Woeful Circulation for Just Retailed Digital Edition of Newspapers

The American Press Institute’s Cyberjournalist.net picked up our item last week about the woeful circulation of newspaper digital editions. Cyberjournalist’s lead sentence, although well-intentioned, made a conclusion that we didn’t: “In case there was any doubt that digital editions of newspapers were a horrible experience and destined to failure,….”

It’s not quite a simple as all that.

Retailed digital editions of newspapers (i.e., those sold directly by the publication to the consumer) do have dismal circulations. This is because the proper technologies (i.e., truly interactive files of less than 1MB per edition delivered routinely, wirelessly, automatically, and without proprietary applications into consumers’ handheld, portrait-screen, 4×6″ or larger-sized combination phone/music/video/reading devices or e-paper devices) are still three to five years away. Retailed digital editions of newspapers aren’t destined to failure, but will fail until those technologies are in the hands of consumers.

However, the Olive Software retailed digital editions that are hybrids of digital editions and Web sites (such as at the Arkanas Democrat Gazette but not at the Washington Post) have had a modicum of relative success for newspapers that insist upon charging for online content (itself is a questionable practice and not particularly successful).

The picture is different for digital editions of business-to-business magazines, scientific journals, or trade journals. They’ve generated healthy additional circulations from digital editions. For example, 65,000 of Ziff Davis’ eWeek magazine’s 400,000 circulation is now from digital editions.

Meanwhile, wholesaled digital editions of newspapers (sent by the publications via the Internet to distant locations, such as kiosks, hotels, resorts, corporations, cruise ships, etc., where the editions are printed out and distributed to consumers) are certainly successful for publishers. These generate ten to 20 times the additional circulations that retailed digital editions do and all major publishers should use these (vendors include NewspapersDirect, Satellite Newspapers, etc.)

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.