Hard economic lessons for news. Jeff Jarvis: Then What Can I Buy With My Credit Cards and PayPal? Ice cream shop out-‘fans’ S.F. Chronicle. The report yesterday that newspaper circulation declined another 5% in the latest reporting period got me thinking about ice cream for two reasons.
First, anyone who loves newspapers would rather ruminate about rum raisin than the relentless, 20-year slide that has brought weekday circulation to less than 40 million copies today from an all-time high of 63.3 million as recently as 1984. Second, it reminded me that the folks following the tweets of my favorite ice cream shop in San Francisco – a quirky place called Humphry Slocombe – now vastly outnumber those who buy the San Francisco Chronicle on any given day of the week. The shop, which produces such exotic flavors as prosciutto ice cream and beet sorbet, has 301,352 followers on Twitter vs. the 223,539 individuals who buy the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on an average weekday or the 10,639 people who follow the paper’s website on Twitter.
Newspapers can be social media, too – even if they are printed on dead trees. Théories sur les médias.