Election results are coming in

As I watch election results stream in tonight from the mid-term election, I've been reflecting upon the ongoing election we've been witnessing over these last few years -- the voting that consumers have been doing with their mouses.

Newspaper readership has been slipping steadily over the last few years, but nothing like the results from the latest circulation reports. A steady slide has turned into a steeper dive, as almost every major metro paper in the study saw declines. Fully 22 of the top 25 daily papers saw declines in the 6 month period ending Sept. 2006!

Sunday papers, once the sacred cows of publishing, also saw steep declines.

Here is the summary.

Some of the steepest 6 month declines:
Los Angeles Times: (-8.0%)
The Philadelphia Inquirer: (-7.5%)
The Boston Globe: (-6.7%)
The Oregonian, Portland: (-6.8%)

The scope and size of these numbers is shocking even to those of us that expected it. Are we witnessing the tipping point? With circulation slipping, the pressure will be on to cut advertising rates (pressure from customers getting less bang for the buck, and pressure from ad sales departments to make the numbers). As more customers test online media for local advertising and find success, the flight away from traditional newsprint will continue.

Where will their numbers bottom out? They don't have to go to zero mind you...they only need to go below the breakeven level needed to support the incredibly high fixed cost infrastructure.

Most of the editorial and sales staff would still be needed in an electronic version, so much of that stays. Exactly where that breakeven point is only the newspaper knows, but as the numbers continue to skid, look for more bad headlines.

You'll see at some point, I predict, that certain papers will do what the trade magazine Electronic Publishing announced in March 2006: that it would stop printing altogether. (Nevermind the irony that a magazine called Electronic Publishing ever was *printed* to begin with.) The point here is that the overhead needed to publish and deliver an electronic edition is much less than the that of a traditional printed newspaper.