Statesman Math

On Friday, the Statesman printed an article on page 3 of its business section titled “Little newspapers show big profits.” Of course, I can’t find it on their (still execrable!) website to link to it, but it was written by Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post.

The gist of the article is that newspapers with less than 50,000 circulation are doing quite well financially, thank you very much, but that from 50,000 to 500,000 they’ve got problems. Seems folks are turning to the net for national news, and the little papers have a lock on local news and reaching local folks with local advertising.

Anyway, the Statesman says here that it is “a 62,000 daily / 83,000 Sunday circulation newspaper.” It also says on the same page

The Idaho Statesman is the most widely read newspaper in the state of Idaho, reaching 196,232 adults per week. This includes 123,993 readers each weekday and 167,840 each Sunday.

I don’t savvy the difference between “circulation” and “reaching” and “readers”, but to me these numbers don’t seem to jive.

Anyway, the point is the Statesman is in the group of papers that aren’t doing so well. I don't have any info on how the Statesman is doing, just that it's in a poor demographic.