The Daily Background

Newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher on November 5th paper sales:

Many of us who have been reporting for years on the declining demand for the daily miracle — in newsprint anyway — were both pleased and a bit perplexed to see Wednesday’s mad rush for Barack Obama editions.
[…]
Of course, watching the New York Times print 50,000 more copies, and the Chicago Tribune 200,000 and USA Today 380,000, one couldn’t help think that some kind of saving grace had reached the ever-declining print circulation world. I mean, when was the last time a major daily like The Washington Post put out a print extra? Some 600,000 copies worth, at that?
[…]
Part of the draw also had to be the great Page One designs that many of the Wednesday editions had. The Chicago Sun-Times stood out for its elegant portrait of Obama with the small “Mr. President” headline, while others used large type and moving photos to bring home the historic and poignant elements of this moment.

Of course, this one-day extravaganza for print copies that provided a nice bump for many newspapers — involving their revenue and egos — will not last. Many of the same people who stood in line or grabbed for copies of The Washington Post, New York Times and even the Detroit Free Press, do not subscribe to those papers and likely will not pick up another printed paper ever again.

Guilty as charged. I’m one of those who scrambled to get copies of papers I won’t ever to subscribe to. Thanks to a friend to whom I now owe a big favor, I managed to get ahold of both the local November 5th editions of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times (which are now being sold on Ebay for several times their newsstand price).

It was pretty interesting though to see people here in Chicago and elsewhere scramble to get ahold of newspapers that in many cases still had wet ink, as publishers rushed out multiple extra printings. When was the last time you saw that?

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