Word: gannett
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Doomsayers proclaim that the newspaper business is dying, as readers get older and youngsters fail to pick up the newspaper habit. But Doug McCorkindale sees it differently. Next month the 34-year veteran of Gannett Co. steps down as CEO; he remains chairman for another year. Reflecting on his long involvement with the nation's largest newspaper publisher (which owns more than 100 dailies, including flagship USA Today), McCorkindale spoke with TIME's BARBARA KIVIAT about the prospects of a company that gets 68% of its revenue from newspaper ads and 18% from paid circulation...
...have to put those numbers in focus. Unfortunately, a few of our friends in the industry had some circulation issues, and I think they were very conservative in their accounting [this time around] so that they didn't have anything come back to haunt them. If you look at Gannett's numbers, we are not down anything, like a lot of the folks in the industry. And in fact USA Today, which just raised its cover price from 50¢ to 75¢, actually had a positive circulation for the period ending in April. Having said that, there is no doubt that...
...game plan is to deliver information to people when they want it and how they want it. If that's in print, O.K. If they want to go on the website and get the news, that's O.K. too. Every single Gannett newspaper and television station has a website. And young people do read print if you take a traditional Gannett medium-size-market newspaper and you package the same information but in a way that younger people want to see it--shorter stories, more graphics, easy maneuverability. We have young-people publications in places like Cincinnati [Ohio], Indianapolis...
...costs $31,000, compared with $75,000 for a black-and-white page in the Wall Street Journal.) "The challenge facing USA Today is to get the circulation to 2 million or above," says John Morton, a newspaper analyst at Lynch, Jones & Ryan, a securities firm in Washington. "Gannett has established there is a market for the paper. Now the question is, is it going to be a market that is profitable...
...launched an international edition of USA Today last year (15,000 copies sold a day, in Europe and the Middle East) and plans to increase the newspaper's maximum length from 48 pages to 56 in November. Perhaps most important of all, despite USA Today's substantial losses the Gannett Co. chalked up its 71 st straight quarterly rise in profits last month. Its net profit for 1984 was $224 million...