The D&C’s declining circulation numbers
Rotten has an interesting bit about the D&C’s circulation numbers:
According to his analysis of numbers issued by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the D&C’s circulation has fallen precipitously in the past year. Circulation for the daily D&C is down 4.3% in a one-year period. The Sunday D&C is down 5.6%.
In comparison, the Buffalo News’ daily circulation is down 1.1% for the same period. The Syracuse Post-Standard is down 2.1%. The Sunday loss for Buffalo is 2%, with Syracuse losing 2.2%.
The newspaper business is going through a rough patch, with readers moving from paper to the Internet. So it’s not surprising that the D&C is losing subscribers. What is surprising is the size of the loss, more than double that of nearby cities.  The differential must be due to something more than just Internet competition.
One hint at the problem is the other newspapers losing readers. There are six Gannett newspapers in New York. Most of them are losing far more readers than the average upstate newspaper. Circulation loss for the upstate dailies in Elmer’s cohort averaged about 3%. Gannett papers, in general, did much worse than that. The Westchester Journal-News lost 8.8% of its daily readership in the past year. Elmira lost 5%, Ithaca lost 6.6%, and Binghamton lost 4.1%. Only Poughkeepsie beat the average, losing 2.8% year-over-year.
I know nothing about the newspaper industry. But I think everyone agrees that the Buffalo News is the best paper in western New York. At some level, quality must have an effect on circulation.
Look at Gannett’s national newspaper, USA Today. While its distributed in many different venues, I think the quality of their reporting pales in comparison to the New York Times and Washington Post.
That’s setting the bar pretty high — the Wash Post and NYT are by far the best papers in the country, especially now that the LA Times and WSJ have been gutted.
Actually, USA Today has been bucking the trend a little bit. While you’d still never mistake it for the Times or the (pre-Murdoch) WSJ, it’s become a more substantive paper in the last decade or so, with longer articles and some pretty solid national and international reporting than in the days when Al Neuharth founded it.
That’s my impression as well.
It’s also worth noting that as good as the Times and WaPo are, overall, the Times went through an ugly period under Howell Raines and WaPo now has a deranged editorial board (though less so than the WSJ), so papers definitely rise and fall.
They sure do. And sadly, many more are falling than rising at the moment. There’s a very close link there to ownership consolidation - a lot of very good regional and super-regional papers have become decidedly more mediocre after being swallowed up by bigger owners. It happened to family-owned papers such as the Des Moines Register and the Louisville Courier-Journal when Gannett came in, it happened to the LA Times when the Chandlers gave way to Tribune, it’s even happened on a much smaller scale locally with the Messenger-Post papers since the Ewings sold out to Gatehouse.
I wish Warren Buffett owned more papers. He’s done a good job keeping the Buffalo News afloat. Wish he’d put out a Rochester edition.
Who owns the WP? I believe the NY Times is still mostly privately owned. Am I correct?
I understand the WP and NY Times are tough comparators, but I’m still not impressed with USA Today (although it may have improved over the past decade). To me, in the private market, innate superiority of competitors isn’t a good excuse for lower quality from a consumer’s perspective. On the other hand, I think USA Today markets itself to a different audience. Those who want a quick update, on the run.
I guess, my point is that I feel Gannett’s news reporting is watered down at all levels, and could be improved at all levels. However, I think their marketing strategy continues to be producing a newspaper that is a relatively quick read with little investigative reporting.
I think the D&Cs biggest failure is a total lack of investigative reporting. You won’t read something from the D&C that wasn’t either released to them, pulled off a police scanner or pulled from a canned interview. There’s no excitement there.