Yesterday, the latest newspaper circulation figures were released. The Chronicle suffered a 3.9% decline in daily readership.
Today, the Chronicle put its spin on the decline, in a story in the business section:
“We anticipated some decline of home-based subscriptions because of overdue accounts,” said Jack Sweeney, president and publisher of the Chronicle.
“If a subscriber is one day late with a payment over 90 days, they’re eliminated from the paid circulation averages. We were hit harder than usual by late payments this last six-month reporting period, so we’ll be working on improving our collection procedures.”
We’ve heard that carriers are encouraged to continue to throw newspapers even after subscribers cancel, and we suspect somehow it’s connected to Sweeney’s 90-day take. That’s a cynical perspective perhaps, but the entire industry has become pretty cynical about circulation.
To Sweeney’s credit, he does seem to recognize the reach of the Chronicle‘s web operation:
Major newspapers are making huge strides online, Sweeney said, with chron.com averaging nearly 50 million page views and 3.8 million unique visitors each month.
“Our online sites are free and our print products are paid, so, in a sense, we compete with ourselves,” he said. “It has affected our paid numbers somewhat, but the total audience for the Chronicle’s news and information continues to grow, and that’s what our advertising customers like to see.”
At some point, one suspects the print edition may well be eclipsed by a web edition that’s more timely and more local. We hope that’s the case, anyway. The challenge for the web crew — for all web editorial operations really — will be to match the heavy traffic with relevant, revenue-generating advertising.
UPDATE (05-04-2005): A reader emails me that rules changes by the Audit Bureau of Circulations were significant enough that comparing the circulation figures with the last measuring period may well be akin to comparing apples and oranges, and that the next period may give us a better set of numbers for comparison.
UPDATE 2 (05-04-2005): The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article on the circulation declines in the industry.
