Douglas E. Jessmer

It doesn’t look good.

Even with the one positive number — St. Pete’s Sunday boost of about 8,000 copies —  there’s an overall drop in Tampa Bay Sunday circ of more than 3,000 papers. The figures are among statewide semiannual data released by the Newspaper Association of America. The Times says:

Florida leads the nation in percentage of residents over the age of 65, a demographic that’s dominant among newspaper readers. So when newspaper circulation drops in the Sunshine State - as it did for 13 of the state’s 16 largest daily papers - the industry’s got a problem.

In southeast Florida, the drop was the worst, the absolute worst being The Miami Herald’s Sunday plummet of nearly 40,000.

With the drops being so inconsistent, it doesn’t seem like it’s because “people aren’t reading newspapers anymore.” One question remains unanswered: Why?

Also: What’s these papers’ Web readership looking like, and does it offset (or help offset) the circulation drops?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under vizeds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.