On page 21 of the 3/10/08 issue of Ad Age is a beige box where it is written that marketers are thinking of cutting back on direct mail in favor of increased email in the face of recession. While I, as a guy who helps create lot of email, should be seeing this as a good thing, I also see this as a potential bad thing. First, we all get too much email as it is. The email we do get should be relevant and help improve our quality of life in some way. Emails promising me a 0% APR on transferred balances isn’t either of those things. Second, approaching email as an electronic version of direct mail may be cheaper than the current tree-based method, but I don’t believe it will be better. Marketers who use it in lieu of direct mail because it’s cheaper are missing the unique attributes of the medium and, in fact, are making it less effective, not more.

We’ve had a rough couple months. Forever (I think literally), I’d wake up and the paper would be at the breakfast table. Finally, we decided the content of the paper (The Star Tribune) wasn’t worth the experience of reading it at the table.

This decision was not taken lightly. Our kids had already begun the tradition. Our oldest checked the comics and weather every morning. Currently, the paper is an amalgamation of other organizations work. As the staff continued to get trimmed at the Strib, it started feeling more like a Google homepage rather than a hometown source. So, after much discussion (no debate really), we canceled the paper.

This morning, as I sit here reading my MacBook, I found this article from the Rake (which went online only this week). You can read about the Rake ceasing its print operation in an article from The Star Tribune. The irony.

Long story short, the Rake article gives a nice picture of what they call “the online news scrum” in the Twin Cities.