msb-0322 For Print Media, The Sky IS Falling

msb-0322 For Print Media, The Sky IS Falling

Sam Cooke - "change going to come"
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Led Zeppelin - "Your Time Is Gonna Come"
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Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall
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intro

Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!

MSBPodcast is "not" any kind of a medical podcast.

It is by and for MSers.

Its purpose is to keep us entertained, to explain our symptoms, to remark on our discoveries, and to raise the general consciousness about our disease.

The path to illness is shadowy, murky and rough strewn.

The path to wellness is lit by the lamp of knowledge.

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I have a quick and easy, painless and too to figgin' nosy customer survey that I really, really, really need you to go and fill out.

You can go to my podcast page [ http://www.msbpodcast.com ], click on the button on the left hand side of the page and anonymously answer a few simple questions.

I really need this.

If you've already done this, thanks...

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Feedback comes first, so...

Happy fourth of July to all my American listeners.

Over in Newspaper land, things are looking pretty grim.

In some cases, "A Change Is Gonna Come", in others... "Your Time Is Gonna Come".

Google's "Ad Planner" is another nail in the coffin.

As Pink Floyd sang it: "Another brick in the wall."

---- "PIE IN THE SKY" by: "The Portraits" http://www.theportraits.info/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop us an email: "charles at MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Fire in the Sky" by: "Shakermaker" http://www.shakermaker.org/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: "charles (at) MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Home In The Sky" by: "Atomic Brother" http://atomicbrother.com/

"Thesis:"

The New York Times is running "this" [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23paper.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin ] article about how grim things look for our old friends the newswpapers.

The internet is eating the lunch off of their plates.

The worse part is that the vacuum is causing the implosion of something that never really had a business model.

The coexistence of advertising and the news was never more than a marriage of convenience. To quote "Liebling": [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Liebling ] "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Far more accurate was the quote that "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."

As long as newspapers had a lock on people's eyeballs, they were the only game in town that people could afford. (When the last time you saw an ad on television or, to a lesser degree, heard one on the radio that was not owned by some mega-corporate-conglomerate "Keiretsu" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu ].)

Now that the advertisers are freed by the internet and the culture of the web, from having to support newspapers, (and all that "stuff" which doesn't do anything for the sellers' bottom line,) after the oil price hike calamity, they're running away as far and as fast as their newly slimmed down pocketbooks can take them.

---- "Imitation of the Sky" by: "Bryan Scary & The Shredding Tears" http://www.myspace.com/bryanscary

"Synthesis:"

The internet and the web have broken the traditional uneasy alliance between business, which, I kid you not, I saw this with my own eyes in an old issue of "Life Magazine", [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Magazine ] ran ads for Flivvers, Flappers, Cakes and Coolers next to pictures of dirt poor Okies fleeing the Ozarks or the devastation that was the Dust Bowl in a photojournalism essay by "Margaret Bourke-White" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Bourke-White ].

Neither can have been terribly happy about the juxtraposition of consumerist wealth and abject poverty with the vapid expressions of "insouciant" indolence contrasting with the misery so deeply etched into the lines on the faces of those itinerant indigents.

No wonder the advertisers are running. They have a hard enough time making shit without running into "Tom Joad". [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapes_of_Wrath ]

And if you think the world isn't "full" of Tom Joads, you must be cowering in an abandoned "missile silo" [ http://www.siloworld.com/SITES%20FOR%20SALE/SitesForSale.htm ].

Okay, so where does that leave the sinking ship, the newspapers, now that the rats are jumping off.

They are being forced to compete for your attention along with everybody else.

But they're not like everbody else.

They enploy journalists, people who job is, or more to the point "was," to report the news.

Propagandists still have jobs because nobody lies right to you face unless they're paid to. Its just too much to ask.

Ad men still have jobs because... Well, if you were cynically inclined, I'd refer you to the last point. Lets just say that they still need to inform you of what their bosses have on sale.

Neophites, avuncular adepts and true believers in ... well anything... are on the internet; ranting, railing or raving about the objects of their obsession.

We fill blogs and wikis and keep up a constant barrage of banter, IM and tweets.

Some of it is good. Some of it is informed, some of it is legible and readable.

But some of it, most of it I'd say, would be ass-wipe, if I was inclined to treat my laptop that way.

Where does that leave the journalists?

I honestly don't know.

Its a "métier" that I have long admired but never held my skills and my passion up against. I wouldn't measure up.

I'm just an opinionated blogger and DJ who finds and plays podsafe tunes for myself and other MSers to listen to for a couple of hours a week.

I hope I'm entertaining as well as having some musical taste and that I can entice the niche players out there, the people who make stuff for us MSers to advertise their wares on this podcast.


---- "Watching the sky fall" by: "Hugh Campbell" http://www.tamusic.co.nr/

"Conclusion:"

I'm also wondering if I might need a change of formats.

I think I'd like to try to make the Monday podcast a record of a 'live call-in' show that I would record on Sunday evenings in my time zone.

What do you think?

Seriously ... Write "me" [ mailto:charles@msbpodcast.com ] and I can see what I could do by September's "MS Self Help Group" meeting.

Maybe I could also enveigle the occasional doctor, clinician, drug manufacturer ... somebody we can listen to... to take part. (I'm not a salesman. I can't sell an ad on this or any other medium to save my life, but maybe if they come on through "Skype" [ http://www.Skype.com/ ] and talk to/at/with me, they'll think about advertising on podcasts. [Hey, it worked with "Joel Goldman". { http://www.joelgoldman.com/books/shakedown.asp }])

We have a show going with an good audience of sometimes over a hundred downloads per day, (sometime quite a few more times than that but I figure that they're iTunes subscribers pulling off the old episodes,) and okay they're from all over the planet but the lions' share is from here in the 'States, a sizable fraction from Canada and Britain and a few in Australia and New Zeland. (I suspect that they're using these podcasts to learn English in India, China and Japan since I have the complete text along with the audio, [the tunes are just a bonus to language students :-}])

I'll be happy if I can convert some of "you" to the same using "iTunes" [ http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=120932170 ] but going back to the "site" [ http://www.MSBPodcast.com ] to catch the YouTube videos I have selected.

I'll be even happier to get some sponsors to use the model I'm creating for this podcast to advertise their goods and services.

---- "Fell Out Of The Sky" by: "State Shirt" http://www.stateshirt.net/

Outro