Care for a lesson in why merely skimming the headlines of your chosen newspaper (you do still read one, right?) isn't always the best way to get information? Take the case of the New York Times Company's July revenue report released this morning. Unsurprisingly, it ranges from partly sucky to mostly sucky, with an excellent chance of serious sucky to come. Of course, the best and worst thing about media-metrics is how easy it is to manipulate it all to one's advantage.

The quick and dirty way to manipulate media reportage is to headline your story about your competitor's woeful status with a well-chosen piece of the available data. Which is why the Times' press release doesn't have any! "The New York Times Company Reports July Revenues," it mumbles, which is code for "It's so bad, we can't even use an adjective to describe it."

The Associated Press highlights the most significant piece of news, that NYT & Co.'s total July revenue fell by 10.1% compared to the same month last year, which is not good at all. Eeek. At News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal, of course, they've gone with a number that looks scarier because it's bigger. Like so: "New York Times Ad Sales Fell 16% Last Month," says the Journal. Impressively, Rupert Murdoch's new biz broadsheet had the decency to refrain from squeezing every possible decimal of loss into the headline—the reported decrease is 16.2%. Editor & Publisher depends on big news (happy or sad) about newspapers for its bread and butter, so they've turned it up a notch: "July Ad Revenue Falls 16.2% at NYT Co. on Plunge in Classifieds," the industry's journal says. Oooh, plunging classifieds. Please continue reading our other stories on the terribly distressed state of the press! Click here.

Far dirtier and more complicated is the massaging of auditing data to suit a media outlet's particular needs. If you believe the first page of their advertising media kit, the New York Post's circulation has undergone "an unprecedented increase of 44.1% over the past seven years." Wow! But! It gets even better on the second page: "Since 2000, the Post's circulation has soared an unprecedented 61%." Amazing! How did it do that!

But if you want to see a really masterful display of the media-metric dance, look no further than the Daily News, where they win you over by drowning you in demos till you just pay for the goddamn ad campaign already. Nearly 14% of Daily News readers, just over 650,000 of them, have household incomes over a $100k! Swell! Those are the readers you want! But, um, isn't the News' entire circulation hovering just under 700,000? Oh. Yes. Indeed! The News is feeding you their readership numbers, not their number of readers, see? No? It's a fun little trick performed by measuring how many different New Yorkers might read the very same copy of the paper on any given day. Mostly, this happens on the subway, the marketers say. Probably in the bathroom stalls of your workplace, too. And you know how many people ride the subway each day!

Confused? Exhausted? Don't worry. There's nothing at all wrong. Just sign the contract and we'll let you go.