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Sunday, November 06, 2005
Semiannual FAS-FAX Report
The Bad News in Black and White
By Joseph T. Hallinan
Source: Wall Street JournalThe Fourth Estate is braced to get more bad news about itself next week.
On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases its semiannual figures on circulation -- and they are expected to show that paying readers continue to disappear at an alarming rate during the latest six-month period.
Challenged by online rivals, a dearth of younger readers and an advertising downturn, newspapers are suffering through their worst slump in years. The last ABC figures, which were released in May, were the worst for the industry in nine years, showing that average daily circulation had dropped 1.9% in the six months ended March 31 from a year ago.
Indications from the biggest newspaper publishers show many expect similar plunges for the six months ended in September.
Gannett Co., the nation's No. 1 publisher with about 100 papers, says its daily circulation through Sept. 25, including its publications in the United Kingdom, was down 2.5% over year-ago levels. At No. 2 Knight Ridder Inc. -- whose largest shareholder has called for the sale of the company -- the daily drop was 2.9%.
Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others, says its circulation as reported to ABC will be down around 4%. That estimate excludes figures for Newsday, of Long Island, N.Y., which has been censured by the ABC following a scandal in which it -- along with several other newspapers -- admitted artificially boosting circulation results. By mutual agreement, its circulation won't be released on Nov. 7.
Not all chains are expected to report such big drops. Sacramento-based McClatchy Co. says daily circulation was down 0.7% as of September, to just under 1.4 million copies. But it also expects circulation for the full year to fall around 1% -- ending 20 consecutive years of circulation growth.
The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., expects circulation to be up slightly, because of increases in online readership. ABC in recent years has allowed the inclusion of certain online readers in circulation figures.
In all, there are about 1,500 daily papers in the U.S. The ABC numbers cover nearly 900 of them. Since some of the papers will be reporting under new rules this period, an apples-to-apples comparison to previous numbers may be difficult in some cases.
The growing worry in the industry is the numbers reflect not just a slump, or a simple extension of a long-term decline in readers, but a more tectonic shift in habits. More Americans clearly are getting their news online; about 30% of adults turned to the Internet for news in 2004, compared with almost none in 1996, according to a poll by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Such figures have newspaper owners scrambling to make sure readers going online get their news from their own sites -- not Yahoo, MSN, or other popular Internet-only sites that have sprung up.
At the same time, some see a shift as an opportunity to win over new readers -- especially the younger ones who don't tend to read papers at all.
"By one measure the newspaper business is facing this crisis," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a think tank that's part of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. "But by another it is also looking at the best opportunity for growth that it's had in two generations."
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Posted by fm on November 06, 2005 at 12:42 AM