News circulation cratering, despite Belo’s desperate spin

Belo reports that the circulation at the News is off about 13 percent for daily and 12 percent for Sunday, as compared to six months ago, as noted in a
company press release.

Of course, the News’ own reporting on this, as part of circ numbers at major newspapers around the country, “massages” the message.

The company attributed the steep drop in part to two deliberate policy changes, which account for about seven points of the daily decline and eight points on Sunday. On April 1, it ceased including third-party barter circulation in reported figures. It also ceased distributing to areas approximately 200 miles or more outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

OK, let’s take Belo’s estimates at face value. That still leaves a 6 percent drop on daily and 4 percent on Sunday circ numbers.

Yes, other major dailies continue to drop, but not at that rate. The Los Angeles Times, which is cratering in part due to corporate-imposed staff-whacking as serious as anything Belo has done here, is the only big-sized daily to have a greater rate of circulation decline.

The story then goes on to spin towards Bob Mong and Bob Dechard’s Net-oriented vision for the future:

Newspaper owners have bolstered their Web sites to attract online readers and advertisers, helping to make up for the loss of readers, the association said. It said newspaper Web sites serving the 100 largest markets reported an average 8 percent growth in their online audiences.

Strange, though. Belo doesn’t release numbers for those sites, or say how much it has grown over the survey time period. Maybe there’s nothing to massage there.