New York magazine’s publicist Serena Torrey, who you probably heard from already about Sunday’s Oscar party at Spotted Pig – which we’re totally disinvited from this year – is on the defense after Keith Kelly reported a few facts about the pub’s recent misfortunes. Even though “Web traffic” (pageviews? unique visitors?) on nymag.com is up 2000 percent from last year, as Torrey claims, newsstand sales dwindled 7.8 percent in the second half of 2007, Keith reports. NOT FAIR!, argues Torrey.

“In fact,” she whines in to Romenesko, “New York raised newsstand prices by 25% in July 2007 AND we cut draw by more than 2%. We planned and budgeted for a much more dramatic falloff in newsstand sales (which represents only 5% of our circulation to begin with) in the second half of last year; 7.8% falloff was a major victory — as was getting our bulk to 48k (down from twice that two years ago).” See how anything can become good news?