My local paper and former employer, the News & Observer, engaged in some prolonged navel-gazing over the weekend, posing this query in its weekly Q section (the conceit of which is that a burning social question is posed, and then addressed): “What is the future of the N&O?”

The corporate answer, as distilled from the twin essays by the paper’s editor and publisher: Readership will continue to skyrocket, and nifty new products will shore up the bottom line.

The answer the N&O’s two top executives didn’t mean to reveal, but did so anyway because they’re not very good at spin: Beats the hell outta them. They’re just as clueless as anyone else.

Of the two essays, the one authored by editor John Drescher was the most egregiously slippery. Here’s how he started:

More people are reading The N&O than ever.

In fact, depending on how you slice the numbers, our growth in readership is faster than the growth in population in the Triangle — one of the fastest-growing areas in the country.

His assertion — that the N&O’s growth in readership exceeds the local growth in population — is laughable. In fact, Drescher acknowledged later in the essay that “paid daily print circulation has plateaued at about 170,000″ and that any additional readers have come via the online edition. Eventually (and only after conceding that many online readers are already subscribers and therefore don’t contribute to any “growth”), Drescher wrote the words that completely contradicted his opening assertion:

If you add overall print readership with online readership, we’ve grown, although not as fast as the Triangle’s population.

Then there was this in Drescher’s essay:

But online readership is growing quickly.

In 2002, about 43,000 people a day visited our Web sites, newsobserver.com and triangle.com. In 2007, about 81,000 people a day visited those sites — an increase of 88 percent.

That sounds impressive, but Drescher fails to put that statistic in any context. In just a few moments of googling, I learned that the number of people in North America using the Internet grew by 120 percent from 2000 to 2007. That means that the N&O’s growth in online readership, on an annualized basis, was just about exactly what the continent’s growth in Internet use was as a whole. In short, the paper was simply lifted by the tide — which is different from growth.

In all likelihood, the N&O loses more readership ground every day. But Drescher didn’t get to that kernel of truth about the paper’s readership without first making you wade through ten inches of ham-handed spin. Remember, this is the guy who’s in charge of the N&O’s daily news report.

For his part, publisher Orage Quarles offered this peek into the future (but also first declaring, without a shred of irony, that the only reason people think the industry is reeling is because “most [newspapers] diligently report the latest on our audience and ad revenue performance”):

In the next few months, we’ll launch an advertising sales partnership with Yahoo that has huge potential, and we’re days away from unveiling a Web site for moms in the Triangle that already has people buzzing. We’re also expanding our print portfolio of niche publications and magazines, with the latest, Skirt!, ready to debut April 1.

Notice that none of those things have anything to do with the paper itself, at least not directly. Quarles is talking about media-related income streams, not the core business of news. In fact, he’s implicitly suggesting that the N&O will continue to diminish as a business enterprise, with other products expected to pick up the revenue slack.

Then there was this plaintive sales pitch from Quarles:

Do you realize that in the greater Triangle you can get The N&O delivered to your house every single day for a whole year for $165? And that a lot of folks spend that much every month for cable, Internet and home entertainment? Looked at that way, we’re quite a bargain.

But if the N&O’s growth is all from online readership, and considering that people need Internet access in order to get to the paper’s web site, why would Quarles bust on you for spending so much money every month on …

Oh, never mind.

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