Newspaper Audience - 2006 Annual Report

Part, but only part, of the story is a shift to online news reading, often at a newspaper’s own site. How much that is a factor probably varies, but it may be significant. The NAA estimated that online newspaper readership was up 15.8% in September 2005 compared with September 2004, reaching 47.3 million unique visitors (a total probably helped by interest in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita).12 Surveys about online consumption also suggest that those who visit newspaper Web sites spend less time with the print product. And privately, executives report that some major newspapers’ Web sites now attract as many users in a day as they sell papers. To the extent that newspapers are losing readers to their own Web sites, the issue becomes one of whether they can begin to change the economic model of the Web.

But there is a wealth of other online news options, especially for readers mainly interested in national and international news. They can turn to the sites of national newspapers, to those of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, listen to NPR or even watch Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. That may explain why bigger papers that try to offer a comprehensive national report rather than just local news are now suffering more. More broadly, newspapers compete for time with a range of Internet activity — shopping, searching, blogging, iPod, games and e-mail.

On stories like Katrina, cable TV kicks into high gear as a competitor (see Cable TV Audience). Niche competition like youth weeklies, or the free commuter dailies that are aggressively hawked at transit stations, whittle further on circulation.

Another factor, well understood in the industry but not much discussed, is a steady switch from seven-day subscribers to occasional buyers. The most frequent pattern is that readers, except sports fans on Mondays, skip the first busy days of the working week, then pick back up for the weekend cycle.13 The stronger online sites become, the more appealing that consumption pattern is; for the semi-regular reader, a check to see that he or she is not missing big local news on a given day is free and only a click away. (At the instigation of its advertiser members, the ABC is phasing in required reporting by each day of the week — allowing advertisers to see just how many fewer papers go out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.)

Finally, there are some technical reasons for the recent declines. The ABC tightened its rule on how many holidays and bad-weather days a year could be exempted from accounting. The rules on “other” circulation have also tightened, and a number of companies are voluntarily trimming such circulation.

The federal do-not-call rule that was phased in during 2004 and 2005 has also had an impact on phone solicitation, which had been the No. 1 source of new subscription sales. Consequently, it has become more expensive to recruit new subscribers. Many newspapers have opted to take the hit rather than invest in different approaches to attract readers.