Professor Levine's Marketing Class

From Paul...

I don't know much about geography...or marketing. But that doesn't keep me from lecturing. Today, class, a little quiz. Let's say you own a restaurant and you charge $20 for your grilled salmon. (Or, in the case of Jim Born's restaurant, a slab of baby-back ribs).
With the recession, business stinks. Therefore, class, do you:

(a) Reduce the size of the salmon?
(b) Raise the price from $20 to $30?
(c) Give away your prized orange souffle, even if the diner doesn't order an entree?
(d) Fire half your cooks and servers?
(e) All of the above?

I don't know the correct answer. But The New York Times has chosen (e). The latest move is to raise the newsstand price by a third, from $1.50 to $2.00, this in the face of lethal circulation and advertising losses, severe staff cuts, a reduced news hole and, of course, the newspaper industry's suicidal decision to give their orange souffle away on the Internet.

Why is the Times doing this? You don't see Chrysler raising car prices? My guess is this. The Times must have done a marketing study, which concluded that casual readers have already been weeded out. People still shelling out their shekels for the paper are the die-hards. They don't care if the paper costs $1.50 or $2.00. They've got to have the paper. I fall into that category and have been a Times reader since the days when my parents subscribed by mail. The paper would come two days late, but we still read it. Of course that was before television. Or radio. Or the telegraph.

How much would you pay for your local (or national) newspaper?

DOES A TABBY COUNT?

Question on my application for an umbrella insurance policy: "Do you maintain on the premises an exotic animal such as a tiger?"

YET ANOTHER CHEERY ASSESSMENT OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Publishing bigwig Tina Brown, currently editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, had this to say at Book Expo, according the Jacket Copy blog of the Los Angeles Times:

“Magazine articles are the new books,” Tina Brown said, referring to the public’s shrinking appetite for long-form publishing and looking like Lady Di in her chic bob and magenta power suit.

THINGS I LEARNED WHILE LOOKING UP OTHER THINGS

If you're like me, you're doing research on the Internet and stumble across something more interesting. Soon, you forget what you were looking for, and you're hip-deep in the irrelevant, but fun material.

I can't remember what I was looking for over the weekend, but I stumbled across mini-profiles of every inmate on Florida's Death Row. There are a couple mathematical errors in the list, compiled by the Florida Sun-Sentinel, but according to my count, 23 inmates have been on Death Row for 30 years or more.

This friendly fellow is Gary Alvord, 62, convicted of first degree murder in 1974. One look at Alvord, and I'm glad Jim Born is out there protecting us...when he isn't writing.

LOS ANGELES MORONS BUILD A NEW SCHOOL

California is broke. The City of Los Angeles just cut salaries by 10% across the board. Fifty-percent of public high school students drop out or are thrown out of school. So what does the School District do? Build a new high school for $87 million. Oh, wait. There were cost overruns. The actual price of the new school is $232 million! Yes, it's a showplace. It's Disney World. It's the World's Fair. It has a multi-million dollar decorative tower with no function, no rooms, nothing to teach our children. And yes, California is about to shitcan loads of teachers and Los Angeles just cancelled summer school due to budget shortfalls.

Apropos of nothing, the Los Angeles Times story about the school says it was originally to be built "on the sight of the district's old headquarters." Yes, the Times has fired many of its copy editors.

Paul