Strong readership, solid city

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This article was published 24/10/2015 (3892 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Among the most common complaints from readers is the refrain that they can’t find any good news in their newspaper.

But for those who care about newspapers, there was indeed some good news that we came close to burying on page B7 of Friday’s edition in yet another example of how demure the Free Press remains.

Headlined Survey shows larger audiences for newspapers, the story talked about a new national readership study that found 78 per cent of Winnipeg adults read the Free Press each week.

To be more precise, Vividata’s read on our readership found that each week, 487,000 Winnipeggers turned to the print and/or digital version of the Free Press — 79,300 more than previously reported under the industry’s old measuring stick.

What that adds up to is clear market dominance for the Free Press as part of a penetration rate that is among the highest of any newspaper in the land.

But rather than boast, I wanted to add some perspective, because the numbers from Vividata are about much more than who gets to claim to be the No. 1 newspaper in each city.

For almost as long as I have been at the Free Press, there has been talk newspapers are dying. Some high-profile bankruptcies, shrinking newsrooms in Canada and the United States and a whole lot of chatter from bloggers eager to see our demise have added to the doom and gloom.

While revenues remain an ongoing challenge for everyone in the news business, the reality of newspaper readership has not only been overlooked but misunderstood.

Yes, the Free Press has far fewer home subscribers than when I was a paperboy in St. James. And yes, circulation continues to shrink every year in every newspaper market.

But fixating on those numbers means seeing the Free Press as only a newspaper, instead of what it has become and what it now delivers to smartphones, tablets and desktops.

In other words, if you focus only on print and not pixels, you are missing the transformation that has allowed us to reach more readers than ever before in our 143-year history.

If you ignore the evolution that has enabled the Free Press to deliver long-form journalism such as today’s second chapter of The Rivers that looks great in print and even better online, then you aren’t getting the whole story.

If you discount the changes in business models that are banking on readers to provide a greater bump to the bottom line of newspapers such as the Free Press, you are missing out on how important you are to our future.

So rather than the sky falling, there is the promise of a brighter future if newspapers can break free from the print cocoon to become something more than the past prism that defined us and threatened to consign us.

Again, the Vividata numbers don’t lie. Newspaper readership — when you factor in everyone who turns a page, swipes a tablet and downloads an e-edition — is up across Canada. From coast to coast, digital readership has almost tripled to 31 per cent reach.

And if we reach more and more readers, then the revenues needed to fund our journalism and serve this community will be there for the long term.

“Newspapers stitch people together, weaving community with threads of information, and literally standing physically on the street, reminding people where they are and what they need to know,” Stephan Salisbury, a prize-winning culture writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for the past 36 years told the Guardian.

In recent years, the Inquirer has faced bankruptcy, falling sales and round after round of layoffs. And as Salisbury knows better than most, the implications of the death of a newspaper are dire.

“What happens to a community when community no longer matters and when information is simply an opportunity for niche marketing and branding in virtual space? Who covers the mayor? City council? Executive agencies? Courts?… It is this unravelling of our civic fabric that is the most grievous result of the decline of our newspapers. And it is the ordinary people struggling in the city who have lost the most, knowing less and less about where they are — even as the amount of information bombarding them grows daily at an astounding rate.”

For nearly a century-and-a-half, the Free Press has been the information thread that has helped weave this community together. That’s a good story. An even better one is that rising readership means we can keep that thread going.

 

Paul Samyn is the Free Press editor.

paul.samyn@freepress.mb.ca @paulsamyn