More unfortunate news for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as papers across the Country also see drops in their own circulation:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s weekday circulation fell 6.7% for the six months ended March 31, and Sunday circulation fell 6.0%, figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show.
Monday through Friday circulation for the Journal Sentinel averaged 203,240, down from 217,755 for the comparable period a year earlier. Sunday circulation averaged 361,355, down from 384,537.
While circulation numbers for the JS have been dropping for some time, this is the largest percentage drop since I’ve been taking notice. Previous circulation drops had been in the neighborhood of 2%-4%.
In related news, the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild voted last week to approve a 6.6% pay cut for the 191 Journal Sentinel employees it represents in an attempt to cope with the finacial problems of it’s employer and to avoid layoffs of some their coworkers.
There are a lot of theories and ideas out there about how newspapers can cope with declining ciruclation numbers and ad revenue. Even if there are solutions out there, will newspapers be able to implement them in time?
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
Another question is “Will they implement those solutions?” Many, if not all, of these papers have been doing business the same way for so long that I believe their inability to change with the times will be their downfall (amongst other things)
I think the newspapers like the MJS is getting hit in several different fronts. the Internet is taking a lot of readers away, with the poor economy, people are not going to fork over a couple hundred dollars a year for a newspaper subscription and those that buy a single copy, they are not buying them now. Also, with slow business, stores are not advertising as much, so they lose income that way. so you combine lower readership and lower advertisement revenue, the end may be near for the MJS.
There is a perception, real or otherwise, that the MJS is a liberal newspaper and it will always have that perception and so, conservatives just are not going to buy a cpy that they see as biased when there are so many other sources of news.
Why the decline in newspaper circulation? Here’s my opinion:
1) The Internet enables you to get real time news, a newspaper can only give you the news that occured before the edition went to print.
2) 24 hour cable news: FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc., etc. gives you current news plus live high-speed auto chases, police stand-offs and plane crashes.
3) Many business advertise on the Internet or have their own web sites. Shop on line, you can even download saving coupons.
4) The Journal has been downsized (literally) yet has increased its price 50%. Other newspapers have also raised prices but give you thinner, smaller editions.
Just this morning I was thinking how nice it is to have dropped the newspaper subscription. No more need to get up early and put on clothes and run outside into the rain to (hopefully!) grab the paper in the narrow window between delivery and theft! (They say no one reads newspapers anymore, but they do evidently steal them!) No more having the paper I paid for missing most days. Once delivery got to be later than the time I leave for work (which is after 7:30, not especially early, hours and hours after the delivery time in the old days), I gave up on it. I can’t believe I didn’t sooner. The hassle of newspaper (non)delivery is just such an aggravation. Not to mention the vending machines, which are often not stocked with the current paper, and only accept coins after numerous cycles of inserting the coins and hitting the coin return and re-inserting them until it is happy. The jsonline website may suck, but I have a laptop now and can read it in the kitchen over breakfast, and there is just no way I’m going to put up with the aggravation of trying to get the paper anymore.
The big issue, if you pardon the pun, is ad revenue. The funding that has underwritten most of the newspapers has come from advertising, either directly on the pages or via classifieds.
eBay is eating the classified ad revenue, as is Craigslist and the rest. So that’s declining.
For direct page ads, Internet ad rates are much lower than print ad rates. CPM’s for online ads can be twenty-five cents or possibly less. That’s the full ad, though small, for a quarter per thousand circulation. That keeps the newspaper ad rates low, and if they raise print ad rates to compensate, they lose more.
I think in some ways we’re seeing an application of Gresham’s law to the news industry. People are willing to get their news for free from second sources, which in turn hurts the primary sources. Specifically, people won’t pay the JS for news, because they can read about it for free, not noticing that their “free” sources are quite often getting the news from the JS or similar for-pay outlets. The “bad” (in gresham’s terminology) sources drive out the good. It’s already been happening in terms of fact-checking; today’s newspapers for the most part aren’t any more careful of facts than the average blogger.
Newsmakers themselves want to control the sppin, so they put their own stories out on the net for free, so if the newspapers sell a carefully-considered analysis, they’re still not going to sell many.
If I knew the answer, I’d make a few million on it, but one answer could be in design as several former eastern bloc newspapers have been discovering. A more appealing newspaper might increase circulation. Also, a stronger focus on local news would take them out of competition with the CNNs of the web, so that might help. Still, this doesn’t address the fundamental problem — that netizens think everything should be free, and get upset when it isn’t.
The most unfortunate thing about the impending loss of the Journal will be the lack of third party oversight of the government. While the Journal’s selection of investigative targets was often biased, or myopic, they do have the resources needed to truly uncover government misdeeds in the face of stonewalling. I suspect that we will all be the worse for the Journal’s financial weakness, especially as the size of the government is growing dramatically.