Phil Bronstein, Editor at Large, Hearst Group
Explore Posterous
Search posterous
Search all posts and users. Type a name, type a favorite song title, whatever! See what comes up.
More posterous blogs
Here are posterous posts filed under hearst...
allowing foods without based supermarket nutrition
Review: The Supermarket Diet by Janis Jibrin
Title - The Supermarket Diet Author - Janis Jibrin Format - Trade Paperback, 288 pages Publisher - Hearst Release Date - January 1, 2007 ISBN - 1588166570 and 978-1588166579 Brought to you by nutrition experts at Good Housekeeping, the Supermarket Diet offers a groundbreaking approach to navigating the supermarket aisles...allowing-> foods-> without-> based-> supermarket-> nutrition
- Review: The Supermarket Diet by Janis Jibrin Title - The Supermarket Diet Author - Janis Jibrin Format - Trade Paperback, 288 pages Publisher - Hearst Release Date - January 1, 2007 ISBN - 1588166570 and 978-1588166579 Brought to you by nutrition experts at Good Housekeeping, the Supermarket Diet offers a groundbreaking approach to navigating the supermarket aisles...
- Save Money Buying Organic Locally Grown Food At The Farmers Market Organic foods are all the rage these days for good reason. They are healthy, fresh, devoid of many harmful pesticides and chemicals, and don't pollute the environment. Unfortunately, organically grown foods can be anywhere from 10% to 100% more expensive than their non-organic counterparts, making it difficult for families on...
Former Fat Guy Rob Cooper On Diet and Nutrition Last week I posted a fitness interview with Rob Cooper. He is the guy that lost 300 lbs the natural way. This week we will focus on his diet and nutrition. We can stand to learn something from his weight loss journey. Health wise, I think continual learning is crucial...
Eat Smart's Nutrition and Digital Food Scale This is not a paid review, just an in-depth look at a product Israel and I are interested in buying. He was able to email the Vice President and secure FMU readers an 11% discount off the $75 Nutrition Scale price. Simply enter the code "UNLEASHED" when you check out....
Way #38: Move beyond the fear that your “food world” is NOW severely limited on your way to Gluten-Free Simplicity. Way #38: Move beyond the fear that your “food world” is NOW severely limited on your way to Gluten-Free Simplicity. OK.. I know... I can't stand it when someone tells me, "You can't do that any more." Oh.. I get soooo upset at that sometimes. So for me when...
What I Learned About the Economy From Watching Food, Inc. (dir. Robert Kenner, 2009) NB: As you can imagine from watching a film like Food, Inc., it can be hard to separate the emotion and just report "calmly" on the plain facts presented by the film. Originally I wrote this the same day I saw it, but I've since gone back and edited it...
How to Eat Low Fat Without Low Taste One of the main things that keeps people from trying low fat foods is the fact that a lot of them taste, well, pretty bad. It's all too easy to brush it off as "rabbit food," and convince yourself that you need real food. However, there are many low...
Be Lazy and Frugal: Get Take Out Food Without Breaking the Bank Take-out food, in my opinion, is the best thing since sliced bread. Seriously- who doesn't like the convenience of picking up dinner for the family on your way home? No need to spend a half hour preparing it, just open the cartons and containers and enjoy time around the family...
Music Blogging Adding music capabilities to your blog, your myspace, or your livejournal can be a really excellent way for you to add atmosphere to the pages, further personalizing them for those who visit. When it is done right, adding music to your blog is something that can make it unique and...
5 Simple Solutions to Weight Loss Are you tired of hard, complicated diets that simply do not produce the results that you are looking for? You are absolutely not alone, because there are people all over the world that are yearning for simple solutions to weight loss that will drive results. Research has shown that 98...
5 Online Store Search Results
Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Snacks, Treats Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Foods, Meals Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Home-Based Businesses Businesses for Sale Opportunities
Bars Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Bearish Or Bullish? That Is The Question Normally, I don’t like to talk about the day to day market performance or weekly economic indicators. But a change in the nature of my work makes this more relevant and the people I’m surrounded with talk about it at length. And no one can agree on where we’re...- Work, But What Suits Your Needs For people who are keen on working, and earning an income but cannot or do not wish to get into a routine job, there are various options available today. Everything from home based businesses to online opportunities awaits people willing to spend a few hours and put in a bit...
Gym Membership Renewal Saga : Too funny!! I have an absolute penchant for 'true life' screw-ups, and never more so than when they come packaged in letters and emails. If you have been following Daily Screw-Ups for a while you will no doubt remember the hilarious Bricklayer's Accident Report, The Hilarious and Infamous Flexi Wings Letter and...
It's official: recession good for the atmosphere. One of the good things that have come out of the global economic downturn is the unparalleled fall in greenhouse gas emissions. A recent study sponsored by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has stated that the recession has in fact provided a “unique opportunity” to move the world away...
5 Online Store Search Results
Foods, Meals Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Home-Based Businesses Businesses for Sale Opportunities
Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Bars Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Snacks, Treats Foods, Bars Snacks Weight Management
Three Ways Falling in Love is Good For Your Budget I always thought that when M and I moved in together it would be harder to keep a joint budget then when I was on my own. And while it may be a little more complicated than having just one account and worrying about your own expenses, it turns...
Pork slices with apples Here's an interesting yet easy way to serve pork slices, with apples! It helps to cover up the taste or smell or pork that some people may not enjoy. It's also rather refreshing to cook with fruits and some herbs. Easy peasy to make, this pork slices with apples recipe...- The Importance Of Dog Dental Care by Moses Wright Dog dental care is often ignored by dog owners unless the dog develops a dental problem. Routine dental care can prevent dental problems. A dogs teeth should be brushed every day. Like humans, dogs can develop dental problems including dog dental disease and infections due to a...
College student loans come with flexibility I enjoyed reading the M-network answers to the question posed by Leah last week. There is a lot of good information in the M-network responses and you will find an argument for almost every viewpoint in the comment thread. I have discovered that the comment threads here at Gather...
5 Ways to Stay Out of Debt When Unemployed The following guest post was submitted by Knight Hooson. Knight was born and educated in Canada before moving to Great Britain in 2002. Now based in London, he writes for The Credit Letter where he blogs about managing credit cards and personal finance. When not working, he enjoys learning about...- All the money in the world, part 3 The purpose of this post is to look at the two scenarios I laid out earlier (winning a million dollars and being filthy rich), and analyzing how my choices in those two scenarios differ and what I can learn about this whole exercise. First of all, one big difference was...
- The Perfect Gift Ideas Is there a perfect gift or idea? Probably not, but there is the next-to perfect ideas that will work for anyone, and those gifts will accommodate men, women, children, and pets. How do you buy the perfect gift is always a question in mind. One of the best solutions I've...
You can't trust in money during a storm I believe that God orders all events and this belief is a comfort, not a threat. Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose". So how does this affect my...- Hitaway Training System A tennis training system that costs less than $30? It actually can happen and with this one, we were really surprised at the overall quality. When we got the box, we were pretty skeptical, after all, many training devices will cost at least a few hundred dollars, if not thousands....
Why Do You Need a Blog For Your Company? If you’ve been hearing a lot about the corporate blogging trend and wondering how you can make it work for your company, there are specific reasons that having a blog is very important. It really is worth the extra effort that goes into the creation and management of the blog,...
Blog Search Query Tags:
weight loss success protein bar fiber content straight forward approach trade paperback meal preparation diet revolution different foods freezer good nutrition hearst nutrition experts
Sub-$300 Kindle coming soon?
Despite iSuppli's announcement a few days ago that put the Kindle 2's gross margin at 50%, media has given it little fanfare, mostly pushing out sanitized reiterations of the same report; surprising, considering that 50% is not only double that typically found in consumer electronics, but also more than twice what Amazon has been earning in recent years.
The iSuppli teardown demonstrates Kindle's success of course, but its implications are wider. Fifty percent margins imply that a sub-$300 device is already easily within Amazon's reach. Even if the company were to go as low as $260--which I'd imagine would be much too low, but illustrative of the flexibility at hand--it'd earn a 30% margin, healthy for the industry and much better than average Amazon. With greater scale as the Kindle goes mass, Amazon would earn back margin previously forfeited.
This points toward a much higher likelihood that a sub-$300 Kindle will hit the market in Amazon's next iteration, in which the company might even begin price discriminating, selling Kindle 3 at the higher price we're used to and Kindle 2 at much lower levels. That the device only makes up 1% of Amazon's revenues today in light of heavyweights like B&N, Hearst, and News Corp all threatening to enter the hardware space, only point toward that same direction.
Death of the Modern Newspaper
The death of a modern newspaper is a real-time, multimedia event.
When journalists on the Rocky Mountain News were summoned to their Denver newsroom on February 26 to be told they were working on their final edition, they relayed the announcement through live blogs, online videos, slide shows of tearful colleagues and a minute-by-minute stream of updates on Twitter. “It’s odd to cover your own funeral,” read one tweet.
Bad news about America’s newspapers is tumbling out too fast for their presses to keep up. The closure of “the Rocky” after 150 years capped a week in which the Journal Register Company and the 180-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer joined the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy proceedings.
Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle and on Monday said it would make the Seattle Post-Intelligencer an online-only publication. Gannett, owner of USA Today, has followed The New York Times in slashing its dividend to preserve cash. Titles from the venerable Cincinnati Post to the six-year-old New York Sun have folded.
Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print’s role as intermediary between advertisers and customers. The crisis is affecting not just newsprint: most news magazines, broadcast news outlets and newswires are also suffering.
Nowhere, however, has the impact been greater than in the US newspaper industry, where civic identity and an often monopolistic grip over local classified advertising had sustained an array of titles with journalistic resources envied by many national newspapers in other countries.
Dwindling circulation and advertising are nothing new but until recently the hope was that newspapers might be saved by private ownership or cost-saving roll-ups of titles under fewer, stronger corporate umbrellas.
The bankruptcies and closures prompted by a near one-third decline in advertising revenues since their 2005 peak have shattered those theories, leaving owners looking for new ideas. But what prospect is there of a solution when Barclays Capital predicts a further 21 per cent fall in newspaper advertising revenues this year alone?
A debate playing out in the pages of the properties it most concerns has focused on two new hopes: that charitable endowments may replace commercial business models and that readers who have grown accustomed to finding news for free online can be made to pay.
“Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance,” David Swensen and Michael Schmidt from Yale University’s endowment argued in The New York Times this year. The more than $200m (£143m, €155m) annual cost of its newsroom could be covered, they estimated, by a $5bn endowment that would guarantee its independence. Extrapolating from Yale’s calculations, the Nieman Journalism Lab estimated that it might cost $114bn to subsidise every US paper.
Charitable models exist already: ProPublica, producing “investigative journalism in the public interest”, is supported by the Sandler Foundation and other trusts. MinnPost.com was set up in Minneapolis-St Paul with funding from local families and foundations.
Outside the US, the state is at times stepping in. France is injecting €600m ($776m, £554m) over three years by doubling government advertising in newspapers and offering tax breaks for publishers’ digital investments. UK local publishers are lobbying for looser competition rules to allow consolidation.
The idea of charitable or state assistance makes many uneasy. Subsidies could create unfair competition for commercial rivals. In any event, many endowments are already suffering market-driven declines. “The idea of charitable endowments is a bit of a red herring,” says Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor who writes the influential Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
Two prominent US newspapers are supposedly sheltered by not-for-profit parents, he says, but The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned its print edition and the Poynter Institute is selling the Congressional Quarterly to support its St Petersburg Times flagship: “There’s nothing about that form of ownership that insulates you.”
Instead, the notion of charging for news online is gathering momentum after a cover story by a self-confessed “old print junkie” in Time magazine. Walter Isaacson returned to the title where he was once managing editor to argue that news should no longer be free online.
Until now, only specialised news organisations such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and trade publications have succeeded in generating meaningful online subscription revenues. With online advertising growth stalling, Mr Isaacson wrote, general news outlets needed to create “an iTunes-easy method of micropayment”, offering their product for a nickel an article or a dime a day in the same way as Apple’s music store sells tracks and albums.
Past attempts to charge for individual stories have gone nowhere, but his call came as many owners were concluding that their decision to chase online advertising rather than subscription revenues was not paying off.
Cablevision, the owner of Newsday, and Hearst, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, have both said they will start charging readers of their websites. Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times, hinted last week that it would revive attempts to charge for content, 18 months after ending such an initiative. “We have renewed our analysis of how paid content can augment our core advertising business,” he told a university audience.
With the typical item on the Google News home page linking to hundreds of similar, free stories about the same subject, charging for most news will be difficult “unless the product dramatically changes”, says Anthea Stratigos of Outsell, a publishing research firm. To succeed, papers will therefore have to provide content that readers find more valuable than the mass of commoditised information.
“We must put staff resources behind building those channels of interest that have the greatest potential: those built around pro sports teams, moms and high school sports, to name a few,” Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, told staff.
Bluffton Today, launched by Morris Communications after it shut the Carolina Morning News, is seen as one way forward: it is hyper-local, with reader-written blogs on its website. But as one of a handful of online initiatives to have spawned a successful print iteration, it represents a model that could have new followers.
Collaboration between publishers on an iTunes for news may, however, be one of several remedies impossible under antitrust restrictions designed in an era where policymakers were more worried about over-mighty media owners colluding than the fragility of the fourth estate. Mergers of neighbouring newspapers, or between print and broadcast owners in the same market, have been blocked for decades.
Media owners express little hope that this will change under President Barack Obama, who campaigned on diversifying media ownership. “It is as if regulators went to sleep during the Eisenhower administration and woke up staring blankly at an iPhone,” John Chachas, co-head of the media practice at Lazard, which is advising on several newspaper restructurings, told the Dallas Morning News last month.
Newspapers should be exempted from antitrust restrictions for long enough to establish “an industry-wide system to track and charge for the reuse of their content” by online aggregators, he argued.
Charging for news online could help publishers’ top lines but that would address only one of their problems. The spate of dire news shows the industry’s challenges fall into three broad categories: the mismatch between costs and revenues; inappropriate capital structures; and oversupply. Any hope of a durable news business rests on tackling all three.
“One inescapable conclusion of our study is that our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today,” Mr Swartz told his staff: “It is equally inescapable that during good times our industry developed business practices that were at best inefficient.”
Jonathan Knee, director of the media programme at Columbia Business School, likens newspapers’ “antiquated” cost structures to those in the airline industry. Labour unions, the inefficient use of printing plants and distribution networks and journalists’ frequent reluctance to ask whether what they want to cover serves the interests of readers have all kept costs high, he argues.
The industry is having to rethink its assumptions, outsourcing printing and distribution and carrying advertising on front pages that long resisted it. The cuts to costs have been sweeping. McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald, has announced three restructuring plans since June, involving more than 4,000 job cuts in all.
A concern voiced by union leaders and investors alike is that indiscriminate cuts will only make it harder to produce content valued by consumers, in print or online.
Several publishers are cutting national or foreign coverage to focus on local areas, relying on newswires for the rest. Five papers in New York and New Jersey plan to share articles and pictures. Again, competition law may complicate further collaboration.
But it is servicing debt that represents one of the largest costs for many publishers. A Moody’s analysis of six large operators in November found all but Gannett had debts above four times their earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. In Tribune’s case, the multiple was 12.3. “A number of these newspaper companies are still reasonably good businesses but the problem is they took on too much debt,” says Mr Mutter.
Others estimate that industry profitability is even higher. Mr Knee says newspapers enjoy margins well above those of film studios or music labels providing a cushion against falling revenues. But to reduce debt multiples to a more sustainable 2-3 times ebitda, tough restructuring will be required. “In some cases bankruptcy may be a good option,” Ms Stratigos says, because it allows publishers to deal with union contracts, pension liabilities and other operational costs.
For some publishers, closing more titles will be the only viable option. The disappearance of some competitors from an oversupplied and shrinking market may help the industry, however. Dean Singleton, owner of Denver’s other paper, said when the Rocky closed: “This dramatically improves the finances of the Denver Post.”
The prospect of fewer, more narrowly focused titles facing less competition, employing fewer journalists and charging readers who once enjoyed their content for free is an unpalatable one for many. It may also be a troubled industry’s best hope.
In a country where a free press is enshrined by constitutional amendment and newspapers measure success by Pulitzer prizes as well as profits, concern about failing titles is coupled with anxiety about what impact the industry’s financial troubles will have on journalism.
American journalism is “under enormous stress”, Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times, recently told a university audience. Quality reporting, whether on local government or Iraq, was becoming harder to pay for and “the immediate future looks, at minimum, grim”.
The damage already done to newsroom resources is spelt out in a report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, released on Monday. By the end of 2009, US dailies will employ 20-25 per cent fewer journalists than in 2001; foreign staff have suffered even deeper cuts; and half of the states in the country no longer have a newspaper covering Congress.
While some online-only newsrooms offered “solid journalism in niche areas of interest”, these and the new voices of citizen journalists and bloggers are in aggregate “far from compensating for the losses in coverage in traditional newsrooms”. The limited resources of most online news organisations could be finished off by a single lawsuit.
Not everyone is alarmed by the changes. A separate Pew study last week found that only 43 per cent of Americans thought that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community a lot. A similar number, 42 per cent, said they would not miss their local paper at all if it were to disappear, even though newspapers remain the second largest source of local news after television, well ahead of radio and the internet.
The dilemma for proprietors is that cutting editorial costs, while often a necessary response to falling revenues, risks alienating more customers. “The core journalistic values have to be there for the product to perform,” cautions Anthea Stratigos, a publishing consultant. This can still be achieved, other analysts say, if news organisations focus their limited resources well.
Pew offers one piece of positive news for “legacy” news providers, whose online audiences grew far more last year than did those for new media. “The old norms of traditional journalism continue to have value,” it concludes.
But it has one further demoralising message: “Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online,” it says. Journalists, in other words, do not even have the consolation of being able to blame others for their woes.
Not long ago, freesheets were seen as the nemesis of the paid-for newspaper. Now it seems at least as likely that the free newspaper model will be the first to fail, writes Ben Fenton. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, which publishes more than 100 free titles around the UK, says: “Free newspapers are in the frontline trenches of this war, simply because they only have advertising revenues.”
Across Europe, newspaper groups are struggling to cope with advertiser migration to the internet as well as recession. Both represent the most serious threat of their type that the industry has faced in peacetime, Mrs Bailey says.
It is noticeable that companies with the most serious threats to their existence have a strong element of free newspapers in their portfolio. Mecom, the UK-listed publisher with operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Scandinavia, has postponed talks with its creditors as it struggles to sell off assets.
Last month, Metro International, the world’s largest publisher of free papers, announced plans for a rights offer after admitting it had breached its debt covenants and did not have sufficient working capital for the next 12 months.
Metro, which is Swedish-controlled and has daily readership of more than 18m from 81 editions in 22 countries, was looking to raise SKr550m ($65m, £46m, €50m) through its issue to shareholders. But later in February it announced it had received a takeover approach. Metro had already suspended operations of its fully-owned titles in Spain.
In the UK, Trinity Mirror and the rival Johnston Press, which between them publish around 230 freesheets, have both released dismal results in recent months, where the only bright spots were increases in circulation revenue at their paid-for titles.
Simon Baker, analyst for Credit Suisse, says that for regional newspaper groups in Europe, demand is still relatively strong and it is the advertising inventory that is really hurting.
“The real solution for newspapers is to increase cover price to a new equilibrium to reflect better the balance between the consumer who really wants to read their content, nand they really do. and the declining advertising demand,” he says. “Obviously, for a regional newspaper publisher for whom the freesheet was the business model, that is a fundamental challenge.”
Free papers were successful against paid-for incumbents because of their cheapness to produce. Nothing, however, that print has so far been able to think of is anything like as nimble as the internet.
