The real Seattle circulation figures
The Audit Bureau of Circulations this week announced figures for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, and the year-over-year drop in average weekday print circulation among 379 U.S. daily newspapers was 10.6 percent. That's not strictly due to people simply walking away from print. Over that year, the incentives to subscribe changed, in some cases through price increases and distribution pullbacks. But it's ugly just the same.
So what happened in Seattle? It's difficult, though not impossible, to say.
A year ago we had two daily printed newspapers, and today we have one. Complicating matters, we don't know how many people a year ago subscribed to both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which now publishes online-only as SeattlePI.com.
But here's what we know for sure: Today's Seattle Times average weekday circulation of 263,588 is, by my calculations, 52,085 less — 16.4 percent less — than the 316,673 combined circulation of both papers a year ago.
So while the Times is touting a circulation gain of "an amazing 32.6 percent" and that "84 percent of the non-duplicated daily P-I subscribers are now Times subscribers," the bigger picture of print newspaper circulation in Seattle is somewhere short of amazing, unless you're talking about an amazing drop.
The above chart was assembled by yours truly, who painstakingly pored over news clippings of the past 10 years and plugged the numbers into Excel. Figures are for the six-month periods ending March 31 (spring) and Sept. 30 (fall). Data are from ABC as reported by ABC, both daily newspapers, the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattle Weekly. Due to the wide range of sources required to assemble the spreadsheet, some numbers reflect adjustments after auditing and some numbers are those reported before audit. If anyone has a better collection of Seattle data, I'd love to see it.
Comments:
Posted Tue, Oct 27, 4:39 p.m. inappropriate
Thanks for the good work, Chuck. I'd like to see some further research into how much of the Times' daily circ of 263,588 is actual PAID circulation. Too many stories out there about P-I subscribers being continued on freebie plans.
Posted Tue, Oct 27, 4:54 p.m. inappropriate
I believe that is all audited paid circulation.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 8:36 a.m. inappropriate
I'm sure I'm counted in the audit of paid circulation, but do the auditors know that I pay for just the weekend editions but receive the weekday editions as well, a gift, I guess, from the Times. In any case, I'm about to drop my subscription. I like reading a printed newspaper, but not enough any longer to justify the paper.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 10:12 a.m. inappropriate
Chuck: I don't think your analysis accounts for the readers who used to take both papers (as I did). How many were there when the P-I folded? That entire number vanished, and it makes the drop from combined circ to the current Times circ look much worse. I'm more interested in the Times' retention figures for former P-I subscribers. If those are accurate, then things may not be so terrible for the Times.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 10:27 a.m. inappropriate
Augustus,
As I said, "Complicating matters, we don't know how many people a year ago subscribed to both ..." One figure I've heard is an overlap of 16,000. If true, and we "credit" the Times for not actually losing those readers, we still wind up with an 11.4 percent drop in circulation.
In the end, though, that's also 16,000 fewer papers in the advertising buy.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 10:29 a.m. inappropriate
Sea Wolf,
The Audit Bureau of Circulations now counts any paper sold for a penny or more, and not, as previously, any paper sold for the cover price. So the Times could conceivably be assigning six cents of the Sunday-only price to those other six days and calling it paid circulation.
Posted Wed, Oct 28, 12:58 p.m. inappropriate
Mr. Taylor, as a fellow scribe you probably already know this, but street sales -- sales from vending boxes and newsstands -- are generally the most indicative circulation numbers for urban dailies, though I don't know if ABC still lists those figures separately.
Some other ways you might get accurate indications of what's happening:
-- Contact the business agent of the union that represents circulation drivers -- I don't remember which local this is in Seattle -- and ask for their comparative employment/route mileage figures over, say, a 20-year period.
-- Contact the city government and/or Metro and inquire as to the numbers of vending boxes. I vaguely recall that when I was in Seattle -- The Seattle Sun era -- these boxes had to be licensed. It seems to me The Sun led a huge fight over the constitutionality of such licensing, though I don't remember its outcome; as The Sun‘s founding photographer (1974-1976), my attention was…well, er, focused elsewhere.
-- Consult the publications of Standard Rate & Data. SRD books are prepared for the advertising industry, intended to enable media buyers to cut through obfuscation and falsehood in determining how best to allocate their clients' media budgets (though I must confess I have never seen an SRD book -- as common as city directories in East Coast newsrooms and ad agencies -- on this end of the country).
Hope this is helpful, not just to you but to anyone trying to chronicle the (deliberate) self-destruction of U.S. informational media.
***
Yes, I said "deliberate" destruction.
To those of us who acknowledge the historical truth of class-struggle, it has been obvious from the very beginning the creation of news monopolies was intended to circumvent First Amendment guarantees and thereby -- in the name of protecting capitalism and its historically inevitable transition into fascism -- gradually impose on the United States a de facto censorship ultimately as effective as that of the Third Reich.
The result is Moron Nation, a 21st Century version of the Tsarist Russian Mujiki. Until the deliberate creation of its U.S. counterpart, the Mujiki -- the rural peasantry of pre-revolutionary Russia -- was probably the most ignorant, dependably submissive, politically malleable (and therefore violently reactionary) population in human history.
(Think of the mobilization of hatred characteristic of “tea parties” as the U.S. counterpart of the Tsar’s pogroms -- hate-fests for which the Mujiki provided the goon pool -- and the analogy comes into sharp focus.)
Now, with the dumbing down of the U.S. population essentially complete, we are merely seeing the next logical step: the termination of all mass-circulation media.
And no, the Internet is not a workable alternative. The Internet is by definition exclusionary -- the poor are locked out by their poverty. The more we are subjugated by capitalism, the more we are denied the very information that might enable us to mobilize against those who are literally making us their slaves.
Which is, of course, the very reason mass media is being destroyed: the betrayal of health-care reform is a classic cause-and-effect example.
Particularly since the cost of computers and Internet access continues to edge upward even as the buying power of the population declines -- a decline from which the economics of capitalism will never again allow real recovery -- the Internet is therefore ever more definitively elitist. This means the Internet's allegedly “revolutionary” impact is merely another expression of the smiley-faced idiocy by which Moron Nation hides itself from reality.