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saw big circ declines A few actually grew, most of them smaller local papers Oct 27, 2009 There were a few winners buried in the gloomy newspaper numbers released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Two papers with circulation of 50,000 or more actually saw double-digit percentage growth, and another four were up by 1 percent or more. That's a tiny fraction of the 379 daily papers surveyed by the ABC, which found that Monday to Friday circ plunged an average 10.6 percent for the six-month period ended Sept. 30, more than double the rate of decline this time last year. Still, growth is growth, and there are a few lessons to be drawn from the gainers. The first is that seizing on a competitor's weakness works. The Oakland (Mich.) Press aggressively courted readers of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, where home delivery was dropped four days a week. As a result, the Oakland Press' circulation jumped 7.26 percent, to just over 68,000. And while they did not see circ gains, declines at the Denver Post and Seattle Times were not as severe as they might have been, as those papers picked up subscribers to their now-defunct crosstown rivals, the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The second lesson to be drawn from the circ gainers is that electronic editions are of huge importance. Several newspapers that registered small year-to-year increases, including the Wall Street Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal and New Haven (Conn.) Register, credited rising readership of e-editions for the boost, according to Editor & Publisher. Finally, it doesn't hurt to be a smaller paper right now. Just two of the top 10 gainers have circ of more than 100,000, according to ABC, while all but one of the top 25 largest papers in the country saw circulation decline. The argument goes that hyper-local papers have an advantage over their bigger brethren, in that they deliver news that can't be found anyplace else. Meanwhile, the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times, all of which saw declines, often report on stories you can find in 50 different places on the internet.
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