Nevada Caucus

Nice. But watch how the" populer vote vs. delegate count" is being spun.

New Hampshire Primary Night

Hooray.

Iowa Caucus Night

Ugh.

Christmas Time

Have a happy – and meaningful – Chrismas.

The New BMW 135i

Here is a video I made at the San Francisco International Auto Show yesterday, on Thanksgiving (BTW, the Packers won). I'm quite smitten by this car, the first of the new 1-Series from BMW. This is intended as the new entry-level series for the pricier BMWs. As much as I love my little Jetta, it may be followed by a 135i someday.

The 135i begins production in December 2007, and is expected to go on sale in the United States in March, according to a BMW representative at the Auto Show.

News magazines, part III

During a visit to Borders yesterday, noticed:
Der Spiegel: 202 pages
Focus: at least 220 pages
Newsweek: 98 pages
Time: less than 80 pages
Still think you're getting your money's worth from American news magazines?

Department of Cool Magazine Covers

As a long-time fan of magazines, magazine designs, and magazine covers in particular, I always like seeing a cover that just grabs me and is, well, cool. So with this cover, posted recently in the "next month's issue" section of the Starlog site.

That's a cool cover.

Packers Could Go All the Wa--- Wait? What Happened?!?

So here I am, at home in San Francisco, the transplanted Wisconsinite that I am, actually able to watch a Green Bay Packers football game on local television, courtesy (and I use the word loosely) of Fox. I'm not a rabid football fan; the Chicago White Sox and Vfb Stuttgart are the teams I follow more closely and in the sports I like more. But I am a Green Bay fan, a fan of the city where I grew up and of which I remain parochially boosterish (to slaughter several language cutoms at once).

But the game. It was a rematch with rivals Minnesota, which claimed to be on the upswing after being rejuvenated by the previous week's win against San Diego. And the Pack, well, they're just the most exciting team to watch these days. Between the always-exciting Brett Favre and a high-achieving band of first- and second-year teammates, they've built up a winning record that has made the national media take notice of a town they usually don't talk about unless it's used in a sentence in December with "the frozen tundra of."

Oh, yeah, the game. So the Packers play a great game, beautifully executing a running game, the one component of a championship team they were supposedly missing. They stopped Adrian Peterson, the Vikings' supposedly heroic running back. They ran in for touchdown after touchdown, running the score to 27-0 midway through the third quarter. Then suddenly a Fox sports broadcaster cuts in and announces that because the Packers are so far ahead, Fox is going to switch to a "more competitive game." And so goes one of my few chances to see my hometown team out here on the West Coast. Thanks, Fox.

Now, presumably, Fox thought that West Coasters who were watching NFC Central game were only doing so because they were football nuts and would watch any game, so better serve them up with one that is more "competitive." But I differ. The people watching were a mixture of people like me, who specifically wanted to watch those two Midwestern teams (and a goodly portion of whom were happy to see li'l ol' Green Bay take the stuffing out of Minnesota), and the people Fox thought were watching the game anyway --they'd watch anything. So, if the second group of people will watch anything, why not let 'em keep watching a game that they'd be talking about on Monday morning at work? They'll be happy (being relatively easy to please, anyway) and the people like me would be happy, too.

Instead, Fox didn't let either group see the entire game.

Oh, the Packers won the game 34-0. I would have loved to have seen it. Some other network, please buy the NFL rights from Fox.

Thin News Magazines, Part II

From a visit to a newsstand store yesterday, some additional evidence supporting my previous posting:

Newsweek: about 68 pages
Time: about 70 pages
Der Spiegel: about 250 pages
Focus: about 250 pages

(page counts are approximate, due to unnumbered inserts, cover counts, etc.) So, which do you think provided more news this week?

Selling Short

For years we've been watching American media deal with media consolidation, closings of magazines that didn't meet public companies' margin needs, and assimilation of online media into the print/video-dominated world. Lots of jobs have been lost because of this, and many grand old magazines have been butchered because they didn't meet some half-baked ideas that people don't want intelligent content anymore.

But sometimes it helps to break out of our provincial worldview here in the United States and see that we're being sold a bill of goods. American magazines have been getting thinner and thinner for years, yet UK publishers roll out giant, high-gloss mags filled with ads and edit pages.

Or look to Germany for another case in point. Here in the United States, our news weeklies publish every week and deliver us – what? 68 pages? 72 pages? maybe 88 pages when they stuff in an advertorial? Newsweek recently revamped its design and laudibly promoted the fact that it would target READers. And how many pages were in its first redesigned issue – the one that should draw extra ads because of the publicity surrounding the redesigned mag? I believe it was something like 68. How many pages did Germany's newsweekly Der Spiegel have that week? 206. (Not the same issue that's pictured here; I picture what's available.) And Der Spiegel's not the only game in town in Germany; its competitor, the newsweekly Focus, was also over 200 pages. In fact, Der Spiegel and Focus (as well as Stern, a news/features/personality weekly magazine read by somethinglike one out of every nine Germans) are larger than 200 pages almost every week; on their "thin" weeks, they're only about 140 pages, which would be banner, bumper issues for an American newsweekly.

So if Germany can produce big weekly newsmagazines, why are we being sold short here in the United States with thin magazines that act as if they don't have enough content to fill a 100-page magazine? They add an awful lot of fluff about celebrities to accompany their often very good political and national news reporting. But Der Spiegel puts out a desk-thumping huge magazine every week, with few celebrities in sight, with lots of excellent (and deep, and famously well-researched) news on politics, national events, international events, commentary, trends, and even extremely readable history. (I still remember filling a cross-country flight reading a great report on the Enlightenment "revolution" in Prussia.)

American magazines can do better. They can also deliver a better value to their readers. Until they do, I'll find that value in the European press.