Stillwater Tribune: Show Biz Update

Well... the ratings are in... Bill Prendergast in "International Mystery: Tokyo Takedown" was an absolute disaster... It cost me about half my regular audience, forever...

The demographics are broken down for me. It says "Among women ages 18 to 35, I lost 75% of the readership..." "Males ages 25 to 40, it cost me 85% of readers...that's significant because that's a key spending demographic..." So I guess I shouldn't be expecting Shoebuy.com to invest in any more advertising space on this blog anytime real soon... What else... "Teenagers of both sexes hated it." Hmm. No Ipod ad money, either... "Males ages eighty-five to ninety-three...about seventeen per cent of them actually died while "Tokyo Takedown" was running." Well I can hardly be blamed for that.

(throws report across the room)

Oh, who cares? Who the hell cares? What am I now, a ratings whore? I'm an artist, and a journalist, god damn it, and a damn good one! Ratings aren't the bottom line for me, I've got something to say, and people need to hear it! Is that what this business has become all about, market share, demographics, advertising revenue? Is it? Is it?

Christ I need an aspirin. I was hoping this spy story thing would take off, maybe I could get a break from covering politics all the time and make a nickel for a change. I guess it's back to covering the Congressional elections for me. Right back to the shitty end of the stick.

I could try and rebuild the readership base by posting more pictures of my cute dogs, but I'm already out of cute dogs. I'd have to get a new dog every week to keep a strategy like that going. And I'd have to put the existing dogs down, to make room. I'd have to change dogs and put at least one dog down, every week, just to get my baseline readership back up to speed. Could I face that, emotionally? Probably. I got through law school; I guess I could kill a few dogs.

No, the wife would object. It could be big, though, a lot of new people might come in every week to see which dog is going to die--"Canine Survivor", I could call it...

Nah. I'll do the politics thing again instead. I love dogs. But maybe...cats...