In reading the online version of the Flint Journal and the article it wrote about its own buyouts there was a link to its own information site.
On that site the Journal posed its daily circulation and daily readership numbers (daily circ: 83,813 and daily readership: 174,620). Sunday circulation was posted at 101,590 with a readership of 227,679. These numbers are quoted as from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (December 2004; and Scarborough Research 2005)
The 2008 numbers, available at the website for ABC are much lower. The daily readership numbers as of September 2008 stood at 73,018, more than 10,000 down from just three years ago. The Sunday circulation numbers for 2008 are even worse. Sunday is now 88,897, or down more than 12,000.
Current readership is harder to quantify, but if you are into numbers and comparative numbers for dead tree and online readership go to the Scarborough Research site or specifically the following pages on the Scarborough site:
http://www.scarborough.com/press_releases/SNARR%20FINAL%20A%204.30.08.pdf
Before you scroll down to the Saginaw/Bay City/Flint pages (28, btw), make sure you read and understand the methodology used for the various numbers which is given near the front of the pdf you will be reading. For all the Booth employees in the other cities there are comparable graphs in the report. I'm going to put those together for a later post.
It is clear that MLive is not providing the online numbers of many other markets (shock!) and the newspaper's general readership is below many large newspaper markets, both online and dead tree.
The numbers are interesting to those of us who would like to see newspapers survive. A corporate strategy that promises to shrink readership and reduce quality and quantity seems like the old medical strategy of bleeding a sick person to get them well.
For the few posters angry with me for writing this stuff, please remember the old newspaper adage: "Don't kill the messenger."
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10 comments:
Hmmm... Let's see.
Stay an afternoon paper at least ten years after we should have switched to all mornings.
Keep chasing that "backwards cap wearing" non reader (and if "he does read the paper he doesn't pay full price for it, if he pays anything at all..) and piss off or bore the older subscribers that pay full price for the paper.
Keep goofing with the TV guide!
Raise the price of the paper and then give the reader less things to actually read in it..
And those GD NRA Bags!
tennis shoes and backward hats ...
rofl.
i had forgotten that line! We were to chase new readers dressed like that ... but reporters couldn't dress like that!
meanwhile, we cheesed off the people who put the bacon in the pan.
Jim keep informing...Good work!
no doubt. we should have gone to mornings. thankfully, i was never subjected to the backwards hat rule.
You are quite wrong in your interpretation of Scarborough.
Fact: circulation is down; sunday is now below 100K. However, compared to the national average for circulation loss, the Journal has performed better than average.
Fact: readership only makes sense as a percentage, the true measure of audience captured. If your market is losing people at roughly the same rate of lost circ, your readership is not really affected. Also, if you walk away from circ outside your market area (Genesee county), your circ will go down but readership, again, will be unaffected. At the end of 07, the journal had the best readership for a daily of any paper in the US, and was 3rd for Sundays.
Fact: while readership has declined in the last 4 years or so, it is not a significant loss and is much lower than the national trend.
Fact: if you count Mlive, there are more readers than ever.
OK, anonymous, but my understanding is that advertisers pay on the subscription rate. Of course, I could be wrong.
Lower subscriptions, lower ad revenues. From what I was told while I was there, the revenue stream from the online advertising does not come to the individual papers. Again, that may have changed.
When I looked at Scarborogh I compared market share in the Flint market with those of other markets and it appears that the coverage percentage of the Flint/Bay City/Saginaw area is slightly below average compared to other markets.
Wow. So if the poster's righteous defense of the Scarborough research is correct, the Journal isn't bleeding quite as badly as other newspapers. In fact, it seems to be a pretty popular paper.
OK then, so why have most of the reporters and copy editors been fired? And why can't the Journal sell ads for this very popular paper?
Dear Oakland:
I know it feels like a firing, but in actuality it is not.
People are being offered options, none of them very good. But technically they can stay with the chain, but are not guaranteed where they will end up or what they will end up doing.
I guess it is possible that a reporter in Flint could find a job as a custodian in Kalamazoo if there was no other job.
As one who took the buyout option, I have to be honest and say that it was not a firing.
But other than that, your point is well taken. If the research is so good, why are things so bad.
I'm the anonymous Scarborough poster.
First, coverage area. Understand that those numbers are for the DMA, which would be Flint, Bay City, and Saginaw (basically a big chunk of central/eastern michigan). However, that's like a really generic approach and it comes from evaluating markets without really looking at the papers and what they consider their market area. Obviously if you average areas of very low penetration (like Frankenmuth, say) with very high ones, you're dragging down the whole picture.
For the Journal, the market area is considered to be GENESEE COUNTY only. By that measure, my statements stand -- but I'm only talking about READERSHIP, which doesn't even care if you purchased it or not! Let me give you an example.
Let's say there are 400,000 adults in Genesee County, and 200,000 of them read the paper (which is actually probably the equivalent of roughly 100,000 subscriptions; generally there are 2 readers per HH) = 50% readership.
Now let's say, 5 years later, there are 350,000 adults in Genesee County and 175,000 of them read the paper (87,500 subscriptions or so) = 50% readership.
You see? You've just lost 12,500 subscriptions, but your readership has remained unchanged.
Think of it as more like a "loyalty" measure.
So you're right, circ is down, ad revenues are down. 100K is the magic Sunday number by which advertisers begin considering you differently (big market vs. small market). People like Kohl's and JC Penney begin changing their spend. The Journal just dipped below 100K for the first time this year. THAT is a big deal for ad revenues. Ad sales are generally down because advertisers don't have any money (a la financial meltdown). Word on the street is that some auto dealers are going off contract because they are so uncertain about their financial future. And auto is like... the mainstay of the Journal.
As for why Flint isn't hemorrhaging readers: Flint is a very homogeneous market. On average, it's older and less educated than the rest of America (sound like an auto worker?). I would argue that's the biggest reason readership is relatively flat. These people grew up with the paper and will always embrace it in paper form. As Flint's loyal readers die off or leave the area, the Journal is not picking up the Gen Xers, or anyone else under 40 really.
So all I'm saying is that your points are valid, and so are mine. They can coexist without contradiction.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
Thanks for the very good lesson. I think I actually get it now. I appreciate you coming back with it.
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