This Week in Magazines: Why We Pay for a Stale Bagel, not Online News Content

The August 14 issue of The Week will deflate the male species far more than insurance lobbyists seek to puncture the Obama administration on health care reform. In sum, they're "no more attractive than their cavemen ancestors."

This is according to a little-known species of undetermined physical allure and charisma, namely evolutionary biologists at the University of Helsinki. They tracked 2,000 American men and women over several decades:

Women rated as beautiful had, on average, 16 percent more children than their more ordinary counterparts and more girls than boys.

Handsome men, however, had more success in reproducing than the average guys. Since men choose mates largely based on attractiveness, beautiful women have a much better chance of passing on the genes for physical beauty to the next generation of girls.

Women, on the other hand, tend to choose as breeding partners men of high status and wealth, who offer protection and security for them, and their children.

The result: rich men have more wives and lots of children.

This also is another reminder that, if this is true so far as beautiful women's preference for men of status and wealth, that I'd best not have my two boys follow me into journalism.

As the Obama administration mulls new rules on executive compensation, it might check Aug. 3 Modern Healthcare's "The Big Pay (Scale) Back." It's an annual executive compensation survey whose general conclusion is that, "Perhaps the day has come that critics of executive compensation have been waiting for."

Perhaps.

For the first time in its seven years, Modern Healthcare's annual survey of corporate CEO pay has failed to turn up a healthcare CEO who raked in more than $15 million in compensation last year. The performance of the stock market in 2008 was a big reason that the compensation of the 30 CEOs covered by the survey was relatively low. Not a single CEO cashed in stock options worth more than $10 million in 2008, also a first for the survey.

Still, the compensation, no surprise, doesn't in any real way mirror the precipitous drop in many companies' earnings. It's a reminder that the game remains rigged. Wayne Smith of Community Health Systems tops the list, at nearly $14 million.

Of course, another reason not to go into journalism is the inability of its proprietors to figure whether, or how, to charge consumers for online content. You can't just give the stuff away for free and hope to succeed, unless you plan on simply hiring minimum wage reporters and editors, then getting in quality what you pay for. The Aug. 17 Business Week may further confound on this matter of online revenues, at least when it comes to advertising.

It seems as if CBS.com and Hulu (a joint venture among NBC, Fox and ABC) are using two very different strategies when it comes to luring advertisers. CBS's research tells it to replicate the traditional broadcast model by hitting viewers with as many ads as they'll tolerate (to discern same, it does lots of research in Las Vegas, offering discounts on Nathan's hot dogs in return for purported citizen wisdom). Meanwhile, Hulu's research convinces it that it should go with far fewer, and more memorable, ads.

The conclusion here? "It's possible that neither model -- more ads vs. fewer pricier ones -- is viable."

Huffington Post gets mentioned in, of all places, the July-August Cornell Alumni Magazine, whose "When It Rains" chronicles the decidedly negative response (including in Huffington Post) to Cornell economist's Michael Waldman's linking of autism to television watching and to counties with lots of rain (meaning more indoor activities, like television watching). His subsequent research underscored how TV could be a possibility, along with vitamin D deficiency, household chemicals, air pollution and chemicals in precipitation itself. The academic, who runs the university's Institute for the Advancement of Economics, is the father of a son with an autism spectrum disorder, and is pretty much convinced of some association between autism and precipitation. "Maybe it will turn out to be important. Maybe it won't. But the relationship is certainly strong."

Aug. 24 Forbes will probably gets most of its attention for college and business school rankings in which the U.S. Military Academy at West Point tops Princeton, California Institute of Technology, Williams College and Harvard as the top college. It's based on five criteria: graduate rates; national and international awards won by students and faculty; student satisfaction with teachers; average financial debt upon graduating; and post-grad success as manifested in part by recent grads' average salaries.

But this also includes "Loneliness Can Kill You," a look at work by University of Chicago neuroscientist-psychologist John Cacioppa, who derides the traditional notion that individuals (and their genes) are guided solely by self-interest. He argues that we prosper only to the extent to which we are socially connected to one another, and that loneliness is a dominant trigger, akin to physical pain, hunger and thirst. And it may be getting more common in an era in which socializing, notably through the Internet, seems easier. Ultimately, his most important link is between loneliness, on one hand, and substantial, adverse physical and psychological impacts on the other.

SportsBusinessJournal explores the frictions caused by the U.S. Olympic Committee's plans to start its own Olympic television network, to the obvious chagrin of the International Olympic Committee and NBC, which spends huge sums for Olympic rights. One can only speculate as to whether the move might unintentionally present a hurdle to Chicago, the American entrant in the race for the 2016 Summer Olympics, getting the final nod from the IOC in October. Meanwhile, is there really and truly an audience for an Olympics channel? Hmmm.

It's not quite a testament to economic deprivation but "Our Year Without Shopping" in September Good Housekeeping has its moments as Kym Croft Miller details a shift from a life in which she and fellow college grad spouse and three children were "dedicated accumulators of the consumer parade of hip clothes, sports cars, and electronic toys." So they spent a year in which they purchased only "edibles and depletables (things we used up, such as shampoo or gasoline)."

Perhaps the greatest lesson of our experiment was realizing that the act of buying things, exciting as it can be at times, is rarely as nice or interesting as the alternatives. Having time free of shopping is empowering.

Oh, when they returned to a slimmed-down life of consumerism, dress socks were the first big purchase, with vacuum bags deemed by Kym as her own foremost "luxury."

There's no evidence of Kym's family buying stale bagels during their year of austerity but Salon.com's "The Future of Journalism" blog opines on the extent to which we're willing to pay $1.25 for a stale bagel but not for online news -- and proceeds to make a case, in Economics for CEO Dummies, as to why purchasing the former is more rational than the latter. Ah....

July-August Atlantic Monthly includes "Daredevil," Northwestern University's prolific and brilliant Garry Wills' ultimately generous appreciation of the late William F. Buckley Jr., all the more notable since Wills was a protégé-turned-nemesis. As for that transformation, largely based on Wills' long ago turn from National Review orthodoxy, there is this:

For more years than I wish, Bill and I were estranged. Though he had backed off from the southern view of black inferiority, he thought that Martin Luther King Jr. was hurting the country in its struggle with Communism by criticizing America, and he was a strong friend of Henry Kissinger in defending the Vietnam War. Even my own friend at the magazine, Frank Meyer, tried to have my comments against Richard Nixon killed, and Bill finally refused to publish my claim that there was no conservative rationale for our ruinous engagement in Vietnam. Later, when I moved out of my office at Northwestern and reduced my library to what would fit into my home, I gave a used-bookstore owner the pick of my volumes at the university. He went off with many titles that Bill had inscribed to me, and when irate fans of his found them in the store, they bought them and sent them back to him, calling me an ingrate for selling his gifts.

That said, Wills remained fond of Buckley and this is a testament to the need to differentiate professional/intellectual and personal differences. It's all the more effecting given their ideological break on so many primal issues in American life.

Comments

[BBackSoon]

I for one used to get the local paper, the big town paper and even a national news magazine or two but in the past few years, I am unable to pay for news. Not so much because I feel I don’t have to but because I simply cannot afford it.

And in the same vein, if online content becomes pay only, I will go where it is free and the content appears to be truthful. I can deal with partisan to a certain degree but opinions must be based on fact.

[Maezeppa]

We readers are a commodity, sold by the media outlets to advertisers. Let the advertisers pay.

[Mike Butson]

Seems the real issue is, which format do we prefer to digest the media? Contrary to such biased opinions we read (online of course), there is a certain creature comfort in holding a dormant paper magazine. It allows a more private and intimate visit with the story, not to mention the gluttonous luxury of eating gooey snacks with no key-jam worries.
To compete with freebies though is an impossible situation. How do the print wizards build a model that is 100% advertiser supported? Or do the net folks charge a little cash to shore up the field?. I suspect both sides are working frantically and hope we, the audience are not left holding the bag...

[praxitas]

problem is the product is so uneven that you may just as easily be sinking your teeth into a chocolate bar as a stick of poo. even free, the latter is painful, but when you paid for the 'privilege' it absolutely galls.

[jsgaetano]

Why you can't charge for news- because ALL your competitors are NOT charging.

I'm elated to see Fox charge for their online news. It's going to prevent everyone online to NOT read FOX.

But hey, if you want to know what FOX is going to say in their stories (almost word for word), you can still read RNC press releases for free.

[Cool-headed]

Only 4 comments on this story. Other stories on today's HuffPo have over 1,000 comments.

See how interested readers are in the fascinating subject of paying to read newspapers?

[jsgaetano]

It's probably because it's already a foregone conclusion.

Dead tree media is... dead.

[rjmiller]

Because every HuffPo reader already knows why they, personally, won't pay for online news.

[mountainweb]

Paying for real news is one thing, paying for opinions that are in many instances outright lies is totally another. Sadly, journalism in many cases has become political pandering of the worst sort with the "journalist" slanting the news or what they wish was the news, toward the political side they are wanting to impress.

The large town newspaper close to where I live had sunk so low that most of the "news" were really personal attacks on people and not the real news. They had to reduce their circulation by 50% but said it was ok since that would not effect their readership(LOL).

[gvnn688]

You are soooooooo right.

[ricchase]

I have absolutely no intention of being nickle and dimed to death for a wide variety of "news" coverage. Especially when it would no doubt be the same "corporate-smack" we have all come to loathe. Don't the major newspapers and news outlets REALIZE they are failing because people don't want to read lies, planted stories, and very sickening accolades of all that is wrong with our drowning system of government? If it comes to having to pay for what is called "news" these days, I'll get my information from the stars. It would no doubt be more informative and true.

[max08]

Paying for journalists would flourish if the taboos came off. No one, NO ONE, is going to pay for being muzzled, or read muzzled opinions. And all the taboo subjects, and conspiratorial subjects, and whack-job subjects are what some of the people want some of the time. What does it take for the journo biz to wake up and realize this?

Look at the ridick birther movement. People will pay for getting the latest from their correspondents in Mombasa. I'm not one of them, but I'll be damned if I'm going to say some are not allowed. But. Look at that nutcase Orly Taitz. She careens around on MSNBC from Tel Aviv with her new birth certificate and hysterical accusations and not one — not one — anchor had the balls to ask what she was doing there . . because Israel is a taboo.

I maybe advocating the online equivalent of Yellow Journalism and tabloid fare for some, but as long as we know that there are certain subjects you wont touch, and certain places you wont go to to investigate a story, then we aint giving you our dough. The reader's time and money are valuable too.

[Daly]

too much disparate information