Newspaper ad dropoff reflects recession ahead?

Newspaper ad rates dropped almost 10 percent in 2007. The decline, in percentage, was the biggest since the Newspaper Association of American started tracking ad sales stats in 1950.

National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7 percent to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5 percent to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5 percent to $14.1 billion.

That last number, the anchor bringing the total print advertising drop to 9.4 percent, shows the effects of Craigslist, which continues to try to be like a newspaper classified advertising website when it suits its purposes, but then claims it isn’t one when it wants to avoid federal fair housing law. (Click the Craigslist label for more.)

Meanwhile, online ad revenue, while continuing to grow, had its rate of growth slow last year. Some of that is natural. Between all of the above, online ad revenue now makes up 7.5 percent of total newspaper ad revenue.

Google makes it easier to avoid Morning News website

First, let me say, as tens of thousands of others in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex have said over the last three-plus years since the Snooze, officially known as The (don’t forget to capitalize that “the,” New York Times pretentiousness and all) Dallas Morning News, changed its website to its current form.

It sucks.

It sucks donkey dongs.

It sucks George Bannerman Dealey’s donkey dong, in fact.

It is probably THE WORST website of any major seven-day daily newspaper in the United States, excepting of course, other A.H. Belo papers in Riverside, Calif. and Providence, R.I. (Belo websites suck because Belo blows — the different papers’ websites are mirror images.)

One of the worst things about the Snooze’s website is the impossibility of finding any Snooze story that is not actually linked on the website’s homepage. The story may have been written in the last 24 hours; it may have run in that day’s hardcopy.

But, if it ain’t on the homepage of the website, you ain’t gonna find it.

Solution? After getting frustrated at the donkey-dong sucking Snooze website (see for yourself), I go to Google News, hit the advanced news search, enter Dallas Morning News as my search (don’t even have to use “the,” let alone the prissy-fit capitalized version), and then enter my normal Google search words.

Voila! Link(s) spit out to just the right articles.

Well, now, Google is going one step further.

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

The results of the search are almost all individual company pages. Google tops those results with a link to the home page of the Web site in question, adds another search box, and offers users the chance to let Google search for certain things within that site.

The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.

Tough shit. Your unsearchable website, with further editorial cuts ahead, certainly won’t get better. If anything, it will get worse.

Oh, and to throw you further under the bus… you have a paper always bragging about the APME awards it wins for sports coverage, then it outsources all its high school stuff to a third-party site, one that doesn’t have as much online high school sports as the DMN did five years ago.

You don’t like it? Make your own website better. Google is, indeed, just saving me more work now.

More layoffs ahead at Dallas Morning News

That’s what I’ve heard through the grapevine; no numbers mentioned on the job cuts. I guess, if enough editorial staff gets cut, Southwest can go back to flying uninspected airplanes without it getting noticed in the public as readily.

Court makes wrong ruling on Craiglist housing ad bias liability

Although Craigslist steals a boatload of ads from traditional newspapers and even more from alt-weeklies, a federal appeals judge said it doesn’t have the same legal burden as them to make sure its classified ads for housing aren’t discriminatory.

The lawsuit, filed by a consortium of Chicago attorneys in February 2006, accused Craigslist of violating federal housing laws by publishing more than 100 ads that excluded potential buyers or tenants on the basis of race, gender or religion.

I strongly hope this is pursued to the Supreme Court and overturned. And, the Chicago lawyers who started the legal action say they’re not giving up yet on rooting out discriminatory housing lenders and sellers.

But, that’s a toughie.

The decision upholds a November 2006 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve ruled that Craigslist serves as an intermediary party, not a publisher.

And, that’s why it’s a toughie. You have both a district judge and an appellate judge unwilling to tackle new media issues. And, you know SCOTUS, should it even take such an appeal, isn’t going to be any better.

So, unless those Chicago lawyers find grounds to appeal this particular ruling, this gives Craigslist a hugely unfair legal advantage over traditional newspapers.

Reporters and media protection latest BushCo ‘security threat’

I guess a media shield law will give al Qaida “aid, hope and comfort,” or some other stupidity.

First, we have the Subtler, Suaver Alberto Gonzales™, Attorney General Mike Mukasey, claiming a shield law now wending its way through the Senate, defines a journalist too broadly.

Of course, this is the same AG Mukasey who cut blog/online news source Talking Points Memo off the list of daily e-mail media recipients from the Department of Justice.

And, doorknob bless Patrick Fitzgerald for prosecuting Scooter Libby, but he’s just wrong in claiming a shield law isn’t needed.

Dismissing notions that media subpoenas would dampen investigative reporting, Fitzgerald said, “Journalists have been saying the sky is falling since 1972 ... and that suddenly the stories will dry up. But I'm not seeing big blank spaces on the front page.”

Uh, Pat, the worry isn’t what has happened since 1972, but what has happened since 2001. Get a clue. Or else admit that you’re spinning a line here.

‘Weblog’ not ‘blog’ guaranteed to make paper website look old-school

So, a weekly newspaper group has had a website since, oh, 2002, 2003. It’s finally entering the blogosphere, and what does the newspaper’s webmaster do?

He calls the front-page link Weblogs.

Weblog as a term, other than in the mouths of people who still wear pocket protectors in their shirts, died out about the same time five or six years ago that this newspaper group started its website.

A trite lede that is long past usable

I saw this one most recently in The Dallas Morning News. It’s the old “he/she must be smiling from heaven” type lede.

With the number of Hindus, Buddhists and secularists increasing in our country, this is a lede that is of no relevance to the first two groups and off-putting to the third. That’s not to mention the fact that it was beaten to death a decade or more ago.

So, Herb Booth and thousands of other reporters? Can it.

Newspaper website marketing no-no

Why would you have an “about” link on the front page of a website for a daily newspaper if you don’t actually have any information posted about yourself? Hmm, Yreka, Calif., can’t be that behind the times, right?

Journalists get depression wrong with ‘chemical imbalance’ meme

No, I still don’t believe memes exist, at least not in a strong sense, but the word is a handy catch-all. Anyway, that’s besides the point.

A set of psychology researchers say that media use of “chemical imbalance” to describe depression is scientifically inaccurate. Rightly, they note that the idea comes from classical Greece’s concept of the four “humors” in the body.

Science journalists get depression wrong by dissing SSRIs

A set of psychology researchers rightly say that media use of “chemical imbalance” to describe depression is scientifically inaccurate.

However, the researchers then have to follow up on the overhyped recent Public Library of Science report and claim, as does the author of the World Science story, that modern anti-depressants really don’t work:

The drugs, known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs, recently turned out to be largely ineffective.

Boy, that’s wrong in several ways. First, the PLoS story only claimed that antidepressants were relatively ineffective in mild or moderate depression, not all depressions.

Second, the PLoS authors overstated their case. From the study:

On average, the SSRIs improved the HRSD score of patients by 1.8 points more than the placebo, whereas NICE has defined a significant clinical benefit for antidepressants as a drug–placebo difference in the improvement of the HRSD score of 3 points.

That may not be great effectiveness, but it’s nowhere near “largely ineffective.” And, since milder depressions are usually likely to ring up lower diagnostic scores, the numeric steps of improvement, by HRSD scores, that provide relief, will be lesser anyway.

So, perhaps science journalists aren’t so great about writing about depression, either.