Small-town US papers not losing circulation
Posted by
Jeffrey Blyth
on 28 February 2006 at 10:40
Tags: Journalism, Online, United States
US newspaper sales continue to fall. The Los Angeles Times has lost nearly four per cent of its circulation in the last six months. The Houston Chronicle was down six per cent and the San Francisco Chronicle lost more than l6 per cent. Ad income is down, too.
But not small-town papers; their circulations are holding steady, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota (pop: 56,000) has remained level. The same is true of papers in towns like Caspar, Wyoming, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Of course one reason is that papers in such towns don’t have much competition. In Bismarck, for example, the nearest other paper is in a town 100 miles away. These papers generally also have more English-speaking readers and are usually older. In Bismark, for example, only two per cent of the population is foreign-born. In New York it’s 36 per cent.
The big question however is how long America’s small-town papers can hold out against the spread of the Internet. At the moment broadband internet access isn’t as widely available in rural communities as it is big towns and cities — but it is spreading. At the moment Bismarck is not even included in the list of the top 100 towns in the US whose residents have access to the Internet.
Tags: Journalism, Online, United States
