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Ex-Times Editor: Two Important Sets of Numbers

The disgraced ex-editor of The New York Times, who lost his post at the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabrication/plagiarism scandal, spends much of his time fishing and working on a memoir in his Pennsylvania retirement. But Howell Raines recently took the time to give Forbes' David Andelman a few of his thoughts on the fortunes of his former employer and the newspaper business as a whole. Says Raines, "I think what you have to look at in a business sense in a newspaper of the traditional sort are two sets of numbers that I think are important. If your circulation has been basically flat for 20 or 25 years and your stock price has decreased by 50 percent in the last two or three years, I think you've got to look at those numbers and see what they mean." One possible approach is to "make significant changes in the quality of what you do in order to drive circulation and eventually follow that circulation into other media outlets."

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