Good reading, bad writing

Courtesy of The Browser, here's a blog entry by Edward Jay Epstein explaining why television and movies have swapped roles, with cable TV being the home of "elite entertainment" and movies focusing on mindless, crowd-pleasing fare.

It's a compelling analysis rooted in the economics of cable TV versus movies and is well worth reading. However, for a guy who makes his living as an author, he is a pretty sloppy writer on his blog.

Even with a $30 million budget– the average in 2010– studios cannot afford to reach the entire prime time audience, so they must concentrate their blitz on the cable programs that are demographic groups with a proven disposition to go to movies on weekends cluster around.

Even if you see that removing "are" from that sentence makes it scan, that's not the clearest writing around. Nor is this an isolated example: his longer blog entries are riddled with run-on sentences and half-edited thoughts. Not the best advertising for his care as an author.