The Newspaper Association of America’s May advertorial represents a desperate attempt to convince advertisers that the newspaper industry “remains strong” and shows just how bad things have gotten for advertising’s favorite pastime. Still, this PR fluff, written by NAA president and CEO, John F.Sturm (or some PR agency), and titled, “The reality about newspapers,” screams for critique. Here’s mine, line by line.
In the past two years, the newspaper business has faced unprecedented financial challenges. The economic meltdown and advertising recession have hit our industry hard. But make no mistake about this: newspaper media – print and digital – remains strong and will emerge from the current environment an even stronger multi-platform force.
First, it’s more like the past five years that newspapers have been facing financial challenges. Maybe Sturm doesn’t read his own NAA Web site, but if he did, he would see that NAA’s own data shows that total paid circulation had fallen 16 percent nationwide from 2003 to 2008. So newspapers’ precipitous decline began well before the recession. And it continues to decline. The recent Audit Bureau of Circulation report shows that newspaper circulation declined an average of 7 percent nationally compared to the previous year. Some, like The Atlanta Journal Constitution, declined almost 20 percent. And newspapers continue to close and cut print days. Although, digital readership did increase nationally by 10.5 percent, print circulation is dying. Newspapers need to change and change quickly.
Here is the reality about newspapers today:
1. Myth: No one reads newspapers anymore.
Reality: More than 104 million adults read a print newspaper every day, more than 115 million on Sundays. That’s more people than watch the Super Bowl (94 million), American Idol (23 million) or that typically watch the late local news (65 million).
Who said no one reads newspapers? What most people are saying is that fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers, especially printed ones. But here’s something that really bothers me about Sturm’s advertorial. He doesn’t do what journalist are supposed to do, use attribution. Notice how he just asserts facts, like viewership. For example, contrary to Sturm, the Super Bowl actually had 151.6 million total viewers and 98.7 million average viewers (total number of viewers during a half hour). American Idol had 28.8 million viewers last week. I’m not sure where he got his statistic on 104 million adults reading newspapers every day. I typed it into Google and only got his quote and others citing his quote. Also, as others have pointed out, his statistic doesn’t indicate the geographic region these alleged 104 million readers come from.
2. Myth: Young people no longer read newspapers.
Reality: 61 percent of 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds read a newspaper in an average week and 65 percent of them read a newspaper or visited a newspaper website in the past week.
How many 18 to 24-year-olds have you seen kicking back with a cup of coffee reading the newspaper lately, if ever? According to Stateofthemedia.org, “Young people in the age groups of 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 continue to have the lowest readership levels of daily newspapers. Among readers 18 to 24 years of age, 31% say they read a newspaper yesterday, according to data from Scarborough Research.” That cuts Sturm’s readership in half.
3. Myth: Newspaper readership is tanking.
Reality: Average weekday newspaper readership declined a mere 1.8 percent between 2007 and 2008, and about 7 percent since its peak in 2002. Compare that to the 10 percent decline seen in the prime time TV audience in 2007 alone. Meanwhile, newspapers’ Web audience has grown nearly 75 percent since 2004, to 73 million unique visitors a month.
Where do I begin? According to Editor and Publisher, US newspaper circulation fell industrywide by about 13 percent, or 7.4 million, from 1999 to 2008. And, as mentioned above, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s last report, daily circulation dropped 7 percent when comparing the last six months to same period last year. I’m not sure what data Sturm is using that indicates that 2002 was a peak for newspapers. Again, attribution would be helpful here. The stats and links above would indicate that Sturm’s data doesn’t comport with the rest of the news world. Additionally, the 10 percent decline in prime time TV watching needs clarification. It looks like Sturm is mistaking the number of people who watch TV with the time during which people watch TV. In other words, with things like online TV and DVR, people don’t have to watch TV during prime time.
4. Myth: Many newspapers are going out of business.
Reality: Newspapers, as individual businesses, by and large remain profitable enterprises – with operating margins that Wall Street analysts estimate will generally average in the low to mid teens during 2009. While that may be down from historical highs, such margins would be the envy of many other industries today. As consultant John Morton said in a recent American Journalism Review article, “Overall, the beleaguered newspaper industry’s financial health has been weakened but remains healthy by most measures. In this environment, that is an achievement.”
We have to thank Sturm for providing philosophy students around the world with another perfect example of a non sequitur. Are newspapers going out of business? Yes. I agree with Sturm that newspapers can be profitable, but not as publicly held companies. Publicly held newspapers were in trouble well before the current economic situation. Read this 2005 article in Smart Money, which shows newspaper costs rising 11 percent, declining circulation and a readership whose average age is 55.
5. Myth: Newspaper advertising doesn’t work.
Reality: Google’s own research shows that 56 percent of consumers researched or purchased products they saw in a newspaper. Google also says that newspaper advertising reinforces online ads: 52 percent are more likely to buy products if they see it in the paper.
The irony of this “reality check” is that, according to his own 2008 NAA press release, the study he refers to was conducted by Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo. Google’s Print Ads division commissioned it. And when the findings came out, Google closed its Print Ads division primarily because they determined that newspaper print advertising wasn’t profitable, as I reported earlier this month. Sturm left this part out and went on to quote more from his press release. And it gets worse. The “56 percent of consumers” he cites isn’t 56 percent of all consumers, rather it’s 56 percent of those participating in the study who read newspapers. Here are some quotes from the NAA press release:
According to the study, among people who research products and services after seeing them advertised in newspapers, two-thirds (67 percent) use the Internet to find more information. Of that group, nearly 70 percent of consumers actually make a purchase following their additional research.
Then, at the end of the press release, it says:
Newspaper readers respond to ads in their newspapers. More than half (56 percent) of respondents either researched or purchased at least one product they saw in the newspaper in the last month.
I’m sure journalists everywhere are embarrassed that Sturm is representing them, but it hasn’t stopped newspapers from running this advertorial all week.
6. Myth: There are no creative options in newspapers.
Reality: Newspaper advertising options have exploded and now include shape and polybag ads, post-it notes, “we prints,” shingle spadeas, scented ads, taste-it ads, glow-in-the-dark, belly bands and temporary tattoos, as well as event and database marketing, behavioral targeting, e-mail blasts, e-newsletters and more.
I don’t know anyone in the ad business who says that there are no creative options for advertising. Just look at the average newspaper. It’s ridiculous how many different distractions there are in each issue. And this has been the case for years. There is more advertising and less news. This is simply Sturm’s attempt to pitch advertising to prospective clients.
7. Myth: If newspapers close, you will still be able to get news from other sources.
Reality: Newspapers make a larger investment in journalism than any other medium. Most of the information you read from “aggregators” and other media originated with newspapers. No amount of effort from local bloggers, non-profit news entities or TV news sources could match the depth and breadth of newspaper-produced content.
Here’s where I agree with Sturm, although I think we need to change the way we talk about this issue. We don’t need “newspapers” that are based on printed publications run by publicly held corporations. But we do need journalism and full-time journalists. And we need to pay for it, not through advertising, but through non-profits. David Simon, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and creator of the award-winning HBO series, The Wire, presented a clear and compelling case for this at a recent Senate hearing on the decline of the newspaper industry.
This is not a portrait of a dying industry. It’s illustrative of transformation. Newspapers are reinventing themselves to focus on serving distinct audiences with a variety of products, and delivering those audiences effectively to advertisers across media channels.
I think this need to deliver audiences to advertisers is what’s gotten the newspaper industry in trouble. As David Simon so eloquently put it in his Senate hearing earlier this month, “High-end journalism is dying in America. And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” I’ll let Sturm have the last word.
For more on the power of newspaper media, visit www.newspapermedia.com.
