First jobs are formative and mine was a doozy — I hawked vegetables for an open air fruit stand in Brooklyn, where I learned such customer service lingo as: “Hey, lady, you gonna buy that tomato or just fondle it?” Another lasting lesson of that job was the methodology of loading a cool room. Believe me — you do not want to move 60 pound cantaloupe crates more than once if you can help it. My boss, an amazing alcoholic nicknamed Shimmy, had a mantra: “Do it by the numbers, bubby.” By this he meant to visualize where everything should end up; newest buys to the back, unless they were ripe and had to be sold; then start rearranging. I was reminded of this last night  when I stopped at a corner market on Cedar Street in Berkeley (west of MLK if you’re a local) that had just been taken over by a new family. We got to gabbing about produce.

But I digress. In this case by the numbers means the reports on advertising spending.

Let me start at the national level with a dour report from MediaDailyNews:

“Total U.S. ad spending declined 0.3% during the first quarter of 2007, according to estimates released this morning by TNS Media Intelligence . . . shifts were evident across the media mix with TV declining 2.7% . . . Internet display advertising soared 16.7% . . . Radio and newspaper spending continues to erode, but consumer magazines demonstrated a strong rebound, rising 7.1% . . . As a result of these shifts, TV lost nearly a share point of U.S. ad spending, while the Internet gained more than a point and magazines gained a half a point.”

Meanwhile, at the local level, Borrell & Associates released its fifth Local Media Benchmarking Survey that covers roughly 2,200 dailies, weeklies, radio stations (most numerous category; about 60 percent of the mix), TV stations and a handful of independent local sites. Visit the home page to register for a free executive summary, as I did last night. Highlights:

• Newspaper sites garnered 36 percent of local online revenues, up nearly a third over last year
• but “pure-play internet companies (Google, Yahoo!, Monster et al.) are hot on their heels with 33.2 percent
• one out of four sites surveyed “were on track to generate more than $1 million in gross revenues this year; 6.6 percent of them will generate more than $10 million.

My concern: if and when local citizen media rears its head the dollars will be locked up. Quelle domage!

Elsewhere in advertising: A story in Advertising Age says incumbent advertising players are leery of the string of acquisitions by Internet companies and suggests they will be feeding the Federal Trade Commission info to shoot down the Google-DoubleClick deal.

(You’ve been doing well at publishing, technology and audience-building. Suddenly your online publication has become a business. Where can you find help in managing your startup?)

Sarting a Web 2.0 business is a game of twists and turns and success may come from an unexpected quarter when entrepreneurs follow the rules: build, test, assess and only then try to scale.

That’s the short and dirty synopsis of a fun and useful Business 2.0 story that uses this example of how an afterthought turned into the main event:

“Ludicorp, the original parent company of online photo site Flickr, began as a startup developing a massively multiplayer game called the Game Neverending. As part of the initial software development, the company developed a tool that allowed people to share photos and chat about them. As more and more of the internal team and their friends began to use the tool, it became clear that providing technology to share photos in a unique way was the real opportunity–a shift that led to the creation of the Flickr website and an all-new business model. The Game Neverending was never launched, but Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for an estimated $30 million.”

Don’t be blinded by the chimera of success. The Small Business Administration says “over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years,” according to a list of the top 10 reasons why. Reason number one: lack of business experience. So check out some tips before you become a stastistic.

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Obituaries are a mainstay of the local paper. Can local web publishers create a template for folks to write up their departed’s story? Pictures should be easy to add; video in time. Make the web posting of the obituary free. The publisher can, however, make money by delivering various hard copy mementos to friends and family (have you seen the new picture books? what about mailing stuff to out-of-towners?). These are services that may have value to the family. For artifacts they will pay. The publisher will offer free web display and user-generated labor to create a place for anyone to be remembered; and simultaneously create a network of producers to craft these mementos. The publisher’s fee will be for pulling these services together.

I recently bounced that idea off Tish (the Constant Observer) Grier and got back a qualified maybe. That leads me to wonder: is there some sort of Open Source development wish list for media people who come up with ideas that may be money-makers — but they lack the technical know-how to implement?

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