How I learned to stop worrying and love bad newspaper news
We had a hard time finding the good news in Monday’s report that U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen more than 10 percent, based on an analysis of 379 daily papers. Thank goodness for the newspapers whose publishers helped them understand why losing hundreds or thousands of paying readers is good.
Most papers acknowledged deep declines in circulation, but explained it in one of the following ways:
- We had to clear out all the bulk copies sold at discount. (I’m still not sure how this one works because I recall publishers saying this a couple of years ago. How many deadwood readers are there?)
- We shrank our coverage area so of course we lost some circulation. It tells advertisers that they’re getting a BETTER quality of reader.
- We’re charging more for the paper so circulation revenue has risen, and anyway, who wants to rely on a business as fickle as advertising (the one that lined our owners’ pockets for the past 150 years.)?
- Readership is rising on the Internet.
- At least we didn’t get whacked as bad as the next guy.
All these statements are true, and they all are good business moves. What I can’t find among the numbers is what percent of print decline at many of these papers is because of the other reasons that you hear from people. Some are legitimate, some aren’t and some are just silly. All say one thing: Many people don’t pay for the paper anymore, which means there’s less money to keep them in business. (Don’t believe us? Ask the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):
- I hate my newspaper
- My newspaper doesn’t have anything interesting in it
- News is boring
- News is free on the Internet
- My newspaper is biased to the right/left/middle/other Little League team than the one my kid is on
- My paper stopped running Garfield in the funnies. It doesn’t run Hints From Heloise anymore.
- You can’t get good TV listings anymore
- I don’t care about anything that happens in the rest of the world or outside my front door.
- There’s not enough local/regional/national/world news here.
- The sports section sucks.
- It always arrives too early/late for me to read it.
Here are samples of how some papers handled Monday’s news:
San Francisco Chronicle headline: Chronicle’s strategy shift starts to pay off
Now showing: The cable show
The big story in the media for the rest of the week is the annual National Cable Telecommunications Association Show, or “the cable show,” as its commonly called.
This year’s primary topic looks like it will be how the big, traditional operators in the business will adapt to an age when the Internet is giving people more options to watch shows, and not always in a way that feeds the bank.
Here is our own take on the show from the Reuters wire:
Both sets of companies will be brainstorming on how to cope with or benefit from disintermediation: consumers can now watch decent-quality video online whenever they want, and often for free.
“Last year, cable companies were in a more probelgradetectionist mode but now they’re facing up to the inevitable trend, because online video is really here to stay,” said Tuna Amobi, equity analyst at Standard & Poor’s.
Executives will also have the economy on their minds.
“The current recession has cut into consumer spending for household TV and telecommunications, while also causing most marketers to reduce their advertising budgets,” said Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan.
Pointer:
1. Thanks for contributing to the recursion, but I disagree.
2. They pay me in the news business to cover the news business.
3. There are people inside and outside journalism who say that news outlets shouldn’t cover themselves and shouldn’t cover the news business. They say that it bores the reader and that it is essentially writing for a small group whose emotional and professional inbreeding are well known.
4. I disagree with that. Covering the news business now, as everything about it changes and threats to its survival mount, is an exciting story to tell people. I also believe that you can promote transparency and trust in news organizations by telling the public in an easy-to-understand way how the business works. You don’t have to go to the grain-by-grain level of Editor & Publisher; you should write, as I constantly say, stories that Mom can understand, whether she’s a high school dropout or a PhD. This is necessary now more than ever as more people harbor paranoid, fearful mistrust of the news.