Circ Slide Accelerates

By: Jennifer Saba Just how far can circulation continue to fall ? and can "total readership" really help right the ship? On April 28, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released the latest six-month circulation data for the period ending March 31, 2008. For most of the 534 dailies filing with the organization, circ fell an average of 3.5%, while some 601 Sunday papers gave up about 4.5% overall, according to ABC. Those numbers represent the worst drop-off in many years.

The reasons should by now be mind-numbingly familiar. Publishers are cutting other-paid, and yanking back discounted copies. They're eliminating those freebie bonus days. They're concentrating on "quality." Why chase those who don't want you, they reason. It's too expensive.

The New York Times, for instance, shed more than 9% (or about 150,000 copies) on Sunday. Spokeswoman Diane McNulty tells E&P the decrease was planned: The Times, she explains, killed bonus days and bulk copies, accounting for about two-thirds of the loss. What's more, the Gray Lady instituted a price increase for its single copies and for subscribers in July. McNulty notes that the Times' circulation revenue was up.

Over in the Big D, The Dallas Morning News cited pretty much the same circumstances to explain a 10.5% decline in daily and 7.6% slide in Sunday. Publisher Jim Moroney says the paper decided against reporting bonus days, even though several were taken.

The paper also continued to cut its third-party circ. The discounted category, which will essentially be a thing of the past when ABC applies new rules by April 2009, was severely cut in Dallas, down about 75% daily and 80% on Sunday. As a result, the paper is seeing improvements in cutting churn, Moroney says.

Some big metros made gains. The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News advanced its daily circulation by 1.6% to 234,772 copies. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer grew its daily more than 1% to 129,563.

Publishers are trying to shy away from paid print circ as the primary metric, and ABC is helping to move the focus to readership stats on not only the print edition but the corresponding Web site with Audience FAX. Comparable numbers won't be available until the September report, but already there are warning signs on the horizon.

Just a few days before ABC released its spring circ numbers, Scarborough Research reported on the reach of the top newspapers and their Web sites in the country's largest 81 designated market areas (DMAs).

E&P looked at 20 markets of varying sizes and found that for the most part, when taking weekly print and online readership into account, newspapers are still losing share. By comparing the Scarborough data in 2008 with the same report in 2007, most papers lost reach. For example, The Fresno Bee's integrated reach ? the percentage of adults who have read the newspaper's print edition or visited the Web site (or did both) during the past seven days ? fell to 49% in 2008 from 55% in 2007. This happened even though the Bee increased its online reach by two percentage points.

So what's happening? According to Scarborough Research's Senior Vice President of Print and Digital Media Services Gary Meo, "Online readership is growing, but the declines in print are not being offset by the increases in online readership. The integrated newspaper audience is declining."

Meo is quick to point out that Scarborough only measures the core print and Web site; when all of a newspaper's products are taken into consideration, it could bump up the market reach. "If newspapers are not investing in their Web sites," Meo says, "then their overall declines would be worse."