Morning commute, V train, 8:45

4 newspapers

2 magazines

13 crackberries/iPhones/iPods. Including mine. The guy next to me was listening to Aretha Franklin on his iPod

0 Kindles or Nooks

2 books

The number of books started off as 3. However, just before I got off the train, I glanced at the women standing in the door, reading a hardcover book. At the top of the page were the incriminating words: The DaVinci Code. As previously stated, Dan Brown doesn’t count in any category. And by the way, who pays hardcover for that stuff?

2 miscellaneous print items — including 1 holiday catalog

total print: 10

total electronic: 13

total: 23

density: about 80 people.

Evening commute, F train , 5:10

5 newspapers

1 magazine

5 crackberries/iPhones/iPods

1 Kindle/Nook, etc. In this instance, a Sony Reader –I had to look it up as at first I assumed it was a Nook, the look of which I have not yet committed to memory. Still no Nooks spotted, but this my first Sony sighting. Frankly, it looks more attractive than the Kindle.

2 books

3 miscellaneous print items, including mine, though now I forget what I had.

total print: 11

total electronic: 6

total: 17

density – ? Too distracted by the Sony Reader to count.

I think of magazines as havens for long-form reporting, and newspapers as masters of the short-form, breaking news, whose roles in the 24-hour news cycle to make sense of a barrage of information is even more important now that we’re constantly taking in short snippets from the Web. As all things McSweeney, this effort is sure to be hot and hip and maybe even smart, but I’m not sure function is really meeting form here.

And my sentiments notwithstanding, I will definitely be on the lookout for these during my commutes!

Thanks to BEE (and the race horse you were named after) for the tip.

P.S. So maybe  I would love to see McSweeney’s produce a literary newspaper and accompanying magazine in which the newspaper presented the first drafts of the lit that ends up in the magazine in final form. If a newspaper is the draft of history, seems fitting that a newspaper produced by McS would be the first draft of lit.

The morning commute was too crowded  to get a real good count of anything, especially as I got a seat, which restricts my line of sight even when there are no teeming masses of humanity on all sides. And there was a tie this morning, on the F train around 8:30:

1 newspaper

1 magazine

3 crackberries/iPhones/iPods (including mine)

0 Kindles or Nooks

1 book

0 miscellaneous items

–

total print = 3

total electronic= 3

total= 6

density: very crowded – at least 125 people. A more clear system for describing density is on its way, but since I started counting (approximate) total number of riders in my car, most commutes it tends to come in between 70-100: cars where all the seats are taken up, and lots of people are standing, but not packed.

The evening commute was a little later than usual, less crowded, and only marginally more exciting than the morning commute due to the presence of one old-school NYC hustler. I still can’t really tell a Brooklyn accent from the Bronx or even what is supposedly a Hell’s Kitchen accent (I read about it somewhere, I swear), but this guy was definitely local. He looked kind of young, though, to really carry that kind of accent and I suppose that is what made me suspect he was an actor. Fatigues and a scraggly beard. Between pitches to individuals, he kept saying “I helped someone out this morning. I do it when I can.” F train, around 7:20 PM:

4 newspapers

2 magazines

7 crackberries/iPhones/iPods (including mine)

0 Kindles or Nooks

5 books

1 miscellaneous items

–

total print = 12

total electronic= 7

total= 19

density: elbow room, about 60 or 70 people. All seats taken but not too many folks standing.

I’m not going to backdate any posts to fill in blanks — I’ll post a summary at the end of the week — but just want to say that one of the books from last night’s commute was a mom reading a children’s book to her daughter. A first! And charming. It was pretty heavy duty – definitely along the lines of Brothers Grimm, not so much The Hungry Caterpillar.

Hashmarks are easier because they make me feel less self-conscious about overt peoplewatching — especially since taking notes in margins looks like a perfectly natural thing to do. Nevertheless, I like the tidiness of using the iPhone Daily Tracker app, and having all the numbers in one place.

In the meantime here’s a bit from Slate’s Daniel Gross on why the reports of the death of the newspaper (and other print media) are highly exaggerated. He makes a good point: “Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels?” But I’m not sure he’s fully accounting for the fact that print’s decline started well before last fall.

P. S. I get the irony with my preferring the iPhone over hashmarks, but let me add my two cents on why, despite the crappy biz numbers for print media, I don’t think it’s going to die (just contract a bit):  choice. People love having choices. Some people will always want to choose newspapers, or mostly newspapers, or magazines, or mostly magazines, or Kindles, or mostly Kindles. Or Kindles and flashcards. Paper is like money: we’ve had it a long time and even if lots of it passes through our hands electronically these days, at times and pretty much every day we still need cold hard cash to move the world.

MORNING

Print once again led during the week’s morning commute, this time by a much bigger ratio of 2.5 print items for each electronic item (raw totals were 80 print, 32 electronic). Week 2 was 1.72 print items for each electronic item ( raw, 57:33 ). Why that might be is a mystery to me; we’ll see what this week holds.

That increases the cumulative ratio of print to electronic for the morning commute from 1.56 to 1 at the end of Week 2 to 1.86 to 1 at tend of last week.

EVENING

And while electronic media holds onto the evening commute, the ratio here decreases for Week 3, to 1.25 electronic items for each print item (raw 49:39). Week 2 was 1.47 to 1 (raw 28:19).

The cumulative evening electronic to print ratio at the end of week 2 was 1.37 to  1  (raw 51:37). At the end of this, week 3, it’s down just a tiny bit to 1.31 to 1

COMBINED

Week 3:     1.46 print to 1 electronic (raw 119:81)

Cumulative from Week 1:     1.32 print to 1 electronic (raw 275:208)

Okay, enough of inside jokes that will only be funny to about 3 people. Here’s last night’s commute:

4 newspapers

1 magazine

8 crackberries/iPhones/iPods

0 Kindles or Nooks

2 books

0 miscellaneous items

–

total print = 7

total electronic= 8

total= 15

density: elbow room (see below)

–

Also, I’m introducing a new metric, which will approximate number of people in the train car. Again, fairly unscientific, but even a ballpark measure is likely to come in handy to get a sense of the proportion of people who consume media during their commute.  I estimate I’ll have 5 categories, but will make use of 3 on a regular basis.

Practically deserted: Everyone is seated and there are plenty of empty seats to choose from. I don’t expect to use this rating very much at all, because this hardly ever happens at rush hour, though it does sometimes happen during early morning commutes.

Empty: The majority of seats are taken and just a couple of people, if any, are standing. This sometimes happens on the locals in the morning, especially if it’s early.

Elbow room: All or most seats are taken and there are many people standing, but few invasions of personal bubbles. Last night’s commute was an elbow room commute, and I counted (by an unscientific but reasonable process) there were about 120 people on the train.

Packed: All seats taken, and many unavoidable violations of personal bubbles. This is probably the most common category.

Sardine: I don’t get on these trains, though I may occasionally be on a train that moves from the packed state to the sardine state. These are the trains that are almost as bad as those trains you see videos of, the Japanese trains that need attendants to push people in.

For the next several times I find myself on a train that fits each category, I’ll note the density using this scale and make an approximate count of the total number of people in the car. Once I’ve got about 10 counts for each category, I’ll create an average that I’ll use as the approximate number of people on any given train in that density rating. It will take a while before I can really use these numbers to look at proportions, etc.

Theory: local trains will have higher overall tallies because of the greater number of stops.

9 newspapers

3 magazines (it was hard to tell, but  I suspect two of these were actually AM New Yorks designed to look like magazines)

6 crackberries/iPhones/iPods, including mine

0 Kindles

5 books

3 miscellaneous print items

–

print total= 20

electronic total=6

total= 26

5 (4+1) newspapers

1 magazine

12 (9+3) crackberries/iPhones/iPods, including mine

0 Kindles/Nooks

4 books

1 (0+1)  miscellaneous print items

–

total print= 11

total electronic= 12

total= 23

P.S. Also, taking the E to transfer to the G to get to Greenpoint doesn’t trigger my E-train neurosis. Although I do disdain the platform at 53rd Street and B’way. It’s one of the ugliest stations ever, and miserable to hang out in.

0 magazines

6 crackberries/iPhones/iPods (including mine)

0 Kindles

5 books, including another tiny bible. I often see bibles, korans or talmuds though it seems less so lately. Often, people reading the bible or other religious literature are highlighting phrases, sections.

3 miscellaneous items, including a set of flashcards, which were too far away for me to see, but I’m guessing med student stuff or foreign language study.

–

total print= 14

total electronic= 6

total= 20