An interesting article in Monday's New York Times offers the first intelligent defense of the overall circulation decline at major U.S. daily newspapers. The gist is that most papers aren't that concerned.
The story says that "many papers have decided certain readers are not worth the expense involved in finding, serving and keeping them."
Here's an excerpt:
In the boom years, “there was more willingness by advertisers to assign some value to the occasional reader, the student, the reader who doesn’t match a certain profile,” said Jason E. Klein, chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing alliance.
But advertisers have become more cost-conscious and have learned how to reach narrowly tailored audiences on the Internet. Sponsors of preprinted ads that are inserted into a newspaper have been especially aggressive in telling papers that some circulation just is not worthwhile.
While I am not absolutely sure that this is not a masterful PR stroke by the newspaper biz, it does make sense to me on many levels. With the overall fragmentation of media, the hunt for eyeballs has evolved to the hunt for quality eyeballs. Why wouldn't newspapers evolve just the same.
When folks ask us if newspapers are dying, we always respond that the opinion leaders are still influenced by what is in print (or online forever on a daily's Web site). Aren't these same opinion leaders the quality eyeballs that we seek?
Perhaps the time has come to stop looking at dailies as purely mass market.
Here's a link to the story:
Click here while it's hot.--John
http://www.miamipublicrelations.com http://www.davidgarciapr.com
