Category Archives: circulation

Press Gazette: Tabloid editor: kiss and tells are not worth the effort

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"Press Gazette has seen unofficial industry estimates for the following NoW splash stories: "Crouch Beds £800 teen hooker" (8/8/10), "Cheating Roo beds hooker" (5/9/10), "Toon star's cocaine and sex orgy" (7/11/10), "Matt's a cheating sex addict (24/11/10) and "I bedded Roo's Man U team mate" (27/4/11). According to the estimates, "Cheating Roo beds hooker" - the story about Wayne Rooney cheating on his pregnant wife with a prostitute in a hotel room - was the only story to achieve a substantial week-on-week sales uplift. The other editions were either flat or slightly down week on week."

Press Gazette: Press and Journal editor slams journalism degree courses

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"Derek Tucker, the outgoing editor of Aberdeen’s Press and Journal ... said his paper had not 'sold its soul to make an all singing all dancing website' and instead adopted a strategy against the industry norm by imposing strict limits on the amount of content uploaded to its website. ... He said “remaining Jurassic” about the internet had served his paper well as it had managed to avoid the large drop in circulation being suffered elsewhere in the regional press."

Reuters: Newspaper paywall datapoint of the day

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Felix Salmon: "The fact is that insofar as printed newspapers compete with the web, they compete with everything on the web, not just their own sites. No general-interest publication can prevent its print circulation from declining simply by walling itself off from the web. Which is why the NYT paywall is so silly: millions of dollars in development costs, and enormous amounts of important management time, devoted to something which will probably end up grossing no more than $20 million or so a year. That compares to $78.3 million in internet advertising revenues in the last quarter alone."

open Democracy: Journalism’s many crises

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Todd Gitlin: "Four wolves have arrived at the door of American journalism simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial - so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis - is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business. "

WSJ.com: Some Newspapers Shed Unprofitable Readers

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"But the reality is in some ways less bleak than the latest [circulation] numbers indicate: Some newspapers have raised newsstand prices, curtailed discounted copies and halted delivery to the least profitable customers. Also, while print circulation has been declining for years as readers continue their mass migration to the Web, many publishers point out they are reaching more readers than before through print and online."

Observer: Are papers in freefall? Not if they innovate

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Peter Preston: "Sometimes, amid encircling gloom, it's wise to set benchmarks longer than a week last Friday. Always, there are choices to be made - or not made. And usually (perhaps, maybe) innovation is its own reward. A Times drop of under 20,000 in five years isn't systemic collapse. A Guardian surge online that brings in more than 23 million unique users a month on top of a million-plus print readers isn't carnage."