What Happened to Our Newspaper?

I get to work with all kinds of businesses, new ones, old ones, online only and brick and mortar only along with many that are some kind of combination of all these factors.

This is the final few months for one of my favorite clients in Fort Wayne, a retail shop that has sold coins since 1976.  They used to also sell stamps and then switched over to jewelry along with the collectable coins and related supplies.  They were a big advertiser in the local newspaper when they began and only in the past decade have stopped their newspaper ads.

The reason they are closing is their business has changed.  Michelle is the youngest of the owners at 58 and her partners are 70+.  When their lease expires this summer, they will have liquidated all the gold, silver and collectables and either retired or picked up something else to do with their time.

The store closure is a sign of the times as many businesses have closed as the owners have decided to call it quits.  Some are sold to new owners, some are passed down to another generation, but those that last have made some changes over time.

Another client of mine recently completed an ownership transition as the previous owners sold the company to some of the management staff.  That company is over 70 years strong and will continue for a few more decades I predict.  They also used to run newspaper ads and don’t anymore.

Two decades ago when I returned to the radio advertising world in Fort Wayne Indiana, the major media sources that you could use to advertise with were radio stations, television stations and newspapers.  Fort Wayne had a pretty healthy newspaper business with both a morning paper and afternoon paper and it was filled with ads and local news.

This would have been 2003.  We had the internet, but MySpace was the primary Social Media platform until Facebook launched a couple years later and grew to be the dominant online site in the world.

Traditional media has made adjustments, as radio and TV have evolved and added services to keep and grow their audiences so businesses could continue to advertise and invite those viewers and listeners to spend money with them.

Newspapers however have not faired as well.

Earlier this month, on Facebook,  I posted a picture of the building that used to house our two daily newspapers.  All day long and for a few more days, people were commenting about how much has changed with the newspaper business.

For starters, the afternoon paper finally ceased publication a few years ago and more recently the morning paper dropped from publishing 7 days a week to just 6 with a combined weekend edition for Saturday and Sunday.

As I was sharing some of my insider knowledge about the reasons the newspaper has become so small with a fraction of the number of pages, I decided to also share some data that I received with actual numbers.

For a long time the Radio Advertising Bureau was able to provide me with personalized reports that were verified and audited for our local papers.  My access to this service ended in 2015 but the numbers tell the story.

In a snapshot in the time from 2009 to 2014, the number of households in our area climbed 2.6%.  That’s good.

Newspaper subscriptions to the morning paper fell by over 34% during those 5 years.  The number of subscribers to the afternoon paper declined by over 40% in those same 5 short years.  In an attempt to hang on, the newspapers increased their advertising rates on their rate card by 18.5 percent.  That’s bad.

If you were unable to cut a deal with the paper you were paying over 18 % more to reach between 30% and 40% less people than you had 5 years before.   That’s a spread of over 50% that is not in your favor if you were a newspaper advertiser.

This downward spiral of decreased subscribers which lead to decreased ad revenue (despite the attempted ad rate increases) has lead to less pages in the daily paper.  Less reporters too along with less people overall.  In short, that’s what happened to our newspaper.

The last set of circulation numbers for the afternoon paper was less than 13,000 and the morning paper 42,000. Population figures in my reports indicate there were over 300,000 people in our area back in 2014.

I tell this not to gloat about how great radio is compared to our papers.

While it is true we have more radio listeners to WOWO and our sister stations at Federated Media then the remaining paper has subscribers, and I can help you invite those listeners to become your customers…

… I am saddened by the demise of our local paper.  The journalists and the people who supported them are a type of news media that needs to find a way forward.  Long form investigative reporting along with seeing the news about your family or neighbor making a positive impact, that’s good news worth keeping alive.