In its editions last Friday and on Sunday, The Globe published accountings of its audited print circulation numbers – 40,948 paid distributions per edition for the daily paper and 72,206 paid copies of the Sunday publication. The numbers did not include its online-only subscribers, which a company officer put at some 310,000 last April.
In the early 1990s, as the paper’s managing editor, I met with academics at MIT’s Media Lab both in Cambridge and at The Globe’s news desk in Dorchester as they were imagining the future of newspapers in an oncoming online universe.
Over coffee one night, one of the visitors told me that “there would be no print copies of your paper for sale within 10 years.” This was a time when The Globe’s paid print weekday circulation was in the 520,000 range and the Sunday figure was topping 800,000 copies.
Yet here we are, 33 or so years later, and The Globe is distributing print copies to some 41,000 subscribers while I’m reading the so-called replica edition online – but as I’ve always read the paper, looking at the editors’ layouts of every page and selecting what stories, photos, editorials, and columns I want to focus on to the fullest.
Still, the latest numbers suggest that the value of producing 41,000 (and dwindling) newspaper copies for sale every day won’t cut it for much longer against the costs of paper and ink and industrial presses and trucks using costly fuel to do so.
No print copies will likely mean no more computer screen presentation of a traditional edition – a page-by-page march to the end laid out in broadsheet form – just news items, features, photos, and graphics given vertically by topic and context.
And with that, the words “front page news” will begin their fade into lore, the musky repository of the linotype machine, the typewriter, the street hawker, and the paperboy.
