| ||||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSA new report issued by The Media Audit reveals that 43.8 million U.S. adults have read an alternative newspaper or visited an alternative newspaper's website in the past 30 days. The study, which compared past four issue readership among 117 papers across 88 U.S. Markets, reveals an average readership of 374,296 adults in 2007 compared to 362,938 in the previous year, a 3% increase. Further, the average number of unique monthly website visitors among the 117 papers is 113,469 adults in 2007 compared to 106,139 in 2006, a nearly 7% increase.
Bob Jordan, President of International Demographics, observes ".... one of the benefits for alternative newsweeklies is the opportunity to reach outside the city where papers are not as readily available... there are a lot of people who come into the city from the suburbs for entertainment and these alternative newspaper websites are positioned as one of the best choices for restaurant, live music, and concert recommendations."
Among the highest reaching alternative newsweekly in the country, Madison Wisconsin's Isthmus has moved to the top of the list, reaching 37.4% of all adults in Madison, compared to 34.6% a year earlier.
- Spokane Washington's Inlander ranks second in the study, reaching 36.1% of the market
- San Diego Reader (35.6% reach)
- Tucson Weekly (33.2% reach)
- New Haven, Connecticut's New Haven Advocate (32.4% reach)
- Columbia, South Carolina's Free Times (30.6% reach)
- Eugene Weekly (29.7% reach)
- Reno News and Review (29.2% reach)
- Madison, Wisconsin's The Onion (28.7% reach)
- The Austin Chronicle (28.6% reach)
Total reach is based on past four issue readership of the newspaper combined with past 30 day website visitors.
Alternative newspaper websites with the highest market penetration include: Madison Wisconsin's Isthmus (13.5% of the market), then:
- The Austin Chronicle (11.4%)
- Charleston, Carolina's Charleston City Paper (10.3%)
- The New Haven Advocate (10%)
- The Memphis Flyer (9.5%)
- Minneapolis City Pages (9.2%)
- Madison, Wisconsin's The Onion (8.9%)
- New Orleans' Gambit Newsweekly (8.8%)
- Syracuse New Times (8.3%)
- Washington D.C.'s The Onion (8.2%)
Among the top 10 highest reaching alternatives based on persons 18+ is New York's Village Voice with over 2.4 million readers across the New York City metro area who read the paper or visited their web site, followed by:
- Time Out New York (1.8 million readers)
- L.A. Weekly (1.7 million readers)
- The Onion in New York City (1.3 million readers)
- Orange County Weekly (1.1 million readers)
More information from this report is available from The Media Audit here.
1 person recommends this article.
RSS FEEDS
What Randy Campbell just proved is that stats are manipulated to appear to the benefit of whoever is using them. Just as the papers did in the mid 90's (10 years ago) to downplay its threat to the Newpaper industry. What more PR bs. Google owns the industry now.
Woops, dumb idea print industry, you missed the boat before it launched.
W
Additionally, if the dreaded "pass-along" readership statistics are used in determining readership -- it further weakens the the merit of this report. The old "X-readers/copy" chestnut, of which I've often seen newspapers and their demographic-sampling enablers laying claim to 5, 6, or more readers per copy, should embarrass anyone touting them.
For what it's worth, I can name a couple smaller market papers, including the one I work for, who exceed the top ranked papers here by 10 or more points, and meet or beat the web traffic of as well.
That said, at least someone is telling the story of success that Alternatives have realized in the past 10 years, and our bright future. Congrats to the fine newspapers listed above.
Randy Campbell Publisher, Santa Barbara Independent independent.com