Wow! Not too pretty is it?

If these graphs could make noise, that noise would sound a lot like the scraping sound made by the shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic.

we need a new boat.

Yeah, this looks ugly at first glance, but what about a comparison with papers that didn't redesign? Circulation is down nearly everywhere so I'm guessing the redesigns did not have that much impact overall. Of course it would have been great to see them go the other way after the changes!!!

Keep in mind, too, that circulation practices are changing at a lot of U.S. newspapers: mostly, de-emphasizing "other paid" circulation in response to some of the well-publicized circ scandals of recent years.

We should be coming out of that cycle soon, though, so if the sharp downward trend continues, you can't blame it on changes in practices indefinitely.

Good point, Jay.

To put some of the small blips and dips both after (and before!) redesign launches into perspective, it would be interesting to pinpoint when major marketing pushes were introduced along the way, or sales promotions, in conjunction with the redesigns.

Anyway, thanks Mark for the legwork here, discouraging as it all may be.

Ouch! No wonder Rupert now says he is in the news business not the newspaper business.

I think redesigns also exist to invigorate the advertisers, who maybe get the impression that the paper is old.

Kudos, Mark.

Hmm. What I see here is U.S. publishers quietly scaling back their questionable circulation schemes and spreading those losses out over the past several reporting periods.

In the wake of the high-profile circulation pumping scandals (and the severe penalties issued) publishers got the message. That is what I believe these graphs for the U.S. market are truly illustrating.

That and smaller format papers are the future, of course!

What was the last redesign that involved EXPANDING sections and adding any signficant amounts of newshole? Giving readers not just a reshuffled or redirected product, but MORE product?

Sadly, a lot of our redesigns in the last several years have a healthy dose of Shrinkage Management to them.

That's our industry reality right now. We are investing less in the product we produce (including the people needed to produce them). That keeps profits flowing in the short term. But does it help grow the struggling business?

Imagine if the iPod were selling poorly. So Apple cuts its development staff, goes to cheaper components, drops storage capacity and fires Jonathan Ive. Do you think iPod sales would GROW?

That rant aside, I think industry and society trends are bigger than all this. The newspaper cannot be what it was previously in our society. If nothing else, the underlying business that supports it (classifieds, advertising) is changing too profoundly.

We're struggling through a transition. And the sad/scary truth is no one really knows what they're doing or where this is going or how exactly it's going to turn out.

Gawd, is 7:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning too early for a double whiskey?

You can't blame these circulation drops on changing circulations. I was in the business over 40 years, and that old canard has been trotted out every time circulation losses are posted. The old quantity vs readership balderdash doesn't cut it.

At some point, print types are going to have to realize that TV and the net can do lots of things print can't do, and print is going to have to quit relying on eye candy and get back to the news business.

When is the last time a newspaper redesigned with the intention of strengthening its news content rather than just dressing it up with new clothes?

Wow, Hal, way to save the kicker for last. A redesign should accentuate content (and should not be for cosmetic reasons unless the paper's really disfigured), and that it takes a revolution or reinvention, not just a redesign. There's still not enough revolutionary thinking in the industry.

We're all afternoon newspapers now.

No matter how good you are, or how hard you work, you're still a newspaper, with all the structural obstacles.

And yet, after the wave of foldings, mergers and JOAs in the '70s, '80s and '90s, there are still afternoon newspapers. They're mostly in small one-newspaper towns where they fill a need that doesn't impress the 20-percenters on Wall Street.

There are companies that still make buggy whips. People still make books by hand. There will still be some newspapers. The question is, will they be made by companies that are satisified with five or 10 percent, or will they be a living exhibit next to the blacksmith's shop?

I don't think so, is interesting, but now you know the different marketing, in Europe they buy newspaper to read, in America we do money selling advertising, we don't have readers here? but still is interesting, I have different opinion? or somebody like old fashion and black and white newspapers, maybe we can see some reactions, in America more important is sell ads not circulated more papers on the street, or together! maybe I have to buy an old TV black and white again?

Holy cow, Mark! Great work!

Oh my god!! the Club again!!

To help with the comparison and to get a better sense of the general trend, I'd like to see the British numbers charted using a six-month rolling average (since they report monthly).

If you want to know whether a redesign helps or hurts or does nothing for circulation, then run a means test with a two sample group (papers that did redsign and papers that did not). Or, you could do time series regression to measure the effect of the redisgn. Your choice, but you would get the same answer.

Hal Sander's post sums this up best for me. Publishers seem to be focusing on the wrong thing. The product is news (information), but the real question ought to be how best to utilize the different transmission media to deliver that product. How can newsprint be best utilized? What part of the mix does it require/need/deserve? And how can it be utilized to best meet the needs of the readers? (And clearly, a looming question is how to pay for it, but that discussion is best saved for another date)
Web sites are incredibly important and seem unlikely to diminish in importance anytime soon. They, and TV, are the morning dailies now.
But those two media (web and tv) have limitations that print does not. They are shortlived and surface while print can be long lived and deep.
Most of the redesigns we have seen here strike me as window dressing for sharply reduced content (shorter stories, reduced news hole, less depth - in short mimicking many web sites). And that doesn't seem to me me as best utilizing the inherent qualities of print. A reinvention is needed - a whole new notion of what print is and can be.
Wake me when the revolution starts.

It's too bad you can't launch a redesign for only half your copies each day. And keep the original design for the other half. Or could you?

You should put these charts on a zero baseline. They are misleading otherwise.

Andrew,

I'm no infographics expert, but why? You do that here, you either end up with acres of pointless vertical space, or you compress the scale and flatten all these lines out, which to me seems misleading. Philip Meyer likens this to "plotting a hurricane surge against the depth of the ocean."

And Tufte says:

"The urge to contextualize the data is a good one, but context does not come from empty vertical space reaching down to zero, a number which does not even occur in a good many data sets. Instead, for context, show more data horizontally!"

I make no claim that these are statistically unassailable graphics, I was just looking to quickly illustrate the trends here. The graphics for the American papers are all on the same scale, except for the sub-100,000 papers. And Bakersfield and Waterbury are, percentage-wise, on roughly the same scale as the the larger ones. It seemed to me that putting the smaller papers on the same number scale would be misleading as it would mask larger percentage circulation decreases. Looking back, though, the Spokane chart may exaggerate its losses in comparison with the others.

But my main point here is not to compare newspapers to each other but to show circulation trends at each paper. Also, I'll cop to assuming here a certain level of graphic-reading sophistication in my audience.

I wonder if we could chart when papers launched major Web overhauls and what that did to the ciruclation on the daily. Sometimes a big redesign of the main paper is timed to a re-launch of the Web site with lots of extras. Maybe it has nothing to do with the redesign and everything to do with driving more people to the Web site at the same time.

In the case of the US papers all of them seem to have redesigned too late. They all appear to have been in long-term sales freefall to begin with. Is this the reason for the redesign? The British papers had a steady readership and redesigned to stay ahead of the game.

"For what they're worth..""

Well, nothing.

I detest the random display of graphs, charts and percentages that attempt to influence public opinion on a particular matter without employing proper methods of study that prove a statistically significant result.

If we're talking about redesigning for results, then Bakersfield and Waterbury are two smashing successes because both saw significant increases in revenue as a result of their redesigns.

These charts show circulation only. Circulation watchers need to know the difference between discounted circulation and "quality" circulation. Unfortunately, these charts make no distinction, which makes them misleading. Bakersfield does no discounting, and despite this commitment to quality circulation Bakersfield's Sunday retention is above the national average since launching their redesign. Sunday is important because it's the day that newspapers make at least half their money.

Here's a link to the complete story that explains all this data in a meaningful way that newspapers can use to improve their performance.

http://www.brasstacksdesign.com/newspaper_circulation.htm

I don't know what would happen if you compare those circulations with the averaged circulation of all the US newspapers. I miss it. And I don't know if the fall were a tendency before the redesign. But I appreciate this kind of concerns. We need this essays to support our redesign propositions.

I'd love to see the states for the Dallas Morning News after their redesign.

I am sure it has among the worst stats of any of these groups; its redesign was awful.

All of this reveals what we already knew: The design-based approach has been a miserable failure across the board. Newspapers would be far better off chucking that approach and going with something else.

But keep putting the designer spin on it!

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