Couple of quick pointers to interesting AdAge pieces.

First, the horror continues at Marketing and PR industry giant Interpublic Group, with news of a deeper and wider SEC investigation into their rather...um...interesting accounting practices (hey - they're a creative company, what do you expect?). As AdAge also notes: "...in what has become an annual summer event, Interpublic announced the departure of another chief financial officer."

What a mess. I witnessed some of the ugliness in my relatively short stint with one of the Interpublic companies. More on that topic another time.

Secondly, AdAge also points to a Nielsen//Netratings study showing that more newspaper readers are moving away from print to get their news online.

"Nearly one-quarter (21%) of Web users who do read newspapers now read the daily paper online," according to the AdAge piece. (The Nielsen news release is rather more conservative - they tag the result as "a fifth". I agree with them - 21% is much closer to a fifth than a quarter. But I'm quibbling).

AdAge goes on to cite ABC numbers that indicate the fall in newspapers' average daily circulation in the six months to March 31, 2005. Dailies are down 1.9% to 47.4 million - Sunday papers fell 2.5% to 51 million.

What I'd really like to see now is a much more direct, single-survey comparison of growth against the fall off. Maybe the numbers are in the full Nielsen//Netratings report, which I haven't read.

One fifth of all readers choosing to get their news primarily online is an interesting stat - but I'd love to see a hard stat that proves the correlation between falling print circulations and growing online news audiences. It seems intuitively right and obvious, but where's the research? Guess I've got some Googling to do...