US: Print circulation unrelated to paid electronic circulation

Posted by Lindsay Berrigan on May 3, 2007 at 10:58 AM

The new Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report showed the newspaper industry in a period of experimentation with paid electronic editions. Some of the biggest metro papers, the same ones with thriving websites, sell far fewer electronic editions than mid-sized dailies. For now, print circulation and paid electronic circulation seem unrelated.

In fact, that the list of 12 papers that reported average sales of over 2,000 paid electronic editions per day seems almost random:

Wall Street Journal: 336,373
Investor's Business Daily: 56,891
Orange County Register: 15,640
The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colo.: 13,135
Columbus Dispatch: 5,704
New York Times: 4,912
East Valley Tribune of Phoenix, Ariz.: 4,100
The Dispatch of Moline, Ill.: 2,678
Denver Post: 2,514
Little Rock Democrat Gazette: 2,438
Minneapolis Star Tribune: 2,251
Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Mass.: 2091

The Wall Street Journal is the US’s second-largest daily. So where is USA Today, the largest? Off the list with an average of 1,288 electronic editions per day. That’s less even than Boston’s Christian Science Monitor (1,901), but certainly more than the Boston Herald, which though four times larger than the Monitor in print, sells just six online editions per day.

Further, electronic editions are certainly the only place where the Gazette of Colorado Springs (Colorado) and the Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) can claim higher circulation than the New York Times.

In this period of trial and error with electronic editions, some smaller dailies seem to have found the formula, while larger metro papers could perhaps benefit from a look at the WSJ’s model.

Source: Editor & Publisher