Polishing the Brass on the Titanic (Continued)

On Thursday, I wrote about the downward plunge of newspaper circulation in the U.S. based on the recent numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The average decline in circulation for daily weekday papers was 10.6 percent (or about 30 million copies), based on numbers from the past six months compared to the same six months in 2008.

But, before we freak out any more about the end of American newspapers as a whole, Daniel Gross of Slate has a word of advice: Chillax. (Really, that's exactly what he says in the article.)

Here's why he thinks things aren't as bad as they might seem:

"First of all, there's nothing ipso facto shocking about a decline in patronage of 10 percent in six months. Many political blogs and cable news shows have seen their audiences fall by much more than 10 percent since the feverish fall of 2008. And advertising at plenty of online publications has fallen by a similar amount. In case anybody has forgotten, we've had a deep, long recession, a huge spike in unemployment, and a credit crunch. Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures....

...Many other components of consumer discretionary spending—hotels, restaurants, air travel—have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels?"

Certainly the election last fall drove circulation numbers higher than they would have been, resulting in a more dramatic falloff in the time since, but that doesn't change the fact that the decline exists. And if it continues to slide, even at a slower pace, that's bad news, right?

Wrong, says Gross, because falling circulation does not necessarily mean falling revenue. Many papers have increased prices at the newsstand and for home delivery. So, while the New York Times has seen a 7.3 percent drop in circulation, they have also announced that revenues are actually UP 6.7 percent in the third quarter. At the same time, income from circulation surpassed income from advertisements for the first time, ever.

Of course the question is whether the higher costs can balance out the losses that are being felt in advertising (traditionally the way newspapers made their money), while at the same time not driving away so many customers that even higher prices are forced upon those that remain. It does not sound like a good long-term plan, but at least there might be hope.

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Polishing the Brass on the Titanic

The Audit Bureau of Circulation, which calculates newspaper circulation numbers in the United States, has released the totals for the six-month period from March-September. Let's just say they aren't very pretty.

When compared to the circulation numbers from March-September of 2008, only one of the top 25 newspapers in the United States has seen an increase an increase in circulation. That paper, the Wall Street Journal, is up a whopping 0.6 percent. As for the other 24, its not only that they are down, but how badly they are down. Here's a sampling:

USA Today: -17.2%
New York Times: -7.3%
Washington Post: -6.4%
New York Post: -18.8%
Houston Chronicle: -14.2%
Boston Globe: -18.5%
Dallas Morning News: -22.2%
San Francisco Chronicle: -25.9%

These aren't papers that no one cares about; these are some of the most important papers in the country. And some of them have lost one out of every five or six readers in the span of a year. Megan McArdle thinks this is more than just a bad stretch:

"I think we're witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren't there. At some point, industries enter a death spiral: too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers. That drives more customers away. Rinse and repeat . . ."

McArdle, who stood in front of me and about 40 other enterprising young journalists back in June and tried to assure us there would be some kind of future in the business, is not the only one who says newspapers are circling the drain.

Paul Gillin, of Newspaper Death Watch, says that newspaper circulation today is lower than it was in 1940, the first year for which data on circulation is available. Back then, 31 percent of people read a newspaper. Today, it's less than 13 percent. Even worse, in 1940 there were 118 newspapers published for every 100 households in the United States. Ten years ago, there were 53 per 100 households. Today, that total is less than 33 per 100 households.

On the plus side, the ABC also released the top 10 circulation gainers during the past year. Then again, I think it's a top 10 list because there weren't enough papers with positive numbers to make a full top 25.

Maybe it's time I read the writing on the wall and gave up on this kind of career.

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The European Stages of Life

The people who research this kind of thing believe that half of the babies born in America in 2007 will live to be 104. Maybe that means we need to redefine traditional ways of looking at the stages of life, so today the New York Times took a reflective look at how man has defined his own life throughout the centuries.

This one is without a doubt my favorite, from A.A. Gill in the London Times, July 2009:

"I've often thought that Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You're born Italian. They're relentlessly infantile and mother-obsessed. In childhood, we're English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey, and only happy when kicking balls, pulling the legs off something, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. Then, in middle age we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous, and pedantic. Then, finally, we regress into being Belgian, with no idea who we are at all."

People Just Don't Care About News

At least that seems to be the message that has been sent by recent viewership totals of the four major cable news stations -- CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, and HLN (formerly known as Headline News) -- during prime time.

CNN, which is by far the one that relies on actual news coverage (as opposed to talking heads and one-way opinion shows) to drive its audience numbers, came in dead last for the month of October for prime-time programming, reports the New York Times.

However, CNN still has the highest viewership numbers when you look at all the hours in the day, but when it comes to prime-time, the most important hours of the day in terms of advertising revenue, it looks like the American public has a much stronger taste for opinion. FoxNews has made a living on those types of programs (led by the "Papa Bear" himself, Bill O'Reilly, who grabs an average of 880,000 viewers a night), so it should be little surprise that Fox dominates almost every time slot of the prime time schedule.

Opposite 'O Reilly at 8 p.m. is MSNBC's Keith Olberman (the #1 pundit on my list of pundits I'd like to personally strangle) who pulls in less than 300,000 viewers a night, followed by HLN's Nancy Grace with roughly 270,00. In the same time slot, CNN's Campbell Brown gets only 162,000 viewers.

The story is pretty much the same at 7 p.m., with Fox's Shepard Smith grabbing the top spot with 465,000 viewers, while MSNBC's Chris Matthews (179,000), HLN's Jane Velez Mitchell (166,000), and CNN's Lou Dobbs (162,000) barely manage to get that many viewers combined.

The only CNN host not to finish in last place during prime time is the ancient one, Larry King, who managed to finish third at 9 p.m. with 224,00 viewers. That's still well behind Fox's Sean Hannity (659,000) and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (242,000), but ahead of HLN's Joy Behar (181,000).

Maybe the saddest part for CNN is that their signature show, Anderson Cooper 360, also went to the bottom of the barrel in October. Cooper (who got 211,000 viewers) was beaten by RE-RUNS of Olberman (223,000) and Grace (222,000) during the 10 o'clock hour. Fox's Greta Van Sustern won with 538,000 viewers.

Sadder still - in three of the four time slots, CNN programs were beaten by HLN programs....and HLN is actually owned by CNN. Basically, that's like USA network getting better prime time ratings than NBC.

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Money=Smarts?

The New York Times published this interesting graph on its business blog today, which seems to indicate there is a strong positive correlation between family income level and SAT scores:


But before we start jumping to conclusions and deciding that we have to handicap the SAT by adding points for kids from lower income households (I say that as a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me too much), maybe there is something else at work here.

Greg Mankiw calls it the "least surprising correlation of all time", and argues that the effect is not causal because there is a pretty significant omitted variable bias at work here. In this case, the omitted variable is the parent's IQ. He argues that smart parents tend to make more money, and they pass those good, smart genes (not to mention an interest in learning, no doubt) on to their kids. He also offers this fantastic tidbit:

"Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward. (After all, people with more money buy larger homes with more bathrooms.) But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores."

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution takes the same argument and goes one step further with the statistics. He offers this graph, which charts the income of adopted versus biological children with regard to the income of their parents:

While there is a noticeable positive correlation between biological children's income and that of their parents, the correlation is non-existent for adoptees. So, it appears that genetic material plays a stronger role in children's success than simply growing up in a big, expensive house. Score one for nature over nurture here.

In general, I think it is also worth noting that the effect seems to be overstated a bit. Based on the average of the whole graph, moving up an income level equates to a 12 point rise in SAT scores (which is certainly considerable), but most of that effect is on the lower end of the scale. Once you get above a 6-figure income, the trend flattens out. The jump at the end is due to the fact that the last income category is open-ended and thus contains a much larger range of potential components, so that should be disregarded.

Using "family income level" for something like this is ultimately a flawed premise anyway. There are way too many variables in something like how much money a family makes to ever use that as a standard for measuring anything else. It doesn't have to be all about the parent's IQ either. The parent's level of education, their work ethic, and even something as simple as where they live will all impact income level.

How do we know which of these variables is at work as the reason why kids from richer households get higher SAT scores? It could be all three (plus others, I'm sure), or it could be all because they happen to live in richer areas with better schools. The point is, you can't make either of those conclusions from this kind of information.

What About Chappaquiddick??

I'm convinced that the death of Ted Kennedy is more of a cultural event than a political one.

As the last link to the "Camelot" days of the 1960s, his death means a great deal more to people (at least people from my parent's generation) for that symbolism than for anything he has accomplished politically. In a way, that makes him a lot like his brothers John and Robert. Neither of them were responsible for anything spectacular during their political careers (unless you count JFK's spectacular failure with Bay of Pigs....or that time he almost started a nuclear war and then managed to avoid it at the last possible second....). Still, I can acknowledge that the Kennedy's meant something important to America nearly fifty years ago.

And so, as with the passing of any great cultural symbol, I can understand and accept a certain level of grandiose tributes and laudatory epitaphs. However, in the coverage of his death that I have watched (admittedly in limited amounts) today, I have noticed an odd occurrence: there has been practically no mention of Mary Jo Kopechne, the woman who died when Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969.

Kopechne's death turned into a major controversy in the months that followed, and it is certainly one of the first things that many people think of when they head the name Ted Kennedy.

The event was significant politically too; it likely cost Kennedy the Presidential nomination in 1972. He later ran for President in 1980, but was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the primaries.

It's not that surprising to see the cable news happily glossing over that moment in the life of one of their heroes (since most people reporting the news today are both liberal and grew up during the 1960s, I suppose this is to be expected), but I was curious to see what kind of attention the New York Times gave to the "Chappaquiddick incident".

Here's "all the news fit to print" on the issue:

"For much of his adult life, he veered from victory to catastrophe, winning every Senate election he entered but failing in his only try for the presidency; living through the sudden deaths of his brothers and three of his nephews; being responsible for the drowning death on Chappaquiddick Island of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to his brother Robert." (bolding mine)

Yes, they dedicated an entire clause to one of the defining events in Senator Kennedy's life. Apparently, it did not even deserve a full sentence of its own. And that clause was more than two-thirds of the way down the first page of the obituary. That would be like writing an obituary for Bill Clinton and only mentioning Monica Lewinsky once, in a clause buried at the bottom of the page.

Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, or neither

I've touched on the whole bring-your-guns-to-the-town-hall-meetings phenomena before, but things continue to spiral a little out of control. It seems the craziest people are not the ones at the meetings with the guns, but the members of the media who continue to be completely appalled by these actions. Of course, they are mostly ignoring the fact that there has yet to be a violent incident involving one of these gun-toting citizens.

Last week, Megan McArdle did a great job exposing some of the loonies. Her recent post is here.

Apparently, not even the esteemed New York Times columnist Frank Rich can avoid jumping on the crazy train. He compares the current state of "violence" with the violet threats made against Kennedy by right-leaning radicals who feared he was the sign of a new liberal order in the 1960s:

"As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order. Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed."

Of course, he fails to note that most of the violence in the 1960s (including, most importantly, the ACTUAL ASSASSINATION of a U.S. President) was perpetrated by leftists. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and a Castro sympathizer, not a conservative nut-job.

Of course there are plenty of dangerous extremists on the right as well, but Frank's attempt to compare these protesters (who are entirely within their rights and have not done any actual violence to anyone with their firearms) to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (one of those previously mentioned dangerous extremists) is more than a little bit of a stretch.

In fact, the only real link he can establish is that McVeigh once wore a T-shirt that proclaimed Jefferson's quote about the "Tree of Liberty" being refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots (a quote that has become popular with some health reform protesters). Obviously, this is a fool proof method of proving that these legal gun carriers have the same motives as the man who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City.