The Future of Newspapers: National and Hyperlocal
One important but unnoted consequence of the Long Dark Decade of the Newspaper Business is the widening circulation gap between America’s three national newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times — newspapers and its regional dailies.
Five years ago, the New York Times had 19 percent more subscribers than the Los Angeles Times. Now it has 32 percent more subscribers. The New York paper’s paid circulation declined by 22 percent in that period, but the Los Angeles paper’s paid circulation declined by 34 percent.
While the circulation of the country’s first self-proclaimed national newspaper, USA Today, has declined by roughly the same amount as the Times’ circulation percent over the past five years, the paid circulation of the Wall Street Journal — get this — has declined by less than a tenth of a percent.
Those numbers include subscriptions to the future of newspapers: paid subscriptions to electronic editions. The Wall Street Journal counts 449,000 electronic subscribers, while the Times has 71,000. (The Detroit Free Press, which now only publishes a print edition three days a week, is in second place with 99,000 electronic subscribers.)
Until the founding of USA Today in late 1982 by Gannett Co. Inc., the United States had never had what European nations always had: national newspapers. The Wall Street Journal circulated nationally, of course, but it was a niche newspaper, focused on business news. (Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. have changed that.)
Now we do. And our three national newspapers, while not exactly thriving, have emerged from Long Dark Decade of the Newspaper Business as more dominant news sources and reasonably successful business models.
The most important questions in life, of course, is: Compared to what? We have long had four classes of newspaper in the U.S.:
- National dailies
- Regional dailies
- Local dailies
- Local weeklies
While the national dailies are doing all right, the regional and local dailies are getting killed. Compare the circulation decline of the three national newspapers over the past five years to the circulation decline of the next 97 regional newspapers in the list of top 100 largest-circulation daily papers:
- Decline in circulation of papers ranked 1, 2 and 3 in circulation, 2005-2010: 13 percent
- Decline in circulation of papers ranked 4-100 in circulation, 2005-2010: 42 percent
Here in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have lost 48 percent of their paid print newspaper circulation each in the past five years.
Local dailies (whose circulation numbers are much harder to come by) aren’t doing much better, to judge from reports of staff cutbacks. The more than 6,200 local weeklies in the U.S. aren’t doing much better.
Perhaps the print newspaper business in the United States is becoming more like that in United Kingdom, which has 1,200 newspapers but the top eight papers with the highest circulation are all national papers — except we’ll have three instead of eight. But we now have something the U.K. doesn’t have.
While the three national newspapers have emerged as a category to themselves over the course of several years, the strongest category in journalism at the moment is online local — or, to use the buzz word, hyperlocal — news.
Boston.com has its Your Town local news sites; Gatehouse Media, in addition its eight daily and 117 weekly newspapers in Massachusetts, has its WickedLocal.com website; AOL’s Patch.com has 73 local news websites in Massachusetts (with more to come) and in just 15 months has grown nationally from 12 local news websites to 775.
As of today. Patch.com has big plans.
Follow Mark Leccese on Twitter at @mleccese.
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About the author
Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College, covered Massachusetts politics, business and the arts for more than 25 years as a newspaper reporter, editor and magazine writer. He has More »Recent blog posts
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