Washington Post: the latest example of print ad plunge
Just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse for newspapers, it somehow manages to get even bleaker. Today’s example is provided by the Washington Post Co and its flagship paper (and the online site Slate). The company reported third quarter earnings including results from its newspaper division today.
Print advertising revenue fell 20 percent to $57.6 million — quite a stunning plunge even as newspapers across the U.S. manage to post quarter after quarter of print ad revenue declines. Even more disturbing is that online revenue, which includes washingtonpost.com and Slate, plunged 14 percent to $23.3 million. Display online ad revenue dropped 17 percent.
The Washington Post is one of those curious oddities in the industry that manages to be extremely local — it’s market penetration of the D.C. area has always been one of the highest in the U.S. — and also draws the interest of a large national audience. So while it may compete with the “nationals” i.e. New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, on the news front, it is very dependent on local advertising. The NYT, USAT and WSJ get a hefty portion of their advertising revenue through national advertisers.
The local advertising category hasn’t been holding up as well as national advertising. It’s taking it on the chin as the housing market struggles, unemployment remains high and retail outlets are going out of business or simply taking their advertising elsewhere.
That’s not to say that national advertising revenue isn’t hurting as well. It’s more of a mixed bag. At the New York Times, for example, the division that mainly includes its flagship paper reported advertising revenue fell 6 percent to $156.1 million in Q3.
Gannett, which publishes USAT, used to give some information on how that paper was doing by reporting paid ad pages, but the company ceased — to use the parlance of research analysts — to provide more color on the USAT front. Instead, Gannett reports that national advertising, including USAT, fell 17 percent. USAT represents a big chunk of Gannett’s national advertising.
The Wall Street Journal manages somehow to defy these trends. Ad revenue rose 13 percent in the third quarter– that includes print and online – according to a memo from Dow Jones’ top executive Todd Larsen to employees.
Wall Street Journal snags another hotel chain
Under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Wall Street Journal has made no bones that the New York Times is enemy No.1. But that hit list doesn’t stop at the Gray Lady. From time to time, the Journal pivots to set USA Today in its crosshairs — and its latest actions mark a move in that direction.
The most recent flag the Journal captured involves Choice Hotels. Earlier this week, the Journal announced it will become the “preferred newspaper” beginning in January for guests at more than 3,700 Choice Hotel properties including Comfort Inn, Quality Inn and Clarion Hotel. What was the “preferred newspaper” before the Journal swooped in? That would be USA Today.
USA Today begs to differ. A spokeswoman for the paper emailed the following: “USA Today remains a preferred vendor for Choice Hotels in 2011.”
It’s a matter of semantics because guests have to request copies of newspapers. According to the Journal, the paper will be delivered as a “complimentary amenity” to guests who ask for it come Jan. 1.
There’s some history here. In April 2009, Marriott Hotels announced it would no longer automatically drop newspapers at the doorsteps of guests. Instead, it made copies of USA Today, the Journal and other local metros available upon request. What seemed like an innocuous, eco-conscious move on the part of Marriott only served to hurt the circulation of USA Today, which built a large part of its circulation on hotel-distributed copies.
Indeed, later that year in October 2009, the Journal overtook USA Today as the largest newspaper by circulation in the United States, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
(Photo: Reuters)
New York Times introduces film club
Nothing else seems to have helped newspapers reflect the stronger economic recovery of the rest of media. Old films can’t hurt.
The New York Times forged another path to the club-based membership service — a trend that has grown in popularity among newspapers. Today the newspaper debuted the New York Times Film Club, created for “an audience passionate about movies,” according to the press release.
Membership to the club affords you two red-carpet screenings of remastered Hollywood classics as well as six preview viewings for upcoming releases. The yearly membership costs $100 for individuals and $175 to add another person.
The first red carpet screening is for Paramount Pictures “The Godfather” on Jan. 5, 2011 in New York City.
The NYT, along with other newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, are launching clubs — wine is especially popular — as way to reap some extra revenue and strike a deeper relationship with readers.
Newspapers in the U.K are particulary adept at at this taking it way beyond wine and film. Mark Fitzgerald, the former editor of E&P, reported in April on the trend noting the Guardian extends offers for a wide-range of stuff including cottage rentals, duvets, and plant seeds.
WSJ defies newspaper ad trends
Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2 — but you sure wouldn’t know it over at The Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street Journal Publisher Les Hinton sent around an email (posted on Romenesko) touting the paper’s eye-popping 17% increase in print and online ad revenue in the quarter ending September versus the same period a year ago. Print advertising jumped 21% while online ad revenue advanced 29%.
Hinton notes that this is the Journal’s fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and attributes the rise in ad revenue to the new products and sections such as Greater New York.
Meanwhile the Journal’s main competitors, USA Today and The New York Times, are not experiencing the same lift in print. In Q2, USA Today’s paid ad pages fell. The New York Times Co., which includes the flagship Boston Globe and other regional papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida, warned that overall print ad revenue will decline around 5% while online ad revenue is expected to rise 14%.
We’ve been keep stacks of the Greater New York edition and the checks we made find the ad count slim on some days. Our informal hoard consists mainly of sections from the summer which is a light season for advertising typically. Today’s Greater New York looks thicker with ads from the jeweler Kwiat, conEdison, sister broadcast station FOX (full page) among a smattering of others.
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.
Thanksgiving: Cook a turkey, buy a newspaper
Thanksgiving thank-you lists can get pretty lengthy. This year, add a newspaper to the things you’re thankful for. That, more or less, is the message that the Newspaper Association of America is delivering in an advertisement that it hopes daily papers will run this coming Monday. The ad will appear a week before the Audit Bureau of Circulations publishes its latest circulation statistics for North American newspapers.
As USA Today has already said, and other insiders have told us, circulation is going to fall compared with last year — and those declines at many papers likely will be worse than usual. That’s the kind of thing that advertisers don’t like to hear, and one of the reasons that they are devoting their dollars in increasing amounts to other media. But as the NAA will remind people, some of that sentiment might be misplaced. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the ad.
Not too bright to put “Turkey” & “Newspspers” in the same ad. And I work for one..
Wall Street Journal vs USA Today — Part II
Earlier this week I brought you the brewing circulation tussle between USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and which paper will be able to claim to be the largest one in terms of circulation. You can read that here, but for the recap, here are the main points:
- Editor & Publisher reports: 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 Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press report that the Journal would be the largest paper by circulation, according to the Journal.
- USA Today responds, “We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newspaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.”
As I wrote at the time, it seems that the Journal is counting print and online subscriptions together, and why not? Both are made up of paying subscribers. USA Today, of course, is counting printed newspapers.
We won’t know until their circulation numbers are published on October 26 what the final, comparable figures would be. But today, the Journal revealed its latest numbers:
Circulation was 2,024,269 as of the six-month period ending in September 2009, compared with 2,011,999 in the same period a year ago. Individually paid circulation, a number that advertisers like to watch, grew to 1,437,853. That’s impressive, having any growth at all.
As to how it stacks up to USA Today, and who will be able to claim to be the No. 1 newspaper publisher by circulation, we’re going to have to wait until the 26th.
(Photo: Reuters)
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.
Wednesday media highlights
Here are some of the day’s stories about the media industry:
Recession sends Americans to the Internet (Reuters) S. John Tilak writes: “More than two-thirds of American adults — or 88 percent of U.S. Internet users — went online for help with recession-induced personal economic issues and to gather information on national economic problems, a study released on Wednesday said.”
BBC and Government Fall Out Over Financing Plan (NYT) “The BBC and Britain’s Labour government, which has a history of support for the “Beeb,” have fallen out over a government plan to share some of the broadcaster’s £3.6 billion in public funding with its commercial television rivals,” writes Eric Pfanner.
USA Today introduces Newsdeck site for top headlines (Editors Weblogs) “To give visitors another way to view the news, USA Today has introduced a site it calls Newsdeck that compiles the top headlines in an easy-to-read format. Users can scroll through stories in eight categories, including News, Money and Sports, with the ability to switch back and forth between the latest news and the most popular articles.,” writes Liz Webber.
Bing’s First Month A Bust (Business Insider) Dan Frommer writes: “Microsoft’s U.S. search market share was 8.4% in June, up from 8.0% in May, according to comScore. It would have been a disaster if Bing didn’t grow at all with all that advertising and free promotion vianews coverage, so at least it’s up a little.”
In other news:
Hangin’ with USA Today’s new masthead
Gannett Co Inc has not been too generous lately with making its executives available to media reporters. And why would it? Few newspaper publishers have because there’s little good to say about the business.
Ad sales are tanking, as usual. Debt is looming (what else does it ever do?). Lots of self-styled media experts can’t let a day go by without writing a few blog posts telling publishers that they brought it on themselves and they deserve to die.
With that merry backdrop, I was surprised to get invited to a press conference and an interview with Gannett’s latest picks for editor (John Hillkirk) and publisher (Former Detroit Free Press Publisher David Hunke) of USA Today. Gannett brought them to New York to meet the insular Manhattan media world, which is responsible for writing all those obituaries that you’ve been reading about newspapers lately.
Here are some excerpts (paraphrased as well as verbatim) from our conversation on Wednesday afternoon at Gannett’s New York bureau at Madison Avenue and 54th Street:
Advertising revenue is down by some 30 percent versus last year. Publishers say much of this is because of the recession. How far down would ad revenue be without the financial crisis?
About 10 percent, Hunke guessed.
Nobody we talk to in the newspapers around the United States is very happy. At Gannett, they’re dealing with layoffs, furloughs, you name it. What can management do?
Hmmmm. Guess WaPo/Slate subscribers and readers are getting tired of paying for and reading biased reporting and outright lies, and the advertisers don’t want to waste their money in venues where readers and subscribers are fleeing in droves.