new signature file quote candidate: especially resonant for bloggers?

"The ultimate scarce resource in life is the willingness of other people to pay attention to us." -- Robert Frank, Falling Behind, p. vii.

the only way we can turn this company around is to make a product sufficiently addictive as to undermine career aspirations and family life

From CNN.com story on the Wii:

Nintendo's turnaround began five years ago, when the company's top strategists, including CEO Satoru Iwata and legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, zeroed in on two troubling trends: As young consumers started careers and families, they gradually cut back on game time. And as consoles became more powerful, making games for them got more expensive.

what predicts how much coverage a tragedy gets?

So, the New York Times is currently running stories on its front page about 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech being murdered and 160 citizens of Iraq being murdered. Enormous tragedies, all, obviously. Yet, the VT shootings will presumably get at least 10x--and perhaps more like 100x--the total column inches of coverage in the NYT than these Iraq bombings will get (indeed, a telling part of the coverage of Iraq bombings is how commonly and easily they are lumped together).

I'm not making any judgment on the wrongness or rightness of this as a journalistic practice, but: I've always thought it would be interesting to do a study of the relationship between the number of deaths in a tragic event and the number of column inches a story gets, and then what are the other factors that lead events to get more or less coverage.

Even just for the deaths of individual soldiers, I think it would be an interesting graph to see how (I presume) coverage of individual soldier deaths has declined as the war has gone on, despite the rate of soldier deaths being, if anything, remarkable for their relative consistency over time.

I'm presuming there is research on this and it's more that I'm not aware of it. If anyone is and has pointers to finding it, let me know.