"After 40 years of catering to younger consumers, advertisers and media executives are coming to a different realization: older people aren’t so bad, after all."

Because of the Players and other duties, I'm way behind on my reading. So some of you probably caught Bill Carter and Tanzina Vega's front page NY Times story on a major shift from the 18-to-34 year old obsession to media executives looking to reach geezers. Certainly a rare bit of good news for golf's tendency to skew, uh, older.

This amounts to a reversal in thinking that took hold during the 1960s, when advertisers first started aiming for baby boomers, the largest segment of the United States population. But the reasons for the shift are not just demographic, they are economic.

As a result of the recent recession, unemployment rates for younger age groups have been far higher than those for older Americans. The most recent unemployment rate for those 20 to 24 years old is 14.2 percent; for those 25 to 34, it is 9.4 percent. The rate for people aged 55 to 64 is only 6.2 percent.