Philip Meyer is a newspaperman who thinks he can measure anything. He claims, for instance, that love is quantifiable. Given the right yardstick, he could authoritatively answer poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's question: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

It's not a 'fer stretch, therefore, for Meyer, Knight professor of journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill, to presume that he can measure the quality of journalism at newspapers. That's what he does in an intriguing new book that is making waves in the newspaper business -- if for no other reason the title: "The Vanishing Newspaper, Saving Journalism in the Information Age."

As the title implies, Meyer sees newspapers as fast becoming the dodo of the communications business. We are faced with the threat of obsolescence by the rise of alternative sources of information -- cable TV, online publishing, blogging and technologies yet to be developed. Nationally, newspaper readership is on a downward slope that, if Meyer is to be believed, has us going out of business before Social Security does.

"If you extend the line, you find the last newspaper reader disappears around 2040 -- in April, if you want to be really precise about it," Meyer said during a recent "Webinar" -- online seminar -- about the future of newspapers.

But as his subtitle suggests, Meyer is looking for solutions that could avoid that doomsday scenario. That's where the measuring comes in.

Meyer is that unusual type in the newspaper business, a reporter who can add and subtract (and do regression analysis). He made a reputation for himself three decades ago by bringing tools of statistical analysis to reporting -- generating new information through polling, database analysis and other techniques that explained, for instance, why people participated in race riots in the 1960s. As a reporter turned professor, he has gone on to spread the gospel of "precision journalism" to new generations of journalists.

Using these tools, Meyer set out in this book to measure indicators of newspaper quality -- accuracy, credibility, readability -- and then compare the quality measures with newspapers' business success. His hypothesis and hope: the better the newspaper, the greater the bottom line. He and I spent a quiet morning at his home recently discussing his ideas.

Meyer contends that newspapers are not in the information or even communications business, but the influence business. Newspapers have societal influence, through news coverage, that is not for sale, and commercial influence, through advertising, that is for sale. Under this "influence model," advertisers are attracted to newspapers that, because of their quality, are trusted by readers.

"I loved that the moment I saw it, because it's economic justification for quality journalism." So then he set out to test it.

How do you measure quality? For one measure, accuracy, Meyer and his students clipped random stories from newspapers and sent survey forms to sources named in the stories -- more than 5,000 sources for 22 newspapers over a two-year period. Those with higher ratings, he found, had more trust among readers. He did similar tests with credibility and readability.

I was pleased to note that The N&O rated tops on one of the accuracy tests. Another quality measure, on readability, found that articles in The N&O are pitched at about a 10th-grade reading level. For most newspapers, that's too high, but Meyer found that it was OK for the Triangle because our readers are better educated.

So what are we to make of all this? Does newspaper quality make a difference? Using his tools, Meyer was able to establish a correlation between newspaper quality and business success of newspapers. Those with the best quality ratings had the highest percentages of readers in their markets. But he was not able to determine whether quality caused success, or vice versa. "It's possible that quality is just an inadvertent effect of business success."

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