A report on PaidContent suggests that many readers of the News of the World Sunday paper, which shut down in July amidst the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, have not switched to reading any other Sunday newspapers. The National Readership Survey estimated that 7,217,000 people read the paper in the period from January through June of this year, Of that number, 4,342,000 did not read any other Sunday paper. Subsequently, total readership of national Sunday papers fell from 19,221,000 to 15,859,000—meaning that 3,362,000 people stopped reading Sunday papers altogether. The article doesn’t speculate on the causes, and at...

Oh, what fun! Oh, what marvelous schadenfreude! Oh, where’s my popcorn bucket? At least one court has finally lost all patience with copyright troll Righthaven. Ars Technica reports that, after a series of attempted appeals and delays, including missed deadlines for appellate filings and an attempted excuse that Righthaven’s lawyer has to undergo surgery, the court that issued a $34,000 judgment against Righthaven in August has finally authorized lawyer Marc Randazza to enlist the aid of the US Marshals to collect nearly $64,000 in costs and fees from the company through asset seizure. I look forward to...

The Onion is a terrific on-line satire magazine that is almost always good for a chuckle. But perhaps the best chuckle of all comes from people unfamiliar with the Onion encountering its stories out of context and taking them seriously. One of the best known examples of that is the Onion article claiming Harry Potter got kids into Satanism, but there have been others. Recently, the Onion posted an article claiming that “every style of parenting produces disturbed, miserable adults.” It attributed this finding to a (fictitious) study done by the (real) California Parenting Institute of Santa Rosa. And,...

Here’s another new media magnate warning old media that the time is nigh to ditch the old print and jump into the new electronic world. Harvey Levin, founder of entertainment news site TMZ.com, spoke at the National Press Club on Monday where he told newspaper and magazine publishers to get out of the print business and get on the web. As the Washington Post points out, it does take some chutzpah for Levin to issue prescriptions to traditional news media, given that most celebrity gossip isn’t exactly Pulitzer-quality journalism. But on the other hand, in the six years since...

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, at Journalism.org, has released a study on how many people own tablets and how they use them. According to the study, 11% of the US adult population owns a tablet, 77% of those owners use their tablets daily, and 53% of tablet owners read news on them on a daily basis. The only things that they do more than that on tablets are e-mail (54%) and surf the web (67%). (E-book reading only comes in at 17%.) There are other figures relating to how many tablet news readers read more...

The New York Times reports on a mysterious sales spike that two local Long Island papers experienced last week, as mysterious buyers swooped in to grab every available copy from newsstands at $1.50 a pop. The papers had to print 64% more papers than usual to keep up with demand. The mysterious buyers were estimated to have snagged 4,000 out of the total 14,120 newsstand copies. The owner of the papers speculated that the mysterious buyers could have been “someone involved in a truly monumental school project; someone really proud of their grandchild on the honor roll; someone with...

How are newspapers going to survive the e-revolution? Dan Pacheco of BookBrewer thinks he has the answer: e-books. He points to the recent Huffington Post decision to start organizing and curating years of journalism work on particular subjects and releasing it in the form of e-books. E-book revenues, he suggests, could supplement flagging on-line ad revenues by targeting people who would like to read on given subjects in depth with materials that probably already exist in many newspaper archives. Why settle for a paywall when you can aim specific stories at target audiences who might never bother trolling...

Some newspapers seem to be taking a cue from the cell phone and tablet industry, offering discounted tablets with a newspaper subscription where cell companies have been offering them with cellular service contracts. The Philadelphia Media Network, publisher of several Philly-area papers, has launched a deal in which it will offer Archos Arnova 10.1” Android Tablets at $99 for $9.99/mo 2-year subscribers, or $129 for 1-year $12.99/mo subscribers. (Amazon lists the non-G2-version of the tablet at $182.53 with a $199.99 MSRP. Presumably the G2 will be slightly more expensive.) "This partnership recognizes that consumers are...

The stories about Rights Haven’t, I mean Righthaven, just keep getting better and better. The latest word is that the online content copyright troll has petitioned a federal judge to set aside a $30,000 legal fee judgment against it and allow it to continue suing individuals. The company stated that if this isn’t done, the defendant could move to seize Righthaven’s copyright assets and Righthaven might have to declare bankruptcy. This is amusing to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, a company that could afford to file over 275 lawsuits in various jurisdictions is balking at...

PaidContent reports that the UK newspaper The Guardian is using an intriguing bifurcated strategy for its mobile apps. The Android app for the paper will be free (subsidized by advertising), whereas the iOS version will cost “the equivalent of four daily print copies [£3.99] for an entire year’s mobile app access.” It’s tempting to wonder why anyone would want an app dedicated to only one newspaper taking up room on their tablet or smartphone at all, let alone one you have to pay for. But the Guardian seems to be aware of that, too. The article indicates that...

The Media Briefing has an interesting article looking at some recently-released statistics about Internet use in the UK. Only 77% of British households have Internet access, and half of those who don’t have it don’t feel they need it. And only a little more than half of those who do have it say they regularly read news on it. To put this in context, 57 percent of internet users and 91 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds used social networking sites in the same period. The people who are soon going to be your ad manager’s target audience already...

Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources. The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics...