Charles Apple

Editor & Publisher’s Jennifer Saba published a Special Report Sunday of a new study that looks at single-copy sales:

John Murray, the Newspaper Association of America’s vice president of circulation, says that daily single-copy sales dipped roughly 5% for the six-month period ending September 2006. Some markets, he contends, have experienced much larger drops on Sunday. Compare that to the overall decline in circulation for the same period, where daily and Sunday fell “only” 2.8% and 3.4% respectively.

And single-copy is a more critical issue than subscriptions, the Association says.

Buyer behavior has become more erratic when it comes to purchasing papers at the newsstand (or local convenience store or supermarket). This means front-page design and hard-driving marketing tactics are even more necessary to ramp up sales, the study suggests.

And of course, pricing remains as sensitive as ever. According to the report, 80% of those surveyed found the daily paper to be a “good value” at 50 cents. But when the cost creeps up to 75 cents? Forget it, they said. Only 16% would shell out an additional quarter, or so they claimed.

I wonder about the cost issue. I mean, that seems like common sense. But when USA Today raised its cost from 50 to 75 cents, it was hardly a blip. And that’s certainly a single-copy-driven paper.

E&P’s Special Report goes on and on, detailing retailing strategies and distribution issues and marketing gimmicks. But they really don’t return to the idea voiced a couple of grafs ago: Spending more effort on front-page design. And content isn’t mentioned at all.

Is content an afterthought? Or should we ignore it? How does that factor into the equation?

I’m left disappointed. I hope you are, too.

Read the E&P Special Report here:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003550169

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 6:24 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Newspapers, Visual Editors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.