A weekly (or almost weekly) magazine that I receive, recently announced that it was going to have four “green” issues this year, with the goal of being “carbon neutral” in 10 years. I was curious how they would handle this “green” issue. o their credit, they emailed me when it was ready and I went […]
Category: Writing and Publishing
Writing and publishing articles by author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
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DMNews Scales Back
Weekly news publications, I am told, are the ones most squeezed in today’s markets. They are wedged between the proverbial “rock” (instant news via the Internet that trumps weekly updates) and “hard place” (advertisers reallocating their ad dollars towards more established monthlies that target the same audience or online). One of the magazines that I […]
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Another One Bites the Dust
Today I learned that another magazine I read is ceasing publication. This isn’t really a surprise to me. In fact, I’m surprised that they have hung on this long. They were an advertiser-supported magazine and their number of ads has been a bit sparse as of late. From my perspective, their content focus and target […]
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More News Than You Can Use
A few months ago, I blogged about the various random press releases that I receive each day. In that post, I committed the faux pas of labeling them all as spam — and was quickly chastised for making a sweeping overstatement that was not entirely correct. In this, I was reminded that spam is in […]
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Seven, Eleven, and Zero
A few weeks ago, I lamented about the number of syllables in the letter W. I asked for he be given equal treatment to the alphabet’s other 25 one-syllable letters. Today, I have the same concern for seven. You see, of the single digit numbers, all but seven enjoy one-syllable conciseness. (In case you are […]
Recently I pondered the correct spelling for W. Not finding an official answer, I went with “double-u.” Upon further contemplation, I realized having similar doubts about the spelling of many letters. Therefore, I advance this list, which I ultimately found in Google’s scan of the book “The Institutes of English Grammar” by Goold Brown. (I’ve […]
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A Lament for W
No, this isn’t a post about George W. Bush. Instead, this is a blog about the letter W. I feel sorry for W; you see, it’s hard to pronounce. Consider the phrase, the “World Wide Web.” It is easy to say; it’s concise, with only three syllables, rolling off the tongue. Ironically, its abbreviation, “WWW” […]
The trend in magazine publishing is to migrate to non-printed forms of distribution (such as email, PDF files, and online reading) in order to reduce costs. While I see this transformation as spanning many years or even decades for most publications, I also noted that the recession is accelerating this trend. The reason is that […]
I enjoy math and like working with numbers. It is therefore not surprising that I track weekly blog readership. The week prior to the US Presidential election, I noticed that the reading of my blog dropped 25%. At first I assumed this was because too many of my musings were about the election; perhaps people […]
The DMA (Direct marketing Association) recently released their annual report on the catalog industry. The report indicated that in 2007, 36% of sales [for the catalog industry] were conducted online. What is shocking is that this statistic is a decrease from 2006, when it stood at 40%. In fact 2007’s percentage was lower than both […]