For a monthly magazine, I maintain, unless you’re in porn, there’s no money in doing a tablet edition of a magazine. Now we can see, and the results are there, that tablet growth — it just ain’t happening. We’ve been living with tablets for long enough now that we can see that people who like to read on tablets read on tablets, and those who want to read on print read on print. We can see there continue to be more people who read on paper than off of a backlit screen.
And again, there’s no money in adding those extra editions. There’s the production cost: I think everyone was fooled in the beginning by thinking ‘Oh, we can just do one version for Apple and that’s it.’ Now there are myriad different tablets, different operating systems, different formats, which means that what everyone thought just meant posting PDFs, now the demands mean there being moving video, streams, and all kinds of things.
We all know that it takes an extra six or seven staff to make a tablet edition and do it well. And we can’t recover that. The money’s not there every month to recoup that. An advertiser is not going to pay that much more money just because you’re offering them a tablet edition. In fact, they want it as added value. We haven’t found a way, and I haven’t seen anyone who’s making it work. And, certainly on this side of the Atlantic, you’re seeing a lot of the monthly magazines retreat from their tablet editions completely, because it’s just not bearing the fruit that we thought.
While the approach has only been tested in mice, researchers said on Wednesday it proved surprisingly good at clearing tangles of plaques linked to Alzheimer’s in the animals’ brains and improving their memory, as measured by tests such as navigating a maze.
In the past, high-energy ultrasound has been combined with injected microbubbles, which vibrate in response to sound waves, to get drugs across the so-called blood brain barrier.
But the new research, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is the first demonstration that ultrasound alone might have a beneficial effect on the memory-robbing condition.
March 12
By the end of yesterday, I told Kate that I was done with speaking, and would be happy if I didn’t have to talk to anyone else for awhile. Despite that, yesterday was oddly thrilling — going to the OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) studios and having a conversation “on mic” remains fun in a weird, oh, is this what I do now? way even after the first time it’s happened, and then having an hour+ phone conversation about Jack Kirby with someone way smarter than I am (even though I worry that I just rampaged over whatever she wanted to talk about, all the time) — it was great, even with the panic about making both appointments due to travel matters, even with the stress that it put on the rest of my workday.
I feel as if it entirely distended and ruined my week, though; this doesn’t feel like a Thursday at all, but another Monday even though there wasn’t a weekend in there at all. Or maybe it feels like the most Friday of Fridays, because there’s all the exhaustion but none of the relief of knowing that you can sleep in and relax tomorrow? Either way: this is going to end up being a strange, wonderful week in the end.
Story creation could be interactive. There have been crowdfunding platforms such as Spot.us and Beacon, but nothing that operates on quite the level of granularity and speed envisioned by Jay Rosen’s explainthis.org, where users type in questions for journalists to answer. There are thousands of variations on the idea of having the users direct the reporting, everything from demand-driven production to a quiz after each story that says, “what should we report on next?” The point is to put journalists and users in an interactive loop. Good reporters listen anyway, but I want something stronger, a sort of contract with the audience where they know exactly how to be heard. For example: ‘Our reporter will investigate the top-voted question each week.’