Big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the last six months, and CNN finished dead last in prime-time against more partisan rivals like Fox and MSNBC. | AP photo composite by POLITICO News gets worse for the MSM

There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the mainstream media — or MSM — but Monday was one of the worst.

New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the past six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC.


Are the two connected?

Eric Alterman, a media columnist for The Nation, and a frequent critic of the MSM, thinks they are. "Nonpartisan news, and news aimed at a broad audience, doesn't have the cachet, and therefore the consumer base, it once had,” Alterman said. “The whole notion of citizenship has been declining for decades now.”

With the proliferation of media across platforms these days, there’s less shared knowledge among people, who are increasingly heading to niche outlets for information. At the same time, there’s a large appetite for the new media world where the MSM gatekeepers no longer hold as much clout, and “he said, she said” journalism gives way to strong point of view. Just last night, NYU hosted a debate among prominent journalists on the subject: “Good Riddance to Mainstream Media.”.

And in today’s cable news universe, Alterman said, “politics without a slant, without a point of view, is interesting to very few people.”

That’s probably one thing that the Nation writer and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly agree on.

O’Reilly, host of the top-rated cable news show, told an audience last week that networks need to give viewers “a product that is entertaining and informative.” As for his 8 p.m. rival on CNN, O’Reilly said: “Nobody watches Campbell Brown. You have to evolve if you want to survive in the commercial world. If you are going to do a straight newscast in prime time, you are going to lose.”

Brown is losing not only to O’Reilly and a partisan on the left, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, but also to Nancy Grace, who hosts a more tabloidy show at the same time on sister network HLN.

CNN President Jon Klein says he knows why those approaches work, and he’s not going to go there. “It’s the oldest trick in the book to trot out over-the-top hosts and put them on a cable-news show,” Klein told POLITICO in May.

There’s no doubt that the over-the-top, and politically partisan, hosts are having more success attracting viewers on nights when there’s no major news event. Acknowledging the low ratings, Klein told staffers on Tuesday, according to TVNewser, that CNN “refuse[s] to do the things that might get us a quick number or cater to the extremes that would alienate our core viewers.”

But if CNN’s president accepts that political agendas — or the lack thereof — play a role in the prime-time ratings, does that hold true for newspaper circulation as well?

“I don’t think newspaper circulation has dropped because of any ideological thing,” said Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy. “Mostly, it’s a matter of the economics of the situation — free versus expensive.”

While Jones said he’s impressed by how many people still buy newspapers that are available online, it’s hard for top newspaper executives to hide their concern these days. During a benefit event on Monday night, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offered up an ominous, yet telling, analogy for the newspaper business: the Titanic.

Sulzberger told New York magazine that the “industry is in the midst of massive transition,” a fact clearly on display that morning when newly released circulation numbers showed a 10.6 percent drop across over 300 newspapers. The Times, which announced last week that 100 newsroom jobs needed to be cut by the end of the year, lost 7.3 percent of its print circulation in the past six months.

And the Times was hardly alone. Besides The Wall Street Journal — which caters more to a niche business readership — all of the top U.S. daily newspapers witnessed drops in circulation ranging from the single digits to upward of 25 percent.

The Washington Post, whose website has fewer unique monthly visitors than the Huffington Post — a site that offers news and aggregation with a liberal slant — fell 6.4 percent in print circulation. The long-running tabloid war between the New York Daily News and the New York Post is a thing of the past, as both papers continue falling — 14 percent and 18.7 percent, respectively. USA Today, previously the highest-circulation national newspaper, saw its readership plummet 17 percent.

Attempts by newspaper executives to cast the numbers in a positive light had a slightly desperate feel to them. A headline in The San Francisco Chronicle, which dropped more than 25 percent, read: “Chronicle’s strategy shift starts to pay off.”

Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega was quoted as saying that a new business model for the paper, in which it moves away from relying on advertising revenue, was beginning to emerge and that the Chronicle’s online audience continued to grow.

Similarly, CNN reacted to Monday’s numbers by emphasizing that the recently relaunched CNN.com leads other cable news websites. It also said in a statement that the network “measure[s] our audience across all CNN worldwide platforms and throughout the day, not just prime time.”

While it’s clear that CNN is trying to downplay the significance of winning in prime-time — after talking up the importance of the three-hour block last year — it’s true that nightly viewers are just one part of the day’s audience. And it’s also a relatively small audience by comparison with the numbers reached by broadcast network programming.

“The O’Reilly Factor” averaged nearly 3.4 million viewers in October — the highest among cable news shows — and another 1.5 million for the repeat at 11 p.m, a few million less than top broadcast anchor Brian Williams averages on the “NBC Nightly News.” While the evening newscasts don’t have the same power as decades past, about 20 million viewers still tune in each night across the Big Three. By comparison, under 6 million people typically watch the four cable networks at the prime hour of 8 p.m.

A few million viewers, Alterman pointed out, are “a complete failure in terms of what historically has been a successful television show.” However, cable new shows “only need very small numbers to make these shows work.”

But while some of CNN’s prime-time shows may only be pulling in six-figure audiences, the network’s success online shows that there’s still an appetite for general-interest news, perhaps at the expense of readers actually buying newspapers for sports, weather and the latest word out of the White House. Last month, CNN’s digital network brought in over 38 million unique visitors, second only to Yahoo! News.

Similarly, newspaper executives point out that their product, still generated in the newsroom, has more readers than ever. The problem is that millions of those readers aren’t paying. It’s why issue No. 1 on the minds of publishers and top editors is how and when to charge for the news.

Mark Jurkowitz, associate director for Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, agreed that newspaper executives have a point about the general news product being strong, despite declines in advertising and circulation.

“I don’t think the newspaper circulation numbers are reflective of people not wanting objective news,” Jurkowitz said, pointing out that papers like the Boston Globe still have plenty of readers online.

While the Globe’s circulation dropped 18.5 percent over the past six months to 264,000 — half what it was two decades ago — Boston.com brought in over 5.2 million unique visitors last month. A similar argument can be made for the Times — which had 21.5 million unique monthly visitors in September — and CNN, both established news brands that continue to grow in online readership.

“The problem isn’t an audience problem,” Jurkowitz said. “It’s fundamentally that nobody’s been able to make money on the online side.”