I've been picking up newspapers and magazines and been quietly horrified at how thin they are. I'm no fan of advertising, but I know it's how they pay the bills, and there are no ads there.
The Chicago Tribune is trying to keep their "news hole" at no more than 50%, and AFAICT, are failing. Even with the Cubs at the World Series (and the Trib pimping that for all its worth), the sports section has virtually no advertising. Most noticeable is the lack of classic retail: beer, wine, alcohol, automobiles, consumer electronics (a periodic Fry's ad excepted), clothing (with a few exceptions), etc. Some home services (windows, siding, etc.), and occasional furniture. But overall, terrifically thin.
Time Magazine as of September was similarly famished-looking.
Reminds me of running into a friend you'd not seen for a while, with a fatal disease. It's a visual shock.
I had a similar thing with games magazines a while back. I was subscribed to GameStar (then one of Germany's largest computer game periodicals) in my teenage years, and it always weighed in at about 200-250 pages. I unsubscribed in 2006 as I was too occupied with studying, but picked up an issue in 2011 from the newspaper stand out of nostalgia. I was shocked that it had shrunk down to some 100 pages, and most of the tests were about free-2-play junk. Whole sections were gone, too (e.g. hardware tests IIRC). It's like one of those childhood memories that look really bad in retrospect.
Sorry to dump on your aside, but the media arm isn't affected. The Finance/Risk news (for financial clients) division is the one being downsized, and they were profitable.
Hey, accurate info is good info, I appreciate that.
Which does though raise the question of how it is newswires (Reuters, UPI, AP) are succeeding where direct media outlets aren't. Or is it just that the pain is there but less than (in T/R's case) the finance/risk arm?
The two big TR business units are legal and financial, and both industries pay for access to information when it helps their businesses.
I worked on some of the legal products, and customers were much more sensitive to completeness and accuracy of information they could obtain than the average person with a newspaper. Even with "free" news products people would also pay for alerts.
The Chicago Tribune renamed its holding company "Tronc" a few months back. It didn't help. Gannett just declined to buy them a few hours ago. Tribune Tower is being converted to condos.
> The newspaper / print media industry generally is doing abysmally poorly.
They're not doing well but I wouldn't use the term abysmal. Print media is still declining but a lot of publishers are offsetting much of that loss with online revenue.
"In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads." A trend that's getting worse -- it had been 10:1 in 2011, according to Pew Research.
I worked with bare NAND flash on embedded system. NAND flash doesn't work like RAM where you have address pin that cover the entire space. For NAND flash, you have to send a read command with the address you want to read the data from. There are various kind of read command, one of them is auto-increment read, where you can keep reading the data and once the end of the block is reached it will load the next one.
I had a IP camera running uclinux [1] on ARM7 years ago. The camera was connected to the CPU with USB interface internally. I guess the benefit with using Linux was free ip, USB, and uvc stack.
