Two Newspaper Town: Both Down

On the coat tails of the Herald’s sale of many of its suburban newspaper franchises, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported both newspapers in town saw a decline in circulation numbers – both papers down and Boston placed only second behind San Francisco for declining print readership. The Herald saw its print subscription drop at a slightly higher pace than the Globe for both the weekday circulation and the Sunday edition. It’s not that surprising in the increasingly online-centric world that the paper edition is losing ground. You can surf Bostonist on your PDA, grab some Yahoo! or Google updates on your phone as you’re waiting for the bus – and there’s always that VCast (in our opinion it’s not yet worth the free trial month). Print continues to struggle. The decline in print circulation has been blamed on inflated numbers due to the artificial increase in the run up to the Sox World Series Championship and the Patriots Superbowl wins. Meh.

Bostonist gets the paper at home. There’s something nice about the ritual of going to the front porch each morning to find out which corner the news has landed on (we’ve yet to identify any statistical significance of right v. left, but stay tuned). But we know we fall in a minority group of people under 35 – or even 45 – who read the paper in the print edition. It makes us feel more sophisticated to pick up a paper and get ink on our hands but we still check out the news online. Be it from Boston.com or BostonHerald.com or any of the other sites we’ve added to our feed reader, the news junkie in us can’t live with print alone. Radio, online media, weekly papers, and the like provide us with the full range of digestible information that we crave. We’re just waiting until everyone catches on and opens up comments on their sites (you know, blog style) so that the news will become a little bit more interactive.

In an attempt to "reinvent public media in a participatory world", the Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosts a conference called Beyond Broadcast this weekend. This Friday and Saturday topics ranging from Citizen Journalism (with Dan Gillmor – who wrote the book on it) to participatory services like YouTube and Odeo will be covered. We imagine there will be a few people who will deliver a well formed exposition on Net Neutrality if you want to hear more on why it's important to save the internet. Registration for the conference is still open and only $50 if you pre-pay. No doubt someone will be blogging it and sticking it on a wiki if you can't make it.

Photo of the Alewife News, wonderfully devoid of people looking to purchase any print editions, courtesy Flickr user: Autistic Psycho