Alliance for Audited Media

Northeastern news project wins $100k grant; plus, more on the Herald, and AI hell in Melrose

We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.

“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”

Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.

The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:

• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”

• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.

• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.

• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.

• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”

• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.

More on the shrinking Herald

Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.

Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.

For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.

As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.

In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.

Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.

What fresh hell is this?

The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.

So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.

Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.

In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.

That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.

The Herald’s print numbers keep dropping while digital holds steady; plus, media notes

The Boston Herald Traveler plant sometime in the 1950s. Photo (cc) 2013 by City of Boston Archives.

Paid print circulation continues to fall at the city’s second daily newspaper, the Boston Herald, while paid digital subscriptions are essentially unchanged over the past year. That information was gleaned from published statements that the Herald filed with the U.S. Postal Service this past September as well as the previous September.

Last week I reported that the dominant daily, The Boston Globe, is losing print customers more quickly than it’s adding digital subscribers — a departure from previous years, when digital was growing rapidly. The paper is predicting a return to faster growth in 2025.

I’m reporting on the Herald’s numbers with less information than I would like, but I believe I have enough to make some accurate apples-to-apples comparisons.

Unlike the Globe, and unlike virtually every daily newspaper I’ve ever looked at, the Herald’s postal statements include Sunday numbers in its average circulation totals. If I had access to the Alliance for Audited Media’s reports, I could find separate totals for Sundays and weekdays. Last October, for instance, Mark Pickering, writing for Contrarian Boston, found that the Herald’s average paid weekday print circulation was 16,043, a decline of more than 20% over 2022. Sunday circulation, he reported, was 19,799 last year, a drop of more than 16%.

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Pickering was relying on numbers that the Herald had reported to AAN. Unfortunately, AAN ended free log-ins for journalists and researchers a couple of years ago. And when I asked for four reports last week regarding the Herald and the Globe, I was told that it would cost me $200. No thank you.

So that brings us to the seven-day print numbers that the Herald reported to the Postal Service. According to reports filed on Sept. 20, 2024, the Herald’s average print circulation during the preceding 12 months was 13,092 — a substantial drop of 2,566, or more than 16% over the previous year.

Now for digital circulation. As I wrote last week, the digital numbers that newspapers report to AAN and the Postal Service involve some double-counting and are actually higher than the internal numbers. Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me that the paper’s paid digital circulation is currently 261,000, an increase of 6.5% over the previous year but substantially below what’s on the postal (and AAN) statements.

Given that, I’d like to know what the Herald’s internal count of digital circulation shows. But publisher Kevin Corrado did not respond to an email seeking clarification, so I’m going to go with the postal statement. And according to that statement, the Herald’s average seven-day digital paid circulation is now 27,894, just 655 more than it was a year ago.

For some reason, the 2023 number is slightly lower than what Pickering reported at Contrarian Boston a year ago for both weekdays and Sundays, which suggests an unexplained discrepancy between what the Herald reported to the postal service and to AAN.

All told, the Herald’s average paid circulation as reported to the postal service, print plus digital, is now 40,978, a decline of 1,919, or about 4.5%.

Media notes

• Media critic Margaret Sullivan, whose lengthy résumé includes a stint as The New York Times’ public edtior, weighs in with some thoughts on a bizarro juxtaposition of Times headlines about presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The headlines: “In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave” and “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics,” which is another way of saying that the Orange Authoritarian is a fan of eugenics.

As Sullivan writes, the Harris head is “unnecessarily negative, over a story that probably doesn’t need to exist,” while the Trump head “takes a hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest.” Liberals and progressives on social media, especially on Threads, have been up in arms at what they see as the Times’ soft treatment of Trump. Though I think much (OK, some) of that criticism is overwrought, there’s no disputing that the paper blew it with the two headlines Sullivan cites.

• Speaking of the Times, executive editor Joseph Kahn was interviewed on NPR in recent days by “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep. Kahn was asked to address criticism from the left, including the Times’ obsessive coverage of President Biden’s age and its weird both-sidesy treatment of the candidates’ housing plans. (Harris: Build more; Trump: Deport the occupants.)

“In people’s minds, there’s very little neutral middle ground. In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy,” Kahn said. He added: “It’s not about implying that both sides have absolutely equal policies on all the issues. It’s about providing well-rounded coverage of each of the two political parties and their leading candidates.” Read or listen what Kahn has to say and see if you agree.

• This blog is built on WordPress, open-source software that powers many news websites. Unlike Twitter, Meta or Substack, WordPress has always seemed like a non-evil alternative. You can set up your blog at WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service, or do it yourself using the free WordPress.org software. I’ve done both, and currently Media Nation uses dot-org.

Now all that is being threatened. Longtime digital journalist Mathew Ingram, who’s gone independent, has a terrific post up about the battle between Matt Mullenweg, a wealthy entrepreneur who controls both dot-com and dot-org, and WP Engine, a major third-party hosting service that I don’t use. “In a word, it’s a godawful mess,” Ingram writes. “And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not.”

Beehiiv, anyone?

• The PRESS Act, which would create a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources except in rare cases, has been endorsed by The New York Times. I’ve written more about it here.

The Globe’s circulation levels off; plus, the Tampa Bay Times, angst at CNN and remembering Donald Barlett

Paid circulation growth at The Boston Globe has leveled off, as a modest increase in digital subscriptions has barely been enough to offset the continued deterioration of its print business. That’s according to publisher’s statements filed with the U.S. Postal Service that were printed in the Globe earlier this week as well as numbers provided by the Globe.

On weekdays, the average paid print circulation between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, was 57,450. A year earlier it had been 64,977. That’s a decline of 7,527, or 11.6%.

On Sundays, the average paid print circulation was 102,703, down from 116,456 a year earlier. That represents a drop of 13,753, or 11.8%.

The Globe also reported paid digital circulation to the Postal Service, but those numbers — the same that it provides to the Alliance for Audited Media — are not a good reflection of the paper’s actual digital subscription base. According to Carla Kath, the Globe’s director of communications, paid digital circulation is now 261,000, an increase of about 6.5% compared to last October, when it was around 245,000.

When you combine paid print and digital, the Globe’s average weekday circulation is about 318,000, up by 8,000 over a year ago, for an increase of 2.5%.

On Sundays, average combined circulation now stands at 364,000, a rise of 3,000, or a little more than 0.8%.

Oddly enough, the paid digital numbers that the Globe reports to the Postal Service and AAN are higher than its internal figures because AAN uses a different methodology that allows for some double-counting.

Earlier this year, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry told employees that her “North Star” goal for paid digital circulation is 400,000, plus another 100,000 for Stat, the company’s health-and-science news site. She did not put a timetable on that, but in May she told Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal that she expected 2024 to be a “building year,” with accelerated growth coming in 2025 and beyond.

“Our subscribers can see this investment with our expanded daily news videos, our new weather center, better games, new podcasts, deeper geographic expansion, and more,” Henry told Seiffert. “We do not expect growth to follow a linear pattern — we have a long-term strategy for continuing to serve our community as a strong and sustainable organization.”

Kath’s email message to me struck a similar tone. “Like most publishers in 2024, we have seen moderation in non-subscriber traffic. However, we’ve adjusted our strategy and continue to grow digital subscriptions while focusing on long-term growth and sustainability,” she said.

“Total paid subscriptions are up more than 30% over the last five years, and 2024 is performing as we expected. We continue to innovate and plan for growth in 2025 as we aim for our ongoing goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.”

Media notes

• The Tampa Bay Times has dropped its paywall for coverage of Hurricane Milton and its aftermath — just in time for a story on the Times’ own building being damaged by a collapsing crane. Zachary T. Sampson and Chris Urso report:

A crane collapsed in downtown St. Petersburg during Hurricane Milton’s thrashing winds Wednesday night — leaving a gaping hole in an office building that houses several business, including the Tampa Bay Times.

The crane fell from the Residences at 400 Central, the 46-story skyscraper being built across from the Times’ office, as the storm pummeled the region.

The crane remained crumpled across 1st Avenue South early Thursday, completely blocking the street.

The city said in a news release that no injuries have been reported at the site. The building damaged by the crane had closed ahead of Milton’s arrival Wednesday. No one from the Times’ newsroom was working inside when the crane collapsed.

• Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy has a tough item on CNN chair and chief executive Mark Thompson on the first anniversary of his tenure. Darcy, who left CNN a few months ago to start his newsletter, Status, writes:

In conversations that I have had over the last few weeks with employees at all different levels inside the company, it has become clear that morale has fallen considerably since Thompson took the helm. Staffers, who were once wide-eyed and filled with hope that Thompson would stroll into Hudson Yards with a toolbox full of foolproof, executable ideas, are now questioning whether he will ultimately prove to be successful in reversing the outlet’s dimming fortunes.

• Donald L. Barlett, one of the great investigative reporters of the 20th century has died. I remember reading his and James Steele’s “America: What Went Wrong” in the early 1990s, when it was first released. You might call it an early warning signal about the damage that Ronald Reagan’s economic and tax policies favoring the rich were doing to the country — damage that has contributed to the anger and polarization of politics today. The book was a compilation of reporting that Barlett and Steele had previously produced for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an obituary for The New York Times, Glenn Rifkin writes (gift link):

Over four decades, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative prowess, rooted in deep, systematic research and complex analysis of issues and institutions that profoundly affected Americans, resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting (they were finalists for the award six times), six George Polk awards and various other honors.

Mr. Barlett was 88.

Print circulation drops again. But why are we still counting?

It has become a strange and perverse exercise. Every so often, Press Gazette, a U.K.-based website that tracks developments in the news business, rounds up the latest weekday print circulation figures reported by U.S. newspapers and informs us that, yes, they’re down once again. For instance: The Wall Street Journal, 555,200, a drop of 14% over the previous year; The New York Times, 267,600, down 13%; The Boston Globe, 56,900, down 11%.

These same news organizations, though, are succeeding in selling digital subscriptions. The Times has 9.7 million digital-only subscribers. The Journal is around 3.5 million. The Globe has about 250,000, and CEO Linda Henry has announced a push for 400,000.

Why does Press Gazette persist in tracking these print-only numbers? Because they’re there. Twice a year, the Alliance for Audited Media reports print circulation for every newspaper that’s a member. Reliable digital numbers are much harder to come by.

As the Press Gazette itself concedes: “While print remains an important revenue stream, data on digital subscriptions presents a more promising picture.” No kidding.

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Circulation holds steady at the Globe while it continues its slow decline at the Herald

The news about paid circulation at Boston’s two daily newspapers is so-so. The Boston Globe is hanging in there, trading paid print for paid digital, while the Boston Herald continues its long, slow slide.

First the Globe. This week the paper published its Statements of Ownership for both the Sunday and daily papers, something it’s required to do under federal postal laws. Average weekday paid print distribution for the one-year period from Sept. 1, 2022, to Aug. 31, 2023, was 64,977, down from 74,220 a year earlier. That’s a decline of nearly 12.5%. The story was the same on Sunday, as the paid print edition on average registered a decline from 128,920 to 116,456, or about 9.7%.

Paid digital, though, gave those numbers a boost. Using the methodology employed by the Alliance for Audited Media, the average weekday combined print and digital circulation for the 12-month period that ended Aug. 31 was, 346,944, up from 337,748 a year earlier. That’s an increase of 2.7%. On Sunday, total paid circulation is now at 408,974, compared to 403,566 the year before. That’s up about 1.3%.

Now, why am I invoking AAM’s methodology? Because its figures have always involved some double-counting, and it’s not entirely clear what they’re measuring and what they’re not measuring. For instance, according to the Globe’s Statements of Ownership, its current average paid electronic distribution on weekdays is 281,967, and on Sundays it’s 292,518. Globe spokeswoman Heidi Flood told me that those numbers are taken from the figures that the paper reports to AAN using the auditing agency’s rules. Also, digital subscribers to the Globe know that you pay one price, so different numbers for weekdays and Sundays make little sense.

So what is the Globe’s own assessment of its paid digital circulation base? Flood told me in an email that the Globe currently has “more than 245,000 digital-only subscriptions.” That’s an increase of about 10,000 since February 2022, when then-editor Brian McGrory said in an email to his staff that paid digital was around 235,000.

Given all that, let’s put current paid circulation of the Globe at about 310,000 on weekdays and 361,000 on Sundays. That’s more or less unchanged over the past year or so, although readership continues to shift from print to digital. Print brings in more money than digital both from subscribers and advertisers, but it also costs more. The Trump years and the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a lot of growth at the Globe, and that has now leveled off.

One possible good omen for the Globe is that the Statements of Ownership show slightly higher paid circulation on the days closest to the filing dates, in early September 2023, than the 12-month averages. That could mean growth continued over the previous year, but I don’t want to overinterpret a small (literally a one-day) sample size.

Over at the Herald, meanwhile, journalist Mark Pickering has taken a look at the latest AAM reports, which cover the six-month period ending March 31 of this year. Pickering, writing for the newsletter Contrarian Boston (sub. req.), found that paid weekday print circulation at the Herald was down 20%, from 20,353 to 16,043; on Sunday, the print Herald dropped 16%, from 23,702 to 19,799.

The Herald’s combined print and digital weekday circulation dropped from 50,707 to 46,783, for a decline of around 8%. But remember, AAM’s digital numbers are somewhat inflated, as some print subscribers are also counted as digital subscribers. As with the weekday numbers, add about 30,000 digital subscribers to get the Herald’s combined paid Sunday circulation.

“For the Herald,” Pickering wrote, “the numbers seem to show that there will be some circulation to be gained through digital subscribers, but how much remains to be seen.”

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Gannett seeks correction to Nieman Lab article

Last Friday I disputed Joshua Benton’s reporting in Nieman Lab on the extent of the decline in paid circulation at USA Today, owned by Gannett. Now Gannett has asked for a correction. I’m sure Gannett would take issue with my reporting as well; as I noted in an update, both Benton and I may have been led astray by the lack of transparency with which Gannett reports its numbers.

In fact, there’s a statement within Gannett’s request for a correction that is just pure gold regarding the circulation figures that it reports to the Alliance for Audited Media: “AAM data is used to help advertisers understand publisher reach in specific markets, not to infer readership or paid circulation.” Huh?

Surely it is news to many of us that terms such as “print readership,” “print and digital readership” and “circulation” ought to be defined by something other than their plain English meaning. In my earlier post, I concluded that it is impossible to know what Gannett’s publicly reported numbers mean. This only confirms it.

Gannett is wrecking its papers, but USA Today’s circulation is not down 93%

Update: Trying to write about Gannett and accurate numbers simply isn’t possible. One reader notes that USA Today didn’t start offering digital subscriptions until 2021 — and yet Gannett was reporting paid (or unpaid?) digital for USA Today to the Alliance for Audited Media starting at least in 2012. So how is that possible? Another reader hints at an answer — if you subscribe to any Gannett paper, or maybe just any Gannett daily, you get a subscription to USA Today included. Or you used to. Maybe that changed after USA Today’s paywall went up.

So it could be that USA Today’s paid circulation was far lower in 2018 than what it reported to AAN — not the 2,632,392 that Joshua Benton used, and not the 1,584,462 that I used. Instead, maybe what we ought to look at is the 631,076 print figure. And since USA Today seemed to be selling an e-paper option as well, that would bring total paid circulation in 2018 to 654,743.

Now let’s go for an apples-to-apples comparison. The 156,453 that Benton reported for USA Today’s current paid circulation is the total of print and replica. That’s a nausea-inducing decline of 76% over the four-year period, but that’s still not nearly as much as the 93% Benton’s numbers showed. It’s also a lot worse than the 33% estimate that I offered.

But wait! USA Today has been selling paid nonreplica digital subscriptions for nearly two years now. How many? As I explained, Gannett stopped reporting that figure a while back, so we don’t know. Surely it’s not the “zero” that Gannett claims on its most recent report to AAN. (It should at least be one; I mean, I bought one.) We simply can’t know how by how much USA Today’s paid circulation has declined without knowing that important figure, or whether subscriptions to other Gannett papers are included. Without access to Gannett’s internal numbers and insight into exactly what they mean, it’s an unsolveable mess.

Earlier: Did USA Today’s paid circulation drop by 93% between 2018 and 2022? The near-certain answer to that is no — yet that’s the astonishing claim that Joshua Benton makes at Nieman Lab. I knew there was a problem with his numbers as soon as I saw them, mainly because I recently put some effort into figuring out how USA Today’s corporate owner, Gannett, compiles its circulation figures. So let’s dive in.

Benton reports that USA Today’s paid circulation in the third quarter of 2018 was 2,632,392 and then fell in the third quarter of 2022 to just 180,381. That’s a staggering loss of 2,452,011, or 93%. But as I’ll show, much of that apparent loss is the result of a change in the way Gannett reports its paid digital circulation to the Alliance for Audited Media.

What I was able to dig up at AAN uses slightly different time periods compared to what Benton found. I’m going to use all of 2018 rather than the third quarter because the latter wasn’t available when I looked. But it should tell the same tale. It shows that the average weekday circulation that year was 2,708,983, which is in the same ballpark as what Benton reported. A lot of that, though, consists of “affiliated publications” such as Local/Life and Sports Weekly. The circulation of the paper alone was 1,584,462. Now, pay attention to the following breakdown, because it will prove important:

Print: 631,076
Digital replica: 23,667
Digital nonreplica: 929,719

“Digital nonreplica” is the term for digital subscribers who access the website but don’t bother with the e-paper. As you can see, it comprises the vast majority of digital subscriptions — and, at some point, Gannett simply stopped reporting that number.

Now let’s look at the third quarter of 2022. Paid weekday circulation is reported as 180,381 at the top level at ANN (the figure Benton used) or 156,453, which is the number that pops up at AAN if you click through. That latter number comprises 132,176 for print and 24,277 for digital replica (the 156,453 figure, which I didn’t immediately grasp) — and zero for digital nonreplica. So, yes, print circulation is down by a stunning 79%, which may have more than a little to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. USA Today, after all, was a staple of hotels for many years. But digital replica is up slightly. And digital nonreplica simply isn’t being reported.

I encountered this recently when I was analyzing some numbers for Gannett’s Burlington Free Press in northern Vermont. I discovered that, not only had Gannett stopped reporting digital nonreplica, but that — according to confidential internal reports I had obtained — it was underreporting its total paid digital circulation by about half.

Gannett is trying very hard to sell digital subscriptions for its incredible shrinking news outlets. Keep in mind, too, that people don’t buy subscriptions to the replica edition — they buy digital subscriptions, period, and the papers themselves report how many readers are accessing the e-paper so they can tout that number to advertisers. (AAN recently explained all of this to me. As you’ll see, it’s pretty complicated.) In other word, Gannett is telling AAN how many subscribers are accessing the e-paper, but they’re keeping total digital circulation to themselves.

Now, I’m going to take a leap here and assume that USA Today’s total digital circulation was the same in 2022 as it was in 2018, or maybe even a little higher. I base that on several factors: digital circulation was up at all of Gannett’s New England properties, according to the confidential report I mentioned; USA Today’s digital replica circulation was up slightly; and Gannett has been pushing digital subscriptions hard. I even signed up for one, and it was a great deal — with a little fiddling, I can use it to access every Gannett paper in the country. Of course, there’s little in them.

With all that in mind, I came up with a guesstimate that USA Today’s paid circulation in the third quarter of 2022 was about 1,056,000. I’m building in a nonreplica figure of 900,000, a decline (as I said, unlikely) compared to 2018. Put all that together, and using a 2018 circulation figure of 1,584,462 (that is, not counting “affiliated publications”), and I come up with a drop of 33% between 2018 and 2022. Now, that’s still a lot — but it’s also in line with a lot of non-Gannett papers that Benton used for comparison.

Everything else Benton says about Gannett is right on target. The company has decimated its papers, is closing them and selling them off, and generally appears to be squeezing out the last few drops of revenue they can muster before people like top executive Mike Reed, the $7.7 million man, walk away. It’s an outrage, and we really can’t call attention to it often enough.

But the crazy circulation drop at USA Today and other Gannett dailies is more a function of Gannett’s decision to stop reporting paid digital nonreplica subscriptions than it is an actual measurement of readers fleeing for the exits.

More fun with numbers: AAM explains how it counts digital subscribers. I’m still confused.

By Dan Kennedy

As I wrote last week, the matter of how the Alliance for Audited Media counts paid digital subscriptions is something that has confused me for a long time. In September 2021, I sent an email to Erin Boudreau, AAM’s senior marketing manager in which I asked her some of the questions that I asked here. She responded with links to two fact sheets (here and here), neither of which struck me as especially helpful.

Because of that, I wrote last week’s item without checking in with AAM again. I immediately heard from Boudreau, but still without the information I was looking for. Now, I have no reason to believe that Boudreau was being deliberately obtuse, and I’m also aware that AAM is at the mercy of the newspapers that pay them. AAM’s job is to be accurate and rigorous, but they’re dependent on the data that publishers provide.

In any case, I decided to try again with Boudreau, asking her a series of specific questions expanding on what I asked her a year and a half ago.

Read the rest at What Works.

Counting print subscribers is easy. It’s time to bring that same precision to digital.

The Burlington Free Press of Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2019 by Dan Kennedy.

In reporting on the newspaper business, there are few matters more obscure or maddening than determining paid digital circulation. My example for this morning is the Burlington Free Press, a Gannett-owned daily that, I wrote recently, will soon be printed in either Auburn, Massachusetts, ~~Worcester~~ or Providence, hours away from its home base in northern Vermont.

The change is the result of the giant newspaper chain’s decision to shut its printing plant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which will affect several other papers as well. Gannett’s standard defense of moves like this is that they’re shifting to digital, so print doesn’t matter that much. But as I observed at the time, the Free Press sells more than twice as many print papers as it does digital subscriptions.

My item prompted someone to send me a “confidential and internal” Gannett circulation report.

Read the rest at What Works.

The Globe reports that paid digital-only circulation has hit 226,000

Every time I open a window, in floats another end-of-the-year memo from a Boston Globe Media executive. This one is from Tom Brown, vice president for consumer revenue, who reports that the Globe’s digital-only subscriptions now stand at 226,000 — a remarkable accomplishment given that the Globe was at just 95,000 in mid-2019.

For those of you who keep telling me that the Globe is going to drop its print edition, let me call your attention to this observation by Brown: “The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue.”

That’s true even though print circulation according to the most recent report filed with the Alliance for Audited Media was just 128,000 on Sundays and about 73,000 on weekdays. The Globe, like other newspapers, will shut down its printing presses once costs exceed revenues — but not a moment before.

Also, I thought it was interesting that the Globe’s paid digital circulation kept rising this year even as overall traffic shrank following the end of the Trump era. (It’s over, right? Please tell me it’s over.)

“We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election/post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane,” Brown wrote. “We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.”

The full text of Brown’s memo follows.

Dear Colleagues,

The past two and a half years have been a period of exceptional subscriber growth at the Globe. In mid-2019, we were thrilled to have the leading digital subscription business among major metros with 95,000 digital-only subscribers. From the launch of Globe.com in the fall of 2011, it took us over 7 years to get to that number of digital-only subs. It took less than a year to more than double that number as we continued to refine, invest, and innovate to develop the sophisticated approach that we have today.

This note is intended to share an update of how we have evolved since that time and what the current state of our subscription business looks like.

The consumer team has disciplines in:

- Analytics
- Testing
- Pricing
- Database/campaign management
- Email operations
- Customer insights and market research

We work with so many of you across the organization on a wide array of projects. Our main focus is growing subscriptions and related revenue. Our team is in service of the incredible journalism that is created here every day. We feel a responsibility to recommend and enact strategies that help to continually attract new subscribers and retain existing subscribers. We focus on analytical techniques and approaches that can improve our ability to draw in, acquire, engage, retain and maximize yield of subscribers. We believe in the rigorous testing of new ideas and letting the data and analytics guide us as we refine our approach.

A Brief history – mid 2019

With support and guidance from leadership we set out to accelerate the growth of our digital subscription business. After a period of testing that began in the fall of 2018, we embarked on a major shift in our acquisition strategy in mid-2019. Encouraged by the early results of the testing we switched the core introductory offer (the offer most commonly seen on the paywall and in email). The rigorous outreach, tracking, sampling, and testing combined with our consistently excellent journalism led to our acquisition rate increasing by more than 500% and remarkably, engagement increased and the retention rate stayed the same. This propelled a sharp increase in subscribers beginning in the summer of 2019 — we passed the 100,000 subscriber mark in mid-June 2019! As 2019 continued, so did the strong results, and we felt more encouraged with each passing week that we had tapped into a new audience that saw great value in a Globe subscription once they had a chance to spend time with our content.

The effect of the pandemic on subscriptions

As the pandemic began in March 2020, we became even more relevant to our subscribers and to new readers. Many of the subscribers already acquired on the new offer were moving off their introductory rate in the early days of the pandemic, which caused an increase in retention. At the same time we were acquiring new subscribers at a record pace. Going into 2020, we planned for a record year with growth to 178,000 subscribers by the end of the year. This goal was surpassed in early April. By early May we had over 200,000 digital only subscribers. While it took over 7 years to grow to 100,000 we had added the next 100,000 in less than one year!

Earlier in 2021

We had a strong start in 2021, but in the post-election / post-inauguration spring news audiences around the country began to wane. We saw about a 25% decline in our non-subscriber audience during this period — something that was widely seen throughout the industry, yet our overall subscriber numbers grew modestly.

Where are we now — Q4 2021

Over the past 5+ months traffic has increased and so have subscriptions. We have reached a new all-time high of 226,000 digital-only subscribers.

We are a leader among U.S. major metro newspapers and one of only a few that have surpassed 100,000 digital only subscribers. Our strategy is being widely adopted across the industry and we are proud to be innovators in this approach and thrilled that it is even possible thanks to the incredible journalism, investment across the company to consistently improve what we do, and the support of the entire organization.

New England is the core for digital subscribers, accounting for 76% of total subscribers, but there are subscribers in all 50 states and more than 3,000 international subscribers!

A sampling of what we have planned for 2022

- Continue to monitor acquisition results and test other offers to make sure we are always following an approach that nets us the best results for the long term health of the business.
- Testing of new acquisition approaches and getting more dynamic with our subscription offering.
- Working with the Product Development and Engineering teams to implement new tests and a redesigned checkout flow.
- Taking a data driven approach to increasing engagement and retention through a series of initiatives designed to address churn both proactively and reactively — working closely with Marketing and Customer Service.

Home Delivery

The print paper remains at the core of what we do and at 55% of consumer revenue, the largest component of revenue. While print subscriber volume has declined as more people choose a digital option, we still have a dedicated base of home delivery subscribers. We are continuing to invest in Home Delivery acquisition and will increase that investment in 2022. Our Home delivery subscribers consist of a very loyal base with an average tenure of over 20 years! We continue to use analytics to make sure we can deliver the best experience possible to every subscriber.

Print newsstand sales

Another important piece of the consumer business is the revenue generated from sales of single copies on the newsstand. The single copy business was hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic as the foot traffic to stores, especially in the city of Boston, collapsed suddenly. 2021 has been a bounce back year though and sales have remained relatively flat year over year since the spring, indicating that there is still a consistent demand for print single copy.

I hope this gave you a good glimpse into our consumer business. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions to any of us on this entrepreneurial consumer team.

Thank you!

Tom Brown