Thinking about Sweeney's circulation spin
The Chronicle's self-serving story explaining away its decline in circulation did not escape the keen eye of Slampo, who does quite a thorough Fisking of the entire piece on his blog. Here's an excerpt:
The Houston Chronicle headline writers, no doubt aware of the rising reader clamor for more “happy news,” did indeed dig down to locate the nearly obscured silver lining with the factually sound subject-verb-direct object combination “Chronicle retains ranking.” If the paper had not retained its ranking … well, that would have almost risen to the level of real news, since by our ’rithmetic it would have required a gain of about 22,000 daily papers over the previous year to surpass the sixth-ranked Chicago Tribune---that’s a larger numbers gain than reported by the NYT---or a loss of 140,000 or so to drop beneath the eighth place Boston Globe. (It’s all about the art of the possible, we guess.)
We’re not here this evening to offer our complex and turgid explanations for the continuing fall in newspaper circulation and/or readership---we’re available to do that in private, for $250 an hour, with shower and hot towels available---but we can’t let Mr. Sweeney’s sundry rationalizations of the numbers pass without comment.
The entire post is here.
Incidentally, that Chronicle story ran the following numbers related to Chron.com:
The Chronicle also reaches many more readers online, with chron.com averaging 60 million page views and 5.3 million unique visitors each month.
A story that ran in the Houston Business Journal on Monday, however, cited different (lower) numbers for Chron.com:
Chron.com, the newspaper's Web site, averages 50 million page views and 3.8 million unique visitors per month.
The Houston Business Journal appeared to take key information from this press release from Feedburner, also dated Monday (November 7).
So, which numbers are accurate, and why the discrepancy?
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/09/05 09:02 PM | Print |
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