Emma Bazilian over at Adweek:

It’s a fairly common assumption that millennials don’t read print media because they’re all too busy browsing blogs, clicking on Facebook links and watching YouTube videos to crack open a physical magazine. Well, a new study from Condé Nast says young people’s magazine readership is actually the highest it’s been in decades.

I’d believe this story more if the study weren’t conducted by Condé Nast. I think print magazines do have a place in young peoples’ schedules today, even if most of the successful mags the article mentions are traditional toilet reads.

Dan Cryan writing in the third person over at IHS iSuppli:

Netflix’s share of U.S. online movie revenue soared to 44 percent in 2011, up from less than 1 percent in 2010…. The caused [sic] the company to rise to first place in 2011. Meanwhile, Apple’s share of total revenue declined to 32.3 percent last year, down from a 60.8 percent in 2010, despite enjoying strong revenue growth.

“We are in the midst of a significant change in the way people pay to consume movies online,” Cryan said. “All the significant growth in revenue in the U.S. online movie business in 2011 was generated by rental business models, which provide temporary access, not permanent ownership. Rental delivers unlimited consumption with a low monthly fee for older titles as well as cheap rentals of new releases, providing the kind of value that online consumers want.”

But what are people watching? (Let me cut through some of the marketspeak: iTunes is transactional VOD and Netflix subscription VOD, or SVOD.)

IHS research reveals that it’s not unusual for 70 to 80 percent of titles consumed through a transactional service to be new releases. However, SVOD services are overwhelmingly used for older titles.

Netflix is banking that the convenience of a streaming library of older titles, which has brought in a tidal wave worth of new customers, will sustain them until their original programs start firing on all pistons. They may be right, but we’ll see once the much anticipated House of Cards debuts early next year.

Apple is hiring a pizza cook. Here’s the job description:

The ideal candidate has extensive experience making pizza dough from scratch and is able to portion and toss the dough; possesses the ability to hand stretch the pizza (without using a rolling pin) and cook the pizza to order in a high temperature oven. The cook will also prep and maintain all food items necessary to make a variety of pizzas (toppings, sauces and related prep).

At least 2-4 years of experience working a high volume wood burning pizza oven featuring thin crust, Neapolitan style pizza.

Two things:

1. I love that this description is so detailed. No rolling pin pizza at Apple, only hand stretched thin crust.
2. Clearly this is related to an upocoming product announcement at WWDC. The Mac Pro is roughly the size of 4-5 pizzas…the Mac Pizza? Can’t wait.

(via Doug Stephen via reddit.)

This may be a bit old but it’s new to me: Global Moxie’s Page One Browser Extension. Once installed, your browser (Safari or Chrome) will seamlessly go to the single page version of multi-page articles on popular Web sites. Here’s only a third of the sites it works on:

• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• The Atlantic
• Slate
• Wired
• Vanity Fair
• Rolling Stone

Recently, I found myself seeking out the “Single Page” button before I would even start reading a story. This extension obviates that tick, and it makes my web browsing that much lovelier.

Just finished up listening to this week’s Back to Work After Dark where Merlin Mann made a throwaway comment about Ross McElwee’s excellent film, Sherman’s March. I don’t know if it’s as well-known as Merlin makes it out to be so I figured I’d link it here. You can nab the DVD on Amazon¹ or watch it streaming on Netflix.

Perhaps seeing the film’s complete title will titillate you further. Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. Check it out.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

Two years ago, Dan had the idea to launch and grow a podcast network targeted not necessarily at the biggest tech/nerd audience, but rather the best tech/nerd audience. He was right, it worked, and I’m proud The Talk Show was a part of that. Lastly, to long-time listeners of the show, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your support, feedback, and attention.

I was just saying that Gruber takes his time but generally gets it right when he posts a non-linked list piece.

Good stuff. Would’ve been better before the show launched.

Oh yeah: he’s selling the show’s ads directly and they cost 12.5 times what a usual Mule Radio Syndicate ad spot goes for. That should give you a clue as to what the 5by5 business disagreement was.

Kirk Semple reporting for The New York Times:

In this age of online streaming and Blu-ray Discs, there is still a place where the bulky VHS cassette endures: the immigrant communities of New York City.

Be sure to watch the accompanying video.

My love of VHS has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with the privilege of having a unique viewing experience. The defining film for me was Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, which looks astounding (and totally different) on VHS. Similarly, Lindsay Anderson’s If…. is almost a different movie on DVD than it is on VHS.

In both cases I’d still choose the DVD/Blu-ray version (of course), but it’s always nice to see how organic even these home video formats can be. Glad someone is keeping it alive.

Probably for link-baiting¹ bullshit like this:

No answers, no article. Just a few mindless thoughts and then a 24 hour free for all in the comments.

Yesterday, John Gruber released the second episode of his revamped The Talk Show podcast over at Mule Radio Syndicate. His guest was filmmaker and fellow podcaster Adam Lisagor. As promised in the show’s notes, part of their discussion revolved around Gruber’s moving the show away from Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network.

Gruber admits that the way he launched the new show, by not mentioning the split on the first episode, was “dishonest.” So he lays out as much as he’d like to share. The schism stemmed from a “longstanding and significant” business disagreement between John and Dan.

Dan, the co-host, is obviously very popular and extremely talented. He’s extremely good at what he does and I’m super proud of the work we did together. And I think we had lots of good shows and some great shows. Dan, the owner of a podcast network, I have longstanding disagreements with. Came to an end. Why did I take The Talk Show with me? Because I love it.

Gruber makes the case that the branding, artwork and overall idea of The Talk Show stemmed from him. He considers it his “second most-beloved child, creation,” and he didn’t want to leave it behind when he left 5by5.

You’ve got to respect Gruber’s honesty in this episode. He wants to get his side of the story out but in a way that is as friendly as possible. Lisagor joins in to Socratically extract John’s statements on the matter. If he had written what he was thinking, it would have been cold. Even the block-quote above sounds more unfeeling than the way Gruber presents it in the episode.

There’s one thing I don’t understand, though. Gruber concedes that Dan wouldn’t have continued The Talk Show without him. Why, then, would John want to do the show without Dan? I understand how much he loves it, but, as Adam point out, it’s just a title.

When David Letterman moved from NBC to CBS, he couldn’t take his show’s name, Late Night,¹ with him. So he used a different name, The Late Show, and built a successful brand around it. Had Gruber launched the new show with a different name I’ll bet there would have been significantly less blowback and more room for him to cultivate his old fan-base.

But that’s not how things played out. Instead, Gruber wrested the show from Dan. The battle is over, and John won. He got to keep his show and now he gets to do it on his own terms.

I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for years and, in all honesty, none of how this series of events played out surprises me. John’s style is to be as open and forthright, even (and often) at the expense of anyone else in the industry is covering, as possible. That is once he knows what he wants to say. Readers of the site are used to this. He’ll ignore a specific topic for some time, or he’ll be posting noticeably less content for a few days until a lengthy and eloquent ★-toting post goes up. And he nails it.

I’m not sure that this episode, titled “Dare I Say, Kubrick?”, is exactly him nailing it, but it is clearly Gruber being Gruber. And that’s what was missing from his first episode last week. By ignoring the obvious storm that was brewing around him, John was missing the chance to own a story of his own making.

Or, he was waiting for it to get big enough that he could come along and have the last word.

Either way, I’d say this whole affair is an example of everything we love and everything we hate about John’s style, which is to say that he’s still at the top of his game.

The new Talk Show sounds like it has a lot of great surprises in store.

I missed this piece from Watts Martin earlier this week:

I’m quite skeptical of the notion that the way the Internet will disrupt Hollywood is by giving everyone the tools to make their own media. Everyone does have the tools to make their own media, to be sure; at least on the Mac, you can do some pretty high-grade stuff just with Garage Band and iMovie if you learn how to use them. However, a lot of what Hollywood produces still requires Hollywood resources. A garage filmmaker could spring for Final Cut Pro, but the box does not include a polished script, professional matte and CGI illustrators, makeup and costume artists, and Katee Sackhoff as the tough but sensitive female lead.

What can be disrupted this way, though, is anything that really doesn’t require that kind of crew and special effects budget. Things like talk shows, especially audio-only.

He comes to the same conclusion I did when breaking down the niche news blitz around John Gruber’s 5by5 split: that new media outlets can garner audiences as loyal and vociferous, if not as big, as their terrestrial forbears.

Where I disagree with Martin is the notion that Hollywood is somehow impenetrable because of their vast resources. I’ve seen plenty of big hits that have had terrible scripts, some that have even made a billion dollars, so I’m not sure that’s the secret sauce in Hollywood.

Garage filmmakers may not be able to make blockbusters, but I do think they can hold their own otherwise if they take the medium as seriously as top-tier podcasters do. That’s a big if, though.