Save Our Press

Events last week delivered a swift kick in the pants in case I was feeling more confident about newspapers’ fiscal health.

We’ve heard over and over the soothing mantra from our leaders that our overall readership — print and web — is the best it’s ever been and growing, even though print circulation is dropping. Well, online advertising revenue is slowing down and in some cases dropping.

All I know is that if newspapers can’t offset their loss of print revenue with gains in online revenue, we’re screwed. And right now, it looks like we’re screwed.

Tangent: I love The Wall Street Journal’s The Numbers Guy blog. The author, Carl Bialik, is a columnist who writes about how numbers are misused in the news. His blog is an effective prod to lazy journalists and a counterweight to the marketing machines that spin statistics and data for their own advantage.

So he pounced on The Newspaper Association of America on Valentine’s Day, picking apart its feel-good press release that 2007 was “a banner year” for U.S. newspaper web sites, reaching a monthly average of 60 million American adults.

Bialik asked the critical question, “Did newspaper web sites increase their market share of adults’ total time on the web?” We all know that adults are spending more time on the web, uploading to YouTube, downloading from iTunes, and offloading their spleen onto a blog. So we would expect the number of adults visiting newspaper web sites to increase as they spend more time online. The key is whether their minutes viewing newspaper web sites grew faster than their total minutes on the web.

To answer the question, Bialik asked Nielsen Online for the monthly average unique Internet audience, Web page views, pages per person and time per person for each year from 2004 to 2007. He then calculated monthly averages for newspaper sites for each year using NAA’s numbers.

The market size has been fairly stable: The number of American adults online each month has barely grown — from 150 million in 2004 to 159 million in 2007, according to Nielsen Online.

U.S. newspaper Web sites have increased their market share about 38 percent over the four-year period, Bialik found, or nearly 10 percent annually. That’s the good news.

But because American adults spent more time on the web and viewed more web pages in 2007 compared with 2004, newspapers’ performance wasn’t all that impressive, Bialik reported. “The average Web user loaded 51 percent more Web pages in 2007 than three years earlier, and spent 23 percent more time online. The equivalent increases for newspaper Web sites were just 24 percent and 20 percent, respectively. So newspapers were losing share of the average reader’s total Web activity.”

This doesn’t seem unusual, though. American adults are growing more sophisticated in their Web adventures.

Like a freshman in college, Joe Q. Public may not have had the confidence on the Web in 2004 to go beyond reading his favorite newspaper online. Four years later, he’s the Big Man On Campus, comfortable with its alleys, stairwells and backdoors. When he goes on the Web, he has a richer online experience in mind. Maybe he starts with the newspaper’s web site, but he also checks e-mail, reads a blog or two, posts to his own blog, checks the restaurant review where he’s meeting a client for lunch, and wanders around a three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life.

I don’t see how newspapers can increase their share of people’s time unless they add modules to their web sites that give people certain functions and services they now have to go elsewhere to find. Newspaper web sites, it seems, need to think of themselves more as “department stores” than simply “newsstands,” and be constantly innovating to keep their audience engaged.

Otherwise, Joe Q. Public may head for the exits.

Which newspaper web sites do you like coming back to several times a day, and why? (”It’s my job” isn’t the answer I’m looking for.) Post your comments!!