At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld digs into the catastrophic newspaper numbers. Every six month increment for (weekday) newspaper circulation has gotten worse than the one before it. The latest: a 10.6 percent plunge from the year-earlier six-month period. The previous three ABC reports: weekday declines of 7.1 percent, 4.6 percent, and 3.5 percent.
Meantime, Alan Mutter calculates that newspaper circulation is now below WWII levels (when population levels were less than half what they are now). Up next: Crimea, War of the Roses, and then on to the Peloponnesian War.
— BusinessWeek asks “Can Main Street Catch Up to Wall Street?” The answer to that, as always, is no.
— The New York Times catches up with Neel Kashkari, the young Goldmanite who ran the TARP bailout under the old Goldmanite Hank Paulson. He’s retreated to a monastic-sounding-but-probably-not life chopping wood at his secluded California mountain cabin. With the benefit of distance, he says Wall Streeters are not “patriots” and that they’re full of “bull” in saying they didn’t need the bailouts. (h/t Heidi Moore and Dealbreaker)
With all due respect to apocalpyses catastrophic and otherwise, what are you talking about? I'm intrigued by the fashion in which newspaper doomsayers manage to twist and shout and have it both ways apocalpytic. When newspapers fail to give a smothering embrace to the internet, they are portrayed as mastodons, stegasorii waddling toward the tar pits. And when they do embrace it, the same DSayers rummage through their roll-up desks and pull out the old corporeal measuring sticks and pronouce: Y'all still doomed! So Mutter calculates that newspaper circ has hit WW 2 levels, with 30_Years War levels to follow. And even the frequently sane and incisive Chittum intones about "catastrophic numbers"
But the whole end of the world thing turns to sand upon close examination. Most papers, not the least the one I work for (the NYTimes), and many many others have never, ever, had more readers. It's just that these readers come to us via the highways of the world wide web, as the Mutters of the world are forever applauding in a different context.
I don't mind an argument that says we're screwed because we can't figure out how to capitalize upon those web readers. Or even that we're screwed because we won't erect some elementary pay walls. But the mid-20th century measuring sticks are so 20th century in their ignorance.
#1 Posted by Michael Powell, CJR on Tue 27 Oct 2009 at 12:04 PM
Hi, Michael,
I think we've all figured out by now that the metro newspaper can't make a go of it on the Web only with anywhere near the size newsrooms we've been accustomed to. If your only profitable business is disappearing at a double-digit clip that creates a negative-feedback loop with the already-worse advertising numbers.
Re charging online, I'm in that camp—if only as an immediate emergency measure to try to stem print-circ declines. I wrote this a few hours before this post about the WSJ being the only one to charge and the only one in the top 25 to increase circ.
But despite all the noise in the last six months, nobody's doing much there. It's hard to turn a big ship around. It's even harder when it's taken on this much water. For many, perhaps most, newspapers, there's not much left to charge for.
I think most of us know papers have more readers than ever. Nobody knows how to monetize them, though, in part because those readers spend so little time with the paper. But time spent per month and unique visitors aren't increasing much anymore online.
The caveat here is that papers are intentionally cutting their unprofitable circulation. That's good. But we just don't know how much of the huge circulation decline is from that and how much is from readers just giving up the paper because it's thin as Kate Moss (your NYT is one of the very few exceptions) or because they can read it free online or whatever. The newspapers have been saying that for years now. The problem is, because of the ad decline (much or most of which is not coming back), more and more of it keeps becoming unprofitable circulation.
#2 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 27 Oct 2009 at 12:59 PM
The NYT gets, I gather, about 20 million views per month. Let's say one million of those read the paper fairly seriously several times a week. That gives the NYT an effective circulation--by the old/new metric of 1.8 million. Not bad, and consistent with my notion that more people are reading papers than before.
This is not to argue that the corporeal paper is not vastly important; it is. But the losses in circulation at many of these papers owe clearly to the migration to the web. As is clear if you wander through a dorm, plenty of students still read the paper, but few pay for the pleasure (Nor should they, as we've encouraged the notion that quality comes at no cost). But I'd still argue that the doomsayers, including yourself in this instance, misapprehend the problem, which in some vaguely encouraging way, is perhaps less dire than it appears.
#3 Posted by Michael Powell, CJR on Wed 28 Oct 2009 at 03:35 PM