Newspaper Circulation as a Measure of Metropolitan Influence and Dominance

NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION AS A MEASURE OF METROPOLITAN INFLUENCE AND DOMINANCE Phillip D. Phillips" Newspaper circulation is a well recognized means of delimiting urban hinterlands. Park and Newcomb used newspaper circulation as a measure of major metropolitan hinterlands of the United States in 1933. (1) Newspaper circulation has also been used as one of several measures of a single city's hinterlands in numerous studies, including Chauncy Harris' study of Salt Lake City and Edward Ullman's study of Mobile. (2) Howard Green used newspaper circulation as one of several measures to show the range in break points of influence between New York and Boston. (3) The full possibilities of using newspaper circulation to measure metropolitan hierarchy and the intensity of metropolitan influence have not been exploited, however. Park and Newcomb's simple delimitation of areas of metropolitan dominance is reprinted without revision in textbooks forty years after it first appeared. (4) Newspapers are a communications medium of news and advertising. As a result, newspaper readership is both the result of natural affinities between hinterlands and urban centers and the generator of an "information field." Subscribers to large city daily newspapers are exposed to information about events in the city where the paper is published— city politics, sporting events, discount store prices, etc. This awareness is likely to breed a "home town loyalty," despite the fact the subscriber may live hundreds of miles from the city. Even if a paper publishes an outstate edition, it will still carry a good deal of metropolitan news. Areas which are not served by a major city paper probably will lack an orientation and loyalty to a major metropolitan center. Unserved areas are, moreover, likely to be "provincial" in their outlook due to the lack of immediate information concerning day to day events in a major metropolitan center and generally inferior coverage of national and international news by small city papers. Television and radio coverage of news is, by necessity, much more superficial and less extensive than that found in newspapers. (5) The importance of newspapers as a communications media and the lack of recent studies aimed at determining the spatial implications of newspaper circulation suggest the need for a regional level study of newspaper circulation, as is undertaken in this paper. Newspapers are an ideal topic for study not only because of their role as a communications media, but also because of the nature of the newspaper business and the completeness and accuracy of information concerning newspaper •Dr. Phillips is assistant professor of geography at the University of Kentucky. This paper was accepted for publication in March 1974. 18Southeastern Geographer circulation. Newspapers, as a business, tend to be spatially monopolistic for three reasons: (1)They must delimit areas for which they will provide local coverage and hire local "stringer" correspondents. (2)Carrier delivery requires that a certain minimum percentage of households, about 5-10 percent, subscribe to make home delivery feasible. (3)Advertisers demand that a percentage of households within an area be reached by a newspaper in order to provide sufficient market penetration. If a newspaper does not reach a significant proportion of households in an area, advertisers will look to other papers or other media. As a result of these factors, large metropolitan newspapers tend to informally "carve out" more or less exclusive circulation hinterlands. Generally , if a city produces a morning and evening paper, the morning paper will circulate to an extensive area, the evening paper to a more restricted area. The longer lead time between news filing deadlines and delivery time for the morning papers makes distribution over a wide area more feasible than for afternoon papers. Only a handful of cities in the United States still have newspapers owned by more than one firm. In these rare cases, one paper may attempt to develop an extensive out of town circulation, the other a more intensive in town circulation . (6) The Audit Bureau of Circulations provides an unusually complete source of information on the circulation of nearly all daily newspapers with over 10,000 subscribers. The Audit Bureau's reports provide exact counts of home delivery and newsstand sales of each individual newspaper for every town and county in which...