Newspaper Circulation Plummets
By Don | October 27, 2009
Figures released yesterday showed that newspaper circulation is still in a freefall with no end in sight.
From the New York Times
The 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.
This isn't a liberal or conservative issue as virtually all newspapers suffered to one degree or another but the decline does mean that liberal papers have far less influence as they used to as readers abandon them for the internet. Even if readers are migrating to the papers web pages they are only there for two to three minutes at a time which isn't long enough to digest the editorials.
Some papers like the Washington Post have resorted to loyalty programs to reward print subscribers. In the case of the Post readers receive points for answering a daily quiz related to an article in the paper that can eventually be redeemed to gift certificates and other awards. That may temporarily stem some of the erosion but won't solve the longer term issue of a declining base of potential readers.
Post #2423
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I’m sure there are others as my wife and I. We subscribe to the Times for forever, even though we now live in Colorado (15 years). I’m NOT a Republican, but the NYT’s past five years or so have taken their editorial section, and stirred-it into their news sections. We just want the news, not the extra flavoring.
I cannot help but wonder if the govt will be stepping in to bail out a chosen few of the newspapers next. (???) Not that they want to own or control anything, of course !
October 27 at 2:33 pm | #1 | Link
I look forward to the day the NY Time, LA Times, and all the other liberal papers bite the dust. People are buying print because they don’t want the garbage they print. I look forward to their lying reporters having no jobs.