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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: puborectalis who wrote (654151)	5/8/2012 1:20:24 AM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1577886

The Washington Post Is In Even Worse Shape Than You Think Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff 5/07/2012 forbes.com The Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%. Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them, they held a secret meeting with the paper’s president, Steve Hills — without inviting executive editor Marcus Brauchli. Now, are you ready for the really bad news? Check out the chart below from AppData.com. It shows the number of monthly average users (MAU) of the Washington Post Social Reader, an app that encourages Facebook users to read and recommend articles from the Post’s website. Nice Guy, Finishing Last: How Don Graham Fumbled the Washington Post Co. Jeff Bercovici Forbes Staff For those readers who suffer from chart-blindness, AppData shows Social Reader’s MAU falling from 17.4 million to 9.2 million over the past 30 days. It would be hard to overstate the importance and centrality of the Social Reader to the Post’s strategy. When I interviewed the Post Co.’s chief digital officer, Vijay Ravindran, earlier this year he pointed to the app as one of the company’s most promising new products, a way of bringing precious new younger readers to a franchise that has been otherwise challenged to reach them. It’s in large part the promise of social-powered distribution that has induced Post chairman Don Graham to keep the paper’s digital editions free. This even though other newspapers are having real success with various types of paywalls, and even though Warren Buffett, the company’s biggest and most influential outside shareholder, has made it clear he thinks papers must charge for their digital content. In other words, if the trend in the chart above is genuine and not some kind of blip, the Post needs to completely reevaluate the assumptions underlying its digital distribution strategy. And fast. Update: It doesn’t seem to be a blip. Buzzfeed’s John Herrman notes that other Facebook-based media consumption apps, including the Guardian’s, are showing signs of audience collapse as well. Meanwhile, here’s what an AppData spokeswoman told me, via email. The data from AppData comes directly from Facebook. The data is accurate; no methodology/implementation change from AppData would cause the change. Facebook is constantly testing how social readers/open-graph-enabled apps appear and and how much distribution they get in the news feed. This may impact the active user counts for all social reading apps, including others like The Guardian. For example, it recently started grouping social reader stories in a “Trending Articles” aggregation. Many Facebook users are still learning about social reading apps, deciding whether they want to use them or not, and whether they want to share activity with their friends. The peak growth of the Washington Post Social Reader may have come from users trying it out, and since then has come back down.

To: puborectalis who wrote (654151)	5/8/2012 10:30:16 AM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1577886

This great, it will raise a whole generation of kids who will hate Democrats. Remember just tell your kids the Dems want to take your cup cakes away. Parents: Rule’s half-baked State’s junk food ban could take bite out of school fundraisers Bake sales, the calorie-laden standby cash-strapped classrooms, PTAs and booster clubs rely on, will be outlawed from public schools as of Aug. 1 as part of new no-nonsense nutrition standards, forcing fundraisers back to the blackboard to cook up alternative ways to raise money for kids. At a minimum, the nosh clampdown targets so-called “competitive” foods — those sold or served during the school day in hallways, cafeterias, stores and vending machines outside the regular lunch program, including bake sales, holiday parties and treats dished out to reward academic achievement. But state officials are pushing schools to expand the ban 24/7 to include evening, weekend and community events such as banquets, door-to-door candy sales and football games. [iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" name="i_middle" id="i_middle" bordercolor="#efefef" src="http://www.bostonherald.com/includes/processAds.bg?position=Middle&companion=Top,Right,Middle,Middle1,Bottom&page=bh.heraldinteractive.com%2Fnews%2Fregional%2Farticle" frameborder="0" height="250" scrolling="no" width="300"][/iframe] The Departments of Public Health and Education contend clearing tables of even whole milk and white bread is necessary to combat an obesity epidemic affecting a third of the state’s 1.5 million students. But parents argue crudites won’t cut it when the bills come due on athletic equipment and band trips. “If you want to make a quick $250, you hold a bake sale,” said Sandy Malec, vice president of the Horace Mann Elementary School PTO in Newtonville. Maura Dawley of Scituate said the candy bars her 15-year-old son brought to school to help pay for a youth group trip to Guatemala “sold like wildfire.” She worries the ban “would seriously affect the bottom line of the PTOs. “The goal is to raise money,” Dawley said. “You’re going to be able to sell pizza. You’re not going to get that selling apples and bananas. It’s silly.” Food fundraisers have helped send the renowned Danvers High School Falcon Band to the Rose Bowl Parade in California and the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Danvers Parents for Music Education sell fudge because “it still works,” said the group’s president, Matthew Desmond. “Even my wife will buy it.” Middleboro School Committeeman Brian Giovanoni, whose board will discuss the mandatory meal makeover Thursday night, said, “My concern is we’re regulating what people can eat, and I have a problem with that. I respect the state for what they’re trying to do, but I think they’ve gone off the deep end. I don’t want someone telling me how to do my job as a parent. ... Is the commonwealth of Massachusetts saying our parents are bad parents?” No, insists Dr. Lauren Smith, DPH’s medical director. “We’re not trying to get into anyone’s lunch box,” Smith told the Herald. “We know that schools need those clubs and resources. We want them to be sure and have them, but to do them a different way. We have some incredibly innovative, talented folks in schools who are already doing some impressive things, who serve as incontrovertible evidence that, yes, you can do this, and be successful at it.” State Sen. Susan Fargo (D-Lincoln), chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Public Health, said the problem of overweight children has reached “crisis” proportions. “If we didn’t have so many kids that were obese, we could have let things go,” Fargo said. “But,” she added, “this is a major public health problem and these kids deserve a chance at a good, long healthy life.”

To: puborectalis who wrote (654151)	5/8/2012 10:51:17 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577886

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday endorsed rival Mitt Romney, according to reports. Santorum urged supporters to back Romney. How Santorum must have hated making that endorsement...........one of the least convincing endorsements I have heard in say the last 20 years.