Sometimes the react is better than the first act.
Mathew Ingram and Steve Yelvington have good posts on British newspaper consultant John Duncan Webster’s Dictionary of Audience Exaggeration: How internet metrics promote the myth of the dying newspaper.
Yelvington has several nuggets, but this one I can’t pass up quoting:
However, the notion that a newspaper’s daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap, and especially so in markets where the newspaper is home delivered, such as is typical in the United States. Try dividing! Once again, I ran over this morning’s paper with my car on my way to work.
Tags: print readership | newspapers | internet metrics
In rural media, the “shopper” format is dying horribly as well. I had a conversation about this yesterday. And subscriptions are down, but I think that is as much that our local population has decreased due to job loss from closed/outsourced manufacturing jobs.
Needless to say, I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all.