Newspaper circulation down, news site usage up
Beware crowing that newspapers are dead. The paper business is dying, for sure, but the news business is alive and getting well.
Today, however, there will be plenty more armchair analysis of the death of newspapers, because the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) The last bastion of the newspaper elite, the Sunday reader who luxuriates in a 300-page opus, has finally begun to give up on paper.announced another half-year worth of the inevitable decline in paper circulation. These kinds of reports are like watching paint dry—you put the paint on the wall and you know it will eventually dry, watching it doesn't accelerate the process. It's the same with the evolution of the news business, which was built in part on squashing tree fibers and smearing it with ink.
The bad news, if it is bad news, is that newspaper circulation declined 2.6 percent during the last six months. The "good" news, if you are particularly interested in mashing trees into pulp, is that the decline in paper circulation is steady compared with six months ago rather than accelerating. Here's the NAA's list of the top papers and their daily circulation. Some of that decline is represented by cutting of copies that used to sit on newsstands going unsold, the really interesting change, from my perspective, is that Sunday circulation is dropping at a fast clip, 3.1 percent overall.
The last bastion of the newspaper elite, the Sunday reader who luxuriates in a 300-page opus, has finally begun to give up on paper.
Sounds bad, but it's actually good. Readers aren't abandoning news, they are going online for it. In September 2005, the NAA reported that 40 million Web users had visited newspaper sites in the previous six months. During the most recent half year, newspaper sites attracted 56 million users. The net is that the Net is winning, and that news organizations are coming around to the fact that online is their future.
Did I say it was all good news? No, there's still relatively little acknowledgment by newspaper companies that the gathering of news and inclusion of readers in the debate about the meaning of news must change more than it has. The paint, however, will eventually dry, and at that time news sites will have a role not very different from newspapers in the physical world.