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."

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