New circulation numbers are out for The Star, and they are grim.
The only comfort Star management can take in these statistics is that the hometown paper has a lot of company from many other major metropolitan dailies.
The statistics come from the Alliance for Audited Media, a nonprofit organization financed by media companies. Among other things, AAM puts out quarterly circulation reports for newspapers.
For the quarter ending Sept. 30, the average, paid circulation for the print version of the Sunday Star was a measly 119,892.
Average Monday-Friday, paid circulation was 78,122.
Another 10,000 or so people have stand-alone, digital subscriptions to the Sunday Star. (Print subscribers automatically get digital subscriptions.) The 10,000 figure strikes me as very puny, considering the core, five-county metro area has a population of about 1.7 million.
Let me put the print circulation numbers in perspective.
:: In September 2009, Sunday circulation stood at nearly 308,000, meaning the paper has lost nearly 200,000 Sunday subscribers in eight years.
:: As recently as the late 1990s, The Star’s Monday-Friday circulation was well into the 200,000s, and the paper mounted a marketing campaign designed to propel weekday circulation to 300,000 by the year 2000. It never got close.
:: My first newspaper job was with The Kentucky Post and Times-Star, which was a one-section wrap-around to the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star. In 1968, our section, which went to northern Kentucky residents, had a weekday circulation of about 50,000, which I considered piddly. The Star’s weekday circulation is now bordering on piddly.
The circulation decline for The Star and many major metropolitan dailies can only be described as precipitous. In just the last two years, The Star’s Sunday circulation has plunged by more than a third, and Monday to Friday circulation has dropped more than 25 percent.
A few days ago, I put in a call to Phil Schroder, The Star’s vice president of “audience development,” hoping to speak with him about the Star’s circulation, but I did not get a return call.
…Where is this headed, and what does it mean? Let me quote a friend — a retired, long-time Star reporter — with whom I spoke recently:
“What we’re talking about now is a long, ugly drag to the bottom.”
Gulp…
If it wasn’t clear earlier why The Star’s owner, McClatchy Co., is selling assets, like the 18th and Grand headquarters building, it is now. (McClatchy also had a deal in place to sell and then lease back The Star’s green-glass printing plant a block to the east, but it scrapped that deal before it closed.)
**
Here are some third-quarter statistics from other major metropolitan dailies…
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Lee Enterprises, owner): Sunday print circulation, 135,998; daily circulation, 87,567.
Miami Herald (McClatchy): Sunday, 118,893; daily, 70,492
Fort Worth Star-Telegram (McClatchy): Sunday, 113,135; daily, 60,691
The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY, owned by Gannett): Sunday, 112,145; daily, 72,356
**
Newspapers used to be cash cows, generating returns on investments of 30 percent or more. That’s all changed. Some media companies that owned TV stations and newspapers have spun off their newspapers and created new TV-based companies free of the debt and cash-flow drain of the newspapers.
The most significant change in the newspapers industry’s revenue model is that, in the past, advertising provided the vast majority of newspaper revenue, allowing prices for the print product to be set very low. Some of you, I’m sure, remember when you could buy the daily paper for a dime. The last 15 years or so, however, people have turned more and more to the Internet for their news, and advertisers have followed. With advertising revenue way down, newspapers have had to shift a greater share of the revenue burden onto circulation, and that can only be achieved by raising subscription rates.
The Star, for example, has now set subscription renewal prices at $800 or more a year for ongoing subscribers. Renewal rates are negotiable, however, and the only hard-and-fast rate being or one-year, start-up subscriptions. Nevertheless, The Star is losing a lot of subscribers because some people don’t want the hassle of negotiating and others aren’t willing to pay the final rate they’re quoted.
Where The Star and most other major metropolitan dailies erred early on was giving away their content on the Web. It is very difficult to get people to pay for anything that starts out free…Remember the outcry that erupted 15 or 20 years ago after Kansas City announced it was going to stop providing residents with free trash bags? Similarly, it’s been extremely challenging to get people to start paying for newspaper content they used to get gratis. A lot of people simply won’t pay — even though online subscriptions cost a very reasonable $13 a month.
All in all, newspaper companies are caught in a descending spiral, and the bottom is not in view. To play off the old wheel-of-fortune ditty…down and down it goes, where it stops nobody knows.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
The Star reaps what it sows. We got fed up with the editorial board michegas, not to mention the ridiculous Missouri endorsement, and dropped for awhile. Then we signed back up for a Sunday/Wednesday subscription, only to see them drop the once enjoyable house/home section.
If I want details on anything I have to go online to multiple news sources. An example would be the recent Antonio Soave disaster. Both the Topeka and Lawrence papers nailed it way before the Star, but the facts went unnoticed until the Star “broke” the story, which they really did not. (And the real reporter-type story is where did a part-time KU language instructor come up with half a million dollars to presumably launder through a restaurant, but no one seems to be onto that angle.)
The recent, brilliant expose on Kansas secrecy is almost an anomaly at this point. Sad, just sad.
My favorite part of your comment, Liselotte, is throwing out the word “michegas,” which I had never heard of.
Googled it, and this came up from the Yiddish Slang Dictionary…
“This can be spelled ‘meshugas’ as well and comes directly from the Hebrew word ‘meshuga,’ which also means crazy.”
Thus, in the context you used it, craziness…
Well, when I am AWAKE I spell it mishegas, but I think spellcheck modified it about 3 times lol. My favorite word is meshugener, but there are too many choices in the current news cycle to pick just ONE name for an example.
I would love to know the average age of those who are still subscribing to The Star’s print edition.
WHEN Phil calls me, I’ll ask him…
I’d be willing to bet it’s at least 40. That was my thought as I read this piece: millennials and younger DON’T READ.
If you want the model for where this is going, look at The Kansan over in KCK. They sold their building, farmed out the printing and moved into rented offices. The next step was a digital only product and then oblivion.
You can thank Carol Marinovich in part for that. When The Kansan’s editor, Roy Teicher started running investigative pieces on Marinovich’s administration her mentor Dick Bond yanked the advertising from his bank and Marinovich threatened to “bury the Kansan”.
So The Kansan’s publisher fired Teicher and the reporter who had done most of the investigative pieces, Rebecca Shelton, became the editor. The first thing the editor did was have the new editor make a “we really didn’t mean it” tour of the UG. She wrote an editorial apologizing for being so mean to the UG and then Marinovich pulled their legals. Between the loss of income and the loss of credibility, they were toast. Marinovich had indeed, buried the Kansan.
By the way, Shelton was a top-notch reporter. She tried publishing her own paper in JOCO after that and then managed Penzey’s Spices in OP for awhile.
It all just means people will get dumber.
“Pithily” put, Bruce.
Back to the important thing here…Liselotte’s introduction in these spaces of the word “mishegas.”
I almost contacted my good friend Dan Margolies before commenting on it, but, naturally, he contact me…Master of all things Yiddish, he says…
“Just to set you straight, mishegoss (pronounced mish-ih-GOSS) means madness, craziness, foolishness, nonsense. It’s a very common Yiddish word.”
He sent me a link to an interesting and funny story about the word…
http://forward.com/culture/116716/clearing-up-the-meshugas-for-maureen-dowd-and-will/
Where would we be if we didn’t have you to keep our priorities straight ;-)
Good research, Dan Margolies! The great Yiddish newspaper editor Abraham Cahan would be proud of you.
We’re on a roll in the Comments Dept…
Not sure if a column that pretty much implies the imminent death of this newspaper is the right forum for smart-aleck remarks.
I grew up in a community where we had multiple newspapers. My family took both and I am not looking forward to an era when we rely on 60 second spots delivered by blow dry airheads as a source of news. I also found it disturbing when no one in the news business in the metro area came to The Kansan’s defense. But i’m not about to let it turn a pleasant conversation with friends into a wake.
I also don’t think that it’s death is anywhere near imminent. There is still substantial value for something with the influence of a daily newspaper, but the difficult task is finding the balance where it can remain profitable.
Bubkes! Smart-aleck comments are all we have in the face of the frickin’ NRA, global warming/climate change, The Grim Reaper and the almost boringly slow ‘death’ of print journalism. We should stand around rending our garments for an event that’s going to take at least another decade to transpire? Feh, bring on the gallows humor!
Millennials and younger people totally read. They just do it elsewhere, mostly. (I am a 38-year-old subscriber, FWIW.) On the meshuga tip, everyone in KC owes it to themselves to visit Meshuggah Bagels on 39th, which is about as close to a real bagel as you can get in this part of the world.
Jim, yours is the third bad news journalism story in the last twenty four hours. The other two, the FCC relaxing its ownership rules, thus opening the way for Sinclair broadcasting to own multiple outlets that spout propaganda and not journalism. The second is the Koch Brothers interest in buying Time magazine. I guess the super wealthy — in the case of Time, the Luce’s — have always owned media outlets. I worry about Murdoch’s vast influence with the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and the Kochs go beyond the editorial page and into the news pages. Thus the public doesn’t debate using the same frame of reference.
I hope someone figures out a way to employ talented and committed journalists even if it is something other than using the newsprint.
By the way, I was thinking if you had held a contest for who could have guessed the closest to the circulation number, I would have lost big time. Good Post.
Excellent points on Sinclair and Koch Brothers, Tom…The black hats (by our measure) are doing all they can to make big inroads into the mainstream media.
And then again, there’s Bezos and George Soros.
https://www.mrc.org/commentary/soros-spends-over-48-million-funding-media-organizations
http://www.mrc.org/commentary/over-30-major-news-organizations-linked-george-soros
Since the Star blatantly sets out to insult anyone with the slightest conservative bent, they alienate about half of their possible subscribers/readers right out of the gate. I am overjoyed that this over-the-top liberal rag of a paper is sinking in its own quicksand. I wouldn’t buy a copy of the Star for the old price of a dime, let alone the inflated price they now attempt to charge.
As Rev.Wright says, “Their chickens are coming home to ROOST!”
I always find it amazing that those with a conservative bent quickly go to how “liberal” the local newspaper is. For those of that mind set, if you don’t think management would not quickly change to go to a conservative bent because it would increase circulation and make them more money, you are fooling yourselves. Most of the conservatives I know have submersed themselves in right wing talk radio and Fox News on TV and have no interest in any print media.
Also why would a media company want to chase readers of groups aging out? The average age of the Fox News viewer is 68 – the oldest of any channel. That is nine years older than the average CNN viewer. Most of conservative talk radio is considered to have the same age range.
Just for laughs, read some of the radio consultants on where they think conservative talk radio is going. They see it going the same way and having the same problems that print media is now having.
Media companies, like any business, want to try and get younger readers and viewers. For those of us in the baby boom generation (I’m at the tail end), the time of the market catering to us is coming to an end. By 2020, those of voting age under 45 is projected to exceed the size of the baby boom generation. And with time that group will become the predominate group and they have different views and tastes than the baby boomers.
None of the so-called conservative newspapers are doing any better than the perceived liberal newspapers. In fact, many are doing worse financially but they have someone willing to subsidize the losses. In Washington DC, if conservative causes no longer wanted to put up with losing an estimated 30-40 million dollars a year publishing alternates to the Washington Post, the Post would be the only newspaper there.
The New York Times and the Washington Post are showing how to stay afloat as the print market changes. Develop a large online national subscriber base to go along with a local print subscriber base. The unfortunate thing is that I think this only works with very large metro news organizations that have some forward looking management. The former Tribune Company, now Tronc (what a name!), had a chance at this with their big papers in Chicago and L.A. to build nationally, but they’ve botched it. And having grown up in the Chicago area, the Chicago Tribune historically was and continues to be known as a hard core conservative newspaper. And it is sliding in circulation just like virtually every other newspaper out there.
Excellent observations top to bottom, Bill…
— If The Star magically switched from leaning liberal to conservative, the paper’s downhill slide would accelerate dramatically. This is Kansas City, a Democratic city where U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has a job in Congress as long as he’s vertical.
— Tronc (you’re right about the name) is and has been a certifiable disaster. What a shame what The Tribune has done with the Times-Mirror papers, including the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. I have a buddy who got out of Tribune before it completely tanked. He scrambled around to make a living on Internet news for a few years but finally landed nicely at the Voice of America.
— It is a tragedy how conservative talk radio has trivialized what were formerly the best radio stations in big cities, such as KMBC here, KMOX in St. Louis and WHAS in my hometown of Louisville. Until about 25 years ago, WHAS was a beacon of light, with responsible local reporting, diversified talk shows and at least one hilarious afternoon talk-show host. That host, Terry Meiners is still there, but the station has succumbed to the ditto-head stench.
Will news from Sinclair and Koch, Inc. be known as Fake News, Inc.?
I would never give up my subscription to the Star. It has been a battle to get it ‘digital only’ and understand their subscription policies, but I still rely on it to have the best regional news. I just don’t think their subscriptions department knows what’s going on. It seems a little better now.