SNA: U.S. community newspapers fare better than metro dailies
By Erina Lin, Thursday 14 August 2008 at 22:57 :: Newspaper Data :: #2111 :: rss
Newspapers serving suburban communities are generating more revenues than those in big metro areas, according to second quarter figures released by Suburban Newspapers of America, MediaPost reported.
Total ad revenues for community papers in the United States reached US$482 million in the second quarter, slightly down 2.4 percent from the same period last year, according to SNA.
Though in decline, figures for community papers look great compared to the newspaper industry at large, especially big titles that have seen revenues plummet recently, according to MediaPost.
For example, in the first quarter, total U.S. newspaper ad revenues fell 12.85 percent to $9.23 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Individual publishers faced sharp downturns in the second quarter; for example, The New York Times Co. saw its ad sales go down 10.6 percent, McClatchy down 16.8 percent and Gannett down 13.3 percent, according to MediaPost.
SNA President Nancy Lane said community papers keep succeeding because “they provide much needed hyper-local news and advertising,” MediaPost reported. “Advertisers, especially at the community level are reaching an engaged audience that no other medium can effectively serve.”
Between October 2006 and March 2007, U.S. Sunday papers whose circulations were less than 20,000 saw overall circulation down 2.7 percent, compared to same period one year earlier. This is much healthier than the 4.6 percent downturn for all newspapers overall, and 7 percent at 12 leading metro dailies, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, MediaPost reported.
Unique local products stand out from the national and international news titles, whose content is increasingly treated as a commodity due to the Internet, MediaPost reported.
Lane’s comments echoed the earlier statement of Dick Porter, CEO of the Publishing Group of America.
“If you pick up The New York Times, the front page of the Times is national and international news, and you can get a lot of it from another news source, in one form or another. But if you live in a small town and trash day moves from Tuesday to Thursday, who else is going to report that?” Porter once said, according to MediaPost.
Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at Outsell Inc. said that “small dailies and weeklies have done better, both in advertising and retaining their circulation. They're not growing greatly, but they have been up a little bit, versus the big city dailies, which have been sharply down,” MediaPost reported.
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