A California Newspaper Drops Its Monday Print Edition Because Circulation Is Way Down That Day, But It Still Files Its Web Site, And With New Stats Showing Big Fluctuations In Daily Circulations For Most Newspapers Is That California Newspaper On To Something?

Philip M. Stone March 6, 2006

The Tracy Post in California’s San Joaquin Valley is taking a “Mondoliday” from now on. The Monday – Saturday paper is switching to Tuesday-Saturday in print, the web site continues seven days a week but with increased coverage on Mondays.

The family-owned newspaper had a paid circulation of 9,000 until last June when it switched to giving the paper away to all 19,000 households in the Tracy. The newspaper adopted a real scientific way of discovering which publishing days were the weakest -- employees drove around town, saw where unread newspapers piled up, and soon figured out the biggest pileup was on Mondays!

Publisher Robert S. Matthews, told readers that the newspaper is “faced with financial challenges as we try and balance our goals with the constraints of operating a profitable business.” In other words, why publish on Mondays and lose money? It is a risk -- four newspapers compete in Tracy, a city of 80,000 residents -- but having already laid off staff recently, including some in the newsroom, the newspaper believes it had no option but to take a novel approach to cutting costs.

Could that just become a trend for other newspapers in similar situations where some days are far more powerful circulation days than others? The web site is still there; let that take up the slack?

The question becomes more imposing following fascinating new numbers from the US Audit Bureau of Circulation that now requires not just total circulation, but day-of-the week reporting, too. And the swings are pretty dramatic.

As reported in Editor & Publisher, The Chicago Tribune’s best day is Friday with 684,664. Its worst day is Monday with 464,415, that’s a difference of 220,249 copies (31%). At the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times, the best day is also Friday with 990,904 copies, but its worst day is Tuesday at 780,957 copies – around 210,000 difference (21%).

The trend across the country shows similar percentage changes between best day/worst day with circulations usually better on Thursdays and Fridays and usually worst on Mondays and Tuesdays.

There are repercussions to such statistics. Newspapers are used to making around 20% profit margin. Could that number be increased it newspapers just printed on those days that have the largest circulations? And what about advertisers? Is an advertiser going to be happy paying the same to advertise in a Monday newspaper as for a Friday newspaper? Does the advertising department have rates that take that into account?

Newspaper subscribers are used to “light” days. There are days when it takes both hands to carry the newspaper into the house, and there are times when the youngest kid can retrieve it with one hand. When advertising is down the news hole goes down with it, but newspapers still published.

Some newspapers have done their number crunching in perhaps a more scientific way than they did in Tracy, but they still came up with the same conclusion – that Mondays are light. At the considerably larger Charlotte Observer, for instance, executives looking to save on newsprint costs seized the statistics to reduce the number of sections on Mondays from five to four.

But the Tracy newspaper has now taken that to the next logical step. Perhaps easier for them in a small town although there is plenty of competition – perhaps too much competition for such a small community -- but it is a business decision made on the numbers and newspapers are looking at the numbers these days closer than ever before.

As they try to figure out the right convergence with their web sites perhaps for some newspapers resorting to just web publication for the soft days could be a financial solution.

The problem with that, of course, is that advertisers pay much more to advertise in a newspaper than they do on the web – most estimates are that a web site needs to pull in somewhere between 20 and 100 readers to gain the same revenue that would have been earned from one print reader.

With all that in mind it is interesting to note the Newspaper Association of America’s new $50 million advertising campaign that basically tells advertisers that newspapers, with all of its multiple information channels, are the place to invest advertising to gain the best returns.

Among the stats offered are that 52% of consumers say they check out ads in newspapers five times more than any other medium; 46% say newspapers are their preferred medium to receive advertising information as compared to 10% who preferred television; 51% said newspapers were of the most value in planning shopping, compared to just 11% who preferred the Internet; and that newspapers lead all media in heavy usage among “influential” and opinion leading consumers at 41%.

NAA President John F. Sturm summarized, “Newspapers are aggressively communicating their true strengths by better defining the quality and size of their audiences, proving consumer engagement with newspaper advertising, and highlighting the expanded footprint today’s newspapers deliver through their core products along with Internet sites, ethnic and youth publications, and more.”

All of that is fine and dandy but in better defining the size of audience newspapers are now telling advertisers that some days in print are better than others. How is an advertiser supposed to handle that?

While there is no question that newspapers needed a helping hand in convincing advertisers that they should stick with their trusted friend rather than transfer a whole lot of their spend to the Internet, it looks like the NAA needs to get another project launched real fast this time aimed at readers -- convincing them to buy newspapers at the beginning of the week, too!

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