[Patrick Adams Final Draft] Falling Print Readership In Relationship to Advertiser Dollars

By Patrick Adams
Editor: Jennifer Johnson

Ivy King, a senior social work major, rarely reads newspapers anymore. She picks up a few headlines from her Blackberry phone, but does not generally rely on print.

“I just don’t want to buy them except for the Sunday paper for coupons,” King said.

She belongs to a current trend of citizens becoming further alienated from news print media. Newspapers are failing to bring in new readers, like King, and losing advertiser dollars at the same time.

More Americans are losing interest in quality journalism, according to Conrad Fink, director of the Cox Institute of Newspaper Management Studies, and current journalism professor at the University of Georgia.

“I believe that Americans have disengaged from serious consideration of the compellingly important political, social and economic issues of the day,” said Fink.

Consumers are increasingly going online to find their news instead of buying the print version. The digital shift is a problem for newspapers primarily due to a lack of interest from advertisers.

Newspapers typically draw 75-80 percent of their revenue from advertising rather than sales and subscriptions, said Fink. Advertisers depend on newspapers largely because of their ability to penetrate households fitting into specific demographic categories. Advertisers want to reach people that might buy their products.

Newspapers traditionally attracted great business from advertisers, but news print has been losing that ability recently.

“Advertising is moving away from newspapers – that’s for sure,” said Dr. Dean Krugman, advertising professor at the University of Georgia.

Readers who are switching to online publications are now spending very little time viewing news before they move on to other Web sites.

“New York Times users are coming on for about 28-30 minutes monthly, meaning just seconds daily,” said Fink. “Users at other newspapers are coming on for much less time.”

Readers traditionally spent 28 minutes daily reading the print product, but this is a decreasing trend, according to Fink.

Citizens who now prefer to go online for their news complain the major reason for not reading the newspaper is that there simply isn’t enough time in the day.

Citizens are receiving less value from reading newspapers thoroughly than doing other things with their free time. Dr. Fink believes that news print management is somewhat at fault.

“By cutting costs, we [newspapers] were losing journalistic value,” said Fink.

The newspaper industry spent too much effort cutting costs in order to adapt to an ailing economy that they began neglecting valuable journalism, according to Fink. If newspapers fail to provide quality reporting, advertisers are not going to reach the right audiences and will give their business to newsprint’s competitors.

“The [Athens] Banner-Herald is still profitable as a newspaper, but they have lost paid advertising and paid circulation,” said Cecil Bentley, former executive editor of the Athens Banner-Herald, and current Director of Career Services and Corporate Relations at Grady College at the University of Georgia.

Paid advertising has been falling for years along with paid circulation, according to Bentley.

Bentley didn’t think there had been much variation in total market coverage during his three years at the Athens Banner-Herald, but much of the audience had shifted towards the digital publication. However, the advertising revenue gained from the Banner-Herald’s Web site did not adequately compensate for the advertising revenue lost on the print side of the spectrum, according to Bentley.

Much of the losses in advertising revenue could also be attributed to the poor state of the automobile, real estate and help-wanted sectors who are all big contributors to classified advertisement revenue, Bentley said.

The future of the newsprint industry will largely depend on its ability to reconcile print with online publication in an efficient manner to create greater household penetration. Greater household penetration will bring in more money from the advertising industry, according to Fink.