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Report: Cuts speed newspapers' decline
A pedestrian stops at a newspaper vending rack in San Francisco, Calif.
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Kai Ryssdal: Given the way the circulation numbers read today, nobody would accuse American newspapers of being too big to fail. The Audit Bureau of Circulation says average daily circulation fell 10 percent this spring and summer compared to last. That's not such a surprise. But the pace of decline is accelerating. Marketplace's Jeremy Hobson reports from New York.
JEREMY HOBSON: Since newspaper sales started dropping in the early 90s, publishers have had to do more with less.
Rick Edmonds follows the industry for the Poynter Institute. He says things got especially bad in the last year. The financial crisis forced businesses to pull newspaper advertisements, even if they felt they were still getting a bang for their buck.
RICK EDMONDS: That really puts the heat on to make even further cuts, and my sense is that readers are quite sensitive to changes that seem to reduce quality.
And readers today are more important than ever to newspapers' bottom lines.
Vince Casanova is the senior vice president for Publishing Operations at Tribune Publishing. That's the company that owns the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times. He says subscriptions and newsstand sales now make up a bigger slice of the revenue pie.
VINCE CASANOVA: They're a larger share of the total revenue stream than we had in the past for two reasons. One, we've raised prices; and two, overall advertising revenues are down.
Casanova says Tribune newspapers are focusing diminishing resources on what they think readers want: strong local coverage and good investigative reporting.
But still, who wants to pay twice as much for a paper half as thick?
Media Blogger Dan Kennedy says the Boston Globe is operating with about 60 percent of the news staff it had a decade ago. And yet, he says...
DAN KENNEDY: The Globe recently raised the price of seven-day home delivery to almost $50 a month. We can't afford that.
Kennedy says he's cut back to just Sundays. He reads the rest of the week's editions online for next to nothing.
In New York, I'm Jeremy Hobson for Marketplace.
About the author
Jeremy Hobson is host of Marketplace Morning Report, where he looks at business news from a global perspective to prepare listeners for the day ahead. Follow Jeremy on Twitter @jeremyhobson
What do newspapers and the oldsmobile have in common? The latter is dead and the former is dying! We will, within the next decade or less, see the gradual demise of many newspapers, as an example of a forthcoming extinction, through mergers and acquisitions and closings as people are getting their news from multiple other sources-the laptop and a cup of Java is replacing the paper in-hand and that same cup of Java-better yet with no ink on one's fingers and clothes If I were a newspaper reporter or worked on a printing press, I would start looking for a job related to the many online news channels or consider changing careers. I believe that your MARKETPLACE would be a great venue for discussing an issue (Interview) that keeps bugging me because it is not what it appears to be, and that is this nation's near 10% unemployment and people, though I am very sympathetic, call-in to you with their unemployment woes and for many they may keep calling-in until they realize that they have reached their epiphany moment and unless they either return to school, vocational or academic, they may be without a job-period; or they take a lessor job and even then that job may be temporary. I am a local author, who the has just written a book titled "Entrepreneurial Decision Making," which is supported by my teaching website (www.newventurecoach.org). My position is very clear, most of us will need to reengineer and/or reinvent ourselves to survive in this fast-paced hi-tech marketplace. We have already witnessed the death of many industries by default to foreign competition, relocating offshore, technological advances, outsourcing and changing market demands, to name a few. Thanks, RJ
Marketplace:
Regarding your story about declining newspaper circulation, you left out one important fact - one newspaper has actually increased in circulation.
As reported by the AP (10/26/09):
"As both publications indicated earlier in the month, The Wall Street Journal 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."
But no one is asking why this is happening or what it means for the numerous publications in decline.
One answer is to look at what the publications with shrinking circulation have so much in common.
