Why the Newspapers are Dying

This morning's Minneapolis Star-Tribune provides an easy answer to that question.

Buried back on page D2 in the Business Section is the article headlined, "Sunday circulation up 5.7% to 504,616 at Star Tribune." A bylined story by David Phelps, no less! Well, that's the local spin on the story that I read yesterday via a link on the Drudge Report titled, "Newspaper Circ down 5%..."

Now let's pause and think. Who is interested in this information? Newspaper insiders? Check. How about American culture watchers? Check. Advertising managers at local businesses? Double Check!

So where's the list with the top 25 papers in the country and current rankings? Everyone interested in this story knows that's the format that this story follows. Put the local spin on it if you want, but give us the basic facts. Drudge does this, of course, with his link to "THE LIST ..."


I know Drudge will have this story every few months and will link to the list, usually at Editor and Publisher. The Strib? They seldom ever include "all the facts" with any story.

By the way, just in case you are keeping score on an ongoing basis, here's the past few years of history, as I track it. These are the daily circulations, not the Sunday figures. (click to enlarge)



The bottom line? Most newspapers have suffered circulation declines of 15 to 20 percent over the past four years.

Curious about my selection of papers to track this way?

Well, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post are there just because they are the "National Papers." I've read and admired the Journal for about 40 years. I used to subscribe to the Sunday New York Times until they lost their ability to do objective news. At least they now have a decent truth detector in Tom McGuire at Just One Minute. The Los Angeles Times was also once a good paper. They also come with a good truth detector at Patterico's Pontifications.

"The Strib", or Minneapolis Star Tribune, was once a halfway decent paper too. We still have a subscription in order to read a bit of local news. Sure needs a truth detector, though. Powerline Blog at least keeps them a bit honest.

And The Oregonian was my home town paper when I grew up in Portland. They earned my admiration for taking on the unions and surviving a bitter five-year long illegal strike beginning in 1959.

How Can Anyone Take These Newspapers Seriously?

I opened up the local Minneapolis paper to the Business Section today and found an article titled "Winners And Losers From A Stronger Yuan." It only took two paragraphs to discover that the Associated Press' Christopher S. Rugaberl had a point of view:

China's decision to let its currency rise in value adds buying power to its exploding middle class — a win for American electronics makers, which can sell more computers and iPods to a hungry market.

At the same time, it puts a squeeze on U.S. retailers like Walmart because Chinese-made imports suddenly cost more.

(emphasis added)

Got that? It was good for the Chinese people but not bad for American people - just bad for those nasty American retailers! Whatever happened to symmetry? Well I suppose that was taught in Geometry Class. And they told the Journalism majors there would be no math!

Why no recognition that this might affect American consumers? Maybe because this guy and his administration had been calling for it. And the AP wouldn't say anything negative about him.

Top Load vs. Front Load Washers

Wintering in Cairo led us to be in the market for a washing machine.  The machines are pretty much limited to front loaders so we went with the flow and bought a popular model, the Zanussi Ideal.  We had a little familiarity with front-loaders from a recent visit to a friend who has one back in the states.

Check around the internet and you might find a chart like this one at About.com 

Now we already knew that there was at least one item missing from this chart based on conversations with our friend. Just try putting "front load washers stink" (don't include the quote marks) into Google and you will see what I mean.  There is a problem with mold building up on the gasket unless properly cared for.  Now we know about two more issues.  Check this vibration thread at houseblogs.net "Think Sikorsky helicopter hovering in the laundry room!" And, by the way, there is no opening the door and redistributing the load with a front loader either.  You just have to tough it through.

And the biggest think we noticed is expressed in this discussion thread.  Front load washer cycle time - is 115 minutes normal?

So, lets just revise that chart a bit:

The Expense of Health Care

Much of the concern with our present healthcare / healthinsurance system seems to center around cost.  "Bend the curve" of cost increases says the president - without much evidence that the bill before congress will do any such thing.

But why are the cost rising?  Carpe Diem, one of my favorite econ-blogs notes the increased use of "other people's money" as a cause.  And it probably is part of the problem.  But there are two fundamental issues that are easily overlooked.

First, there are a lot more older Americans than there used to be.  Frankly, it's us "old farts" that use the expensive parts of health care.  Treating my heart attack is more expensive than setting my son's broken leg.  And let's not forget the mom-in-law's hip replacement.

Remember that image of the babyboomers dominating the market for consumer goods twenty years ago?  Guess where they are now?

 

And the second reason for increased costs?  Well, we now can do something for the old folks.  Remember grandpa's treatment for a bad hip?  He got a cane.  Mom-in-law got a hip replacement. 

When president Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, the standard treatment was six months of bed rest.  I believe that Mamie was instructed to cuddle up and "keep him warm!"  Today, we would have seen a stent inserted at a minimum but more likely a triple or quadruple bypass.

The reason we spend more money on healthcare is because:

• It's possible
• It's effective
• We have the money

The only real question is should I pay for my own stent or should I charge it to your children and grandchildren?  That's what the debate is really about.  And that's where professor Perry's "Other Peopl's Money" chart comes in.

(Note cross-posted at my numbers blog)

Recovery.gov Reports mm Jobs Created or Saved in Congressional District xx

There have been a lot of blog posts and newspaper articles written about Recovery.gov reporting results for the 57th district of Minnesota or "the fightin' 59th" of Illinois. But few focus on the real problem.

Since the site reports information from ordinary folks who receive "stimulus money," you can hardly expect them to know their congressman.


I once stood on the busiest corner of downtown Minneapolis during lunch hour while KTCA reporter Eric Eskola showed a picture of congressman Marty Sabo to passersby saying "Do you know who this man is?" I watched about 15 minutes of "uh, uh, no!" before anyone even came close.

But part of the job of programmers creating a website is to make sure that things like invalid congressional districts don't get past basic input edits! Try changing one digit in your credit card number the next time you input it on Amazon.com and see what happens!

A Congressional District input should be a wonderful learning tool. "Back in the day," we would have assigned a rookie programmer to handle this part of the coding on a project. "These two columns on the card contain the Congressional District," would have been stated to the rookie. "Make sure its valid."

With any luck at all, the rookie in question was a newly hired MBA from finance who had been sent down to the department to spend a few months "learning about computers". He'd been to programming school. Now the fun would start. Would he find a good source for his information? Would he only check to see if the input was numeric and less than some maximum? Would he allow "00"? Would he find the programming standard for tables? Would he document the table in understandable fashion? And the big one!"

So what are you going to do when the districts change after next year's census? ...Well, who do you think is going to make that change?

Eventually, everything would be fine and our MBA would go back to his "real" job upstairs. But years later when there was a major issue to work out in a possible acquisition or major restructuring and our MBA was now the CFO, he's the one who would say:

Let's get somebody from IT involved. Those guys have way of thinking through all the details and ramifications of stuff. We could really use that on this task force.

And that's the way it was.

And spending 18 million dollars to rework a website? We'll leave that for another post. But a lot of old MIS types are turning over in their graves.

Lumberjack or Logger?

I was browsing Amazon.com for books on lumbering and railroads around the 1900 era. Yes, I know, "strange tastes" and all that.

I meandered into the reviews for this book, "Glory Days of Logging/Action in the Big Woods, British Columbia to California" after Amazon caught me browsing through "Minnesota Logging Railroads." (Isn't it wonderful how Amazon does this? I recall disparaging them in the late 1990s when the stock market had given this profitless company a valuation exceeding General Motors - proof that the market does really know stuff about the future!) The author of the review has some pretty strong opinions about lumberjack versus logger:

(Please don't call them lumber-jacks. I never heard a man who works in the woods called a lumber-jack all my years going up in Oregon. Yet a recent TV show about the worlds most dangerous jobs constantly referred to them a lumber-jacks.)

I grew up in Oregon hearing both terms used. Of course, half of my family was from Minnesota. So, I thought, perhaps it is a regionalism. After all, shortly after I had moved from Oregon to Minnesota, I was having dinner at my future wife's house and my future mother-in-law said, "could you pass the hot dish, Tom?" I was at a loss for what to do - hell, most of the dishes on the table were hot! How was I to know that "hot dish" is Minnesotan for casserole?

So perhaps lumberjack is Minnesotan for logger? Wikipedia suggests that it is more a function of time than place. But our true Minnesota Lumberjacks are timeless:


And don't miss the Lumberjack World Championships in the Lumberjack Bowl when you visit Hayward, Wisconsin.

1980 Ford Fairmont - Abuse of Convention

This was our 1980 Ford Fairmont.

Purchased in the depths of an "Energy Crisis" - oil would soon be non-existent and we would all be walking or biking - here was my contribution to solving the world's problem!

This baby came with a 2.3L 4-cylinder engine and a four-speed manual transmission achieving an EPA rating of 23mpg. (The estimated MPG numbers for other similar sized cars ranges from 07 to 24 MPG.)

I remember this car as fondly as I do the 55 MPH National Speed Limit of the time. But we were in the Second Oil Crisis and still wanted to make trips to our lake cabin. And we needed enough room to haul that Afghan Hound too! What's a guy to do?



My least favorite feature on the Fairmont was its horn. Ford violated the common sense practice of putting a horn button where everyone else had been putting it for about 60 years - on the steering wheel. Someone had a better idea. The horn was activated from the turn-signal stalk. No I am not making this up!

Oh, what kind of actual mileage did I get? Mostly 27-28 with an occasional 30-31 for all highway driving.