Where we’re at
While sending some Christmas greetings, a longtime reader asked for an editorial explaining how The Citizen is doing with so much gloomy news about the news media and the newspaper industry in particular.
As anyone who follows the news knows, newspapers in North America are in bad shape. While they continue to do well in other parts of the world, they have been closing steadily for the past 20 years in Canada and the United States, with increasing frequency in the past five years.
Here in Prince George, the Free Press closed in 2015, leaving The Citizen as the last remaining newspaper and a daily to boot. The Free Press was printed by The Citizen in its final two years of operation. As we told our staff the day the Free Press closed, their departure was no cause for celebration. The Citizen lost a good-paying print job that day and there was no guarantee we would pick up enough of the Free Press’s advertising to cover the print job’s revenue, never mind coming out ahead. And that’s exactly what happened.
On the dollars and cents side, The Citizen’s annual revenues have been declining for most of the last 10 years. We have remained profitable every year, however, due to revenues from the several other print products we publish, such as our Profiles Of Excellence magazine, reducing the number of publication days from six to five, administrative costcutting, technology enhancements and – the painful one – a reduced workforce.
Our parent company, Glacier Media, a publicly-traded company, continues to make money, as well. In the quarter ending Sept. 30, Glacier made $6 million (that is, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization or EBITDA for the accounting nerds) on revenues of $54.8 million. On its community media side, where The Citizen resides with its sister newspapers, Glacier made $3.6 million on revenues of $32.4 million in that quarter. It sounds great but here’s the bad news – those revenues are down 9.8 per cent from the same quarter last year and earnings are down 27.4 per cent from the same three months in 2016.
Sadly, we experienced similar decreases here at The Citizen in 2017 and those numbers are obviously unsustainable over the long term. The revenue side of the story has been bleak in recent years but the readership side of the equation remains solid. Print and digital subscriptions are stable. Online readership is steady (and spikes during major news events), in part because of News250’s departure and our added commitment to breaking news but also because of some changes we made to our website to make content flow faster and smoother, particularly to those accessing The Citizen through their smartphones.
Both regular and occasional readers have high expectations of The Citizen and its journalism. Boy, do we hear it when we miss a game, an event or make a mistake. The thanks and the praise are always welcome but the complaints are helpful, too, because they reveal an engaged audience that will not tolerate anything but the best from their local newspaper.
When they disagree with written opinions, they say so, in writing and phone calls, and then they keep coming back, knowing the next day there will probably be different views expressed more in line with their beliefs.
People looking to reach local residents with their message know the value of The Citizen, too. That’s why Christy Clark sat down for exclusive interviews with us, as did Adrian Dix when he was NDP leader and John Horgan did in the runup to last spring’s election.
Whether readers love or hate that particular story or column or letter or editorial, local residents – regardless of whether they read every day or once a month – expect us to be here with the news and views when they want it.
Demand for local news remains as high as ever, so the challenge for The Citizen, as it is with all of our sister newspapers in Glacier and across the continent, is to better link revenue to readership, advertising to audience.
Many newspapers have put their journalism partially or completely behind a paywall, forcing readers to pay for stories on the website.
We’ve considered it several times but each time have discovered that the cost to implement and maintain such a system would have lost us too many readers.
In the coming year, we’ll continue to make the necessary decisions to remain profitable while still providing excellent value to both our readers and our advertisers. We’re looking at a variety of other options and studying what’s working in other markets like ours to find the best path forward but we remain committed – staff, management and our corporate owners – to serving Prince George with award-winning journalism.
The Citizen, now in its 102nd year in Prince George, is sticking around because readers and residents demand it. We will continue to adapt to the ever-changing marketplace, as we always have.
Please keep reading (and if you have the financial means, consider a print or digital subscription) because you can count on us to uphold our end of the bargain.