The Wall Street Journal remains the top-selling US daily newspaper, while The New York Times has bumped USA Today for second place, largely due to digital subscriptions which now account for 19 percent of average US daily newspaper circulation, up from 14 percent in 2012, according to The Alliance for Audited Media’s (AAM) semiannual Snapshot report.

The report covers top-line circulation and audience figures from October 2012 through March 2013 for approximately 700 US and Canadian newspapers. In this case, the bottom line still tells a story of continued newspaper circulation declines despite gains across digital platforms. 

Daily circulation for the 593 US newspapers reporting comparable averages for March 2012 through March 2013 decreased 0.7 percent. Sunday circulation for the 519 newspapers reporting was down 1.4 percent.Continue reading...

Bid adieu to another legendary brand. The New York Times Company is rebranding its 125 year-old International Herald Tribune as The International New York Times as it strives to buttress its international presence. 

The change ends the 40-year-old IHT brand—which is perhaps most familiar to U.S. expats—and underscores the tectonic shifts in newspaper journalism and revenue streams wrought by digital and an increasingly competitive environment for readership.

Based in Paris, the rechristened paper will debut a new website this fall. “This recognizes our global reach and is an exciting and logical move,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times. 

Mark Thompson, president and CEO said in a statement there was “significant potential to grow the number of New York Times subscribers outside of the United States…The digital revolution has turned The New York Times from being a great American newspaper to becoming one of the world’s best-known news providers. We want to exploit that opportunity.”Continue reading...

As news broke on Tuesday afternoon that the authorities had begun closing in on suspected gunman Christopher Dorner, who has for days been the subject of an intense manhunt, the Los Angeles Times found itself hosting a collision of art and reality on the front page of its website.

For a time, the newspaper's coverage was wrapped inside a dominant ad for the TNT police drama "Southland," with images (above) of actor-officers with their guns drawn. Several minutes after the news began unfolding, The Times took the ad down (below). 

The Times explained to brandchannel through a spokesman: "Given the heightened interest and anxiety around this breaking news, The Times and TNT determined that it would be in the best interest of our readers and Southland viewers to temporarily take the ad off the latimes.com homepage."Continue reading...

The Tokyo Newspaper, aka Tokyo Shimbun, and Dentsu Tokyo have created an augmented reality app that "translates" stories from the newspaper into a child-friendly format. Replete with cartoon-character commentary on stories, headlines (pop-ups) and child-friendly text, the app makes it easier for children to understand what's on the printed page.

The app, which was chosen recently by Ad Age as a Creativity Pick of the Day, provides opportunities for advertisers as well. Companies like yogurt-maker Meiji are placing interactive ads in the paper targeting children and their parents.

The move comes as newspapers worldwide search for new ways to sustain their printed product as readers, especially young ones, become accustomed to receiving their news in the digital space. But while the focus tends to be on attracting millennials and others crucial to the papers' survival, recruiting even younger readers is also a part of other newspapers' efforts.Continue reading...

Newspapers are losing $7 in print advertising for every $1 of digital revenue gained, according to a study by The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism last month. Even worse, according to Newsosaur's Alan D. Mutter:

Publishers since 2005 have lost $26.7 billion in print advertising revenues while gaining only $1.2 billion in new digital revenue. Thus, the true ratio of print loss to digital gain is 22 to 1, not the 7 to 1 reported by Pew in March.

According to Pew, the newspaper industry acknowledges several obstacles including “cultural inertia” as a major factor. “The difficulty of changing the behavior of people trained in the ways of a mature and monopolistic industry... 15 years into the digital transition, executives still feel they are in the early stages of figuring out a how to proceed.”

"We have all these [new] products we are working on that we believe are going to deliver results that are part of our sustainability," said one executive. "But we need to eat today."

Newspaper executives are part of an industry “caught between the gravitational pull of the legacy tradition and the need to chart a faster digital course.” Continue reading...

Happy Quasquicentennial, Hearst! 125 years after what started in 1880 with the acquisition of the San Francisco Daily Examiner by American publisher and U.S. Senator George Hearst, the Hearst Media empire now spans more than 100 countries in 35+ languages. And if you were in New York on Monday evening you might have looked up and noticed that the Empire State Building was lit up in "Hearst blue" in tribute to Hearst's 125th.

The company's vast holdings today encompasses newspapers (Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union); magazines (Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, ELLE and O, The Oprah Magazine); TV broadcast stations and stakes in cable TV networks (Lifetime, A&E, History and ESPN); automotive, electronic, medical/pharmaceutical and financial information properties; digital and interactive marketing services; TV production; and real estate and other operations.

On March 4, 1887, Hearst turned the Examiner over to his 23-year-old son, William Randolph Hearst. By the 1920’s, one in four Americans read a newspaper he owned in chains that stretched from coast to coast.Continue reading...

Across the U.S., newspapers continue to find themselves in dire straits. Bleeding red ink as they lose print subscribers, most cannot compete with the multitude of online news sources available to their readers. According to the Newspaper Association of America, from 2000 to 2009 the total circulation of daily newspapers dropped from 55,773,000 to 46,278,000, while the total circulation of Sunday newspapers fell from 59,421,000 to 46,850,000.

Yet one newspaper is bucking the downward trend. The Deseret News, in Salt Lake City, Utah, has just announced that its Sunday circulation grew 24 percent in 2011, and that its Salt Lake City market area readership increased 26 percent over the past year. In addition, the paper's online market share between January 2010 and September 2011, by page views and visits, far exceeds that of its three leading local competitors, according to data from Hitwise supplied by the Deseret News.

How has this small brand managed to thrive in an industry that is moribund at best?Continue reading...

Has Canwest Global Communication’s brand been dealt a death blow? Canada’s biggest media company, owner of Global Television and a chain of big-city daily newspapers plus The National Post, received court approval today for a bankruptcy restructuring.

The move comes after months of missed interest payments on its crippling debt load. But while the restructuring might be enough to save the company – or, more likely, parts of it – it could be too late to save the brand.

While Canwest continues to operate under Canada's federal bankruptcy protection law, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, and pledges to continue business as usual, it may not be status quo to consumers and, perhaps more importantly, for advertisers.Continue reading...