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Flash! Newspapers are dying!

If you consider that “old news,” you are in the minority. According to a 2018 Pew Research study, a majority of U.S. adults (71 percent) believe their local news media are doing well financially.

I guess they haven’t noticed how the price of a daily newspaper has been going up while the number of pages has been going down. That’s probably because that same study found only 14 percent pay for their news anyway.

(Where do they get their news? TV? Facebook? They don’t get any news?)

Yes, it’s true. Fewer people – many fewer – get a daily newspaper anymore.

Just check the numbers.

And thanks to an obscure 1912 law, newspapers are forced to disclose their true paid circulation numbers in their own pages every fall (usually early October): they must reveal, among other things, the actual number of newspapers they print and the number they sell, which is always different. Newspapers bury this little nugget of information in tiny print in the classified ads, surrounded by lots of legalese. But they publish it.

Even if you’ve never paid attention to newspaper circulation numbers – and most people haven’t – these will surprise you.

 

Before I get to the Kingsport Times News’ subscription numbers through the years, let me amaze you with the circulation numbers of a newspaper I wrote for in the 1990s, the New York Daily News.

The Daily News is best known for a 1975 headline during New York City’s financial crisis:

Ford to City: Drop Dead

Two weeks earlier the Daily News had published its annual circulation numbers. The newspaper sold an average of 2,887,608 copies a day. That’s almost three million copies! It was the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the country.

When I started writing for the paper 14 years later, circulation had slipped considerably to 1,422,837 copies, a decline of almost a million and a half copies a day. But it was still the largest circulation daily in the country.

The latest circulation number I can find for the Daily News is from 2019. A total of 194,504 print copies were sold each day.

In roughly 25 years circulation has dropped over 90 percent.

Modern publishers would note that comparing today’s print circulation to yesteryear’s numbers is like comparing apples and grapes. Today’s papers have much smaller print numbers – partly by design - but those are dwarfed by the number of digital readers. And that’s true. It is a different era for newspapers.

 

Now to the Kingsport Times News:

The Kingsport Times was founded in 1916 as a weekly by Cy Lyle, who already published the weekly Johnson City Comet. Weeklies were not required to publish circulation numbers under the 1912 Congressional act but Lyle self-reported a circulation of 1,000 copies sold weekly to the trade publication Ayer’s Newspaper Directory.  

The circulation for 1917, the first full year of publication, was self-reported to Ayer’s as 1,500 copies a week. Ayer’s noted Kingsport’s population was 6,000.

In 1921 the population number changed to exactly 5,692. The census had been published that year. And the Kingsport Times circulation had taken a tumble, down to 1,000.

The Kingsport Times became a daily on Oct. 1, 1924. So in October 1925 the newspaper published its first “official” “legal” Statement of Ownership.

The Kingsport Times had sold 3,106 copies a day that year.

The next year, 1926, circulation had increased slightly, to 3,312.

But as the Depression approached that number of readers began to fall, down to 2,421 by 1928.

By 1929, a scant few weeks before Wall Street crashed and the Depression enveloped the country, the Kingsport Times listed its circulation as 2,416.

That was the bottom. From 1930 until, well, fairly recently, the Times-News circulation increased almost every year.

 

1930 – 2,692

1935 – 4,720

1940 - 8,095

 

I wondered if circulation dipped during World War II when so many local men and women were serving in the military. Those readers must have been replaced by the influx of defense workers at Eastman and Holston Defense because circulation held steady (even rising one year) during the war years.

 

1942 – 10,626

1943 – 11,610

1944 – 12,659

1945 – 11,644

 

The post-war boom helped boost newspaper circulation, too.

The year I was born, 1947, circulation had skyrocketed to 16,695. That’s a jump of 5,000 readers in just two years! That’s the biggest two-year increase in the newspaper’s history.

 

Circulation continued increasing into the twenty-first century:

1950 - 19,405

1955 - 21,047

1965 - 26,536

1975 – 37,638

1985 - 47,158

1992 - 45,944

 

Then came the internet and other changes:

2004 – 41,734

2010 – 38,511

2020 - 19,438

2022 – 16,917 (Sept. 28, 2022 issue)

 

The last time the Times News print circulation was as low as 16,000 was the year I was born.

So in 76 years the Kingsport Times News went from 16,000 to a peak of almost 50,000 and now back to 16,000.

The next official Statement of Ownership circulation numbers are due in a couple of weeks.

I’m hoping they will start going back up.

 

 

A dime would once buy a cup of coffee and a morning newspaper:

 

The price of a daily newspaper has gone only one direction over the years: up. The price of the Kingsport Times News over the years:

1916 – two cents a copy

1920 – three cents

1940 – still three cents

1942 – five cents

1968 - ten cents

1975 – 15 cents

1982 – 25 cents

1988 – 35 cents

2023 - $1

 

Who owned the Times-News?

Many well-known local folks were listed among the newspaper’s owners in 1950:

 

2. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as those of each individual member, must be given.) Kingsport Publishing Co., Inc., C. P. Edwards, Jr., First National Bank and Val Edwards, Co-Trustees, E. W. Tipton, E. W. Tipton, Jr., Joe N. Tipton, George T. Tipton, Mrs. Catherine T. Brown, Howard Long, S. P, Platt, Richard Brockman, Mrs. Dorothy N. Edwards, Val Edwards, A. D. Brockman, S. E. McAmis, Mrs. Vera J. White, James Brockman, Shirley Joyce Brockman, J. W. West, all of Kingsport, Tennessee.

 

Other cities, other newspapers, all available at Kingsport newsstands in the fifties and sixties.

 

In 1967 when the late Troy Brown started working at Wallace News on Broad Street in Kingsport, Troy told me the newsstand stocked a dozen or so out-of-town newspapers. (Troy retired from Wallace in 2016.)

Here are a few of those papers and their 1967 circulation numbers along with their most recent circulation figures (in parentheses):

New York Times - 1,419,329 in 1967 (740,000 print subscribers in 2022)

Washington Post - 702,679 (159,040 – 2023)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution – 252,439 (52,803 – 2022)

Nashville Tennessean – 233,121 (19,270 – 2022)

Knoxville News-Sentinel – 167,792 (19,430 - 2022)

Memphis Commercial-Appeal – 331,672 (13,523 – 2022)

Asheville Citizen-Times – 47,330 (7,058 - 2022)