I was just leafing through the latest issue of Editor & Publisher, the trade journal of the newspaper industry.
Yes, old habits die hard. I still read it. After 25 years in the newspaper business, I still can’t get the ink out of my veins, even though I see the industry self-destructing before my eyes.
In fact, no one who doesn’t read this E&P would believe what I am about to tell you, but it’s true: This trade journal of the newspaper business is fixated on the Internet. Nearly all the articles in each issue have something to do with the New Media. It’s a sign of the times. The newspaper industry is dying – and it knows it. All it thinks about is the new medium that is supplanting it.
But I digress.
What caught my eye in this particular issue of E&P – dated May 12 – has nothing to do with the Internet, at least not directly.
It’s about newspaper circulation in the last six months.
It seems the war in Iraq didn’t do what many had hoped for newspaper sales. Circulation was pretty much flat for all but one major-market, top-20 daily paper – the New York Post. The Post’s circulation shot up more than 10 percent in that time period. No other paper had anything remotely resembling those gains.
But two newspapers suffered significant declines in circulation in the last six months – both of them owned by the New York Times Company. One was the Times itself, which lost 5.3 percent of its readers in that period. The other was the Boston Globe, which lost 6.3 percent of its readers.
What’s this all about? What does this mean? What is the significance?
It means the New York Times was sliding into oblivion even before the Jayson Blair scandal. It means there’s big trouble on the horizon for America’s “newspaper of record.” It means the New York Times might soon be known as the Old York Times.
I’m not joking. I was asked the other day on television if I thought the “diversity” craze would come to an end with the sad spectacle of the New York Times scandal, in which a young black reporter, hired without qualifications and promoted despite inadequacies far beyond those of most mild-mannered newspaper reporters. No, I said. We’re a long way from seeing the end of the diversity fad. But I think we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the New York Times.
The host was stunned. I never got a chance to elaborate.
The New York Times has been on the way down because of political correctness long before the name Jayson Blair became synonymous with fraud and deceit. Readers have been rejecting the Times and the direction it has taken under Executive Editor Howell Raines.
In fact, in the last six months alone, 63,751 of them have quit. That’s enough circulation to start a fairly sizable daily newspaper in a medium-size market. On top of that, its sister paper to the north, now under New York Times management, lost nearly 30,000 readers in that period.
The Times, famous for its Sunday paper, the largest in the United States, also lost 62,000 readers for that edition, too. The Globe lost nearly 25,000 Sunday readers.
No other major paper came close to these losses.
Even though Jayson Blair was committing his unusual brand of high jinks during this period, few outside the paper had noticed. Instead, they were noticing something else – that the paper stunk.
Just imagine what the next six-month circulation report will be like – what we will call the post-Jayson period.
By the way, you will notice that New York Times readers are not just quitting one paper. They are picking up another. The New York Post’s gains in the same period were nearly identical to the Times’ losses. Factor in the New York Daily News’ pickup of 5,000 and you can account for every single one of them.
These people are not coming back. They’ve found a new home. And there will be even more Times refugees now that its cover as an honest, accurate, careful, credible newspaper has been blown.
