Newspaper Trends

If not for the fine folks at the Pew Center I'd be stuck on some days for something to post. They come through again.

The chart at the right shows the trend over the past two years from print to online. According to the report:

Overall newspaper readership declined in spite of an increase in the number of people reading online newspapers: 14% of Americans said they read a newspaper online yesterday, up from 9% in 2006. This includes those who said they read
only a newspaper online (9% in 2008), as well as those who said they read both print and Web versions of a newspaper (5%). These numbers may not include the number of people who read content produced by newspapers, but accessed through aggregation sites or portals such as Google or Yahoo.

When Things Get Bad

From the Good News, Bad News desk, a lousy economy may be bad for business, even the journalism business, and yet, and yet ...

Here's this from a recent Pew report:

Americans continue to follow news about the economic crisis closely because they feel it is directly relevant to their lives. More than eight-in-ten (85%) say even when the economic news is bad they feel better knowing what’s going on, while 77% say they need to stay on top of economic news because it matters in the financial decisions they make.

In other words, when things go to hell, people go to the news. Sounds great, right?

The second graf arrives like a needle in the eye:

At the same time, close to half (46%) of the public says they often feel they don’t have enough background information to follow economic news stories ...

Rut roh.

So people care. A lot. It's their lives we're talking about here, they're friggin economic existence. The opportunities are there, news people. But the way we tend to tell news stories, especially economic news stories, often don't work -- at least in print. TV does this pretty well, especially CNN, in helping the average person understand not only what the hell is going on but also what it means to them personally

Other news providers, especially newspapers in dead-tree or online, need to think hard about how to make this work.

More on this later, especially on a set of famous experiments that demonstrate how we tell a story about economic conditions can influence who people blame for problems.

Who Killed the Newspaper?A Detective Story

My captain called me at the bar where I nursed a bourbon and thought of getting out of the cop business.

“Got a case for you,” he said. “Get to the hospital.”

“Not the morgue?”

“Not yet.”

The victim lay unconscious in a hospital bed. She was oatmeal gray and bruised like an old banana. Murphy looked down at his notepad. “Age unknown. Multiple blows to the head and body. No witnesses.” He closed his pad. Murphy was never one for small talk.

Someone, maybe a nurse, had tried a little blush on the gray lady’s face to liven her up. Maybe she’d been pretty years ago, but the color made her garish and sad.

Years of detective work had taught me to check out family first. Murphy cut me off. “No husband or boyfriend,” he said. “She does have a crazy uncle who plays music and talks to himself, full of conspiracy theories and such.”

I knew the guy. He couldn’t shoot himself with a loaded gun.

“And she has a niece,” Murphy added. “Maybe you’ve seen her – too much makeup, kinda loud and full of herself. Supposedly she called the victim every morning to find out what she was supposed to say that day. Pretty, but not too bright.”

I knew the type.

Neither had alibis, but my gut told me to look elsewhere.

Yeah, I knew the old lady. She’s a tough old broad who’d been whacked around for years and still she got up for more. The doc said she might last the night. Maybe. But when I asked him if she’d ever fully recover, he just shook his head.

I headed out the door. There was another family member, one Murphy didn’t know about.

The kid, they call him. I’d seen him hanging around wearing these stupid goggles and sucking Mountain Dew. Works people, a real connector. You looking to buy? He’ll find a seller. Need companionship? He can help. He did it all, this guy, services others used to do, but he does it for less. But I didn’t think he was my guy. He might have handed someone the baseball bat, but he didn’t swing. Not his style. Mostly he just put people together, skimmed a little off the top, and moved on to the next big thing.

I had a bigger someone else in mind.

Problem was, investigating The Fat Man was dangerous business. He had cops on the payroll, and word was even the chief got a weekly overstuffed envelope with his morning latte. He’d tried a few times to reel me in, but I always found a way to wriggle free. I’m either lucky or stupid that way.

So someone had bashed the old lady enough times that it finally mattered. Motive and opportunity, that’s the detective mantra, and plenty had motive. Politicians around the city never liked her much, but she always held her own with those sleazeballs. Some local business types, they sat around their chamber and complained, but kill someone? Bad for business, plus they didn’t have the guts.

No, only The Fat Man fit the profile.

I worked my snitches until one finally spilled that The Fat Man had mishandled the old lady’s finances to the point where even he found himself in debt to the wrong people. You know the kind. Late with a payment? We’ll take a finger to remind you of your debt obligations.

The Fat Man kept a place downtown, off Wall Street. The guy had his own obligations to people he owed money and to those grown comfortable by being on his dole. Everyone expects their 20 percent of the action and The Fat Man always found ways to provide it. Word was he’d put a lot of people down along the way, left them hurting, all to service debts he never should have rang up in the first place.

Maybe the old lady finally said no to him. Or more likely he figures he can kill her off, press his case for any insurance money, sell off her belongings.

So I headed downtown.

When I got there, the place was buzzing with fire fighters, flames shooting out of his fancy office. The place smelled like burned paper.

Murphy leaned against a wall, scribbling in his pad. He looked up at me. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “that the bad guy got what he deserved.”

That’s how stories are supposed to end. Too bad they never do.

Turned out The Fat Man sucked all he could out of the old lady, took his cash overseas to a country club in China or India.

The fire?

Murphy shrugged and tossed a match to the pavement.

“Sometimes people just need a good show.”

In the "I couldn't say it better myself" category, a blog (and reference to magazine article) about the death of newspapers.

Really. If you hate political corruption, or love newspapers, or both, read this.

What Congressmen Know

Comparisons between the economic mess now and The Great Depression are nothing new, but a GOP congressman shows just how much history he knows this week when he blamed President Franklin Roosevelt for the Depression.

According to history scholar U.S. Rep. Steve Austria of Ohio:

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria told the Dispatch as he criticized the economic stimulus package currently moving through Congress. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Um, no. That's not history. Alert, brainiac -- the Depression started in 1929. Roosevelt took office in January of 1933. Listen to his comments.

Alert number 2: "Freshman Congressman Steve Austria conceded today that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not cause the Great Depression."

Whew.

Okay, so our history major is a Republican and Roosevelt was a Democrat whose Fair Deal looks similar to what Obama is trying. Clearly there are politics at play here, so much so that this guy let his political predispositions get in the way of clear thinking. Even regular people do this -- misspeaking to make a political point, even if a bad one, remembering things in ways that fit our predispositions. This guy just gets to be the ass of the week.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, start your engines...

When Knowledge Items Go Bad

I'm working with a large data set now that includes several measures of political knowledge. One set of questions gets at what people know of the two candidates (their religion, state of residence, demographic stuff). The Cronbach's Alpha for this index is not great, about .55. An index of standard political knowledge items such as how long is a U.S. senator's term, how many times can a president be elected, standard textbook civics class stuff, that is only .60 or so. Not good.

But questions about the candidates stands on issues, that alpha is awful, somewhere between .40 and .50 depending on which items I use. These are way too low and, to be honest, unexplainable.

Oh it gets better. These indices, created quick and dirty to peek under the hood of my data, don't line up at all with my key independent variable. And dammit they should. This is a great theory with the data getting in the way (I'll discuss more fully at another time, closer to subbing this thing to a journal). Basically, there should some relationship here.

I've blown two long afternoons on massive data recoding and analysis, triple checking all my recodes.

I shoulda been a plumber. Named Joe.

National Priorities

What do people name as the top national priority? You're thinking, "Aha! Trick question! It's so obvious!"

No trick. Just like you guessed, it's the economy. A CBS News/NYTimes poll had 60 percent of adults nationwide saying the economy is, to borrow from CNN, job #1.

In second place? Other.

I don't know what the hell other is, given the long list of topics scoring from 2 or 3 percent. In that list you've got stuff like war in Iraq, family values, education, health care, poverty, and the ever-popular "unsure." Given the margin of error, there is a huge tie for second among nine different topics.

Other recent surveys show largely the same thing -- economy first, a host of other issues tied at a distant second. What people know out there is that things are bad, getting worse, and there's not an overload of confidence in government's ability -- Democratic or Republican -- to fix the mess. Sometimes political knowledge comes down to direct experience, and I'm betting average people out there have a hell of a lot more direct experience with job loss and tough economic times than do the suits in D.C. of either party.