A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades

The Virginian ^ | 10/29/2009 | Moneyrunner

[moneyrunner]

This made my day (oh and the DJIA was up 199.89). But the Dow will go down again, the trend in newspaper readership is delightfully steady. Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that's no way to look at data! It's confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation. (We excluded USA Today, because we don't care about it. If you're in a hotel? You're reading it now. That's nice.

[WhoisAlanGreenspan?]

Speaks for itself doesn't it?

I spent some time this morning explaining why we want to cancel all yellowpages advertising with AT&T. Times are changing and we watch our dollars spent on advertising very closely. It's the most expensive and yields poor results.
We sell all over the country. People have driven many miles to find us. Yet when I need to find the phone number of a business across the street or across town, my online search never deals with AT&T either. I usually find it in the first or second result, AT&T's aren't in the first few pages online.

We know there is a small number of people who find things the old fashioned way in the printed yellow pages. It's not even a dozen customers a month. The cost just doesn't justify the expense.

[M1911A1]

The Seattle Times just sent me a letter begging for a subscription. I tossed it, but I’m thinking I should have sent it back with a note -

“How’s that Hopey Changey thing you liberal dolts endorsed working out for you? Go beg from your master, not me.”

If somebody started a newspaper that was just sports and comics, I’d fork out for that.

[sbMKE]

AT&T “autorenewed” a few of my yellow pages ads a couple years back. I followed up and dumped every last ad with extreme prejudice - dozens of them. Haven’t noticed a drop in sales.

Everyone googles. Phone books are great for pressing leaves and nothing else. Newspapers are for puppies.

[Texas Fossil]

Thanks for the great graph.

The problem with newspapers (excluding the WSJ which writes for a special group of readers and creates most of their content internally) is simple. It is not about media (electronic vs print), It is about CONTENT.

When LBO’s took over most of the regional newspapers and were sold the idea that they could purchase content from AP cheaper than they could create it, it was their death warrant. They were sold on the idea that they could cut staff and replace people with canned content and increase profits was a long term lie. They soon found themselves making more profits than ever in the history of the companies, but readership was falling. Now it is in Free-Fall. The content is so bad that the only people who read the papers are those who do it out of habit.

[JerseyHighlander]

Are these the falsified historical ABC circulation numbers or the adjusted numbers?