It’s grim back home
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Ever since I moved to the US in 1996, I've been reading one Romanian daily newspaper or another, with titles changing as their web presence waxed and waned and as my own preferences shifted over time.
As it happens, a significant part of my livelihood has come lately from helping some eighty-odd American daily newspapers stay in business. I use survival analysis to improve subscriber retention rates and revenue yields. The author of the idea is Matt Lindsay of Mather Economics in Atlanta. I helped re-factor his Stata code so it would keep up with a growing variety of analysis needs, and did a few other things. The system works. We get a cut of the revenue improvement that we can reasonably claim credit for. I set up a way to measure that by using a randomized test/control group methodology borrowed from clinical trials. Our clients are generally a satisfied bunch -- as long as this way of gauging effectiveness is good enough for the FDA, it's good enough for them too.
So I was wondering for a while now if our services might be of use in Romania as well. The fine people of the Romanian Circulation Audit Bureau keep a great online database. I nosed through it a bit, and it looks like the papers back home are in serious trouble:
Basically, based on data up through the last quarter of last year, there was a silver lining: though the number of titles was falling steadily from its 2006 peak, at least for those left standing circulation held up alright. That bit of good news was wiped out in the first quarter of 2009: both circulation and titles dived to 2003-2004 levels. Romanian newspaper owners should talk to Matt.
No. 1 — July 14th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Interesting stuff........I wonder how much of this is attributable to the changes in Romanian education levels (e.g. increases in school drop out since 2000 and increases in illiteracy, especially among the minority Roma), population shifts (Romanian population is getting older as the fertility rate has declined since the late 1980's & some of the skilled, young adult population left when emigration policies loosened), or an increase in the GINI index nearly of c. 10 pts. since 1990 (?)
These trends have slowly emerged over the past 15 to 20 years & could *help* explain your finding that readership has dropped off recently: as older readers die off, there is a smaller-than-expected consumer pool of young readers due to these rising illiteracy rates, increased poverty, and emigration of a prime consumer group of skilled young adults....add to that the traditional explanations of the decline in newspaper readership (e.g., internet news sources, etc.) & it does seem grim. There's probably a lot I am missing (or making bad assumptions about) here, but it just seems to me that situation for newspaper survival might be even more difficult than in comparable areas of Europe or North America.
No. 2 — July 15th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I have no idea. Everything you mention would pull in the correct direction and though I'm not sure about the actual size of each problem, they are all well-documented. They also reinforce the usual explanation -- a shift from print to online content. Growing inequality will cause the readership of paid daily newspapers to grow along with the ranks of the better-educated and better-paid. That will look good for a while, but these people are also the first to switch to online content.