Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

Two dailies that I work with (very small circ.), one is being discontinued and absorbed into the second, which will become a weekly in July. I was told this is a test market.

 

You can't shrink your way to prosperity.

 

That makes as much sense as not running death notices every day. Two devout audiences: the ones who want to know who died and the wonks who open the paper to the op-ed pages.

 

Very small circ applies to virtually every paper in the chain. Below is a chart that I cut and paste from the latest 10-K of the circ of USA Today and 15 of the largest largest papers in the chain. The first number is daily and the second is Sunday circulation.

USA TODAY www.usatoday.com McLean, Virginia 781,193 534,592
Detroit Free Press www.freep.com Detroit, Michigan 83,733 896,634
The Columbus Dispatch www.dispatch.com Columbus, Ohio 137,374 134,754
The Arizona Republic www.azcentral.com Phoenix, Arizona 109,034 320,249
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel www.jsonline.com Milwaukee, Wisconsin 75,676 115,026
The Oklahoman www.oklahoman.com Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 39,639 50,521
The Indianapolis Star www.indystar.com Indianapolis, Indiana 58,501 150,852
The Cincinnati Enquirer www.cincinnati.com Cincinnati, Ohio 50,165 95,239
The Courier-Journal www.courier-journal.com Louisville, Kentucky 45,250 115,546
The Austin American-Statesman www.statesman.com Austin, Texas 47,217 67,639
The Record www.northjersey.com Bergen, New Jersey 39,683 48,684
The Des Moines Register www.desmoinesregister.com Des Moines, Iowa 40,768 91,427
Democrat and Chronicle www.democratandchronicle.com Rochester, New York 43,101 73,569
The Akron Beacon Journal www.beaconjournal.com Akron, Ohio 40,804 50,824
The Providence Journal www.providencejournal.com Providence, Rhode Island 41,289 48,057
The Tennessean www.tennessean.com Nashville, Tennessee 33,693 103,420

A couple things that jumped out. Nashville has a daily circulation of under 34,000 in a metro area with a population of over two million. Jacksonville, with a metro population of over 1.6 million, Palm Beach with a population of 1.5 million and Memphis, with a population of 1.3 million do not make the list which I guess means that the circulation in those cities is less than Nashville's circulation.

Also, congratulations to the folks at the Columbus Dispatch which really kicks ass. Columbus and Nashville are basically the same size but the Dispatch has four times the circulation.

 

That is true; however, we can't apply print circulation numbers to any argument because those numbers mean nothing to Gannett.
It's all about digital subscriptions and their growth.

 

I'm still getting flooded with mega-discount offers; the cut-rate esubsciption offers never seem to end. The real question is, what is the conversion rate to full-price esubsciptions. Good luck getting New Gannett to answer that question.

 

The answer has to be zero. I kept getting $9.99/year digital offers. I finally took one. The full-year price was $29.99.

Gannett owns a billion papers up here, but my deal is only good for a certain grouping of them. I can’t look at some of the other dailies’ content unless I pony up more $$$. If they said hey, get everything we offer except USAT for $50/year, I might consider if.

 

At the end of the first quarter Gannett said that that they had 1.75 million electronic subscribers, which works out to less than 8,000 per paper,

The total electronic circ was up 44% over the previous year. The question then becomes why there was such a large increase in circ over the past year when the same product had been available on the marketplace for many years? The answer is probably hellacious discounting.

I still think Gannett is a company withering away on its journey to Chapter 11.

 

I was bummed that my old paper, The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., isn’t on that list anymore.

Then I checked to see what its circulation is now. It’s 26,000, down from almost 150,000 when I was there. Now I’m even more bummed.

That paper, perhaps more than most and certainly more than other large papers, had what amounted to a captive audience.

 

I jumped on the delawareonline.com site from the News Journal and the immediate popup ad offered a years esubsciption for $9.99. I don't see how 10,000 or 20,000 esubscibers can cover editorial expenses.

 

Rick Edmunds is way behind the curve, as usual. GannettNJ canned its editorial page editors at its six dailies more than three years ago. Gannett is scuttling daily editorial pages at its regional papers - Poynter

 

Flailing News Chain Gannett Cuts Back on Opinion Pages