Read the rest of this post on the original site

News International Ltd., said Tuesday that around half of the 105,000 paying readers are monthly subscribers, including those to the digital sites and to the Times iPad app and Kindle edition. The others are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. There are also about 100,000 joint digital and print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the Web sites, the iPad app, or both, since launch, the company said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

“What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” researcher Mark Post told the Sunday Times. “We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.” If Post and his colleagues are able to do that, we may end up with an environmentally friendly meat that reduces the impact of food production. Said Post, “You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.”

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina, envisions a day when we use countertop bioreactors to make our meat–steaks and chops with nutritional profiles that we have predetermined. “It would look like a coffee maker,” Mironov said back in 2007. “This is my dream.”

Sadly for Mironov, he wasn’t able to find funding. NASA turned down his request for a grant, and the lone group that did express interest in his work, taking the you-are-what-you-eat philosophy full circle, was interested in meat cultured from its members’ own cells. Mironov declined to identify that particular…diners’ club, but said, “I don’t want to participate in high-tech human cannibalism.”

Tough times have forced many papers to rethink their circulation strategies. An obvious conclusion: Much of the money publishers were spending to print and deliver dead trees has gone to waste. New strategy: Print fewer copies, and charge more for the ones you do sell.

That’s a tactic, not a strategy, but in the near-term it might work.

In its last quarter, for instance, the New York Times (NYT),  saw its daily circulation drop by more than seven percent, but saw circulation revenue jump 6.7 percent, due to price increases. Last spring a single copy of the Times at a newsstand jumped from $1.50 to $2.00, and a Sunday Times now costs a staggering $6. But people are buying them.

Meanwhile, News Corp. (NWS), which owns The Wall Street Journal as well as this Web site, has been steadily increasing the WSJ price. And circulation revenue is up at the McClatchy (MNI) and Media General (MEG) chains.

Again, the industry can’t shrink its way to recovery. There are fewer people paying for news–on or offline–than there have been in decades, and there’s no way to paint this as a positive. But the people who still subscribe to papers value them, and it would be foolish not to capitalize on that. Editor & Publisher:

There are several reasons as to why circulation keeps dropping, aside from former readers who have kicked the print edition to the curb. Publishers have been purposely pulling back on certain types of circulation, including hotel, employee and third-party sponsored copies. No longer are they distributing newspapers to the outer reaches of the core market. The cost of delivery and the cost of materials have forced publishers to scale back.

Another shift has occurred: volume has taken a back seat to dollars.

Several major newspapers across the country have aggressively hiked prices of single-copy and home-delivered papers in search of circulation revenue and a renewed focus on loyal readers. Circulation is guaranteed to go down as prices go up, but publishers have opted to wring more revenue from readers as advertisers keep their coffers closed.