Cable News: That activity may explain one other change in the sociology of news consumption in 2010. The audience for cable news in the last year declined substantially. In aggregate, the median viewership fell 13.7% across the entire day in 2010. Prime-time median viewership fell even more, 16% to an average of 3.2 million, according to PEJ’s analysis of Nielsen Market Research data. Daytime fell 12%.
And for the first time in the dozen years we’ve monitored this segment, every channel was losing. CNN suffered most. Its median prime-time viewership fell 37% to 564,000 viewers, and MSNBC beat it in total viewers during prime time for the first time. But Fox fell, too, 11%, and MSNBC declined 5%.
Network News: If the losses were new to cable, they were not for network broadcast news. Audiences for almost every network news program fell again in 2010. Evening news audiences fell by 752,000 viewers, or 3.4%, from 2009 and have been on a downward trend for three decades. Network evening news is, however, still an extraordinarily powerful source of information in America. Some 21.6 million people on average watched one of the three programs each night. That is roughly four times the combined number watching each cable news channel’s highest-rated program. In the morning, an average of 12.4 million people tuned in each day over the year, 3% fewer than in 2009. That is the sixth consecutive year of losses. The PBS NewsHour averaged 1.1 million viewers nightly during the 2009-10 season, basically unchanged from the year before.
Newspapers: Print circulation also continued to decline in 2010. Weekday circulation fell 5% and Sunday fell 4.5% year-to-year for the six-month period ending September 30. There is some good news in those numbers, however. The losses in 2009 were double that. Online audience, though imprecisely measured, did grow some, and many papers can claim their overall audience is bigger than ever, but the data suggest that it did not fully compensate for print losses industrywide. One survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, finds the total audience that reads newspapers, in print and online, at least three times a week dropped by six percentage points over the last two years. By this count, 40% of Americans report reading a newspaper in any form, down from 46% in 2008 and 52% in 2006. The number of those who reported reading “yesterday” print and online now sits at 37%, down two percentage points from 2008.
Magazines: Circulation for the six news magazines in our report fell 8.9%. By far the largest portion of that, subscriptions, fell 8.6%, but that number is controlled, based on how much magazines want to spend to “buy” readers. Newsstand sales, which is a smaller component, dropped 17.7%. Circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%.
But the biggest change in radio listening may be just ahead. A good deal of radio listening occurs in cars, and we are on the brink of internet radio being widely available there for the first time. Toyota is including Pandora in its multimedia system in all new models in mid-2011. Pandora also signed a deal with Pioneer that would put its online radio service in at least six other car manufacturers by the end of 2011. People may be ready. More than quarter of Americans (27%) said they were “very interested” in online radio in the car in 2010; this is up 17 percentage points from 2009.
Local TV News: The one traditional media platform that possibly could claim some good news on audience was local TV. At network affiliates, viewership continued to decline in all the traditional time slots (i.e. 5-7AM, 5-7PM, 11-11:30PM), across all sweeps periods, this year an average of 1.5%. Fox affiliate newscasts lost viewers in both their basic timeslots – local morning newscasts lost 1% and prime-time news lost 4.9%. But stations of all types added audience at the new early timeslot of 4:30 a.m.; stations in 69 cities had news that early, up from 28 a year earlier. And 7 p.m. audiences, where some stations are adding news, are also growing. Finally, there is some evidence that viewership gains at independent stations offering news may now compensate for the loss of audience at network affiliates, meaning that the overall audience for local news, because of more news being available, has roughly held steady.
Newspapers We estimate that advertising revenues at newspaper organizations fell by 6.4% in 2010 from the year before. That compares to a drop of 26% in 2009. We estimate print newspaper ad revenue at $22.8 billion, with roughly $3 billion more for online. Going back, that means newspaper ad revenue is down 48% in four years. Circulation revenue, though the final estimates are not yet calculated, is expected to be flat or down marginally, after falling 10% from 2003 to 2009. Contrary to what those who have already written print’s obituary may think, newspapers generally are still operating in the black. Typical profit margins hovered around 5%, according to our analysis. That is less than a quarter of what they were in the 1990s. With revenues declining, it means that newspapers are surviving largely by managing costs. Though difficult to measure, our analysis suggests that about half the fall-off in ad revenue now is due to declines in the size of the print audience delivered to advertisers. Not only is the total number of ads decreasing, but with such smaller audiences, newspapers are not able to charge to as high a rate.
Digital: The economics of the web hit a milestone in 2010. For the first time, more money was spent on online advertising than on print newspaper advertising. Online advertising overall grew 13.9% to $25.8 billion in 2010, according to data from eMarketer. A challenge for news organizations is that much of this online ad spending, 48%, is in search advertising, little of which finances news. Banner ads, where news organizations currently get most of their online ad revenue, make up less than half that — or 23% of all online ad spending. There was, though, in 2010 some development in more sophisticated banner ads that might attract greater advertising.
Mobile ad spending still amounts to just 3% of total online ad spending ($743 million), but it increased an impressive 79% in 2010. User fees have not seen this kind of growth yet. Fewer news organizations than expected moved to paid content models in 2010, and consumers paying for news apps are still rare. Just 10% of those who use an app for local news had paid for it, according to new survey data released in this report.
Magazines: In print magazines the number of ad pages sold across the industry overall was flat in 2010 (-0.1%), after steep declines in 2008 (11.7%) and in 2009 (25.6%). News magazines fared slightly better with an increase in ad pages of 1.4%. Much of that growth came from niche publications, while general-interest publications have had a harder time, according to Publishers Information Bureau. The year no doubt would have been tougher had ad pages not increased in the automotive category by 16.9%. But 2010 is probably earmarked as much as anything by the sale of Newsweek for a dollar and the assumption of debt by audio magnate Sidney Harman. Newsweek, according to its sales prospectus, lost $85 million (before pension credit) in 2008 and 2009 combined and was on track to lose $22 million in 2010.
