Weekend Tids and Bits

 

 

That Makes All the Difference honors go to Donna Barrett, CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., who tells us in an Editor & Publisher column that newspapers aren’t dying because they’re losing readers, they’re dying because they’re losing revenue.

 

Well, that certainly lifts spirits and concentrates on the positive. It’s a day-brightener like telling someone with an inoperable brain tumor that they have the heart-lung capacity of a 20-year-old.

 

Barrett cites the usual suspects for plunging revenue, including the recession and the All-Purpose Newspaper Demon called Craigslist. But she might also want to rethink the use of some of her stats, including “More Americans read printed newspapers than own dogs.”

 

If that’s high in the pitch of her ad reps, they’re selling lead life vests and wondering why they never see repeat customers.

 

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Coming Storm Forecast: Look for cash-strapped governments on all levels to accelerate a move to stop printing legal notices in newspapers and start posting them on government websites. In many cases, that will require a change in law, and in all cases newspapers will howl that taking away a blatant taxpayer-funded subsidy –oops! taking away a vital public service –puts democracy at risk, not to mention a low-cost/high-profit revenue stream.

 

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Another Obscure Holiday last week besides Earth Day was Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day, April 23. This is the mutated Take Our Daughters To Work program launched by the Ms. Foundation in 1993 to expose girls to the idea of careers. By 2003, limiting career exposure from parents to girls seemed discriminatory enough that boys were added. Now it is a non-discriminatory reason to skip listening to boring stuff at school and listen to boring stuff at work with Mommy and Daddy instead.

 

My own experience was to take then-teen daughter Elaine to work and put her to work for the day in the mailroom. That seemed to permanently satisfy her career exposure needs, since she never asked again.

 

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Ken Lerer’s lecture at the Columbia J-School has some keen insight into why newspapers, paper checks and facsimile machines are fast becoming anachronisms. He’s a co-founded of The Huffington Post, and the easiest way to read the Columbia Journalism Review article is online, natch. Catch it at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/tough_love_with_ken_lerer.php?page=all  

 

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Math/Smath – It’s An Epidemic If We Say It Is: The swine flu hysteria is focused on Mexico, where  the AP reports that it “has killed as many as 68 people and sickened more than 1,000.” So let’s do the math, boys and girls. The population of greater Mexico City alone is 22 million. And let’s assume for our math problem that all 1,068 cases of swine flu are confirmed (which they haven’t been) and uniformly lethal (which they aren’t). That means the percent of the population at risk is .000049. That’s about half the number of folks in greater Mexico City who die in traffic accidents each year. And if you restrict the math to just the 68 who have died, whether or not they all died from swine flu, then this scourge has wasted .0000031 percent. And, of course, the disease isn’t just limited to Mexico City, so if you take the percent of Mexico’s population of 110 million that have died from this horror, it’s .00000062 percent.

 

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