BevLog

Announced on Friday - a "major restructuring" cuts 130 more jobs. "This significant restructuring reflects USA Today's evolution from a newspaper company to a multi-platform media company," said David Hunke, the paper's president and publisher.

But the Gannett "USA Today" founder Allen H. Neuharth, 86, said the worst "news" about the paper was last month when the front page was a wrap-around-ad for Jeep...displacing actual news. Circulation of "USA Today" was -14% last year slipping behind "The Wall Street Journal" as the country's most widely circulated paper.

Last night on WETA Newshour "Art Beat," Jeffrey Brown had an interview on Cape Cod with Bill Powers, (scroll down to August 16) author of the book "Hamlet's Blackberry." Powers, a career (print) journalist focused now on technology and families suggests that time "disconnected from screens could reconnect lives."

Google Search turned up another video of Powers about the implications of the history of print communication vs. today's online.

In Fall 2006, Powers, then a Fellow at Harvard, first wrote a Discussion Paper for a series. The paper at 75 pages looks like a first draft of his book with extensive references and notes.

Christopher Moore, former publisher of the Observer Newspapers (Herndon and Reston) which folded recently, went virtual when he joined the Aol team writing for RestonPatch online which just launched.

Instead of the paid staff of traditional newspapers - RestonPatch news has teams of "contributors."

Focused on local news, this week's issue reported about the first laundromat to open in Reston. But it didn't clean up with paid classified advertisers.

Allbritton Communications launched its new local news Web site TBD on Monday. TBD.com is a highly "social" site complete with a presence on Twitter, Facebook and Foursqaure. Plans include geocoding technolology to turn local into "hyper-local."

Reporters include 127 (or 129) local bloggers and TBD "hopes to engage readers into helping to report or complete articles." You can send your tips and leads to reporters via an Android mobile app (with iPhone app soon to come).

An introductory letter from the editor provides elaboarate, excited detail about how the site had been under construction for nearly a year. And there are already 47 comments posted. So much for the old-fashioned newspaper's "above the fold" news.

Clearly the most buzz about advertising these days is focused on the "bad old days" (1964) depicted in Season 4 of "Mad Men. Episode 1 ran on AMC - July 25. "Parade" magazine even jumped on board with an August 1 cover story "Who Is Jon Hamm?" - better known as Don Draper.

The "Mad Men official site" is packed with video "peeks" and blogs and threads to share views, reviews and gossip via today's social media. For everything you
(n)ever needed to know about "Mad Men" go Wikipedia.

"Mad" is short for Madison Avenue - where all of this took place. I was a copywriter there (after the drama had peaked) and saw mass marketing start to lose hold in the late '80s right around when the advertising agencies moved away to the West Side and boutiques opened in SoHo.