Democrat-gazette bucks trend, retains print subscribers

The Arkansas DemocratGazette ranks 25th among all metropolitan dailies in terms of print editions sold, even though the Little Rock market is the 72nd largest.

The Democrat-gazette’s Sunday circulation increased by 2.7 percent, to 263,738, for the six months that ended March 31, putting it at No. 32, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Many newspapers have lost substantial numbers of print subscribers in the past 20 years. For example, The New York Times lost 32 percent of its daily print subscribers — from 1,145,890 in 1992 to 779,731 this year. The Commercial Appeal in Memphis slipped from 176,411 to 92,020.

The Democrat-gazette, meantime, had average daily print circulation of 175,276 as of March 31, according to the Audit Bureau. That has hardly changed from its September 1992 circulation — a year after the Arkansas Democrat bought the assets of the Arkansas Gazette — when the paper had 176,741 print subscribers.

“The primary reason [for subscriber retention] is the fact that [ Democrat-gazette publisher] Walter Hussman was ahead of the industry in protecting ... news room generated stories from being available to nonsubscribers on the Internet,” said Nat Lea, vice president and general manager for the Little Rock-based editions of the newspaper.

“The prevailing thought in the industry, excluding the past year or two, had been that you had to be on the Internet to build audience and that you had to put everything that your newsroom generated out on the Internet. We have very good traffic on our website. We’ve been able to build Web traffic by using information that is not generated in our newsroom. It preserves the value of the subscriber-exclusive content.”

Some of the largest cities in the country — Miami, Atlanta, San Francisco, St. Lou-