Last week it was reported that the ratings board of the motion picture industry is now going to factor in cigarette smoking as part of the overall rating of a film.  Films with excessive smoking will now certainly get a PG-13, if not an R rating.  The goal is to cut down on the influence on teen smoking behavior.  There is clear correlation between the glamorization of cigarette smoking on screen and people smoking.

While this development is certainly to be applauded from a public health point of view, it does seem to be off the mark if the goal is to lessen unhealthy behavior in young Americans. Excessive drinking, use of guns, corporate theft and deceit, physical and sexual violence are also bad for this country’s health and they are also widely depicted on the big screen.  It is absurd to think that a scene depicting gun violence or a robbery might get a less restrictive rating if the actors are not smoking. There is no need for me to dwell on this aspect of the topic, as Marshall Herskovitz, the accomplished Hollywood producer, has written a great piece on this development.

This news story did get me to thinking about cigarette smoking, but from a more historical point of view. It could be argued that, in the United States, cigarette smoking is a habit largely contained in a single century.  At the beginning of the 20th century, cigarette smoking was not widespread.  In the middle of the century it …

It is often valuable to have a grasp of history when looking to the future.  Too often those that don’t have a historical perspective think that everything is new when in many cases what is new is a refurbished version of a past success model. 

The other day Clear Channel Communications announced that a station it owns in Dallas, KZPS, was going to stop airing 30 and 60 second commercials.  Instead of running lots of commercials, the station will have advertisers sponsor an hour of programming.  During each hour the DJ will spend about two minutes speaking about the sponsor or the sponsors products in a personal, conversational way.  This compares to the usual commercial load on radio stations of 12 to 16 minutes of 30 and 60 second spots.  In addition, sponsors will have category exclusivity.  The station has sold four sponsors, Southwest Airlines, AT&T, Coors and Guitar Center, and will therefore not have any other airlines, phone companies, breweries or music retailers on their air.
The impetus for this major change is the radical changes in the media landscape that have occurred in the past few years.  Radio has long been an out of home medium, listened to predominately in cars – that’s why radio stations call their version of prime time, drive time.  Radio was serving a captive audience of people stuck in traffic.  Now with the advent of commercial free satellite radio, CDs and iPods, drivers have commercial free choice.  Whenever I drive …

Last week it was announced that Life magazine would cease publication, again. This is the third death of the magazine since it was founded in 1936. Life was a weekly from 1936 to 1972, when it first stopped publication. It was revived as a monthly in 1978 but then shut down again in 2000. It was resurrected as a newspaper insert in 2004 but never really took hold in that iteration which was an incredibly misguided strategy to begin with.

Life was, simply put, the greatest showcase of quality and historically important photographs in the middle part of the 20th century in America. Many of the greatest photographers in the country dreamed of being a Life photographer, and in fact became great because, in part their photographs appeared in the magazine. I remember as a young boy the thrill of coming home from school on the day that Life magazine was delivered by the mail man. It was a thrill to sit down and spend an hour looking at every photograph and reading every caption. At a time when there were only 5 TV stations coming into the home and newscasts were 15 minutes with no video, Life magazine was truly the window to the world. Why write about this in a place with a tag line “A Future Look at Today”? Well the story of Life magazine is a story about the last 75 years of media and also a story …