Boston Globe Print Circulation Sinks 11% to 68,806

June 28, 2022

From our Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts desk

For the past few years, the hardreading staff has unhappily tracked the knee-buckling declines in the Boston Globe’s daily print circulation, while the Boston Business Journal’s redoubtable Don Seiffert has chronicled the Globe’s halting digital subscriptions.

But we were totally unprepared for William Turvill’s piece the other day in the UK’s Press Gazette.

Top 25 US newspaper circulations: Print sales fall another 12% in 2022

Our top 25 ranking, based on figures shared by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM), shows that The Wall Street Journal and New York Times retain the largest daily print circulations in the US.

Gannett’s USA Today keeps third place, but is close to seeing its print circulation fall below Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.

Here’s the top part of AAM’s newspaper circulation chart.

Boston Globeniks: We’re Number 14! We’re Number 14!

Everyone else: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

All due respect.

4 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider

Two-Daily Town Goes All Digital (And Slightly Mental)

May 23, 2019

For more than two decades the hardreading staff has proudly been one of the 17 home subscribers to the Boston Herald.

But the plopping of four daily newspapers on our doorstep every morning (Boston Herald, Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal) has become too much to bear in this, our dotage. So we decided to pare down our print publications.

Ave atque vale, Globe and Herald print editions.

But, of course, it wasn’t that easy.

The Herald, feistily, told us that we’d have to wait for a month to convert our print subscription to a digital-only one – a sort of tabloid quarantine that seems totally self-defeating.

The Globe, on the other hand, welcomed our shift from print to digital, as it has with many others according to this piece from the estimable Don Seiffert in the Boston Business Journal,

The Boston Globe now has more online subscribers than print ones

The Boston Globe reached a milestone earlier this year when the number of its digital subscribers surpassed that of its weekday print subscribers for the first time — likely the only traditional, regional daily in the U.S. to have done so.

Filings the Globe submitted in the past week to the Alliance for Audited Media show that the inflection point occurred sometime in the first three months of the year. During that time, the number of weekday print subscribers fell from 108,719 to 98,978, an 11 percent decline year-over-year. That’s about on par with industry-wide rates of decline.

During the same time, the filing indicates that digital subscriptions — as measured by a category called “restricted digital access”— went from 107,902 to 112,241 as of March 31. While the Globe doesn’t specify exactly how it counts the number of online subscribers, restricted digital access seems to be a good approximation, and the paper’s director of consumer revenue, Tom Brown, confirmed this week that its number of online subscribers now stands at 112,700.

 

Handy circulation chart:

Except the BBJ piece kind of glossed over the economics of the Globe subscription shift.

Let’s take the hardreading staff, for example. Previously, we paid about $850 a year (!) for our Globe print subscription (digital access included). That’s roughly eight times what we pay for the Times or the Journal, and twice what we now pay for the Globe’s Sunday print edition and digital access.

Two-Daily Town Calculator (pat. pending):

For every lost print subscriber and gained digital subscriber, the Boston Globe loses roughly $400 per annum. Not to mention, according the the BBJ report, the Globe this past year lost 10,000 print subscribers and gained 5,000 digital ones.

Totally not sure how that makes the Boston Globe more financially viable.

But, as the big time reporters say, time will tell.

5 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider

Boston Sunday Globe’s – Gasp! – Circulation Increase

October 9, 2018

So the hardreading staff was working its way through the Sunday papers when we came upon this notice on page 2 of the Boston Globe’s Ideas section.

 

 

One number that caught our eye was the Boston Sunday Globe print circulation increase from an average of 201,358 last year to 213,557 last month.

 

 

Next item of interest: The Globe’s paid digital subscriptions, which have risen to 111,680 according to this filing.

 

 

Problem is, Globe editor Brian McGrory has repeatedly stated that the paper needs to corral 200,000 digital subscribers to ensure its financial sustainability.

So half a loaf doesn’t quite make it, no?

Crosstown at the Boston Herald, on the other hand, the circulation news is downright dismal, as the Boston Business Journal’s Don Seiffert recently noted.

Boston Herald print circulation sees biggest drop in three years

The Boston Herald’s weekday print circulation saw a bigger drop in the first three months of 2018 compared to the previous quarter than it’s seen anytime in at least the past three years.

The newspaper’s weekday average print circulation fell to 40,914 during the first quarter of 2018, according to a report the Herald filed this week with the Alliance for Audited Media.

That’s a drop in circulation of nearly 3,200 subscribers — about 7.2 percent — from the fourth quarter of 2017. It marks the largest three-month decline in the paper’s weekday print circulation since at least 2015.

 

See our kissin’ cousins at One-Daily Town for further gory details.

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider