Last week, the Hair Spin Team aka Press Department taught us all a lesson in how to get attention for our shows.

Hair announced that they were having an open call audition for future replacements in the show. They didn’t care if you were from Washington, DC or Akron, Ohio. They didn’t care if you were repped by William Morris or your Uncle William. They were going to give you the chance to audition for a place in the tribe.

So, there’s been a ton of buzz as of late about rumors of many of the major news publishers getting together, led by Rupert Murdoch, to discuss a larger strategy of charging consumers for online content. This has been talked about plenty of times in the past and a few of the major online publications do charge for content but I do get the feeling that there is new pressure beginning to heat up for the leading news publishers to begin getting their revenue figures back up. Online is the one place that many feel has the best growth potential opportunities in the current market place.

Personally, if me paying a couple bucks a month helps ultimately save the leading news organizations – I’m game.

Print advertising is plummeting and online advertising has slowed. In addition, there is no evidence that the current business model will ever be able to slide lost print revenue into filling online inventory. While cost-cutting efforts have been making the finanical reports seem hopeful, these are short-term fixes and over time the popular news media need to figure out new revenue streams that have legs.

It’s clear that Google’s expansion into aggregating news has really rubbed many in the newspaper business the wrong way.

According to the news publishers interviewed in the attached story, "we can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore." Wow.

Read the following story and I suggest you keep a very close eye on this.

Read on.

With all of the recent changes in the newspaper industry, a new question is being asked as many begin to expand their presence online – does a print edition drive significant online readership? Last month, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shuttered its print edition to move exclusively online. A little over a month after this change, it’s now being reported that SeattlePI.com (the official site for the former newspaper) experienced a 23% drop in website traffic while 75% of the top 30 online editions of newspapers saw double-digit upticks in traffic. Does this mean that the print edition was having that much influence on web traffic? If so, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other print publications exploring moving to a digital-only format had better readjust their website traffic projections upon making such a move. Our friends at the NY Times continue to lead the pack and were up 7% from last year at this time.

For what it’s worth – we still are yet to see a strong connection between print and online.

Read on.

Here’s some morning trivia for your commute this week – pick up the NY Times this Wednesday and see if you can count how many active Broadway shows are no longer listed in the ABC listings. I won’t even try …

Read what the markets are saying which isn't pretty.

Here’s an interesting story for Broadway marketers – particularly those targeting the younger slice of the traditional theatergoing market. According to a new research report, the more affluent you are, the more connected you are to both accessing the Internet …

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On a recent survey to Columbia University students who bought Broadway tickets, of 201 surveys completed, the leading source people selected as to what they read to learn about theatre was the NY Times Online (53%) – more than double …

So, it’s old news that print advertising is rapidly on the decline. At least the NY Times can begin charging admission for people to climb the Times building if things get ugly (full page rates get you a camera crew …

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With so much money spent on advertising in print for live entertainment, I saw this article to be particularly interesting.

In what I would suspect will be an increasing trend, The Capital Times, one of Wisconsin’s leading daily newspapers, will …

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Between the stale pretzels and the dixie cup of water, there’s some new entertainment making its way on to your future flights. It’s Internet access!

This has been discussed for quite some time but it looks like there is …

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I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s clear that consumers are having a much larger impact on the way brands are both built and shaped. Whether they loved your show or hated it, they …

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