Today I remembered how much fun it is to spend hours and hours looking for interesting stories.  I also re-read yesterday’s newsletter, and as discussed previously, I let several typos pass through the scrutiny of proofreading.  I will correct them below because it changed the content’s content; the rest are easier to read quickly.  This will change as we grow; for now, the motto stands “Publish before Perfection.” 

Let’s talk about fifty years of toys and the transition into new media and advertising, followed by important lessons to learn.

In the post: High-Intensity, I corrected and rewrote a few sentences; it seems Grammarly does not like the word unchallenging, which changes the context of the commentary. 

A story in a new publication called Stacker took us back to Santa Heaven.  The article titled Top holiday toys from the year you were born, goes back to 1920!  We skimmed the first fifty years to land on Nerf Ball, the top toy from the year one of us was born!  We were again struck by how many toys have been recycled.  We will break this story into two parts; the first part will be the 70s through the 90s.  Here is a quick peek at each decade’s highlights.

The 70s started with a Nerf Ball, and what a decade it was for toys!  Weebles – wobble, but they don’t fall.  We all experienced how an oven works with Shrinky Dinks and a new form of rubber with Stretch Armstrong.  The Atari hit us in the late 70s, and we finished the decade off working on our memory and the worst iPhone alarm sound you could imagine in the Simon electronic game.

In some ways, the 80s were just the 70s 2.0.  A lot of similar categories of toys; games, action figures, stuffed things, and another console.  The 80s brought the Rubik’s Cube, an analog version of the Simon.  Stars Wars Action Figures from the 70s made their way to He-Man in the 80s.  Transformers were toys before cartoons and movies.  Nintendo hit the market in the late 80s, followed by the Game Boy.

This is where it started to get interesting; as a person born the same year, the Nerf Ball was the top toy; the 90s is where the transitions began.  The Talkboy was the first toy I didn’t recognize, and the Tamagotchi is the first toy on the list that I know we bought for one of our kids.  Also, Furby has come to mean something different over the years.

All these memories make us smile and remind us of times when we begged parents, Santa, and anyone else who would listen to us whine about how important each one of these items was to us.  Some of these items also came with or were later turned into stories.  Star Wars was a movie, then action figures; the Transformers went from toy to show to film.  We put our hands on the very first poorly designed joystick in the 70s, and joysticks are gone, replaced by controllers and keyboards. 

As mentioned above, Stacker Media is a new media company. According to its website, its mission is to bring data-driven news with rich editorial insights and bring that to newsrooms throughout the country.  The website has a quick walkthrough of the timeline from August 2017 until the present, and the initiatives laid out and accomplishments to date are impressive. 

The story of Top Toys going back one hundred years is an example of creativity and data analysis; most stories would give you the last twenty years.  The tale of Stacker Media is good, full of promise and transparent financing, addressing many issues that challenge news and publishing in general. 

Good as all of that sounds, the problem is this:

Ads and programmatic advertising are designed to reduce the reader’s ability to focus and read the content they came for.  The ads distract, move, aggravate, and take away from the information.  Most of them look like they were created by version 1.0 of whatever the ad platform was, and there is no oversite to what goes where.  There is a place for advertising; as a reader of free or price-reduced content, we enter that contract eyes open, but we went from Mad Men, where a team of talented people crafted content and design after the research team put together the audience demographics, so let’s be honest, some dude with an app. 

Magazines have ads, but they don’t move or make sounds, and when the magazine takes the time to lay out the content, the ads enhance the content.  Television used to have advertisements that sometimes rivaled the talent and range of programs they played with.  In twenty years of reading news on the Internet, the only significant change in advertising is the overwhelming number of ads technology can show you on every page.  As the traditional news and journalism industry continues to change, news outlets like; The Bulwark, Puck News, Vox Media, Axios, and others are doing great work.  Many are experimenting with subscription services, which could be a game changer on many levels. 

The best model is a subscription model that supports the news, journalism, and stories you tell.  With a subscription-only model, the focus is on the information, the quality, the product, and the subscriber of the products.  Any model with advertising is an advertising model.  Hybrid models with ads and subscriptions are the worst of both.  It’s also possible that a subscription-only model won’t sustain the cost of the quality product. If that’s the case, we, the readers, will continue to read the stories while tolerating all the distracting crap that goes along with them. 

Sahil Bloom gives us 22 lessons learned in the past year.  Something else to add to the good Twitter category.

1440 newsletter gave us a little shot of happiness today. People can be wonderful.

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With A Shout Team