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Reading Between the Lines
THIS week brought another spate of bad news for newspapers. Daily circulation is down an average of 2.8 percent over the last six months, continuing a slide that started at least a decade ago. Layoffs and labor strife continued across the country, from Philadelphia to Oakland, Calif.
There’s no question the newspaper industry is “under siege,” as a MediaNews Group publisher told his employees in a memo warning of layoffs at his San Francisco Bay Area newspapers
(eastbayexpress.com). But how bad are things, really?
For starters, those circulation figures may not be as dire as they sound. A “significant portion” of the drop “results directly from the industry’s long-term, and arguably long-overdue, initiative to eliminate inefficient vanity and promotional circulation,” writes Allen Mutter on his blog, Confessions of a Newsosaur (newsosaur.blogspot.com).
That means newspaper companies are cutting out discounted subscriptions, free papers at hotels and delivery to far-flung locales, none of them particularly appealing to advertisers and increasingly seen as not worth the cost.
Just as the lackluster circulation numbers were being dissected, the Newspaper Association of America released the results of a study it commissioned showing that when Internet readership is counted, the newspaper audience is actually way up — nearly 8 percent over all from February 2005 to March 2006 (naa.org).
But the study does not mention that newspapers still haven’t figured out how to make a healthy profit from Internet readership. Cluttered, hard-to-navigate newspaper sites proliferate. And many sites force readers to register, which Internet types say is counterproductive, when those readers can so easily go elsewhere for their news. In terms of the content itself, Louis Hau of Forbes.com thinks he has the answer: Look to New York City’s dueling tabloids, The Post and The Daily News. Even as most other papers had circulation declines, both tabloids picked up readers. The gains, Mr. Hau said, can be attributed to the fact that both papers “emphasize local coverage,” “offer stories you can’t get anywhere else,” “keep it short,” and present the news with “attitude” and “a point of view.”
PRIVACY UP IN THE AIR The federal government scrapped plans for Secure Flight, a program that would have created profiles of airline passengers to enable automatic background checks by running names through government and commercial databases. Passengers were to be assigned a “risk score” based on the data.
But though the government was stymied by complaints about invasions of privacy, the private sector may nevertheless take up the reins, Bruce Schneier, a security expert, warns on his blog (schneier.com).
As reported in August by Aviation Week, a company called Jetera is planning to use much of the same customer information to provide individual entertainment options for fliers (if your buying habits suggest you are a baseball fan, maybe your in-flight movie will be “The Natural,” for instance) and to market to passengers both before and after flights.
“So what the government rightly decided not to do, the start-up corporation Jetera is doing instead,” Mr. Schneier writes. “The U.S. government already collects data from the phone company, from hotels and rental-car companies, and from airlines. How long before it piggybacks onto this system?”
MUGGERS, SKIP THIS Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer, walks around with about $20,000 in his pockets, he told The Sunday Times of London in an interview this week that focused on his wealth and his spending habits. “Cash has always appealed to me more as a means of payment than cards,” was his simple explanation (timesonline.co.uk).
His biggest windfall was, of course, when Apple Computer went public in 1980. How big a windfall was it? “I’m not sure how much I made out of that,” he said. “ It might have been $60 million, but it could just as easily have been $120 million.”
