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From Capital New York:
Is The Washington Post closing in on the Times?
Could it be? An old-fashioned newspaper war, but one fought in the digital trenches? Neither venerable news institution wants to call it a head-to-head battle, but the numbers are beginning to tell us otherwise. Meanwhile, we can only begin to speculate about the business implications of the numbers we see.
Just now, The New York Times announced it has reached a pinnacle of the digital news age: One million digital-only subscribers.
A generation ago, The Washington Post competed with the Times at the top echelon of American journalism. Flush with Watergate– and Pentagon Papers–inspired pride and with profits, the two papers set the gold standard of the business.
Then, the two took separate paths, the Times going first national and then digitally global, and the Post became a super-regional D.C.-area behemoth, embracing a market position of being “for and about Washington.” As digital disruption changed everything about the business, we seldom heard the Times and the Post mentioned in the same sentence, except maybe on certain beats—like Washington. In the Times’ now-famous Innovation Report, published in March, 2014, the Post got but a single mention; Vox Media got seven. The next generation of Times staffers who put the report together quite rightly felt the ever-hotter breath of the Voxes, Buzzfeeds, Vices and Business Insiders on their necks. The Post seemed a pretty distant concern.
Now, word out of 620 Eighth Avenue,
a little more than a year after the report’s publication, is that the Times is paying significantly more attention to the competition rising from the other end of the northeast corridor.
The Post now can claim 90% of the monthly U.S. unique visitors of The New York Times, according to Comscore. Though under owner Jeff Bezos, the Post has become a fairly private company, we can see how it has moved up quickly in the pack of national news providers.
In the chart below, note that the Post landed its greatest number of unique visitors ever in June at 54.3 million—about five million fewer than The New York Times, at 59.7 million.
Compare that to October, 2013, when Bezos bought the Post. Then, the Post could count only two thirds of the Times’ audience count. Six months earlier, it could claim only 60%. Back then, the roll-up of Tribune Company newspapers usually bested the Post, as sometimes did Hearst’s newspapers....MORE
