The Providence Journal’s advertising sales dropped again during the first three months of this year, as Rhode Island’s statewide daily newspaper reported losses in nearly every type of notice.

The Journal’s advertising revenue was down 15% between Jan. 1 and March 31 compared with the same period in 2012, parent company A.H. Belo disclosed in an SEC filing. Quarterly ad sales fell to $9.6 million, or $1.7 million below last year’s level.

Total first-quarter revenue at The Journal from all sources was down 9% from 2013, falling to $20.6 million, thanks to a 10% increase in its contracts to print and distribute other newspapers. Circulation revenue fell 7% to $8 million.

“In Providence we got off to a bumpy start for a variety of reasons,” A.H. Belo CEO Robert Decherd told investors in a conference call last week. He said some of The Journal’s promotional plans for the start of the year were hamstrung by the winter storms that hit Rhode Island.

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The Providence Journal’s Sunday print circulation fell 10% during the six months ended March 31, figures released Tuesday showed, as the newspaper’s parent company reported a first-quarter loss of $8 million.

The Journal’s print circulation on Sundays – the most lucrative edition of the week for most papers – totaled 109,516 copies, down by 12,763 since March 2012, the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations) reported Tuesday morning.

The Projo sold an average of 79,244 traditional print editions on weekdays between Oct. 1 and March 31, a decrease of 6,252 from a year earlier and 45% fewer than in September 2007.

Saturday circulation dipped below 100,000 for the first time, falling by 10,484 to 98,651. Weekday circulation fell below 100,000 for the first time in 2010. The overall pace of circulation loss has slowed since 2009-10, when the annual rate of decline on Sundays peaked at 17%.

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Robert Decherd

The Providence Journal’s parent company gave its top executives pay raises and $1.7 million in bonuses in 2012 as they eked out an annual profit for the first time.

A.H. Belo awarded CEO Robert Decherd $1.9 million in 2012, up from $1.6 million in 2011 and $499,180 in 2009, according to a Securities & Exchange Commission filing.

Decherd’s compensation included a $567,692 salary, bumped up from $480,000 in 2011; $705,678 in cash bonuses; $487,500 in stock awards; and $127,139 in other benefits, including $7,920 for life insurance. Decherd is also A.H. Belo’s chairman and president.

In addition, the Dallas-based company said it paid Executive Vice President James Moroney $1.4 million in 2012, up from $1.1 million in 2011; Chief Financial Officer Alison Engel $805,490, up from $626,091; and Senior Vice President Daniel Blizzard $557,672, up from $424,991. Former executive John McKeon received $272,286 before his departure last April.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Providence Journal’s revenue losses nearly stopped in 2012 as significant growth in the company’s contracts for printing and distribution helped offset dwindling advertising and declining circulation.

The Journal’s revenue totaled $93.8 million in 2012, according to an SEC filing by its parent company A.H. Belo. The 1.4% decrease compared with 2011 was the newspaper’s smallest in at least eight years. Total Journal revenue has plummeted 43% since 2005, when the paper pulled in $165.6 million.

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(Re-upping this in case you missed it during Sandy. -TN.)

Providence Monthly had a fun idea for its November edition – get a bunch of Rhode Island journalists together to talk shop and discuss where we think the battered media industry is going next.

The roundtable was earlier this month, and it was interesting to hear where all of us agree, disagree and aren’t sure. The group Providence Monthly brought together was Tim White and me (WPRI), Ian Donnis (RIPR), Erika Niedowski (AP), Dan McGowan (GoLocal), Tim Murphy (Projo) and Dave Scharfenberg (Phoenix).

The full conversation is here in five parts. A sample:

John T: We have seven reporters seated at the table and only one representing a print daily, which is quite a change from if we had had this conversation ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. What is the changing nature of this profession as the era of the traditional beat reporter gives way to this new media landscape? What does the beat reporter of the future look like? Who does the next generation’s Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein work for?

Ted N: I think it’s interesting, because we’re at a time where you can jump in in different ways. My job was just an experiment by Channel 12. They never would have had a writer when it was just a TV station; there was nowhere to put the writing. Now everyone has a website. Erika’s stuff used to be primarily available inside a newsroom until it got into a paper. Now the AP has a mobile site. I don’t like to make predictions anymore – not that I ever did and I haven’t been in it that long – but I never predict where it’s all going. I think a lot of it is just trying to keep an eye on where things are moving and sort of get there along with the readers – not wait until you realize that people have migrated, and then you’re left behind. You’re not in the place where people want to be. But hopefully the standards can remain the same.

The Providence Journal’s print circulation fell 7% during the six months ended Sept. 30 as subscriptions to its new electronic edition rose past 4,000.

The Journal sold an average of 83,733 traditional print copies on weekdays between April 1 and Sept. 30, a decrease of 6,352 from the same period a year earlier, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported Tuesday.

The Journal said its total average weekly circulation was 114,303 when “branded editions” are included, which would include its free ProjoExpress publication. The Audit Bureau changed its rules in 2011 to count those.

The Projo’s print circulation on Sundays – the most lucrative edition of the week for most papers – totaled 117,784 copies, a drop of 11,240 since the September 2011 report. Saturday circulation fell by 9,117 copies, from 115,892 to 106,775.

ProvidenceJournal.com had 1.2 million unique visitors as of March 31, up from 868,693 in the six months ended March 31 and matching the audience for the old Projo.com a year ago, the Audit Bureau said.

The Journal reported 4,224 subscriptions to its e-edition, broken out as 1,398 on weekdays, 1,411 on Saturdays and 1,415 on Sundays.

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Providence Monthly had a fun idea for its November edition – get a bunch of Rhode Island journalists together to talk shop and discuss where we think the battered media industry is going next.

The roundtable was earlier this month, and it was interesting to hear where all of us agree, disagree and aren’t sure. The group Providence Monthly brought together was Tim White and me (WPRI), Ian Donnis (RIPR), Erika Niedowski (AP), Dan McGowan (GoLocal), Tim Murphy (Projo) and Dave Scharfenberg (Phoenix).

Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. A sample:

John T: We have seven reporters seated at the table and only one representing a print daily, which is quite a change from if we had had this conversation ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. What is the changing nature of this profession as the era of the traditional beat reporter gives way to this new media landscape? What does the beat reporter of the future look like? Who does the next generation’s Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein work for?

Ted N: I think it’s interesting, because we’re at a time where you can jump in in different ways. My job was just an experiment by Channel 12. They never would have had a writer when it was just a TV station; there was nowhere to put the writing. Now everyone has a website. Erika’s stuff used to be primarily available inside a newsroom until it got into a paper. Now the AP has a mobile site. I don’t like to make predictions anymore – not that I ever did and I haven’t been in it that long – but I never predict where it’s all going. I think a lot of it is just trying to keep an eye on where things are moving and sort of get there along with the readers – not wait until you realize that people have migrated, and then you’re left behind. You’re not in the place where people want to be. But hopefully the standards can remain the same.

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – A growing number of contracts for printing and distribution gave The Providence Journal a slight bump in revenue during the first half of this year despite a deep drop in springtime advertising revenue.

The Journal’s total revenue rose to $46.7 million during the six months of 2012, an increase of $597,000 or 1.3% compared with the first half of last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week by its parent company A.H. Belo.

The share of total Journal revenue that came from advertising fell below 50%, a symbolically important milestone in light of newspapers’ historic reliance on advertisements to pay the newsroom’s bills. Printing and distribution contracts’ share of revenue jumped to 13% and circulation accounted for 37%.

The Journal is one of many papers with a changing revenue mix, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell. “All are seeing rapidly increasing percentile contributions from circulation – or what we should call reader revenue,” he told WPRI.com. “Projo is at the leading edge of change, probably due more to ad decline than [its] digital circulation program.”

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Providence Journal’s finances brightened during the first three months of this year, as the paper used higher circulation revenue and more third-party printing work to offset another sharp drop in advertising.

The Journal’s revenue totaled $22.7 million in the three months ended March 31, up 3% from $22 million in the same period last year, according to a regulatory filing. That performance helped offset weakness elsewhere within its Dallas-based parent A. H. Belo, which said companywide revenue slid 7% in the first quarter.

The Journal’s first-quarter contract work nearly doubled to $2.8 million year-over-year as the paper distributed more national and local newspapers and landed new commercial printing jobs. The paper’s circulation revenue also posted a healthy gain of nearly 6%, rising to $8.6 million.

Advertising is no longer the bedrock of The Journal’s business that it once was, contributing only 49.5% of total revenue in the first quarter. Ad sales through March 31 fell to $11.2 million, down nearly 10% from a year earlier, with declines in all categories. Digital advertising on ProvidenceJournal.com slipped 7% to $1.5 million compared with 2011.

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The Providence Journal’s print circulation fell almost 7% during the six months ended March 31 as it sold fewer than 300 subscriptions to its new electronic edition.

The Journal sold an average of 85,496 traditional print copies on weekdays between Oct. 1 and March 31, a decrease of 6,311 from the same period a year earlier, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported Tuesday.

The Journal said its total average weekly circulation was 114,013 when “branded editions” are included, which would include its free ProjoExpress publication. The Audit Bureau changed its rules in 2011 to count those.

The Projo’s print circulation on Sundays - the most lucrative edition of the week for most papers – totaled 122,279 copies, a drop of 8,380 since the March 2011 report. Saturday circulation fell by 7,676 copies, from 116,811 to 109,135.

ProvidenceJournal.com had 868,693 unique visitors as of March 31, down from 1.2 million for the old Projo.com in the six months ended Sept. 30, the Audit Bureau said. That echoes other estimates showing traffic down by about a third.

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Josh Fenton has opened the kimono at GoLocalProv and offered a peek at the startup news site’s strategy.

In two separate articles on NetNewsCheck, Fenton declined to disclose the numbers everyone wants to know – revenue and profit – but said GoLo “went functionally cash flow positive in Providence after about eight months” and is benefitting as advertisers shift their spending from print to digital.

According to Fenton, GoLo gets an average of 115,000 unique visitors a month; its dominant demographic is women between the ages of 30 and 50; it has 10 full-time employees; nearly half of its revenue comes from display advertising; and 20% of its unique visitors arrive via social media.

“You have to get to a point where you’re competing for the news cycle,” Fenton told NetNewsCheck. “That has always been our strategy – to invest in the level of reporters and research that allows you to break the biggest stories in the marketplace.”

Fenton also pointed with pride to the fact that GoLo doesn’t subscribe to a wire service such as The Associated Press. “There’s no third party content on our site,” he said.

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Advertising sales at The Providence Journal plunged by more than 60% over the last six years, forcing Rhode Island’s top newspaper to eliminate a third of its work force and to rely increasingly on subscribers and printing contracts to pay the bills.

The Journal’s total revenue dropped for a sixth straight year in 2011 to finish at $95.1 million, down 5% from 2010 and off 43% since 2005, parent company A.H. Belo disclosed in an SEC filing. Lower advertising and circulation sales were partly offset by $3 million in new printing and distribution contracts.

Journal publisher Howard Sutton declined to comment on the results. “The printed Journal has adapted to changing times, intensifying its focus on local and regional news and carefully managing its cost structure to match lower revenues,” A.H. Belo CEO Robert Decherd wrote in an op-ed on Feb. 26.

The Journal sold $52.9 million worth of advertising in 2011, down 11% from the prior year, with retail, preprint and digital lower but classifieds higher. Advertising has fallen a dizzying 61% at the paper since hitting $136.5 million in 2005, though last year’s percentage decrease was the smallest since 2007.

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There’s more grim news from Rhode Island’s beleaguered newspaper industry.

R.I.S.N. Operations Inc., which owns nine daily and weekly newspapers in Rhode Island, recently eliminated seven full- and part-time jobs at the Kent County Daily Times and its sister papers, WPRI.com has confirmed.

The employees worked in several different departments, publisher Nanci Batson told WPRI.com. “The restructure was a business decision based on the current economic climate,” she said in an email. “We value the welfare of all our employees and we’re especially sensitive to those who lost their jobs as a result of this restructuring.”

“We appreciate the positive contributions they made to our newspaper team and their presence will be sorely missed,” Batson added.

R.I.S.N. Operations paid $7.6 million to buy the Daily Times, the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times and the Wakefield-basked Southern Rhode Island Newspapers group of weeklies from the Journal Register Co. in 2007. R.I.S.N. is incorporated in Marion, Illinois.

The layoffs come as R.I.S.N.’s papers face more competition. In addition to Edward A. Sherman Publishing Co.’s South County Independent and the Breeze Publications papers, AOL’s hyperlocal Patch network has created websites for Coventry, East Greenwich, Narragansett and South Kingstown, North Kingstown and Woonsocket.

The Valley Breeze reported last month that multiple reporters and other employees were recently laid off at R.I.S.N.’s Pawtucket and Woonsocket papers, as well.

• Related: Publisher: Kent County Daily Times staff down 28%, not 75% (Jan. 17, 2011)

(photo: Echo Media)

A.H. Belo executives gave no explanation Tuesday for why The Providence Journal’s sales trailed those of its two sister papers in 2011 and didn’t say if they’re satisfied with the response to its new website.

In a short conference call with investors, A.H. Belo CEO Robert Decherd and his management team outlined no plans for the Providence paper and didn’t indicate when the company expects to start charging Web and iPad readers for its new electronic edition created by Olive Software. The company’s Dallas Morning News flagship started charging last March.

Only one investor asked A.H. Belo executives questions during Tuesday’s call. Chief Financial Officer Alison Engel promised “a robust update” about its “subscriber content strategy” on its next investor call, which will likely happen in April or May. An executive said in November The Journal will launch its paywall this year.

The Journal suffered the largest year-over-year drop in advertising revenue during the fourth quarter among A.H. Belo’s three papers, the company said. Ad sales surpassed expectations at the Morning News and Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., during the three months ended Dec. 31, Decherd said.

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The Providence Journal’s new website is drawing a smaller online audience than the one it replaced in October, according to two companies that track Internet traffic.

The total number of visitors and page views to ProvidenceJournal.com/Projo.com were both down 32% in the 10 weeks ended Dec. 24 compared with the 10 weeks before the new website launched, figures from Experian Hitwise show. The paper switched to the new, scaled-down ProvidenceJournal.com site on Oct. 17.

ProvidenceJournal.com/Projo.com averaged 300,241 U.S. visitors a week between Oct. 22 and Dec. 24, down from Projo.com’s 439,013 weekly average between Aug. 13 and Oct. 15, Hitwise said. Average weekly page views declined from 1.3 million to 884,706 over the same period.

Separate figures from Nielsen also showed a decline in The Journal’s Web audience.

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the new Rhode Island's Future

It’s back to the future for Rhode Island’s Future.

The lefty website that was an influential voice of opposition to the Carcieri administration will return to its roots on Wednesday by debuting with a new look and a commitment from 15 contributing writers to reenergize the blog, which fell all but silent last year.

“There is this ephemeral image of Rhode Island being this bastion of liberal policy,” Brian Hull, who bought Rhode Island’s Future in August 2009, told WPRI.com. “Sure, everyone’s a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s a liberal. Now RIFuture is coming back to actually have that strong liberal voice that’s been missing.”

With Hull busy as a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Rhode Island’s Future became a ghost town in 2011, rarely updated except for occasional scattered posts, some anonymous, and event announcements. It was a far cry from the consistent commentary that marked the site in its heyday under founder Matt Jerzyk or that still happens at Anchor Rising.

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The press corps at Rhode Island’s State House just got a little smaller.

The Newport Daily News will not send longtime political reporter Joe Baker to Providence to cover this year’s session of the General Assembly that began Tuesday for the first time in memory, WPRI.com confirmed on Thursday. Baker, who joined the paper in January 1984, is no longer writing his political column but remains on staff.

Daily News editor Sheila Mullowney minced no words about the decision, describing it as a disappointing move and one of a number the paper’s parent company is making to deal with the financial challenges facing print media. She said she hopes the absence of a Daily News reporter at the State House is only temporary.

“We feel right now we can’t afford to send somebody to Providence during the session,” Mullowney, a former president of both the Rhode Island Press Association and the New England Associated Press News Executives Association, told WPRI.com. “It’s unfortunate. It’s not an easy decision to make.” Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed herself is from Newport.

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I believe (and hope) this is correct:

With technology empowering everyone with the ability to create and to distribute, I predict — and wish — that in 2012 the new dominating factor will be Credibility. Actually, earned Credibility.

What will stand out from the sea of content will be the voices we turn to time and time again. Trusted sources of news and information will transcend their mastheads and company brands…and become their own brand. Brands that are solely based on being known for the quality and reliability of their work.

It’s looking like 2012 may be a make-or-break year in the long history of The Providence Journal.

With revenue and circulation still falling precipitously, the Projo is poised to bet big on pushing readers back to print by forcing those who want all its content to either subscribe to the print edition or read it in an electronic format that’s an exact digital replica of the dead tree version.

The strategy is risky, to say the least. The new ProvidenceJournal.com’s debut was met with withering criticism, including from the paper’s own commenters. The e-edition software developed by Olive Interactive remains buggy (the share tools stopped working on Firefox 8 for Mac earlier this month) and its article pages don’t even say that you’re reading a Providence Journal story. There are still no Projo iPhone or Android apps. It’s all a marked contrast with the award-winning new BostonGlobe.com, also launched this fall and also charging readers.

Journal management is notoriously tight-lipped, so it’s hard to judge if the new website is meeting their expectations. Compete.com says the paper’s unique visitors on the Web plunged from 425,486 in September (on Projo.com) to 233,091 in November (on ProvidenceJournal.com). But take that with a grain of salt, since Compete’s numbers are notoriously unreliable.

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By David Segal

The Geeks are ascendant in the halls of Capitol Hill. After a decade or two of know-nothing dominance of political dialogue, people who, you know, know things, are finally having their piece. During a hearing last week on the far-reaching, technically complex Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Congressman Jason Chaffetz admonished his colleagues to “bring the nerds in and get this right.”

The grassroots activist group Demand Progress – which I helped start about a year ago and has since grown to nearly a million members – has helped lead the fight against SOPA, moving hundreds of thousands of constituent contacts to Congress, organizing activists and techies to fight the bill, and meeting with legislators and folks in the White House to express our members’ concerns.

SOPA would give the government new powers to shut down websites that are accused of facilitating copyright infringement. All of the Web’s best sites – especially the social networks that rely on user-generated content and make the Web fun and politically relevant – could fall victim to such claims.

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A top executive at The Providence Journal’s parent company says he’s hopeful a shift toward getting more money from subscribers and less from advertisers will help its papers weather the storm.

“We don’t have an audience problem,” Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told students and faculty at the University of Texas at Austin last week. The problem is the failure of digital advertising revenue to match the rates the company gets for print. “Advertising is not a dependent source of revenue going forward,” he said.

The share of the Projo’s revenue that comes from advertising sales has fallen from 82% in 2005 to 56% in the first nine months of this year, according to SEC filings. Circulation’s share rose from 17% to 36%, and the paper has also been signing more printing and distribution contracts. Moroney cited similar trends at his paper in Dallas.

But the print edition remains vital. Moroney said ads on DallasNews.com would generate a maximum of $14 million in annual revenue at current rates, compared with roughly $90 million from print circulation.

The newspaper business is in “a transition and that’s hard,” he said. A video of Moroney’s presentation is posted after the jump.

• Related: Full Projo paywall set for 2012 as advertising sales slump 11% (Nov. 3)

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The Providence Journal’s new website is an interim step for the newspaper as it prepares to roll out its full digital paywall next year, executives at parent company A.H. Belo said Wednesday after reporting a third-quarter loss.

“Providence actually did what I would call a subscriber-content initiative ‘light’ … and there are plans for them to do what we’re doing [now in Dallas] next year,” Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told investors on a conference call. He made similar comments in July.

“Providence we will definitely do next year, and they’ll benefit from all the learning the Dallas Morning News will have,” Moroney said. The Journal replaced its old website on Oct. 17 with a new one that publishes brief news items and an electronic replica of the print edition.

The Journal’s advertising revenue fell 11.2% to $38.2 million during the first nine months of 2011, with double-digit declines in display, preprint and digital ads compared with 2010, A.H. Belo disclosed in an SEC filing. Total revenue was down only 6% to $68.8 million thanks partly to a 50% jump in printing and distribution contracts.

“Providence isn’t an easy market these days,” A.H. Belo CEO Robert Decherd said. “Frankly, I think we did well – all things considered – in Providence.”

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First, a disclaimer: I want newspapers to survive, both because I have a lot of friends who work for them and because they still make up a significant chunk of most communities’ journalistic backbone.

That said, there’s a reason a lot of young writers are bailing on newspapers, and Ben Huh gets to the heart of it in this piece for The Washington Post. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but this part is spot on:

Gene [Weingarten] is confusing journalism with the business of newspapers. Journalism is thriving, thanks to cheap and easy means of publishing like WordPress, the huge interest by the readership, and increase in the diversity of opinions. Sure, the new journalism may not look like the journalism of yore, but society isn’t under threat from the lack of journalism. Newspapers, however, are continuing to see declines as the readership shrinks due to an age demographic, inconvenience of print, and shrinking budgets. …

What’s killing newspapers isn’t the lack of new ideas, it’s people who obstruct the change that’s required to survive.

Read the rest here. (Fittingly, I wrote this post in WordPress.)

Update: And this piece by Alexandra Petri, which Huh references, is a great take on what it’s like to be a young newspaper reporter today, asked “to write a story and then produce an interactive personality quiz photo gallery for it using JavaScript, which is noble but not quite how we pictured things. ‘You are under 30, so this is your metier, right?’ they say, hopefully. ‘Absolutely,’ we murmur. ‘And tweet more!’ ‘Sure!’ we say.”

Here’s yet another reason to mourn Steve Jobs – the late Apple CEO was a defender of traditional journalism.

”I would love to help quality journalism,” Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson. “We can’t depend on bloggers for our news. We need real reporting and editorial oversight more than ever. So I’d love to find a way to help people create digital products where they actually can make money.”

But Jobs was also “very blunt and critical of what newspapers were doing in technology,” News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch told Isaacson. The Poynter Institute’s Steve Myers has more on Jobs and journalism here.

(You may say, “Wait a sec, Ted, you’re a blogger.” True, I write a blog – but I think Jobs was using the colloquial distinction between “bloggers” as independent, amateur news gatherers and full-time professional reporters who do this for a living and work for traditional media outlets.)

R.I.P. Projo.com (shown here in 1997)

The Providence Journal’s long-awaited new website quietly debuted around 4:30 p.m. Monday, nearly two years after parent company A.H. Belo announced it was coming.

As expected, going forward full articles will only be published in the print edition and an electronic replica of it, with news briefs going online. It’s unclear whether an e-edition subscription will be $416 a year – the cost for home delivery of the print edition – or have a different set of price points.

However, this may not be the finished product – an A.H. Belo executive said in July there would be an interim step for the Projo site while its new content-managemt system gets installed.

For now, here are quick links to the new site:

• Check out the new website here. Its formal name is “ProvidenceJournal.com,” not “Projo.com.”

• Check out the electronic edition on the Web here or see the iPad version here.

• Journal Publisher Howard Sutton explains the changes here. Digital editor Peter Phipps offers his take here.

• The 7-to-7 News Blog is still here but short items are now being posted here. (Scroll past the history items.)

• The mobile version is still m.projo.com if you want to read the news feeds on your smartphone.

• The look and feel of ProvidenceJournal.com is different from its sister papers, DallasNews.com and PE.com.

• Links to old Projo.com stories now redirect you to the new ProvidenceJournal’s home page.

(screenshot: Internet Archive)

If you’re a newspaper proprietor these days, good news is relative. So The Providence Journal’s executives must be at least somewhat pleased with their latest advertising numbers.

The Journal’s ad sales fell 8% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, according to an SEC filing by parent company A.H. Belo. That follows 13 consecutive quarters of double-digit advertising losses, making April 1-June 30 the paper’s best three-month stretch since late 2007.

The Journal’s ad sales shrank by a smaller percentage in the second quarter than those of its sister papers, the Dallas Morning News and The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., A.H. Belo said last month.

The Projo’s classified ad revenue fell 5%, display and digital ad revenue fell 7% each, and preprint ad revenue fell 11%. The SEC filing attributed the drop in display sales to “a decline in retail advertising, partially offset by an increase in general advertising.” Classified ads for housing and jobs declined but car listings rose.

The Journal’s total revenue – which also includes circulation and printing/distribution sales – was down 6% in the first half of this year compared with 2010, falling from $49 million to $46 million. But second-quarter revenue was down just 4% year-over-year, to $24 million.

Advertising has contributed 57% of the Projo’s revenue so far this year, with circulation adding 36%, a big change from the old 80/20 rule that said newspapers get 80% of revenue from ads and 20% from circulation.

Projo.com will roll out a “premium-content-light” system this month as a first step toward implementing a paywall, A.H. Belo executives said on a conference call with investors in July. But so far The Journal has not offered any official word about the pending changes to its website.

More Providence Journal and A.H. Belo coverage:

• A.H. Belo’s surprising success amid the newspaper storm (May 18)
• Projo falls below $100M mark as half of ads evaporate (March 14)
• Projo union OKs new 3-year contract with AH Belo (Feb. 16)
• No reason for Belo to sell Projo with price at $51m (Dec. 28)
• Why the Projo’s finances are healthier than you think (Nov. 18)

Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up an interesting take last week on a new FCC-commissioned paper that revealed “miserably low levels of online news consumption” in cities across the country. According to the paper, the top local news site in a typical U.S. market reaches just 18% of local Web users each month, and those people only spend about five minutes on it. That’s five minutes a month.

For somebody who spends his days churning out local news, those statistics are a little disheartening. But Benton went on to make this solid point:

If raw readership totals equaled impact — on political discussion, on democracy, on the culture — then USA Today would be more important than The New York Times and Reader’s Digest would be more important than The New Yorker. Reaching the “right” people — and by that I mean the people who have disproportionate influence in political discussion, democracy, or culture — can make an outlet’s reach more potent than traffic numbers would suggest.

So for sites like MinnPost or Voice of San Diego, which write extensively about politics and local government, it’s possible to be both a must-read in the corridors of City Hall or the statehouse and still reach an audience that’s disproportionately influential.

My humble outpost here on WPRI.com operates along the same lines. I realize the vast, vast majority of people have never heard of Nesi’s Notes, let alone clicked on it, and the chasm is beyond enormous compared with the hundreds of thousands who watch a local newscast or pick up the paper on any given day. On the other hand, I know from my emails and phone calls that the people who do read the blog include a lot of movers and shakers in politics and media. Who knows? Maybe a really sweet chart will help them do their jobs better.

Like any writer, I’d like to have the biggest audience I can. But I’m also realistic. In the fragmented media landscape of 2011, nobody is going to have the reach the Projo did back in 1960, when one paper was sold for every four Rhode Islanders. But hopefully, if you do good work and engage in a little shameless self-promotion, you can put together a quality readership that finds value in what you do. Plus, as Barry Ritholtz suggested a few months back, such a group could be extremely desirable to advertisers.

Not that there aren’t downsides to this trend. A veteran observer of Rhode Island politics mentioned to me recently that she worries about the local media landscape becoming a closed ecosystem, with insiders writing for other insiders. That could lead to a hermetically sealed conversation that excludes unorthodox thoughts from the public discussion. And it raises concerns about democracy, since most citizens won’t be engaging with the information influencing their leaders. I’m not sure what can be done about that, beyond being on guard for it.

Anyway, those are my two cents. Now back to your regularly scheduled non-navel-gazing.

(photo: Ben Sutherland/Flickr)

The Providence Journal’s advertising revenue slid 15% during the first three months of 2011, marking the 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit ad declines at the paper as its recovery lagged behind those of its two sister publications.

The Journal sold $12.4 million worth of advertising from Jan. 1 to March 31, down from $14.6 million during the same period in 2010, parent company A.H. Belo disclosed in an SEC filing this week.

The Journal experienced “declines in substantially all categories” of advertising during the first quarter, with classified ads down 20%, display and digital ads off 15% each, and preprints down 9% compared with 2010, A.H. Belo said.

Advertising revenue at both the Projo and its sister paper The Press Enterprise was “a bit softer” from January through April “than we had anticipated going into the year,” David Gross, A.H. Belo’s vice president of investor relations, told investors Tuesday.

“We responded to the softness with real-time adjustments to expenses,” Chief Financial Officer Alison Engel said. “We eliminated positions, delayed or froze open positions, reduced some marketing expense and reduced other discretionary expenses.”

If the present advertising trends continue, Gross added, “we will make additional expense adjustments in order to keep our operating cost properly aligned with our revenue.”

The Journal’s net operating revenue totaled $22 million in the first quarter of 2011, down about $2 million from a year earlier. Circulation revenue fell 5% to $8.1 million, while printing and distribution revenue rose 7% to $1.5 million.

Bright spots for The Journal included increases in automotive classified ads, preprinted mail revenue and outside printing and distribution contracts for other papers. Its revenue mix has shifted significantly in recent years, with advertising now making up only 56% of the total and circulation’s share up to 37%.

CEO Robert Decherd said The Journal’s is struggling more than A.H. Belo’s other two papers, which both appear to have hit bottom. “We’re still feeling a downdraft, a significant downdraft, in Providence,” he said. “But we’ve managed through that previously in Dallas and Riverside.”

Engel said the Morning News is currently contributing about 90% of A.H. Belo’s operating profit.

Decherd and other executives expressed optimism about the future, highlighting investments in technology and the company’s strong financial position. ”During this transition, we must reinvest in our print franchises, which generate most of our revenue today, and be ever mindful of opportunities in the digital space,” he said.

Decherd pointed out that A.H. Belo had less than $7 million of cash and cash equivalents on hand and had borrowed $13 million from its creditors during the first quarter of 2009; as of this year’s first quarter, it had a $52 million cash stockpile and no debt.

Gross cited Rhode Island’s meager population growth as one reason for the paper’s declining circulation. He also expressed optimism about Projo Express, a condensed publication The Journal launched last year.

Gross hinted that the online paywall The Journal is scheduled to unveil in the second half of this year will look much like the new one at the Dallas Morning News, saying that its rollout “would not have been possible without the investment that we have made and that we continue to make in common technology platforms.”

Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney described a favorite feature on his paper’s new iPad app. Audience metrics show tablet use peaks between 7 and 11 p.m., so the paper has added a tab to its drop-down menu that says “The Big Story,” which is updated with a collection of content relating to a topic in the headlines – the death of Osama bin Laden, for example – by the time iPad users switch their machines on in the evening.

Moroney said the click-through rate for iPad advertisements is “much greater” than on regular websites, which has pleased the Morning News’ advertisers.

Moroney also expressed particular optimism about The Journal’s future because of its “deep” relationship with local readers in Rhode Island. ”It goes back a long way and we have therefore a brand – not a word that a lot of people in the journalism world like to use – but our brand is a powerful asset and it helps us online,” he said.

The Providence Journal will put much of its content behind an online paywall sometime between July 1 and the end of this year, executives at parent company A.H. Belo confirmed on Tuesday.

The Projo “will roll out its subscriber content strategy in the second half of 2011″ for the print edition and Projo.com, according to a presentation A.H. Belo’s leaders made to investors in New York and posted on its website. The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., will follow suit next year.

A separate section of the presentation defined the term “subscriber content” in the context of A.H. Belo’s flagship paper, the Dallas Morning News, which began charging readers $17 a month for digital access in March.

“Subscriber content is original and proprietary content, exclusive to, and generated by, The Dallas Morning News,” the slide said. “Subscriber content is only available in our newspaper, dallasnews.com, the mobile web and on our table and smart phone applications.”

The Journal’s print circulation fell by about 8 percent during the six months ended March 31, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported earlier on Tuesday. A.H. Belo reported first-quarter earnings on Monday, and disclosed that among its three papers the Projo’s advertising revenue is falling at the fastest pace.

The Journal’s publisher issued a memo last October that said the paper’s plan was to post short summaries of its lengthier local stories online, but only offer the full versions to print and electronic-edition subscribers. He also said Providence-based firm ExNihilo is designing a new version of Projo.com.

The Providence Journal’s print circulation fell by about 8 percent during the six months ended March 31 as the paper lost the smallest share of readers it has in two and a half years.

The Journal sold an average of 91,807 copies on weekdays between Oct. 1 and March 31, a decrease of 7,766 from the same period a year earlier, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported Tuesday.

The Projo’s circulation on Sundays – the most lucrative edition of the week for most papers – totaled 130,659 copies, a drop of 11,029 since the March 2010 report. Saturday circulation fell by 10,214 copies, from 127,025 to 116,811.

Projo.com had 1.4 million unique visitors during the latest reporting period, the Audit Bureau said. The Journal is reportedly planning to start charging readers to access its content online later this year.

Like most newspapers, The Journal has been losing print readers for years, but the pace of decline has sped up recently. The paper now sells about one-third fewer copies a day than it did three years ago in early 2008, when Sunday circulation was 192,849 and weekday circulation was 139,053.

But thanks to higher prices, the loss of readership hasn’t meant a loss of circulation dollars for The Journal. The paper’s circulation revenue totaled $35 million in 2010, up from $28.5 million in 2005, SEC filings show.

The latest circulation numbers follow Projo parent company A.H. Belo’s disclosure on Monday that the Providence paper’s advertising sales dropped more than those of its other two papers during the first three months of this year.

The Wall Street Journal continued to be the most-read daily U.S. newspaper through March 31, with an average circulation of 2.1 million, the Audit Bureau said. It was followed by USA Today (1.8 million), The New York Times (916,911), the Los Angeles Times (605,243) and the San Jose Mercury News (577,665).

The NYT is tops on Sundays, with 1.3 million readers, followed by the LA Times (948,889), The Washington Post (852,861), The Chicago Tribune (780,601) and the Mercury News (636,999). The Boston Globe’s circulation was 219,214 on weekdays and 356,652 on Sundays in the latest report.