Independent UK: America's grim newspaper story

[marmar]

America's grim newspaper story

Circulations are falling and some pundits believe that newspapers in the United States will be dead in a generation. But some proprietors actually want to shed readers.

By Stephen Foley
Wednesday, 30 April 2008



Extra, extra, read all about it. Newspaper circulations in freefall. Readers desert to the internet. Abandon hope, all ye who enter print journalism.

Newspaper circulation has been dropping steadily in most of the developed world for many years, but the armageddonists are firmly in the ascendancy, particularly in the US, where they have taken to specifying a date on which the last newspaper will be printed in the country. (October 2044 on current trends, according to the American Journalism Review.)

The latest round of grim circulation data, which was published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations this week, showed such a sharp acceleration in the downtrend that the date might have to be brought forward. The ABC survey of 534 of the largest daily newspapers found a 3.6 per cent decline in the six months to 31 March, compared to the same period a year ago. In the previous six-month period, the year-on-year decline was 2.6 per cent. A year ago it was 2.1 per cent. Papers in the biggest metropolitan areas are hurting most; Sunday editions are dropping most steeply of all. The august New York Times, which is distributed across the country, lost 9.3 per cent of its Sunday readership in the last six months. The figures looked bad enough to make newspaper executives choke on their cereals when they appeared in yesterday's editions.

Only here's the real scoop: this is not all bad news for the industry, and in many cases, the figures are exactly what managers wanted and worked towards.

Eh? Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for journalists, explains that - while many former newspaper readers are indeed now satisfied getting their news from the internet – this is only part of the story.

"It is 50-50 between the rise of the internet and what Gary Pruitt, chief executive of McClatchy described last week as 'managed circulation reduction'. He said that they were no longer sending papers out into the boondocks, where distribution is expensive and it is an area that advertisers do not really care about."

In short, newspaper executives are making a hard-headed judgement that not all readers are created equal, at least not in the eyes of advertisers.

"There is a lot of 'ego circulation', but with newsprint prices going up, with transportation costs going up, anyone looking at the business model will say that there are copies that they don't have to print," says one analyst at a fund management firm. "Paid newsstand sales and home delivery, these are the prized readers. Now companies are thinking about trimming superfluous distribution. Many companies have previously been reluctant to touch circulation, because all it does is throw gasoline on the fire. They are all being accused of being dinosaurs, of having their heads in the sand. Deliberately cutting back on circulation simply generates another story about how bad the business is, but it can in fact be a much more rational business decision." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/americas-grim-newspaper-story-818071.html

[bemildred]

1. They are dead now. Been dead for a while. nt

[Doctor_J]

2. The only difference between our "press" and Pravda is

that we have alternative sources, thanks to the internets. Rove should pay for everyone in the US to get subscriptions to NYT, WaPo, NY Post, Chi Trib, LA Times, and every other right-wing rag. None of them print or air anything but White House propaganda. It should come as no surprise that no one wants to read them, let alone pay for them

[Prophet 451]

3. And no-one believed Pravda n/t