Houston’s Bleeding Information Source loses another pint:
The Houston Chronicle’s circulation declined 11.7 percent daily and 15.7 percent on Sundays, but the paper is expected to remain the seventh-largest metropolitan daily in the United States when the Audit Bureau of Circulations report is released today. The Chronicle is expected to drop from the sixth-largest Sunday paper to the eighth-largest.
Chronicle Publisher and President Jack Sweeney attributed most of the declines to strategic decisions made by the newspaper to discontinue circulation outside a 90-mile radius of downtown Houston, increase the daily newsstand price to 75 cents and eliminate advertiser-sponsored distribution.
Yeah, that’s just what I would do to attract customers — decrease the size and quality of the product, sell it in fewer places and switch from homemade to generic ingredients. If that doesn’t work, a price hike ought to do the trick.
But hey, it’s not all bad news. Chron editor Jeff Cohen overcame Hurricane Ike to break 80 twice in September. Congratulations, Jeff! Your remaining colleagues must be very proud.
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Matt: I gave your comment OY a thumbs up.
Also, don’t forget: birds are not as popular a pet as they used to be. That has to hurt. Freezer rap has improved and become cheaper. They have those new “puppy pads” that are much more absorbent. And although car re-painting has become quite common in the “barrio”, masking paper isn’t that hard to find or expensive. So, that leaves “window washers” at your favorite stoplight and . . . well, that leaves window washers.
Besides, the Chron was so yellow, it was hard to tell when the puppy used it. Maybe they should go ahead, tip their hand, and print it in Spanish only.
WRT raising the price and reducing circulation: like all liberals, they think that prices (and taxes) can be raised infinitely. They really only need to sell one paper per year, for $100,000,000 .
Most of a newspaper’s revenue is in the advertising. With the rates based on circulation, sounds to me like they own some pretty significiant refunds to current advertisers and will have a heck of a time trying to explain their annual rate increase. I see more layoffs in the future….they should start at the top if they really want to stop the bleeding, but of course, they won’t..
Matt,
Is there a linkage, some linear correlation, between the significant decline of Houston’s daily print “News Backbone” and the ridership decline of METREAUX’s boondoggle, unsafe, and unreliable “Transit Backbone” tram?
Heeeeyyyyy….where’d all the comments go to the Chron article? Are they suppressin’ the people again?
Not many folks care that the Chron’s circ is shrinking….nobody goes there anymore, so who cares? Interesting article and comments under today’s LST heading “Chronically Shamless”, which helps explain why the Hearston Chronicle keeps losing respect….and circulation.
Who?
Bramanti rises to the occasion.
The Chronicle has become a liberal blog. It’s written for liberals, by liberals and is a nice tax write off for someone. Maybe the Hearst corp really doesn’t care about making a profit in Houston.
Hearst has deep pockets and they bought The Houston Chronicle as a “cash cow”. They thought this would be one of their best profit centers. It was doing well and if they could put the Post out of busines, which they did, they could dominate the market. But they got greedy. Thought they could send in their own people and compete with the New York Times. Now, lay-offs and outsourcing are becoming more and more common. Guess they accomplished one of their goals. The New York Times is in deep trouble too. Heard this morning their stock (NYT) has been reduced to “junk” status. And they still don’t get it. Go figure.
Final nail in the coffin: Chris Bell endorsement. “All Libs All The Time” should be their masthead.