Some Thoughts on Newspapers
June 24th, 2005,I grew up in a newspaper-reading family. Every day began with a perusal of the paper. Sitting at breakfast, we were each absorbed in our own section, swapping them as necessary. On Sunday mornings the paper would get strewn around the living room floor. When we traveled, we enjoyed reading the local paper wherever we were staying.
For a time we even got two newspapers, one in the morning, the Minneapolis Tribune, and one in the evening, the Minneapolis Star (both published by the same company, Cowles). But mostly I remember reading the Tribune in the morning, retrieved from the plastic tube beneath the mailbox.
Newspaper reading therefore became a habit. Following the news, opinion, sports, and comics just seemed like part of life.
Newspapers have changed since I was a kid in the 1970’s. Some of the more obvious changes include the use of less text and more graphics and photos, the addition of color, and the overall shrinking of the page size.
The names and ownership of the local papers changed too. The Star and Tribune were combined into the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1982. Then, in 1987, the paper became the Star Tribune, Newspaper of the Twin Cities. In 1998 Cowles sold the paper to the McClatchy Corporation, publisher of the Sacramento Bee. On the other side of town, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, published by Knight-Ridder, became simply the Pioneer Press in 1990.
Of course, newspapers are also becoming less of a habit as people increasingly rely on television and online news sources–many of the latter being the web sites of newspapers. As a result, the circulation of printed newspapers is declining. In early May National Public Radio aired a story about declining newspaper circulation in the United States. Their online article led me to the web site of the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), which has a list of the top 150 newspapers in the United States, by circulation. (There are some discrepancies between the NPR and ABC lists, for some reason.)
The Star Tribune is ranked 14th in the nation by ABC at a Sunday circulation of 655,000, about 16,000 less than the previous year–which seems like a large drop. Among the top 20 newspapers, only the New York Times and New York Daily News increased their circulation between 2004 and 2005.
Is it inevitable that we move beyond the costly, resource-intensive distribution of the printed newspaper? Why kill all those trees just to deliver the news?
I will admit to being attached to print, probably more so than younger people. I worry about losing easy access to a diversity of opinion and news. When you scan the sections and headlines of a newspaper, you get a wide swath of news. When you spread out the editorial and opinion pages of a good newspaper, you get a large “screen” containing editorials, letters, and opinions from all parts of the political spectrum. When you look at the opinion page of a newspaper like the Star Tribune, you’re likely to see George F. Will alongside Thomas Friedman, Molly Ivins sharing the same page with David Brooks. If newspapers die, will we only read the opinions similar to our own, the ones that are most comfortable to read? Will we each go to web sites that have been crafted for our own peculiar niche of opinions? Has the change already occurred?
My fears about a balkanization of the news-consuming public may be unfounded. There may still be a similar number of people who try to read a wide range of news and opinion–even opinion that challenges their own biases–as compared to the past. Online news is cheaper to distribute, so theoretically high-quality news sources could be distributed at a lower cost, making them accessible to more people–perhaps even free. Of course, getting online access requires some kind of device and connection in order to do so–neither of which are particularly cheap. We shall see what the future brings.
More on National and Regional Newspaper Circulation
The ABC ranking of the Star Tribune as the 14th largest newspaper in the country are slightly ahead of what one would expect given size of the population, particularly given the fact that many of the largest newspapers are national papers (such as USA Today, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal). The Star Tribune has a higher circulation than the San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution–papers that are in larger metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, the Twin Cities metropolitan area is the 16th largest metropolitan area in the country by population, at about 3 million people. For comparison, the largest, New York, is 18 million. Chicago, the capital of the Midwest, is the third largest at nine million. Atlanta, the capital of the South, is 11th at 4.2 million. USA Today, by the way, has by far the largest circulation of any newspaper in the nation.
The Upper Midwestern papers in the top 150, with their national ranking and circulation, are below:
14. Star Tribune (Twin Cities) (655, 198)
26. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (411, 749)
48. Pioneer Press (Twin Cities) (247, 495)
50. Des Moines Register (239, 367)
86. Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI) (148, 292)
144. Green Bay Press-Gazette (82, 379)