Economy & Work

Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists and distinguished scholars gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2006 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Peter Berger, professor emeritus of religion, sociology and theology at Boston University, examined the globalization of religious pluralism and how the […]

A majority of Americans say they set a budget limit for their holiday shopping; 56% have already set or plan to set a limit while 41% say they don't use a budget limit for holiday shopping.

A majority of Americans say they set a budget limit for their holiday shopping; 56% have already set or plan to set a limit while 41% say they don't use a budget limit for holiday shopping.

by Robert Ruby, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life November 8, 2006 Voters in South Dakota on Tuesday rejected what would have been the nation’s most restrictive law against abortion, and Arizona became the first state to defeat a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage. Of the eight states where bans on gay marriage […]

The new numbers released this week were bad enough for a newspaper industry that lost nearly 3% of its circulation in the last year. But when you factor in subscriber discounts, the economic picture gets worse. And the industry’s efforts to compensate for decreasing circulation with increasing online readership may not stand up to scrutiny.

The new numbers for the newspaper industry are out, and they show another disheartening drop of nearly 3% in total average daily circulation. But the picture may be more complicated than the first impression. Not all papers are hurting, and many companies have trimmed questionable circulation. The industry also is boasting that, when online readers are included, overall readership is growing.

This statistical profile of the foreign born population is based on Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey public use microdata file, which was released August 29, 2006.

Sandwiched between a declining print industry and an online universe still building economic momentum, newspaper companies are looking at combined Internet and newsprint readership as a new way of measuring audience. A big unanswered question is whether advertisers will agree that this is a more accurate way to count their potential customers.

Earlier this year, a research team led by a Harvard professor unveiled a strategy to help reverse the revenue and circulation ills of the newspaper industry and encourage it to reinvent itself. Some publications have reported early success in adopting the plan that asks readers: “What do you hire a newspaper to do for you?”

Young workers who have grown up with the internet, cell phones, video games, iPods, and digital cameras are different from their elders. Those who are now hiring the young "digital natives" need to recognize how they have grown up in a unique worl...