By: E&P Staff The FAS-FAX released today shows paid circulation at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution falling about 9 percent for the six months ending in September.
The paper points out that it shrunk its sales territory, but its online audience soared. The AJC's total online and print audience has surpassed 50 percent of the market, the FAS-FAX also showed Monday.
An excerpt from an article in the paper follows.
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Robert Eickhoff, the AJC's senior vice president of operations, said the circulation decline was expected. The newspaper on April 1 cut its distribution to areas where delivery wasn't cost effective so that the AJC now delivers to 73 counties centered on metro Atlanta. The paper has also pulled back on bonus circulation and stopped offering "heavy discounts."
"We've chosen that path because it is our advertisers that have told us what is most important to them," Eickhoff said.
Adjusting for those planned cutbacks, the newspaper's circulation was down about 4 percent to 5 percent, Eickhoff said.
Eickhoff said the AJC is focusing more on home delivery and single-copy sales. He acknowledged that some readers are leaving the newspaper as media sources proliferate.
Despite the print decline, the AJC's total audience is growing fast, said Hyde Post, vice president of the AJC's Internet unit. AJC.com reached a record of 100 million monthly page views in August and is on pace to reach 1 billion annual page views by November's end. Ad revenue also is growing rapidly, Post said.
"I think we're fortunate to have an audience online that increasingly looks to the AJC as a breaking news resource as well as, increasingly, a resource for other needs they have in life," Post said.
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