are because we’re focusing on them — Neil Glassman
• David Brooks: Kids in homes where they develop strategies for impulse control do better in school. Doesn’t auger well 4 my kid. — josh chasin
• Yes! RT @fettersac David Brooks – emotion is the foundation of reason. Tells us what we value — Alan Edgett

See also:

• Sweetspeeches.com
• David Brooks at TED 2011, Huffington Post

But this year’s graduation at Ithaca College in upstate New York wasn’t like that. The commencement remarks by college president Thomas R. Rochon used a classic movie scene from The Graduate about the life and times of a college graduate as a way to connect the students’ generation to their parents’.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the observation, “The only constant is change.” Rochon used Dustin Hoffman’s fictional character Benjamin Braddock as a metaphor to remind today’s graduates and their baby boomer parents just how true Heraclitus’ words ring today. “Change has become the only constant we can rely upon,” said Rochon.

If Benjamin had been a real person, he would have received his bachelor’s degree in 1967 – the year the film was released. He would now be 65 or 66 years old, about to retire. Think what he would have witnessed between the day he graduated and his retirement this year.

When Benjamin graduated, the greatest threat to American security was a country called the Soviet Union. The largest corporation in the world was General Motors, the same General Motors that recently emerged from bankruptcy. When Benjamin graduated, no one had ever been to the moon.

And, unlike many of you, we know that Benjamin actually listened to the speeches at his commencement because he had no other options unless he brought with him either a transistor radio or a battery-powered record player.

Today, the odds are pretty good that Benjamin is retiring from a job that did not exist in 1967, or that existed but is now performed in an entirely different way using technologies that were not even dreamed of when his career began.

Of course, 45 years is a long time. But consider the pace of change in just the last four years – the span of time most of you have been at Ithaca College.

When you were freshmen, there had never been an African-American president of the United States and there was no reason to think there would be one any time soon. When you started at IC, there had not yet been a global financial meltdown triggered by misplaced confidence in financial instruments that few people understood.

Rochon then ratcheted the change theme up a notch. Because things have changed since Heraclitus’ time. Change is no longer a constant. The rate of change is accelerating.

The first iPhone came out just before you began your freshman year. Today, as you graduate, you can buy a fourth generation iPhone at your local electronics store. And the blogs are full of rumors about new capabilities that will be added to the iPhone 5, surely coming soon.

It’s a great metaphor and a good analysis…except for the one little fib that Ithaca’s college president told the graduates. “You have not yet reached the generational divide at which one develops a desire to just have technology sit still for a few years so we can get comfortable with our existing gadgets before trading them in for new ones,” said Rochon. “You might never cross that generational divide. You may be the ones for whom change is so omnipresent that the only thing that would make you uncomfortable would be to find out that there will not soon be another major advance in the way we stay connected with each other.”

President Rochon, shame on you for lying to your students. Instead of this innocent fib, you  should have told them about what Joni Mitchell, a real contemporary of the fictional Benjamin Braddock, had to say about change in her 1970 song, The Circle Game.

“Tell him, ‘take your time.’ It won’t be long now — till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”

Dave Zornow is a media research consultant, web applications developer and hyperlocal publisher in Nyack, NY.

Sources:

• Ithaca College President Thomas R. Rochon, Commencement Remarks, 5/22/2011
• WikiQuote on Heraclitus
• JoniMitchell.com, The Circle Game
• Wikipedia, The Graduate

In “retirement,” you get asked the same question — politely, of course, and with sincerity: “Are you enjoying it?” My answer is always matter-of-fact: “No, I’d rather be at the newspaper.” And that’s the truth even if I am otherwise “enjoying retirement,” certainly a relative term.

If you have reasonable health, if other creative opportunities have opened since leaving the job — ones that would not have appeared if you were still under the clock — if you have grandchildren to visit in Texas and locally, if you can help as a volunteer, if you can take a daily walk, if you can share time with family when the crazy hours of decades of deadline newspaper work often detoured that, then how can you honestly deny that you don’t “enjoy” retirement?

And I do, and I hope the same for other retirees. The trouble for me, though, is that I always felt like the country doctor — I did a necessary job that others could perform, yes, and I was as expendable as the rest, but my calling (and I think I was sent to it) was the sort, as is the doc’s, that you don’t leave until God takes you away. I wrote, I photographed, I commented. I cursed my job and many of the bosses every day, but that was part of the difficult daily birth that is a newspaper. In delivery, people were informed, and that is a blessing and a gift for those who receive and those who give. I never would have retired.

But newspapers and the rest of the media are in sea change, and though there will always be insatiable demand for information, delivering it economically and to people who absorb it electronically rather than simply in print are forcing downsizing everywhere. I could no longer get out of the way of the train, though I was grateful that it didn’t let off any of my colleagues, at the time at least. I made way for some younger people, who kept their jobs for a few years.

Five seasons out, I am thankful for the renewed simplicity of life, though I sleep no longer than I did working various shifts for 42 years.  Curiosity is still my companion, and though the body ages, does the inner life ever get old?

But I can no longer — with fellow newspaper stiffs — glance up at the clock in the editorial office, chase deadline and then step back wringing wet from the day’s (night’s) delivery. We were doctors of a sort, and you don’t leave the job. It leaves you.

Arthur H. Gunther III is retired as editorial page editor and columnist of The Journal-News, a daily in Nyack, N.Y. He writes regularly at columnrule.blogspot.com

“Here’s the top story we’re following at this hour: For the first time, there’s definitive proof that Fox News, the U.S. cable network that claims to be ‘fair and balanced,’ is neither fair nor balanced. Next up this hour: Experts say temperatures will drop when winter comes. And finally: Eating regularly is key to good health. Stay tuned for more details.”

OK, maybe these aren’t great revelations. But Fox News’ coverage of Comedy Central’s “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally on October 30 is worthy of a second look. The story posted on their Website stands in stark contrast to the pieces published by other media outlets, both liberal and conservative.

Disputing Fox News’ “fair and balanced” slogan is a “man bites dog” kinda story. However, it’s instructive to both lovers and haters of the leading cable news operation because the 1996 launch of Fox News in 1996 is one of the most significant events in cable new history, second only to Ted Turner’s 1980 creation of CNN. So an analysis of how a leading — albeit controversial — news network frames a story can tell us a lot about their journalism. And the people who watch the network.

Here are a few “leads” written by the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Washington Times, the Associated Press, Fox News and the Christian Science Monitor. See if you can tell which one fits the Fox News narrative.

Source #1: “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show, part Halloween celebration and part political rally to call for common sense before Tuesday’s congressional elections. Satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, hosts of late-night cable TV shows, poked fun at politicians and media for stoking partisan fervor.”

Story #2: “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show. But what seemed to unite the tens of thousands who converged on the National Mall on a sunny Saturday in Washington for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was a genuine desire to push back against the strong rightward tilt of the 2010 midterm campaign.”

Story #3: “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right, Saturday’s crowded Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear marked an ironic uprising by those who want to turn down the volume. Three days before midterm elections, tens of thousands of people packed the National Mall to listen to Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, looking for a laugh and a chance to display their disenchantment with what they say is the bitter tone of the nation’s political discourse.”

Story #4: Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts entertained a huge throng stretched alongside the National Mall by poking fun at the nation’s diversity and its ill-tempered politics. Stewart is popular especially with Democrats and independents, a Pew Research Center poll found. Colbert of “The Colbert Report” poses as an ultraconservative, and the stage Saturday was stacked with entertainers associated with Democratic causes or Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Story #5: In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng Saturday at a “sanity” rally poking fun at the nation’s ill-tempered politics, fear-mongers and doomsayers. “We live now in hard times,” Stewart said after all the shtick. “Not end times.”

OK, pens down. Which one did you pick? Maybe it was easy — or maybe it wasn’t.

The pro-business, right leaning WSJ, owned by the same News Corp company that owns the Fox News Channel, wrote “In an election season characterized by loud divisions between the left and the right…”

The Christian Science Monitor published “They came from far and near, some wielding signs and hoping to attract a little attention, others just to watch the show.”

If you chose “Just three days before pivotal midterm elections, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw a “sanity” rally in the shadow of the Capitol that organizers insisted wasn’t about politics. But there were political undertones to Saturday’s event as the two Comedy Central hosts…” you found the Fox in the cable news hen house.

Strangely, the Washington Times, a conservative counterweight to the Washington Post, used the the AP story without sending a reporter to the rally (“In the shadow of the Capitol and the election, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert entertained a huge throng…”)  Which makes you wonder: if their reporter couldn’t afford the $5 Metrocard to get to the Washington mall, things must be REALLY tough in the newspaper business…

Finally, Reuters wrote “Two of America’s best-known television comedians drew tens of thousands of people to a rally on Saturday that was part variety show…”

(One honorable mention that didn’t make this list: “whilst” surveying foreign news reports for their take on the event, I ran across the The Guardian blog of Richard Adams. His Jon Stewart rally ‘as it happens‘ entry provided an amusing play by play of the event as it unfolded from the vantage point of an outsider looking in. It was very funny with lots of wry Brit observations about American culture.)

What makes the Fox story unfair and unbalanced? Journalists are trained to report what is “new” when reporting the news. Glen Beck’s August rally was news because a conservative political pundit gathered thousands of his followers on the Washington Mall in the same location on the same day as Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech. If you were there and didn’t that wasn’t your story, you must have had an another agenda. That *was* the story. The day was about GB and his ability to muster his masses to the Washington Mall. It was an unprecedented event because it had never been done before by a cable TV celebrity — until Saturday.

Using the same logic, Saturday’s story was about how between 60,000 and 250,000 people gathered on the mall (Stewart put the number at “millions” as a pre-emptive strike for those who would try to compare his rally to Beck’s) to see two TV celebrities in the company of Discovery’s The Mythbusters, The Roots, The OJays, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Sam Waterson, Tony Bennett, Jeff Tweedy, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Ozzy Osborne and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Among many others.

If there was a political message, it was relatively weak. Telling everyone to think for themselves and stop believing everything you read on Websites, see on cable news and hear on talk radio isn’t exactly a revolutionary manifesto. It may have been a little hard to write that sentence if you worked on the copy desk at Fox, CNN or MSNBC — the three networks that dominated the mocking clips shown by Jon Stewart — but you’d have to be an idiot to have missed that point. Or, perhaps had an agenda that reinterprets the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

In the second sentence of the Fox News story, the network reported that “there were political overtones…poking fun at the nation’s diversity and ill-tempered politics.” Actually, Stewart and Colbert weren’t poking fun at the nation’s diversity, but at the tendency of the news media to characterize events by who shows up. Fox seemed to deliberately miss the point that the Comedy Central kids were poking fun at news pundits who tune the facts to fit a particular news narrative targeted to their core audience. Writing “news” which rings of truthiness but doesn’t try to capture what happened isn’t news – that’s entertainment.

Google time line for the phrase "fair and balanced." It wasn't much of an issue until FOX News was launched and George W Bush became president.

Which is OK. The “fair and balanced” phenomenon in journalism is fairly new. Biased reporting in newspapers has a much richer history that predates the concept of fair and balanced journalism.

Fox News is to the 65+ audience what MTV is to 18-34’s: a consistent stream of content which tells people in a demo niche what they want to hear. Both networks have relatively small audiences which exert an oversized influence on the American culture. Both Fox News and MTV are extremely good at what they do: aggregating a high concentration of similar people to resell to advertisers. MTV gets heat because they don’t play music videos anymore; Fox gets heat before their definition of news isn’t what many regard to be fair and balanced. It’s a marketing disconnect which occurs when a cultural icon behaves differently than “we” think they should.

Fox News may not be “news” in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow. But I bet that William Randolph Hearst would be impressed.

Stewart and Colbert are right when they suggest you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV. As long as that healthy skepticism includes Comedy Central, we should all be ok.

Dave Zornow has worked as a media research consultant and applications developer at TNG Research for 20 years. He publishes MediaNewsAndViews and the hyperlocal Website NyackNewsAndViews.

See also:

• Fox News Freaks Out Over Stewart/Colbert Rally, PoliticusUSA
• Can Fox News be ‘fair and balanced’ if News Corp. gives to Republicans?, CSMonitor.com
• Rally For Sanity: They Also Want Their Country Back, Mediate.com

Well, it’s that time of year again. A little after Wimbledon and just before the MLB pennant races heat up, a lot of people with foreign wear spandex and race bicycles crazy fast up and down mountains in a far away land we love to visit almost as much as Fox News loves to criticize. Beginning today in Rotterdam and ending three weeks later in Paris, it’s the Tour de France.

Over the next three weeks, we’ll be writing race commentary, explanation and interpretation of both the race and the ratings. Don’t know a “domestique” from a demo rating? Stick with us to learn about the race — and its media and marketing impact.

Whitey Chapin offers this preview of what to expect when the race’s first 9 km stage kicks off in Rotterdam on Saturday:

Saturday July 3, 2010 –Lance Armstrong has certainly created even more drama with his recent announcement that this year’s Tour de France would be his last. Winning the Tour one more time has been Lance’s goal over the past year. From daily training to racing in competitions ranging from the Tour of Luxembourg to the Tour of Switzerland, Lance Armstrong devotes 12 months a year to being on the podium in Paris.

Armstrong’s influence dominates the Versus cable network, which signed on for cycling coverage years ago based primarily on Lance’s popularity. Similarly, RadioShack created and sponsored a full cycling team solely for Lance Armstrong’s pursuit of another Tour de France title.

RadioShack’s new team was formed a year ago after Armstrong’s one-year association with Team Astana. Lance had returned to cycling after several years off following his record 7 victories at the Tour de France. Team Astana signed Lance on, but there was immediate conflict with teammate Alberto Contador. Last year at the Tour, Contador won the race (his second title), as Armstrong finished 3^rd in his return. The team was divided as Contador rode away from the pack for the victory against the team’s directions on how the race should proceed.

Versus achieved superlative results in last year’s Tour with Armstrong versus the year before without him. TV delivery was up 134%, and online impressions were up 117%. RadioShack stated publicly that their goal in sponsoring Lance’s cycling team was to both launch a new creative platform and to further support cancer causes and Lance’s Livestrong charity.

So here we are in 2010 with the reputations of Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Versus and Radio Shack ready to be recast again. Ratings are sure to go up again. From a marketing perspective, while there are 198 riders who will race in the Tour, there are only two who matter.

Nielsen’s 2009 revenue was flat — albeit $4.8 billion worldwide. Operating income fell dropped 72 percent to $116 million from $421 million in 2008 mostly due to restructuring and accounting charges.

During 2009 Nielsen sold it’s EDI movie measurement service to Rentrak and a handful of B-to-B magazines in the entertainment business including Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, Hollywood Reporter and Billboard. Additionally, Nielsen pulled the plug on radio industry bible Radio And Records last June.

In March 2009, the company announced plans to cut 1600 jobs or about five percent of its headcount.

Sources: Crain’s NY, 3/30/2009, Yahoo News, Mediabistro, 6/4/2009, NY Times 12/10/2009

Apple’s iPad, a supersized iPhone tablet computer, has inspired hope and fear from print publishers as well as ample discussion about how this latest innovation will save or slay magazines and newspapers. Here’s a 2005 flashback that presaged today’s announcement.

While relaxing with a good book and my iPod this weekend, I drifted off to sleep. And I had an amazing dream.

It was one of those dreams that spring from your last conscious thought. I had been thinking about the new video iPod and what a holiday great gift it would make. I’d also just read about the Washington Post posting their video podcasts on the iTunes Web site. I mused about how you could now get almost any conceivable content from almost any media online….

In my dream it was all true. Even magazines, the mother lode of great content, were now available in iTunes. I dreamed that I could get editorial content packaged like cable – buying a tier of 100 titles for a reasonable $30 a month which included “gotta have” books bundled with “might be nice to read ones,” too. It was all there to read online, on a PDA, a notebook or a video iPod.

In my dream, magazines publishers decided to work together because they found a rising tide of incremental revenue really did lift all boats. And by looking beyond the covers, newsstands sales, circulation and glossy pages by which they have traditionally defined themselves, they had created a new revenue stream that didn’t cannibalize their current subscriber base. Furthermore, these media visionaries had kindled* a new reading boom in America by stealing an idea from amazon.com. By including “people like you have also read” recommendations in their online iTunes storefront, magazine publishers had increased customer satisfaction, reduced churn and extended their brands into a new space. The first mass media was reborn, iTuning into new audiences while simultaneously lowering production and distribution costs. Ad sales profited too, as targeted banner ads, based on the interests I demonstrated in previous editorial selections, were included alongside the online copy.

I suddenly awoke and realized it was all just a dream. I rubbed my eyes and smiled recalling my short-lived editorial adventure. Then I turned my attention back to the book I had been reading before falling asleep, “The Gilded Dinosaur.”

Dave Zornow is president of TNG Research, a media research and applications development company that works with media sellers and research providers.  This story was originally published in the Cynopsis:Weekender newsletter, 11/3/05

* Editor’s note: I believe the use of the word “kindle-d” in this Nov, 2005 article about making magazine content more mobile was random. But it is funny how things turn out!

By Peter M. Gordon

The first thing I remember about that summer was the endless rain. Days and days of it left streams swollen and mud everywhere. The sun barely peeped through the clouds the entire month of August. Then I remember the refugees clogging the roads, hungry, buying food when they could, begging when they couldn’t. The entire county felt like it had been visited by a plague of soggy locusts with tie-dyed shirts and jeans. Abandoned cars blocked the shoulder for miles up and down the highways and back roads, as the pilgrims grimly trudged on.

The media coverage in Sullivan County was akin to that of a major disaster. I remember reports of starving, malnourished bodies rushed to emergency rooms, and wild uncorroborated stories of bulldozers trying to move immense piles of garbage running over teenagers in sleeping bags. Tales of violence rape, and drug abuse abounded. It seemed like hell on earth. That’s how I remember Woodstock.

During the summer of ’69 my family stayed, as we did for several years before and after, at B & K bungalow colony on old Route 17 on the outskirts of Monticello, New York. Sullivan County in the Catskills was still a prime vacation destination for New York residents. It contained resorts from grand hotels like the Concord and Grossingers to low end motels where air conditioning was still considered a novelty. In those days, in our colony, wives either didn’t have a job or worked for the school system so they could take the summer off. Fathers worked in the city, drove up on the weekends to spend time with the family, get drunk on Saturday night, and go back to the city.

Our colony sat on a piece of land facing Old Route 17, a two lane road that was once the main drag through the Catskills resort area. On the other side of the colony was the elevated span of the Quickway, the new route 17 New York State had built just a few years ago. Both those roads ran directly to Bethel, home of Woodstock. We could hike from our colony to the border of Bethel in 15 minutes.

I don’t remember hearing anything about the music festival a few miles down the road earlier in the summer. I was only 12 at the time and much more interested in the fortunes of the Mets, who were playing great baseball for the first time in my life. Even so, when the first hippies started driving by on Route 17, occasionally stopping to buy milk or bread at our colony’s store, I made sure I saw them. Mom and Dad had warned me about these cowards who were afraid to fight for their country like Dad did during World War II. They didn’t look that dangerous to me with their long hair (boys and girls) and colorful outfits. I thought they were cool.

Suddenly one day in August there were thousands of them, all going to Woodstock. Parents kept a close watch on their kids, particularly the older ones, for fear the hippies would seduce them with drugs and free sex. Some of the teenage counselors that stayed there during the summer did get permission to go and set out in a blue station wagon with sleeping bags and a cooler. They came back a few hours later. They gave up. It was just too hard to get close to the music. I thought Woodstock was a big bust – the joke was on all those poor hungry hippies. Imagine my surprise when I learned it defined a generation.

I’ve read a lot of media tributes to Woodstock during this 40th Anniversary Year. I wish I had a dollar for every news anchor that said, “if you remember the sixties you probably weren’t there.” . If you were there, you were probably muddy, cold and hungry for most of it; if you didn’t make it you spent the weekend living in your car.

After Woodstock the hippies went back to their college, jobs, and families and lived their lives. Unfortunately, we did not see the great outpouring of peace and love that Woodstock supposedly promised. The real lesson of Woodstock was that music festivals could attract big crowds. Better organized promoters who planned for large crowds could make a lot of money. Bonaroo, Burning Man, and even the Warp Tour are the real legacies of Woodstock today.

Woodstock was really the end of an era. The gentle smoke of pot was giving way to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. The bungalow colony era was ending, too. Mothers were getting full time jobs, and couldn’t afford to spend the summer away from work. With two incomes, families could afford more exotic vacations, and pretty soon the Catskill resorts became ghost towns, waiting for the miracle of casino gambling or other schemes to revive them.

Woodstock is probably the best known example of the sixties’ generation penchant for self-absorption. I plan to celebrate 1969 by remembering the Mets triumph and man’s landing on the moon.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant.

“Up to half of all Web users delete their cookies at least once a month,” says John Lovett, a senior analyst at Forrestter Research. Although Forrester’s results are at the high end of several studies, the 30 percent estimate at the low end of syndicated study results still troubles researchers and advertisers.

Lovett says that 21 percent of users delete cookies for no particular reason. And 55 percent kill their cookies because they mistakenly believe that keeping cookies will slow down their PC’s behavior (please tell your Aunt Gladys the truth: deleting cookies won’t make your 386 Windows 3.1 PC run any faster).

But deleting cookies does affect publishers’ unique visit counts and calculated conversion rates. For advertisers, it distorts reach estimates and frequency capping algorithms.

Gian Flgoni Chairman of comScore, cites different estimates, but agrees with the trend the frequency of monthly deletion is increasing.

Fewer persistent cookies — and the inability to identify the same user on multiple computers or platforms — inflates unique visitor counts. Doubleclick Product Manager Sean Harvey says his company models these data to adjust for deletions. The IAB has worked to address this industry issue through education and best practices guidelines.

Concerned that cookies are becoming an endangered species — whose life and death affects advertising — panelists urged researchers to write their representatives in Congress about the value of cookies and offer a tutorial on their benefits.