Newspapers Play with Numbers

Link to September 18 techdirt post, "The Lies Newspapers Tell Themselves About Their Traffic".

Excerpt:
We've already discussed how delusional it is to believe that 10 to 15% of online newspaper readers will suddenly convert to paying for online news content, but the numbers may be even worse than that. Jeff Sonderman points us to Alan Mutter discussing a report that suggests newspapers are vastly overcounting their online audiences:

In "nearly every market" included in a study of 118 newspapers of every size in every part of the country, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive found that publishers on average report the number of unique visitors to their websites is 1.3 times larger than the population of their respective communities -- and fully 10 times greater than their print circulation.

Those numbers are not just moderately overstated. "They are magnificently incorrect," said Harmon.