NYTimes.com to Offer Subscription Service. They’re putting MORE stuff behind a pay wall, not less. Discouraging, and I think penny wise but pound foolish. And I guess this voids Times’ pretensions as an organ devoted (partially) to serving the public interest.

about the speech by Jim Stengel, of P&G, that was referred to in the Auletta article: ‘All marketing should be permission marketing’. Good stuff.

is a great piece by Ken Auletta: The New Pitch. Subtitle: Do ads still work? The bigger question, hinted at about halfway through, is “can advertising agencies effectively isolate the variables required to accurately measure effectiveness?” When TV was run by local affiliates and there were generally only local offerings on the newsstand in addition to a few national publications, it was easy to run an ad in, say, Cleveland and use sales figures from Detroit as the control group. In an advertising-saturated world, though, one wonders what kind of assumptions-gymnastics a marketer has to engage in to demonstrate that a piece really was effective.

in Quebec this morning is the resignation of Jeff Fillion, a so-called “shock jock” in Quebec City. For Anglos who might not have been following this story very much the news will seem curious at best, but underlying Fillion’s resignation is a series of interlocking stories that are at once fascinating and sordid. Fillion has been under immense pressure due to a defamation suit brought by TV weather host Sophie Chiasson, and there is little disagreement that Fillion – who savaged her for months on his show as being a witless, big-boobed no-talent – went way beyond the bounds of approppriateness in his commentary. At the same time, however, Chiasson is linked to Fillion’s disgraced (and again unemployed) arch-rival, the convicted pedophile Robert Gillet. Add to that the widespread suspicion that Gillet and people close to him were behind the CRTC’s threat to pull Fillion’s station’s license last summer. The larger story at play here touches on all aspects of Quebec City media and local politics, and it’s fascinating to follow from an outsider’s perspective.