Circulation plummets across the Atlantic

There was more evidence of the decline of newspapers across the Atlantic yesterday.

The Audit bureau released six month figures which editor and publisher says

for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707.

For the top 25 newspapers in the United States,all saw falling circulations apart from the WSJ.the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent drop for The Chicago Sun-Times.

Overall,circulation was down 7 per cent.

The most savage job cuts so far.

The bad news continues to roll in from the media with the Independent group announcing that 90 jobs are to go.

Independent News and Media says that it will save around £10m as it cuts a quarter of its editorial staff from the Independent and the Independent on Sunday.

Speaking to the FT,Simon Kelner its managing director said that

“If we are to safeguard the future of the papers, there is no other way to do it.”

The paper is estimated to be losing around £10m a year and its last circulation figures suggest that it is struggling more than the other qualities.

The Company employs a total of 430 staff in London

How do you count your web hits

As newsprint declines taking its advertising revenue with it,media organisations need to be able to accurately measure the traffic on their web sites as their need to attract alternate advertising revenues increases.

The New York Times carries a good article this morning exploring methodologies associated with this.

Explaining the problem the paper says

big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.

The problem though is not new

media companies have haggled with advertisers over audience numbers for decades. Television broadcasters cannot prove how many people watch their shows. Print outlets have circulation numbers, but those do not capture multiple readers of each copy.

The problem on the net appears to be that each advertising company has its own method of counting page impressions and one of the major problems happens in the work place

online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems .

This is going to be a continuing problem for web sites as more publishing moves to the web.

ABC'S for Feb What do they mean?

The ABC'S for the nationals are out and once again commentators are opinionating on what it all means.

What it certainly means is that once again circulations amongst the nationals is falling.The biigest falls appear to be amongst the mid market papers in Feb with the Mail recent stron run ending and the Express showing year on year falls of around 8%.

Roy Greenslade writes that for the Mail in particular,

"having enjoyed such a lengthy upward trajectory, it is an embarrassing reversal of fortunes. Its problems aren't of the order of many other titles, of course, but it does signify a softening of its sale that is unprecedented in its recent history"

The Guardian and the Times are both shedding readers as well,a point not lost on comment son the Guardian media blog

"Both you in particular and Media Guardian in general are doing a great job of avoiding talking about the Guardian's ABC numbers (biggest drop among ``quality'' national newspapers in Feb, and dreadful numbers for Observer, too). Gagged? Or is it a case that problems away from home are easier to see than those close by?"


Sunday paper's in particular seem to be under attack both in the quality section and the popular catagory,the Times and the Observer seem to be under particular pressure here.

Peter Cole ,writing in the IOS,takes a differing approach to measuring readership reminding us that

"We have now entered the age of multi-platform publishing, and in the newspaper business this means publishing all the content you have assembled in a variety of ways - on your website, on mobile phones, and as podcasts, downloads and video."

Whilst the sales figures are declining the appetite for news is growing

"The matter is further confused by what you measure and how you measure it. Online is global; most advertisers are national, regional or local. And how are we measuring the numbers logging on to a particular newspaper website - in terms of unique users, or of the audience size or reach? Similarly, what do we mean when we talk about the frequency with which one person goes to one site - number of different places (pages) visited, or frequency of use?"

Should we therefore be that concerned about this measure of readership which was after all brought in when covergence was just a future thought?

Interestingly the current state of the media report suggests that technology is overwelming the old ways of measuring the audience for news and content producers feel that"the old yardsticks are undercounting their readers