A FrontBurnervian alerts me to this Editor & Publisher circulation report, which shows the News down big-time. Why do I think that’s good news? If you raise prices 30-40% and lose 22% of your subscribers as a result, you’ve gained. The old model was to do whatever poissible to get readers in order to charge advertisers more. The new model is to make money on circulation, serve fewer readers, and deliver a core, committed audience to advertisers. The News is doing what it needs to do.
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I hope you’re right that the News is on track. All one has to do is look at what is being billed as the future substitute ‘alternative press’ to see the value of an in-depth traditional newspaper operation despite its its sometimes infuriatingly perverse presumption.
A DMN friend who had been laid off has been rehired so that was a pleasant surprise indication that the future shows promise.
Meanwhile, the DMN yearly subscription price replicated buying a KIA. If only they could throw in the 10 year warranty.
I don’t understand your logic that this is good.
If you lose 22% of your readers doesn’t the DMN have to lower it’s ad rates? And doesn’t advertising revenue bring in a higher percent of revenue than subscriptions?
And if the DMN loses further advertising revenue won’t the subscription revenue have to go up to compensate? Which leads to a further decline in circulation?
It bothers me a lot that the Belo Boys are making money off jacking up subscription rates, delivering a newspaper that includes about 10 pages of ads in a 16-page A-section and counting on the shrinking base of subscribers to continue to do what they’ve been doing. Anyone the News rehires ought to continue to quietly look for a job with a future.
It’s working now, but unless the print content improves, it’s not going to be worth the cost of home delivery. Until canceling recently, we were Sunday-only at $1.50 a week, mostly because we could save that in grocery coupons.
I am one of the remaining subscribers and yet the News is doing their best to drive me away by not having the paper there for me to read with my Cheerios.
At least 4 times in the past 6 weeks we’ve had to call and ask for our paper to be delivered only to get it in time to dump in the recycler on the way to work.
If I can’t open up the paper on my breakfast table and spill some milk on it then I don’t need it. For that to happen the paper needs to be there at 6:30 at the latest, and really that feels generous.
It hasn’t been a problem for some 20 years but maybe these days that’s asking too much.
So, seriously, when should I expect my morning paper to arrive?
Losing nearly a quarter of your subscribers is never good. I don’t care how you spin it.
Wick, I guess you are assuming the circulation won’t continue to fall in the future, negating the benefit of the price increase on revenue. Why don’t you think the circulation will continue to fall?
@jnw32: What people don’t realize is that circulation is a managed part of the business. If renewals are strong — and the News is saying its renewals at higher prices are very strong, which is backed up by the increase in circ revenue on their financial reports — the publisher can decide what level of circ they need. It is a function of the law of aggregates in marketing. Basically, a publisher provides the level of circ the advertiser is willing to buy. In European publishing, this has never been the case: subscribers pay the freight, and advertising is icing on the cake. U.S. publishers are now trying to move to that model. The News is moving quite successfully, if their reports are true, and as I said, so far their publicly released financial statements back them up. I once cut the circulation of a magazine I bought from 1.2 million to 900,000 by doubling prices: it turned the magazine from being in the red to being in the black. So it’s a strategy I know can work very well — if renewals are strong.
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 263,810 — (-22.16%)
Wow! This is all ?!
R.I.P
Don’t think for a second they aren’t trying to get back that lost 22%. I didn’t renew (just stopped this past week) and I have received no less than 7 calls a day from them for at least a month. I’m at work when they call and never have a message left. You’d think they’d move on to the next poor soul. Yet they call. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Wick, thank you for the explanation. I am pretty skeptical, however, that renewals will be strong, because I think the core audience will want a better product than the DMN now provides. Also, I don’t think the DMN is willing to provide the product its core audience wants. Once I saw in one of the features where the editors answer questions from readers, in a question posed about the DMN’s liberal bias, the editors, in denying any liberal bias, said that if they wrote to their readers’ biases the DMN would be the paper equivalent of Fox News. If I was a shareholder, I would say what is wrong with that? After all, Fox is killing its competitors. This, I think, is why the DMN will ultimately fail. Despite what the editors and liberal readers say, conservatives think the DMN has a liberal bias, and eventually that will cause the conservative readers, which I believe is the true core audience of the DMN, to cancel their subscriptions. That is why I cancelled mine a couple of years ago.
Too bad the ‘core audience’ for the newspaper knows more about the city than the writers at the DMN.