Dear reader, for cost reasons you can stay stolen from us

 
US publishers Newspapers in America accept circulation cuts if they can save costs. Year after year, the American Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) publishes new alarming statistics that point to a continuous decline in circulation among daily newspapers. Year after year, the press also jumps on the bandwagon and quotes experts predicting the imminent death of the entire industry. But in the boardrooms of many major US newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune or the San Francisco Chronicle, a new conviction has taken hold: Stop chasing after every single subscriber and deliberately cause circulation losses where it will ultimately save costs.
"This is a sensible survival strategy for newspapers," says Colby Atwood, President of the newspaper consulting firm Borrell Associates. "They don't want to increase circulation quantitatively so much as qualitatively." Circulation is often reduced where distribution is geographically difficult in the vast Americas. Publishers prefer to focus more on the demographics of their circulation areas and try to communicate to advertisers that their readership might be particularly desirable to certain marketers, which in turn means they can charge higher rates for ads - even though circulation is somewhat smaller.
Publishers are thus returning to a source of income that has always been most important to them: advertising customers. On average, 80 percent of a newspaper's revenue in the US comes from advertising and only 20 percent from subscriptions. "Publishers are aiming for higher penetration in those areas that are particularly important to them," says Atwood, explaining the trend towards qualitative downsizing.
Newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News, which belongs to the Belo Group, have been limiting their distribution to a radius of 200 miles for about a year. Belo, which pursues a similar strategy with its other three newspapers, saves around eight million dollars a year in this way. The US newspapers sold around 10 percent fewer newspapers than in 2000 and therefore suffered an annual circulation loss of 1.3 percent. Compared to the magazine industry, however, this is a "slow development" says Jason Klein, President of the marketing association National Newspaper Network (NNNLP). This is because the magazine industry's circulation has fallen by 27 percent over the past 25 years, compared to just 11 percent for newspapers.
Retaining disloyal readers is extremely expensiveThis new practice also results in considerable savings for publishers in terms of marketing. In the past, generous discounts were given to newly acquired subscribers, but today it is better to get rid of them because the associated costs are not worth the effort. Once coveted distribution targets such as hotels, hospitals or schools, where newspapers were often distributed free of charge, are no longer considered attractive for publishers because the newspapers are often not read at all.
According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), it now costs 68 dollars to acquire a new subscriber, twice as much as five years ago. However, these new readers are generally difficult to retain and quickly drop out after the discount period expires. The Los Angeles Times in particular is seen as a pioneer in the industry, with hardly any promotions or self-promotion, preferring to rely on a loyal reader base.
"Circulation is now only an important measurement tool for those companies that add advertising to newspapers. Or for journalists who learned at school that circulation is all that matters," says Bill Murray from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). He points out that publishers are increasingly measuring readership rather than circulation. Because the quality readers of newspapers, who actually read the products and belong to a certain demographic, are becoming increasingly important, 500 newspapers have already started to provide not only circulation figures but also demographic data to the ABC. Since the beginning of November, this data has also been available to advertisers under the title Audience-Fax.
David Cole, editor-in-chief of the industry publication NewsInc, points out that for a long time a whole series of newspapers maintained a so-called "vanity circulation", i.e. a piece of circulation that was only intended for representation purposes.
"Newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, for example, only distributed their paper in Anapolis, the capital of the US state of Maryland, to give local lawmakers the impression that they had a presence in the state capital, even though no one there subscribed to the paper," explains Cole. "An expensive practice that advertisers couldn't care less about."
Gerti Schön, New York