McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt's Anchorage Speech Part 3

There is a part 1 and part 2 to this discussion of Gary Pruitt's April speech at Commonwealth North in Anchorage. The first is an overview. The second covers the models/stories/assumptions that appeared to underlie Pruitt's talk. This one talks about the numbers. They appeared here and there. I've gone through the speech to pull out the sentences that had numbers. Numbers are hard to talk about, so I've prepared this little slide presentation. Then I'll talk about a few of the numbers below.

Pruitt Presentation - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Pruitt Presentation

Slide 2: 50% of adults in US read the news paper. He was trying to show that the newspaper wasn't dead. I'm not sure what this statistic means. Journalism.org has a very thorough discussion of the meaning of such statistics. Here's a clip from State of the of the News Media 2007 .

A third way to look at audience is to add together traditional print audience, unduplicated — exclusive — online audience, and unduplicated audience for the newspapers’ specialty niche publications. The industry has different terms for what that adds up to — total audience, integrated audience, total reach or market footprint. But they mean the same thing.

A major reason the industry likes this metric is that the audience for newspaper online sites and niche publications continues to grow at double-digit rates. Hence the Newspaper Association was able to headline its analysis of results for the six-month period ending September 2006, “Eight Percent Increase in Total Newspaper Audience.”

Is it a valid measure? Certainly it helps the industry’s battered image. It is less clear how well it sells financially.

BTW, on McClatchy's map, I could only count thirty papers total. Maybe I miscounted. It's late.


Slide 3: If his numbers are correct - 90% of original reporting done by newspapers - then the decline of newspapers would be a serious problem. Even if bloggers were to fill in the gap, newspapers pay their reporters, and most bloggers write for free, or minimal Google ad revenues. It's also hard to make sure that all the important stories are covered through blogs. But we could question whether this happens in most newspapers, but so far, newspaper coverage has probably been better than blog coverage.

Slides 4 & 5 are probably the most interesting. 33% of cash profits (not sure why he says 'cash' here) come from non-newspaper sources. BUT print accounts for 80% of revenue.

Internet accounts for 11% of revenues - $200 million. I'm not sure what the other 9% is (that is neither internet nor print).

Slide 5 raises the issue of non-newspaper related internet business. Classified ads revenue, he'd said in the speech, were the first to disappear to the internet. What he's saying in Slide 5 is that they simply went out and bought their way back into the classified ad business by buying big chunks of internet classified ad sites.

Homescape.com's About button says:

Homescape is a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, which is owned by five leading media companies: Belo Corp. (NYSE: BLC), Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI), Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB) and The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO). To execute on its objectives, Classified Ventures has four leading businesses - Apartments.com, Cars.com, HomeGain and Homescape.

I'm assuming Pruitt knows something I don't when he included the NY Times in the list of owners of Homescape. It's also interesting that Homescape owns two of the three other companies that Pruitt named separately.

Slide 6:
There were (2000 Census Data) in 2000 184,412 Anchorage residents 18 years and over. 80% would be 147,530. Does he really mean the Anchorage market, or is he talking about the ADN market beyond the Municipality of Anchorage? It would mean 80% of the readership was from outside of Anchorage. That could be, but it does seem unlikely.

We better operate the leading local internet business in each of our markets and have the leading internet site with the most traffic and the most revenue of all of the local sites. And we do.

Pruitt says the ADN gets 250,000 hits. I wasn't sure if he meant per day or per week or per month. The advertising section says 243,000 readers per month. If that is true, then it appears that the ADN is getting trounced by the AlaskaReport which gets around 400,000 hits a month. (Dennis gave me figures in an email.) Actually the media kit at the ADN gives significantly higher numbers for the online hits. Here it says they get 10 million page hits a month and 994,000 monthly unique users.