Circulation study: Digital up, print down

[JBHawkEye]

At my former paper, the juco men's basketball team won national titles and was one of the winningest programs in the nation. The arena would sell out most games. Prominent local businessmen ran the booster club. But our preseason tab rarely had ads. "We just can't sell it," said the ad director.

When spring rolled around, the ad director decided we needed to do a tab for the juco's baseball and softball teams, even though most of their games drew 50-100 people. The thing was jammed with ads, and most of the ads wished the softball team well.

It should be noted that the ad director's daughter was the softball coach.

 

[Matt Stephens]

Let's say newspapers go to two days a week of print. This means that the print edition will become even less timely and basically feature oriented. We are already seeing papers consolidate into centralized printing plants. I think that going to a couple days of print a week will accelerate this trend because timeliness will become less important.

As an example let's say that five papers print out of the same plant. What is cheaper? To consolidate the five papers into one regional paper or maintain separate papers and websites? I think cheaper wins and we see a lot of consolidations.

I think the hurdle to that is the printing plants generating revenue for one paper because it prints so many other regional papers that aren't owned by the same company. Denver, for example, also prints regional Gannett papers. Gannett in Fayetteville prints our Raleigh paper. If you own the press, you want as many publications you can handle printing as often as possible so you can hike up fees. I think in order for that to work, you have to have a lot of papers owned by one company printing at one location. Which, I suppose, is becoming more common, especially since the Gannetthouse merger/acquisition.

 

[LanceyHoward]

I think the hurdle to that is the printing plants generating revenue for one paper because it prints so many other regional papers that aren't owned by the same company. Denver, for example, also prints regional Gannett papers. Gannett in Fayetteville prints our Raleigh paper. If you own the press, you want as many publications you can handle printing as often as possible so you can hike up fees. I think in order for that to work, you have to have a lot of papers owned by one company printing at one location. Which, I suppose, is becoming more common, especially since the Gannetthouse merger/acquisition.

That is my point. The individual newspapers printed at a plant will over time merge into a single publication because it is more profitable to consolidate. In capitalism companies industries move to the most profitable solution.

And what I think will be a model is what happened when Raleigh bought Durham and basically made Durham a zoned edition.

 

[Readallover]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/11/07/media-newspapers-print-ipad-little-rock/

 

[MileHigh]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/11/07/media-newspapers-print-ipad-little-rock/

The Anschutz-owned Denver Gazette launched more than a year ago and is exclusively digital. It produced what looks like a newspaper each day, but there is no print product. They thought of giving out iPads when they launched but didn't, which I thought was a mistake.