Long after Trump fades & falters, there will be a large audience for lumpen revanchists on Fox News. These dead-enders won’t quickly meet their end – they’ll be a faction, and so an audience, waiting for a someone to inspire them in their ethnic prejudices, economic ignorance, and conspiracy theories. Fox News will exist after…
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Advertising, Bad Ideas, Business, Marketing, Newspapers
The Janesville Gazette‘s Time-Share Stage of Decline
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
A nearby newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, part of an out-of-state chain (APG) owned by a family that made billions in billboard advertising, recently tried to position half-off advertising as a ‘community grant‘ program. See That’s Not a ‘Community Grant’ – It’s Half-Off Advertising. It’s an old – often true – adage that bad goes to…
Advertising, Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Boosterism, Culture, Economics, Economy, History, Poverty
Boosterism, ’30s Style
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Although the Roosevelt Administration was (whatever its other mistakes) candid about the economic conditions it faced, there was in the ’30s, as there has been over the 2010s in Wisconsin, a delusional impulse to happy talk – regardless of economic conditions – among some politicians and some business groups. Margaret Bourke-White‘s Kentucky Flood depicts the…
Advertising, Business, Newspapers
That’s Not a ‘Community Grant’ – It’s Half-Off Advertising
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
One of the saddest traits of local newspapers is how those publications condescend to readers. Another example of this comes from the Janesville Gazette, where that publication is contending that half-off advertising is somehow a community grant. Splashed all over the webpage of that paper yesterday, one found ads for the so-called community grant program.…
Advertising, Newspapers
Nothing Says Dog-Crap Publication Like Dog-Crap Ads
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
One can estimate a for-profit publication’s value in the marketplace by the ads it attracts. The leaves the Janesville Gazette, a rusty link in an out-of-state newspaper chain, in a weak position: it’s running dog-crap ads. Consider this canine calling-card displayed on the Gazette’s main page today, 1.9.20 (‘Trump Is On A Roll…Ends Another Obama…