Advance, Plain Dealer struggle to adapt to new reality


On May 13, 1983, The Plain Dealer listed on its editorial page its circulation figures — 497,386 daily and 501,042 on Sundays.

In its latest circulation numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media — The Plain Dealer long ago took its circulation figures down from the editorial page — the monopoly daily newspaper in Cleveland reported average Sunday circulation for the first quarter of 171,404 and average circulation for Wednesdays and Fridays (the only weekdays the paper is home delivered) of 94,838.

A year earlier, those same numbers were 216,711 and 141,053. Part of the reason for the decline in average daily circulation is the decision in 2013 to reduce home delivery, typically where 80% of newspapers are sold.

Advertising revenue has long been the main source of media revenue, and when circulation falls, advertising revenue follows.

“Since around 2001, newspaper advertising revenue has been plummeting,” George Rodrigue, president and editor of the newspaper, wrote in an email to staff. “It’s below the level of the 1950s now. This has forced newsrooms around the country to make painful adjustments.”

That continuing decline in readers — diminishing its value to advertisers — led the PD to trim its editorial staff in April, laying off 14 news staffers. Since, then it has laid off another 29 staffers, as part of a shift in page production to a centralized system.

It’s unlikely that the Cleveland newspaper will disappear any time soon, in part because of its relationship and its importance to its companion news organization, cleveland.com.

The Plain Dealer Publishing Co., which runs the newspaper, and Advance Ohio, which controls cleveland.com, are both owned by Advance Publications. They operate as separate companies. Work from cleveland.com reporters appears in The Plain Dealer, while the work of PD reporters also appears online on cleveland.com.

The New York City-based parent is a media giant that has had a long commitment to newspapers: It traces its roots to a single newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. And while Advance just sold its New Orleans operation — the Times-Picayune newspaper and its nola.com website — it’s unlikely the Cleveland business will be sold. The New Orleans sale, which Advance announced May 2, appears to be a one-off, a victim of the decision by the owner of the Baton Rouge Advocate to compete in nearby New Orleans. The Advocate has notified Times-Picayune employees that all will be laid off and it is keeping only the name. Some of those laid off might be hired back by the Advocate.

Although 60 daily newspapers closed since 2004, according to a 2018 study, “The Expanding News Desert,” by the University of North Carolina — Advance Publications is not banking on a recovery of print for The Plain Dealer. It firmly believes the future is cleveland.com, the 23-year-old digital news operation, calling its strategy “digital first.” It also has expanded its business side beyond advertising, offering clients a variety of digital marketing services, including search engine optimization.

As Rodrigue wrote, the advertising cuts, followed by staff cuts, are typical in the newspaper business, including the other 23 newspapers owned by Advance. News operations that pair print and online outlets have lost about two-thirds of their ad revenue over the last dozen years.

Online advertising has been able to show modest ad growth in recent years, but the bulk of the advertising revenue newspapers used to have has been siphoned off by online giants, including Google, Facebook and Craigslist, which now corral 51.5% of the $207 billion spent on advertising in the United States, according to Magna, a media buying service. Print’s share — magazines as well as newspapers — has shrunk to 14.9%.

However, it is not at all clear if the Cleveland operation can survive continuing losses.

As a private company, Advance does not disclose financial information. Chris Quinn, the president and editor of Advance Ohio, declined a request for an interview for this story. Advance Ohio is the Advance organization that operates cleveland.com and oversees the marketing and advertising for both outlets.

“I think I’m going to sit this one out,” Quinn said, responding by email to an interview request. “I’ve found of late that the best way to get our story out there is to tell it ourselves or to talk with people who cover our industry.”

Advance shocked the media world in 2009 when it closed its Ann Arbor (Mich.) News and reconstituted its operation in the college town as AnnArbor.com, a website that would publish a print edition two days a week. Then in 2012 it reduced the publication of the Times-Picayune to three days a week.

The rest of the Advance stable of newspapers has followed suit, including the PD, which went to four-days-a-week delivery in 2013. The strategy, said then-managing editor Thom Fladung at the time, was an attempt to re-create as much as possible online the domination of local advertising revenue that hometown newspapers had in the days before the internet.

The move hastened the loss of circulation, and observers do not believe online advertising has offset the loss of circulation and ad revenue, as Advance might have hoped.

“They would say that their calculation in 2008 and 2009 that print wasn’t going to bounce back at all and over time you would just as soon be out of that business was correct, and the savings when you don’t have to print and deliver and you don’t need as elaborate a layout system, are real savings,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Tampa, Fla. “On the other hand, a strategy of building up huge volume with the websites and selling a lot of advertising, I won’t say that hasn’t worked at all, but it hasn’t worked nearly as well as they’d hoped.”

Ken Doctor, a media analyst and former print and digital news executive, described Advance as a “highly paternalistic” organization that was slow to start trimming its operations after the Great Recession

“All of a sudden, (Advance) got the religion that the digital world was going to overtake the print world and flipped the switch faster than any other company, but without preparation, and they are still dealing with that today as we approach 2020,” Doctor said in a telephone interview from the office of his Newsonomics consulting firm in Santa Cruz, Calif. “Their plan (cutting days of print) hasn’t worked.”

Industrywide, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, newspaper advertising nationally peaked at $49.3 billion in 2006. By 2017, that figure was down to $16.5 billion, with digital advertising accounting for one-third of that total, reports PwC, the worldwide auditing and professional services firm, in its annual Global Entertainment & Media Outlook. However, PwC reports digital advertising for news organizations is expected to grow by only 2.2% a year, while print losses will run about 10.4%.

On its website, Advance Ohio states that its brands reach 1.5 million different local consumers every week, about the same number, it claims, for the total audience reached by local television stations at prime time and local radio stations during drive time.

But, said Doctor, trying to sell digital advertising against the likes of Facebook and Google “is an ongoing disaster.”

Locally, advertisers and advertising agency executives say they use the PD and cleveland.com, but the two aren’t significant parts of media budgets, save perhaps for the auto dealers.

“People still are attracted, not only to the physical newspaper itself in a physical sense, but also to the cleveland.com version, which has some advertising in it,” said Lou Vitantonio, president of the Greater Cleveland Automobile Dealers Association. “It gives the dealers an opportunity to put numerous offers out in one place. I’m sure the budgets for print and cleveland.com aren’t the same as they were because we have other places we have to advertise to be in front of customers.”

Jim Gagen, president of SynerG Marketing & Media Inc. in Lakewood, a longtime media buyer, whose clients have included Cedar Point amusement park, Medical Mutual and Perkins Pancake Restaurants, said he uses the PD and cleveland.com, but not extensively.

“People are saying their entity is so diminished, is it worth the cost anymore?” he said. “Ten or 20 years ago, you would say, ‘That’s what it costs and we’ve got to do it because no one else has that kind of reach.’ “

He said the Advance sales staff is not as interested in selling newspapers ads as selling online advertising or the variety of digital marketing services that are part of online marketing, such as search engine optimization and geofencing, two services that help clients increase the reach of their digital advertising.

But there, Advance is fighting an uphill battle, competing with advertising agencies, marketing firms and digital specialists, said Jason Therrien, president of thunder::tech, a Cleveland digital marketing and web design agency.

“I assume this approach is justified because, if they’re already talking to a local company that advertises with them, why not sell them marketing services, too?” Therrien said in an email. “In theory, this can work, but going from publishing to standing up to a full-fledged professional services firm is a big jump that takes a combination of time and money to build the infrastructure for. They’re not the only ones trying it.”

Editorially, Advance Ohio is seeking to attract new revenue with two new products: a weekly podcast called This Week in CLE, offering an analysis of a week’s news, and Project Text, essentially blogs produced by cleveland.com reporters that are sent to customers via text and will cost $3.99 a month after the first month of free service.

“This is a way for people to support the journalism here,” Quinn wrote in a column in late April. “Everyone knows about the challenges we face in a changing media landscape.”

More on Advance and The Plain Dealer: The civic impact of fewer reporters



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