AJC, other newspapers continue readership decline
As if we needed more evidence that daily newspapers are not a growth industry, Editor & Publisher has released more grim statistics. Of the nation’s 25 largest daily newspapers, virtually all of them saw a decline in paid circulation. The only papers to escape a downturn in weekday circ were the two biggest, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, which basically remained static. But c’mon, when is the last time anyone can remember actually buying a USA Today? If it weren’t for hotels and airports, this newspaper wouldn’t exist.
The biggest drop was experienced by the Dallas Morning News, whose weekday circ fell a breath-taking 10.6 percent. Ouch. The next-biggest decline was by our very own Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose Monday-Friday circulation tumbled by 8.5 percent – to about 327,000 – followed by the Boston Globe, Newark’s Star Ledger and so on. The average drop looked to be somewhere around 4.5 percent.
It also seems that the AJC’s ranking among big-city newspapers slipped a couple of notches. Now the nation’s 18th-largest paper by circulation, it has fallen behind both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Cleveland Plain Dealer since last year. We mention this merely as trivia; only in New York, Chicago and a very few other cities with competing dailies do relative rankings have meaning.
E&P also helpfully lists Sunday circ numbers, and they are even more deflating. The ad-filled Sunday edition is the bread and butter for most newspapers, so this news is especially alarming. The Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News – a combined Sunday edition of the city’s two big dailies – tumbled a stunning 14.8 percent, while Newark readers tuned out to the tune of 12.3 percent. The only major dailies to see small increases in Sunday sales were the St. Petersburg Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The AJC fared slightly better than most, losing only 5 percent of its Sunday circulation since last year, which dropped it just under 5 million copies. This has to be viewed as good news at the AJC, which had seen much-steeper declines in previous months. Even now, AJC staffers and pollsters are feverishly working on what the company calls “AJC 2.0” – a near-complete overhaul of the Sunday paper that may be unveiled before the end of the year. AJC editor Julia Wallace personally told CL last year that the Sunday paper would likely shrink in size.
The AJC ran an article over the weekend about the new stats, reminding readers that the size of the falloff was partly due to the paper’s decision to shrink its circulation zone in an effort to cut costs. But the headline smacked of Soviet-style spin: “AJC boosts print/online audience.” Polling has shown that, for reasons beyond our ken, AJC.com enjoys one of the healthier readerships among daily newspaper websites. But as any media consultant will tell you, online readers don’t pay the bills.
What does all of this mean for CL and other alternative weekly newspapers? Sorry for the cop-out, but it’s tough to say. One of the reasons for the decline in paid newspaper readership is that, with the ascendancy of the Internet, people have come to view media as something that should be free. But consumption of the printed word – free or otherwise – is slowly declining as well, which doesn’t bode well for newspapers in general.