Twenty of 34 Canadian dailies reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations saw Monday to Friday circulation decrease in the April-September period, with declines ranging from less than a 1% to a 9.5% drop for the Herald-Tribune in Grand Prairie, Alta.
“Obviously the economy has something to do with it,” said Bob White, ABC’s senior vice-president, Canada. “But you should be looking at the total media footprint of newspapers. Yes, the actual paper consumption is down, but the access to their websites is up dramatically.
“I don’t think it’s so much an indictment of newspapers, as it is an indication that people are accessing the brand in many different ways.”
Two Canwest publications, The Province in Vancouver and The Gazette in Montreal, bucked the industry trend with double-digit increases in average Monday to Friday circulation. Circulation for The Province grew 16.4% to 160,055, while The Gazette’s circulation increased 11.7% to 143,783. Canwest titles the Calgary Herald and the Ottawa Citizen also saw circulation increase 4.4% and 2.5% respectively.
A focus on promoting the Gazette as a learning resource in Quebec schools has had a sizeable impact on the publication’s circulation, said Bernard Asselin, vice-president of marketing and reader sales and service. “It’s really helping us not only on the circulation side but also bringing in new young readers—and that’s an investment for the future.” Asked if its popular “Words Matter” campaign had any impact, Asselin said “That’s the $64,000 question. But one thing we know is that we don’t have a brand image problem. Not all papers can say that.”
Among the two national dailies, the National Post’s Monday-to-Friday circulation declined 5.6% to 190,197, while The Globe and Mail was essentially flat at 329,503. Phillip Crawley, the Globe’s publisher and CEO, said the newest figures reflect an ongoing effort by the publication to trim deeply discounted circulation, such as papers distributed to hotels and airlines.
“We’re trying to maintain a bit of stability in our numbers,” said Crawley. “I think everybody’s trying to manage where you get rid of some of the circulation that’s unproductive, that’s not actually delivering you readership or revenue benefits.”
Crawley said that while the Globe is pushing to increase its fully paid home delivery subscriptions—which he calls “the gold standard”—it is also pushing a new bundled product called GlobePlus, which provides an e-edition of the paper, along with access to online archives and its subscription financial website Globeinvestor Gold. Introduced this year, GlobePlus currently has about 19,000 subscribers. “It’s a new type of offering, so we’re really just testing it out to see how people like that combination,” said Crawley.
Total circulation among the 34 Canadian papers reporting to ABC dropped 1.3%, to 2.44 million from 2.47 million for the same six-month period in 2007.
In the U.S., average daily circulation for the April-September period is down 4.6% compared with the same period last year. The top two U.S. papers, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, reported flat circulation, while The New York Times says circulation declined 3.6%.
“Certainly the U.S. has got different problems to us, simply because they’ve had a recession there for quite a while,” said Crawley.
The ABC report does not feature several prominent publications, including the Toronto Star or any of the Sun dailies. Sun Media Corp., Transcontinental Media and Torstar all defected from ABC to rival circulation firm CCAB earlier this year.
