Tuesday, May. 19, 2009

What else doesn’t TV report on?

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

Everyone seems to know many big-city newspapers are struggling to survive.

Not very many folks realize things are even tougher for the television networks.

Why?

One explanation is that both newspapers and TV networks have reported extensively on the problems of newspapers, a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania has found. But TV’s talking heads have been much less forthcoming about their own issues.

“The television networks have basically not been very interested in talking about television’s problems,” Michael X. Delli Carpini, one of the study’s authors, told Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times.

The study’s authors reviewed 26 major newspapers and the prime-time evening newscasts of the four major TV networks from 2000 to early 2009. They found 900 newspaper stories about the drop in newspaper circulation and 95 about the shrinking broadcast news audience, the Times article reported. The TV newscasts had 38 reports on shrinking newspaper circulation and only six about the declining newscast audiences.

The Times report also noted that during the period TV network news lost 9 million viewers, falling from 32 million to 23 million — a 28 percent decline. Newspapers also lost 9 million in sales, falling from 56 million daily to 47 million — a 16 percent drop.

Both are serious declines, but it’s clear the appeal of TV news is declining much faster.

And it’s worth noting that many newspapers have intentionally cut low-price sales by third-party vendors and have weeded out subscribers who live far away and thus do not pay enough to cover delivery costs.

In addition, newspaper cost-cutting has prompted cuts in low-yield or no-yield Newspapers in Education (NIE) sales to school classrooms, some of which are being replaced by online digital copies.

What’s the combined impact of these decisions? It’s hard to say because they would have to be tallied newspaper by newspaper across the nation’s more than 1,400 daily newspapers.

But a circulation expert from one of the nation’s major newspaper groups believes at least 30 percent of the decline — perhaps more — is the result of newspapers making such strategic changes.

If that’s accurate, the future of newspapers looks much better than either newspapers or television would have you believe.

Here’s what I know and can document about the Tri-City Herald: Our website has five times the number of monthly page views of the nearest of our TV competitors, which aggregates both its Yakima and Tri-Cities stations into a single total. In fact, it’s likely that separately those stations don’t have a tenth of the online traffic the Herald generates.

And when we did our last Belden readership survey several years ago, before TV viewers were abandoning network news in droves, the most-watched local news report had a 13 percent share of Tri-City households.

At the same time, the Herald was being read by more than four times as many folks. So, yes, newspapers, including the Herald, are fighting to hang onto every reader we can, both in print and online, and are facing a slow erosion.

But television viewers are being washed away by the twin tidal waves of cable channels and the internet. And though TV doesn’t talk about it, the big networks every night have fewer and fewer folks watching their news.

Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

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