Times circulation gets boost from P-I print shutdown, company says

Daily circulation of The Seattle Times has grown by nearly 50 percent in the initial period since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped publishing a newspaper in mid-March, according to The Times.

The impact of gaining former P-I readers reversed an underlying trend of paid-circulation declines at The Times, a pattern bedeviling newspapers around the country, as reflected in reports released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Total average paid circulation of the printed Sunday Seattle Times fell nearly 8 percent to 376,515 for the six months from October 2008 to March 2009, compared with the year-earlier period, the audit bureau reported.

Average daily paid circulation also declined 8 percent during the same period, to 203,175.

The number of readers who read the print version of the paper also fell 3 percent, from 1,523,761 to 1,472,913, according to a survey.

The audit bureau's numbers included only two weeks of publication since the P-I shut down print operations in mid-March, so they shed little light on how that paper's shutdown affected circulation of The Seattle Times.

"The critical headline not reflected in these results, however, is the incredible success of the transition to one newspaper," Alan Fisco, Seattle Times vice president of circulation and marketing, wrote in an e-mail to all Seattle Times employees Monday morning.

A snapshot of current circulation for the daily Seattle Times was reported at 289,000 on Monday morning, up from 194,000 before the P-I stopped publishing, Fisco said.

The Seattle Times Co. automatically converted P-I subscriptions to Times subscriptions after the P-I stopped printing in mid-March. Only 2 percent of 74,000 former P-I subscribers chose to cancel their subscriptions since the P-I closed, Fisco reported.

The company didn't say what percentage of former P-I subscribers have chosen to renew after receiving a bill for The Seattle Times.

It is typical for a paper to get a big bump in circulation when a rival closes, only to watch those gains erode over time, said Rick Edmonds, media-business analyst for the Poynter Institute.

"It will go up and stay up for a while, and will gradually kind of float down," he predicted.

For its part, the P-I reported a drop in daily paid circulation from 129,560 to 116,792, but it ceased publication to go online only before the audit period ended.

The audit bureau also reported good news for The Times in its review of readership, which includes the total audience of print and online.

The number of readers surveyed within the Seattle market who said they looked at seattletimes.com, The Seattle Times Web site, sometime within the past 30 days was up nearly 1 percent, to 834,035 from 826,397 during the same six-month audit period.

The combined audience of print and online readers in the Seattle market was also up slightly, to 1,812,277 from 1,808,233.

Total Web site activity, pulling readers from around the world, rose nearly 5 percent, to 9.1 million unique visitors to The Seattle Times Web site, from 8.7 million.

Overall, the number of adult readers using the combined print and online version of The Times has grown 3 percent from 2002-2008, The Seattle Times Co. reported.

Nationally, the circulation figures presented a grim picture. Not only did the nation's newspapers continue to lose circulation, but they also were losing it at a faster rate than previously.

Overall, average daily circulation declined 7.1 percent in the October-March period from the year-earlier period among the 389 daily newspapers that reported during both periods.

The decline has accelerated from the 3.6 percent drop reported in the earlier time frame.

Some of the circulation losses can be attributed to cutbacks that newspapers, including The Times, made themselves, such as eliminating circulation in outlying areas to save printing and distribution costs.

USA Today remained the country's largest paper, despite the steepest circulation drop in its history, to 2.1 million.

The New York Times is still the country's largest Sunday newspaper, with 1,451,233 paid subscribers, down 1.7 percent.

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