Growing down

A big ad in Wednesday's Billings Gazette proclaimed, "Circulation is UP! Billings Gazette's circulation is GROWING!" An editor's note on the opinion page today made a similar claim. But neither the ad nor the note answered the two questions I always ask my writing students when they baldly state, as they often do, that some trend or another is increasing: How much? Since when?

Since I can't order the Gazette to produce its research, I did some of my own. The annual reports on the Lee Enterprises web site list circulation figures for each paper for the period ending in September. For the Gazette, I compared September 2004 to September 2005. Sunday circulation had, indeed, increased by 331 papers, a stunning increase of 0.6 percent. But daily circulation was down 740 papers. So in September 2005 the Gazette was selling 4,109 fewer papers a week than it had a year earlier.

As Chico Marx used to say, "'Atsa some joke, eh, Boss?" Using that kind of math, I expect to demonstrate in the Outpost next week that I am growing younger.