Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

Advice You Can’t Avoid

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Woman drinking Irish whiskey
Woman shown after reading too many women’s magazines. Image credit: Pixabay

There’s nothing like an empowering, encouraging and uplifting woman’s magazine to make you feel like you’re an utter failure as wife, mother and career type.

Stand in line at any grocery checkout these days and you’ll find no less than thirty of these things, all of which must assume that your life is a mess, because they offer endless advice on how to fix it. After much study (I have four children, so I spend a lot of time at the grocery store), I have decided that I am going to start a woman’s magazine. I’ve already worked out the formula for publishing success.

First, each issue must include something on weight loss. I’ll vary the type of article on a three month cycle. In the first month, there will be an article describing seven “miracle foods” that help you lose weight naturally. In the second month, we’ll discuss the latest herbal supplement/aromatherapy/ acupressure “breakthrough.” In the third month, I’ll throw in the latest diet plan. I figure that as long as it promises to help you lose 25 pounds by [insert upcoming holiday], any plan will do. After all, grown women with all their faculties have actually been known to follow things like the “cabbage soup diet.” When I want to boost sales, I’ll do a focus piece on plans like “the ice cream diet” or “the fried chicken diet.” [Aside: Will someone invent a Merlot diet? Please?]

Sprinkled throughout the magazine there must also be ideas on how to save money. For example, I might show readers how to avoid having to spend money on fancy curtain tiebacks by combining a toilet paper tube, some of junior’s finger paint and a bit of creativity. I will also need to print tips on how to save time, by, for instance, putting your foundation/cover makeup in a spray bottle for easier application in the morning. Stress-busting tips are also de rigueur, and must involve something that you wouldn’t think of on your own, like hanging upside down from your clothes rack to stretch and release your back muscles.

Of course no woman’s magazine would be worthy of the genre without a tempting dessert on the cover, preferably something that involves chocolate. The dessert must look like it was crafted by a team of highly trained pastry chefs. The headline should promise that you, with your chipped measuring cups, twenty-year-old bakeware and a busted sifter, can throw it together in ten minutes or less.

Now I have you feeling hopeful about shedding holiday pounds, guilty because you’re thinking about dessert, and kitchen impaired because your Light and Fluffy Chocolate Mousse could be used as masonry mortar. So it’s time to bring in fear.

This will also follow a three month article cycle. I’ll start with Death In Your Medicine Cabinet: Learn About the Everyday Medicine That Could Kill You! This will be followed up with Danger in the City: Get Street Smart Before It’s Too Late! I’ll finish the cycle with a bittersweet Katie’s Journey: Read About One Woman’s Struggle Against the Disease That’s Killing Thousands Daily.

Finally, no woman’s magazine would be complete without a story about sex (or if I want to publish another Cosmopolitan-style magazine, at least half a dozen articles). The good thing about this topic is that it hits all the right notes all over again. There’s hope (Spice Up Your Bedroom Life!), guilt (Why Your Spouse Feels Neglected), Fear (New Survey! Who’s Getting More Than You), and kitchen impaired (Wait, what?).

Right, I’m off to pen the inaugural issue. I have time for this because I used the spray bottle foundation trick this morning while hanging upside down from my closet organizer.

 

 

Know What?

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Know What?
Image Credit: Pixabay

This just in! A Kansas State researcher once discovered that if you compliment a woman about her appearance, she feels better about herself.

Ooh! And in other news, another researcher (also at Kansas State) determined that familiar songs act as memory prompts; amazingly, hearing a song from days gone by reminds you of a specific time or place.

This must mean that:

1) Academics really are nerdy types that don’t go out on dates very often.
2) Researchers really need to read more marketing how-to books, because advertising wonks discovered the benefits of music for memory association, oh, about 75 years ago.
3) The whole creationism vs. evolution debate in Kansas is already having an effect on the quality of research done there.

Okay, to be fair, Kansas universities aren’t the only places producing … interesting studies. The University of Durham recently made the headlines because researchers there announced that they’d discovered that sports teams that dressed in red have a slight advantage over those that don’t. I’d be willing to bet money that their next study will be: The Effect of Scientific Research on Sports Wagering: Red Teams Get Shorter Odds.

Personally, I’d like to see a study entitled: How the Heck is This Sort of Research Getting Funding Anyway? Or how about: Why on Earth is This Stuff Being Published?

Published research is supposed to be filtered by what’s know as the ‘peer review’ process. If you’re an academic, you’re supposed to do your work, write it up in a paper and submit it to a journal. There, a panel of your peers examines it, and either rejects it, suggests ways to improve it, or gives it the green light for publication.

This little system works well except in the following situations:

1) If you’re doing pioneering research, and there aren’t enough other people in the field for you to actually have peers yet.
2) If your paper argues against a currently accepted theory, in which case you’re liable to get your paper stamped “crackpot” as well as “rejected.”
3) If you have recently insulted, criticized, argued against, or accidentally cut off in traffic, any of the people who end up on your review committee. In this case you’re liable to get your paper stamped “mother dresses funny,” “crackpot,” “should have credentials revoked” as well as “rejected.”

With this kind of process in place, how are some of these studies being published? It may be that there are just too many people submitting too many papers.

I once dated a mathematician who admitted that he wrote (and had published) the same paper several times over: he’d run a math experiment with one set of numbers, and published the results. Then he’d change the input numbers slightly, run the experiment again and published the results. Which just goes to show: academics do go out on dates from time to time.

No, wait, what it really points out is that perhaps journal reviewers are overwhelmed, and aren’t reading papers as closely as they could be.

We know this to be the case on at least two occasions: Alan Sokal submitted a rubbish piece to “Social Text” a few years ago, had it accepted, and then revealed his hoax in another journal. More recently, some computer science jokers wrote a program that generates complete papers for you (http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/). The authors of the program submitted a generated paper to a conference — and had it accepted.

(There’s also the issue of crappy reporting on studies by the media, but that’s a whole other post!)

All of which leads me to ask three more questions:

1) How many other nonsense papers are getting published that really shouldn’t be?
2) Is knowledge really doubling every five years, like the pundits say? (Not really, if the studies above are any indicator of what’s being touted as “knowledge.”)
3) How cool is it that I ‘wrote,’ in less than five seconds, with my eyes closed, a 1500 word paper called “A Synthesis of Forward-Error Correction Using Mir” ?
3b) Where can I get one of these autogenerator thingies for humour posts?

 

How a food festival might save the publishing industry

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640px-1876_printing_press_Harpers_Weekly_Dec23

In the wake of Jeff Bezos’ much ballyhooed purchase of the Washington Post, pundits have inevitably returned to discussing the slow and painful death of traditional media outlets.

While it is worth noting that news of the deaths of some of the big news institutions has been greatly exaggerated, it is true that journalism is in a very sorry state. Radio has been taken over by shock jocks and shrill jills, and your TV news screens are a mess of tickers, DOGs, and permanently overexcited talking heads.

Online, it’s not much better; in fact, it may be worse. First-hand reporting is now just a quaint 20th-century notion. Most online “articles” are simply a smidgen of copy that rehashes what some other site is talking about. If you follow the trail back to that other site, you will find its story is second-hand too. And that’s if you are lucky enough to find something at least pretending to be reportage. Increasingly, you’ll find a slide show of pictures, or one of those horrible formula pieces that use a number, a celebrity, and something random to make up a story. You know the type: “8 Ways Lady Gaga’s Hair Is Like Bacon” or “6 Horrible Diseases the Kardashians Might Be Worrying About Right Now (and You Should Too!)”

How did we get here? As always, follow the money. Journalism, the real stuff that is, can be expensive. Those costs used to be covered by subscription sales and ad sales. But then along came the Internet, and some media outlets put their material online for free. People not only stopped buying the dead tree copies, they stopped buying, period. Now, the only way to make any money in the business is to get people to write for you for free (also known in the industry as “for the exposure”) and to charge for your online ads by the pageview. More pageviews means more money, which is why everything—from the crazy headlines to the scintillating pictures—is now geared to make you click, click, and click some more.

Some outlets are now trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle and are locking up their online content behind paywalls. This works as long as A) you have a large potential audience, B) you put out something worth reading, and C) enough of A ponies up for B. But this is a really tough equation, especially as audiences shrink or shift.

This is where the food festival comes in.

At most of those yummy “Taste of” events that are so popular right now, you pay an entrance fee and are handed a wad of tickets. You can then exchange the tickets for dishes at the various stalls; maybe it’s three tickets for an onion bhaji sampler and eight tickets for a pulled pork sandwich with fries. At the end of the day, you have had a chance to eat many different items, and the restaurateur gets to cash in the tickets.

This model would perfectly suit the modern media consumer. On any given day, I might want to read an article from The New York Times, The Register, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Maclean’s. Right now, it is too expensive and impractical for me to subscribe to all of these publications, especially if they only have things that interest me occasionally. So, if they go completely behind a paywall I will simply have to stop reading them. But if I could choose to read parts of them when I want to, I would be quite happy to pay fair value to do so.

I am not naive enough to believe that such a model will put an end to sensationalism and fluff; after all, that kind of thing is not new. What we now think of as pageview journalism used to be called yellow journalism, and exaggerating for fun and profit almost certainly goes all the way back to the beginning of our history as social animals.

But it might change the landscape just enough for the good and important kind of journalism to survive … at least until the next paradigm shift.