NEW YORK — Following the sagas that played out in Denver and Albuquerque, Seattle has become the latest market that can no longer support two major dailies. Hearst in January was forced to make a critical decision on what to do with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Kill the P-I altogether, or let it live online. It chose, of course, the latter “” and March 17 marked the last day a Post-Intelligencer print edition would roll off its presses. But was this a terribly sad, or actually quite promising turning point?
Those interested in the vitality of newspapers “” a topic that extends as far as the White House these days “” are keeping a close eye on the P-I’s experiment, as Seattle is the first major newspaper to fully pull the plug on print and try to make a go of it online. Many other newspapers are tentatively moving in this direction. Perhaps they’re not kicking print to the curb completely, but they’re cutting back on editions and dropping weak days in print.
E&P decided to take a look at what happens to a newspaper’s Web traffic once the print edition is dropped on certain days or eliminated completely. Is there a spike in online readership? Is the print product a necessary vehicle to drive people to the Web site?
Inkless in Seattle
In the P-I’s case, it fell off the top-30 list of newspaper Web sites compiled by Nielsen Online (owned by E&P’s parent company) for the month of March, shortly after the print edition folded.
Monthly unique visitors at Seattlepi.com dropped 23% year-over-year to 1.4 million. On the surface, this seemed to suggest that print visibility is critical to the success of the Web site. The Seattle Times, no longer tethered to the P-I in a joint operating agreement, saw its Web site’s March unique users spike 70% to 2.2 million.
In April, Seattlepi.com’s uniques decreased 17% to 1.4 million, but the publication was back on the top 30 list at No. 29. The Seattle Times, meanwhile, grew its monthly uniques 39% to 2.3 million and ranked at No. 18 in April, according to Nielsen. To put this in context: Looking at six months of Nielsen data starting in September 2008, the Seattlepi.com had beaten the Seattle Times most of the time.
But two months of data does not a trend make. And Seattlepi.com argues that according to its internal tracking, its numbers in March and April were actually up. Michelle Nicolosi, newly appointed executive producer of Seattlepi.com, says the site hit three milestones in April: On April 30, it broke its daily unique-user record since the paper went online-only with 324,000, according to Omniture; in April, uniques at the site were up 1.6% to 4.3 million; and in March, uniques had increased 9.6% to 4.5 million.
Beyond those numbers, there’s also the fact that under the JOA, the Seattle Times Co. was responsible for operating the business side of the P-I. It hosted the servers, it handled the promotion and it created the classified site NWsource.com. When Seattlepi.com became a stand-alone, the P-I had to procure its own servers and provide its own classifieds “” NWsource went with the Seattle Times “” and form a new sales team.
“We never had marketing before, and it was frustrating for everyone here,” says Nicolosi. That’s changed now that Hearst is completely responsible for the site. “We actually have a marketing plan worked out,” she reports. “The first day we had our sales people in the office” “” 14 in all “” “it was historic.”
When the Seattle P-I went Web-only, its staff was slashed from a newsroom of 145 to only 20, raising questions as to whether it could provide enough content and compete with the Seattle Times. When asked about this challenge, Nicolosi directed E&P to its homepage to show how much content was there. She noted that its strategy is to act largely as an aggregator “” such as sites like The Huffington Post “” pointing to other sources from within Hearst, community bloggers, the Associated Press and occasionally even the Seattle Times. It’s a practice Seattlepi.com started before the print edition was eliminated.
As Nicolosi sees it, the P-I is on track “” at least according to its internal numbers. “Right now the thing that is really important to me is that we haven’t lost readers,” she says. “Once they get here, we want them to stay around on the site. We are really obsessed with watching our numbers.”
Eyes on Detroit
Another closely watched experiment is being attempted in Detroit. At the end of March, the Detroit Media Partnership stopped home delivery of the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Newsstand copies, however, are still available seven days a week, plus home delivery via the U.S. Mail.
In April, traffic at the Detroit Free Press shot up 74% year-over-year to 1.5 million uniques, according to Nielsen. At the Detroit News, uniques for April were up 32% to 1 million. Yet that influx of online visitors on non-home-delivery days is not consistent, according to Janet Hasson, the Detroit Media Partnership’s senior vice president of audience development and strategy, and fluctuates according to news cycles.
Where Detroit’s executives see a more stable readership pattern is in the electronic editions. “The e-editions have seen consistent visitors and page views on non-home-delivery days,” says Hasson. Before March and prior to the home-delivery change, each month 109,000 visitors accessed the e-editions of both papers, totalling 1.7 million page views. In April, 798,000 visitors accessed the e-edition, with 17 million page views.
During the first quarter of 2009, anyone could read the e-edition free of charge, to entice readers into trying it out. But by the beginning of May, users had to be subscribers in order to access it. During the first two weeks of May the e-editions averaged about 300,000 visitors, says Hasson, who expects it to level off between 600,000 and 700,000 monthly visitors “” accounting for some 15 million page views.
The e-editions’ popularity has not come as a surprise to Hasson. During the summer of 2008, the Partnership asked longtime subscribers to be part of an experiment in which volunteers’ home delivery was cut down to three days but the e-edition was available throughout the week. “Their comments suggested they were open to the e-edition,” she recalls. “They had been going online to check for updates.”
Hasson says the Partnership has been heavily promoting its various distribution channels through radio, non-traditional advertising and in the pages of the papers for several months. Single-copy sales on days with no home delivery are up 20% to 25%.
Out West, Julie Moreno, publisher of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., and vice president of the Pacific Region of Freedom Newspapers, was concerned about a dropoff in Web traffic once the paper radically changed frequency and distribution.
The Tribune cut its Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday editions in January and eliminated Saturday copies in May. It changed its distribution strategy, making copies free in its core distribution area “” with 80% delivered to homes and 20% available on racks and stands. “When we made that change, we had budgeted page-view declines year-over-year,” says Moreno, and forecasted a drop of 30%.
“We were making substantive changes to our coverage,” she says. One example: no more original reporting on Phoenix Suns basketball. “We were trying to get back to community coverage that was unique and couldn’t be found anywhere else,” she adds.
In January, the Tribune’s page views were up 22% year-over-year, according to Omniture data “” something Moreno attributes to such major news events as the Presidential Inauguration. In February, page views were flat; by March, they were down 3% “” but still much higher than the paper had projected.
Moreno and her team are keeping a close eye on the data on a day-to-day basis. “We have been tracking on-print cycles and off-print cycles,” she notes. “There’s a little bit of a correlation in the decline [in traffic] on off-cycle days. On days we are printing, traffic goes up a couple of percentage points,” when one might have expected the reverse. She says the difference is slight, and it’s still too early to come to any solid conclusions about online readership being tied to print editions.
Small markets, modest results
Smaller papers that no longer publish on certain days have had to make their own adjustments, too. When The Courier in Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa, dropped its Saturday edition in February, it completely redesigned its Web site for that day; a big hook for those weekend editions was its sports coverage. “By taking that away in the print edition, we didn’t want to lose readers to other newspapers,” says Nancy Newhoff, editor of the Lee Enterprises-owned paper.
Starting at around 6 p.m. Friday through 6 p.m. Saturday, sports news dominates the Courier’s site. Traffic increased slightly on weekends, says Online Editor Michelle Gebhardt. High season for local sports ended soon after the transformation, but the Courier is readying for increased traffic in the fall when football season starts up.
Page views were down slightly on Mondays after The Frederick (Md.) News-Post suspended its Monday edition on April 6. “To be honest, flat isn’t a bad thing,” says Web editor Jason Brennan. Monthly page views for all days in April were up.
In Pennsylvania, The Intelligencer in Doylestown and the Bucks County Courier in Levittown, as well as the Burlington County Times in Willingboro, N.J., eliminated their Saturday editions in February. Karl Smith, general manager for all three sites, says he’s seen “a modest increase” in Phillyburbs.com’s page views on Saturdays since the print edition got dropped: “The first Saturday we saw a nice bump “” it was higher than normal. It didn’t carry through.”
Then again, Smith says, getting readers to visit the Web site over the weekend has always been an uphill battle. “Our business is based on people who screw around at work,” he jokes.
Print’s influence still felt
The move to drop print is a relatively new phenomenon in the industry, and for the most part still initiated by smaller-sized papers. But Rick Edmonds, a business analyst with The Poynter Institute, believes the evidence that print drives people to read online “” and thus needs to be cut carefully “”will be more definitive in another six months.
“In the whole group of readers who use both, people are shifting the time they spend with the print edition more and more to online,” he adds.
That assertion is supported by research conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. According to its latest annual study of the impact of online technology in the United States, 22% of Web users stopped their subscription to a printed newspaper or magazine because they could access the same content online.
Still, in the 81 markets it surveys, Scarborough Research reveals that online-only newspaper readership on average is still extremely low: The number of adults who said they read newspapers online-only during one week is 4%. “I do agree that print readership drives online readership to a significant degree,” says Gary Meo, Scarborough’s senior vice president of print and digital media services. “We see that in our own data. There is an enormous amount of duplication between print and online for most newspapers we measure.
“The question becomes, when the print driver goes away, what does that do to Web site traffic?” he adds. “We have no data yet, but in my opinion, when the print edition goes away, a certain portion of those readers will go online and a certain portion will not. The question is: how many of each?”
By Jennifer Saba
June 29, 2009
source: editorandpublisher.com