First, I’m developing a new blog that will replace History Eraser Button. It’s a blog about copywriting called Breaking Copy. You can read my first real post today. It’s about Sarah Palin and it’s called “Blood Libel.”

Breaking Copy is still being developed and may have some bugs. I’m planning to spend the next few weeks ironing out the wrinkles, with a real launch date of February 1, 2011.

Also during the holidays, I created a page about the history of the building where I’m living now. See my 63 Wall Street Scrapbook.

Thanks for reading and watch this space soon for more information about the Breaking Copy blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

• Mike Huckabee: “NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left…. It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new Congress to start with NPR.”
• Sarah Palin: “If NPR is unable to tolerate an honest debate about an issue as important as Islamic terrorism, then it’s time for ‘National Public Radio’ to become ‘National Private Radio.’”
• Some dude on Huffington: “It’s clear that NPR would rather play consistently to the left than reach a balanced audience. And for that, they deserve to be pushed away from the public trough.”

I’ve never been a big fan of using tax money to support media programming; its too close to the state-run media in countries with less freedom of speech. But the truth is, in the U.S., public radio hardly gets any tax money. NPR gets no tax money directly. Most of NPR’s revenue comes from private donations. Federal money is funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which doles out grants to local stations, which can use it to pay their NPR dues. How much did the CPB budget for radio this year? $90.5 million. That’s nothing.

I’ve become interested in data visualization, so just for fun, here’s a quick and dirty chart illustrating the amount of tax money spent on public radio compared to a few other choice areas. I threw News Corp’s annual revenues in for good measure. All numbers (except the TARP spending) are from FY 2010.

Sources: 2010 Federal Budget, ProPublica, News Corp. financials, 2010 Federal HHS Budget, Taxpayers for Common Sense, CPB.

Another thought: Fox News has been advancing the narrative that Congress should investigate and defund NPR, with Bill O’Reilly and other commentators framing the federal funding of NPR as tilting the playing field against private broadcasters. So here’s another piece of math if you want it: Federal spending on public radio is less than 0.28% of News Corp’s annual revenue.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Good morning everybody. I hope you read the file we sent out before this meeting, but in case you didn’t, here are the highlights: Q3 revenues were off 38%. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low. Frankly, we also expect corporate to implement redundancies before the holidays. I know this is a bitter call to swallow. But it’s also a wakeup pill.

Team, it’s time to think outside the swan.

What does that mean? First, reach for the low-hanging eggs. Seek out the black baskets. For too long, we’ve been putting all our fruit in one box. That changes today.

Second, be nimble. Drive in the fast shoe. Keep lines of communication open. There’s an old saying that goes, a lane can travel halfway around a fact while the world is still putting on its lies. I find it helpful to always keep that in mind.

And finally, adapt. Feed the cloud, and starve the lining. You can’t stop the losers, but you can learn how to ride. And when the surf gets bumpy, remember that every winner has a sugar wave.

I look out at this room and I see a lot of potential. I know we can meet our goals if we all do our best work. But I’m not going to silver-coat the situation. Our chips are to the wall. It’s hard to turn around a table. But we’re going to put our best backs forward. And we’ve put all our bucks on the battleship. I know I speak for all of management when I say, the foot stops here.

Now I’ll open the floor. Any questions?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

A couple of months ago, I noticed a curious phrase showing up on lots of blogs.

“You should follow me on Twitter here.”

This phrase stands out for being terse, awkward, even rude. Most people would write “Please…” instead of “You should…” Yet this specific line of clunky self-promo copy spread like the flu. A Google search for that exact phrase returns 154,000 results! (For comparison, a search for “Please follow me on Twitter here” returns 1,690 results.)

We can trace this phenomenon to blogger Dustin Curtis, who used testing to find the optimal way to convince people to follow him on Twitter. “You should follow me on Twitter here” was proven to be the most persuasive sentence. You should read about his experiment here.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse shoddy writing edited by machines. On the other hand, shouldn’t you use every weapon in your arsenal to make your writing more effective? You should!

I decided to try a test of my own. For the last six weeks, visitors to this blog have been part of an experiment.

* * *

On my home page and at the top of this blog, I’ve been running a link asking people to give money to a charity bike ride I’m doing this Saturday and Sunday. I wrote a simple program that randomly shows one of a series of pre-programmed messages, then records how many times each message was displayed, and how many times people followed the link from that message. I use that data to calculate the percentage of clicks each link got. Then I compared the click-through rate of each phrase against other phrases that ran at the same time.

Turns out Dustin Curtis was right. Adding “You should” to the front of a sentence significantly increases the number of people who click on a link. So does adding “You can.” Longer sentences produce better results. Adding a user benefit helps. Including a dollar value helps sometimes, but not always—I tried $5, $10, $25, but only $25 had an impact.

The results of my test follow.

But first a few notes: This was more for fun than for science. Because my site gets relatively little traffic, it would have been a stronger test if I had chosen fewer phrases or let each test run for more time. Additionally, a lot of my traffic comes from spiders for search engines; my simple program counted them as visitors. I figured spiders behave in predictable ways and were unlikely to skew the results of the test, but counting them may have contributed to higher- or lower-than-normal click-through rates. There was also a significant swing in the number of total clicks from week to week, perhaps due to the behavior of spiders.

* * *

* * *

Summary: “You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride” was the most powerful phrase of the bunch. However, the real point is not whether it motivated people to click, but whether it motivated people to give. Sadly, it did not. During the time I ran this test I received 14 donations. (P.S.: Thank you!) I am fairly sure sure all of the people who gave found out about my bike ride from e-mail or Facebook postings, not from this web site. You could argue that some might have seen this message here as well, and that reinforced their behavior. But still: Nobody followed a link and then decided to give.

But that can change right now! You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

—Henry Field, writing of the first undersea telegraphic cables, quoted in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I was breezing through the story about NBC in today’s Times and smashed into a pair of phrases that I’ve never really been sure about. I looked up both in the dictionary, and of course the Times got both right. (Show-offs!) Here’s what I learned:

“Today the network is in shambles…”

Is it correct to say NBC is in shambles or a shambles? People who work at NBC might dispute this, but grammatically both are correct. Merriam-Webster’s offers two similar definitions of shambles (“a scene or a state of great destruction” or “a scene or a state of great disorder or confusion”) and two usage examples (“The city was a shambles” or “an economy in shambles”). Interesting, another meaning of the word is slaughterhouse.

“Jay Leno’s talk show … has foundered in the ratings…”

When I read this, I thought the word should have been floundered. In fact, the verb founder means “to become disabled,” to collapse, or to sink. Flounder as a verb means “to struggle to move or obtain footing,” “to thrash about wildly,” or “to proceed or act clumsily or ineffectually.” Both words fittingly describe Jay Leno, but when you’re talking about sinking ratings, foundered is more precise.

By the way, the dictionary says the origin of the verb flounder is probably the fish—picture a flounder flopping around.

Homework: Some time this week, try to slip one of these expressions into a conversation as casually as possible.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

So what, right? Here’s what: Amazon is making a recommendation based on a book I purchased in September 2000—Nine years ago!

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that Amazon never forgets what you’ve ordered. This might seem creepy, but making recommendations based on purchase history is a pretty benign idea, and a smart business strategy. But do people really have the same interest in books after nine years? In this case, no. I bought a book about Venezuela for a vacation I was taking then; I have no plans to take another vacation there today. (If it could, I bet Amazon would make travel book recommendations based on plane tickets people buy.)

Realizing that Amazon keeps such meticulous records, I wondered: What’s the first thing I ever bought from Amazon?

The answer: The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual (1998 Edition) (Spiral-bound), which I ordered on July 20, 1998. It set me back $9.75, plus $3.95 shipping. I bought this book for school, but I still use it today. It’s one of about six reference books I have within arms reach at my cubicle at work. Maybe it’s time to buy a new edition.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This is a poster for the long-defunct Eastern Airlines Air Shuttle. Note the classic Eastern logo in the lower-left part of the sign. How old is this sign?

The Air Shuttle was a ground-breaking, no-reservation, walk-up service that flew every hour between LaGuardia and Reagan National. It began in 1961, and grew into a huge success through the 1980s. A number of competitors began copying the idea, including Pan Am in 1986. With Eastern on the verge of collapse in the late 1980s, Donald Trump bought the Eastern Air Shuttle assets in 1989 for his start-up airline. Trump Airlines almost immediately went out of business, and USAir took over the shuttle in 1992. US Airways and Delta (Pan Am) still operate the popular shuttles between LaGuardia and Logan and Reagan National. I flew the Delta Shuttle once and it was as convenient as promised—plus it was fun to fly out of the old Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia.

Today, this sign is an anachronism. Amtrak’s high-speed Acela started running in 2000, and airport security went to hell after 9/11. Plus getting to LaGuardia is either slow or expensive, and often both. Today it’s usually faster to take the train to D.C. than to fly.

(Historical information comes from Wikipedia and the US Airways site.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.