Lisa Snedeker writes in MediaLife about newspaper audience metrics and near the end hits on a key point:

… the other problem newspapers face is coming up with a metric to replace circulation that combines print and online readership in a manner that advertisers can understand and work with.

That raises fundamental questions. Is the online visitor of the same value as the print reader?

One approach has been to weight a month of web traffic to a week’s worth of print circulation, according to Philip Meyer, the Knight chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.”

But Meyer sees this as an apple-and-oranges formula. “I don’t see any logical reason to do it that way.”

Meo agrees that comparing the past seven days in print to the past 30-day internet traffic is goofy. “You wouldn’t do that with any other media,” he says. “We think comparing the past seven days’ print audience to the past seven days internet audience makes sense.”

The visited-in-last-30 day metric makes no sense to me. It never has. It tells you nothing about an engaged, loyal audience.