Seattle Times daily circulation up sharply

Seattle Times average daily circulation jumped more than 32 percent in the first full report of circulation figures without a print Seattle Post-Intelligencer, according to a report released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The Times' average daily circulation for the six months ending Sept. 30 jumped to 263,588 from 198,737 in the same period a year ago. That was because The Times assumed the P-I's subscribers when The Hearst Corp. ceased publishing the newspaper last March, pumping up Times circulation numbers overnight.

The audit bureau posted the daily circulation figures with the caution that they aren't an apples-to-apples comparison. But there was good news for The Times in its retention of readers who were switched to Times subscriptions after the P-I folded in favor of an online-only product.

Eighty-four percent of former P-I subscribers now take The Times. About 90 percent of those subscribers have since renewed their subscriptions, said Times spokeswoman Jill Mackie.

Lost in the shuffle were some of the 22,000 single-copy buyers of the P-I. Single-copy sales of The Times in the past six months stood at 31,305, up from 23,218 before the P-I stopped printing on paper.

Part of the attrition might have resulted from increasing the price of a single copy from 50 to 75 cents, said Alan Fisco, vice president of circulation and marketing for the paper.

The conversion of P-I readers was better than the 70 percent the paper predicted, Fisco said. That's better than is usual when one newspaper closes in a market, said John Morton, an industry analyst based in Silver Spring, Md.

Typically only about 50 percent of former subscribers of a closed paper convert to the remaining paper, Morton said.

"It shows the value people in this local market put on having a printed newspaper," Fisco said.

Of course, the question is how many subscribers the paper will keep over time.

Despite good news on the conversion, The Seattle Times joined other newspapers in the country in posting a circulation loss for its Sunday newspaper, with a drop of 5.93 percent.

That was narrower than the industry's average Sunday circulation decline of 7.5 percent, and The Times Sunday circulation of 359,672 remains in the top 25 Sunday newspapers across the country. The Times is in 20th place, ahead of the New York Post, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The (Baltimore) Sun, The Columbus Dispatch and The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The bureau's report showed a grim state for U.S. newspapers beyond their Sunday editions, with some flagship papers posting double-digit losses in average daily circulation in the April-September period from the same six-month span in 2008. Some lost a quarter or more of their daily circulation.

Industrywide, daily circulation dropped 10.62 percent during the reporting period.

"It's a gloomy day, that is for sure," said Rick Edmonds, media-business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Newspapers around the country have been hammered by the recession and transition of advertisers to online publications.

At papers all over the country, some readers have moved from print to other sources of news, on the Internet. There is also a continuation of a trend, especially in the case of metro papers, including The Seattle Times, to eliminate circulation in more remote geographic areas.

This is also the first reporting period that reflects an economy in serious recession and readers letting their subscriptions lapse, as well as newspapers raising subscription prices.

Edmonds predicted papers would probably remain smaller than they were in the glory days, but that newspapers would persist.

There has been some good news in the industry of late. "The industry is back in the black, by and large," Edmonds said. Almost all newspaper companies are operating "in positive territory," he said, partly by making deep cuts in operations to match lower revenues.

At The Seattle Times, costs have been cut by 34 percent over the past two years, and employment reduced to 1,245 employees from 1,919 employees two years ago. The newsroom staff has been cut about 40 percent over the past five years.

One of the serious issues for the industry, though, is whether newspapers will alienate even loyal readers with continued cost cutting, Edmonds noted.

"Papers are smaller, more expensive, and people have alternatives," Edmonds said. Cutting quality while raising prices may feed further decline, he warned.

Sunday circulations for many newspapers have posted smaller losses, he thinks, in part because they are providing a better read.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com