If I’m to believe the national media, newspapers are dead or dying. What do they base that on?
Paid circulation is down? How’s that different from broadcast TV viewership? Or magazine subscriptions? Or radio listeners? But I can’t recall many or any headlines or cable or Internet shout-outs heralding the passing of TV, radio or magazines. Ignored in the cacophony are the self-imposed cutbacks of inefficient distribution to outlying areas with few readers and fewer advertisers, or the growing number of free distribution newspapers.
Those outlying areas are not paper-less.
So goes the famous quote by Mark Twain, and it certainly applies today to one significant portion of the newspaper industry: local community papers. While news of the never-ending struggle of daily newspapers have become omnipresent, many community newspapers are not only surviving-they're thriving.
Seeking to accommodate community newspaper publishers squeezed by the recession, the Audit Bureau of Circulations board has given its final approval for a new Community Newspaper Audit service with lower costs and simpler requirements.
Newspaper publishers hoping to staunch the flow of ad dollars out of the medium got some help this week from a Scarborough reseach study, which found that 74% of American adults either read the newspaper or visit the newspaper website at least once a week.
NEW YORK A new National Newspaper Association survey found that 81% of respondents read a local weekly paper each week, 73% read "most or all of it," and those readers spend an average of 40 minutes with the paper.
The New York Times Co. said it has decided not to sell The Boston Globe, saying the paper’s financial performance had “significantly improved” in recent months.
The company had been exploring a sale of New England’s largest newspaper and had received two bids to buy the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which it also owns. The Times Co. said it is continuing to assess "strategic alternatives" for the Worcester paper.
The last few years have had precious little good news for the newspaper business, but there may be some positive trends at last.
After hitting all-time lows earlier this year, newspaper stocks are rebounding -- slightly.
NEW YORK Newspaper advertising revenue at community newspapers declined half the rate of the national industry average, new figures from Suburban Newspapers of America reveal.
Newspapers are hurting all over the United States, but the pain is less severe at small publications like The Blackshear Times in Georgia.
The weekly newspaper fills an information vacuum in a county of 17,000 people who live about 75 miles from the closest metropolitan market, in Jacksonville, Fla. That has made it easier for The Times to hold on to its 3,500 subscribers and keep its revenue stable in a recession that's ravaging much of the newspaper industry.