Circulation Death Spiral

Newspaper circulation numbers for daily newspapers were released recently, and (you may want to sit down for this) circulation is down! We'll give you a moment to clutch at your heart and flop about in your Aeron - Just nod when you're ready for us to go on...

Ok, we wouldn't be writing about this if our own hometown two didn't bleed more than the national average. Over the past six months, the average loss by daily newspapers was 2.6 percent. Doesn't seem like much, really. The Seattle Times dropped 5.4 unfortunate percentage points and circulated 220,734 papers daily. The Post-Intelligencer reallly took a beating and shed 9 percentage points from their circulation diet. They only distributed 131,769 papers daily over the past six months. Sounds kinda ugly.

It's kind of assumed that more people are reading online, though, where we're a little harder to measure. Is it actually true? If you could prove that to newspapers, or, more specifically, their advertisers, you'd be, well, not quite Gates-rich, but up there. How many people read through RSS? How many read Seattle Times headlines and ledes on Google News? How many read 3rd party blogs that snark on the stories and then fail to click through to the original material? And how do you slap a Macys ad on that? Good times at the dailies. Good times.

The P-I has responded by launching a series of website upgrades and starting a new blog every 8.5 minutes. The Seattle Times is apparently happy to sit and not do much of anything on the web. Who knows what effect either strategy has had.

In yesterday's joint Sunday edition (the circulation of which fell from 457,010 to 435,581 over the past six months, btw), there was an article on the union that represents employees of both the Times and the P-I and its decision to stop financing the group Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town. Two-Newspaper Town is one of the few things that now stands between us and One-Newspaper Town. We can expect that One Newspaper to continue bleeding circulation after a little bump while it absorbs the P-I's diehard print readership.