Media Meltdown And Blogs

I posted earlier about Scott Burgess take down of Simon Jeninks dismissive Times (UK) article on bloggers. Yesterday I posted a similar take down of the BBC's Justin Webb's dismissive article concerning Rathergate and bloggers.

Gallup pollster joins in dissing bloggs with this poll "Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues" and notes "Very few Americans read them with any frequency". But Instapundit notes an analysis of that poll.

MYSTERY POLLSTER OFFERS AN ANALYSIS of Gallup's new poll on blogs.

Key bit:

No, the collective reach of blogs is nowhere near that of television or print media, but focusing on the relatively small percentages misses the rapidly growing influence of the blog readership in absolute terms. The 12% that say they read political blogs at least a few times a month amount to roughly 26 million Americans. That may not make blogs a "dominant" news source, but one American in ten ads up to a lot of influence.

All the more so when you look at which ten percent it is.

Now comes tentative proof that bloggers are having a real impact and exposes the real reasons for all this dissing of bloggers.

Instapundit notes a report on declining newspaper sales in America.

NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION IS IN DECLINE, especially where "quality" circulation is concerned:

The Prudential Equity Group issued a biting 72-page report this morning on the state of circulation and found that both quality and quantity continue to decline.

Among other findings, the report said that "other paid" circulation was up 34% in the last reporting period, which it labled "troubling.". . .

In the below-average category, the L.A. Times experienced an overall circulation decline of 5.6%. Full-paid home delivery was down 10.8%, much worse than the 2.4% national average, the report said. Home-delivered copies through third party sales decreased "significantly," said the report.

The report noted a curious trend at the Times regarding other-paid circulation, calling the fluctuations and changes "peculiar." As one category drops another gains, with the rough total remaining constant. "A 158% increase in discounted copies also signals to us more trouble with circulation and selling at the cover price," the report said.

Glenn also notes that he cancelled his LA Times subscription, turned down a free subscription and the LA Times still delivered the paper to his door!

He speculates the reason could be to pad subscription figures; something other big newspapers have been charged with doing. For as Glenn points out this might be media's Enron.

More thoughts on the subject here. Is it a "media Enron?" I don't know, but people sure seem to be doing their best to make the numbers look as good as possible.

With falling newspaper sales, the take down of Dan Rather and Eason Jordon, it is little wonder that legacy media are launching an all out assault on bloggers. Bloggers have the ultimate weapon with which to fight back and ironically that same weapon is available to legacy media. It's called the truth.
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