Newspaper circulation drops slightly less sharply

Circulation numbers are out of the last six months and most big newspapers saw a decline when compared to last year. The drop isn't as bad as in past years, but that's not saying much. For some papers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, this decline has been relentless. Here are the numbers for the 25 largest papers, as reported in the New York Times, with this year's first, followed by last year's, and the percentage change:

WALL STREET JOURNAL   2,061,142 … 2,024,269 … 1.82%
USA TODAY   1,830,594 … 1,900,116 … -3.66%
NEW YORK TIMES   876,638 … 927,851 … -5.52%
LOS ANGELES TIMES   600,449 … 657,467 … -8.67%
WASHINGTON POST   545,345 … 582,844 … -6.43%
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS   512,520 … 544,167 … -5.82%
NEW YORK POST   501,501 … 508,042 … -1.29%
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS   477,592 N/A
CHICAGO TRIBUNE   441,508 … 465,892 … -5.23%
HOUSTON CHRONICLE   343,952 … 384,437 … -10.53%
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER   342,361 … 361,481 … -5.29%
NEWSDAY    314,848 … 357,124 … -11.84%
DENVER POST   309,863 … 340,949 … -9.12%
ARIZONA REPUBLIC   308,973 … 316,873 … -2.49%
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE   297,478 … 304,544 … -2.32%
DALLAS MORNING NEWS   264,459 … 263,810 … 0.25%
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER   252,608 … 271,182 … -6.85%
SEATTLE TIMES   251,697 … 263,588 -4.51%
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES   250,747 … 275,641 … -9.03%
DETROIT FREE PRESS   245,326 … 269,729 … -9.05%
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES   239,684 … 240,146 … -0.19%
OREGONIAN   239,071 … 249,164 … -4.05%
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE   224,761 … 242,693 … -7.39%
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE   223,549 … 251,782 … -11.21%
NEWARK STAR-LEDGER   223,037 … 246,006 … -9.34%

Four in the morning

1. The Los Angeles food truck economy is blowing up - these days, any outdoor event that doesn't include a food truck is probably lame. Atlantic

2. KQED in San Francisco is boosting its ranks to boost its newscasts. SF Chronicle (via LA Observed)

3. Playboy is now safe for work (i.e., boring; i.e., what more proof do we need that the Internet is an online distraction zone?). fishbowlLA

4. Politico needs a corrections policy. Regret the Error (via Romenesko)

Man on the street

Over a seven-year span, Tom Graham, a journalism professor at City College of San Francisco, walked every street in San Francisco. He writes about the experience here.

Circulation drop*, **

The average weekday circulation for the daily newspapers fell 8.7 percent over the last six months, according to the most recent ABC report.

Of the big papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and Dallas Morning News did the worst, dropping 22.6 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively. The Washington Post and USA Today also saw double-digit declines, with the Post down 13.1 percent and USA Today dropping 13.6 percent. The New York Times beat the average, but only slightly, with a drop of 5.1 percent.

The Wall Street Journal was the only major newspaper to see a bump in circulation, though by less than 1 percent. Most of the increase was attributed to a boost in the paper's online subscription base.

*Added from LA Observed: [The] San Diego Union-Tribune ... saw its circulation plunge 23%**. The Los Angeles Times lost 14.7% to reach 616,606 daily (down 7.6% Sunday to 941,914.)

**CORRECTION: As a reader correctly pointed out, the numbers for the Union-Tribune are wrong. The San Diego daily saw its circulation drop 8.7 percent

The newspaper death tax

Alan Mutter tried to buy obituary space in the San Francisco Chronicle and learned that it would cost $450 "for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice." This kind of gouging is a disservice to the community and to the paper, he writes:

This practice is not only exploitive, but also strategically tone deaf, because it misses a terrific opportunity to cement reader loyalty to a newspaper.

Every country editor knows that names make news. Birth announcements, wedding announcements and death notices are the only ways most people ever get their names in the newspaper, an event that remains a big deal to all but the most jaded individuals. ...

While metros can’t fill their shrinking news holes with every birth, wedding or funeral, they can offer people a free place on their websites to self-chronicle the comings and goings of their families.

The full post is here.

Journalists making a difference

Winning a Pulitzer Prize just wasn't enough for photograph Kim Komenich.

From the Chronicle:

On Monday, as Komenich was at a Wells Fargo Bank in downtown San Jose, he saw a teller being robbed and the suspect reaching for his pockets. Komenich walked up behind the suspect and held him in a bear hug until police arrived.

"Between classes, I go out there and do what I can do to make the world a little better for people," Komenich, 53, of Mill Valley quipped.

He can photograph a tall buildings in a single bound.

(photo from San Jose Police Department via SF Chronicle)

Chron writer arrested in Weed

Tom Stienstra, the "outdoors" writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was arrested along with his wife on charges of possessing marijuana for sale.

From the Chronicle:

Siskiyou County sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Gravenkamp said deputies found "a sophisticated marijuana cultivation operation in the barn" at Stienstra's home in Weed, a small town 30 miles south of Yreka, when they searched it March 25.

Authorities seized 60 marijuana plants, 11.1 pounds of processed marijuana, scales, packaging materials and other paraphernalia from the barn and the home, Gravenkamp said.

They also found medical-marijuana recommendation papers for Stienstra, his wife, Stephani Cruickshank, and Cruickshank's son, who also lives at the home, Gravenkamp said.

Four in the morning

1. Meg Whitman wants media attention, but not media questions. Chronicle

2. Bonuses for Orange County Register employees. LAO

3. The new editor of the Pasadena Star-News says he's back in the USSR. Star-News

4. The Los Angeles Daily Journal eliminates one of two D.C. reporter positions, prompting reporter Robert Iafolla to quit, and adds a labor and employment beat to the legal paper. LAO

Four today

1. The newest Senator from Delaware argues for a robust federal shield law for journalists. LAT

2. The San Francisco Chronicle claims that it has cut itself to profitability. SF Weekly

3. Caught in trap of naughtiness, Canada's second-oldest magazine will reluctantly change its name: "Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver no matter what it's about." Reuters

4. The sportswriter who outed Mark McGwire's steroid use gets some vindication. E&P in Exile

McChronicle

The San Francisco Chronicle plans to publish select material from McSweeney's 300-page Panorama newspaper, which is envisioned to celebrate the newspaper style but appears to include few newspaper writers. From the Chronicle news release:

The Panorama will be a 300-plus-page, single-edition newspaper published by McSweeney's, the independent San Francisco publishing house founded by author and philanthropist Dave Eggers.

The Panorama features the contributions of Michael Chabon, Stephen King, Andrew Sean Greer, William T. Vollmann, and Junot Diaz. It also includes writing from such acclaimed Bay Area authors as Michelle Tea, Tom Barbash, Robert Hass, and Daniel Alarcon, Eggers and many others. ...

"The Panorama in part is a way to demonstrate the many things that newspapers can do uniquely well, and how necessary they are to a thriving democracy," Eggers said. "From the beginning, we conceived of this as a way to show readers how much newsprint can do, and how essential to the craft of journalism readers' support of print is."

I wonder if they'll pay tribute to the yellow journalism, too?

(found via Romenesko)

No truth in advertising

A white supremacist group sneaked an ad for its website, victoryforever.com, into a San Francisco high school newspaper. The creators of the $30 ad apparently put up a prop website that had links to innocuous music offerings and showed that to students at the Lowell High School paper. The creators then changed the site to the one that's up now, which includes links to white resistance music and racist videos.

It takes a team

In an effort to strangulate the shrinking San Francisco Chronicle, Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group has joined with Philip Anschutz's San Francisco Examiner to sell ads. The resulting "San Francisco Bay Area Buy" will offer ad space in 14 newspapers with a combined circulation of 808,000.

Four in the morning

1. Caught on tape: A spokesman for Attorney General Jerry Brown's office admits to surreptitiously taping conversation with reporters when questioned by the San Francisco Chronicle. Taping a phone conversation without informing the other party is illegal in California. Now the secret recordings the AG's office made could become evidence of a crime. Chronicle

2. Pep talk: After subjecting its papers to severe layoffs, Gannett company comes back with mission statement aimed at getting that old newsroom swagger back. The statement itself is pretty straightforward stuff for shrinking papers - emphasize local watchdog reporting, use online to break stories, try to get young people to read, be helpful to readers, etc. Editor and Publisher

3. Citizen shield law: The Senate version of the reporters' shield law would protect both professional and citizen journalists; the House version would cover only for the pros. AP

4. Layoff Time: Time Inc. plans to layoff or buyout about 540 employees and the news department - Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Ilustrated magazines - is expected to take the hardest hit. NY Post

Cuts at the Chronicle

The San Francisco Chronicle laid off another five editorial employees in recent days. More layoffs are expected, but not in the editorial department.

Battle for the Bay

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both plan to launch a special edition targeting the San Francisco Bay Area, and both are poised to create other regional editions if the experiment by the Bay works out.

From the Times:

Both The Journal and The Times seem to be betting that the Bay Area is the place to try first. Its biggest newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury-News, have suffered through some of the sharpest downsizing in the industry, and a very high percentage of the region’s residents moved from elsewhere, which usually means less attachment to the local paper. ...

“I think the San Francisco area is the most obvious market to try this in, because it’s big, it’s sophisticated and it’s getting progressively more poorly served by its papers,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute. But if the strategy takes off in multiple cities, he said, the national papers should worry that “they’d be seen as administering the final death blows to these metro dailies.”

In addition to the shrinking Bay Area papers, the Los Angeles Times has curbed its coverage of California as well.

Chronicle goes totally domestic

The San Francisco Chronicle shuttered the Chronicle Foreign Service today.

Knife sharpening in San Francisco

The union representing workers at the San Francisco Chronicle says management plans to cut more jobs. How many and when are still unknowns.

From the SF Weekly:

When asked how many layoffs were possible, [guild rep Carl] Hall noted "Obviously that's the question everyone wants to know." He also added that no reason was given for the paper's announcement other than "what one might infer: I guess it's a continuing problem of getting costs in line with revenues given the state of the economy and the goings on in the news business."

Neither "I" nor "team" in Chron's I-Team

The San Francisco Chronicle will shutter its investigative unit - aka, the "I-team" - once the last remaining member, Lance Williams, heads off later this month to his new job with the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley.

Chronicle deputy managing editor Steven Proctor told the SF Weekly that money was definitely an object in making the decision:

The Chron's beat reporters will now be relied upon to turn up the fodder that leads to investigative stories -- and write them. If need be, a beat reporter may be given a few weeks to track down such a lead. ...

"If money wasn't an object, we'd have more of a combo approach," [Proctor] says. "Obviously, we have fewer people than we did at one time. That does require changes in strategy."

Williams' former team members left the paper earlier this year in the latest round of downsizing.

(h/t fishbowlLA)

Chronicle layoffs

The San Francisco Chronicle fired 20 people from the newsroom on Thursday (one person took the bullet for someone else by agreeing to take a buyout). Brock Keeling at sfist has a list of names.

Step inside the way-back machine

Still think newspapers didn't see the Internet coming - or were scared to experiment with electrons? Check out this KRON report from 1981* showing the San Francisco Chronicle and nine other newspapers testing a rudimentary Internet system.

The video is more evidence that newspapers, for all their faults, didn't miss the significance of going online, they misunderstood (as most of us did) how the Internet would alter the economic landscape. Consider the assessment David Cole offers for what the electronic newspaper would mean for the Chronicle: "We're not in it to make money" he says, adding "we're probably not going to lose a lot."

Exactly the wrong instincts on both points.

(*Also in 1981: Ronald Reagan became president, Rupert Murdoch bought the Times of London, MTV was launched)