“Rats Mob The Upper East Side” (Also the fashion catwalk)

The Wall Street Journal debuted its New York edition today, which featured on its front page the breaking story, “Rats Mob the Upper East Side.” The WSJ reports: “An army of rats is scurrying into apartments, stores and even car engines on a stretch of the Upper East Side.”

Meanwhile, over on Vanity Fair, they may have unwittingly proposed a solution:

From Billy Reid's Fall 2010 Collection (Yes, that's rat fur they're wearing)

Here are some choice quotes from the VF piece:

“I love the masculinity of it. It’s sort of the bad-ass fur,” [Designer Billy] Reid explains.

Locals have explored other uses for nutria [rat] pelts, including pillows and teddy bears.

“It makes a great blanket,” says Edmond Mouton, biologist and program manager at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. His department’s Web site includes a recipe for “stuffed nutria hindquarters” that serves 15.

I don’t know what PETA will have to say about this. But I can’t imagine the rich fashionistas of the Upper East Side caring. Because if there’s one organization that’s persona non grata on the Upper East Side — where there’s probably more fur per capita than anywhere else — it’s PETA.

What Newspapers Can Learn From Big Tobacco

First my disclaimer: I consider the tactics used by Big Tobacco to be, at best, manipulative, at worst diabolical. Nothing I’m about to say should be considered an endorsement of that industry.

But in the face of declining cigarette sales, they are doing something that newspapers are not: innovating.

For example, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco is test-marketing a new product, called Camel Orbs, that looks fiendishly similar to Tic Tac breath mints. (You can read about it in today’s New York Times.) They’ve also launched other dissolvable nicotine products such as Camel Strips — I’d imagine they work something like those Listerine breath strips so many love — that are getting slammed in a new study being released by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.

See how they do? How they’re adapting their business model? In response to anti-smoking ordinances and the rising stigmatization of cigarette smokers, they’re devising ingenious new ways to deliver nicotine to consumers, not just clinging to their rapidly declining signature product, the cigarette. They are finding ways to hook a new generation of consumers, not just bemoaning the loss of  the ones who are dying off. In short, Big Tobacco is showing considerable wile, and staying nimble.

So why is the news industry so flat-footed in the face of a similarly declining signature product and an aging/terminal consumer base? Journalism is crucial; newspapers are not. Information is the real drug — I speak from personal experience, here — just like nicotine. So find ingenious new ways to deliver that drug, and get people hooked.

As for paywalls and such, I can’t help thinking, there’s a reason dealers give you sh*t for free. And dealers know that customers don’t just start with the premium sh*t straight away, usually: You have to get them hooked on the cheap/free stuff first.  I’ve heard the NYT plans to give 10 articles for free before the paywall blocks access, but I think that could work against them. If I only get 10 per month, or whatever, I’m going to have to ask myself with each and every article, “Is this article worth spending one of my precious ten free credits?” That kind of cognitive work, that weighing of lost opportunity costs, is often enough to drive away potential customers. I don’t know what the NYT plans on charging for stuff behind the paywall, but as Chris Anderson points out in his book, “Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit By Giving Something for Nothing,” (which, btw, is available on iTunes as a free audiobook) the gap between free and one penny is enormous. Studies show that just asking people to pay one penny for something is enough to make them turn it down entirely.

So learn something from Big Tobacco, news industry. Maybe, then, things could be as the voice promised in the movie “Field of Dreams”: If you build it, they will come.

Good god, I hope so. Because I may just be a fledgling journalist today, but I’m working really hard at honing my bat. And one day, I want  my chance to play ball, too…