U.S. Newspaper Circulation Falls 10%
- By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA
Published: October 26, 2009The two-decade erosion in newspaper circulation is looking more like an avalanche, with figures released Monday showing weekday sales down more than 10 percent since last year, depressed by rising Internet readership, price increases, the recession and papers intentionally shedding unprofitable circulation.
In the six months ended Sept. 30, sales fell by 10.6 percent on weekdays and 7.5 percent on Sundays, from the period a year earlier, for several hundred papers reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That means that the industry sold about 44 million copies a day — fewer than at any time since the 1940s.
The figures join a list of indicators of the industry’s health — like advertising and newsroom headcounts — that, after years of slipping, have accelerated sharply downward, as newspapers face the greatest threats since the Depression. Through the 1990s and into this decade, newspaper circulation was sliding, but by less than 1 percent a year. Then the rate of decline topped 2 percent in 2005, 3 percent in 2007 and 4 percent in 2008.
A driving factor has been the collapse in advertising, with revenue down 16.6 percent last year and about 28 percent so far this year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The ad slowdown pushed papers to raise prices to make up some of the loss, driving down sales, and it has forced them to consider charging for access online. Less advertising has also persuaded papers to drop delivery to customers who live in outlying areas, are intermittent subscribers or have low incomes.
Industry critics say circulation has also fallen victim to budget cuts that have made newsrooms smaller and papers thinner. “I’ve worried for a long time that they’re losing readers because they’re offering less, and I think we’re seeing the effects of that,” said Alan Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes a blog about the industry called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
Among the nation’s largest newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle reported the biggest decline, 25.8 percent on weekdays, to about 252,000 — less than half what it was six years earlier — and 23 percent on Sundays, to about 307,000. For The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Dallas Morning News, circulation dropped more than 22 percent on weekdays, and about 19 percent on Sundays.
“We had to go to a new business model for this newspaper,” said Mark Adkins, president of The Chronicle, whose owner, the Hearst Corporation, has said the paper lost more than $50 million last year. “We have gone from $4.75 a week to $7.75 for home delivery in the last year, and we have dropped way back on discounting. There are places we used to truck it like Modesto, Lake Tahoe, that we don’t, because quite frankly, that’s not a market that local advertisers care about.”
The Los Angeles Times, which dropped 11 percent in weekday sales, has fallen from 1.1 million in early 2000 to 657,000. The New York Daily News fell 14 percent to 544,000 and The New York Post 19 percent to 508,000.
The Internet, where newspapers are generally free, has siphoned off circulation and advertising even as it made papers more widely read than ever before. This year, newspaper sites have had more than 72 million unique visitors a month, compared with 60 million in 2007, according to reports by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association.
James M. Moroney III, publisher of The Morning News, said that the printed newspaper was becoming something of a premium product and that too much attention was paid to circulation figures, considering all that has changed. His paper raised its subscription price this year from $21 a month to $30, two years after adopting a policy that it would not deliver the paper outside a 100-mile radius.
“Everybody keeps telling the newspaper industry to evolve, to change, to become digital,” he said. “And when we do that and grow our audience, people focus on these print circulation numbers. We’ve taken the circulation down very deliberately.”
As it had warned, USA Today had a steep drop in circulation, reflecting the slump in the hotel industry, which distributes most of that paper’s copies. USA Today, the Gannett newspaper published only on weekdays, fell from almost 2.3 million to 1.9 million, a 17.1 percent fall, losing the top spot in weekday circulation for the first time since the 1990s, to The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal’s circulation, just over two million, rose 0.6 percent. It is one of a very few papers to sell online subscriptions, which are counted in the circulation total, helping The Journal, which does not publish on Sundays, defy the industry-wide decline. It has more than 400,000 digital-only subscribers, up by more than 100,000 from five years ago.
At The New York Times, which has repeatedly raised its prices in recent years, weekday circulation fell 7.3 percent, to about 928,000, the first time since the 1980s that it has been under one million. As the third-largest paper, it continued to have by far the largest Sunday circulation, at 1.4 million, down 2.7 percent.
Two major papers, The Denver Post and The Seattle Times, reported significant circulation gains after their main competitors, The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped publishing. Despite halting home delivery four days of the week earlier this year, The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News had smaller-than-average circulation declines.
Zie: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27audit.html?_r=1&ref=media
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