First the Newspaper Association of America canceled its annual conference for U.S. newspaper publishers to tell Wall Street about how great their businesses are. No surprise; business isn’t great.

Now it’s dropping its tradition of sending out a quarterly press release with details on how much money advertisers are spending in the papers, something we discovered after reading the story over at the competition. What’s next? No more website?

I called the Newspaper Association to ask why they stopped sending out the information. Could it be because the 14 percent drop in the first quarter compared to the quarter last year is just the latest and worst in a series of bad numbers?

No, spokeswoman Sheila Owens said:

“We’re going away from putting out quarterly advertising data. It’s not because they’re bad. It’s just because we feel it’s  relevant to put out the year-end (data).”

If you want to find the numbers, you have to tunnel down into the site and go several clicks beyond the NAA’s homepage, which gives no evidence that new data was posted (or just click here). At least you can get the data for free — sort of like news nowadays.