Newspaper circ slides — yet again
The organization that keeps up with newspaper circulation released another bleak round of numbers this morning. For the 602 daily newspapers that reported into the Audit Bureau of Circulations, total daily circ plummeted 8.7 percent while Sunday circ for 548 papers fell 6.5 percent for the six months ending March 2010 compared to the same period last year.
There is a familiar phrase echoed to explain the numbers, the same phrase used to describe advertising results: the declines are moderating! At least compared to the six months ending September 2009, when circulation was in a nosedive, with daily down 10.6 percent and Sunday down 7.5 percent.
Sure, some of that is self-inflicted by publishers weeding out certain types of circulation like those freebie copies you might pick up at a big box retailer. But a big chunk of the loss isn’t by choice. The reality is that readers are choosing to go elsewhere.
The good news is the industry is finally trying to make the case that it is more than just pulp and ink and that newspapers reach people through other channels like the Internet and mobile phones. Soon (and hopefully not too late) that data will be a more integral part of the ABC statements.
So that’s why it’s disheartening to see USA Today still try and claim the top spot by splitting hairs. USA Today is the No. 2 newspaper in the country by daily circ — it was knocked down a peg by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal has always been the envy of the industry since it can rightly count some of its paid WSJ.com subs toward its top line circulation number. Yet USA Today is still trumpeting that it remains tops in print circulation. (Headline of their press release reads “USA Today Remains Number One in Total Daily Print Circulation”)
The problem is, that’s the sort of thing that keeps the focus trained where newspapers least want it.
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
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.
Tribune365, thinking beyond newspaper circulation
Monday’s newspaper circulation numbers please no one who makes their living from selling papers. That’s evident when you look at the top 25 dailies by circulation and see that the best performance came from The Wall Street Journal, which rose less than 1 percent. Considering that advertisers use these numbers to determine where to spend their money, there is little reason to rejoice.
Tribune Co’s two largest papers, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, both posted steep declines on Monday, but the company is urging advertisers to look beyond numbers that it considers less relevant than they were before the Internet. Instead, it wants them to look at how many people they can reach through Tribune’s diverse lineup of papers, websites and television stations.
To make this easier, Tribune has started “Tribune365,” a “multichannel sales solutions group providing customized marketing programs to advertisers looking to reach consumers across a variety of media platforms.” (More on what this means — in English — below.)
“We want to change the conversation around both how we sell and how people perceive newspapers.” Print circulation,” said Vincent Casanova, Tribune’s senior vp of publishing operations “just doesn’t tell the whole story… The objective is to change the conversation from a narrow look at topline circulation results to a broader discussion of the power of newspaper advertising and how to deliver results.”
For Tribune365, that means no longer selling ads to national buyers through a bunch of different sales teams that sell different kinds of ads for this or that part of a paper or this or that part of a website or TV station.
Tribune365 President Don Meek cited a recent ad campaign for big-box retailer Target, which set up one of a 16,000 square-foot “pop-up store” in Chicago (Those are the temporary stores that spring up in cities for a few days at a time, sell a bunch of stuff, and move on):
“We were able to put together an integrated program on WGN, WGN-TV, the Chicago Tribune, RedEye, Hoy… The only thing we couldn’t deliver was the outdoor bus shelter advertising on Michigan Avenue. Not only were we able to provide real estate and promotional support, it was also a fully integrated ad program. They said it was one of the most popular programs that they ever did.”
It’s about time. Tribune365 makes tremendous sense. “Audience aggregation” has become the name of the game, which should now mean aggregating audience across multiple media (er, um, “platforms”). A wise move.
WSJ vs USA Today: Who has the biggest paper?
USA Today and The Wall Street Journal aren’t waiting for Oct. 26, the day North American newspapers report their latest circulation numbers, to begin tussling over which one has the biggest paper.
Editor & Publisher made the first move on Friday when Jennifer Saba reported that USA Today was set to report that circulation fell “17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation.” The news came in a memo from USA Today Publisher, David Hunke, to his workers.
Spicy stuff, considering that when we write about its owner, Gannett, we say it is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher that publishes USA Today, the largest newspaper by circulation.
The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide wrote up the news too, adding this: “After USA Today’s memo, the Journal said it is now the largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation.” Andrew Vanacore at The Associated Press, featured the Jornal echoing that statement: “Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, declined to give out the newspaper’s circulation figures for the period, but spokesman Robert Christie said, ‘The Journal is now the largest newspaper by circulation.’”
We wrote up the story too, going along the same lines. The next day, however, we got this statement from USA Today’s communications vp Ed Cassidy – a bit too late to run it as an update to our old story. Still, it piqued my interest in a big way because it doesn’t go along with the lines of what we reported earlier:
We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newpsaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.
So how do we figure this? It’s hard to conclude when the numbers haven’t come out yet. I suspect that both papers can make the claim to be No. 1 because the Journal is counting copies to subscribers who get only the online edition as adding to the total number of print subscribers. Newspaper publishers argue over whether those copies “count,” but it seems like they should considering that people pay for Web access in the same way that they do for print.
Circulation is irrelevant except to insert advertisers. The only real measure of impact is audience and for newspapers that remains adult readership.
