Magazine Pubs Change Name

The Magazine Publishers of America is being renamed MPA — the Association of Magazine Media (dash and all). The dispatching of “publishers” from the name is meant to signal how readers can engage with magazines beyond the printed page through nontraditional means like Web sites, mobile devices, tablets, events, social media, books, retail presences and even branded merchandise.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, magazine ad spending, which reached $14.4 billion in 2007, fell to $13.3 billion in 2008 and $10.5 billion last year. The declines are expected to continue, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated, to $9.8 billion this year and $9.5 billion in 2011. That cumulative decline from 2007 to 2011 would be 34 percent.

Read more at the New York Times.

Facebook Myths

1. Facebook is used mostly by college kids. While Facebook's base still skews young, about two-thirds of its 134 million American members are older than 26. Outside the United States, Facebook's fastest growth has been among middle-age women.

Facebook messaging is beginning to replace e-mail among the Italian educated elite and among businesspeople in Colombia. And in Indonesia, Facebook's third-largest country, if you use the Internet you are almost certainly a member: Of the 30 million people online there, 27.8 million of them use Facebook.

3. Facebook users are up in arms about privacy. In an experiment, security firm Sophos invited Facebook users to befriend someone named Freddi Staur, whose profile contained almost no information but showed a photo of a small green plastic frog. The request was accepted by 41 percent of users.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Nielsen Online Ratings

For TV and digital media advertisers looking for a comparable metric to its traditional TV ratings, Nielsen will start up a new service called Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings. The new system will be fully available in 2011.

Read more at Media Post.

English. It's dead to me.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."

Read more at the Washington Post.