What a Blowout Year! Wall Street Rocking Without All Those Pesky Former Employees @2:20 PM
The good news out of the state comptroller's office today is that Wall Street is recovering nicely. Lest we forget! "Wall Street employment accounts for 24 percent of all wages paid in New York City even though the securities industry accounts for less than 5 percent of all employment." How can we tell things are going well? Let's look at the financial industry's 2009! READ MORE 1
80% of House Democrats Who Voted Against Health Care Were In McCain-Winning Districts @10:20 AM
That's neat. 31 of the 39 Democratic representatives who didn't vote for the health care bill are in districts that had more McCain voters than Obama voters last year. Mmm hmm! Also, twelve of them are former Republicans of formerly Republican districts. (And to be noted: 1 of the 39 was Dennis Kucinich, who voted against the bill because it was too friendly to insurance companies.) 8
How Are Newspapers Reporting on Newspaper Circulation? @12:40 PM
There were two trends I noticed while compiling yesterday's chart of the last two decades of newspaper circulation trends. I relied upon the New York Times for data, and one trend I found there was that, in general, over the last 16 years, reporting the actual number of newspapers circulated grew and then radically diminished. Instead, most often, the data given was year-over-year percentage changes, or other far less specific metrics. In today's paper, Richard Perez-Pena nicely reports both percentages and actual numbers for 7 papers. But back in this story from April, actual numbers are only given for one paper—the Times itself. The other trend—well, it is largely a flat-line trend!—was the New York Times headlines themselves. Very rarely did media reporters attach themselves to a narrative such as the now-moot Denver newspaper battle, or the nearly-moot New York tabloid battle. Mostly, well…. READ MORE 2
A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades @1:40 PM
Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that's no way to look at data! It's confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation. (We excluded USA Today, because we don't care about it. If you're in a hotel? You're reading it now. That's nice.) READ MORE 43
