Paid circulation at large U.S. newspapers declined in the six months ended in March, but total readership held steady – in part because of online offerings.
The declines nationally averaged 1.9 percent, the Audit Bureau of Circulation said Monday. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News each had declines of about 6 percent, comparable to those at the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle.
But the Denver papers together continue to hold the top spots nationally for market penetration daily and Sunday, according to a Denver Newspaper Agency analysis of the data.
“We did see a decline in circulation, but our market position is very solid,” said Kirk MacDonald, chief executive of the agency, which handles business operations for The Post, published by Media News Group, and the News, published by the E.W. Scripps Co. “We are outperforming our market size significantly.”
Looking at only paid print subscriptions is “a one-dimensional view,” MacDonald said of the newspapers’ performance. He noted that with the online readership, “we are delivering a larger audience than we ever have.”
Readership results were reported by the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group in Vienna, Va., which based its analysis on 814 newspapers that reported data to the circulation bureau. The U.S. is home to 1,400 daily newspapers.
The Post had weekday circulation of 268,004, vs. 267,031 for the News, the circulation bureau’s preliminary Fas-Fax report showed. That was down 6.4 percent for The Post and 6.6 percent for the News.
On Saturdays, the News had 591,066 subscribers, down 3.1 percent. On Sundays, The Post had 735,621 subscribers, down 6.1 percent.
Yet the two newspapers’ market penetration was best in the nation by a wide margin, the newspaper agency’s analysis showed. It stood at 45.52 percent daily and 60.11 percent Sunday. The Washington Post was No. 2, with penetration of 37.17 percent and 48.42 percent, respectively.
The growth in the total Denver audience has been fueled by the rapid growth in traffic on both newspapers’ websites, MacDonald said. The number of unique visitors to newspaper agency sites averaged 137,000 a day for the six months ended in March. More recently, the daily average has been 153,000.
Industry observers attributed the paid-circulation declines to the emergence of news outlets that didn’t exist 20 years ago, including the Internet and a variety of cable-news channels. State and federal do-not-call lists also were blamed: In the past, telemarketing had accounted for as much as 55 percent of a paper’s new subscribers, according to the newspaper association.
Recent scandals involving inflated circulation numbers at several U.S. papers also prompted a more cautious count of subscribers, including readers who were given discounted subscriptions or free issues at hotels.
Staff writer Will Shanley can be reached at 303-820-1473 or wshanley@denverpost.com.
