Triad Newspaper Circulation Decline Makes Public Notice Modernization Laws A No Brainer

Owen Covington from the Triad Business Journal has this headline "Triad daily newspapers see continued circulation declines"  . In the article was some interesting tidbits about our local newspaper for example

 

"The News & Record saw Sunday circulation drop from 79,358 as of March 31, 2013 to 72,649 as of the same date this year, an 8.5 percent decline. It's average weekly circulation was below 50,000, declining from 54,452 last year to 49,496 this year. "

Then later in article other cities did not fare well either

It was a difficult year for all of the state's daily newspapers, none of which saw year-over-year increases in circulation, according to the AAM report.

The Charlotte Observer, North Carolina's largest newspaper, saw Sunday circulation fall from 191,962 last year to 179,698 this year. It's sister paper in Raleigh fared slightly better, with a decline from 179,214 in 2013 to 171,406 this year.

Over the past few years this blog has been notifying the public on the wasted taxpayer money being thrown at paid newspapers in regards to public notice laws in the State of North Carolina. One item that got the attention of the Guilford County Commissioners was the tax delinquency bill where we saw them save over $92,000 here is that report CLICKHERE

Let's dig deeper into the numbers the triad business journal has provided. As we see if you are really wanting public notices then you will need to get a weekly subscription to the Greensboro News and Record because they rarely show public notices on a Sunday edition which is it's most popular day they leave it for the obscure days of Monday and Tuesday for their public noticing. So let's take the population of Guilford County which is 506,610 and with the weekly circulation of 49,000 then that comes close to 10% of Guilford County residents are reading the News and Record in this County . I will even throw them a bone and double their readership to 20% for reading households of 2 who might read the paper. We also need to take into consideration the High Point Enterprise but did not have their circulation numbers for this report.

While doing a little google research I came across this from East Carolina University below :

A Decade of Change: Digital Technology and Internet Access in North Carolina

                                      1999 to 2010

                                               Kenneth Wilson, Ph.D.
                                       East Carolina University August 2010  

In the past decade, North Carolina has experienced an amazing transformation. In 1999, only 53 percent of households had home computers. By 2010 that figure has risen to 82 percent. In just eleven years, the proportion of homes without a computer has dropped 62 percent. In 1999, the proportion of all homes with Internet access was 36 percent but this has risen to 80 percent in 2010. In that same time frame, the proportion of homes without Internet access has dropped 69 percent .

We see that internet in the home has increased to 80% in North Carolina households while we keep on having to shell out taxpayer money to 20% of the population in Guilford County  to have public notices run in a paid paper when in reality we can save money to put this information online on government web sites all over this state.

It is time to modernize the public notice laws in this state and if you want to research more on this you can look under the public notice section with plenty written over the past few years. CLICKHERE

Also we need to remember that our good Senator Trudy Wade from Guilford County has a bill to help modernize Public Notice Laws in the State of North Carolina and needs our help in the short session . Will post more once we find out what is happening with the bill