Unwitting Media Mega-Players and the Red State Consumers Who Support Them
Elizabeth Spiers explores why media consumption in suburban Arkansas is increasingly more important than media consumption in the big city:
The New York Times‘ former Boldfaced Names columnist Joyce Wadler frequently peppered her columns with asides to “J-School Young’un,” a fictional would-be journalist to whom she would routinely dispense advice. We’re going to borrow J-School Young’un for a moment and make the following modest proposal: if you want to learn about the nuts and bolts of the media business—if you fancy yourself more a Roger Ailes or Martha Stewart or Arthur Sulzberger than a Sy Hersh or Bob Woodward—put down those internship listings right now, pull out a map of the United States, and throw a dart at it, preferably somewhere in the direction of the expansive middle. In all likelihood, you’re going to hit a town—or something resembling a town—with a population of less than 10,000 people. Then, via plane, train or automobile, transport yourself to wherever the dart landed and spend a week or two in the chain grocery stores and Walmarts that invariably crop up even in the middle of what technically constitutes “nowhere” and make a running list of what types of media—books, magazines, DVDs, etc—people are buying. Then get out the map again, repeat the dart throwing and transport yourself elsewhere. Do this six or seven times over the course of a summer. We call it “the Do-It-Yourself ‘Simple Life’ Media Internship.”
More here.
Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our 
