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Over to readers. Weird day; lot of talking but not much news to report from it. Final notes:

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* ALL-ELVIS PLATFORM: Bobby Tullis of Mineral Springs, the former legislator who’s the Libertarian Party candidate for 4th District Congress, offers the campaign handout above. Flipside says he’s for economic freedom and personal liberty. “The only promise I will make is that I will try to get Elvis on the $100 bill.”

* THE DEATH OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS: The following comment was posted anonymously on a blog that covers the national Gannett media chain. It refers to a presentation by a tech wiz on newspaper advertising, which has slumped in print and has now gone soft on-line as well. Food for thought wherever you read a newspaper:

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I heard Saridakis give a presentation recently and he discussed how Facebook is a better media buy for “local advertisers” than is the local newspaper.

He backed it up by presenting the Facebook audience size in Wilmingoton DE which is more than five times the size of the readers of the NewsJournal. He also said that Facebook has a more desirable audience than most.

He admitted that Facebook has mobile challenges in ad monetization, but again given their size and scale, they would figure it out and still command 90% local market penetration.

He then asked the audience how many people in the room are on Facebook once a day and almost everyone raised their hands. He then asked how many were on the NewsJournal everyday and maybe three out of 200 people raised their hand. If you were an advertiser, national or local where would you play your money?

He never suggested that the consumer was going to get their news from Facebook, but he made the point that Facebook is the biggest threat to newspapers “online” advertising business and companies like Gannett haven’t figured it out yet. Much like Google Local is in a search world taking local ad dollars from the newspapers from right under their noses.

Great presentation with some scary data and trends that Gannett should be alarmed by.

And anyone who wants to see newspapers survive. I read somewhere else today that 48 percent of the New York Times’ revenue comes from subscriptions, print and digital. Time was, a newspaper did well to get 20 percent from subscriptions, with advertising the big moneymaker.

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