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Editorial: Community newspapers faring well
The Daily Telegram Published Tuesday, May 06, 2008
It’s time for newspapers and their staffs to tell the other side of the story about our industry.This past week, we read about the decline of newspaper circulation in most of the major markets across the country. But, what we didn’t read about is the readership increase that has taken place in other parts of the country in our print products and the expansion of our Web sites. In the Forum Communications Co. market area, 74 percent of adults read our printed product or our newspaper Web sites. This is during a seven day week Sunday through Saturday. This percentage is typical of all newspaper markets our company serves. The Daily Telegram’s Web site was visited 89,360 times from April 4-May 5. On average, each reader visited 4.85 pages for a total of 433,840 views in that one-month period. And they’re loyal customers. Eighty percent of our traffic is from return visitors. We as a communication company feel it is time to provide positive information about our industry to our readers.. No one delivers local news better than your daily and weekly newspapers. We, as an industry, understand the need to deliver the news to different demographics by various delivery methods, and we do that well. We have developed Web sites for each of our markets to serve our online readers as well as our advertisers. Our Web sites, which include our online advertising products, delivered more than 23 million page views in April 2008, with more than 5.2 million visits. Our industry is alive and well and still considered the No. 1 means of delivering information to the people in our communities. Today, we do a better job than ever of delivering the news and advertising , because we can bring it immediately to our Web sites. This is what is happening in our market, and I’m sure there are other positive stories to be told by other newspaper companies across the country. We are not all in a large metro market, where the greatest circulation loss has occurred. The fact is that the community newspaper business remains strong and vibrant. Lloyd Case is president of Forum Communications Co., which owns The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead and 35 other newspapers in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, including The Daily Telegram, Northland Smart Shopper, Duluth News Tribune, Budgeteer News, The Pine Journal in Cloquet and Lake County News-Chronicle in Two Harbors.

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