MMMM # 460 Advertising Pot, Benn at 50, and an obit for NPR's Margo Adler

      The New York Times had already editorialized in favor of medicinal marijuana laws, but the full page ad in Sunday's paper was still a bit jarring. An ad for a quasi-legal drug in THE Times?. Fortune has the story about the ad.
     Twenty three states have approved the use of marijuana for relief of pain from a variety of illnesses.
     Three other states have legislation in line for a vote, and if those laws are approved, half the states will allow it.
     Medicinal marijuana has been the subject of legislation in Alabama for decades, yet it fails every time it is introduced.
     From a media standpoint, I suspect that anyone who wants to buy a full-page ad in any newspaper these days is probably welcomed with  open arms!

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     Longtime Alabama reporter Al Benn celebrated 50 years in the business this week,,,and he wrote about the experiences in a feature in Sunday's Montgomery Advertiser. Also in The Advertiser, Executive Editor Tom Clifford boasted about more than a half-million dollars the paper is spending on equipment for their print products, saying it is a sign of the company's commitment to print.

  Then again, The Advertiser, The Birmingham News, and The Press Register in Mobile all spent lots of money building new newsroom buildings, only to put them on the market when the Great Recession and the digital tsunami struck. As far as I know, none of the buildings have sold. 

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ALSO: Longtime NPR reporter Margo Adler died of cancer on Friday. I had listened to her for many years on many NPR stations, but never knew much about her life, including the fact that she was a pagan, even a Wicca, and had written a book about it in 1979. Her death prompted the public radio show Interfaith Voices to rebroadcast an interview with her and other interviews about her life on Sunday.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of TimLennox.com]