I sent out a newsletter yesterday about the effect of declining newspaper circulation on trade promotion. Concurrently, the latest circulation numbers were released.
To say they're abysmal is to be kind.
The SF Chronicle dropped 80,000. The LA Times dropped another 3.8% (on top of previous catastrophic falls). To be fair, the newspaper industry is saying that the horrible results are the result of cleaning up some of their past practices -- three of the top twenty papers didn't report this period because they're in the middle of investigations into past circulation frauds -- and that some of the circulation loss is just readers moving from the print editions to the newspapers' own websites.
Some truth in this, no doubt.
My main point in the newsletter was about newspapers becoming a targeted rather than mass medium. A Miami Herald editor supported that argument in Editor & Publisher: "Newspapers will become supplemental reading for a very elite audience," he added, and the online edition "will be where the popular press lives."
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