The timing was serendipitous. Since 2008, more than
200 U.S. newspapers have closed or stopped publishing a
print edition, according to Paper Cuts, a blog that tracks
newspaper closings. Print circulation at daily newspapers,
meanwhile, fell by 17 percent between 1999 and 2009.
Subscription and single-copy sales of consumer magazines
have similarly fallen, dropping 10 percent between 2001 and
2010.
And yet:
• Eighty-eight percent of American adults own a cellphone
— 53 percent of them a smartphone — up from 73 per-
cent in 2006, according to the Pew Research Center’s
Internet & American Life Project. Similarly, 57 percent
own a laptop, up from 30 percent in 2006; 19 percent an
e-book reader, up from 2 percent in 2009; and 19 percent
a tablet computer, up from 3 percent in 2010.
• According to the Newspaper Association of America,
newspapers’ online ad revenue grew 167 percent between
2003 and 2011; by contrast, their print ad revenue fell
54 percent in the same period.
• The number of consumer magazines with websites
increased 30 percent between 2006 and 2011, according
to MPA – The Association of Magazine Media.
• Visits to U.S. newspapers’ websites grew 20 percent
between September 2010 and September 2011, according to NAA, which says mobile traffic to newspapers’ websites has similarly increased, growing 65 percent in the
same one-year period.
Add to these facts the introduction of the iPad in 2009,
the launch of the Amazon Kindle in 2007, and the growth
of social media — Facebook and Twitter now have more than
845 million and 300 million users, respectively — and you’ve
got a typhoon of transformation that makes now the perfect
time for a new type of audit report that measures total reach,
offline and online.
“I’ve seen more change in our industry in the last 18
months than I have in the last 28 years,” says Mark Wachowicz, ABC’s senior vice president of marketing and sales.
“We’re moving away from what has been the staple and
the core of ABC’s business, which is print circulation, into
a whole realm of digital alternatives. The CMR is designed
to help change the way advertisers, agencies and even the
financial community view companies like the Tribune Company and Time Inc., looking beyond just the Chicago Tribune
and TIME magazine to see them as multi-channel multimedia
platforms through which the very rich content they own is
delivered.”
Revolutionary Reporting
The CMR differs from the traditional ABC audit report in several ways. While the latter is standardized — every publisher’s
report features the same information in the same black-and-white columnar format — the former is completely customizable: Provided it’s auditable, publishers can include in their
CMR virtually any circulation, readership or digital data they
choose, presented in whatever format they desire, complete
with colorful charts, maps, photos and graphics. As a result,
newspaper and magazine publishers can give advertisers a
holistic view of their entire business rather than a narrow
snapshot of a single publication.
Consider a daily newspaper, for instance. A traditional
audit report tells advertisers how many copies are printed
each day of the week, how many subscribers the paper has
and where those subscribers are located. A CMR tells them
all that, plus how many visitors the paper’s website has,
how many Facebook fans its parent company has, how many
people have downloaded its iPhone app, how many people
subscribe to its various email newsletters, how many people
listen to its reporters’ podcasts, and how many people attend
the home and garden show it produces every year at the
convention center. As a result, instead of selling a single ad
in a single newspaper, advertising sales reps can make the
CMR ADOPTION
So far, the following newspapers, magazines and business publications have produced multimedia circulation reports:
• Air Conditioning, Heating &
Refrigeration News
• Architectural Record
• Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Austin American-Statesman
• Automotive Body Repair News
• Aviation Week and Space Technol-
ogy
• Canadian Underwriter
• Chain Store Age
• Chicago Sun-Times
• Chicago Tribune
• Columbus Dispatch
• Connecticut Post
• Dallas Morning News
• Denver Post
• Drug Store News
• ENR
• Fine Cooking
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• Gettysburg Times
• Home Channel News
• Honolulu Star-Advertiser
• Interior Design
• Kansas City Star
• Lakeland Ledger
• Landscape Architecture
• Las Vegas Review Journal
• Longmont Times-Call
• Los Angeles News Group
• Los Angeles Times
• Loveland Reporter Herald
• Minneapolis Star Tribune
• Motor Age
• National Post
• Nation’s Restaurant News
• Oral Health
• Oregonian
• Palm Beach Post
• Plain Dealer
• Plastics News
• Popular Science
• Salt Lake City Tribune
• San Diego Union-Tribune
• San Jose Mercury News
• St. Petersburg Times
• The Tampa Tribune
