• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Newspaper circulation still declining

Hugh

Member
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/26/business/main5422119.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.8

AP) The decline in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating as the industry struggles with defections to the Internet and tumbling ad revenue.

Figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that average daily circulation dropped 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month span in 2008. That was greater than the 7.1 percent decline in the October 2008-March 2009 period and the 4.6 percent drop in the April-September period of 2008.

Sunday circulation fell 7.5 percent in the latest six-month span.

As expected, The Wall Street Journal has surpassed USA Today as the top-selling newspaper in the United States. The Journal's average Monday-Friday circulation edged up 0.6 percent to 2.02 million - making it the only daily newspaper in the top 25 to see an increase.

USA Today saw its worst decline ever, dropping more than 17 percent to 1.90 million. The newspaper has blamed reductions in travel for much of the circulation shortfall, because many of its single-copy sales come in airports and hotels.

The New York Times stayed in third place at 927,851, down 7.3 percent from the same period of 2008.

Newspaper sales have been declining since the early 1990s, but the drop has accelerated in recent years. Part of this is because newspapers have stopped serving harder-to-reach areas and limited circulation to their core regions.

In many cases, people simply aren't buying print copies as much as they used to, given the abundance of free news on the Internet, often from the newspapers themselves. This has prompted newspapers to consider charging fees for Web access, but it could prove difficult to persuade people to pay for something they are used to getting for free.

Newsday, a Long Island daily, said last week that it plans to start charging people who don't subscribe to its print edition $5 a week for access to its Web site. Newsday's circulation dropped 5.4 percent in the latest reporting period, to 357,124.

Of the top 25 dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle saw the worst circulation decline, falling 25.8 percent to 251,782. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., and The Dallas Morning News both fell 22.2 percent.

Of all the newspapers with a paid circulation of more than 50,000, the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania saw the biggest increase - rising 16.5 percent to 55,370.

The figures from the circulation bureau compare 379 daily newspapers and 562 Sunday newspapers that had reported average sales for both the current and year-ago periods. That means the reported circulation declines were not made higher by the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers.

The totals also exclude many smaller newspapers because of rule changes that make direct comparisons impossible.
 
Of the top 25 dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle saw the worst circulation decline, falling 25.8 percent to 251,782.

Wow. Almost a 26% decline? When's the funeral? They will undoubtedly take a huge ad revenue hit after this.
 
Saw this on Slashdot this morning.

The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets.


And the Onion brings a bit of levity to the whole thing.
 
I read my neighborhood weekly paper when I'm at the laundrymat. It's free, there is always a stack of them at the liquor store next door. I notice that it has always kept the same page count, and I haven't noticed any decline in the number of ads in it. There are plenty of full page and half page ads, so that tells me advertisers are willing to buy the space in them.
 
In order to survive, it appears that papers are going to have find their niche. My local paper prides itself on "hyper-local" coverage. They have a backpage of world news, but dedicate the rest to births, the public record, and local stories of interest. They gather my interest through the public record because I'm nosy. They also gain it by featuring columnists who just make my blood boil. I do enjoy the paper and yes, they are a daily. The monday edition is practically worthless and is about as thin as a politician's honesty. The weekend is the best of course. I think they found a winning ingredient in focusing on "hyper-local" coverage. The question is whether or not people will continue to shell out money for that stuff, or just click online to see that cute baby announcement or news of when the next city council meeting is.
 
Back
Top