top-line research summaries

Print in the Mix:

Print in the Mix: A Clearinghouse of Research on Print Media Effectiveness brings together valuable information and research from a wide-range of credible sources on the role and effectiveness of print in the marketing media mix.

Covering all areas of print, including direct mail, magazines, custom publishing, newspapers, and more, Print in the Mix’s concise facts and top-line research summaries demonstrate print’s effectiveness and role in generating return on investment -- alone and working synergistically with other media to drive results.

Kathleen Parker on the enduring role of newspapers - washingtonpost.com

Kathleen Parker - Kathleen Parker on the enduring role of newspapers - washingtonpost.com

The good-news story
By Kathleen Parker
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Each time another report surfaces about the decline of newspapers, I feel like a death-row inmate counting the warden's footsteps.

The latest echo of doom arrived a few days ago: U.S. newspaper circulation dropped 10 percent from April through September, compared with the same period last year. The largest decrease recorded thus far, the decline was attributed to the usual -- advertising and readership lost to the Web. Industrywide, ad revenue, which constitutes newspapers' main source of income, is on track to drop $20 billion by 2010. Even so, most newspapers remain profitable, and circulation is astoundingly good, all things considered.

That's the delightful view of Alex Jones -- fourth-generation member of a newspaper-owning family, Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic and now author of "Losing the News." In his book, Jones, who also heads Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, manages to combine a dispassionate look at the news business with a page-turning story of traditional journalism's highs and lows.

Boston’s teens in print, powerful writing -

Boston’s teens in print - The Boston Globe  By Betty Southwick October 22, 2009

BOSTON IS known for its writers, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Phillis Wheatley to the more than 75 authors who will appear at the inaugural Boston Book Festival in Copley Square on Saturday. But there are thousands of other writers who are as diligent, creative, thoughtful, and articulate as their more famous peers. They are Boston’s high school students and their powerful stories, arguments, opinions, and analyses can be found in classrooms, newspapers, and literary magazines all over the city.

Students are doing all kinds of powerful writing, from personal narrative to analytic essays to journalistic exposes. They are using writing to understand everything from their school experiences to biology, literature, and history.

4th Annual Print Buyers Conference Will Save Your Firm Money

Print This Out and Hand It to Your Boss!

4th Annual Print Buyers Conference

November 3 - 5, 2009
Westford Regency Inn & Conference Center
Westford, MA

Here's Why Attending the 4th Annual Print Buyers Conference
Will Save Your Firm Money

It's no secret your budget is tight. If you are responsible for scheduling, print production and delivery of your company's creative and print work, then you need to attend the 4th Annual Print Buyers Conference. You'll learn ways to work faster, smarter and more effectively - and save your firm money at the same time. Here's how.

• You'll find out how to strategically source printing - without sacrificing the quality of your work

• You'll get a leg up on your competition with the latest printing insights and intelligence not available anywhere else

• You'll discover the inside secrets of print-buying pros during face-to-face networking with peers from across the country

• You'll look beyond print to identify ways to improve your company's marketing & communications strategies

• You'll explore time- and money-saving trends with #1 experts in printing, paper, design, new media and digital printing: Frank Romano, Daniel Dejan, Gary Jones, Peter Muir, and Xerox VP/GM Gavin Jordan-Smith

• You'll examine how the outlook for print, new media and the economy will impact your business from the industry's foremost economic consultant, Dr. Joe Webb

Now through October 15th, take an additional 20% our affordable Conference price with our 10-year anniversary special. Just use "tenyears" (no quotes) as your Priority Code when you register online at www.printbuyersconference.com to receive a great discount on your 2-day Conference pass. All meals, learning sessions, networking Roundtables, four inspiring keynote presentations, cocktail party, and exhibit hall pass are included. Parking is free, too.

We are so confident that this year's Conference will give you more ideas than you can use, more value than you possibly imagined, and more ways to improve your firm's print & media campaigns, that we're offering a money-back guarantee.*

Don't wait. Go to www.printbuyersconference.com now to register and start your savings now.

We look forward to seeing you in November at the 4th Annual Print Buyers Conference!

Margie Dana
Print Buyers International, LLC
Boston Print Buyers

PS: Sign up for our Print Tips email to get all future event info plus a weekly tip about working with printers. Go to www.printbuyersconference.com. The sign up box is on the right below the Featured Speaker.

*This guarantee applies only if you attend the entire 2-day Conference on November 4 & 5, and call PBI by November 11th to explain why you learned nothing valuable for your current job responsibilities, about printing and new media, or got any insights for your career development.

A Different Paper Company by Gail Nickel-Kailing

Grays Harbor Paper - A Different Paper Company

Business Strategies Etc., was launched by Gail Nickel-Kailing in 2001 to provide outsourced business planning and marketing services and help clients increase revenue and profits through strong marketing and product management processes and implementation of software and other technology.

Here is a terrific a article:
http://www.business-strategies-etc.com/2009/grays-harbor-paper-a-different-paper-company/

Grays Harbor Paper - A Different Paper Company
Friday, June 12, 2009 | Posted to Business Strategies, Sustainability

<Gail> At this week’s Action for a Sustainable America, held in Seattle, I had the opportunity to meet some great folks. The event was one of a series of three where corporate leaders and green innovators examined sustainability as a corporate strategy.

David Quigg, Grays Harbor Paper, introduced the company his father helped rescue with a team of local investors when the Grays Harbor paper mill closed 15 years ago putting hundreds of people out of work in rural Washington.

Housing two of the remaining five pieces of paper making equipment in Washington, the company produces FSC-Certified copy and printing papers containing recycled post-consumer recycled in a “fossil-free” manufacturing process using energy produced on-site.

used laser imaging parts,

Launching new website iFix.com

iFix.com Delivers First Online Resource for Purchasing Equipment Parts

Graphic Arts Service Agents Gain Immediate Global Access to
New & Used Laser Imaging Parts

Amesbury, MA.– May 15, 2009– iFix.com Inc., global provider of new and used laser imaging parts, is pleased to announce availability of the industry’s first online resource store for finding and replacing platesetter parts. iFix.com delivers instant access to a broad range of hard to find service parts; initially focusing on Agfa, Fuji, Heidelberg or Screen equipment. All used parts include an extended 6-month warranty, currently the most comprehensive guarantee offered by any supplier in the industry.

President and industry veteran, Rick Littrell states, "For years there has been a real need in the Graphic Arts Service Market to have immediate access to quality components at economical prices. iFix.com is committed to becoming the "go-to" source around the world known for their expertise and fast turnaround."

iFix.com was created to meet the needs of graphics arts dealers, independent field service reps, and end users who are qualified to service their own equipment. Certified Parts Experts are on call to answer questions, verify pricing and parts availability. Same day shipping is available on any item in stock; additional parts can be sourced with minimal lead-time. All orders are placed online and can be drop-shipped to any location across the globe.

In addition to providing comprehensive website and telephone resources, iFix.com will feature a forum for general support and discussions leveraging social networks including Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/iFixParts) and a LinkedIn Group "iFix Parts" (http://tinyurl.com/LI-iFixParts).
For more information visit: http://www.ifix.com

About iFix.com

iFix.com, Inc. was founded in January 2008, by Rick Littrell, a 30-year veteran of the print and electronic imaging industry. As a former worldwide Product Line Manager for platesetting solutions at a major imaging equipment and media supplier, Rick spent years visiting customers throughout the world and saw firsthand, the need for a reliable and economical imaging system parts supplier to the graphics industry. Getting the right parts, on time and for the right price helps Rick’s customers operate at full capacity and extend the life of their publishing equipment.

Writing Made Simple

The Easy Essay - Essay Writing Made Simple

THE EASY ESSAY WORKS FROM SPECIAL ED TO COLLEGE ED, ED REHAB, BUSINESS AND MORE

In a world where they put a man on the moon before they put wheels on suitcases, the same strange mind set still holds amazingly true with writing. Remember the dread of a report? Essays, for example, are really easy to write.

“I have used this technique with my corporate clients, my theology students, and soon with my students at Kaplan University.”

Dr. Kathleen A. Bishop, M.B.A., PhD, ThD.

“It works for reports from my secretary to our construction personnel. This process saves my associates time, saves my employees time and best of all it, saves me time.”
Gary E. Hunt - Chief Manager, Just Be Green, LLC

“I had wanted to wait until I got feedback from the teachers. They love it and we are looking at using it with some of our AT devices.”

Dr. Suzanne Pope Dobson - Calhoun High School (Special Education Department Head)

“As a physician I recommend The Easy Essay almost daily to patients to help them organize their thoughts and improve their ability to concisely communicate their medical histories…”

Dr. Ernest G Hope MD PhD (Stanford University, USA)

FREE AUTOMATED INFORMATION ORGANIZATION PROGRAM

www.TheEasyEssay.com, a free site, can teach almost anyone how to logically organize a proof format (as an essay, speech, business memo etc,) for any fact, concept or idea in 5 minutes.

www.TheEasyEssay.com uses an automated information organization program. It has been taught to people from eight to eighty, LD and ADHD students, Special Education classes, in high schools and for home schooling. It has also been used for basic expository writing, as prep for the SAT, FCAT and the ACT, as well as a college class and for post graduate work. The program is additionally beneficial for interoffice communications, speech writing, and business, technical and scientific reports. The Easy Essay can even be used for educational rehabilitation purposes; it’s logical, color coded, repetitive functions lead one to believe that it could have beneficial effects in retraining or helping to reopen neural pathways.

Our concept is based on our belief that in most conversations, the majority of the conversation deals with one person telling the other person why something is true; that is, giving reasons for its validity. That is all that we ask you to do on this site, except in writing. We use the essay form because it is the most efficient form of organization available and we automate the organization so that you limit your statements to proving only the things that you have already stated were true.

For those with no information available, the thesis, or main idea you are going to prove, is linked to Google® to help begin your accumulation of that information. Then we show you, very simply, how to prove said fact or idea.

It can be taught to a varied group of individuals at the same time and each will learn to his or her own unique capacity. It is especially helpful for mainstreaming students with special needs. The Easy Essay is easy enough for the user to learn the process and make the use of the automated portion of the program unnecessary in situations where a computer is not at hand or if a teacher wants to make sure his/her students understand the process. The process is limited only by the capacity of the user.

For longer papers it can automatically expand into a 17 paragraph thesis.

The Easy Essay Process is usable in any language.

A noted side effect of the program is that users begin to communicate logically.

www.TheEasyEssay.com is free because we feel it is too important to charge for.

We would appreciate any feedback (use the “Contact Us” section of the site) but in any case:

PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO WHERE EVER IT CAN HELP


Patent Pending 2007- ©1989,2006
The Easy Essay Inc.

The First Real Digital Newspaper Printing Operation

Gmail - Cenveo loss, Real digital newspaper operation - davemainwaring@gmail.com

WTT Premium Content {pay for access}
Tribute Tuesdays

The days of digitally printed newspapers seem to be finally arriving. This is not to say that we have not had such newspapers before. In fact in the past week I have received information from Océ that at their largest digital newspaper printing operation at Stroma in London, the five millionth digitally printed newspaper copy has rolled off their Océ monochrome presses after eight years of operation.

Barnes & Noble Buys an E-Book Retailer By MOTOKO RICH, NYT

Technology - Internet News - The New York Times

Barnes & Noble Buys an E-Book Retailer
By MOTOKO RICH

With overall book sales flat or falling and electronic book purchases up, the bookstore chain has acquired Fictionwise, an online retailer of e-books.

Wayland company is the first in the United States to offer a combination of green large format printing

Wayland company prints with environmental awareness - Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News

By Bob Tremblay/Daily News staff
The MetroWest Daily News
Posted Jan 26, 2009 @ 12:58 AM
Last update Jan 28, 2009 @ 03:44 PM
WAYLAND —

At EcoVisual Communications, green is good.

Launched in November, the Wayland company is the first in the United States to offer a combination of green large format printing for trade show graphics, interior decor images and museum-quality display art. It also provides personalized consultation to corporate marketers on improving the environmental impact of their marketing efforts.

"For too long, excessive direct mail campaigns printed on virgin papers and the production of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in printing processes have created excessive waste and negative impacts on health," says Rick Colson, EcoVisual’s founder and president. "On average, 40 percent of landfill content is paper. Now, the best marketers are beginning to embrace green technologies and even those who lag behind are becoming more environmentally aware."

Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

Op-Ed Contributor - The Kindle Swindle? - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html

The Kindle 2 is a portable, wireless, paperback-size device onto which people can download a virtual library of digitalized titles. Amazon sells these downloads, and where the books are under copyright, it pays royalties to the authors and publishers.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

It’s all a thousand times more convenient ...

State of the Art - Amazon.com’s Kindle Goes From Good to Better - NYTimes.com

Kindles (dream on, Amazon), all of them remember where you stopped reading in each book. (This feature will be more useful if, as Amazon has hinted, you’ll soon be able to read your e-books on other machines, like your laptop or iPhone. And why not? The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades — ka-ching!)

The Kindle catalog is bigger, too; now 240,000 books are available. New York Times bestsellers are $10 each, which is less than the hardcover editions. Older books run $3 to $6.

That said, Amazon is still a long way from its “any book, any time” goal. You don’t have to look far to find important titles still among the missing; they include all Harry Potter books; “An Inconvenient Truth”; “The English Patient”; and “The Associate” (the No. 1 fiction best seller) or anything else by John Grisham.

You can have any of 30 newspapers, including this one, wirelessly beamed to your Kindle each morning ($10 to $14 a month) — minus ads, comics and crosswords. Magazines (22 so far, $1.50 to $3 monthly) and blogs ($2 a month) can arrive automatically, too.

Finally, you can send Word, text, PDF and JPEG documents to the Kindle using its private e-mail address — a huge blessing to publishers, lawyers, academics, script readers and so on — for 10 cents each. Or transfer them over a USB cable for nothing.

So, for the thousandth time: is this the end of the printed book?

cloud computing, you rely on applications running on the Interne

When your files are online and you aren't - The Boston Globe

If you're a Google Docs user, get a copy of Gears. This free program, available at gears.google.com, lets you download your Google-generated documents onto your computer. Work with them even when you're offline, and when you log in again, Gears uploads your modified documents to the Google Docs Internet server, so your up-to-date document is available on any Internet-connected machine.

Gears isn't just for Google Docs fans; it works with other cloud computing services, including Zoho, a rival online document editing service, and Google's Gmail messaging service. You can plow through your e-mail on the plane, write up replies, then transmit them once you're back onlin

librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books.

The Future of Reading - In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update - Series - NYTimes.com

Some of these new librarians teach children how to develop PowerPoint presentations or create online videos. Others get students to use social networking sites to debate topics from history or comment on classmates’ creative writing. Yet as school librarians increasingly teach students crucial skills needed not only in school, but also on the job and in daily life, they are often the first casualties of school budget crunches.

<snipped>
"More than 90 percent of American public schools have libraries, according to federal statistics, but less than two-thirds employ full-time certified librarians."

new ways to get the message across

Media entrepreneurs test new ways to get the message across - The Boston Globe

"was home to the first American newspaper. A Medford radio station was among the first to try selling advertising to support its programming, in the early 1920s. Researcher Ray Tomlinson was working in Cambridge when he sent the first e-mail over the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, in 1971."

"Each innovation created a huge industry, and changed the way we communicate."

"Now, at this moment of tumult in the media world, entrepreneurs in Boston and the wider New England region are trying to develop the next successful models for conveying information. But even as advertisers and consumers spend an increasing amount of money and time on the Internet, building a profitable digital media business isn't exactly a cinch."

Posting headlines and short summaries stories linked to from other sites.

Media chains settle lawsuit - The Boston Globe

As such, the settlement left unresolved the legal issue that drew the attention of news and technology companies, as well as Internet bloggers: whether news websites - especially aggregation sites, including Google News and Yahoo News - can continue with their current practice of posting headlines and short summaries for stories they link to from other sites.

Under the agreement, Boston.com will be able to refer to stories from GateHouse sites, as it has done in the past, and to manually "deep link" to individual articles without presenting the links with headlines or lead sentences.

No damages were awarded under the settlement, and each party agreed to pay its own legal fees. Neither The Times Co. nor GateHouse admitted wrongdoing.

"This agreement is not binding on anyone else," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It has no legal precedent per se. But it could persuade a judge in another case that what Boston.com was doing here was not defensible under fair use" in copyright law.

Ardia, however, described the settlement as a victory for GateHouse. "They seem to have achieved everything they wanted to in their lawsuit except for receiving monetary damages," he said. "It does result in the cessation of Boston.com using GateHouse content as it has done."

In bad times, you’re forced to see if there is a technology” that will help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/technology/26spend.html

"Penny-pinching shoppers like Mr. Title could have the most
immediate effect on the tech industry, particularly if more people
consider canceling their cable subscriptions to watch video online, or
drop their landline telephones to depend on their cellphones or on
Internet calling services like Skype.

Many consumers appear ready
to abandon the costly desktop computer altogether. Analysts expect PC
sales to fall in 2009 for just the second time in the last two decades,
with desktops falling even faster than they did in 2007 or 2008.

The
only bright spot in the PC industry is netbooks. Analysts at the
Gartner research company said shipments rose to 4.4 million devices in
the third quarter of 2008, from 500,000 units in the first quarter of
last year. Analysts say sales could double this year despite a deep
worldwide recession.

Two lumbering giants, Hewlett-Packard and
Dell, missed the first wave of these tiny, stripped-down machines,
allowing Acer of Taiwan to grab market share. Acer pushed Apple out of the No. 3 spot behind H.P. and Dell as sales soared 55 percent. Dell and H.P. are making the devices now."

It's a natural impulse. You want to write a book.

An E-Z guide to publishing - The Boston Globe

How hard can it be? Rockheaded jocks write books. TV talk show hosts write books. Dogs write books. Why not you?

wake up tomorrow and your hard drive is dead

Dueling data backup firms are rare bright spot - The Boston Globe

"We found that the only thing that sells our product is fear," says Carbonite chief executive David Friend. "The fact that you might wake up tomorrow and your hard drive is dead and all your photos are gone."

Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders of the online backup business, a rare bright spot in a gloomy tech economy. Rather than buying their own hard drives to save a copy of their data, consumers and small businesses pay a fee (Mozy's is $59 a year, Carbonite's is $50) to send their information securely over the Net, and have Mozy or Carbonite keep a copy that can be retrieved any time. IDC, a Framingham research firm, predicts that online backup services will generate about $715 million in annual revenue by 2011.

New England Center for Investigative Reporting

New England Center for Investigative Reporting | NECN

NECN is proud to be a founding member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a collaborative effort from some of New England's preeminent journalism organizations and Boston University.

The Center was launched in January 2009, with the goal of producing multimedia investigative journalism for print, broadcast and online audiences. The Center gives Boston University students a chance to work with skilled B.U. faculty and the investigative teams at the Boston Globe, Boston.com, WBUR-FM, New England Ethnic News and NECN, to develop local and regional investigative stories.

The Center, a first in the nation, is funded by its partners and private contributions and grants from foundations, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes journalism excellence worldwide.

To visit the center online, donate to the effort or submit your own story ideas for the Center partners to explore, click here or go to www.necir-bu.org.

The Digital Nirvana blog

The Digital Nirvana » About

The Digital Nirvana blog will focus on educating the printing community about how evolving technologies can fuel opportunities for business growth. Featuring authors from WhatTheyThink.com, prominent industry analysts and other thought leaders, it will be the catalyst for a lively exchange of the most current thinking and a variety of viewpoints.
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Terrific contributors ! Important Topics.
imho, Dave Mainwaring, UncleDaveM_IFM