OTHERS have gotten there first, but it's now time for Unca D to weigh in on the Chronicle's continuing loss of readers. The Audit Bureau of Circulations puts average daily readership for the period ending March 31 at 425,138, a 13.96% decline from the same period last year.
This shrinkage is not primarily because of liberal bias . . .
. . . which is far less pronounced on the news side than it was, say, five years ago. Red-hots like John Otis are gone, and desk editors seem to be more fairminded than before.
[UPDATE: This is not to say that Chronicle reporters and editors do not regularly exhibit standard-issue center-left biases. They do. But absent the sternest leadership from the top, this is all but unavoidable. Standard-issue center-left is as good as it is ever likely to get at the Chronicle and at most other MSM newspapers.]
The Chronicle's big ideological problems now are the left-to-far-left editorial board and the absence of a single conservative local columnist. These are willful, almost unfathomable (to use a Chronicle buzzword), insults to Houston's mainstream readership. These expressions of bias have driven away some readers, as I'm certain the newspaper's polling shows or (if the question has not been asked) would show.
The big problem, however, is the general decline of newspaper readership in the time of the Internet, young people who don't read, and old people who do, but are dying off. It's an industrywide issue, not exclusively a Chronicle issue.
What interests me about the Chronicle's fifteen-paragraph circulation-loss story, however, not the paper's giddy spin on its troubles ("circulation drops, but overall readership up"), though that was striking, or the factual errors (see below), but the disclosures about Chronicle strategy. This information is not new, but it it bears renewed attention.
Much of the precipitous circulation decline was not accidental. It was a deliberate shedding of readers.
The Chronicle has discontinued circulation outside a 90-mile radius of downtown Houston, and prices for both newstand and home delivery are up an average of 20 percent, [Publisher and President Jack] Sweeney said.
Killing delivery zones cuts readership. So does raising prices, thanks to the iron laws of economics. The Chronicle simply ran off high-cost readers and readers who either will not or cannot pay higher subscription costs. Bye-bye.
"We're concentrating our sales and marketing efforts on our core market, the ZIP codes where our advertisers need it," [Sweeney] said.
Translation: The Chronicle is running off poor people and keeping rich people -- the ones who buy the most stuff.
This is not the place to dwell on the disconnect between courting rich people with subscription agents while writing editorials that, if taken seriously and implemented, would make the rich people (and the rest of us) ever-so-much poorer. Maybe this is what love-hate relationship means.
Anyway, whatever else you may say, running off poor readers and keeping the rich ones is a strategy. Coupled with the Chronicle's purges of scores of reporters, photographers, editors, and support staffers and other cost-cutting moves, the printed newspaper can keep on keeping on, even as readers continue to drift away.
Some day, some way print newspapers -- at least those that survive -- will reach financial equilibrium. It's a pity they will be smaller, less encyclopedic, less vibrant. But they'll feature beaucoup ads for BMWs and $2500 wristwatches.
And it's a pity that so many good journalists will be looking for new jobs.
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Look for the Chronicle to trumpet the September 30 ABC circulation numbers, even if they show a loss from the year before. The reduction will likely be much smaller. It's conceivable the numbers could even stabilize. The 90-mile contraction and some other deliberate readership-reduction strategies will then have disappeared from the year-earlier comparison.
Also look for the Chronicle to dream up a redistributionist scheme to keep overcharging well-off readers while giving a symbolically significant number of free subscriptions or subsidized subscriptions to a small, but symbolically significant, number of poor readers.
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MONKEYING WITH THE NUMBERS. The Chronicle said daily circulation was 427,223. ABC said it was 2,085 lower at 425,138. The Chronicle said this was a 13.2 percent decline. ABC said it was 13.96 percent.
BlogHouston, lately banished from the Chronicle's blogroll, first noted these apparent errors. A follow-up post reported the Chronicle's defense of its non-spec numbers, to wit: Not wrong, the reader rep averred; just different.
Not just different, Unca D avers; Bush League.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from unblogHouston.
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