How healthy are community papers? The sudden death of the Eagle Times

A scenic ride along the Connecticut River valley from my abode near Brattleboro, Vt., on the New Hampshire side of the valley, is the city of Claremont — a typical New England mill town with a population of 13,000, a regional hospital, a state college branch, a relatively sound local economy (unemployment rate of 6.0 percent), and until last Friday, a local daily newspaper with a circulation of about 7,800, the Eagle Times.

But on Thursday, Eagle Times owner and publisher Harvey Hill threw in the towel, after subsidizing losses in his operations to the tune of “seven figures”. He gathered his employees and announced that Eagle Publications was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (some were told by e-mail), that Friday’s edition of the paper would be its last, and that the company’s three weekly publications would not publish any more issues. Chapter 7 means the company is heading for liquidation, not reorganization. (Note: links to the newspaper’s web site may not last much longer.)

Locally, the big concern is what will move into the void. At least one entrepreneur has a plan. But more broadly, the big question is what the Claremont situation portends for small “community” newspapers — both weeklies and dailies — across the country. The conventional wisdom has been that it’s primarily the big metropolitan newspapers that are in trouble; that papers in smaller markets remain profitable, if less so than in the past.

An Inland Press Association study cited by Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, in several recent posts suggests that papers under 15,000 in circulation have seen revenue grow slightly from 2004 to 2008, while suffering a 64.8% drop in profits. But the study is based on data from only 120 newspapers of all sizes, and may not have a representative sample of papers in any particular size group.

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Ruminations on newspapers and communities

My friend Richard Floyd keeps a blog called Retired Pastor Ruminates. He is a fellow member of the Monday Evening Club of Pittsfield, Mass., to which I presented a paper, previously mentioned here, on the future of newspapers.

Floyd has now conducted and posted an e-mail interview following up on the paper, in which he pursues, and I attempt to answer, a line of inquiry relating to the function of newspapers in holding together communities, and whether the decline of newspapers will have an effect on the well-being of communities.

The Boston Globe drama: what's next?

In the high-stakes poker game to at least erase the Boston Globe’s reported $85 million annual operating loss and get to breakeven, it looks like management has won the first few hands. Following deals with several other unions, the Globe and the Newspaper Guild reached a settlement in the wee hours this morning. All of the deals need to be ratified, but assuming that happens, what’s next?

The employee concessions so far will only bring the deficit down to $65 million, which leaves a long way to go. Presumably, the restructured union contracts will provide management the flexibility it needs to pursue strategies that not only close the gap, but reshape the business into a news enterprise ready for a new age.

Here are some thoughts on what else might be coming down the pike for the Globe of tomorrow to survive and be profitable:

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Online newspaper audience growth: Good news? Not really.

The Newspaper Association of America trumpeted the release of first-quarter online audience data last week with this headline: “Newspaper Web Site Audience Increases More Than Ten Percent In First Quarter To 73.3 Million Visitors,” followed by the glowing subhead: “Newspaper Web Sites Set Records for Audience, Page Views and Active Reach; Latest Scarborough Research: Newspapers Attract Key Demographics in Print and Online.”

Pardon me, then, for reading and questioning the details and putting the data in context, something the NAA doesn’t do.

NAA reports:

• First quarter traffic to newspaper Web sites was reported as 73.3 million unique visitors (average per month) by Nielsen*.
• That’s 43.6 percent of all U. S. internet users, and up 10.5 percent versus the same time last year.
• Page views grew from 3.1 billion per month in last year’s first quarter, to 3.5 billion in 2009.
• NAA CEO John Sturm suggests this points to “digital success.”

Context:

• Each of the top three news destination on the Web (MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo!News) individually each drew more than half the unique visitors of the entire newspaper industry in March. Year-over-year, MSNBC grew 9 percent, CNN 4 percent, and Yahoo!News 16 percent.
• Yahoo!News alone gained 5.2 million uniques in March, or nearly 70 percent of the gain of the entire newspaper industry.
• Newspaper page views at 3.5 billion per month are less than one percent of total U.S. page views (386 billion in February).
• Time spent on newspaper sites in February, 43 minutes, 9 seconds per month per NAA/Nielsen, compares with total time online of 61 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds per U.S. person. This means newspaper sites get the attention of the U.S. online audience just 1.2 percent of the time.
• The total U.S. online audience (what Nielsen calls the “active digital media universe”) in February was 167 million individuals. As NAA does note, 43.6 percent of that audience visited a newspaper web site, but given that newspaper site traffic works out to only about 1.6 page views per reader per day, many of the newspaper site uniques are clearly represent one-time-only traffic.

NAA further reports:

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Photo by Raoul Trifan, used under Creative Commons license.

Newspapers must grow their online news market share. Can they?

My proclamation the other day that “print is still king” got considerable flack from folks who disagreed with assumptions I made in the analysis, as well as from those who apparently didn’t read the qualifier in the headline: “Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online.” That’s newspaper reading, not news reading.

In other words, that analysis, limited to the world of newspaper content in print and online, shows that as newspaper readers migrate from print to online sourcing of news, most of them are moving beyond the limited realm of newspaper web sites. This was duly pointed out by some of the commenters, and as a next step in considering the problems that newspapers face, it’s worth exploring what the scope of that problem is and what the newspaper industry must do about it.

First, the scope of the problem: To what extent have Americans shifted their news consumption to the Web, and what share of that attention is on newspaper web sites? Let me avoid the risk of stepping into another controversy over statistics and point to a couple of data sources. Here’s the data. Visit the links. I’ll draw my conclusions, and you can draw yours:

Print newspaper readership continues to decline, as indicated by the downward spiral in paid circulation. Year-over-year ABC-audited newspaper circulation fell 4.6 percent weekdays, 4.8 percent Sundays for the six-month audit period ending last September 30. The next batch of ABC data is due shortly for the period ending March 31, and will likely show a continuation of a 30-year downward trend. USA Today alone is expected to show a drop of 100,000 copies or more than 4 percent.

More and more Americans get their news online. In December the Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that for the first time, more people “most of their news about national and international issues from the internet” than from printed newspapers, by a ratio of 40 percent to 35 percent. Here’s the graph from that report:

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

NewspaperProject: A wobbly kickoff

It’s all the fault of us bloggers on “websites that feature negative, gloom-and-doom stories about newspapers.” So, “a group of newspaper executives” has launched NewspaperProject.org, which “will be devoted to insightful articles, commentary and research that provide a more balanced perspective on what newspaper companies can do to survive and thrive in the years ahead.” The “group” also produced print ads and website banners designed for a one-day deployment on Monday, making the point that more people read newspapers than watched the Superbowl.

A “more balanced perspective” presumably means: news and commentary with the optimistic view that the existing newspaper business model has got a future. So the site offers headlines like: “NYT executive editor on why newspapers will survive,” “Time to stand up for newspapers,” “Time for Newspaper Folks to Fight Back,” “The Catalog Factor: Why investors should buy newspaper stocks,” and, believe it or not, David Carr’s “Let’s Invent an i-Tunes for News.” (Yes, that one.) We won’t read about the next newspaper bankruptcy at NewspaperProject.

One of the newspaper industry’s long-standing problems is that it consistently does a terrible job promoting itself. Or rather, it has inconsistently done a terrible job — most of the time it has done no industry-wide promotion at all, and when it has (there have been two or three industry-wide campaigns organized by the NAA in the last decade), it has been done poorly and without followthrough. So far, this is no exception. Let us count the ways this is not the “Got Milk” of daily newspapers:

Read the rest of this post at my blogging home base, the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Somewhere, they are still reading newspapers!

The National Newspaper Association (which generally represents weeklies and small dailies in the U.S.) claims that "community newspapers" are alive, well, and prospering. They've announced the results of a study done by the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute, which appears to indicate that in smaller markets, people are, possibly, actually increasing their newspaper reading.

NNA Executive Director Brian Steffens said that most of the news about the financial health of newspapers is coming from the largest 100 to 250 newspapers.

“That is just a small slice of the picture,” he said....

Steffens noted that in the most recent study, 77 percent of the respondents rated community newspaper local coverage good to excellent. Since 2005, NNA has had three studies done. Steffens said the results from all three are consistent....

The three studies sampled consecutively smaller markets. The first one tested markets with a population of 100,000, the second study sampled markets with a population of 50,000 and the third study looked at markets with a circulation of less than 25,000.

There's a graph showing "very often" readership increasing from about 40 percent to nearly 70 percent over the three studies. But of course, these studies are not consistent in the types of markets they examined. Furthermore, the study's details are not available to you and me; they're hidden behind the organization's membership firewall. (Although some details of the 2005 and 2007 studies are available at the Reynolds Institute site.)

It would be nice to look at those details, but I would suggest the reasons the graph trends upward over the three studies is simply that in the smallest markets, you find the oldest readers. If the NNA studied readership in the same markets over a period of time, they'd find the same overall readership decline the largest papers are seeing, especially among younger demographics.

Now (full disclosure here), I served briefly on the NNA board myself, and I know Brian Steffens and some of the current board members. In my interactions with the group, I often heard the mantra that "community newspapers" are doing quite well, thank you very much. And in fact, they probably are, because they tend to be more in tune with their communities and their readers than big dailies. It's possible this lulls some of them into complacency, as well—in fact, many weeklies and small dailies are still resistant to the idea of offering all, or even any, of their content free online.

There may be a delayed effect, but I believe these newspapers are just as vulnerable to such problems as the inroads of Craiglist on classified advertising and the decline of readership among younger readers as the big boys are, and they should be urgently pursuing solutions by becoming online-driven news organizations.

The good news is their size: small means nimble, and with that comes the ability to innovate, launch quickly, keep a finger on the pulse of the market, react rapidly, and keep things simple. The dinosaurs in big markets tend to have a bit of trouble with those things.