Apr 27 2009
Newspapers failing to live up to the value proposition
Circulation numbers for America’s newspapers came out today, and the news was mostly bad — down 7 percent nationwide over last March. The news was better or worse depending on which newspapers you pick out of the report, but no surprise, USA Today was down by 7.4 percent thanks to a decline in copies distributed by hotels. The Wall Street Journal was the only paper in the top 20 to increase, though the 0.61 percent rise is basically a rounding error.
Now we’ve been hearing about the decline of newspapers for a few years now, based on the observation that people feel sufficiently informed from their daily Web crawls that they don’t need a newspaper. There is some truth to that, though it’s an easy generalization to make. Another easy claim to make is that people get “the newspaper” free on the Internet, compared to paying for the paper product. But the newsstand price never generated enough money to do more than defray the cost of moving it off the end of the printing press and into stores and onto people’s porches.
No, the problem is advertising, which has always paid the bills. There just isn’t any way for the average newspaper to create advertising on their websites that is price-equivalent to the ads they sell in print. The Web equivalent of a full broadsheet page ad would have to be something that pre-empts the site’s content, like an interstitial — those are the ones that pop up in place of the story you just clicked on and make you wait, unless you click them off. Lots of people click them off, however, while a full-page ad in a newspaper practically dares you to ignore it while you’re reading a story on the opposite page.
So even with all things equal, Web advertising has to lag behind that of the paper product. Unfortunately, as readership creeps away from the dead-tree edition, advertisers have had to reevaluate whether they’re getting value for money from the newspaper relationship. And they’re discovering they can do without the newspaper, or at least they can do with fewer ads in the local paper.
Combine an already established business decline with an economic recession and you’ve got shrinking newspapers struggling to stay alive. Of course, the struggle is more pronounced if the newspaper is part of a chain that’s sinking under 10 figures’ worth of debt, which is the case for nearly all the top newspaper companies in the U.S. Whether it’s the New York Times building itself a skyscraper in the world’s most expensive real estate market 10 minutes before banks started collapsing, Sam Zell’s ridiculous (and failed) play for Tribune that was essentially paid for by the chain’s employees, McClatchy’s even stupider play for Knight Ridder or Lee Enterprises’ indigestion after swallowing Pulitzer, we’re talking hundreds of newspaper struggling even worse than they might if they were owned by companies satisfied with the money that can be made in a near-monopoly for advertising in their local markets.
So yeah, the same greed that brought down real estate and banking is a major factor in the decline of newspapers. And the big thinkers in the news business — you know, the ones who paid no attention to the Internet at first, then made filling the website with free content Job #1 — are now grumbling about being trumped by aggregators from Google News to Drudge and Huffington Post, while trying to come up with ways to charge for their content without pissing anybody off. They’re getting louder and more insistent about how they’re the only source for news in their community, while at the same time laying off the people who are reporting, editing and publishing that news for them.
As a longtime newspaper reader, I’m savvy enough to notice when I’m being played. Just where I live, there’s a local daily newspaper (circulation well under 25,000 a day) within a half-hour’s drive of a major metro newspaper (circulation over 100,000). Ten years ago, that little local paper was four sections most days of the week and eight on Sundays, not including comics, magazine supplement, TV book and ad inserts. The metro was always four sections through the week, sometimes five or six, and upwards of 10 sections on Sunday.
Today the local paper is lucky to be three sections during the week, six on Sunday, and the metro paper is four or less during the week and eight on Sunday, counting two sections of classified ads. And those sections have way fewer pages in both papers. But their owners keep increasing the price and reducing the content. I’ve discovered that I’m actually less well read now that I read fewer newspapers and more Web news, because in a newspaper you have the kismet of paging past stuff you weren’t actually looking for and getting sucked in by a science, business or sports story you might not otherwise have read if you were just clicking on links to get what you’re actually looking for.
But today’s skimpier newspapers aren’t going to give me that either, because they’ve cut back so much they’re lucky to get the most important news in, especially when they’re busy cramming in excessively large features on the new season of “American Idol” or putting in stories “inspired” by the local chamber of commerce on how now’s a good time to buy a new car or house.
Oh, and for those of you who claim newspapers are stumbling because they’re “too liberal”: Leaving aside the fact that anybody who thinks the majority of American newspapers are liberal is nuts, the newspaper that lost the most circulation by far is the New York Post, down 20 percent year over year. The Post, as most people know, is owned by News Corp., the same fair and balanced folks who bring us Fox News Channel, and the Post is the paper version of FNC, as evidenced by their big story “Obama’s 100 Mistakes in 100 Days,” tallied by the likes of Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, and other right-wing narcissists. I especially like the Post’s identification of Obama as “Bam,” apparently Rupert Murdoch is rationing vowels so he won’t have to lay off any of the geniuses who compiled the above feature. And don’t forget, the Post is such a sinkhole of fail by normal business standards that the next dollar that paper makes will be the first in the two decades of News Corp. ownership.
