HERE'S A FEARSOME THOUGHT: NO ONE'S MINDING THE STORE

Lack of good data fells attempt to tally revenues from classifieds

The old joke has always been that the people in the newsroom were there because they couldn't count. As with all good jokes, there's an element of truth to the line – in my experience, many in the newsroom are numerically challenged.

A recent study funded by the American Press Institute's Media Center and the Newspaper Association of America finds that maybe it isn't just newsroom people who have a fear of counting – it appears that many newspapers don't keep track of their classified advertising.

As you will see in the story inside, none of the 80 newspapers contacted by researchers could provide "consistent quarterly data for the past five years." The researchers – journalism professors with plentiful newspaper experience – couldn't get information on linage, the ratio of class display to liners or, in at least one case, the amount of money that a newspaper had made in classified advertising.

I can only hope that the professors are the victims of a statistical fluke – that there are 1470 daily papers in the United States that keep accurate records about classified advertising and the survey just happened to miss all of them.

The lack of good record-keeping might be headline material, but the real meat of the survey's preliminary results – disclosed at a three-day conference held last month at API's headquarters in Reston, Va. – is that the hot economy is masking some problems with classifieds.

J.T. "Tom" Johnson, a writer with a varied background (Time magazine writer, a founding editor of MacWeek, deputy editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a journalism professor himself), agreed to cover the API Media Center session for us when it became evident that I was not going to be able to travel to the East Coast. Johnson provides us with information on the session itself, and background on the focus the NAA is putting on classifieds.

But I'm a little scared: When all those newspaper accounting departments keep poorer revenue figures than what I – a known numerically-challenged newsroom type – would have kept, something's wrong.

¶

Housekeeping notes. Three items that may be of interest: