Ads and fill are 84% of Charlottetown Guardian

Chronicle Herald has more than twice as much reporting

Times are a changing and people are finding the news in non-traditional sources like their cell phones, computers at work and home and hundreds of cable channels.

The newspaper business is falling on hard times with layoffs, a few closing and lots of losses where there used to be profits.

Newspapers are nice to have to read on the bus, in the bathroom and when you don’t want to talk at breakfast. Other than that, they generally have yesterday’s news and in the case of all those CP and AP stories they print, last week’s news.

When I wrote Should you pay for a newspaper? it only compared the local Charlottetown Guardian for real content to NJN Network. The paper did badly with only 17% original content. Is that worth paying for when those same stories are online?

To compare other papers, I’ve expanded the survey to include the Halifax Chronicle Herald this week.

The first thing that strikes you is that most of newspaper content is advertising with some free CP or AP stories.

83% of the Charlottetown Guardian is not news they wrote. Things are better over at the Chronicle Herald where only 67% of the paper is not news. The facts make the pompous pronouncements of the Guardian as hollow as brass bells.

Where are those journalists at the Guardian and what are they up to?

To look at content, we broke it down by news, features, sports, opinion, press releases, and ads and Internet content.

NJN Network is news and features rich while newspapers are largely advertising

In one of the Guardian’s recent rants, they claimed bloggers are all about opinion. That’s not true. Our content, and we are only one of 100 million blogs and websites that people can freely access is 38% news, 38% features and 6% opinion. That puts us in the average for opinion content.

The Charlottetown Guardian has 4% of its content in opinion pieces, editorials and letters to the editor, and the Halifax Chronicle Herald has 8%.

The big differences are ads and fill. We are only 15% non-story content and the papers are between 67% and 83%.

The Halifax paper seems to be improving. At 33% original content, the Chronicle is more than double the 15% original content in the Guardian.

Methodology – I chose the Wednesday papers in both cases to avoid the small Monday paper and the heavy weekend editions. Byline stories are counted. Non-byline stories are usually press releases. CP and AP stories are available free online. To avoid skewing the results to large centers with larger papers, the survey reports percentage of column inches in each category and by total.

In reality, most of the newspapers today have their content online. Purchasing a paper or home delivery is largely a matter of habit and one that is disappearing for many people.