Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

In other news, water remains wet, soccer is the world’s most popular spectator sport, and Americans overwhelmingly support the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Circulation falls at many major newspapers

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Circulation fell at many U.S. newspapers in the six months to September, according to statistics released on Monday that for the first time include Internet readership in a bid by publishers to boost their attractiveness to advertisers.

Average daily paid circulation for newspapers printed Monday through Friday fell 2.6 percent and Sunday circulation fell 3.5 percent for the six-month period that ended September 30, 2007, compared with the year before, according to publishers’ statistics released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

You have to feel for the Reuters headline writer. I mean, what else are you going to write there? And yet, the headline can only elicit a great big “No duh” from anybody who’s been following the long decline of the American newspaper business. (Examples here and here.)

Meantime, Jeff Jarvis continues to chronicle episodes of boat-missing or failure-to-comprehend by decision makers in the newspaper business.

Off with their headlines

The Cleveland Plain Dealer didn’t know what it got when it hired four local political bloggers to collaborate on a group blog at Cleveland.com (which I oversaw when I was at the parent company). They got citizens with opinions. You’d think that would be obvious. In fact, you’d think that was the goal.

But apparently not, for when one liberal bloggers was found to have backed and contributed to a candidate, he was fired. Then the other liberal quit. Then the paper shut the blog….

I made a comment on that post; it reads, in part:

Episodes like these reveal the gulf between normalcy in the blogosphere and normalcy in the heads of traditional media executives. Many of the execs just can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that the blogosphere doesn’t operate like a traditional 20th-century U.S. newsroom, while most of the blogosphere can’t even understand what’s so hard for the execs to understand.

Monetizable or not, the blogosphere continues to grow while the dead-tree versions of papers continue to shrink, both in ad pages and in circulation. Put your long-term bets on where the long-term growth is — and expect many, many more “No duh” headlines on this subject from Reuters.