For all the
sturm und drang
about whether people are still reading newspapers, there’s one thing that seems clear. They’re still reading newspaper stories —but they’re increasingly doing it via the Internet.
At least that’s what the most recent revenue results of several other key newspapers in Central Connecticut suggest.
The media giants behind the Hartford Courant, Bristol Press, Hartford Advocate, Middletown Press and New Haven Register — to name a few — all posted early 2007 sales numbers that showed falling advertising, and shrinking circulation revenue. No surprise, it would seem, to the media prognosticators who perpetually nay-say the future ink-and-paper news.
But inside those results — the so-called “first period” results, usually the first five weeks of the year — lay another, more positive trend for media companies: Their online businesses grew. A lot.
Fast Loading
In that time, Journal Register, the Trenton, N.J-based company that publishes The Middletown Press, New Britain Herald and The Bristol Press, among others, saw online revenue jump 26 percent to $1.4 million. Its 221 Web sites, which include the Web portal ctcentral.com and its 40 other member-sites, logged 4.6 million unique visitors and 38 million page views. Both were records.
Although Journal Register declined to break out individual numbers for its newspapers, Marc Romanow, publisher of the company’s three Central Connecticut papers, said “there seems to be more attention paid by readers to electronic publishing than in many other states. People are very hungry for information and they will get it any way they can.”
First period results at Tribune Co., the Chicago-based owner of The Hartford Courant and Hartford Advocate, mirrored that trend. Online revenue rose 17 percent to $20 million, driven by across the board growth in all categories of online ads. Tribune also declined to break out its results for its Connecticut papers. The media kit for the courant.com and ctnow.com, the Courant’s main Web sites, says the two generate a combined 20.9 million page views, and 1.4 million unique visitors a month, numbers the Courant claims are greater than any other local online information source.
Reader Interest
Has any of those newspapers found an answer to the perennial question of how to stop hemorrhaging readers? It’s hard to say. But William Sybert, vice president of advertising for the independently owned Journal Inquirer in Manchester, said the growing numbers might have more to do with the inflated scale of JRC and Tribune, whose other titles include Newsday, The Los Angeles Times, and namesake Chicago Tribune.
Still, even the JI has benefited from a redesign it launched last year, he said, one that added real estate and job listings to its Web site through ctjobs.com, a cooperative project with seven other local newspaper publishers in Connecticut.
“The Web is where we see things going, but smaller publishers are still figuring it out,” he said. “As long as we keep delivering local news that can’t be found elsewhere, our local franchise will still be the print product, at least for several more years.”
