Miscellaneous 'Shoe

-- Freakonomics is now a blog at the New York Times.

-- Marginal Revolution recommends "How Credit Got So Easy and Why It's Tightening" at the Wall Street Journal. "The origins of the boom and this unfolding reversal predate last year's mistakes. They trace to changes in the banking system provoked by the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry in the 1980s, the reaction of governments to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the Federal Reserve's response to the 2000-01 bursting of the tech-stock bubble."

-- Murdoch's Free WSJ Plan: "News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch has said he might make the Wall Street Journal's Web site free, a shift that could compel Pearson to do the same with the online version of its Financial Times. Numis Securities analyst Lorna Tilbian said any move by Murdoch to make wsj.com free has to put pressure on Pearson, while Dresdner Kleinwort's Usman Ghazi estimates a potential hit of up to six percent on earnings per share."

-- "Product Packages Now Shout To Get Your Attention" at today's New York Times:

"Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers’ attention.

The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials.

So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves.

'The media is fragmented, and we can’t find people — we can’t get them to sit down and listen to our argument on a television spot,' said Jerry Kathman, chief executive of LPK, a brand agency based in Cincinnati. 'The package can convey that argument.'"