Papers down, Web up; media gets sideways again

OK. The most recent excitement is over the NAA's crunching of numbers in a report on ABC's latest FAS-FAX numbers that show that newspapers bled about 2.6 percent in circulation over the past six-month ABC reporting period, and, NAA reports, Web usage for news grew.

The circulation drop is bad enough, but it layers atop a similar drop for the preceding six-month period. At least we can say the decline is steady, but we can't say it won't get steeper. And that has a lot of people in the media worried, so much so that the headlines pop little questions like, "Is Print Dead?" (courtesy of cnn.com).

There would be no musing on the death of print if alternative news sources were not available. So, the reasoning goes, because we have the Web, and because newspaper circulation is dropping an average of 2.5 percent every six months (that's a 5.035 percent drop over the past 12 months, if you're scoring at home), why, that must mean that the Web is killing newspapers! Gasp!

Or you could be logical about it, instead.

First, that 2.6 percent describes an average decline, not an overall decline. USA Today, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune all reported gains, albeit 1 percent or less, in circulation. And though the Wall Street Journal slid, its loss was 1 percent.

And there's a very interesting and important lesson there. USA Today, the Times and the Journal are papers with nationwide presence and burgeoning Web presences that constantly brand their products and improve their exposure. They're the leaders in that respect, but they have no competition, really, except for each other. And only one -- the Times -- has any need to compete successfully in its home circulation area. And so it does.

But the Chicago Tribune is even more interesting. The Tribune Co. wowed an investors conference in 1998 with its presentation of a fully integrated media enterprise, blending TV, print and the Web. The journalists themselves discovered new ways to cooperate and develop news coverage for maximum impact and effective branding. So while papers in comparable cities lose readers, the Chicago Tribune posts an 0.9 percent gain.

The big loser is the San Francisco Chronicle, which saw a whopping 15.6 percent of its circulation fall away. Executives there say it's sour grapes, that it's because they started this year to lop off press runs that were paid for by advertisers and then distributed for free, but didn't help them grow circulation.

That's whistling past the graveyard for you. Their circulation is falling -- they still have a bit fewer than 400,000 subscribers, so they're hardly near extinction -- because the freely delivered (not just distributed) San Francisco Examiner is removing reasons to pay for the Chronicle, although probably not as swiftly as owner Philip Anschutz would prefer.

Others that took hard shots were the Boston Globe, which lost 8.5 percent (ouch!), and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which slid 6.7 percent (oof!).

So, it certainly wasn't like each and every paper lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.6 percent. Not at all.
In fact, as we saw, papers of both nationwide and big-city reach held more or less steady on print circulation while their Web reach grew even more quickly.

The common denominator is that all realized early on not merely the necessity of a branding and coverage relationship between print and the Web, but the value of building a news enterprise that blends all available methods -- Web, print and broadcast -- and thereby positions itself for flexibility whenever the technology changes.

So that pokes a tiny hole in the "Internet Killed the Newspaper Star" myth. But closer study of newspaper circulation trends rip that hole all the way through. Circulation drops, as reported by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, go way back to when the Internet was just an experiment in Tim Berners-Lee's network.

In fact, the drops started to get the attention of newspaper executives at about the time CNN debuted.
And if you sit back and think about all this, a little light comes on. And the shadow it casts shows us that print does not have to be a casualty of the technologies that add to and change the way people get news -- we have some newspapers who are proving that.

But the media will never get that message. They're too busy playing Chicken Little.

So here's a prediction before I close:

- The model used by the Tribune, the Times and the Journal will be adopted by some of these papers that are losing readers, or
- Free-delivery mavericks will come in and take those territories (I don't see that as a trend or new model -- just a shark in the water, but a very real one), and
- Enterprises like Kpaul's, which start from the Web and go to print later, and develop more modern and flexible business models along the way, will grow in the place of any print-only (or print-heavy and Web-light) enterprises that falter.

Any way it works out, print is hardly on its deathbed. So don't believe everything you read in the papers.

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