Nielsen Media Research, the gold standard in the TV ratings industry, has announced that it will release numbers in December that show how many people actually sit through commercials on TV. That new yardstick will affect how much advertisers will pay to air those ads and will very possibly alter the economics of the TV marketplace. And not everyone in the TV business is happy about this.
In recent decades, there have been three basic ways that turnout has worked to produce the sort of “big wave” midterm that the Democrats are hoping for next week.
In an election environment which seems to favor the Democrats in so many ways, the Republicans continue to hold two strong cards; they have more money and they are better at getting out the vote than are the Democrats.
That’s the number of Americans who favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements giving them many of the same rights as married couples — a figure that is nine percentage points higher than it was in October 2003. But only 35% favor legalizing gay marriages.
Nearly half of U.S. workers expect they will switch careers sometime in the future. Young workers and part-time workers are more likely to say they are very or somewhat likely to change careers.
The new numbers for the newspaper industry are out, and they show another disheartening drop of nearly 3% in total average daily circulation. But the picture may be more complicated than the first impression. Not all papers are hurting, and many companies have trimmed questionable circulation. The industry also is boasting that, when online readers are included, overall readership is growing.