Editor & Publisher has a story about a Prudential Equity Group study on newspaper circulation that found that circulation is declining:
The Prudential Equity Group issued a biting 72-page report this morning on the state of circulation and found that both quality and quantity continue to decline.
Among other findings, the report said that “other paid” circulation was up 34% in the last reporting period, which it labled “troubling.”
[snip]
The Prudential report found that total average daily circulation across the 50 papers was down 0.7%. […] Though the overall drop seems slight, the firm looked at other aspects of circulation, mainly full-paid home delivery and full-paid single-copy sales, and found the declines to be more dramatic, at 2.5% and 6.8% respectively.
The Chronicle was rated and it didn’t fare so well:
The report found the Boston Globe and the Denver Post racked up the most (negative) points with a CQ score of 7. The Houston Chronicle and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News followed with 6.
At the other end of the quality scale, scoring an explemary 1 point, were: USA Today, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., the Contra Costa Times in Richmond, Calif., the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, and The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel.
The Chronicle has previously received recognition for circulation “freebies.”
And how was the study constructed?
The report ranks the papers from worst to best based on quality circulation, defined as “consumers seeking and paying for the paper.” Low-quality circulation is defined as “copies not paid for by the individual recipient … the reader is most likely less engaged in the newspaper.”
The firm used 10 criteria to create a “circulation quality screener” to measure and score the papers. Some of the criteria include: Decline in total average paid circulation; decline of 5% or greater in full-paid home delivery; full-paid single copies have declined 10% or more; discounted copies represent 5% or more of total circulation and have increased 5% or more; other-paid circulation represents more than 10% of total circulation; and 10 or more days were omitted from daily circulation averages.
A paper received a point for every one of the ten criteria it qualified for. The more points, the more troubling the circulation trend, in Prudential’s view.
Some of us would say that in the Chronicle‘s case, a troubling circulation trend is not terribly surprising.
