Bronte Media

It always puzzles me that advertisers spend billions of dollars on mediums like TV and radio based upon rudimentary diaries of a small sample of consumers. And so too newspaper circulation. For the past 50 years newspaper circulation has been declining as the dailies failed to attract younger readers. Luckily for them, medical advances meant that the readers they did have didn’t die and kept their sanity for longer.

The latest ABC numbers show circulation declined 10.6% from April-September 09 compared to the same period a year ago. That was an acceleration from a 7.1% decline and 4.6% decline in the preceding two reporting periods.

For sure, newspapers have gone bust. And likely some readers have left. But the reality is that unlike other digital media (TV, radio, the Internet), newspapers have a ticking time bomb under them: the cost of paper.

Mastheads have always goosed circulation. The biggest scandal that was revealed was Newsday and others around 2004. Basically, they’d print the paper, ship it to a junkyard, the ABC would count it as circulation (and multiply it a few times to get ‘readership’) and the advertiser would get screwed into paying for a few more readers.

Now it’s not even economic to do that. It’s not even worth USA Today to print the hundreds of thousands of copies that sit outside a hotel door each morning, lonely and unread.