New circulation figures again ugly

Gawker sites. Content-specific sites like MGoBlog (Brian reads this site, so he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he is able to run it as a full-time job). Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech podcast empire is also supposedly quite profitable.

 

I have read in the advertising trades at my day job, an electronic publishing firm so electronic you have to bring in your own scrap paper, that newspaper Web sites are starting to make money with coupons in the Groupon fashion. Content-specific sites, of course, imitate the print periodical business model more than that of newspapers. Almost all magazines began as content-specific concepts.

 

I think we need more than Groupon-style advertising. I have a feeling Groupon will be a fad that will largely play itself out in the next couple years. Not that I oppose it, our paper is introducing a Groupon knockoff next month and we expect it to be popular.

My gut is after a while nobody is going to pay full price for any luxury expenditures if they can peruse the Groupon-style sites and wait for deals they like. And businesses are going to tire of selling their services for .25 on the dollar.

 

Which makes sense, because magazines relied on the postal service and not their own delivery system. The Internet, though, requires everyone to rely on a postal-service-like delivery system.

 

New ABC rules allow publishers to aggregate newspapers in a market. So the 419,000 reported for the Sun-Times now includes 168,000 from the SouthTown papers.

And I think the Sun-Times is about to fold. The dominance of the Tribune Sunday paper and the broadsheet format will push the Sun-Times into the graveyard. The Rocky Mountain News could not overcome similar handicaps, despite a JOA and a stronger competitive position in the local market than the Sun-Times has.

 

i have a big problem with inflating the numbers by including branded editions of the usual paper, especially when they are free throws that go right in the garbage can. hell, people hate the dmn's "briefing" so much that some suburban cities have threatened legal action to stop the yard littering with that crap.

 

unless the rules have changed, you still can't count free throws.

 

Freebies don't count. I know a few papers have offered the paper for a penny a day, but that was awhile ago.

 

I agree with this. Except for the part where you dismiss computers, e-commerce, couponing and discounts.

 

I find it odd how the Bay Area News Group can combine all three of its big papers. I get that they all share content, but that still comes off as weird.

 

First, I was at the L.A. Times when Sunday circulation hit 1.2 million, and daily was just under 1 million, and the damn Orange County Edition, by itself, hit 300,000 on Sunday -- they had T-shirts made. So this is a bit heartbreaking.

As far as getting or not getting a paper, I recently re-upped through June, and spend about an hour each morning with the print product. But it's getting harder and hard to do so.

But still, it's a little more cost effective. If I buy a Zoom or iPad, it will take about three years without a subscription to pay for itself. And I'm going to have to hunt through things more extensively.

I don't think it's old-fogeyism to say that the daily newspaper is still a pretty convenient way of getting a lot of information in a hurry, scanning headlines and pages and things you want to read with no clicks and no paging and you can lounge on the couch or whatever to do so (although you can obviously do that with a portable device, too).

I'll seriously most miss the damn comics page if I give up the daily paper, but if they keep cutting back, something's going to have to give sometime.

 

Interesting how you read that, but it was not in the post.