"Still, the numbers are telling: The literary blogs are reaching a small audience. While larger newspapers have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, the Elegant Variation, for example, has an estimated 5,000 to 7,500 hits a day, while Champion's Return of the Reluctant is averaging 40,000 visits a day."
This psychic statistician is amazingly able to determine that all the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to larger newspapers *actually read* the book review sections. (And, jeez, do we need to explain again the difference between "hits" and "visitors"?)
With a book-focused blog equipped with a sitemeter you don't need to be psychic! You *can* actually tell who's reading what, for how long. There's zero evidence that higher circulation in print = more readers. Just ask all those copies of Oprah's book club selections.
(Here's the link if you wanna read the article, but I really just wanted to gripe about that one part. I'm with Maud Newton, et al on this one: why the competition? There are plenty of books to go around, and lots of great stuff that gets ignored by the so-called "major" outlets. Plenty of great stuff that gets panned too. As I commented to Curtis Fox yesterday (recording a podcast to be posted soon I think), poetry bloggers didn't get all up in arms about this particular controversy because these papers, GASP, are *already* not reviewing us. Just one more reason I read the blogs. They fill a gap.)
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