The 35 people who won't be saving newspapers

I would have like to have been at this meeting at Newsday (where I worked from 1985-95) for the sheer entertainment value:

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn't know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.

Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.

"I heard you say 35 people," he said, from Newsday's auditorium in Melville. "Is that number correct?"

Mr. Jimenez nodded.

That's the number of people paying a weekly $5 subscription fee to read Newsday's Web site since a pay wall was erected in October, meaning the experiment is pulling in a whopping $175 a week (the company inexplicably spent $4 million to redesign the Web site.) Meanwhile, overall traffic to the site is way down, meaning the paper is probably losing thousands in online advertising.

There are some huge caveats that the folks hurling this number around are missing. It's important to know that the Newsday site is still free to print subscribers and Cablevision (which dominates LI the way that Comcast dominates Philadelphia) cable customers -- newspaper service is offered to them in a kind of 19th-Century version of the "Triple Play. So the pool of media consumers from which those 35 is drawn is quite small.

Still...wow.

Newsday may need a deus ex machina -- more on that in a second.