First of all congratulations to Radnauseum on his 100th post (I counted - it's actually 98 - I decided two of them didn't qualify). I never met him but he can't be all bad because he likes hockey and interesting music, including Elvis Costello in his rebel precorporate sellout years. Good luck on your next 100 entries - as your fellow bloggers know, blogging takes considerable effort and time - not to mention incredible brilliance and model good looks.
And hey, it's excitement time! I've got a couple of new Saratoga area blogs on the blogroll over to the right side here - and I think I can definitely call them niche blogs. Thanks to Andrew Acomb for alerting me to a neat blog with vivid photography from the folks at Wild Birds unlimited, a birding store in Wilton. And damn it, someone beat me to a blog about gluten free eating in Saratoga, as you will see in the "Gluten Free Saratoga" blog. To both of you - welcome to the local blogging scene. Please feel free to join our fun in bashing The Saratogian.
Actually, our not so esteemed hometown daily seems to have benefited from some improvements lately - I haven't been counting but there suddenly are an awful lot of actual Saratogian editorials, rather than the usual borrowed editorials from other newspapers. Horatio, Ben - any comments? I do believe the Journal Register Company may have lit a fire under our friends on Lake Ave, not only because of the local negative blog commentaries on the paper, but also the recently announced statistics by a national newspaper trade association that was reported in an article in last week's Times Union.
While circulation at most Capital region newspapers on most days either held steady or actually went up, the circulation at The Saratogian plummeted, by an astonishing 8.5% average for the Monday through Saturday editions, and an eye popping 11.6% on Sunday. Wow! Well, go figure. Hey, a number of us wrote a lot of negative things about the Saratogian in these blogs, but if a picture speaks a thousand words, then these statistics speak 10,000 words. I will commend JRC and The Saratogian for finally waking up and addressing the editorial issue - and perhaps other issues - although the reporting is still spotty at best. The national trend for daily newspapers was a 2.1% average decline in circulation, and the only other Capital region newspaper to see sigificant declines was the Glens Falls Post-Star, however theirs were not as bad as The Saratogian's steep drop.
I would guess JRC is paying attention to the local blogosphere (most companies monitor blog traffic and other "new media" for references to their company or product), and they obviously pay attention to their own circulation trends, in this case negative. I imagine more than one top executive dialed the 518 area code and spewed out some venom to the appropriate folks at The Saratogian. How else do you explain the sudden renewed effort at producing actual Saratogian editorials? Gotta love a country and an era where a few people sitting at their desks typing on relatively cheap computers can have a significant effect on the local media, not to mention national corporations.
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