Newspaper endorsements: Out of step?

Supporters of President Obama gasped prior to the election when four of the major newspapers in Iowa backed Mitt Romney for president in that crucial state. As it turns out, they needn’t have worried, with the President breezing to victory with 52% of the Hawkeye vote.



But the endorsements penned by the Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Quad-City Times and Sioux City Journal were

The Interview About Police Trailers and Falling In Love

Want to read an interview with me about expat life in the Netherlands? Well then today is your lucky day because there just happens to be an interview which has gone live on Expats Blog.

If you want to read about borrowed police trailers, falling in love with a Dutchman, making the switch to a dream career and the difficulty of leaving family behind then head over to the interview now. 

And whilst you are there please take a second or two to leave a kind word about this blog or my expat parenting blog to help me win an Expats Blog Netherlands blog award. 

Newspapers failing to diversify digital audience

Though newspapers have been pretty good over the years at growing traffic on their websites, they are shockingly bad at capitalizing on the social power of the digital media to broaden their audiences.

Audience diversification is important, because the typical newspaper website is read, more or less, by the same senior citizens who take the print paper. Here’s how serious the demographic

Newspapers lost 31.5% of ad share in 4 years

Newspapers have lost nearly a third of their share of the advertising market in the last four years, with the dollars – no surprise here – shifting to the online and mobile media, according to a new study from eMarketer, an independent research company. 

The decline in newspaper ad share – which is far deeper than drops in the other legacy media in the same period – appears to be a direct

Tipping Over to the Dutch Side (2) - Yards and Meters

That'll be 3/4 miles, not kilometres...
(c) Amanda van Mulligen

My last post was about the little things I noticed during a recent trip to England that may mean I have started tipping over to the Dutch side. My Britishness is diminishing a little. Here's another example.

Sitting in my dad's car on the way to his house from Southampton airport he had the sat nav system on. A female voice was telling him about things that he should be doing in a few hundred yards. She may as well have been talking gobbledygook. Yards? I had no idea how long we would need to drive to get a few hundred yards further.

I realised I've gone completely metric. Metres I know. Centimetres I get. Yards means nothing to me any more. A foot is vaguely familiar but not a measurement I think in. Inches I fondly remember. But meters and centimetres are my friends.

Officially the UK has gone partially metric but signposts must display distances in miles and yards and not kilometres or metres. Length and width restrictions on roadsigns are in feet and inches and weight is generally still thought of as stones and pounds rather than the kilograms used in Europe.

It's taken a while to stop thinking of myself as five foot something and remember that I am 166 cm high. However, I'm now there and I recently discovered that tipping over to the Dutch side means that yards, feet and inches are now a part of my history.

Expats Blog Awards: Get your Commenting Hats On

ExpatsBlog.com is running an expats blog award and I'm on the campaign trail. You can help my "Expat Life with a Double Buggy" blog stand out with your kind words.

To help earn an award you simply follow the link through to the listing of "Expat Life With a Double Buggy" on the ExpatsBlog.com site and leave a rating and a comment. So if you're a regular reader and like what you read head on over and comment away. Of course, you can also leave a comment and a rating for this "A Letter from the Netherlands" blog if you enjoy what you read here about expat life in the Netherlands.

And whilst you're over at ExpatsBlog.com......

ExpatsBlog.com provides a list of expat blogs by country to help expats find relevant posts to read. A great place to start if you're looking for an overview of bloggers and information in your host country.

Tipping Over to the Dutch Side (1) - Being Chauffeured

As I already mentioned, I was recently back in England for a few days and I was quite alarmed to see how used to Dutch life I had become. I have realised for some time now that I exist in a world between being British and being quite a lot "Dutchified". But it would appear that with some things I have started tipping over to the Dutch side.

Left side? Right side?
(c) Amanda van Mulligen

Take for example getting in to a car. A very simple thing. However, when I was getting in to the front of my dad's car in England I had to do some swift, hard thinking about where I should be sitting. I was a passenger so I logically had to get in to the left of the English car. But this went against every grain of instinct because of so many years of getting in to the passenger side of a Dutch car so each time I had to do a double take before I headed for the correct side.

I started to understand why Europeans mutter about the Brits making life difficult with everything being on the "wrong" side.

Note to self: probably a lot easier in future to just wait for the driver to get in and then get whichever side they didn't.

There were a more things that seemed a bit foreign in England so look out for Tipping Over to the Dutch Side (2)......