Circulation is down . . . TV is killing us . . . According to Braddon Russell in the biography Roy Thomson of Fleet Street, the gloomy discourse continued for 10 minutes before Thomson spoke. He owned 21 papers at the time. All these years later, the lament is louder than ever.
Nobody reads in a visual age . . .
In truth, he was talking about a television station and only over the years did the words inevitably get bent to the printing-press business that made him wealthy. But even in the raw avarice of the '90s, the numbers are staggering. Just to be sure, I asked Frank Wood, the publisher of the Times-West Virginian , if his paper's 28 percent profit margin means what I think it means. It would draw more stretch limos than lined up for Elvis. The purpose of the Readership Development Conference was to get editors and circulators working shoulder to shoulder in the higher interest of selling those newspapers.