Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well Dove Isaacs found another cartoon; I like this one very much.  The guy goes up to a newspaper vending machine, The Daily News, and it says, "Click to continue."  Click to continue.

There's a new punctuation symbol.  It's called the sarc mark.  It expresses sarcasm.  It means yeah right.  That's what it looks like, if you can see it there.  The sarc mark.  Now the problem is you can't make it -- type it into an e-mail.  You have to actually paste it in some way, so I think it's a bad idea.  I think that we need one that we can make with periods and commas and semi colons or something that expresses sarcasm.  We need sarcasm, by the way.

US Magazine circulation falls 2.2 percent in late 2009.  Yeah, that's the way it's going.  Printed magazines are losing circulation.  I don't think there's much they can do to bring it back up; although, new magazines -- there are new magazines starting and that may help a little bit, but your traditional magazines -- business magazines, consumer magazines -- not doing well.  Although, there are pockets of magazines doing well.  Like Brides Magazines do very well.

Is there a reason?  Sure.  We're getting a lot of our information electronically.  So what we need is a blend of the printed version and the electronic version; that's what publishers haven't quite figured out at this stage of the game.

In Richmond, Virginia they want to stop printing amendments.  Evidently, this is a big thing that the amendments get printed in advance and distributed and they print it in newspaper and that way everyone sees what's going on and then they comment on it.  It's good revenue for newspapers but its -- of course, they charge for it.  So there's a -- one of the representatives in that state are suggesting that they don't print them anymore.

Well if you start taking away from newspapers, even that public service kind of information, you're going to have a problem.

Electronics that obey hand gestures.  Electronics that obey hand gestures.  Hey, electronics -- I've got a hand gesture for you and it's not a sarc mark.

You saw this one in WhatTheyThink.com -- GPO employees brave snow, high winds to print economic report.  Snow storms in Washington D.C. they close down the city.  The postal service didn't delivery mail, right?  But the GPO workers got through in order print the material for the White House, which is the economic report of the President, which people were just dying to see.

All right.  Don't ask me how I know this but Jackie Collins, who writes these novels has one called 'Poor Little Bitch Girl'.  Yeah I said it right.  And the only reason I mentioned it is the bad guy in the book is named Frankie Romano.  Now, she could have picked a different name but there you go.  Again, how do I know?  I'm not telling you.

This was an article; I only took the first page of it.  It says, "Do school libraries need books?"  That's a controversial title to me, by the way.  Because if you go even to the RIT Wallace Library a lot of the research materials are databases.  I can access them online.  The research department used to have lots of directories and materials.  A lot of that stuff went to CD Rom and then it went online and then ****.  The printed version went away.  So that whole area now is a shadow of what it used to be.

Now they're saying that maybe kids will just sit at computers in libraries and access all that stuff that Google has scanned in and other books that publishers have made available.  I would hate to see libraries without books, but what's happening is that libraries will only become -- in the future -- they'll become repositories for old books.  Because new books aren't being published as new books; a lot of encyclopedic information is being published electronically.  It's very unusual.

Now I just participated -- excuse me for getting up here -- I just participated in writing a section of the Encyclopedia of Journalism and it's a 7-volume set.  A 7-volume set of lots of text.  Why?  Why is this in printed form?  Not that I'm against the idea; I think it's a great idea, but much of the information in here is obsolete the day it was written and so it make sense to put some of this kind of informational material in electronic form.  But there are other kinds of books that kid’s school have in printed form.  We just have to figure out what that blend is.

So it says here, "Room for debate."  Well, yes.  I guess, we have to debate it because libraries right now are struggling to figure out what their real mission is at this stage; are they just a portal to the Internet or are they actually the repository for information in all forms?

In any case, that's my opinion.  Take care.

This is the most interesting.  Do you find yourself having to defend print as a marketing medium to your boss, colleagues, and/or customers?  Yes.