Press Row

I suppose we can start here with a fairly obvious statement:

Newspaper readership is declining. Rapidly.

Even one of the biggest names in newspapers over the last 10 years admits the genre that made him famous is a goner. The industry is bleeding out their best talent, either through buyouts (Kornheiser, Sam Smith, Jackie Mack, probably tons of others) or watching them find opportunities to reach more readers and get paid more money.

Worse, as newspapers continue to merge together, their parent companies cut costs by combining the staffs. The Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News, for instance, now owned by the same company, have let go of two of their San Francisco 49ers beat writers over the last two seasons.

But just how accurate was Kornheiser to claim that these multi-billion dollar companies, which plenty of people still rely on for their information intake, are already dead? Probably more accurate than most people realize.

One of my favorite examples of this is a slight stretch, but for the purposes of providing an example…just play along.

Everyone is aware of what Michael Vick did to get suspended from the NFL about a full year ago. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution enjoyed a considerable amount of success from the downfall of Vick, serving as the most major newspaper following the investigation—and sometimes, even breaking the incredible news surrounding it.

So then, in theory, people would be flocking to the AJC to get the latest and greatest about all things Vick. Let’s apply some recent newspaper circulation numbers and combine them with their website hits (according to Nielsen NetRatings) to figure out just how many total people per month read the AJC.

AJC total M-F circulation, March 2008: 326,907

AJC total Sunday circulation, March 2008: 497,149

AJC total web traffic in March 2008: 5,497,000 visitors (major thanks to Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog for clarifying this figure)

So, if we guess-timate that there are four and a half weeks in every month (and that’s padding stats a little bit), we can multiply their M-F circulation by 4.5, and add their Sunday circulation to that, four times.

4.5 x (326,907) + (497,149 x 4) = 3,459,677.5 (sure, round up to the nearest whole person.) Then, they added about 5,500,000 website hits in March, so we’ll make their total about 8.95 million.

Okay, so the AJC, combining their web site and newspaper circulation, brought in around 8.95 million “viewers” in March of 2008.

Let’s compare that with the AOL Sports blogs, which you can find the Comscore numbers for on The Big Lead, among other places. In March 2008, AOL Sports rang up 10.9 million unique hits.

10.9 million. That means that, in theory, more people read about the Michael Vick investigation on AOL Sports than they did at the AJC, even though the AJC was the driving force behind its reporting. (That gets into an entirely other important topic, which we’ll dive into later on.)

I immediately can hear some of the arguments against this comparison: “You’re comparing one of the biggest sports blog/websites to one of the smaller national newspapers.” So you’re telling me that Atlanta, the 34th biggest city in America and ninth most populous metro area, housing a newspaper that dates back to the late 1800’s, can’t be compared with the sports blog of a falling online service provider? Not to mention the fact that we’re adding in all of the AJC subscribers that don’t even read the sports section.

We haven’t even touched on the other inherent money advantages that AOL may hold over both newspaper– costing less to run, having fewer employees, and numerous others—and already, it has beaten it in the one Trump card: people’s eyes.

We’ll dive a bit deeper into some of the surrounding issues later on. (Feel free to call this out as a stretch–but at least tell me why you think so.)