“Beware the Ides of March” — Soothsayer
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will print its final edition Tuesday and become the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.
According to the NY Times, the new on-line PI will compete not just with the print-and-ink Seattle Times, but also with an established local news Web site, Crosscut.com, a much smaller nonprofit organization that focuses on the Northwest. The on-line PI will have 20 staffers, down from 150-plus at the paper.
Over all, newspaper circulation fell 4.6 % daily and 4.8% Sunday for the six-month period ended September 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That was even worse than the 2.6% declines daily and 4.6% Sunday reported for the period a year earlier. That still left daily circulation at 48,408,000 Sunday at 48,786,000.
Between 1960 and 2000 the population of the United States increased from 179.3 million to 281.4 million, so daily circulation per 100 people declined from 32.8 to 19.8. The largest newspapers (by circulation) in the United States are USA Today (2,250,000), the Wall Street Journal (2,000,000), the New York Times (1,100,000) and the Los Angeles Times (739,000).
In January, Nielsen ranked seattlepi.com among the top 30 newspaper Web sites with 1.8 million unique users. The site has an average of 4 million unique monthly visitors, according to internal Hearst tracking.
There’s little good news for newspapers:
- Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper chain and publisher of USA Today, said it will cut its quarterly dividend by 90 percent, to 4 cents per share and use the more than $325 million in free cash flow savings to pay down debt. Gannett’s share price has dropped 60 percent since January, following a series of announcements, including layoffs, unpaid employee furloughs, a $5.2 billion write-down of the value of its newspapers
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The Tribune Company is the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher, responsible for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the The Morning Call. Tribune is struggling under a $13 billion debt load, much of it incurred in taking the company private in 2007, and from plummeting advertising income at its newspapers, says Wikipedia. On December 8, 2008, the Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (right).
- McClatchy is the third largest newspaper chain in U.S.(depending on whether you count recent sales). McClatchy common stock fell below $1 per share, down over 98% since the purchase of Knight Ridder in early 2006. It will cut 1,600 jobs, about 15 percent of the total full-time workforce, and cut wages for the rest of the employees, as part of the previously announced restructuring. The company has about 30 daily newspapers (The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, and others), around 50 nondailies, and direct-marketing and direct-mail operations.
- Knight Ridder, until it was bought by The McClatchy Company on June 27, 2006, was the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspapers.
- Hearst Communications is one of the largest diversified communications companies in the world. Its major interests include 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, including the Seattle P-I, Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle; as well as interests in an additional 43 daily and 72 non-daily newspapers owned by MediaNews Group, which include the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune. Hearst, having shut down the Seattle P-I today, could do the same with the SF Chronicle, which would make San Francisco America’s largest city without a full-service daily paper.
The on-line PI will need to capture the essence of what makes people read the paper, says the Daily Beast. As newspapers start to fold, industry seeks a survival plan, explains the NewsHour.
In other news, Division Media Portland is providing local weather content to Portland area Digital HD Billboards. Perhaps individualized news, ala Minority Report, will follow.
Related newspaper stories on Dailywireless includes; Rocky Mountain News: Final Edition, RCR Wireless News: R.I.P., News Innovation BarCamp, Andreessen on Charlie Rose, Kindle 2: Slimmer, Smarter, Android Market: Open for Business, Google: Free E-books for Mobiles, The Magic Bus, E-Ink Makes News, Bloomberg News: Local Contractor?, Columbian Newsmap, Web-based News Operations, Jeff Jarvis: It’s Journalists’ Fault, Verve: Newspaper Salvation? and CNN’s News Bureau in a Bus.
