Often, I think about the Register not merely for the content it offers – such as it is – but the role of a weekly in a small town. Last year, I pointed out the Register‘s circulation – as reported to the State of Wisconsin, was unimpressive.

In a post from September 14, 2007, I used state paid subscriber figures to show that (1) the Register‘s paid subscriber based was small, especially for a longstanding publication, (2) the percentage penetration of the Register was low, and (3) the Register has a lower penetration rate than other newspapers in the Southern Lakes newspaper chain.

Here’s a part of last year’s post:

Of the listings in the State of Wisconsin document [State of Wisconsin, Newspaper Certification Rates, Statewide Bureau of Procurement Contract No. 15-99955-601], the Register falls in the roughly the bottom quarter of news weeklies by circulation. Approximately three out of four news weeklies listed have higher circulation than the Register

Since then, to my surprise, the Register’s certified numbers to the state show a marked decline: from 1569 last year, to 1297 this year. That’s an 18% percent drop. The new numbers are available on the Web as Word document at Department of Administration Contract No. 15-99955-802 Newspaper Certification Rates — 2008-2009

Some quick points:

First, I did not think that the paid subscriber drop would be this high. I thought that it would be much smaller. In the Wisconsin figures, weeklies are down generally, not just the Register. Many have double-digit paid circulation declines, year over year. If some of them run at a low margin, a drop of this kind for more than a year or two would prove devastating. Papers in a chain have a presumably greater chance of survival, as they can distribute costs (and offer advertising) over a wider area.

Second, shopper-advertisers must be taking a toll on news weeklies. That’s true because they offer lots of space for local ads that are attractive to readers, and one can see that they’re a direction that experienced publishers are willing to consider.

The Week is no longer, but its publisher (Bliss) ceased publication of that paper while simultaneously moving to acquire shopper-advertisers from another publisher. A seasoned publisher saw an opportunity in the local shopper-advertiser market.

We do not have, and likely will not have, a local version of something like craigslist. Those online classifieds work, and are devastating to print newspaper classifieds, but do not exist for Whitewater.

Shopper-advertisers will survive – maybe not all of them, but the format itself. A weekly like the Register would have to shift content significantly to capture advertisers now publishing in the Good Morning Advertiser, for example.

Third, dailies did not have declines this large last year, and that makes sense – they publish more frequently (with timely news), offer more opportunities for advertisers, and thus more for shoppers (more ads, coupons, etc.).

Fourth, the double-digit declines in paid subscribers suggest to me that news weeklies do not have the loyal subscribers they might wish advertisers and readers to believe they have. That seems true across the board.

Fifth, in a town that has a website that offers news and sports information, like Whitewater with the Banner, that website probably represents a ceiling – lower each year — beyond which a local newspaper cannot climb.

It’s not that all the subscribers who cancel will defect to read their local news on the web – it’s that the website makes net increases in print subscribers almost impossible. Not only would a print paper have to recapture lost subscriber numbers, but it would be doing so against the enticements to prospective subscribers that an all-color, easily-updated website offers.

News websites are like online, full-color, free dailies – once in a community, they’ll cap the growth possible for a weekly newspaper.

The combination of higher print costs, and the presence of an online news source with a similar perspective on local news, makes difficult the future of a weekly newspaper.

Sixth, in a situation like this, as subscriber numbers decline, my guess would be that a newspaper would feel increasingly beholden to its remaining, cyberspace-averse readership. That’s a natural reaction – to shore up one’s base. It’s a risk-averse response that accepts gradual decline rather than venture in a new direction.

In this regard, a weekly is like an aging department store that fears remodeling because a more upscale look might offend loyal – but less profitable – customers.

Seventh, if these preceding points should be true, then one can expect an increasingly status-quo outlook from the Register. (That is, if increasingly status quo could be possible for that paper.)

It also means that the Register is less influential than before, and that its favorable depiction of local officials and long-term incumbents is just preaching to an ever-smaller choir.

In my small town, we have a local, weekly newspaper called the Whitewater Register. It’s part of a chain of local weeklies in my part of the state. I follow of the paper, of which I have been a critic. Here’s the first of three Register Watch posts on recent issues of the paper.

Dream towns.

This post covers the Register edition for August 7th, 2008. I correctly predicted the lead (lede) story – of the August 7th issue, in a post entitled, “Municipal Exaggeration: Dream Towns” that I published on the morning of August 7th. Anyone would have spotted the Register story a mile away.

In that post, I showed how a survey that supposedly described Whitewater as a dream town was really describing a much bigger area, an area that actually outperformed Whitewater in the measurements surveyed.

The question for me was why Whitewater’s city government and city manager would even bother to flack the findings, as those findings did not describe our city. I have no idea, but perhaps it was enticing just to find a favorable survey that used the name Whitewater. That’s no reason to use the study – but the desire to look good sometimes takes on an expression of the foolish and unrealistic.

The Register‘s August 7th picked up on the survey, under the headline, “Livin’ in a Dream.” That the title is double-edged might have escaped the Register, but is apparent nonetheless. I’d be the first to contend that the desire to live in a dream – rather than see things as they are – keeps our town back. We could be a true dream town one day, but not by pretending that we are one now.

Advertisements.

There’s something else in the Register that’s interesting to me, but it’s on the back page of the main section of the paper. There’s a half page ad for merchants in historic…Delavan. Delavan is a nearby town, once derided by long-standing residents as a second-rater, that now outperforms Whitewater in several common measurements of community well-being.

Why the large ads for Delavan in the Whitewater Register? I have observed before that the Register‘s principal ads often are not for businesses in Whitewater, but elsewhere: Elkhorn, Burlington, Delavan, etc. That’s true in this issue, too. By my count, of approximately 50 picture ads in the main section of the paper, only about 20%, are from businesses located in Whitewater.

Since the Register is part of a chain, and Delavan has a newspaper in the same chain, it’s likely that ads in one paper are spread over several publications. I have no idea what the rate card’s like for a business’s out-of-town advertising, as against home-town advertising, or what additional value it might provide to an advertiser.

(A quick check of another newspaper in the chain reveals that the Delavan ad ran in more than one non-Delavan paper, not merely the Register.)

I’ll talk about advertising, circulation, and the future of local weeklies in my next post.