Advertising today has a definite view of husbands. Witness the ad below for Yellowbook.com:
Now, this ad might be a bit extreme, but it's illustrative of how Advertising (and the target market of women) view most husbands. As utterly replaceable. The woman even has a half-smile on her face as she searches for life insurance.
The woman is no more attractive than her husband. Compare the ad with this one:
"Jackpot." Increasingly, men are as objectified to women in advertising, as women are to men in pornography. This is not a healthy environment for formation of stable families, and evidence of consumerism as an approach to relationships, with short-term decision making on money and looks being marketed to women explicitly. [There is almost no marketing towards men, an astonishing factor given that say, Cook's Illustrated has gone from 17% male readership a decade ago to now, 50% male, or that it's common to see half the shoppers in the Supermarkets after work comprised of lone males. The idea that women alone make 80% of the purchasing decisions is as flawed as the assumption that there is a large and ever growing population of White youths.]
Note the only attribute for the Groom in the ad. Being hot.
These ads, in tandem, comprise more arrows pointing towards a profound, and probably irrevocable shift towards chaotic, short-term relationships instead of the nuclear family.
...Read more
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Sandra Tsing Loh and The State of Marriage
In my previous post, How Many (White) Men Are Getting Married I noted that there was a definite trend for White Men, between ages 35-40, to be unmarried. Using the GSS Data, the increase was from 5% in 1972 to 25% in 2004. A marked increase. Recent, a couple of articles by married women have shed light on the state of marriage by people who are, in fact, married, and are the Yuppie, White upper income class of people.
The infamous, Sandra Tsing Loh article in the Atlantic, extolling the virtues of divorce and a new post-marriage order where,
Tellingly, the article derides Dads who help around the house and kitchen as "kitchen bitches" and finds both un-manly and un-romantic. Another woman writes that her marriage is a prison and she needs to bust out, because her beta male husband is not exciting, though a good father and husband. Comments about Loh's article can be found both here and here. Ross Douhat in the New York Times makes some silly observations and stupid ones on the matter (that the Upper classes are in fact stable, and with few incidences of divorce, and that cross-class marriages should take place, respectively).
But what is the real picture of marriage today, in America, among Whites? Increasingly, it looks as if marriage was for Upper Class people only, and no longer something that characterizes lower and middle class Whites.
Sandra Tsing Loh's article is not new. Barbara Ehrenreich, of "Nickel and Dimed" wrote a December, 1999 Essay on the future of the family, sadly no longer online, in Time Magazine, in which she advocated a "fluid and ever-changing arrangement" for family care in which "the community" would care for children while women pursued passionate, intense, but short-lasting affairs. More recently, she's written here that:
Standard stuff from a feminist who thinks Muslim misogyny is based on fears of globalization.
Betty Friedan, who wrote of marriage as a prison, in "The Feminine Mystique" set the tone, years earlier of course. It is striking, however, that all of these women belong to a class. Fairly rich, ranging from mansions on the Hudson (Friedan never did housework, she had maids and servants) to various maids and nannies, but not rich enough to prevent divorce or longing for divorce.
The film The Nanny Diaries has a scene in which the prospective nanny, played by Scarlett Johansson, has lunch with her prospective employer (played by Laura Linney). There is an uncomfortable moment when an old friend of the Linney character stops by the table and laments her downward mobility after the divorce. Near the end of the film, the Linney character divorces her husband also, and loses the ability to live the high-life with mansions, summer homes at Martha's Vineyard, and other luxury amenities provided by her master of the universe, Wall Street titan husband. In reality of course, most married couples with that level of wealth try to stay together. The stakes, particularly for the children, are tremendous. There is a lot more ability to rise high on a net worth of $20 million, than there is with only perhaps $8 million an ex-spouse, after lawyer fees. Serious money creates serious behavior, though perhaps the super-rich divorce at the rate of those on the lower end of the financial spectrum.
It's striking that the women complaining about their sexless, "beta male" husbands (Loh, others) and the need to "re-invent" marriage as a formless, shapeless mess in which kids and husbands come last after a woman's need for passion and excitement, all come from a certain class. One able to afford nannies and maids and carpenters, making "kitchen bitches" superfluous, and speaking to the need to indulge "passion" while not at the level of wealth in which divorce means no more summering at the Hamptons in a private mansion. At least one of the women in Loh's article is described as making $120,000 a year, in addition to her husband's income (which should push their dual-incomes to around $200,000 or more a year). Given their social network, it's reasonable to assume the same for Loh and her husband (she an NPR commentator, and Atlantic writer, he a guitarist for Bette Midler) and the rest of her friends.
These women have enough money to hire their own nannies, their own carpenters, their own part-time cooks, and thus don't need or want their husbands helping around the house. It's not any accident that the women describe it as unmanly, as does the Salon.com woman who describes her marriage as a prison. Their basic needs are met by their income, and they desire stimulation and excitement. [This is why, middle income women always support more immigration, legal or illegal. Because immigration increases the supply and lowers the cost of Rosa the Nanny and Manuel the carpenter, without facing competition as, say, a Concert Violinist or Environmental Lawyer, two of the occupations of Loh's friends.]
The women also have another beef with their husbands: they don't respect them because they earn as much or more than their husbands. This is a trend that has been developing for some time.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics website has a wealth of demographic data. Their 2007 report on Women's Earnings has a wealth of data. Among the highlights are:
From the report, we have the following graphs:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Clearly we can see that women's earnings have been increasing. Correlation is not causation, but it is interesting that as women's earnings have increased both in absolute and relative to men's earnings, divorce and later marriage and single motherhood have all increased. Charles Murray believes that the single motherhood rate among White working and middle class women may be as high as 40% and 20% respectively.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Again, correlation is not causation, but marriage seems strongest in those populations (Asian and White) that have the biggest earnings gap between men and women, and weakest in those populations (Black and Hispanics) that have the smallest gap.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Men have done poorly in 1979 dollar amounts (and 1979 was a miserable year, economically) to 2007, in all educational areas except Bachelor's Degree and Higher. But even there, they are far out-stripped by women, and women have done better than men, with small but measurable increases for Associate's Degree and High School Grad, where in comparison men have losses, and substantial ones, from 1979 dollars. Even with less than High School diplomas, women posted smaller losses than men in 1979 dollar amounts, i.e. inflation adjusted.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Finally, we can see that women outnumber men in most workplace areas, except things like mining, trucking, and the like. In Professional occupations, women outnumber men by 9.4%. This is the largest gap on the graph.
It's possible, that as women have closed the earnings gap with men, particularly among middle class, professional occupations (such as lawyers, doctors, the like), the ability of most men, who won't be very exciting even on a good day, to first attract a woman into marriage, and then keep her happy, is low. Given that women can as Loh recounts her friend "Ellen" can pursue lots of bad boys, why not replace "nice guy" husbands like Ron with maids and nannies, and keep the bad boys around? Increasingly, this seems to be the choice women are making.
The Wall Street Journal in the "Real Pregnancy Crisis" suggests that the real issue is non-College White, Latino, and Black women having children out of wedlock. The CDC reports that 40% of children were born illegitimately, compared to 11% in 1970. Fully 60% of these children were born to women in their twenties, only 23% to teens. The article decries the nonsense feminist academics praising this development, ala Loh, Ehrenreich, and Friedan before her.
ABC News notes that America is not alone. Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark post rates of 66%, 55%, 54%, and 46% respectively of illegitimacy. Nations known for rough gender parity in earnings, feminist politics, and lack of respect for their men. [One of Loh's friends notes in the Atlantic how "enlightened" Swedish women prefer dominant, aggressive Muslim men to their nice-guy Swedish men.] But then Sweden allows for gender-based abortion. Not the mark of a successful society, as China attests to. With 32 million more men than women under the age of twenty, gender imbalances due to sex-based abortions can be explosive. So too, lurching into illegitimacy as the social norm.
Thanks to reader Puma, for the link to Rutgers University study on the family.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Over the last 40 years, marriage has declined radically, among women. While there are no class breakdowns, the largest slices of women are naturally going to be lower and middle class women, not upper class women.
We can see this decline in respect for marriage and husbands in the culture too. Nearly every ad, even those now featuring Black fathers, have doofus dads who are the butt of jokes.
Marriage, and the traditional nuclear family it seems, is something only for rich people. Yuppie women like Loh or Ehrenreich, can afford to replace husbands with exciting lovers and immigrant labor. For poorer women, out-of-wedlock children and rotating bad boys are the rule. Only where divorce means giving up real, serious money, in the millions of dollars, and giving up great luxury, do we see stable families and intact, nuclear family marriages. This great sea change, might incidentally explain the hatred of Sarah Palin, who famously married a blue collar guy of no great wealth, in her early twenties, and leveraged his support to run for office, first as Mayor of Wasilla, and then as Governor of Alaska.
After all, even the author of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, cannot get his wife's respect of that of other women. Lewis, a best-selling author not once but twice, with "Liar's Poker" is treated like a doofus.
In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it was eerie how the literally empowered women treated men. Written by avowed feminist Joss Whedon, Buffy and her super-powered female friends pursued, non-stop, dangerous bad boys with superpowers, who were their superiors. Character, morality, and duty meant nothing, only the thrill of violent, dangerous, super-powered men. Perhaps the most illustrative moment came when Buffy's second vampire boyfriend, "Spike" raped her, and she fell in love with him and (implied off-screen sex) with him again. [Star Sarah Michelle Gellar hated that particular storyline and feuded with series creator and show-runner Whedon over it.]
Now, women don't have superpowers. But the better earnings, status, social conditions, and opportunities afforded women have not come without a cost, all across the West. If women are hard-wired to be hypergamous, i.e. desire men of greater power and status than themselves, this would make "kitchen bitches" irrelevant and explain our brave new world of single mothers, rotating bad boys, and disdain, shown over and over again, for fatherhood and men who embrace it. It would also explain the success of the institution of marriage in the only class that still sustains it: high powered men making millions every year and women who work only part-time in jobs that pay little but give prestige, i.e. the Non Governmental Organizations, the NGOs, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International or Heal the Bay.
The very rich men, those of the Upper Class have superpowers. They have more power and status than their wives.
...Read more
The infamous, Sandra Tsing Loh article in the Atlantic, extolling the virtues of divorce and a new post-marriage order where,
...let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see.
Tellingly, the article derides Dads who help around the house and kitchen as "kitchen bitches" and finds both un-manly and un-romantic. Another woman writes that her marriage is a prison and she needs to bust out, because her beta male husband is not exciting, though a good father and husband. Comments about Loh's article can be found both here and here. Ross Douhat in the New York Times makes some silly observations and stupid ones on the matter (that the Upper classes are in fact stable, and with few incidences of divorce, and that cross-class marriages should take place, respectively).
But what is the real picture of marriage today, in America, among Whites? Increasingly, it looks as if marriage was for Upper Class people only, and no longer something that characterizes lower and middle class Whites.
Sandra Tsing Loh's article is not new. Barbara Ehrenreich, of "Nickel and Dimed" wrote a December, 1999 Essay on the future of the family, sadly no longer online, in Time Magazine, in which she advocated a "fluid and ever-changing arrangement" for family care in which "the community" would care for children while women pursued passionate, intense, but short-lasting affairs. More recently, she's written here that:
Which brings us to the third big scenario. This is the diversity option, arising from the realization that the one-size-fits-all model of marriage may have been one of the biggest sources of tension between the sexes all along--based as it is on the wildly unrealistic expectation that a single spouse can meet one's needs for a lover, friend, co-parent, financial partner, reliably, 24-7. Instead there will be renewable marriages, which get re-evaluated every five to seven years, after which they can be revised, recelebrated or dissolved with no, or at least fewer, hard feelings. There will be unions between people who don't live together full-time but do want to share a home base. And of course there will always be plenty of people who live together but don't want to make a big deal out of it. Already, thanks to the gay-rights movement, more than 600 corporations and other employers offer domestic-partner benefits, a 60-fold increase since 1990.
Standard stuff from a feminist who thinks Muslim misogyny is based on fears of globalization.
Betty Friedan, who wrote of marriage as a prison, in "The Feminine Mystique" set the tone, years earlier of course. It is striking, however, that all of these women belong to a class. Fairly rich, ranging from mansions on the Hudson (Friedan never did housework, she had maids and servants) to various maids and nannies, but not rich enough to prevent divorce or longing for divorce.
The film The Nanny Diaries has a scene in which the prospective nanny, played by Scarlett Johansson, has lunch with her prospective employer (played by Laura Linney). There is an uncomfortable moment when an old friend of the Linney character stops by the table and laments her downward mobility after the divorce. Near the end of the film, the Linney character divorces her husband also, and loses the ability to live the high-life with mansions, summer homes at Martha's Vineyard, and other luxury amenities provided by her master of the universe, Wall Street titan husband. In reality of course, most married couples with that level of wealth try to stay together. The stakes, particularly for the children, are tremendous. There is a lot more ability to rise high on a net worth of $20 million, than there is with only perhaps $8 million an ex-spouse, after lawyer fees. Serious money creates serious behavior, though perhaps the super-rich divorce at the rate of those on the lower end of the financial spectrum.
It's striking that the women complaining about their sexless, "beta male" husbands (Loh, others) and the need to "re-invent" marriage as a formless, shapeless mess in which kids and husbands come last after a woman's need for passion and excitement, all come from a certain class. One able to afford nannies and maids and carpenters, making "kitchen bitches" superfluous, and speaking to the need to indulge "passion" while not at the level of wealth in which divorce means no more summering at the Hamptons in a private mansion. At least one of the women in Loh's article is described as making $120,000 a year, in addition to her husband's income (which should push their dual-incomes to around $200,000 or more a year). Given their social network, it's reasonable to assume the same for Loh and her husband (she an NPR commentator, and Atlantic writer, he a guitarist for Bette Midler) and the rest of her friends.
These women have enough money to hire their own nannies, their own carpenters, their own part-time cooks, and thus don't need or want their husbands helping around the house. It's not any accident that the women describe it as unmanly, as does the Salon.com woman who describes her marriage as a prison. Their basic needs are met by their income, and they desire stimulation and excitement. [This is why, middle income women always support more immigration, legal or illegal. Because immigration increases the supply and lowers the cost of Rosa the Nanny and Manuel the carpenter, without facing competition as, say, a Concert Violinist or Environmental Lawyer, two of the occupations of Loh's friends.]
The women also have another beef with their husbands: they don't respect them because they earn as much or more than their husbands. This is a trend that has been developing for some time.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics website has a wealth of demographic data. Their 2007 report on Women's Earnings has a wealth of data. Among the highlights are:
- The difference between women’s and men’s earnings was largest among those aged 55 to 64, with women earning about 73 percent as much as men in this age group. By
comparison, women earned 87 percent as much as men among workers 25 to 34 years old, and 92 percent as much among 16- to 24-year-olds. (See table 1.) - Between 1979 and 2007, the earnings gap between women and men narrowed for most age groups. The women’s to men’s earnings ratio among 35- to 44-year-olds, for example, rose from 58 percent in 1979 to 77 percent in 2007, and the ratio for 45- to 54-year-olds increased from 57 percent to 75 percent. The earnings ratios for teenagers and for workers aged 65 and older fluctuated from 1979 to 2007, but their long-term trend has been essentially flat. (See table 12.)
From the report, we have the following graphs:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Clearly we can see that women's earnings have been increasing. Correlation is not causation, but it is interesting that as women's earnings have increased both in absolute and relative to men's earnings, divorce and later marriage and single motherhood have all increased. Charles Murray believes that the single motherhood rate among White working and middle class women may be as high as 40% and 20% respectively.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Again, correlation is not causation, but marriage seems strongest in those populations (Asian and White) that have the biggest earnings gap between men and women, and weakest in those populations (Black and Hispanics) that have the smallest gap.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Men have done poorly in 1979 dollar amounts (and 1979 was a miserable year, economically) to 2007, in all educational areas except Bachelor's Degree and Higher. But even there, they are far out-stripped by women, and women have done better than men, with small but measurable increases for Associate's Degree and High School Grad, where in comparison men have losses, and substantial ones, from 1979 dollars. Even with less than High School diplomas, women posted smaller losses than men in 1979 dollar amounts, i.e. inflation adjusted.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Finally, we can see that women outnumber men in most workplace areas, except things like mining, trucking, and the like. In Professional occupations, women outnumber men by 9.4%. This is the largest gap on the graph.
It's possible, that as women have closed the earnings gap with men, particularly among middle class, professional occupations (such as lawyers, doctors, the like), the ability of most men, who won't be very exciting even on a good day, to first attract a woman into marriage, and then keep her happy, is low. Given that women can as Loh recounts her friend "Ellen" can pursue lots of bad boys, why not replace "nice guy" husbands like Ron with maids and nannies, and keep the bad boys around? Increasingly, this seems to be the choice women are making.
The Wall Street Journal in the "Real Pregnancy Crisis" suggests that the real issue is non-College White, Latino, and Black women having children out of wedlock. The CDC reports that 40% of children were born illegitimately, compared to 11% in 1970. Fully 60% of these children were born to women in their twenties, only 23% to teens. The article decries the nonsense feminist academics praising this development, ala Loh, Ehrenreich, and Friedan before her.
ABC News notes that America is not alone. Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark post rates of 66%, 55%, 54%, and 46% respectively of illegitimacy. Nations known for rough gender parity in earnings, feminist politics, and lack of respect for their men. [One of Loh's friends notes in the Atlantic how "enlightened" Swedish women prefer dominant, aggressive Muslim men to their nice-guy Swedish men.] But then Sweden allows for gender-based abortion. Not the mark of a successful society, as China attests to. With 32 million more men than women under the age of twenty, gender imbalances due to sex-based abortions can be explosive. So too, lurching into illegitimacy as the social norm.
Thanks to reader Puma, for the link to Rutgers University study on the family.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Over the last 40 years, marriage has declined radically, among women. While there are no class breakdowns, the largest slices of women are naturally going to be lower and middle class women, not upper class women.
We can see this decline in respect for marriage and husbands in the culture too. Nearly every ad, even those now featuring Black fathers, have doofus dads who are the butt of jokes.
Marriage, and the traditional nuclear family it seems, is something only for rich people. Yuppie women like Loh or Ehrenreich, can afford to replace husbands with exciting lovers and immigrant labor. For poorer women, out-of-wedlock children and rotating bad boys are the rule. Only where divorce means giving up real, serious money, in the millions of dollars, and giving up great luxury, do we see stable families and intact, nuclear family marriages. This great sea change, might incidentally explain the hatred of Sarah Palin, who famously married a blue collar guy of no great wealth, in her early twenties, and leveraged his support to run for office, first as Mayor of Wasilla, and then as Governor of Alaska.
After all, even the author of Moneyball, Michael Lewis, cannot get his wife's respect of that of other women. Lewis, a best-selling author not once but twice, with "Liar's Poker" is treated like a doofus.
In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it was eerie how the literally empowered women treated men. Written by avowed feminist Joss Whedon, Buffy and her super-powered female friends pursued, non-stop, dangerous bad boys with superpowers, who were their superiors. Character, morality, and duty meant nothing, only the thrill of violent, dangerous, super-powered men. Perhaps the most illustrative moment came when Buffy's second vampire boyfriend, "Spike" raped her, and she fell in love with him and (implied off-screen sex) with him again. [Star Sarah Michelle Gellar hated that particular storyline and feuded with series creator and show-runner Whedon over it.]
Now, women don't have superpowers. But the better earnings, status, social conditions, and opportunities afforded women have not come without a cost, all across the West. If women are hard-wired to be hypergamous, i.e. desire men of greater power and status than themselves, this would make "kitchen bitches" irrelevant and explain our brave new world of single mothers, rotating bad boys, and disdain, shown over and over again, for fatherhood and men who embrace it. It would also explain the success of the institution of marriage in the only class that still sustains it: high powered men making millions every year and women who work only part-time in jobs that pay little but give prestige, i.e. the Non Governmental Organizations, the NGOs, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International or Heal the Bay.
The very rich men, those of the Upper Class have superpowers. They have more power and status than their wives.
...Read more
Friday, June 19, 2009
How Many (White) Men are Getting Married?
Recently, several bloggers have challenged my assertions that fewer and fewer (White) men are getting married. They cited the GSS Data, available here as evidence that I was wrong, that White Men are getting married at the same rates now as before. The Inductivist and also Audacious Epigone have used the Web Tools available at the Berkeley site to conclude that there is no evidence to support that Men are not getting married, or delaying marriage, over time.
Having downloaded the data myself, I can only conclude that so far ... they're wrong.
[For those interested in replicating my results, the following is how I did it. Those uninterested may skip this section.]
Downloading the data, (I used the 1972-2006 data set), with the variable AGE (age of respondent), YEAR (year of survey), MARITAL (marital status, 1=Married, 5=Never Married, etc), Sex (1=Male, 2=Female), RACE (1=White), plus of course the always present CASEID, you get a nice text file you can load into MySQL. To make things simpler, I added a constraint in the file created and downloaded, and specified only White Men (SEX=1, RACE=1). Loading this into MySQL gives you interesting results. [I wanted to look at White Men only, avoiding race and class, and looking at what most observers believe the most stable and unchanging group of men in the US.]
One of the things that struck me (and this is why you CANNOT avoid looking at the data in raw form) is how small sample sizes are for White Men in the Age Ranges. For example, the SQL Query
gives you this output:
The last row is of course the rollup row, showing there were indeed 598 White Men interviewed in 1975. That might seem like a lot, but look at the data at a more atomic level. Only 7 53-year olds, and only 10 54-year olds, in 1975 were interviewed. Your data is only as good as your sample size, and for each age, the samples can be appallingly small. The problem of course is randomness. Can we be sure that for the very small sample sizes for each age, survey takers got a truly random sample of White Men? Much less repeating it for every year? Given that the survey ran from 1972-2006 (I did not use the file with incomplete 2007-2008 data).
Will each get you the total for each year of all men (all ages), by year, and then the total for all men, all ages, who were never married (MARITAL=5). I've dumped that into an Open Office Spreadsheet to get the following:
[click Image to Enlarge]
Wow. Just for laughs I tried the following:
And got the following graph (once I loaded it into OpenOffice)
Therefore, it certainly looks as if the data suggests that AT LEAST White Men are getting married later, which would certainly make the "Never Married" status stronger in surveys. The data is not inconsistent with that hypothesis, at any rate. How good is the GSS Data? Not particularly good, given questions about small sample sizes for White Men, at each age, and just how random the selection of the survey takers was, but it is one of the few social surveys we do have covering considerable time periods. We certainly see a fairly consistent rise in "Never Married" over the years, which matches the increased cost for a family, given rising housing prices, and the decline of real wages, in terms of house-buying at least, since the 1970's.
Just as important however, may be the changing expectations of women with respect to marriage. Sandra Tsing Loh, the NPR commentator, writer, and performance artist, has a revealing column in the upcoming Atlantic Montly, which I will be posting on later. It certainly seems among professional urban women, marriage has undergone redefinition. Akin to more of a short-term contract offered to NFL free agents, than anything else.
...Read more
Having downloaded the data myself, I can only conclude that so far ... they're wrong.
[For those interested in replicating my results, the following is how I did it. Those uninterested may skip this section.]
Downloading the data, (I used the 1972-2006 data set), with the variable AGE (age of respondent), YEAR (year of survey), MARITAL (marital status, 1=Married, 5=Never Married, etc), Sex (1=Male, 2=Female), RACE (1=White), plus of course the always present CASEID, you get a nice text file you can load into MySQL. To make things simpler, I added a constraint in the file created and downloaded, and specified only White Men (SEX=1, RACE=1). Loading this into MySQL gives you interesting results. [I wanted to look at White Men only, avoiding race and class, and looking at what most observers believe the most stable and unchanging group of men in the US.]
One of the things that struck me (and this is why you CANNOT avoid looking at the data in raw form) is how small sample sizes are for White Men in the Age Ranges. For example, the SQL Query
select year, age, count(*) as Num_Age from gss_marital where year = '1975' group by age with rollup;gives you this output:
| Year | Age | # of Respondents |
|---|---|---|
| 1975 | 18 | 2 |
| 1975 | 19 | 17 |
| 1975 | 20 | 13 |
| 1975 | 21 | 13 |
| 1975 | 22 | 12 |
| 1975 | 23 | 11 |
| 1975 | 24 | 16 |
| 1975 | 25 | 21 |
| 1975 | 26 | 9 |
| 1975 | 27 | 20 |
| 1975 | 28 | 10 |
| 1975 | 29 | 14 |
| 1975 | 30 | 15 |
| 1975 | 31 | 6 |
| 1975 | 32 | 13 |
| 1975 | 33 | 11 |
| 1975 | 34 | 9 |
| 1975 | 35 | 11 |
| 1975 | 36 | 12 |
| 1975 | 37 | 11 |
| 1975 | 38 | 14 |
| 1975 | 39 | 7 |
| 1975 | 40 | 12 |
| 1975 | 41 | 11 |
| 1975 | 42 | 11 |
| 1975 | 43 | 11 |
| 1975 | 44 | 7 |
| 1975 | 45 | 11 |
| 1975 | 46 | 10 |
| 1975 | 47 | 6 |
| 1975 | 48 | 9 |
| 1975 | 49 | 10 |
| 1975 | 50 | 13 |
| 1975 | 51 | 6 |
| 1975 | 52 | 11 |
| 1975 | 53 | 7 |
| 1975 | 54 | 10 |
| 1975 | 55 | 8 |
| 1975 | 56 | 9 |
| 1975 | 57 | 10 |
| 1975 | 58 | 11 |
| 1975 | 59 | 6 |
| 1975 | 60 | 10 |
| 1975 | 61 | 2 |
| 1975 | 62 | 9 |
| 1975 | 63 | 11 |
| 1975 | 64 | 7 |
| 1975 | 65 | 7 |
| 1975 | 66 | 8 |
| 1975 | 67 | 7 |
| 1975 | 68 | 7 |
| 1975 | 69 | 8 |
| 1975 | 70 | 13 |
| 1975 | 71 | 4 |
| 1975 | 72 | 4 |
| 1975 | 73 | 4 |
| 1975 | 74 | 6 |
| 1975 | 75 | 1 |
| 1975 | 76 | 4 |
| 1975 | 77 | 7 |
| 1975 | 78 | 2 |
| 1975 | 79 | 2 |
| 1975 | 80 | 5 |
| 1975 | 81 | 3 |
| 1975 | 82 | 1 |
| 1975 | 83 | 3 |
| 1975 | 84 | 1 |
| 1975 | 85 | 1 |
| 1975 | 86 | 2 |
| 1975 | 87 | 1 |
| 1975 | 88 | >1 |
| 1975 | 89 | 1 |
| 1975 | \N | 598 |
The last row is of course the rollup row, showing there were indeed 598 White Men interviewed in 1975. That might seem like a lot, but look at the data at a more atomic level. Only 7 53-year olds, and only 10 54-year olds, in 1975 were interviewed. Your data is only as good as your sample size, and for each age, the samples can be appallingly small. The problem of course is randomness. Can we be sure that for the very small sample sizes for each age, survey takers got a truly random sample of White Men? Much less repeating it for every year? Given that the survey ran from 1972-2006 (I did not use the file with incomplete 2007-2008 data).
select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital group by year;
select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' group by year;
Will each get you the total for each year of all men (all ages), by year, and then the total for all men, all ages, who were never married (MARITAL=5). I've dumped that into an Open Office Spreadsheet to get the following:
[click Image to Enlarge]
Wow. Just for laughs I tried the following:
select year, count(*) as Num_Men from gss_marital where age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;
select year, count(*) as Never_Married from gss_marital where marital = '5' and age > '34' and age < '41' group by year;
And got the following graph (once I loaded it into OpenOffice)
Therefore, it certainly looks as if the data suggests that AT LEAST White Men are getting married later, which would certainly make the "Never Married" status stronger in surveys. The data is not inconsistent with that hypothesis, at any rate. How good is the GSS Data? Not particularly good, given questions about small sample sizes for White Men, at each age, and just how random the selection of the survey takers was, but it is one of the few social surveys we do have covering considerable time periods. We certainly see a fairly consistent rise in "Never Married" over the years, which matches the increased cost for a family, given rising housing prices, and the decline of real wages, in terms of house-buying at least, since the 1970's.
Just as important however, may be the changing expectations of women with respect to marriage. Sandra Tsing Loh, the NPR commentator, writer, and performance artist, has a revealing column in the upcoming Atlantic Montly, which I will be posting on later. It certainly seems among professional urban women, marriage has undergone redefinition. Akin to more of a short-term contract offered to NFL free agents, than anything else.
...Read more
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Advertising: Where the (White) Men Aren't
Thanks to reader Patrick, for the e-mail tip on the Jawbone "viral marketing" ads. While the ads themselves (originally on the Jawbone website, since pulled but still available on YouTube) are odious, virulently (anti White male) racist and sexist, that they exist and generate many positive comments on YouTube is indeed telling. What is absent from television and nearly all marketing is men. Particularly White men. At least in so far as White Men being the target of sales efforts, instead of mere reflexive hostility.
Below are a sample of the Jawbone Ads, created for the web as part of a "viral marketing" effort:
White Guy in Asian Dry Cleaner (1.1 Million views):
Noisy Guys in Pool (2,478 views):
Noisy Rugby Players in Bar (133,917 Views):
Responsible Marketing did not think much of the ads. Culture Buzz loved it. Top Rank Blog thought it was stupid and offensive. IntoMobile.com thought it was brilliant (because it was a White guy getting murdered by an Asian family).
But what is striking about these videos is the message (all directed by Music Video Director Samuel Bayer [Green Day, Garbage]). The message is that White Guys are terrible, and deserve to be killed, or better yet, turned gay. The video play on the hatreds towards White men by Women, Blacks, Asians, and so on.
Yet ...
Who is the biggest market for Bluetooth headsets? Why yes. White Men.
The older Black man sitting in the Dry Cleaner, ignoring the murder of the obnoxious White male customer? According to the Wall Street Journal, Middle Class Blacks are 40% of the Black population. Blacks themselves are 12.5% of the population. Thus the Middle Class Blacks are 5% of the population, and the Middle Class Black guy just sitting there ignoring the murder of the White guy is 2.5% of the population at best. While it may be quite typical for White women to wish that annoying White guys "turn gay," the gay population in the US is estimated at between 2.5% to 3%. While it's difficult to estimate, women remain a smaller technology buyer segment than men, though single women are increasingly more important technology buying segments, they still trail single men in buying technology, particularly cutting edge consumer electronics.
There isn't much payoff in terms of gaining new customers for new consumer technology like Jawbone's "Noise Assassin" bluetooth headsets by making the largest buying segments the targets of either "turning gay" or death by sharks or angry dry cleaning staff.
Indeed, the implicit message, being an obnoxious White guy gets you turned "gay" or killed by Women or Black Guys is pretty negative. It's one more example of the total failure of Advertising and Marketing to reach White Male consumers. Since the marketing people are so filled with hatred for those very same consumers.
As more and more men and women do not marry at all, or delay marriage well into their thirties, and high divorce rates equal lots of single people, a strategy of relying only on White female consumers and non-existent Black Middle Class consumers (or gay ones) is bound to fail. White Men remain about 50% or more of the potential consumer base for everything from consumer electronics to cars. Single people, whatever the cause, means that at least half of all household purchasing decisions will be made by Men. Most of them, White men.
These ads show how the entire creative culture is oriented around the desire to erase White Men from existence. By either wanting to "make them gay" or simply kill them. Such a culture, oriented in a rough coalition of women, gays, and non-Whites who all oppose the existence of White Men, cannot exist for much longer without a great deal of cultural and political strife. Indeed, the opting out of male viewers from Television and movies is only part of this trend.
...Read more
Below are a sample of the Jawbone Ads, created for the web as part of a "viral marketing" effort:
White Guy in Asian Dry Cleaner (1.1 Million views):
Noisy Guys in Pool (2,478 views):
Noisy Rugby Players in Bar (133,917 Views):
Responsible Marketing did not think much of the ads. Culture Buzz loved it. Top Rank Blog thought it was stupid and offensive. IntoMobile.com thought it was brilliant (because it was a White guy getting murdered by an Asian family).
But what is striking about these videos is the message (all directed by Music Video Director Samuel Bayer [Green Day, Garbage]). The message is that White Guys are terrible, and deserve to be killed, or better yet, turned gay. The video play on the hatreds towards White men by Women, Blacks, Asians, and so on.
Yet ...
Who is the biggest market for Bluetooth headsets? Why yes. White Men.
The older Black man sitting in the Dry Cleaner, ignoring the murder of the obnoxious White male customer? According to the Wall Street Journal, Middle Class Blacks are 40% of the Black population. Blacks themselves are 12.5% of the population. Thus the Middle Class Blacks are 5% of the population, and the Middle Class Black guy just sitting there ignoring the murder of the White guy is 2.5% of the population at best. While it may be quite typical for White women to wish that annoying White guys "turn gay," the gay population in the US is estimated at between 2.5% to 3%. While it's difficult to estimate, women remain a smaller technology buyer segment than men, though single women are increasingly more important technology buying segments, they still trail single men in buying technology, particularly cutting edge consumer electronics.
There isn't much payoff in terms of gaining new customers for new consumer technology like Jawbone's "Noise Assassin" bluetooth headsets by making the largest buying segments the targets of either "turning gay" or death by sharks or angry dry cleaning staff.
Indeed, the implicit message, being an obnoxious White guy gets you turned "gay" or killed by Women or Black Guys is pretty negative. It's one more example of the total failure of Advertising and Marketing to reach White Male consumers. Since the marketing people are so filled with hatred for those very same consumers.
As more and more men and women do not marry at all, or delay marriage well into their thirties, and high divorce rates equal lots of single people, a strategy of relying only on White female consumers and non-existent Black Middle Class consumers (or gay ones) is bound to fail. White Men remain about 50% or more of the potential consumer base for everything from consumer electronics to cars. Single people, whatever the cause, means that at least half of all household purchasing decisions will be made by Men. Most of them, White men.
These ads show how the entire creative culture is oriented around the desire to erase White Men from existence. By either wanting to "make them gay" or simply kill them. Such a culture, oriented in a rough coalition of women, gays, and non-Whites who all oppose the existence of White Men, cannot exist for much longer without a great deal of cultural and political strife. Indeed, the opting out of male viewers from Television and movies is only part of this trend.
...Read more
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Rock is Dead: Rolling Stone and the Lack of Young People
Rock is dead. Or, more to the point, the youth culture that created rock music is dead. Because we don't have enough young people. Not enough at any rate to create the kind of robust, competitive, and creative youth market that characterized the course of Rock music from the 1960's through the 1980's. For anyone seeking proof of that, simply examine the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.
[click Image to Enlarge]
This isn't unusual. See the site Magazine Death Pool for the betting line on which magazines will cease publication. Note that Blender, which ceased publication in March 2009, had on the cover such rock "artists" as Kelly Clarkson. Meanwhile, the current Rolling Stone covers such cutting edge youth concerns as Obama's Energy Secretary saving the Planet, stories on "Mad Men," "Entourage," "True Blood," and "Weeds" (all skewing heavily female, and older, mid forties or later). American Idol's Chris Daughtry, and Willie Nelson are featured, along with the shocking news that American Idol's Adam Lambert is indeed, gay. Lambert of course poses on the cover as a seductive pop tart, reminiscent of Rolling Stone's 1990's era cover featuring the edgy, youth-oriented Britney Spears (pre-meltdown, pre-Federline).
None of these features, stories, photos, or series of covers screams youth orientation, and of course nearly every bit of content skews heavily older and female.
This is because America's most scarce resource is young (White) people, who drive Rock and other aspects of youth culture.
The short story of 20th Century demographics would read something like the following. In the 1920, prosperity and an increased supply of youth (born after the turn of the Century in good times) created a youth culture. Increased prosperity also led to more babies being born. Then the Great Depression ended the Youth Culture, followed by WWII, which made teenagers who turned 18 in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 (born in 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 respectively) into adults very quickly. Youth culture did not return, until the post-War baby boom and rising incomes created it as in the 1920's. Starting with first toys and then music, youth markets exploded. The Davy Crockett craze, and toys, were as important as Elvis. For example, Hula Hoops came on the scene in 1957, along with Frisbees. Kids who were ten or eleven in the 1950's, entered their late teen age years and early twenties in the 1960's, and drove the youth culture, from music to fashions.
But, births became radically reduced in the latter half of the 1960's. Rising costs of living, declines in real wages, ending of restrictions on abortion, contraception, and the belief in delayed marriage reduced fertility and births every year starting in 1965. During the 1970's, this reduced fertility (as families were also hammered by a poor economy) only increased, recovering somewhat in the 1980's, only to fall again in the early 1990's during the recessionary period, and the high cost of housing in the inflationary period of the latter 1990's and early 2000's when the Dot-Com and Housing bubbles drove prices in urban job centers (mostly on the coasts) up past affordability for many families.
This has left marketers, publishers, creative people, pundits, and many others in a mental prison. Their model of how the world works (there is always more young people, and a large group of young people drives an ever changing culture) is at odds with the reality: there is an ever smaller supply (of young White people) who are the engine of youth culture, and this lack of young (White) people is the chief cause of the decline of youth culture in all areas.
While it is true that internet piracy, decline of the CD as a sales medium for music, and the growth of low-cost online sales of mp3 versions of music on sites as diverse as Apple's Itunes store and Amazon's own online offerings have seriously diminished the money rock artists (and everyone else) earn from recordings, live performances are still lucrative.
It's still possible to make (considerable) amounts of money from rock music, by touring and performing live, where fans will pay considerable amounts of money to see favored artists. It's interesting however to see just who ranks in live performing revenues.
The 2004 Rolling Stone Rich List has for example, James Taylor making about the same amount ($20 million) as Eminem. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles are the top three performers. In 2007 Miley Cyrus earned a combined $64 million from concerts and music sales. But no new artists like Elvis in the late 1950's or the Beatles in the mid 1960's are earning this amount of money, from either recording or touring. Cyrus, working the tween girl market, made close to the amount that the Eagles did in 2004 ($63 million for the Eagles vs. $64 million for Cyrus).
As an aside, it's interesting that while musicians can make money from older fans (the Stones, Springsteen, the Eagles) or young tween girls (Cyrus), there's little evidence of any performer who can draw young White men in appreciable numbers to be competitive with the top revenue earners in pop music. Young men seem completely absent from popular music.
The 2000 Census data can be found at that link, while the 1990 Census data (for White Alone) data can be found here, while the 1980 Census data (PDF only) can be found here.
Here is the graphic version of the 1980 Census:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, I've constructed the following table.
From this data, I've constructed the graph below showing the decline in youth cohorts from the 1980 Census data:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
I must mention that the estimates from the US Census Bureau show an increase in youth cohorts, wrt to 2008 vs. 2000, but these are estimates and not complete enumerations. They also fly in the face of the other data, which suggests a birth dearth and scarceness of young people. Among others, the losses at the UPN and WB networks, and continued losses at the merged CW network, aimed solely at teen girls. For example, the highest ratings of WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer were 5.3 million, while that of the 1980's series the A Team were 20.1 million viewers.
Nevertheless, the data for White Alone youth cohorts for the 2008 estimates show an increase in young people created during a decade of high housing costs and declining real wages. Perhaps people magically had children at little cost, unlike earlier decades. Or some other cause is at work (immigration from Europe with pre-existing children)? I do find it puzzling that the peak numbers of the Baby Boom (16-17 million per cohort) is now approached in numbers (around 15-16 million) for the younger age cohorts, under age 5 to age 29. Particularly since the numbers of age cohorts in 2000 who would naturally age (8 years later) don't match up, there seems to be an extra 3 million people added with no explanation. Completeness however demands I point out that data, and let readers draw their own conclusions. My own are that the over-counting might well be from faulty estimates and wrong classifications (Hispanic/White being put into the White Alone category).
The White Alone category is the driver of the youth market, because Hispanics tend to strongly prefer Spanish-language media. As I've noted in other posts, during the campaign for and against California's Proposition 8 (overturning gay marriage), the opponents of Prop. 8 recruited Puerto Rican actress America Ferrara, star of the ABC-TV series "Ugly Betty" to record spots against Proposition 8. In English. Proponents of Proposition 8 got actual, Mexican native and Spanish speaking Telenovela stars to record spots in Spanish for Prop. 8. This undoubtedly helped Proposition 8 to pass.
America has a substantial Hispanic/Mexican youth population, but they tend to inhabit a separate and distinct cultural universe which only occasionally intersects with the English speaking, White/Black culture. Blacks do share many if not most of the cultural assumptions and enthusiasms of the White population, and a quick check of Nielsen's excellent ratings portal confirms that Black and White preferences for Television remains pretty much the same. While Hispanics don't share many of the same viewing patterns. Howver, there simply are not that many Blacks (12.5% of the population) to make an impact as a mass-driver of youth culture.
[Note to bloggers, for those seeking to copy/paste data into Excel from web-pages, a good Text Editor that can do regular expression search and replace is critical. For this post, I'd selected web pages generated by the US Census Bureau website and copied into TextWrangler, the free text editor from the BBEdit folks for the Mac. Using regular expressions I replaced the pattern of \r\t\r\r (a carriage return, a tab, two carriage returns) with \t (a single tab). Of course you need to show the invisibles to figure out what to replace. Gedit on Linux does not have regular expressions, both Kate and Jedit (the latter also available on the Mac) have regular expressions in Search and Replace. Once you've set up your text file properly, save it and import it into Excel or Open Office as a delimited (tab) text file and save yourself lots of tedious typing. It's faster and you don't get errors. A good text editor is also critical in replacing the junk that Excel or Open Office create when it saves HTML files, which I've done in creating this table for Blogger.]
Rolling Stone is as tedious, older skewing, aimed at a mostly older, female readership, as it is, because there just are not that many young people. Not enough young people to make say, either the Killers or Arctic Monkeys (both formed in 2002) as well-known, as popular, and as profitable as say Elvis, the Beach Boys, or the Beatles, in their hey-days, or even as the Eagles in 2004, a band at that point 32 years old (the Eagles were formed in 1972).
Everyone knows the data, but some times it takes the posed glamor shot of an ... American Idol contestant to understand how rock, and youth culture in general, are both dead. Because there are not enough young people.
...Read more
[click Image to Enlarge]
This isn't unusual. See the site Magazine Death Pool for the betting line on which magazines will cease publication. Note that Blender, which ceased publication in March 2009, had on the cover such rock "artists" as Kelly Clarkson. Meanwhile, the current Rolling Stone covers such cutting edge youth concerns as Obama's Energy Secretary saving the Planet, stories on "Mad Men," "Entourage," "True Blood," and "Weeds" (all skewing heavily female, and older, mid forties or later). American Idol's Chris Daughtry, and Willie Nelson are featured, along with the shocking news that American Idol's Adam Lambert is indeed, gay. Lambert of course poses on the cover as a seductive pop tart, reminiscent of Rolling Stone's 1990's era cover featuring the edgy, youth-oriented Britney Spears (pre-meltdown, pre-Federline).
None of these features, stories, photos, or series of covers screams youth orientation, and of course nearly every bit of content skews heavily older and female.
This is because America's most scarce resource is young (White) people, who drive Rock and other aspects of youth culture.
The short story of 20th Century demographics would read something like the following. In the 1920, prosperity and an increased supply of youth (born after the turn of the Century in good times) created a youth culture. Increased prosperity also led to more babies being born. Then the Great Depression ended the Youth Culture, followed by WWII, which made teenagers who turned 18 in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 (born in 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 respectively) into adults very quickly. Youth culture did not return, until the post-War baby boom and rising incomes created it as in the 1920's. Starting with first toys and then music, youth markets exploded. The Davy Crockett craze, and toys, were as important as Elvis. For example, Hula Hoops came on the scene in 1957, along with Frisbees. Kids who were ten or eleven in the 1950's, entered their late teen age years and early twenties in the 1960's, and drove the youth culture, from music to fashions.
But, births became radically reduced in the latter half of the 1960's. Rising costs of living, declines in real wages, ending of restrictions on abortion, contraception, and the belief in delayed marriage reduced fertility and births every year starting in 1965. During the 1970's, this reduced fertility (as families were also hammered by a poor economy) only increased, recovering somewhat in the 1980's, only to fall again in the early 1990's during the recessionary period, and the high cost of housing in the inflationary period of the latter 1990's and early 2000's when the Dot-Com and Housing bubbles drove prices in urban job centers (mostly on the coasts) up past affordability for many families.
This has left marketers, publishers, creative people, pundits, and many others in a mental prison. Their model of how the world works (there is always more young people, and a large group of young people drives an ever changing culture) is at odds with the reality: there is an ever smaller supply (of young White people) who are the engine of youth culture, and this lack of young (White) people is the chief cause of the decline of youth culture in all areas.
While it is true that internet piracy, decline of the CD as a sales medium for music, and the growth of low-cost online sales of mp3 versions of music on sites as diverse as Apple's Itunes store and Amazon's own online offerings have seriously diminished the money rock artists (and everyone else) earn from recordings, live performances are still lucrative.
It's still possible to make (considerable) amounts of money from rock music, by touring and performing live, where fans will pay considerable amounts of money to see favored artists. It's interesting however to see just who ranks in live performing revenues.
The 2004 Rolling Stone Rich List has for example, James Taylor making about the same amount ($20 million) as Eminem. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles are the top three performers. In 2007 Miley Cyrus earned a combined $64 million from concerts and music sales. But no new artists like Elvis in the late 1950's or the Beatles in the mid 1960's are earning this amount of money, from either recording or touring. Cyrus, working the tween girl market, made close to the amount that the Eagles did in 2004 ($63 million for the Eagles vs. $64 million for Cyrus).
As an aside, it's interesting that while musicians can make money from older fans (the Stones, Springsteen, the Eagles) or young tween girls (Cyrus), there's little evidence of any performer who can draw young White men in appreciable numbers to be competitive with the top revenue earners in pop music. Young men seem completely absent from popular music.
The 2000 Census data can be found at that link, while the 1990 Census data (for White Alone) data can be found here, while the 1980 Census data (PDF only) can be found here.
Here is the graphic version of the 1980 Census:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census, I've constructed the following table.
| 2000 | 1990 | 1980 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 5 years | 12,859,892 | 13,649,490 | 11,789,394 |
| 5 to 9 years | 13,944,882 | 13,616,268 | 12,200,468 |
| 10 to 14 years | 14,322,638 | 12,853,558 | 13,699,871 |
| 15 to 19 years | 14,167,148 | 13,342,703 | 16,138,482 |
| 20 to 24 years | 13,064,891 | 14,523,912 | 16,541,315 |
| 25 to 29 years | 13,501,773 | 16,638,544 | 15,262,799 |
| 30 to 34 years | 14,818,786 | 17,351,513 | 14,143,721 |
| 35 to 39 years | 17,031,493 | 16,081,606 | 11,290,738 |
| 40 to 44 years | 17,265,995 | 14,506,390 | 9,408,654 |
| 45 to 49 years | 15,810,626 | 11,585,703 | 9,034,158 |
| 50 to 54 years | 14,213,875 | 9,504,871 | 9,812,613 |
| 55 to 59 years | 11,107,247 | 8,968,416 | 9,990,620 |
| 60 to 64 years | 8,945,842 | 9,211,123 | 8,813,447 |
| 65 to 69 years | 8,040,225 | 8,899,637 | 7,641,210 |
| 70 to 74 years | 7,648,193 | 7,126,564 | 6,001,564 |
| 75 to 79 years | 6,530,019 | 5,485,025 | 4,229,594 |
| 80 to 84 years | 4,408,597 | 3,552,695 | 2,631,873 |
| 85 years and over | 3,778,504 | 2,788,052 | 1,972,317 |
From this data, I've constructed the graph below showing the decline in youth cohorts from the 1980 Census data:
[Click Image to Enlarge]
I must mention that the estimates from the US Census Bureau show an increase in youth cohorts, wrt to 2008 vs. 2000, but these are estimates and not complete enumerations. They also fly in the face of the other data, which suggests a birth dearth and scarceness of young people. Among others, the losses at the UPN and WB networks, and continued losses at the merged CW network, aimed solely at teen girls. For example, the highest ratings of WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer were 5.3 million, while that of the 1980's series the A Team were 20.1 million viewers.
Nevertheless, the data for White Alone youth cohorts for the 2008 estimates show an increase in young people created during a decade of high housing costs and declining real wages. Perhaps people magically had children at little cost, unlike earlier decades. Or some other cause is at work (immigration from Europe with pre-existing children)? I do find it puzzling that the peak numbers of the Baby Boom (16-17 million per cohort) is now approached in numbers (around 15-16 million) for the younger age cohorts, under age 5 to age 29. Particularly since the numbers of age cohorts in 2000 who would naturally age (8 years later) don't match up, there seems to be an extra 3 million people added with no explanation. Completeness however demands I point out that data, and let readers draw their own conclusions. My own are that the over-counting might well be from faulty estimates and wrong classifications (Hispanic/White being put into the White Alone category).
The White Alone category is the driver of the youth market, because Hispanics tend to strongly prefer Spanish-language media. As I've noted in other posts, during the campaign for and against California's Proposition 8 (overturning gay marriage), the opponents of Prop. 8 recruited Puerto Rican actress America Ferrara, star of the ABC-TV series "Ugly Betty" to record spots against Proposition 8. In English. Proponents of Proposition 8 got actual, Mexican native and Spanish speaking Telenovela stars to record spots in Spanish for Prop. 8. This undoubtedly helped Proposition 8 to pass.
America has a substantial Hispanic/Mexican youth population, but they tend to inhabit a separate and distinct cultural universe which only occasionally intersects with the English speaking, White/Black culture. Blacks do share many if not most of the cultural assumptions and enthusiasms of the White population, and a quick check of Nielsen's excellent ratings portal confirms that Black and White preferences for Television remains pretty much the same. While Hispanics don't share many of the same viewing patterns. Howver, there simply are not that many Blacks (12.5% of the population) to make an impact as a mass-driver of youth culture.
[Note to bloggers, for those seeking to copy/paste data into Excel from web-pages, a good Text Editor that can do regular expression search and replace is critical. For this post, I'd selected web pages generated by the US Census Bureau website and copied into TextWrangler, the free text editor from the BBEdit folks for the Mac. Using regular expressions I replaced the pattern of \r\t\r\r (a carriage return, a tab, two carriage returns) with \t (a single tab). Of course you need to show the invisibles to figure out what to replace. Gedit on Linux does not have regular expressions, both Kate and Jedit (the latter also available on the Mac) have regular expressions in Search and Replace. Once you've set up your text file properly, save it and import it into Excel or Open Office as a delimited (tab) text file and save yourself lots of tedious typing. It's faster and you don't get errors. A good text editor is also critical in replacing the junk that Excel or Open Office create when it saves HTML files, which I've done in creating this table for Blogger.]
Rolling Stone is as tedious, older skewing, aimed at a mostly older, female readership, as it is, because there just are not that many young people. Not enough young people to make say, either the Killers or Arctic Monkeys (both formed in 2002) as well-known, as popular, and as profitable as say Elvis, the Beach Boys, or the Beatles, in their hey-days, or even as the Eagles in 2004, a band at that point 32 years old (the Eagles were formed in 1972).
Everyone knows the data, but some times it takes the posed glamor shot of an ... American Idol contestant to understand how rock, and youth culture in general, are both dead. Because there are not enough young people.
...Read more
Monday, June 8, 2009
Failure of the Media Part Two: The Lingering Death of the LA Times
By all accounts the LA Times should be doing well. Absent the leverage demands of the parent company Tribune Media, the potential readership of the LA Times should be large. After all, the US Census Bureau shows 9.8 million people in Los Angeles County alone, and the Metro Area of LA (including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernadino, Orange, and Ventura Counties) offer no serious competitor to the LA Times. [Thanks to Google for the excellent graph at the link.] For people interested in reading about sports, entertainment, or anything else to do with the Los Angeles metropolitan area, there would seem to be no real alternative to the LA Times. It should be a perfect world, both plenty of customers, and no serious competitors. Even local blogs such as LA Observed or Mayor Sam's Sister City (the latter joking "written" by long-deceased Mayor Sam Yorty) offer no serious competition for the broad categories of sports, news, local happenings, and entertainment and few financial resources to compete in those broad categories.
Why then is the LA Times in trouble, with an ever declining readership, ever declining advertising base, ever declining staff, and morale at the paper at rock bottom? The answer is of course, demographics. Simply put, there are not enough upscale, Liberal White newspaper readers to make the LA Times profitable.
It's worth noting that the LA Times circulation peak was in 1988, with 1.1 million readers, daily. The LA Times has been declining in circulation ever since, down to 739,000 daily, as the chart below makes clear. [Data from the Wikipedia cite, see also here]
[Click Chart to Enlarge]
Yet even as the paper has been mired in one controversy over another, from the carefully timed release of sexual harassment allegations regarding then recall candidate for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (two days before the vote), to the suppression of the video of Barack Obama at PLO operative Rashid Khalidi's going away party and controversy over revenue sharing of an LA Times published magazine celebrating the Staples Center, population has been increasing in LA County. The increase is 14%, from 1988 to 2008, while the decrease in circulation is fully one third, at 33%.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
It's useful to recall, how under fully 14% fewer people in LA County alone, the LA Times reached it's peak circulation of 1.1 million daily. The featured Sports columnist was Jim Murray, not J. A. Adande. Batting Cleanup for Murray was the sarcastic Scot Ostler. Pat Morrison, from PBS, was not a columnist, while Jack Smith was. The newspaper, while fairly socially liberal, had a moderate to conservative political bent, was oriented towards serving it's mostly older, male readership in the things that mattered, local Sports, politics, and entertainment. The paper spent comparatively few resources on hip/trendy, but unread music columnists like Robert Hilburn, or tragically hip (but unread) movie critics like Carina Chocano. Angry Hispanic chauvinists and Liberals like Al Martinez and Steve Lopez were largely kept under wraps. Knowing that readership of the LA Times was mostly White, Male, and conservative.
This focus changed, even before Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995, as senior editors began to focus not on what their customers wanted, but on competing with local NPR stations they'd listen to in the drive over to work. Despite, of course, all those NPR stations being subsidized affairs that required massive fundraising efforts quarterly and relied upon being license holders of valuable broadcast frequencies, through government largesse. The success of NBC, nationally, with the Brandon Tartikoff strategy was no help either. Tartikoff's strategy, was to trade absolute number of viewers at NBC in favor of young urban professionals, the yuppies. In the go-go 1980's, the strategy worked as advertisers clamored to get in front of people with money. For the LA Times, however, this strategy was disastrous.
Because locally, Los Angeles was changing. The increase in population, as seen in my post, Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1, was mostly Hispanic/Mexican. Whites were actually a declining part of the population, and there was not enough wealth being created to drive upscale advertising. Even worse, by it's very nature, paper newspapers cannot track the type of people reading it's content (and ads). While NBC and other broadcast networks could proudly tout through the Nielsen reports, just how many women 18-34, or other coveted demographic slices, were watching the shows and ads. Advertisers with the LA Times had no way of knowing if the ads were reaching the wealthy few of Marina Del Rey, Malibu, Santa Monica, the Venice Canals, or people in Torrance, Tarzana, or Culver City, decidedly less wealthy and therefore not worth paying extra for to reach.
Meanwhile, forces were brewing that would devastate LA's economy, create White Flight, and conspire to help mortally wound the LA Times. The forces had two names: Bill Clinton, and Rodney King.
Under Bill Clinton's leadership, the LA area lost175,000 jobs at a minimum. Losses accounted for fully 45% of all high tech jobs in 1998, the near peak of the Dot-com boom. The biggest losses in that sector since the end of WWII, affecting nearly 12,000 firms in the LA basin. As shown in this WSJ article, rosy projections by Clinton and his people about changing over to entertainment from aerospace proved a mirage. High paying jobs, and the ability of those high-paying jobs to sustain a White middle class (that read newspapers like the LA Times) in a region of high housing costs, taxes, and energy costs, collapsed with Clinton's defense cuts. As others have noted, particularly Steve Sailer, LA's geography does not lend itself to living just anywhere. Weather is brutally hot (and smoggy) in low-cost areas such as Riverside, San Bernadino, and the Antelope Valley. Meanwhile job centers are located in nice to live in coastal areas, making commutes brutal. Key coastal areas that have decent climates and easy commutes are off-limits because of huge concentrations of crime-ridden non-White populations, making gentrification a joke (Watts, South Central, Bell, much of Long Beach, and East Los Angeles all fall into this category). Parents have to spend considerable sums of money to live in school districts that are merely acceptable, where their children do not face gangs or anti-education populations. All of this was sustainable as long as high-paying jobs in either the assembly line or engineering staff and large supporting structure of ancillary firms continued to exist. By 1994, that structure was gone, and families unable to afford LA's high cost of living fled elsewhere. To Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.
Few were inclined to stick things out, because of the impact of the Rodney King riots. The riots, and the inept, politically driven response by the LA and State leadership, lost the confidence of LA's middle class. The riots, occurring just hours after the Not-Guilty verdict in the trials of LAPD officers Koon and others, on April 29, 1992, killed 53 people and left substantial parts of the city (most of it located in Black/Hispanic South Central) in burnt out ruins. However, the beating of Reginald Denny, by a Black mob, as the LAPD and other law enforcement authorities retreated, shocked middle class Whites in the LA area. As did the televised gun battles between Korean shop owners and marauding gangs of mostly Black looters, with the law enforcement authorities absent entirely.
Here was unmistakable evidence that when it came to public safety or suppressing a mob of Black (or Hispanic, just as many if not more of the rioters and looters seen on TV were Hispanic/Mexican), the political leadership, from Republican Governors like Pete Wilson down to the LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, and Black Democratic Mayor Thomas Bradley, would choose to sacrifice public safety instead of crack down hard, on mobs of non-Whites. While expedient politically in the short run (avoiding hugely negative press coverage which was for the most part solidly pro-rioter, and predictably anti-police) this series of choices to sacrifice mostly White (and Korean) public safety in favor of avoiding criticism for shooting and mass arrests of Blacks and Mexicans, had predictable results.
Besides increases in gun ownership among Whites, those who could leave Southern California did so, for states that were noticeably more White, and committed to public safety. Loss of confidence in the entire class of leadership, Republican and Democratic alike, when it came to public safety, had the Los Angeles Basin White middle class ready to leave when economic hardship hit in the form of Clinton's defense cuts that destroyed the economic basis of the White middle class.
As a result of the White flight from the LA basin, the LA Times began to lose readership, and potential readership, year by year. All the while, more immigrants, legal and otherwise, crowded into the LA basin. However, nearly all of these immigrants were non-English speakers, and preferred their newspapers, if they read them at all, in their native languages. Further eroding the LA Times financial position. In response, the LA Times leadership, created more and more liberal coverage. Not just on the opinion pages, but in the coverage of everything from Sports, to Entertainment, to News.
Completely absent from the LA Times pages were the growing influence of the MS-13 gangs, their ability to push westward from Downtown LA into MacArthur/Westlake Park, and the flight of Blacks southward into Long Beach out of South Central and Compton as superior numbers of Mexican immigrants (and gangs) pushed them out of native turf. That many of the gang-related murders in the LA area each year were related to these struggles were never mentioned in the LA Times. Meanwhile, it was by no means unusual for LA Times movie critics like Carina Chocano to query film-makers/producers like Judd Apatow on why fat White Guys get all his jokes (Apatow responded that political correctness dictated that only Fat White Guys be funny, the subject of jokes) in PC-inquisitions. Much of the content of the LA Times resembled a PC inquisition, into the state of mind of any (White Male only of course) person who might harbor racist, or sexist, or homophobic thought (crimes).
Naturally, subscribers edged ever downward. To their current level, a third less than the 1988 peak. Now with a heavy debt load acquired by the leveraged purchase of the Tribune Company by owner Sam Zell, the LA Times seems circling the drain like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers that might cease publication altogether in favor of online-only limited content.
The environment for Print Newspapers is dire. Newsosaur notes that young people (and there are few of them to begin with, at least White ones, due to the birth dearth) do not like to read newspapers, and the percentage that do has declined from 40% or so in 1999, to around 30% today. This is consistent with other findings. Older (White) Americans, age 65+, read newspapers the most (above 70% in 1999, to about 65% today). While ALL groups have declined, only ages 45 and up both started and finished above 55% in reading newspapers regularly).
Even worse, ad sales slid an appalling $2.6 billion last quarter or fully 28.3%. There is not any prospect of an upturn in the economy bailing out a failed strategy of appealing to ever younger, more liberal readers, who don't read newspapers in the first place, while alienating older, more conservative readers. The collapse of the housing industry and banrkuptcy of GM and Chrysler, means that ads for houses and autos, mainstays of newspaper advertising, are largely gone. Not to be replaced or revived any time soon.
Clearly, the LA Times, and parent Tribune Company, is only a few short steps away from bankruptcy, and perhaps cessation of the print publication of the LA Times. I doubt many readers will miss them.
So what is ahead for papers like the Times?
They can probably soldier onward, zombie-like, as glorified blogs. Costs for electronic versions are astonishingly low, but there remains the problem of getting people to read their content. The LA Times certainly could have driven millions of viewers to it's website by the simple expedient of putting up the video of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi's going away party. That it did not speaks volumes about it's desire to present ideological purity and propaganda (news suppression) over providing content someone might actually want to read. But simply producing a glorified "professional" version of LA Observed without the style and critically, the content of that website is not going to produce profits. Merely lower levels of losses.
Newsosaur, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, believes that his "ViewPass" will allow newspapers to charge prices content on array of mobile devices a sort of me-too operation in the way that the NFL or MLB charges for games streamed onto mobile phones and the like. I don't think that will succeed. Simply because newspapers are unable to provide anything worth reading.
Lost in all of this is the generational change of leadership in newspapers and indeed nearly all media. Old-line editors were like columnists such as Jack Smith or Jim Murray. They understood, and shared, the likes, dislikes, prejudices, virtues, and flaws of most of their readers. Because they were like their readers: older, Whiter, more conservative, middle class, and well, male. They certainly were not part of the liberal hothouse of academia and the media that exists today, advancement was through apprenticeship and demonstrating that stories generated readers (and thus money), not through "correct" ideology and gender, race, and sexual orientation membership. It would have been unthinkable in the Jim Murray era for the LA Times to employ a Sports Writer who openly had (a publicly celebrated in the LA Times pages) sex change operation. It simply would not have been tolerated, the risk of canceled subscriptions was too high, and the paper's purpose was to turn a profit, not push a social agenda (one alien to most of it's readers).
When the agenda of "celebrating" the transformation of Mike Penner to Christine Daniels takes precedence over providing an enjoyable Sports section for the morning breakfast table, newspaper management has lost all ability to connect with it's potential readers. A "ViewPass" can provide all the centrally managed mobile content that can be created, potential readers won't pay for Sports content provided by trans-gendered folk, even if said content is free.
Newsosaur is quite skeptical of the ability of the government to provide bail-out money. The losses are too deep, and the taxes required too onerous, to provide a complete Pravda model. While it's certain bailouts will be proposed, the ability to push them through in hard economic times when readers have already voted with their wallets (not to subscribe) is questionable.
It's quite likely, instead, that various bloggers, and conglomerations of bloggers, locally, will provide content, and that as newspapers like the LA Times shrink down to LA Observed / Mayor Sam's Sister City size, those bloggers or people like them will grow upwards. After all, it's all about content.
...Read more
Why then is the LA Times in trouble, with an ever declining readership, ever declining advertising base, ever declining staff, and morale at the paper at rock bottom? The answer is of course, demographics. Simply put, there are not enough upscale, Liberal White newspaper readers to make the LA Times profitable.
It's worth noting that the LA Times circulation peak was in 1988, with 1.1 million readers, daily. The LA Times has been declining in circulation ever since, down to 739,000 daily, as the chart below makes clear. [Data from the Wikipedia cite, see also here]
[Click Chart to Enlarge]
Yet even as the paper has been mired in one controversy over another, from the carefully timed release of sexual harassment allegations regarding then recall candidate for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (two days before the vote), to the suppression of the video of Barack Obama at PLO operative Rashid Khalidi's going away party and controversy over revenue sharing of an LA Times published magazine celebrating the Staples Center, population has been increasing in LA County. The increase is 14%, from 1988 to 2008, while the decrease in circulation is fully one third, at 33%.
[Click Image to Enlarge]
It's useful to recall, how under fully 14% fewer people in LA County alone, the LA Times reached it's peak circulation of 1.1 million daily. The featured Sports columnist was Jim Murray, not J. A. Adande. Batting Cleanup for Murray was the sarcastic Scot Ostler. Pat Morrison, from PBS, was not a columnist, while Jack Smith was. The newspaper, while fairly socially liberal, had a moderate to conservative political bent, was oriented towards serving it's mostly older, male readership in the things that mattered, local Sports, politics, and entertainment. The paper spent comparatively few resources on hip/trendy, but unread music columnists like Robert Hilburn, or tragically hip (but unread) movie critics like Carina Chocano. Angry Hispanic chauvinists and Liberals like Al Martinez and Steve Lopez were largely kept under wraps. Knowing that readership of the LA Times was mostly White, Male, and conservative.
This focus changed, even before Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995, as senior editors began to focus not on what their customers wanted, but on competing with local NPR stations they'd listen to in the drive over to work. Despite, of course, all those NPR stations being subsidized affairs that required massive fundraising efforts quarterly and relied upon being license holders of valuable broadcast frequencies, through government largesse. The success of NBC, nationally, with the Brandon Tartikoff strategy was no help either. Tartikoff's strategy, was to trade absolute number of viewers at NBC in favor of young urban professionals, the yuppies. In the go-go 1980's, the strategy worked as advertisers clamored to get in front of people with money. For the LA Times, however, this strategy was disastrous.
Because locally, Los Angeles was changing. The increase in population, as seen in my post, Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1, was mostly Hispanic/Mexican. Whites were actually a declining part of the population, and there was not enough wealth being created to drive upscale advertising. Even worse, by it's very nature, paper newspapers cannot track the type of people reading it's content (and ads). While NBC and other broadcast networks could proudly tout through the Nielsen reports, just how many women 18-34, or other coveted demographic slices, were watching the shows and ads. Advertisers with the LA Times had no way of knowing if the ads were reaching the wealthy few of Marina Del Rey, Malibu, Santa Monica, the Venice Canals, or people in Torrance, Tarzana, or Culver City, decidedly less wealthy and therefore not worth paying extra for to reach.
Meanwhile, forces were brewing that would devastate LA's economy, create White Flight, and conspire to help mortally wound the LA Times. The forces had two names: Bill Clinton, and Rodney King.
Under Bill Clinton's leadership, the LA area lost175,000 jobs at a minimum. Losses accounted for fully 45% of all high tech jobs in 1998, the near peak of the Dot-com boom. The biggest losses in that sector since the end of WWII, affecting nearly 12,000 firms in the LA basin. As shown in this WSJ article, rosy projections by Clinton and his people about changing over to entertainment from aerospace proved a mirage. High paying jobs, and the ability of those high-paying jobs to sustain a White middle class (that read newspapers like the LA Times) in a region of high housing costs, taxes, and energy costs, collapsed with Clinton's defense cuts. As others have noted, particularly Steve Sailer, LA's geography does not lend itself to living just anywhere. Weather is brutally hot (and smoggy) in low-cost areas such as Riverside, San Bernadino, and the Antelope Valley. Meanwhile job centers are located in nice to live in coastal areas, making commutes brutal. Key coastal areas that have decent climates and easy commutes are off-limits because of huge concentrations of crime-ridden non-White populations, making gentrification a joke (Watts, South Central, Bell, much of Long Beach, and East Los Angeles all fall into this category). Parents have to spend considerable sums of money to live in school districts that are merely acceptable, where their children do not face gangs or anti-education populations. All of this was sustainable as long as high-paying jobs in either the assembly line or engineering staff and large supporting structure of ancillary firms continued to exist. By 1994, that structure was gone, and families unable to afford LA's high cost of living fled elsewhere. To Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.
Few were inclined to stick things out, because of the impact of the Rodney King riots. The riots, and the inept, politically driven response by the LA and State leadership, lost the confidence of LA's middle class. The riots, occurring just hours after the Not-Guilty verdict in the trials of LAPD officers Koon and others, on April 29, 1992, killed 53 people and left substantial parts of the city (most of it located in Black/Hispanic South Central) in burnt out ruins. However, the beating of Reginald Denny, by a Black mob, as the LAPD and other law enforcement authorities retreated, shocked middle class Whites in the LA area. As did the televised gun battles between Korean shop owners and marauding gangs of mostly Black looters, with the law enforcement authorities absent entirely.
Here was unmistakable evidence that when it came to public safety or suppressing a mob of Black (or Hispanic, just as many if not more of the rioters and looters seen on TV were Hispanic/Mexican), the political leadership, from Republican Governors like Pete Wilson down to the LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, and Black Democratic Mayor Thomas Bradley, would choose to sacrifice public safety instead of crack down hard, on mobs of non-Whites. While expedient politically in the short run (avoiding hugely negative press coverage which was for the most part solidly pro-rioter, and predictably anti-police) this series of choices to sacrifice mostly White (and Korean) public safety in favor of avoiding criticism for shooting and mass arrests of Blacks and Mexicans, had predictable results.
Besides increases in gun ownership among Whites, those who could leave Southern California did so, for states that were noticeably more White, and committed to public safety. Loss of confidence in the entire class of leadership, Republican and Democratic alike, when it came to public safety, had the Los Angeles Basin White middle class ready to leave when economic hardship hit in the form of Clinton's defense cuts that destroyed the economic basis of the White middle class.
As a result of the White flight from the LA basin, the LA Times began to lose readership, and potential readership, year by year. All the while, more immigrants, legal and otherwise, crowded into the LA basin. However, nearly all of these immigrants were non-English speakers, and preferred their newspapers, if they read them at all, in their native languages. Further eroding the LA Times financial position. In response, the LA Times leadership, created more and more liberal coverage. Not just on the opinion pages, but in the coverage of everything from Sports, to Entertainment, to News.
Completely absent from the LA Times pages were the growing influence of the MS-13 gangs, their ability to push westward from Downtown LA into MacArthur/Westlake Park, and the flight of Blacks southward into Long Beach out of South Central and Compton as superior numbers of Mexican immigrants (and gangs) pushed them out of native turf. That many of the gang-related murders in the LA area each year were related to these struggles were never mentioned in the LA Times. Meanwhile, it was by no means unusual for LA Times movie critics like Carina Chocano to query film-makers/producers like Judd Apatow on why fat White Guys get all his jokes (Apatow responded that political correctness dictated that only Fat White Guys be funny, the subject of jokes) in PC-inquisitions. Much of the content of the LA Times resembled a PC inquisition, into the state of mind of any (White Male only of course) person who might harbor racist, or sexist, or homophobic thought (crimes).
Naturally, subscribers edged ever downward. To their current level, a third less than the 1988 peak. Now with a heavy debt load acquired by the leveraged purchase of the Tribune Company by owner Sam Zell, the LA Times seems circling the drain like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers that might cease publication altogether in favor of online-only limited content.
The environment for Print Newspapers is dire. Newsosaur notes that young people (and there are few of them to begin with, at least White ones, due to the birth dearth) do not like to read newspapers, and the percentage that do has declined from 40% or so in 1999, to around 30% today. This is consistent with other findings. Older (White) Americans, age 65+, read newspapers the most (above 70% in 1999, to about 65% today). While ALL groups have declined, only ages 45 and up both started and finished above 55% in reading newspapers regularly).
Even worse, ad sales slid an appalling $2.6 billion last quarter or fully 28.3%. There is not any prospect of an upturn in the economy bailing out a failed strategy of appealing to ever younger, more liberal readers, who don't read newspapers in the first place, while alienating older, more conservative readers. The collapse of the housing industry and banrkuptcy of GM and Chrysler, means that ads for houses and autos, mainstays of newspaper advertising, are largely gone. Not to be replaced or revived any time soon.
Clearly, the LA Times, and parent Tribune Company, is only a few short steps away from bankruptcy, and perhaps cessation of the print publication of the LA Times. I doubt many readers will miss them.
So what is ahead for papers like the Times?
They can probably soldier onward, zombie-like, as glorified blogs. Costs for electronic versions are astonishingly low, but there remains the problem of getting people to read their content. The LA Times certainly could have driven millions of viewers to it's website by the simple expedient of putting up the video of Barack Obama at Rashid Khalidi's going away party. That it did not speaks volumes about it's desire to present ideological purity and propaganda (news suppression) over providing content someone might actually want to read. But simply producing a glorified "professional" version of LA Observed without the style and critically, the content of that website is not going to produce profits. Merely lower levels of losses.
Newsosaur, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, believes that his "ViewPass" will allow newspapers to charge prices content on array of mobile devices a sort of me-too operation in the way that the NFL or MLB charges for games streamed onto mobile phones and the like. I don't think that will succeed. Simply because newspapers are unable to provide anything worth reading.
Lost in all of this is the generational change of leadership in newspapers and indeed nearly all media. Old-line editors were like columnists such as Jack Smith or Jim Murray. They understood, and shared, the likes, dislikes, prejudices, virtues, and flaws of most of their readers. Because they were like their readers: older, Whiter, more conservative, middle class, and well, male. They certainly were not part of the liberal hothouse of academia and the media that exists today, advancement was through apprenticeship and demonstrating that stories generated readers (and thus money), not through "correct" ideology and gender, race, and sexual orientation membership. It would have been unthinkable in the Jim Murray era for the LA Times to employ a Sports Writer who openly had (a publicly celebrated in the LA Times pages) sex change operation. It simply would not have been tolerated, the risk of canceled subscriptions was too high, and the paper's purpose was to turn a profit, not push a social agenda (one alien to most of it's readers).
When the agenda of "celebrating" the transformation of Mike Penner to Christine Daniels takes precedence over providing an enjoyable Sports section for the morning breakfast table, newspaper management has lost all ability to connect with it's potential readers. A "ViewPass" can provide all the centrally managed mobile content that can be created, potential readers won't pay for Sports content provided by trans-gendered folk, even if said content is free.
Newsosaur is quite skeptical of the ability of the government to provide bail-out money. The losses are too deep, and the taxes required too onerous, to provide a complete Pravda model. While it's certain bailouts will be proposed, the ability to push them through in hard economic times when readers have already voted with their wallets (not to subscribe) is questionable.
It's quite likely, instead, that various bloggers, and conglomerations of bloggers, locally, will provide content, and that as newspapers like the LA Times shrink down to LA Observed / Mayor Sam's Sister City size, those bloggers or people like them will grow upwards. After all, it's all about content.
...Read more
Friday, May 29, 2009
Media Failure Part One: Radio and the Death of Indie 103.1 FM
A lot of talk in the blogosphere and in newspapers and magazines has been about the incipient failure of newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor has gone online only. The same has happened with the Seattle Post Intelligencer and other papers around the country, from Wisconsin to Tuscon. Television too, has had a rapid decline in viewers, with NBC posting the smallest ever average Prime-Time weekly audience (4.4 million viewers) outside the Summer doldrums since the dawn of Television in 1948. Clearly, all media are in trouble.
But it's in Radio that at least part of the problem, the demographic decline of young White people, is clear, and unmistakeable. Likely, no better example can be found than in LA's "Indie 103.1" short lifespan, and replacement by Spanish-language format.
Indie 103.1 began broadcasting it's Punk/Alternative mix in late December 2003, and flipped to Spanish Language radio in January 19, 2009. Over the short, five year lifespan, the radio station was featured on the Fox show "the OC" and on the MTV prank show "Punk'd." Always in competition with rival station KROQ 106.7 FM, the station nevertheless featured Punk/Alternative personalities like Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Joe Escalante of the Vandals, and Dickie Barrett of the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones as DJs or on-air personalities.
With a population of 17 million or thereabouts, it would seem that there would be more than enough listeners for both KROQ and Indie 103.1 to survive. After all, Los Angeles has two all-news AM stations, KFWB and KNX. Why not two Alternative/Punk stations? The answer is simple, there simply are not enough young (White) people in the LA Metro area to sustain two stations.
To get a flavor of the full list of LA Radio stations (familiar to anyone driving in and around Los Angeles), I've compiled the listings below from the sources here, here, and here. The listings below give the FM stations (note some, like KUCI 88.9. FM are clear only in limited areas, while others have strong signals). LA's mountains and valleys make reception iffy in some areas, and transmitters may operate under reduced power making geographic spread smaller than in say, flat and open Dallas. Reduced signal strength allows both KUCI and KTLW (operating out of I believe, Antelope Valley) to share the same frequency. The LA Metro area is a big market. Some stations also broadcast over the same frequency but with different call signs, but the same simulcast programs.
FM Stations:
The AM stations are listed below:
Immediately, two things pop out from the list. One is the predominance of Spanish-language in the FM band, a band formerly reserved for well, Anglo music, be it Rock, Classical, or Jazz. Secondly, the dominance of Spanish language and Asian language radio in Los Angeles's AM bands.
The two graphs below illustrate this:
[click Image to enlarge]
[click Image to enlarge]
Several other things stand out. As anyone who has listened to KCRW, or KKJZ knows, public radio stations are not exactly commercial free. They have frequent pledge breaks, where say, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour urges listeners to pledge dollars for various goodies and so on. In between music, public affairs program (such as "To the Point With Warren Olney") or news, sponsors run frequent "image building" ads touting their "responsibility." It's straight out of "Stuff White People Like" (the blog and book) or ABC's "the Goode Family."
Nevertheless, without the Public Broadcasting presence on the FM band, it would probably have more Asian and Spanish language stations in the LA area. There are at least five Public stations on the FM band in LA (KUCI, KCRW, KUSC, KKJZ, KPFK, are the ones I know). It is telling that in a metro area of 17 million people, there is only one major Classical station (KUSC-FM) and one major Jazz station (KKJZ, formerly KLON-FM, Long Beach). Both broadcasting out of universities (USC and Cal State Long Beach, respectively) as Public Broadcasting Stations.
Next, it's the nature of the successful radio stations on the AM band, that are NOT either Asian or Spanish language. There are six sports talk stations, and seven talk radio stations that are in English in the AM band (station XEPRS 1090 AM is included because South Orange County picks it up from San Diego). Those are nearly the numbers of the Spanish and Asian languages, and account for 56% of the English Language AM stations. That number rises to 65% if you throw in the two all-news stations, KNX and KFWB.
What does this tell you?
In a marketplace (AM, which is totally commercial, no Public Radio) where reaching listeners equals operating profits or losses (if your station does not reach listeners), owners choose mostly English language Sports, Talk/News, or Spanish language, or Asian language formats, with a smattering of oldies or Christian formats in English thrown in.
The LA Almanac here has some interesting data. You can see that several things are immediately apparent. First, that there are more Hispanics than Whites in LA County (unfortunately, there is no source that aggregates the multi-county areas of LA Metropolitan region, including LA, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura counties). This alone drives up Spanish Language stations, and under-reporting (lots of illegal aliens not counted) could lead to substantially higher numbers of Hispanic/Mexican consumers that advertisers selling cola, candy, and other low-cost consumer goods would want to reach. There are also a substantial amount of Asians, more than Blacks in sheer numbers, accounting for Asian radio. It's likely that the amount of Asians has only increased since the 2000 Census.
But also, well just how OLD LA County is with respect to it's White population.
The graph below (aggregated ages 20-21 for sake of smoothing out age cohorts) shows WHY Indie 103.1 failed. Men and women aggregated together do not cross the 200,000 threshold until the late 20's at least. Moreover, there are few young people in the pipeline, take a look at the younger White Angelino cohorts. There's not that many of them. Even assuming that the cohort increases post college (people move to the LA Area), there still is not that many of them. Note also, the slight but decided greater numbers of men, particularly in the late twenties through thirties, over women, among LA County Whites.
[click Image to Enlarge]
Many things Indie 103.1 did during it's broadcast existence puzzled me. The emphasis on Trader Joes sponsored Morning Show Wine Tastings. The use of minor celebrities like Timothy Oliphant and David Lynch to do morning sports and weather. Looking at the demographic breakdown by age cohort, it makes perfect sense. Indie tried to grab the small amount of Yuppie Whites in their thirties and forties and FAILED. EPIC FAIL.
Yes, no doubt Satellite Radio played a part in the demise of Indie 103.1. But note that the station posted negative results in the Arbitron ratings after the recession started to hit, just when people would be looking to escape from costly Satellite Radio into free FM.
It seems there just weren't enough Alternative Yuppies to make Indie 103.1 a go against KROQ, and certainly not enough younger kids (Indie 103.1's 80's Nostalgia Wave makes retrospective sense) to drive newness and sensation seeking to the station. The stations that ARE successful are those that cater to the demographic bulge, around the thirties through the fifties, and the older population that is at least as big as the younger one. Itself a shocking change from what we conceived as "classic" America from say, the 1900's onward through the 1960's, with each generation of young people getting bigger than the cohort that went before.
Now, it gets smaller each generation.
For those traveling through Los Angeles, who wonder why LA radio is a barrage of Spanish, Asian, and not much else, the graph below shows it all:
[click Image to Enlarge]
What are the broader lessons from the failure of Indie 103.1 FM?
One: Your demographic slice your media targets must be large enough.
Two: White America is older and more conservative than the Yuppie model of "Stuff White People Like."
Three: There are not many young Whites, most young people are Hispanic.
Four: Youth-oriented media mostly fails.
Five: Betting it all on Yuppies with lots of money is a bad long-term bet, because there just isn't enough base population of Whites to generate enough Yuppies with money. A recession can kill the business.
Six: The biggest slice of Whites ages 30-59 seem to like Sports and Talk Radio, much of the latter overtly conservative.
Seven: Radio is the reverse image of Television, it's male dominated, with male personalities in Sports and Talk (and even Alternative Rock DJs during drive time). There is nothing like "the View" on AM or FM LA Radio.
Eight: Much of the Yuppie entertainment infrastructure in current radio is a Public Broadcasting anomaly. Making the Yuppie Radio presence bigger than it appears. Since most Public Broadcast stations depend on pledge drives plus NPR subsidies to operate, not ad revenues based on ratings.
But it all boils down to much of White America is older, and more conservative, than you'd think. Certainly compared to the Hispanic population, which is much, much younger.
...Read more
But it's in Radio that at least part of the problem, the demographic decline of young White people, is clear, and unmistakeable. Likely, no better example can be found than in LA's "Indie 103.1" short lifespan, and replacement by Spanish-language format.
Indie 103.1 began broadcasting it's Punk/Alternative mix in late December 2003, and flipped to Spanish Language radio in January 19, 2009. Over the short, five year lifespan, the radio station was featured on the Fox show "the OC" and on the MTV prank show "Punk'd." Always in competition with rival station KROQ 106.7 FM, the station nevertheless featured Punk/Alternative personalities like Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Joe Escalante of the Vandals, and Dickie Barrett of the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones as DJs or on-air personalities.
With a population of 17 million or thereabouts, it would seem that there would be more than enough listeners for both KROQ and Indie 103.1 to survive. After all, Los Angeles has two all-news AM stations, KFWB and KNX. Why not two Alternative/Punk stations? The answer is simple, there simply are not enough young (White) people in the LA Metro area to sustain two stations.
To get a flavor of the full list of LA Radio stations (familiar to anyone driving in and around Los Angeles), I've compiled the listings below from the sources here, here, and here. The listings below give the FM stations (note some, like KUCI 88.9. FM are clear only in limited areas, while others have strong signals). LA's mountains and valleys make reception iffy in some areas, and transmitters may operate under reduced power making geographic spread smaller than in say, flat and open Dallas. Reduced signal strength allows both KUCI and KTLW (operating out of I believe, Antelope Valley) to share the same frequency. The LA Metro area is a big market. Some stations also broadcast over the same frequency but with different call signs, but the same simulcast programs.
FM Stations:
| Call Letter | Frequency | Language | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| KKJZ | 88.1FM | English | Jazz, Blues |
| KCSN | 88.5FM | English | Classical |
| KUCI | 88.9FM | English | College |
| KTLW | 88.9FM | English | Christian |
| KXLU | 88.9FM | English | College |
| KPCC | 89.3FM | English | Public |
| KCRW | 89.9FM | English | Public |
| KBPK | 90.1FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KSAK | 90.1FM | English | College |
| KPFK | 90.7FM | English | Public |
| KUSC | 91.5FM | English | Classical |
| KHHT | 92.3FM | English | Urban Contemporary |
| KLIT | 92.7FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KCBS | 93.1FM | English | Classic Rock |
| KDAY | 93.5FM | English | Hip Hop |
| KMVN | 93.9 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KEBN | 94.3 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KBUA | 94.3 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KTWV | 94.7 FM | English | Smooth Jazz |
| KLOS | 95.5 FM | English | Classic Rock |
| KFSH | 95.9 FM | English | Christian |
| KXOL | 96.3 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KFXM | 96.7 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KLSX | 97.1 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KLYV | 97.5 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KLAX | 97.9 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KYSR | 98.7 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| nina | 99.1 FM | Spanish | Hip Hop |
| KKLA | 99.5 FM | English | Christian |
| KOLA | 99.9 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KKBT | 100.3 FM | English | Hip Hop |
| KRTH | 101.1 FM | English | Oldies |
| KSCA | 101.9 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KJLH | 102.3 FM | English | Urban Contemporary |
| KIIS | 102.7 FM | English | Top 40 |
| KDLE | 103.1 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KDLD | 103.1 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KOST | 103.5 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KRCD | 103.9 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KBIG | 104.3 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KKGO | 105.1 FM | English | Country |
| KBUE | 105.5 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KOSS | 105.5 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KPWR | 105.9 FM | English | Hip Hop |
| KGMX | 106.3 FM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KALI | 106.3 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KROQ | 106.7 FM | English | Alternative |
| KSSE | 107.1 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KLVE | 107.5 FM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KTYS | 107.9 FM | English | Hip Hop |
| KQVM | 107.9 FM | English | Dance |
The AM stations are listed below:
| Call Letter | Frequency | Language | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| KTVO | 530 AM | English | News |
| KMBR | 530 AM | English | Easy Listening |
| KGIL | 540 AM | English | Talk |
| KLAC | 570 AM | English | Sports |
| KAVL | 610 AM | English | Sports |
| KFI | 640 AM | English | Talk |
| KIRN | 670 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KXTRA | 690 AM | English | Talk |
| KSPN | 710 AM | English | Sports |
| KBRT | 740 AM | English | Christian |
| KABC | 790 AM | English | Talk |
| KLAA | 830 AM | English | Sports |
| KRLA | 870 AM | English | Talk |
| KALI | 900 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KHJ | 930 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KFWB | 980 AM | English | News |
| KTNQ | 1020 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KNX | 1070 AM | English | News |
| XEPRS | 1090 AM | English | Sports |
| KDIS | 1110 AM | English | Kids |
| KXTA | 1150 AM | English | Talk |
| KXMX | 1190 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KHTS | 1220 AM | English | Adult Contemporary |
| KYPA | 1230 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KGIL | 1260 AM | English | Talk |
| KSUR | 1260 AM | English | Oldies |
| KFRN | 1280 AM | English | Christian |
| KAZN | 1300 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KWKW | 1330 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KWJL | 1380 AM | English | Oldies |
| KLTX | 1390 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KMRB | 1430 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KTYM | 1460 AM | English | Christian |
| KUTY | 1470 AM | spanish | Spanish |
| KVNR | 1480 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KSPA | 1510 AM | English | Sports |
| KMPC | 1540 AM | Asian | Asian |
| KBLA | 1580 AM | Spanish | Spanish |
| KFOX | 1650 AM | Asian | Asian |
Immediately, two things pop out from the list. One is the predominance of Spanish-language in the FM band, a band formerly reserved for well, Anglo music, be it Rock, Classical, or Jazz. Secondly, the dominance of Spanish language and Asian language radio in Los Angeles's AM bands.
The two graphs below illustrate this:
[click Image to enlarge]
[click Image to enlarge]
Several other things stand out. As anyone who has listened to KCRW, or KKJZ knows, public radio stations are not exactly commercial free. They have frequent pledge breaks, where say, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour urges listeners to pledge dollars for various goodies and so on. In between music, public affairs program (such as "To the Point With Warren Olney") or news, sponsors run frequent "image building" ads touting their "responsibility." It's straight out of "Stuff White People Like" (the blog and book) or ABC's "the Goode Family."
Nevertheless, without the Public Broadcasting presence on the FM band, it would probably have more Asian and Spanish language stations in the LA area. There are at least five Public stations on the FM band in LA (KUCI, KCRW, KUSC, KKJZ, KPFK, are the ones I know). It is telling that in a metro area of 17 million people, there is only one major Classical station (KUSC-FM) and one major Jazz station (KKJZ, formerly KLON-FM, Long Beach). Both broadcasting out of universities (USC and Cal State Long Beach, respectively) as Public Broadcasting Stations.
Next, it's the nature of the successful radio stations on the AM band, that are NOT either Asian or Spanish language. There are six sports talk stations, and seven talk radio stations that are in English in the AM band (station XEPRS 1090 AM is included because South Orange County picks it up from San Diego). Those are nearly the numbers of the Spanish and Asian languages, and account for 56% of the English Language AM stations. That number rises to 65% if you throw in the two all-news stations, KNX and KFWB.
What does this tell you?
In a marketplace (AM, which is totally commercial, no Public Radio) where reaching listeners equals operating profits or losses (if your station does not reach listeners), owners choose mostly English language Sports, Talk/News, or Spanish language, or Asian language formats, with a smattering of oldies or Christian formats in English thrown in.
The LA Almanac here has some interesting data. You can see that several things are immediately apparent. First, that there are more Hispanics than Whites in LA County (unfortunately, there is no source that aggregates the multi-county areas of LA Metropolitan region, including LA, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Ventura counties). This alone drives up Spanish Language stations, and under-reporting (lots of illegal aliens not counted) could lead to substantially higher numbers of Hispanic/Mexican consumers that advertisers selling cola, candy, and other low-cost consumer goods would want to reach. There are also a substantial amount of Asians, more than Blacks in sheer numbers, accounting for Asian radio. It's likely that the amount of Asians has only increased since the 2000 Census.
But also, well just how OLD LA County is with respect to it's White population.
The graph below (aggregated ages 20-21 for sake of smoothing out age cohorts) shows WHY Indie 103.1 failed. Men and women aggregated together do not cross the 200,000 threshold until the late 20's at least. Moreover, there are few young people in the pipeline, take a look at the younger White Angelino cohorts. There's not that many of them. Even assuming that the cohort increases post college (people move to the LA Area), there still is not that many of them. Note also, the slight but decided greater numbers of men, particularly in the late twenties through thirties, over women, among LA County Whites.
[click Image to Enlarge]
Many things Indie 103.1 did during it's broadcast existence puzzled me. The emphasis on Trader Joes sponsored Morning Show Wine Tastings. The use of minor celebrities like Timothy Oliphant and David Lynch to do morning sports and weather. Looking at the demographic breakdown by age cohort, it makes perfect sense. Indie tried to grab the small amount of Yuppie Whites in their thirties and forties and FAILED. EPIC FAIL.
Yes, no doubt Satellite Radio played a part in the demise of Indie 103.1. But note that the station posted negative results in the Arbitron ratings after the recession started to hit, just when people would be looking to escape from costly Satellite Radio into free FM.
It seems there just weren't enough Alternative Yuppies to make Indie 103.1 a go against KROQ, and certainly not enough younger kids (Indie 103.1's 80's Nostalgia Wave makes retrospective sense) to drive newness and sensation seeking to the station. The stations that ARE successful are those that cater to the demographic bulge, around the thirties through the fifties, and the older population that is at least as big as the younger one. Itself a shocking change from what we conceived as "classic" America from say, the 1900's onward through the 1960's, with each generation of young people getting bigger than the cohort that went before.
Now, it gets smaller each generation.
For those traveling through Los Angeles, who wonder why LA radio is a barrage of Spanish, Asian, and not much else, the graph below shows it all:
[click Image to Enlarge]
What are the broader lessons from the failure of Indie 103.1 FM?
One: Your demographic slice your media targets must be large enough.
Two: White America is older and more conservative than the Yuppie model of "Stuff White People Like."
Three: There are not many young Whites, most young people are Hispanic.
Four: Youth-oriented media mostly fails.
Five: Betting it all on Yuppies with lots of money is a bad long-term bet, because there just isn't enough base population of Whites to generate enough Yuppies with money. A recession can kill the business.
Six: The biggest slice of Whites ages 30-59 seem to like Sports and Talk Radio, much of the latter overtly conservative.
Seven: Radio is the reverse image of Television, it's male dominated, with male personalities in Sports and Talk (and even Alternative Rock DJs during drive time). There is nothing like "the View" on AM or FM LA Radio.
Eight: Much of the Yuppie entertainment infrastructure in current radio is a Public Broadcasting anomaly. Making the Yuppie Radio presence bigger than it appears. Since most Public Broadcast stations depend on pledge drives plus NPR subsidies to operate, not ad revenues based on ratings.
But it all boils down to much of White America is older, and more conservative, than you'd think. Certainly compared to the Hispanic population, which is much, much younger.
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