Latest Report Shows Another Decline in Jersey Journal’s Circulation

By • May 4th, 2010 • Category: Blog, News

The latest FAS FAX report released last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), covering the six months ending March 31, finds that average paid daily newspaper circulation fell 8.7 percent across the country year-over-year.

Here in Jersey City, the Jersey Journal‘s slide was not quite as steep, as its average paid daily circulation fell by 7.9 percent, from 22,813 to 22,020. But that’s where the good news ends for the daily.

The 22,020 figure is less than half of the paper’s circulation in March 1999, when it was at 50,055, and about 4,000 fewer than in 2005, when the paper switched from a broadsheet format to its current incarnation as a tabloid. As the New York Times reported at the time, the move to tabloid was conceived as a way to bring back local readers, who have left the paper in droves since the mid-1970s circulation peak of around 150,000.

The most troubling aspect of the report for the folks at 30 Journal Square, however, might be the Journal‘s overall reach, which is percentage-wise the lowest of all major dailies in the state. Using the “occupied households” number provided by the Nielsen Company, the paper reaches only 8.4 percent of the 255,200 households in its coverage area. Each of the 17 other New Jersey dailies in the report are in double-digits, with several near or above 30 percent (the Asbury Park Press, the Record and the News of Cumberland County).

The state’s largest paper, the Star-Ledger, took a huge dive in the latest FAS FAX, with average paid daily circulation plummeting by 17.8 percent from 287,082 to 236,017. The Ledger, however, did retain enough circulation to come in as the 25th largest newspaper in the country. (Both the Journal and the Ledger are owned by Advance Publications.)

The FAS FAX numbers are submitted by the publishers themselves, and are not audited by ABC. The last actual audit report of the Journal, covering the 12 months ending June 30, 2009, found an average paid daily circulation of 23,572.

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is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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  • Riaz

    I am not at all surprised; 3-4 pages of local news coverage; another two half pages of news and then 3 pages of sports news… rest is advertisements.. AM NEWYORK, kind of free papers have more news coverage to read, which is free on top of it!!! I look like a loser who pays $150 per year !!!

  • casual observer

    the jj’s decline in circulation are a result of its continued decline in quality and objectivity. lousy writing, nonexistent research and analysis, and no follow up. it’s really no surprise.

  • -30-

    Sadly, it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (or maybe a death spiral?) with the Journal, like many other struggling papers.

    1. Struggle with declining circulation (and revenues)

    2. Cut staff

    3. Have less compelling content created by fewer, more overworked staffers.

    4. REPEAT

  • Alb

    I think the Jersey Journal is a really beautiful paper, even now. JC List, the Reporter and the Jersey City Independent are all great in their own ways, but they don’t do what the Journal does, and I don’t think they ever can.

    Note that people on JC List, Wired JC and even JC Independent depend very heavily on Jersey Journal links. If the Journal died, local Web news efforts would lose half or more of their copy.

  • http://www.jerseycityindependent.com Jon Whiten

    Alb-

    Despite the offense we take at being lumped in with message boards, which you’ve profoundly misidentified as “news efforts,” in your comment, you’re (partly) right.

    But forget about what message board users would lose if the Journal went under; what about what the city would lose? We certainly don’t have any ill wishes towards our fellow newsfolk at 30 JSQ, and think it would be bad for democracy and accountability if there were one less news outlet here. Jersey City is already suffering from a pretty substantial media deficit compared to comparable cities across the country; it doesn’t need to get any worse.

  • Alb

    I guess you’re being facetious, but I think it’s important to point out that a message board can be an interesting and useful news medium. What determines whether that’s true or not is the intent of the posters and the nature of the posts, not the fact that the posts appear on a message board.

    If, say, you folks actively send someone to liveblog a school board candidate forum, you’re obviously engaged in gathering and publishing news. Anyone who says otherwise has an ulterior motive.

    If people at JC List are engaged in an idiotic mudfight over whether Brooklyn is nicer than Jersey City, and whether posting comments about preferring Brooklyn to Jersey City on JC List is acceptable, that’s obviously not anything related to the gathering or distribution of news.

    But, if a neighborhood group leader posts a report on crime in downtown Jersey City on JC List, and other people post their personal observations about crime in the neighborhood, then, up the point when the thread turns into a debate about racism and anti-yuppie-ism, I think that is a kind of interesting, informal news effort. You could argue that the neighborhood group leader is doing something similar to traditional journalism.

    In a lot of cases, message board “reporters” do a great job of covering neighborhood news and major catastrophes (e.g., Katrina, and the earthquake in Iran a few years back).

    But, of course, ordinary people writing first-hand accounts when they feel like it is different from what you folks do, and, as you acknowledge, what you folks do is different from what the Jersey Journal does.

  • http://www.jerseycityindependent.com Jon Whiten

    Alb-

    Fair enough; the citizen journalism aspect of a message board can indeed be considered news reporting in a way, although without a structure to verify, organize and place those first-hand accounts in context, sometimes that could just be considered information. But as you rightly point out, those lines are increasingly being blurred. And that’s (usually) a good thing.